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Editor Brian W. Shaffer is Professor of English and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs for Faculty Development at Rhodes College, USA. His previous publications include Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro (1998), and Reading the Novel in English 1950–2000 (Wiley-Blackwell 2006). He is the co-editor of Approaches to Teaching Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and “The Secret Sharer” (2002), and Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro (2008), and the editor of A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945–2000 (Wiley-Blackwell 2005).
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature www.literatureencyclopedia.com The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature is a comprehensive, scholarly, authoritative, and critical overview of literature and theory comprising individual titles covering key literary genres, periods, and sub-disciplines. Available both in print and online, this groundbreaking resource provides students, teachers, and researchers with cutting-edge scholarship in literature and literary studies. Published: The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory, General Editor: Michael Ryan The Encyclopedia of the Novel, General Editor: Peter Melville Logan The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, General Editor: Brian W. Shaffer Forthcoming: The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature, General Editors: Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. and Alan Stewart The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature, General Editor: Frederick Burwick The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, General Editors: William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, General Editors: Sangeeta Ray and Henry Schwarz
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer
Volume I
Twentieth-Century British and Irish Fiction Volume II
Twentieth-Century American Fiction Volume III
Twentieth-Century World Fiction
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This edition first published 2011 Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of Brian W. Shaffer, Patrick O’Donnell, David W. Madden, Justus Nieland, and John Clement Ball to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The encyclopedia of twentieth-century fiction / general editor, Brian W. Shaffer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-9244-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. English fiction–20th century–History and criticism–Encyclopedias. 2. American fiction–20th century–History and criticism–Encyclopedias. 3. Commonwealth fiction (English)–History and criticism–Encyclopedias. 4. Authors, English–20th century–Biography–Dictionaries. 5. Authors, American–20th century–Biography–Dictionaries. 6. Authors, Commonwealth–20th century–Biography–Dictionaries. I. Shaffer, Brian W., 1960- II. O’Donnell, Patrick, 1948- III. Ball, John Clement, 1960- IV. Title: Encyclopedia of 20th-century fiction. PR881.E48 2011 823’.910903–dc22 2010016469 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Set in 9.5/11.5 Minion by Thomson Digital, Noida, India 01 2011
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To Rachel, Hannah, and Ruth
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Contents Volume I: Twentieth-Century British and Irish Fiction Edited by Brian W. Shaffer List of entries Preface to The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction Acknowledgments Notes on contributors to volume I Introduction to volume I British and Irish Fiction: A–Z
ix xv xix xxi 1 7
Volume II: Twentieth-Century American Fiction Edited by Patrick O’Donnell, David W. Madden, and Justus Nieland List of entries Acknowledgments Notes on contributors to volume II Introduction to volume II American Fiction: A–Z
vii xiii xv 421 427
Volume III: Twentieth-Century World Fiction Edited by John Clement Ball List of entries Acknowledgments Notes on contributors to volume III Introduction to volume III World Fiction: A–Z Index
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
vii xiii xv 937 942 1400
List of Entries Volume I: Twentieth-Century British and Irish Fiction Ackroyd, Peter 7 Aldington, Richard 8 Amis, Kingsley 10 Amis, Martin 13 Angry Young Man Fiction 15 Awards and Prizes 19 Bainbridge, Beryl 24 Ballard, J. G. 26 Banville, John 28 Barker, Pat 29 Barnes, Julian 31 Beckett, Samuel 34 Bennett, Arnold 39 Berger, John 40 Bolger, Dermot 42 Bowen, Elizabeth 44 Boyd, William 46 Brooke-Rose, Christine 47 Brookner, Anita 49 Byatt, A. S. 51 Campus Novel 54 Carswell, Catherine 57 Carter, Angela 58 Cary, Joyce 62 Censorship and the Novel 63 Chicklit and Ladlit 68 Children’s and Young Adult Fiction 71 Coe, Jonathan 75 Colonial Fiction 77 Compton-Burnett, Ivy 82 Conrad, Joseph 83 Crace, Jim 88 Critical Theory and the Novel 90 Doyle, Roddy 98 Drabble, Margaret 99 Durrell, Lawrence 102 Edwardian Fiction 106 Fantasy Fiction 113 Farrell, J. G. 117 Feminist Fiction 119 Figes, Eva 123 The Film Industry and Fiction 125
Firbank, Ronald 129 Fitzgerald, Penelope 130 Ford, Ford Madox 132 Forster, E. M. 136 Fowles, John 140 Frayn, Michael 143 Galloway, Janice 146 Galsworthy, John 147 Gibbon, Lewis Grassic 151 Globalization and the Novel 152 Golding, William 156 Graves, Robert 159 Gray, Alasdair 161 Green, Henry 162 Greene, Graham 165 Gunn, Neil M. 170 Hamilton, Patrick 172 Historical Fiction 174 Hollinghurst, Alan 178 Huxley, Aldous 180 Irish Fiction 184 Isherwood, Christopher 189 Ishiguro, Kazuo 192 James, P. D. 195 Jenkins, Robin 196 Jewish Fiction 198 Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer 202 Johnson, B. S. 203 Joyce, James 205 Kelman, James 211 Kennedy, A. L. 213 Kiely, Benedict 214 Kureishi, Hanif 217 Lawrence, D. H. 219 Lehmann, Rosamond 225 Lewis, Wyndham 227 Lively, Penelope 230 London in Fiction 232 Lowry, Malcolm 237 Macaulay, Rose 241 Manning, Olivia 242 Mantel, Hilary 244
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LIST OF ENTRIES
Maugham, W. Somerset 246 McCabe, Patrick 249 McEwan, Ian 250 McGahern, John 253 McLiam Wilson, Robert 254 Mo, Timothy 256 Modernist Fiction 257 Moore, Brian 262 Murdoch, Iris 264 Mystery/Detective/Crime Fiction 267 O’Brien, Edna 272 O’Brien, Flann 275 O’Connor, Frank 278 O’Flaherty, Liam 279 Orwell, George 281 Phillips, Caryl 287 Politics and the Novel 288 Postcolonial Fiction of the African Diaspora 294 Postcolonial Fiction of the British South Asian Diaspora 298 Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/ Caribbean Diaspora 303 Postmodernist Fiction 308 Powell, Anthony 313 Priestley, J. B. 314 The Publishing Industry: The Rise of the Paperback 316 Pym, Barbara 320 Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction 322
Richardson, Dorothy 328 Science Fiction 332 Scott, Paul 337 Scottish Fiction 339 Self, Will 344 Sinclair, Iain 346 Sinclair, May 348 Smith, Zadie 350 Spark, Muriel 352 Storey, David 355 Swift, Graham 357 Thomas, D. M. 359 T oibın, Colm 361 Trevor, William 364 Upward, Edward 367 Utopian and Dystopian Fiction Warner, Alan 374 Waugh, Evelyn 376 Weldon, Fay 380 Wells, H. G. 382 Welsh Fiction in English 385 Welsh, Irvine 390 West, Rebecca 392 Wilson, Angus 394 Winterson, Jeanette 397 Wodehouse, P. G. 398 Woolf, Virginia 401 Working-Class Fiction 406 World War I in Fiction 412 World War II in Fiction 416
Volume II: Twentieth-Century American Fiction Acker, Kathy 427 Agee, James 428 Alexie, Sherman 430 Algren, Nelson 432 Anaya, Rudolfo 434 Anderson, Sherwood 435 Auster, Paul 438 The Avant Garde Novel 439 Baker, Nicholson 445 Baldwin, James 446 Banks, Russell 449 Barnes, Djuna 451 Barth, John 454 Barthelme, Donald 458 Bellow, Saul 459 Berger, Thomas 464 Border Fictions 465
Boyle, Kay 469 Brautigan, Richard 471 Buck, Pearl S. 472 Bukowski, Charles 474 Burroughs, William 476 Butler, Octavia 479 Cain, James M. 481 Canfield, Dorothy 482 Carver, Raymond 484 Castillo, Ana 486 Cather, Willa 487 Chabon, Michael 491 Chandler, Raymond 493 Cheever, John 494 Chesnutt, Charles W. 496 Cisneros, Sandra 499 The City in Fiction 500
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LIST OF ENTRIES
Coover, Robert 505 Dahlberg, Edward 508 Danticat, Edwidge 509 Davenport, Guy 511 Delany, Samuel 513 DeLillo, Don 514 Dick, Philip K. 517 Didion, Joan 519 Dixon, Stephen 520 Doctorow, E. L. 522 Dos Passos, John 524 Dreiser, Theodore 528 Du Bois, W. E. B. 531 Ducornet, Rikki 534 Dybek, Stuart 536 Elkin, Stanley 538 Ellison, Ralph 540 Ellroy, James 544 Erdrich, Louise 545 Ethnicity and Fiction 547 Eugenides, Jeffrey 552 Everett, Percival 553 Expatriate Fiction 555 Farrell, James T. 560 Faulkner, William 561 Fauset, Jessie Redmon 566 Ferber, Edna 568 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 569 Foer, Jonathan Safran 574 Ford, Richard 575 Frank, Waldo 576 Franzen, Jonathan 578 Gaddis, William 581 Gaines, Ernest J. 584 Gardner, John 585 Gass, William H. 587 Gender and the Novel 590 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 594 Glasgow, Ellen 597 Gold, Mike 599 Gordon, Mary 600 H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) 603 Hagedorn, Jessica 604 Hammett, Dashiell 606 The Harlem Renaissance 607 Harrison, Jim 612 Hawkes, John 613 Heller, Joseph 615 Hemingway, Ernest 616 Herbst, Josephine 620 Highsmith, Patricia 622
Himes, Chester 624 Historiographic Metafiction 626 Howard, Maureen 630 Hughes, Langston 631 Hurston, Zora Neale 633 Irving, John 637 James, Henry 639 Johnson, Charles 643 Johnson, Denis 644 Jones, Edward P. 646 Jones, Gayl 647 Kennedy, William 650 Kerouac, Jack 651 Kingston, Maxine Hong 654 Kosinski, Jerzy 656 Larsen, Nella 658 Lee, Chang-rae 659 Le Guin, Ursula K. 661 Lethem, Jonathan 662 Lewis, Sinclair 664 The Little Magazines 666 London, Jack 671 Mailer, Norman 676 Major, Clarence 680 Malamud, Bernard 681 Markson, David 684 Marshall, Paule 686 Maso, Carole 688 Mathews, Harry 689 Maupin, Armistead 691 McCarthy, Cormac 692 McCarthy, Mary 695 McCullers, Carson 697 McElroy, Joseph 698 McKay, Claude 700 Miller, Henry 702 Millhauser, Steven 705 Minimalist/Maximalist Fiction 706 Modern Fiction in Hollywood 710 Modernist Fiction 715 Momaday, N. Scott 719 Moore, Lorrie 721 Morris, Wright 722 Morrison, Toni 724 Nabokov, Vladimir 729 Naturalist Fiction 733 Naylor, Gloria 738 Noir Fiction 739 Norris, Frank 743 The Novel and War 745 Oates, Joyce Carol 750
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xii
LIST OF ENTRIES
O’Connor, Flannery 753 Olsen, Tillie 756 Ortiz, Simon J. 757 Ozick, Cynthia 759 Paley, Grace 761 Parker, Dorothy 762 Percy, Walker 764 Petry, Ann 765 Phillips, Jayne Anne 767 Piercy, Marge 768 Porter, Katherine Anne 770 Postmodernist Fiction 773 Powell, Dawn 777 Powers, Richard 779 Price, Reynolds 780 Proulx, Annie 782 Purdy, James 783 Pynchon, Thomas 785 Queer Modernism 790 Rand, Ayn 795 Rechy, John 796 Reed, Ishmael 798 The Road Novel 799 Robinson, Marilynne 804 Roth, Henry 805 Roth, Philip 808 Russ, Joanna 812 Salinger, J. D. 815 Schuyler, George S. 816 Scott, Joanna 818 Selby, Hubert, Jr. 819 Silko, Leslie Marmon 821 Sinclair, Upton 823 Singer, Isaac Bashevis 824 Smiley, Jane 826 Social-Realist Fiction 827 Sontag, Susan 832 Sorrentino, Gilbert 833 The Southern Novel 835 Speculative Fiction 840
Spiegelman, Art 844 Stegner, Wallace 846 Stein, Gertrude 847 Steinbeck, John 852 Stephenson, Neal 855 Stone, Robert 856 Styron, William 858 Tan, Amy 862 Television and Fiction 863 Thompson, Jim 868 Toomer, Jean 869 Traven, B. 872 Tyler, Anne 873 Updike, John 876 Utopian and Dystopian Fiction 879 Van Vechten, Carl 884 Vidal, Gore 885 Viramontes, Helena Marı´a 887 Vizenor, Gerald 888 Vollmann, William T. 890 Vonnegut, Kurt 892 Walker, Alice 894 Wallace, David Foster 895 Warren, Robert Penn 897 Welch, James 899 Welty, Eudora Alice 900 West, Nathanael 903 West, Paul 906 Wharton, Edith 908 White, Edmund 912 Whitehead, Colson 913 Wideman, John Edgar 915 Wilder, Thornton 916 Wolfe, Thomas 918 Wolfe, Tom 921 WPA and Popular Front Fiction 922 Wright, Richard 927 Wright, Stephen 930 Yezierska, Anzia 933 Young, Marguerite 935
Volume III: Twentieth-Century World Fiction Abrahams, Peter 942 Achebe, Chinua 943 Aidoo, Ama Ata 948 Ali, Ahmed 949 Amadi, Elechi 950 Anand, Mulk Raj 952 Anderson, Jessica 955 Anthony, Michael 956
Antoni, Robert 958 Arasanayagam, Jean 959 Armah, Ayi Kwei 961 Aslam, Nadeem 963 Astley, Thea 964 Atwood, Margaret 965 Australian Fiction 970 Awards and Prizes 973
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LIST OF ENTRIES
Awoonor, Kofi 977 Bail, Murray 980 Baratham, Gopal 981 Bissoondath, Neil 983 Black British Fiction 985 Boyd, Martin 986 Brand, Dionne 988 Brink, Andre 989 Brodber, Erna 991 Callaghan, Morley 995 Canadian Fiction 996 Carey, Peter 1000 Censorship and Fiction 1002 Chandra, Vikram 1007 Chaudhuri, Amit 1008 Children’s and Young Adult Fiction 1010 The City in Fiction 1014 Clarke, Austin 1017 Cliff, Michelle 1020 Coetzee, J. M. 1022 Collins, Merle 1026 Coupland, Douglas 1027 Critical Theory and Fiction 1029 Dabydeen, David 1034 Dangarembga, Tsitsi 1035 Davies, Robertson 1037 de Lisser, Herbert G. 1040 Desai, Anita 1041 Desani, G. V. 1044 Detective/Crime Fiction 1046 Duggan, Maurice 1048 Duncan, Sara Jeannette 1050 East African Fiction 1052 East Asian Fiction 1055 Ekwensi, Cyprian 1057 Emecheta, Buchi 1058 English Studies, the Academy, and Fiction 1061 Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction 1066 Farah, Nuruddin 1070 Feminism and Fiction 1071 Fernando, Lloyd 1074 Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives 1076 Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction 1081 Findley, Timothy 1085 Frame, Janet 1088 Franklin, Miles 1092 Gallant, Mavis 1094 Gee, Maurice 1097
Ghose, Zulfikar 1099 Ghosh, Amitav 1100 Gibson, William 1103 Gilroy, Beryl 1105 Gooneratne, Yasmine 1107 Goonewardene, James 1108 Gordimer, Nadine 1110 Grace, Patricia 1114 Grenville, Kate 1115 Grove, Frederick Philip 1117 Gunesekera, Romesh 1118 Harris, Wilson 1121 Head, Bessie 1124 Heath, Roy 1126 Herbert, Xavier 1127 Historical Fiction 1129 Hodgins, Jack 1134 Hosain, Attia 1135 Hospital, Janette Turner 1137 Hulme, Keri 1138 Humor and Satire 1140 Ihimaera, Witi 1145 Indian Fiction 1146 Indigenous Fiction 1149 James, C. L. R. 1154 Jin, Ha 1155 Joaquin, Nick 1157 Johnston, Wayne 1158 Jolley, Elizabeth 1160 Jose, F. Sionil 1163 Joshi, Arun 1164 Keneally, Thomas 1167 Kincaid, Jamaica 1170 King, Thomas 1173 Kogawa, Joy 1174 Kroetsch, Robert 1176 La Guma, Alex 1180 Lamming, George 1181 Laurence, Margaret 1183 Leacock, Stephen 1186 Lessing, Doris 1187 Lim, Catherine 1192 Lim, Suchen Christine 1194 Lovelace, Earl 1196 MacLennan, Hugh 1198 MacLeod, Alistair 1200 Mais, Roger 1201 Malgonkar, Manohar 1202 Malouf, David 1204 Maniam, K. S. 1207 Mansfield, Katherine 1209
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LIST OF ENTRIES
Maracle, Lee 1212 Marechera, Dambudzo 1213 Markandaya, Kamala 1215 Marlatt, Daphne 1218 Melville, Pauline 1219 Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction 1221 Miller, Alex 1225 Min, Anchee 1227 Mistry, Rohinton 1229 Mitchell, W. O. 1231 Mittelholzer, Edgar 1233 Montgomery, L. M. 1235 Moorhouse, Frank 1238 Mphalele, Es’kia 1239 Mudrooroo 1241 Mukherjee, Bharati 1244 Munro, Alice 1247 Naipaul, V. S. 1252 Narayan, R. K. 1256 New Zealand Fiction 1260 Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o 1262 Nkosi, Lewis 1266 Nwapa, Flora 1267 Okara, Gabriel 1270 Okri, Ben 1271 Ondaatje, Michael 1273 Pakistani Fiction 1277 Paton, Alan 1279 Politics/Activism and Fiction 1280 Postcolonialism and Fiction 1284 Prichard, Katharine Susannah 1289 The Publishing Industry and Fiction 1291 Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction 1296 Rao, Raja 1300 Realism/Magic Realism 1303 Reid, V. S. 1305 Rhys, Jean 1307 Richards, David Adams 1310 Richardson, Henry Handel 1311 Richler, Mordecai 1313
Riley, Joan 1316 Ross, Sinclair 1317 Roy, Arundhati 1318 Rushdie, Salman 1320 Sahgal, Nayantara 1325 Salkey, Andrew 1326 Sarachchandra, Ediriwira 1328 Sargeson, Frank 1329 Saro-Wiwa, Ken 1331 Scott, Kim 1333 Sealy, I. Allan 1334 Selvon, Sam 1336 Senior, Olive 1338 Seth, Vikram 1340 Shadbolt, Maurice 1342 Shields, Carol 1343 Sidhwa, Bapsi 1345 Singh, Khushwant 1348 South Pacific Fiction 1349 Southeast Asian Fiction 1351 Southern African Fiction 1353 Soyinka, Wole 1356 Sri Lankan Fiction 1360 Stead, Christina 1361 Stow, Randolph 1363 Tharoor, Shashi 1365 Tlali, Miriam 1366 Tutuola, Amos 1368 Urquhart, Jane 1370 Vanderhaeghe, Guy 1373 Vassanji, M. G. 1374 Vera, Yvonne 1376 Wendt, Albert 1378 West African Fiction 1379 West Indian Fiction 1382 White, Patrick 1385 Wiebe, Rudy 1390 Wilson, Ethel 1391 Winton, Tim 1393 Wiseman, Adele 1396 Zameenzad, Adam 1398
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Preface to The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction Salman Rushdie, that most “international” of novelists, has famously remarked that “the novel has never been a more international form.”1 This is particularly true of fiction written in the English language within the last several decades. Feroza Jussawalla and Reed Way Dasenbrock elaborate upon this point: The single most important development in literature written in English over the past century has been its increasingly international – indeed, global – nature. Once the language of a few million people on a small island on the edge of Europe, English is now spoken and written on every continent and is an important language inside at least one-quarter of the world’s one hundred sixty countries. As English has become an important international language, it has also become an important international literary language.2
It is no mystery why this shift occurred. World War II helped accelerate the break-up of the British Empire (and further rise of American prestige), and Britain’s abortive intervention in the Suez crisis of 1956 marked the decline of British imperial standing. If London dominated 25 percent of the earth’s surface at the turn of the nineteenth century, with control of nearly four million square miles, this dominance, in the three decades following World War II, would shrink to a tiny fraction of that figure. As one observer remarked, Britain’s “major historical experience” in the twentieth century, other than the two World Wars, was “the final flourishing,
later decline and eventual loss of the Empire.”3 Britain’s political empire – in Africa, South Asia, and the West Indies – may be gone, but its “linguistic empire” is stronger than ever. As Jussawalla & Dasenbrock observe, “The Sun may now have set on the British empire, but that empire, in establishing English as a language of trade, government, and education in that sizable part of the world ruled by the British, helped create what may be a more enduring ‘empire’ of the English language.”4 Rushdie casts this linguistic dominance in yet more favorable terms. While it is true that English is the global language as “a result of the physical colonization of a quarter of the globe by the British,” Rushdie eschews viewing this language as an unwanted imposition of formerly colonized peoples, instead regarding it as “a gift of the British colonizers,” a legacy that in any case “ceased to be the sole possession of the English some time ago.”5 Rushdie’s point, coupled with the reality of a “globalized” world in which English-language authors on different continents so readily read and respond to each other’s works, provides the rationale for a major reference text such as The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, which brings together the major English-language fiction, figures, debates, rubrics, and movements of the period from around the world. Novelists and short story writers are currently transcending geographical boundaries in their work; research tools are therefore called for which transcend these
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PREFACE TO THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY FICTION
same boundaries. The Encyclopedia of Twentieth- Century Fiction, with its total of more than 550 entries, accomplishes this very goal. The work provides a convenient and authoritative point of departure for undergraduate and graduate student research, teachers and scholars preparing course syllabi, and general readers in search of reliable, up-to-date bibliographies and filmographies. Indeed, The Encyclopedia of TwentiethCentury Fiction, which in separate volumes covers British and Irish fiction; US fiction; and world fiction in English (from Africa, Australia/New Zealand, Canada, South Asia, the West Indies, and East and Southeast Asia) is the most comprehensive single-resource mapping of this vast, rich, spectacularly heterogeneous field yet undertaken. The three volumes treat not only key authors and texts from the period but also crucial aesthetic and cultural, socioeconomic and political, and national and supranational contexts out of which the novels, novellas, and short fictions emerged. Put simply, The Encyclopedia of TwentiethCentury Fiction aims to elucidate the most important texts and contexts of twentieth-century fiction – novels, novellas, and short fiction – in English. It is also the most technologically sophisticated work of its kind in that it is being published both in print and in electronic formats, the latter of which allows for advanced cross-referencing between and among entries and for the periodic updating of entries. A word on the division of twentiethcentury fiction in English into three volumes is merited. The authors have been divided up across the volumes of the encyclopedia, with very few exceptions, based on their place of geographical origin rather than on their national and ethnic affiliations, cultural influences, or
place(s) of residence (as practicing writers of fiction). Without this guiding principle of organization, it would have been difficult to decide where to place the large number of authors of the last century who traversed standard cultural, geographic, and/or ethnic boundaries (Kazuo Ishiguro, Jean Rhys, Henry James, V. S. Naipaul, Malcolm Lowry, and Salman Rushdie, for example, might have fitted in either of two volumes). The three volumes of the encyclopedia are nevertheless designed to speak to each other and be consulted together; the boundaries between them – as they are between the various authors and movements covered within – are porous rather than absolute. In this spirit, entries in all three volumes are cross-referenced, as appropriate, to entries both within their own volume and in the other two volumes of the encyclopedia. Crossreferenced entries are designated as either (BIF), (AF), or (WF) – corresponding to British and Irish Fiction, American Fiction, or World Fiction – in order to make it instantly clear to readers in which volume the listed entry can be found. As far as the content of the volume’s entries are concerned, those entries devoted to individual authors address the author’s life, literary milieu, influences, key prose works, and reception. These entries conclude with a bibliography of major primary texts, critical works, and, where appropriate, film and video adaptations of the fictions in question. Entries on broad topics – movements, debates, rubrics, and the like – by necessity must be even more surgical in focus. They are nevertheless intended to provide a substantial, reliable, engaging overview of the topic in question and to point the reader in the direction of major primary works and recommended secondary reading. Many of these broader subject entries
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PREFACE TO THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY FICTION
also implicitly advance an argument about the topic in question, although never at the expense of coverage and balance. All of the entries strive to communicate the richness and depth of their subjects as fully and clearly as possible given the necessary constraints of space. Contributors to these volumes come from both sides of the Atlantic and be-
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yond and have been chosen in accordance with their expertise. It is logical that an encyclopedia with a genuinely global scope would attract a global scholarly authorship. Collectively, the contributors demonstrate the vitality and diversity of the critical and contextual lenses through which the field of twentieth-century fiction in English is being explored and mapped today.
Notes 1 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991), p. 20. 2 Feroza Jussawalla & Reed Way Dasenbrock, “Introduction,” in Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), p. 3. 3 Randall Stevenson, A Reader’s Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel in Britain (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), p. 126. 4 Jussawalla & Dasenbrock, “Introduction,” p. 4. 5 Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, pp. 64, 70.
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Acknowledgments A project of this magnitude could not possibly have come to fruition without the input and efforts of many people over a number of years. My debts are as great as they are numerous. At Wiley-Blackwell, Emma Bennett and Isobel Bainton nurtured this project from its earliest through its final stages. Without their experience, wisdom, and patience these volumes would not have materialized. Four anonymous readers for Wiley-Blackwell helped me hone the conception and design of these volumes and refine the entries list. Special thanks are also due the project manager of the Encyclopedia, Amy Clark, whose intelligence, professionalism, and technical savvy kept things humming along through thick and thin; and Barbara Duke, Janey Fisher, Jacqueline Harvey, and other members of the production and editorial teams for their invaluable input. My fellow volume editors – John Ball, Patrick O’Donnell, David Madden, and Justus Nieland – turned what might have been
a tedious editorial process into a welcome voyage of intellectual discovery: I learned much from them about the fiction we all prize during the preparation of these volumes. At Rhodes College, my capable research assistant, Molly Ryan, provided much appreciated organizational and editorial assistance. I am grateful as well to many faculty colleagues, in particular Jennifer Brady, for their friendship and encouragement during my work on this project, and to the Dean of the Faculty, Michael Drompp, for his support. Members of my family – my wife Rachel, daughters Hannah and Ruth, and mother Dorothy – make everything possible and worthwhile, and so I wish to thank them, as always, for their inspiration and example. Finally, a word of thanks to my brother-in-law and fellow malt advocate David for “talking books” with me during the years in which this project was taking shape.
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Brian W. Shaffer
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer
Volume I
Twentieth-Century British and Irish Fiction Volume editor: Brian W. Shaffer
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Notes on Contributors to Volume I Fiona Becket is a senior lecturer at the University of Leeds. She has written widely on the work of D. H. Lawrence and her publications include a study of the language of his major novels and his books on the unconscious, D. H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet (1997), as well as a critical guide to D. H. Lawrence (2002). Other publications include studies of twentieth-century and contemporary fiction, poetry, and drama. Nick Bentley lectures in English literature at Keele University. His main research interests are in post-1945 British literature and literary and cultural theory, and especially in intersections of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and contemporary fiction and culture. He is author of Contemporary British Fiction (2008) and Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (2007), and editor of British Fiction of the 1990s (2005). He has also published essays on Julian Barnes, Doris Lessing, Colin MacInnes, Zadie Smith, Sam Selvon, Alan Sillitoe, and the representations of youth in British New Left writing. He is currently working on a book on Martin Amis. Christine Berberich is senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Portsmouth. She is the author of The Image of the English Gentleman: Englishness and Nostalgia (2007), and has published extensively on Englishness and national identity, as well as on George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Kazuo Ishiguro, Julian Barnes, and W. G. Sebald. Stephen Bernstein is professor of English at the University of Michigan–Flint. His publications include the book Alasdair Gray (1999), and articles and book chapters on Gray, James Kelman, Samuel Beckett, Don DeLillo, and a variety of other writers.
Nicholas Birns is the author of Understanding Anthony Powell (2004) and coeditor of A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900 (2007). He teaches literature at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts. Howard J. Booth teaches English Literature at the University of Manchester. He is the author of articles on male homosexuality in John Addington Symonds, E. M. Forster, Compton Mackenzie, and D. H. Lawrence. The coeditor of Modernism and Empire (2000), he has edited New D. H. Lawrence (2009) and The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling (2010). Martine Watson Brownley is Goodrich C. White Professor of English and Director of the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University, where she works in eighteenth-century English literature and women’s studies. Her eighteenth-century publications include Clarendon and the Rhetoric of Historical Form, an edition of Clarendon’s Dialogues, and numerous articles. In the field of women’s studies, in addition to her book Deferrals of Domain: Contemporary Women Novelists and the State, she has coedited two essay collections and published articles on women writers ranging from Aphra Behn to Christina Rossetti. Bradley W. Buchanan is associate professor of English at California State University, Sacramento. His work has appeared in Canadian Literature, Twentieth Century Literature, the Journal of Modern Literature, the Seattle Review, and Fulcrum. He also edits the Tule Review and is the founder of Roan Press. Gerard Carruthers is reader and head of the Department of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. His publications include Robert Burns (2006), (as editor) The Devil to
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Stage: Five Plays by James Bridie (2007), and (as coeditor) Beyond Scotland: New Contexts for Twentieth Century Scottish Literature (2004). He has recently been appointed general editor of the new Oxford University Press multivolume edition of the works of Robert Burns. Ian Carter is professor of sociology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Ruthlessly exploiting university teachers’ dwindling academic freedom, he has spent 40 years indulging personal interests by writing books about the eclipse of peasant agriculture in Victorian and Edwardian northeast Scotland; British university fiction; railways, culture, and amateur enthusiasm in Britain; and New Zealand’s first director of broadcasting. Deborah Cartmell is a reader in English and director of the Centre for Adaptations at De Montfort University. She is editor of Shakespeare and Adaptation and has published in Shakespeare on screen and adaptations. She is currently writing a monograph of “Pride and Prejudice” on Screen for the Methuen Screen Adaptations Series for which she is a general editor. Winnie Chan teaches colonial and postcolonial Anglophone literatures at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she recently completed her second book, Imperial Gastronomy, which examines relationships among eating, empire, and literary representation. Peter Childs is professor of modern English literature and dean of research at the University of Gloucestershire where he teaches twentieth-century and postcolonial literature. He has published widely in the areas of modern writing, British culture, and critical theory, specializing in the English novel post-1900. Michael Copp is an independent scholar and former tutor at the Institute of Continuing Education, Cambridge University. He is the author/editor of Cambridge Poets of the Great War: An Anthology (2001), An Imagist at War: The Complete War Poems of Richard Aldington (2002), and The Fourth Imagist: Selected Poems of F. S. Flint (2007). He has also contributed the entry on F. S. Flint for The
Literary Encyclopedia. He is currently editing the letters of Richard Aldington and F. S. Flint. Michael Cotsell is the author of Barbara Pym (1989) and of books on Charles Dickens and American drama. He was associate editor of the Dickens Companions and general editor of the series English Literature and the Wider World. He teaches at the University of Delaware. Ralph Crane is professor of English and head of the School of English, Journalism and European Languages at the University of Tasmania. He has published widely in the areas of Indian and Anglo-Indian literatures. His recent books include scholarly editions of four Raj novels – Charles Pearce’s Love Beseiged, Maud Diver’s Lilamani, Margaret Wilson’s Daughters of India, and A. E. W. Mason’s The Broken Road – all published by Oxford University Press India. Sara Crangle is a lecturer at the University of Sussex, and a former research fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge. She has published work on Hardy, Woolf, and Christine Brooke-Rose, among others. She is currently completing a book entitled Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowing, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation, which focuses on intersections between high modernist writers and philosophical thought. She is also coediting an essay collection on bathos. Alice Crawford wrote her PhD thesis on Rose Macaulay at the University of Glasgow, and her book, Paradise Pursued: The Novels of Rose Macaulay was published in 1995. She is academic liaison librarian for arts and divinity at the University of St. Andrews. Paul Crosthwaite is lecturer in English literature at Cardiff University. He has published on topics including the postmodernist novel, fictions of globalization, trauma theory, and the significance of speed and acceleration in contemporary culture. His book, Trauma, Postmodernism, and the Aftermath of World War II, is published by Palgrave Macmillan.
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME I
Alison Cullingford is special collections librarian at the University of Bradford, home to the archives of J. B. Priestley, Jacquetta Hawkes, and other collections on peace, Yorkshire history, and archaeology. Elke D’Hoker is assistant professor at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. She has written a critical study on the works of John Banville (2004) and has published widely in the field of Irish and British fiction. Her articles have appeared in Contemporary Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Critique, Journal of the Short Story in English, and Irish University Review. She is currently writing a book on the short story by Irish women writers. Alistair Davies teaches English literature at the University of Sussex. He has coedited, with Alan Sinfield, British Culture of the Postwar: An Introduction to Literature and Society 1945–1999 (2000). Damon Marcel Decoste is associate professor of English at the University of Regina, where he teaches twentieth-century British and American literature. He has published essays on Ford Madox Ford, Richard Wright, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Malcolm Lowry, and Graham Swift. Author of “The Literary Response to World War II,” in Blackwell’s Companion to the British and Irish Novel, 1945–2000, DeCoste has recently completed a book-length manuscript on British wartime fiction and is currently at work on a detailed study of Waugh’s postwar writings. Brian Diemert is a full professor of English at Brescia University College in London, Ontario. He is the author of Graham Greene’s Thrillers and the 1930s (1996) and of several articles. He specializes in modern British and American literature, especially the 1900–50 period, and is interested in detective fiction and popular studies. Paul Edwards is professor of English and history of art at Bath Spa University. Besides writing extensively on Wyndham Lewis, he has published articles on Tom Stoppard, Ian McEwan, and World War I fiction and literary memoirs, and has contributed to the Cambridge History of Twentieth Century English
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Literature. He co-curated the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition, “Wyndham Lewis Portraits,” in 2008 and wrote the accompanying catalogue. John Eustace is an associate professor in English at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, where he teaches postcolonial literature and theory. He has published articles on Joyce Cary, Peter Cary, Margaret Lawrence, Rohinton Mistry, and Australian culture. Chris Ferns is a professor of English at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of Aldous Huxley: Novelist (1980) and Narrating Utopia (1999), as well as numerous articles on utopian literature and the historical novel. Lisa Fluet is an assistant professor of English at Boston College, specializing in twentiethcentury literatures in English. She is currently working on a manuscript, “Brilliant Career: Modernism, Class and Knowledge-Work in the Twentieth Century,” and has published articles in Novel, Twentieth-Century Literature, and the collection Bad Modernisms (2006). Dennis A. Foster has published two books with Cambridge University Press: Confession and Complicity in Narrative (1987) and Sublime Enjoyment: On the Perverse Motive in American Literature (1997). In addition he has edited a collection of essays with Molly zek, Perversion and Rothenberg and Slavoj Zi the Social Relation (2003), and a dozen essays on literary theory and contemporary fiction. He is currently the D. D. Frensley Professor of English at Southern Methodist University. Oona Frawley lectures in English at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and has held positions at Trinity College Dublin and Queen’s University Belfast. She is the author of Irish Pastoral: Nostalgia in Twentieth Century Irish Literature (2005), and the editor of A New and Complex Sensation: Essays on Joyce’s “Dubliners” (2004), New Dubliners (2005), and Selected Essays of Nuala Nı´ Dhomhnaill (2005). She is currently editing a four-volume project for Syracuse
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME I
University Press, Irish Cultural Memory (2010–11) and completing a book on Edmund Spenser, Spenser’s Trace. Ariela Freedman is an associate professor at the Liberal Arts College, Concordia University, Montreal. Her research interests include memory studies, World War I, James Joyce, and postcolonialism. She has published articles in numerous journals, including Modernism/Modernity and Journal of Modern Literature, and her book Death, Men, and Modernism appeared in 2003. Hedda Friberg-Harnesk is associate professor of English at Mid Sweden University, H€arn€ osand. She is coeditor of Recovering Memory: Irish Representations of Past and Present (2007). She has contributed to ReMapping Exile (2005) and to publications such as Nordic Irish Studies (NIS) and, with pieces on Banville, to the Irish University Review and An Sionnach, in 2006 and 2005, respectively. A monograph, tentatively entitled “The Fleetingly Real: Simulation in John Banville’s Work 1997–2007,” is in the pipeline and she is coeditor of a forthcoming collection on cross-culturality in Irish writing. James Gifford is assistant professor of English and Director of the University Core at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Vancouver. He edited critical editions of Lawrence Durrell’s first novels, Pied Piper of Lovers and Panic Spring, and has published widely on twentieth-century British and American literature. He is equally active in opera and chamber music performance. David Goldie is a senior lecturer in the Department of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde. He is the author of A Critical Difference: T. S. Eliot and John Middleton Murray in English Literary Criticism, 1919–1928 (1998); and, with Gerard Carruthers and Alastair Renfrew, the editor of Beyond Scotland: New Contexts for TwentiethCentury Scottish Literature (2004) and of the forthcoming Scotland in the NineteenthCentury World. Sebastian Groes is lecturer in English literature at Roehampton University, London. He
specializes in modern and contemporary culture and literature, and representations of cities. He is the author of The Making of London (2011), the editor of Ian McEwan (2009), and the coeditor of Kazuo Ishiguro (2009), Julian Barnes (2009), and Kazuo Ishiguro: Critical Visions of the Novel (2010). Dave Gunning lectures in English literature at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of the forthcoming books Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature (Liverpool University Press) and Postcolonial Literature (Edinburgh University Press). Scott Hames lectures on Scottish literature at the University of Stirling. He is the editor of the Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman (2010) and has published articles on Kelman, William McIlvanney, Don Paterson, and Robert Louis Stevenson. He coedits the International Journal of Scottish Literature. Tracy Hargreaves is a senior lecturer in the School of English, University of Leeds where she teaches twentieth Literature. She has written on Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and published a critical study, Androgyny in Modern Literature (2004). She is currently researching the twentieth English family saga and has also published on Woolf and Galsworthy. Graeme Harper is professor of creative writing and director of the National Institute for Excellence in the Creative Industries at Bangor University, UK. Chair of the International Centre for Creative Writing Research (ICCWR), he is also editor-in-chief of New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing. His latest works are the novel Moon Dance (2008), published under his pseudonym, Brooke Biaz, and The Creative Writing Guidebook (2008). Sara Haslam is lecturer in English at the Open University. She is the author of Fragmenting Modernism: Ford Madox Ford, the Novel and the Great War (2002), and editor of Ford’s England and the English (2003), as well as Ford Madox Ford and the City (2005), the fourth
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME I
volume of International Ford Madox Ford Studies. She has published a number of articles on Ford, Henry James, and modernism. Current projects include a book, Victims of Time and Train: From Victorian Invention to Modernist Novel and an essay for the forthcoming Edinburgh Companion to TwentiethCentury English and American War Literature. Janis Haswell is a professor of English at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi, where she teaches British literature and composition and directs the honors program. She has published monographs on W. B. Yeats and Paul Scott, along with numerous articles on teaching literature and composition. M. Hunter Hayes is an assistant professor at Texas A&M University–Commerce, where he specializes in contemporary and twentiethcentury British literature. The author of Understanding Will Self (2007), he has also published articles on Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and other British writers. He is currently working on a book about Elmore Leonard, the American crime novelist. Elaine Yee Lin Ho has published articles on Renaissance literature, Anglophone world literatures, and Hong Kong literature and culture in journals including SEL, Literature and History, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Wasafiri, Ariel, PMLA, and contributed chapters to edited collections of essays by Rodopi, University of Minnesota Press, and Hong Kong University Press. Besides the monograph on Timothy Mo, she is author of Anita Desai (2006), and has just finished editing a collection of essays China Abroad: Travels, Subjects, Spaces, to be published by Hong Kong University Press. Philip Holden is associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore. He is the author of several books and many articles on colonial and postcolonial fiction. His most recent book is Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the NationState (2008). Chris Hopkins is professor of English studies at Sheffield Hallam University, and head of
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the Humanities Research Centre there. He has published Thinking about Texts: An Introduction to English Studies (2001, rev. edn. 2009) and English Fiction of the 1930s: Language, Genre and History (2006), and contributed chapters to a number of books, including, most recently, Critical Essays on Sylvia Townsend Warner, English Novelist 1893–1978 (2006) and New Versions of Pastoral (2009). Robert Ellis Hosmer, Jr. has been a member of the English faculty at Smith College since 1989. He teaches courses on Muriel Spark, Virginia Woolf, and contemporary British women writers. His work has been published in the Paris Review, the Chicago Tribune, and London Magazine. His most recent book, “Shall We Say I had Fun with My Imagination”: Essays in Honor of Muriel Spark, is due to be published in 2010. Alex Houen is a university lecturer in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. He has published numerous articles on modern political literature, critical theory, and avant-gardism, and is the author of Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (2002). William Hutchings is a professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the author of The Plays of David Storey: A Thematic Study (1988) and the editor of David Storey: A Casebook (1992). His most recent book, Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”: A Reference Guide was published by Praeger in 2005. Simon J. James is senior lecturer in Victorian literature at Durham University. He is the author of Unsettled Accounts: Money and Narrative Form in the Novels of George Gissing (2003) and of articles on Charles Dickens and H. G. Wells. He has edited Gissing’s Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (2004) and four H. G. Wells novels for Penguin Classics. Rosemary Erickson Johnsen is associate professor of English at Governors State University. She publishes in the areas of twentiethcentury British and Irish literature, crime fiction, and publishing history. Her book, Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime
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Fiction, was published in 2006. She is currently working on a book project on non-modernist British literature between the wars, supported by research in the Mass Observation Archive (Sussex) and the Penguin Archive (Bristol). William A. Johnsen is professor of English at Michigan State University and editor of Contagion and the Michigan State University Press series Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. Recent publications include Violence and Modernism. Ibsen, Joyce, and Woolf (2003); “To My Readers in America: Conrad’s 1914 Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus,” Conradiana (2003); “Freres amis, Not Enemies: Serres between Prigogine and Girard,” in N. Abbas (ed.), Mapping Michel Serres (2005); “The Religious Turn: Rene Girard,” in English Language Notes (2006). Richard A. Kaye is associate professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of The Flirt’s Tragedy: Desire without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction (1992). Aaron Kelly is a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. He is author of The Thriller and Northern Ireland Since 1969 (2005), Irvine Welsh (2005), Twentieth-Century Irish Literature (2008), and James Kelman: Politics and Aesthetics (2010). He is guest editor of a special issue of the Irish Review entitled “Contemporary Northern Irish Culture” (2009) and coeditor, with Alan Gillis, of Critical Ireland (2001) and, with Nicholas Allen, of Cities of Belfast (2003). Gavin Keulks is professor of English and director of the honors program at Western Oregon University, where he specializes in contemporary British and Irish literature. His scholarly books include the monograph Father and Son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the British Novel Since 1950 and the edited collection Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond. He has also published essays on Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson, and other twentieth-century writers, and is the webmaster for the Martin Amis Web.
Stephen Knight is distinguished research professor at Cardiff University. He has published widely on medieval and modern literature, notably on Robin Hood and on crime fiction. In 2004 he published the first full study of Welsh fiction in English, One Hundred Years of Fiction, initiating the Writing Wales in English series of the University of Wales Press. Kurt Koenigsberger is associate professor of English and director of writing programs at Case Western Reserve University, where he teaches courses in twentieth-century British literature, postcolonial literatures, and research methods. He has written a book-length study titled The Novel and the Menagerie: Totality, Englishness, and Empire (2007) and edited a special issue of Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture on “Globalization and the Image.” He has published essays and articles on Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and William Hazlitt. From 2001 to 2008 he served as associate director of the Society for Critical Exchange. Brooke Lenz is an assistant professor of English at Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota, where she teaches contemporary literature, women’s literature, and writing. Her book John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur (2008) employs feminist standpoint theory in its investigation of cinematic conventions and point of view in the works of John Fowles. Her next scholarly project will explore the relationship between narrative theory and feminist standpoint theory. Barry Lewis earned his BA (Hons.) at King’s College, Cambridge, and his doctorate at the University of Sunderland. A senior lecturer at the University of Sunderland, he has also held posts at the University of Newcastle, the University of Trondheim, and Stavanger College in Norway. Lewis is the author of Kazuo Ishiguro (2000) and My Words Echo Thus: Possessing the Past in Peter Ackroyd (2007). Marina Mackay is associate professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Modernism and World War II (2007), coeditor of British Fiction After
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME I
Modernism (2007), and editor of the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II (2009). Eamon Maher is director of the National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies in Institute of Technology Tallaght (Dublin). He is the author of a number of monographs and is editor of two series with Peter Lang: Reimagining Ireland (Oxford) and Studies in Franco-Irish Relations (Frankfurt am Main). David Malcolm is professor of English literature and chair of the Department of Literary Studies at the University of Gdansk. He is the author of studies of Ian McEwan (2002), Graham Swift (2003), and John McGahern (2007), and co-author of a study of Jean Rhys’s short fiction (1996). He is coeditor of British and Irish Short-Fiction Writers, 1945–2000 (2006) and the Blackwell Companion to the British and Irish Short Story (2008). J. Edward Mallot is an assistant professor of English at Arizona State University. His current book project focuses on memory, nationalism, and narrative in contemporary South Asian literatures in English. His forthcoming research examines British Asian literature and culture. Mallot earned his doctorate from the University of Iowa. Kevin Mccarron is reader in American Literature at Roehampton University, London. He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and has contributed chapters to nearly 50 books on subjects including tattooing, cyberpunk, popular music, horror fiction, dystopian literature, drug addiction, alcoholism, and blasphemy. He is the author of William Golding (1995; 2nd edn. 2006), The Coincidence of Opposites: William Golding’s Later Fiction (1996), and he co-authored Frightening Fictions (2001), a study of adolescent horror narratives. Dermot Mccarthy is a professor of English language and literature at Huron University College, University of Western Ontario and the author of Roddy Doyle: Raining on the Parade and A Poetics of Place: The Poetry of Ralph Gustafson.
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Patrick A. Mccarthy is professor of English and chair of the English department at the University of Miami. His recent publications include a scholarly edition of Olaf Stapledon’s classic science fiction novel, Star Maker (2004); “Modernism’s Swansong: Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano,” in B. Shaffer (ed.), A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945–2000 (2005); Joyce, Family, “Finnegans Wake” (2005); and “Making Herself Tidal: Chapter I.8,” in L. Crispi & S. Slot (eds.), How Joyce Wrote “Finnegans Wake”: A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide (2007). Scott Mccracken is professor of English literature at Keele University. He is the author of Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction (1998), Masculinities, Modernist Fiction, and the Urban Public Sphere (2007), and, with Peter Buse, Bertrand Taithe, and Ken Hirschkop, of Benjamin’s Arcades: An Unguided Tour (2006). He is secretary of the Dorothy Richardson Society. Margery Palmer Mcculloch is senior research fellow in Scottish literature at the University of Glasgow. Her most recent books include Modernism and Nationalism: Literature and Society in Scotland 1918–1939 (2004) and her Scottish Modernism and Its Contexts 1918–1959 is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. She is currently coediting a Hugh MacDiarmid Companion to be published by Edinburgh University Press. Roderick Mcgillis is a professor of English at the University of Calgary. He is the author most recently of Les Pieds Devant (2007) and He Was Some Kind of a Man (2008). He was one of the senior editors of the four-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature (2006). Matthew Mcguire has published widely on both Scottish and Irish literature. His work has appeared in the Edinburgh Review and Scottish Studies Review, as well as The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (2007). He is the author of The Essential Guide to Contemporary Scottish
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME I
Literature (2008) and coeditor of The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Poetry (2009). Dorothy Mcmillan is an honorary senior research fellow in English literature, former head of the School of English and Scottish Language and Literature, University of Glasgow, and past president of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies. She currently works mainly on writing by women, especially Scottish women. With Douglas Gifford she has edited A History of Scottish Women’s Writing (1997). Her most recent publications include the anthology Modern Scottish Women Poets (2003) and, with Richard Cronin, an edition of Emma for the Cambridge Edition of Austen’s works (2005). Kaye Mitchell is lecturer in contemporary literature at the University of Manchester. She is the author of A. L. Kennedy (2007) and Intention and Text (2008), and of numerous articles on twentieth-century and contemporary literature, critical theory, gender and sexuality, and popular culture. Her current research addresses questions of desire, signification, and intelligibility in the representation of female sexuality in contemporary literature and theory.
Michael Valdez Moses is associate professor of English at Duke University. He is the author of The Novel and the Globalization of Culture (1995), editor of The Writings of J. M. Coetzee (1994), and coeditor of Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899–1939 (2007). He is coeditor of the journal Modernist Cultures, published in electronic and print formats by Edinburgh University Press. Alex Murray is a lecturer in English at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Recalling London (2007) and Giorgio Agamben (2009); the editor, with Justin Clemens and Nick Heron, of The Work of Giorgio Agamben (2008) and, with Phil Tew, of The Modernism Handbook (2009). Bran Nicol is reader in modern and contemporary literature at the University of Portsmouth. His publications include The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction (2009), Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction (2nd edn. 2004), D. M. Thomas (2004), Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Reader (2002).
Robert Morace teaches at Daemen College in Amherst, New York. His publications include John Gardner: Critical Perspectives, coedited with Kathryn VanSpanckeren (1982), John Gardner: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography (1984), The Dialogic Novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge (1989), Irvine Welsh’s “Trainspotting” (2001), and Irvine Welsh, a study of the Welsh phenomenon (2007). His “Life and Times of Death and the Maiden” won the 1997 Berger Prize for best theater essay.
Margot Norris is Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches modern literature. Her books include The Decentered Universe of “Finnegans Wake” (1976), Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and Lawrence (1985), Joyce’s Web: The Social Unraveling of Modernism (1992), Writing War in the Twentieth Century (2000), Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s “Dubliners” (2003), and a monograph on the 1967 Joseph Strick film of Joyce’s Ulysses (2004). She has also edited or coedited a number of volumes including the Norton Critical Edition of James Joyce’s Dubliners (2006).
Merritt Moseley is professor of literature at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. He has written critical books on Michael Frayn, Julian Barnes, Kingsley Amis, and David Lodge and edited four volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography on British Novelists Since 1960 and one on Booker Prize Novels, 1969–2005.
Joseph Nugent has presented papers in English and Irish on nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Irish literature. His articles appear in Victorian Studies, The Senses and Society, and E´ire-Ireland. His current project is a cultural history of smell in nineteenth-century Ireland. He is currently an adjunct assistant professor of English at Boston College.
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME I
Thomas O’Grady is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he has been director of Irish studies since 1984. His essays and reviews on Irish literary and cultural matters have been published in a wide variety of journals, including E´ire-Ireland, James Joyce Quarterly, E´tudes Irlandaises, Irish University Review, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, New Hibernia Review, An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Arts, Studies in Short Fiction, Studies in the Novel, and Poetry Ireland Review. Kirby Olson is an associate professor of humanities at State University of New York at Delhi. He is the author of three book-length critical studies: Comedy after Postmodernism (2000); Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist (2002); and Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America (2005). He has been the editor of To Wit: Newsletter of the American Humor Studies Association since 2003. He has also published a novel entitled Temping (2006) and many poems, and has been the recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities. Adam Parkes is an associate professor of English at the University of Georgia, where he teaches modern British and American literature. He has two books in print, Modernism and the Theater of Censorship (1996) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day” (2001), as well as various articles on modern fiction and poetry. His forthcoming book Literary Impressionism in Its Time: From James to Bowen examines a range of British impressionist writers in historical context. Other research interests include modernism and the aristocracy and modernism and forensics. Daphne Patai is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author and editor of numerous books, including The Orwell Mystique (1984) and What Price Utopia? Essays on Ideological Policing, Feminism, and Academic Affairs (2008). Allison Pease is chair of gender studies and associate professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University
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of New York. She is the author of Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (2000) and writes about late Victorian and modernist literature and culture. John G. Peters is the author of Conrad and Impressionism (2001) and The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad (2006) and the editor of Conrad in the Public Eye (2008) and the Oxford Historical Guide to Joseph Conrad (2009). He has also published a number of scholarly articles on Conrad and other literary figures and has translated the Japanese poet Takamura K otar o’s book The Chieko Poems (2007). He is currently an associate professor of English at the University of North Texas. Martin Priestman is a professor of English at Roehampton University in London, and edited The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (2003). Other works on crime fiction include Detective Fiction and Literature: The Figure on the Carpet (1990) and Crime Fiction from Poe to the Present (1998). Works on romantic period literature include Cowper’s “Task”: Structure and Influence (1983) and Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830 (1999). Bryony Randall is lecturer in English literature at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (2007), and has also published on Imagist poetry, Gertrude Stein, life writing, and the proto-modernist writer George Egerton. She is coediting a collection of essays entitled Woolf in Context, and working on a monograph provisionally entitled The Working Woman Writer 1880–1920. Virginia Richter is chair of modern English literature at the University of Berne. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on the eighteenth-century novel and her second dissertation (“Habilitation”) on Darwinism in English literature. She taught English and comparative literature at the universities of Munich and G€ ottingen, and was a visiting fellow at the University of Kent and the University of Leeds. Her research interests include Victorian and modernist fiction,
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME I
gender studies, literature and science, and animals in literature. Jeffrey Roessner serves as dean of the arts and humanities at Mercyhurst College, where he is an associate professor of English. His scholarly interests include cultural studies, contemporary British historical fiction, and creative writing. He has published essays on works by John Fowles, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, and the Beatles, among others. Nancy Rosenfeld teaches in the English Studies Unit, Max Stern College of Jezreel Valley, and is a researcher in the Department of English Language and Literature, University of Haifa. Her areas of scholarly interest are seventeenth-century English literature and the British soldier-poets of World War I. Rosenfeld is the author of The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature: From Milton to Rochester (2008). She has published journal and book articles on the writings of John Milton, John Bunyan, John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, John Keats, and Robert Graves. Elodie Rousselot is a senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Portsmouth, where she has been teaching contemporary literature and postcolonial writing since 2006. Her main research interests are women’s writing, historical fiction, the neo-Victorian novel, and postcolonial studies. She is currently researching the function of history in the work of contemporary postcolonial women writers. Her monograph entitled Re-Writing Women into Canadian History: Margaret Atwood and Anne He´bert is to be published by E´ditions de L’instant m^eme. Nicholas Ruddick is a professor of English at the University of Regina, where he teaches courses on science fiction, horror fiction, and fairy tales. He is the author or editor of nine books; his most recent works include The Fire in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel (2009) and a new edition of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild in the Broadview series (2009). Richard Ruppel is a professor of English at Chapman University in Orange, California.
Most of his writing has been devoted to the life and work of Joseph Conrad. His most recent publication, Homosexuality in the Life and Work of Joseph Conrad: Love between the Lines (2008), was published by Routledge. He is currently at work on a book on Conrad’s politics and a hypertext version of Heart of Darkness. Lorena Russell received her PhD in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is an associate professor in the Literature and Language Department at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. Her interests include feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories. She has published articles on Fay Weldon, Angela Carter, Michael Ondaatje, and J. M. Coetzee as well as on the HBO series Six Feet Under and The Sopranos. Randi Saloman is a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow and visiting assistant professor of English at Cornell University. She has previously taught at Wesleyan University and at Yale University, where she received her PhD in 2006. She has published articles, notes, and reviews on Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett, and modern literature. She is currently completing a book, Virginia Woolf, Essayism, and the Question of Genre, and working on her upcoming project, a study of hotels in modern literature. Margaret Scanlan is professor of English at Indiana University South Bend. Her books include Traces of Another Time: History and Politics in Postwar British Fiction (1990), Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction (2001), and Culture and Customs of Ireland (2006). Bernard Schweizer is associate professor of English at Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus. Among his publications are two monographs, Radicals on the Road (2001) and Rebecca West: Heroism, Rebellion, and the Female Epic (2003); two essay collections, Approaches to the Anglo and American Female Epic (2006) and Rebecca West Today: Contemporary Critical Approaches (2007); a special issue of Studies in the Humanities (December
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME I
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2008); and an edition of a primary text, Survivors in Mexico by Rebecca West (2003). Schweizer is president of the International Rebecca West Society.
Women (1990), Rosamond Lehmann (1992), and (with Shirley Foster) What Katy Read: Feminist Re-readings of “Classic” Stories for Girls (1995).
Charity Scribner has held teaching and research positions at Columbia University, Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut NRW, Humboldt University, University of Oxford, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was granted the Class of 1954 Career Development Professorship in 2005. Scribner is currently assistant professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York and a faculty fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her scholarship examines modern European literature, art, and intellectual life, and her first book, Requiem for Communism (2003), analyzes the aesthetic response to the collapse of communism in Europe.
Claire Squires is professor of publishing studies and director of the Stirling Centre for International Publishing and Communication at the University of Stirling. She is author of Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain (2007) and Philip Pullman, Master Storyteller: A Guide to the Worlds of “His Dark Materials” (2006). She is volume editor of volume 7 (1914–2000) of the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (forthcoming) and associate editor for the Twentieth Century Book in Britain for the Oxford Companion to the Book (2010).
W. A. Senior has a PhD in medieval and Renaissance literature from the University of Notre Dame. A past president of the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts and the editor of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts from 1998 to 2007, he is also the author of scholarly articles on medieval literature, modern fantasy, and science fiction and of Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: Variations on the Fantasy Tradition (1995). James Sexton is adjunct professor and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Fellow at the University of Victoria. He has published numerous articles on Huxley, and is the editor of Selected Letters of Aldous Huxley (2007) and Graham Greene’s No Man’s Land (2005), and coeditor of the six-volume Complete Essays of Aldous Huxley (2000–2). He has taught at the University of Toulon as a visiting associate professor (2002–5), and continues to lecture in the English Department of Camosun College, Victoria during fall terms. Judy Simons is emeritus professor of English at De Montfort University, Leicester. She has published widely on women’s writing. Her books include Diaries and Journals of Literary
€ Axel StAhler is lecturer in comparative literary studies in the School of European Culture and Languages at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He is the editor of Anglophone Jewish Literature (2007) and the coeditor of Writing Fundamentalism (2009). Theodore L. Steinberg is distinguished teaching professor in the English Department at the State University of New York at Fredonia. Although his primary interests lie in the Middle Ages, he has published in a number of areas. His most recent books are Reading the Middle Ages, Twentieth-Century Epic Novels, and Jews and Judaism in the Middle Ages. Michael L. Storey is the Sister Maura Eichner Professor of English at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland in Baltimore. He is the author of Representing the Troubles in Irish Short Fiction (2004) as well as articles and reviews on Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Faolain, Elizabeth Bowen, John McGahern, William Trevor, Bernard MacLaverty, and other Irish writers. John J. Su is associate professor of contemporary Anglophone literature at Marquette University. He is the author of Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel (2005). Philip Tew is professor of English (post-1900 literature) at Brunel University, the elected
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director of the UK network for Modern Fiction Studies, director of the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing (BCCW), coeditor of Critical Engagements and Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a member of the Royal Society of Literature. He has published B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading (2001), The Contemporary British Novel (2004; rev. edn. 2007), and Jim Crace: A Critical Introduction (2006).
Timothy Weiss is a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; his books include Translating Orients: Between Ideology and Utopia (2004), English and Globalization: Perspectives from Hong Kong and Mainland China, coedited with Kwok-kan Tam (2004), and On the Margins: The Art of Exile in V. S. Naipaul (1992). He has been a Peace Corps Volunteer in Liberia, West Africa, and a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco.
Pamela Thurschwell is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Sussex. She is the author of Sigmund Freud (2000) and Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (2001), and coeditor, with Nicola Bown and Carolyn Burdett, of The Victorian Supernatural (2004) and, with Leah Price, of Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture (2005).
Juliette Wells, an assistant professor of English at Manhattanville College, is the author of the entry on Eva Figes in British and Irish Novelists Since 1960. She contributed a chapter on chicklit and women’s literary history to Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction (2006) and has published articles on postmodern reworkings of the novels of Jane Austen and Charlotte Bront€e. She coedited The Bront€es in the World of the Arts (2008).
Richard Todd is professor of British literature after 1500 at the University of Leiden. His books include a monograph on A. S. Byatt (1997) and two on Iris Murdoch (1984, 1979). His Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today was published in 1996. In 2007 he was elected a member of the International Association of University Professors of English (IAUPE). Kathleen Wall is professor of English at the University of Regina. Her books include The Callisto Myth from Ovid to Atwood (literary criticism), and Without Benefit of Words and Time’s Body (poetry). She has published on Virginia Woolf in the Journal of Narrative Theory and Texas Studies in Literature and Language. She is working on a book about Woolf’s use of aesthetic form to articulate a practice that is fully engaged with her society and her historical moment. Patricia Waugh is a professor in the Department of English Studies, Durham University. She has written numerous books and essays on modern fiction, literary theory, modernist and postmodernist aesthetics. She is currently completing two monographs, Humanising: English Literary Studies and the Biologisation of Culture and History of the British and Irish Novel: 1945 to the Present.
Lynn Wells is an associate professor of English at the University of Regina, where she specializes in contemporary British fiction and contemporary culture. Her first book, Allegories of Telling: Self-Referential Narrative in Contemporary British Fiction, was published by Rodopi in 2003 and her book on Ian McEwan will be published by Palgrave Macmillan. She is currently associate vice president (academic) at the University of Regina. Imelda Whelehan is professor of English and women’s studies and director of the Centre for Adaptations at De Montfort University in Leicester. She is coeditor of Adaptation and has published extensively on feminism, chicklit and adaptations. Her co-authored book, Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema is due to be published by Palgrave Macmillan. Anne Whitehead is senior lecturer in the School of English at Newcastle University. She is the author of Memory (2008) and Trauma Fiction (2004). She has also coedited Theories of Memory: A Reader (2007) and W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion (2004). Peter Wolfe’s shorter work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Chicago Tribune, the Nation, Modern Fiction Studies,
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME I
the New Zealand Listener, the Calcutta Statesman, and the Weekend Australian. A Fulbright lecturer in India and Poland, he has also served as a visiting professor in Canada, New Zealand, Taiwan, the Soviet Union, and Australia. His twentieth book, Havoc in the Hub: A Reading of George V. Higgins, was published in 2007.
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Sue Zlosnik is professor of English and head of the English Department at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her publications include three books co-authored and one coedited with Avril Horner on women’s writing and Gothic fiction. She is currently copresident of the International Gothic Association.
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Introduction to Volume I
The subject of the British and Irish volume of The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction is as vast as it is rich and heterogeneous. I will therefore resist the temptation, in my introductory remarks, of summing up or surveying all of what follows; the bringing together of the field of twentieth-century British and Irish fiction is, after all, the task of the volume’s 140 entries. Instead, I will offer a few remarks intended merely to set the stage for a portion of what follows. The years following the start of the twentieth century saw the rise of what in due course would come to be called “literary modernism” – a transatlantic cultural phenomenon that impacted early twentiethcentury fiction and that engaged with myriad extraliterary developments of its day. Features of high modernist fiction, in particular the novel, that predominated between the turn of the century (Conrad’s Lord Jim of 1900) and the late 1940s (Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano of 1947) included radical experiments with point of view and with the representation of time and space; the shattering of the illusion of a unified, omniscient narrator; linguistic pyrotechnics, textual self-referentiality, and literary allusiveness; narrative fragmentation, replete with disorienting stream-of-consciousness and interior monologue narration; and the frank (arguably Freudian) treatment of human sexuality. In comparison to the late nineteenth-century novels of Thomas Hardy, the mature works of Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Dorothy Richardson, and Woolf seemed not a few years but rather lightyears away. The impetus for modernist fiction’s radical experimentation with language, form, and point of view had less to do with the joys of aesthetic innovation for its own sake than with a particular
frustration, as the antihero of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara (1905) puts it, that the “world at present . . . scraps its obsolete steam engines and dynamos” yet “won’t scrap its old prejudices and its old moralities and its old religions and its old political constitutions.”1 George Orwell was by this light misguided to associate literary modernism with “art-for-art’s saking,” with the “worship of the meaningless,” with the mere “manipulation of words” in the service of an art divorced from “the urgent problems of the moment.”2 Orwell, who penned this accusation in 1940, was probably thinking of James Joyce, who had a year earlier published Finnegans Wake, a supremely modernist work that parades, indeed fetishizes, its arcane linguistic and narrative dimensions. Joyce’s sui generis 1939 text notwithstanding, modernist fiction was less about the joys of experimentation and iconoclasm for its own sake – what Orwell calls the “frivolous notion that art is merely [about] technique”3 – than it was about overthrowing novelistic forms and structures, and by extension social forms and structures, that were felt to be repressive and outmoded. Novelty and innovation per se were less important than making the new fiction faithful to contemporary social, technological, psychological, epistemological, and aesthetic currents. Put another way, modernist novelists such as Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Lewis, Woolf, and, to a lesser extent, Ford and Forster, were less interested in “art for art’s sake” than they were in creating works of fiction that comported with their new understanding of the world around them. What T. S. Eliot in 1921 argued of present-day poets also applied to novelists: they “must be difficult” because “Our civilization comprehends great variety and
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME I
complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility [that of the literary artist of merit], must produce various and complex results.”4 In other words, modernist fiction should not be dismissed as an autotelic or narcissistic retreat from modern life so much as an attempt to face and depict it unflinchingly. Perhaps the most important influences on modernism in the novel were a series of revolutionary ideas in European thought that contributed to a heady zeitgeist. The principal idea was a crisis lamented by Matthew Arnold in his midVictorian poem, “Dover Beach”: the retreat of the “Sea of Faith” and the seeming disappearance of God,5 an anxiety that emerges full-blown in Yeats’s celebrated 1919 poem “The Second Coming,” with its theologically resonant title.6 Three seminal modern intellectuals – Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud – all speculated that humans created God out of their need for a protecting father and to explain an otherwise inexplicable, threatening, chaotic world. Marx saw religion as the “sigh of the oppressed,” the “opium of the people”7 – as a means for the “haves” of society to keep the “havenots” mystified and downtrodden; Nietzsche famously asserted that “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him”;8 and Freud likened our devotion to the “fairy-tale of religion” to a “childhood neurosis,” and, following Marx, likened “the effects of religious consolations” to a “narcotic.”9 While some found the prospect of a godless universe liberating, others found the absence of transcendental meaning and teleological human history to be frightening prospects. Unsurprisingly, this shift in thinking had important implications for the ways in which novels were written; many novelists now took it for granted that the traditional view of the world – one subject to a single overarching interpretation, corresponding to God’s intention – was obsolete. Objectivity was an illusion; subjectivity reigned. Many legitimate truths and perspectives replaced the notion of a single “Truth”; “reality” was supplanted by a series of competing realities. In short, how one saw things now was determined by one’s unique perspective, put in dialogue with other individuals and their unique perspectives. This notion informed many modernist novels – among these, Conrad’s Nostromo, Joyce’s Ulysses, Woolf’s The Waves, and Lowry’s Under the
Volcano – in which multiple narrators and shifting perspectives force readers to reconstruct events by negotiating between the various possible ways in which those events can be understood. Put another way, the multiple points of view in these modernist texts are offered not to impede our grasp of the novel’s meaning so much as they are the very point of it. As Orwell argues, seemingly contradicting his above indictment of the modernists for their escapist avoidance of politics: Ulysses could not have been written by someone who was merely dabbling with word-patterns; it is the product of a special vision of life, the vision of a Catholic who has lost his faith. What Joyce is saying is “Here is life without God. Just look at it!” and his technical innovations, important though they are, are there primarily to serve this purpose.10
Another development that influenced the modernist novel – and that which followed in the second half of the twentieth century – was the late Victorian emergence of the discipline of psychology, which further eroded traditional faith in objective norms of perception, knowledge, and certainty. The year 1890 marked the appearance of William James’s Principles of Psychology, a work that reoriented our purchase on “reality.” Rather than being something objectively given, reality was to be understood as something subjectively perceived through the “stream” of human consciousness. If James’s terrain was consciousness and perception, Freud’s, more radically, was the unconscious, which he defined as that area of the mind that is inaccessible to conscious scrutiny, the refuge of repressed wishes too dangerous for us to acknowledge consciously.11 Although such novelists as Joyce and Lawrence expressed skepticism about Freudian thought – Lawrence declared in 1914, “I am not Freudian and never was” and in 1916, following the publication of psychoanalytic/oedipal readings of Sons and Lovers, “I think that ‘complexes’ are vicious half-statements of the Freudians”;12 and Joyce in 1921 referred to Jung and Freud as, respectively, the “Swiss Tweedledum” and the “Viennese Tweedledee”13 – Freud’s impact upon the modernist novel was nevertheless considerable and obvious. (It is surely relevant that Virginia Woolf published Freud in English at her and Leonard Woolf ’s Hogarth Press.) One critic even
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INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME I
went as far as to attribute the “shift in the basis of characterization in fiction after about 1900” largely to the “revolutionary impact of Freudian concepts of the unconscious.”14 It is against this background that British and Irish fiction of the second half of the twentieth century took shape. The response in particular to modernism took two divergent paths, resulting in the flourishing of two conflicting fictional modes: anti-modernist realism and postmodernist experimentation. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the novel in Britain and Ireland tended to reject literary modernist innovations (notable exceptions included Flann O’Brien, Samuel Beckett, and B. S. Johnson), reacting against the modernist novel’s conspicuous, overly precious, complexity. Kinglsey Amis, Iris Murdoch, Angus Wilson, and many others countered in their novels with an anti-modernist, anti-avant-garde “neo-realism.” As Malcolm Bradbury characterizes the mood between 1945 and 1960: “Modernism was over, even tainted; the deaths of Joyce, Woolf, Yeats and Freud had reinforced the feeling. In critical circles, it was already being historicized, defined, monumentalized, given its name and structure; it was no longer avant . . . but arriere.”15 While realistic novels continued to be written over the next few decades and of course prevail today (consider, for example, the work since 1980 of Anita Brookner, Margaret Drabble, John McGahern, Iris Murdoch, and Muriel Spark), a second and divergent response to modernism and its anti-modernist wake in the British and Irish novel – the “postmodernist” novel – evolved between the early 1970s and the present. Indeed, as divergent in their formal, linguistic, and thematic dimensions as the novels of Martin Amis, J. G. Ballard, John Banville, Julian Barnes, A. S. Byatt, Angela Carter, John Fowles, Ian McEwan, and Graham Swift may be, it is reasonable to group their fictions under the banner of the postmodern novel. This novel rejects the anti-modernist backlash; indeed, it internalizes many of the attitudes and perspectives of modernism, yet also takes further and revises a number of modernism’s tenets. As Gerald Graff argues, “postmodernism should be seen not as breaking with romantic and modernist assumptions but rather as a logical culmination of the premises of these earlier movements.”16 The American novelist John Barth puts the relationship
3
between modernism and postmodernism similarly: the “ideal postmodernist author” has “the first half of the [twentieth] century under his belt [even if] not on his back.”17 Allow me to consider the responses to modernist fiction in the British and Irish novel of 1950–2000 in a bit more detail. The first reaction was blazed in England in the 1950s by the prickly, anti-modernist backlash of traditionalist novelists such as Kingsley Amis, John Braine, Iris Murdoch (early in her career), C. P. Snow, John Wain, and Angus Wilson, who rejected both the narrative and stylistic experiments associated with Joyce and the refined literary aesthetics associated with Virginia Woolf, either on the grounds that these were arcane and mystifying or that they had been worthwhile experiments in a now exhausted vein (interestingly, a number of these figures wrote campus novels). For example, John Wain, writing in 1963, insisted that the “experimental” novel “died with Joyce.” Since Ulysses, Wain argued, “there has been very little experimental-writing that strikes one as serious, or motivated by anything more than faddishness or the irritable search for new gimmicks.”18 According to C. P. Snow, “Joyce’s way” was “at best a cul-de-sac,”19 and the literary “doctrine” of Virginia Woolf and others culminated in the novel becoming “totally meaningless in a very short time.”20 If there was an anti-modernist movement in the English novel of the time it was to be found in the so called “angry young men” – comprised of Wain, Braine, Kingsley Amis, and others – whom Amis deemed “reactionaries rather than rebels” because they sought a return “to the pre-Joycean tradition”21 of broadly accessible and relevant literary works. Amis was at his most strident and outspoken in this regard in a 1958 piece in The Spectator. There, he famously argued: The idea about experiment being the life-blood of the English novel is one that dies hard. “Experiment,” in this context, boils down pretty regularly to “obtruded oddity,” whether in construction – multiple viewpoints and such – or in style . . . Shift from one scene to the next in midsentence, cut down on verbs or definite articles, and you are putting yourself right up in the forefront, at any rate in the eyes of those who were reared on Joyce and Virginia Woolf . . . 22
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INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME I
However differently Amis’s Lucky Jim, Murdoch’s Under the Net, and Wilson’s Hemlock and After (all from 1952 or 1953) respond to literary modernism, each of these works represents a desire to return the novel to an earlier, more realistic and chronologically linear model. The anti-modernist reaction to modernism in the British and Irish novel was followed by another reaction, beginning in the early 1970s (though, again, presaged most importantly in the work of Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien). Born of what David Lodge characterized as “the pressure of skepticism on the aesthetic and epistemological premises of literary realism,”23 the postmodern novel of the final three decades of the twentieth century continued and furthered “the modernist critique of traditional realism.”24 Just as Amis and other traditionalists of the 1950s and 1960s registered their frustration with the modernist novel’s lack of accessibility and relevance, so the early postmodernists, in an anti-antimodernist backlash, registered their frustration with the realistic, chronologically linear novel’s lack of artistic courage and innovation. The English avant garde novelist B. S. Johnson, for example, writing 10 years after John Wain argued that the experimental novel died with Joyce, lamented that while Joyce was “the Einstein of the novel,”25 very few novelists in Britain now followed his lead. For Johnson, “It is not a question of influence, of writing like Joyce. It is a matter of realizing that the novel is an evolving form, not a static one, of accepting that for practical purposes where Joyce left off should ever since have been regarded as the starting point.”26 “Why then,” Johnson demanded, “do so many novelists still write as though the revolution that was Ulysses had never happened . . .?”27 Johnson concluded by quoting the French author Natalie Sarraute’s description of literature “as a relay race, the baton of innovation passing from one generation to another,” and then by accusing the “vast majority of British novelists” today with having “dropped the baton.”28 Johnson’s reference to Sarraute here is telling, as many avant garde English novelists of the 1970s gained their inspiration from French writers and intellectuals – specifically from Sarraute, Samuel Beckett (born in Ireland but living in Paris and writing in French and English), and Alain Robbe-Grillet (theorist of
le nouveau roman) – rather than from British ones. John Fowles, for example, the author of one of the earliest important English postmodernist novels, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), admits to finding himself “much more at home in French than in English literature.”29 Be this “French connection” as it may, British and Irish postmodernist novels – among them Fowles’s French Lieutenant’s Woman, Golding’s Darkness Visible (1979), Gray’s Lanark (1981), Swift’s Waterland (1983), Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), Martin Amis’s Money (1984), A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990), McCabe’s Butcher Boy (1992), and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1994) – built upon many modernist novelistic innovations. While “postmodernism” as a theoretical construct defies easy definition – Malcolm Bradbury has called the term a “moveable feast,”30 and Hans Bertens has characterized it as “exasperating” for being “several things at once”31 – it is clear that postmodern novels, in practice, deliberately blur categories that were formerly thought to be antithetical. That is, they blur elite and demotic narrative forms, author and reader, fiction and fact, and they attack realistic conventions of representation, notions of generic purity, and the feasibility of a unified subject. In his exhaustive The Idea of the Postmodern Hans Bertens observes that postmodernism has meant different things to different people at different conceptual levels, rising from humble literary-critical origins in the 1950s to a level of global conceptualization in the 1980s. . . . If there is a common denominator to all these postmodernisms, it is that of a crisis in representation: a deeply felt loss of faith in our ability to represent the real, in the widest sense. No matter whether they are aesthetic, epistemological, moral, or political in nature, the representations that we used to rely on can no longer be taken for granted.32
This “crisis” of representation – that representations create more than they reflect reality – is discernible in the work of the most important French theorizers of the postmodern, JeanFran¸cois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. Although these French theories of the postmodern had little direct influence on the British novels of the period, they nevertheless contributed to a postmodernist intellectual and artistic climate out of which the novels evolved. And they impacted
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INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME I
conversations in critical theory, which also, at least indirectly, influenced as well as reflected developments in postmodernist fiction. It is also worth emphasizing that postmodernist narrative experimentation in the novel, like that of modernist experimentation before it, was undertaken not in the spirit of absurdist or fabulist antirealism, as many assumed, but in the spirit of hyperrealism, one which accounts for the new theories of perception, knowledge, and consciousness alluded to above. What Virginia Woolf argued of the modernist Joyce and other authors of his ilk is also true of the postmodernist Fowles and other authors of his ilk: they all attempt, in their fictions, to come closer to life, and to preserve more sincerely and exactly what interests and moves them, even if to do so they must discard most of the conventions which are commonly observed by the [realist] novelist. Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.33
Woolf ’s point is clear: Joyce and other modernists wrote out of a sense of fidelity to things as they are subjectively and fragmentarily experienced rather than out of an unfeasible stance of objectivity and omniscience. As Woolf hints here, Joyce’s use of interior monologue narration worked as a means of plumbing the depths and shallows of character as never before, a device allowing for the direct representation of the psyche in action. However, one important difference between the modernism of Joyce and Woolf and the postmodernism of Fowles and Swift is that whereas “the Modernist aimed at providing a valid, authentic, though strictly personal view of the world in which he lived, the Postmodernist appears to have abandoned the attempt toward a representation of the world that is justified by the convictions and sensibility” of any single individual consciousness34 or historical account. Indeed, such observably
5
postmodern novels as Fowles’s French Lieutenant’s Woman, Swift’s Waterland, Gray’s Lanark, and Byatt’s Possession deconstruct traditional notions of subjectivity and history, and problematize the distinction between fact and fiction, in ways that go beyond what Joyce and other modernists envisioned. Another clear difference is that postmodernist novels tend to be far more demotic and less elitist in orientation than their modernist forerunners. John Carey’s observation that the literary intelligentsia in the years leading up to 1939 was distinctly elitist and anti-democratic – hostile to the “large reading public” that came into being following “nineteenth-century educational reforms”35 – no longer holds sway in recent years, as the postmodernist novel’s abundant use of popular cultural discourse suggests. It is difficult, given the postmodern novel’s demotic orientation, to imagine its practitioners defining their art in the terms hazarded by D. H. Lawrence: “[B]eing a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet . . . The novel is the one bright book of life.”36 One could elaborate further about twentiethcentury British and Irish fiction along these aesthetic and philosophic lines. Alternately, one could approach the field through the prism of national (English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh) literatures; from the perspective of supranational considerations that account for patterns of immigration, colonialism, war, and globalization; through the lens of gender and sexuality, class, ethnicity, or religion; via a consideration of the business of publishing, filmic adaptation, and literary prizes; and in a host of other ways. Which is the very point and purpose of the British and Irish volume, and indeed its two companion volumes, of The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction: to offer readable, authoritative, illuminating assessments of twentieth-century fiction, figures, debates, rubrics, and movements that point readers in the direction of further avenues by which to explore this fertile, heterogeneous literary terrain.
Notes 1 George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara [1905] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), pp. 140–1. 2 George Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” in A Collection of Essays by George Orwell (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1954), pp. 228–9. 3 Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” p. 245.
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INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME I
4 T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Prose, ed. F. Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 65. 5 Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach,” in M. H. Abrams (gen. ed.), The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th edn., vol. 2 (New York: Norton, 2000), p. 1492. 6 W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” in Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1956), p. 184. 7 Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Robert C. Tucker (ed.), Marx–Engels Reader, 2nd edn. (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 54. 8 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 181. 9 Sigmund Freud, Future of an Illusion (New York: Norton, 1961), pp. 53, 49. 10 Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” p. 228. 11 For more on this see Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (New York: Norton, 1961), pp. 18–27. 12 Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 2 vols., ed. Harry T. Moore (London: Heinemann, 1962), pp. 291, 475. 13 Letters of James Joyce, 3 vols., ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking, 1957), vol. 1, p. 166. For more on the Joyce–Freud connection see Brian W. Shaffer, “Joyce and Freud: Discontent and Its Civilizations,” in Vincent J. Cheng & Timothy Martin (eds.), Joyce in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 73–88. 14 Kenneth Graham, “Conrad and Modernism,” in J. H. Stape (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 211. Interestingly, Woolf says something similar in her essays of the period. In “Modern Fiction” (1919) she makes the case for the new novel’s focus on the interior, not exterior, lives of its characters; and in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924) she famously quips that, “in or about December, 1910, human character changed” (105). Both are reprinted in Peter Faulkner (ed.), The English Modernist Reader, 1910–1930 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986). 15 Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 268. 16 Gerald Graff, “The Myth of the Postmodernist Breakthrough,” in Malcolm Bradbury (ed.), The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), p. 219. 17 John Barth, “The Literature of Replenishment,” in Michael Hoffman & Patrick Murphy (eds.), Essentials of the Theory of Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988), p. 430. 18 John Wain, quoted in Rubin Rabinovitz, The Reaction against Experiment in the English Novel, 1950–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 8. 19 C. P. Snow, quoted in Randall Stevenson, A Reader’s Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel in Britain (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), p. 96. 20 C. P. Snow, quoted in Frank Kermode, “The House of Fiction: Interviews with Seven Novelists,” in Bradbury (ed.), The Novel Today, p. 129. 21 Kingsley Amis, quoted in Michael Barber, “The Art of Fiction LIX, Kingsley Amis” (interview), Paris Review, 64 (1975), 46. 22 Quoted in Rabinovitz, The Reaction against Experiment, pp. 40–1. 23 David Lodge, The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), p. 19. 24 David Lodge, Postmodernism, Antimodernism and Postmodernism (published lecture) (Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 1977), p. 10. 25 B. S. Johnson, “Introduction to Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?” in Bradbury (ed.), The Novel Today, p. 152. 26 Johnson, “Introduction,” p. 152. 27 Johnson, “Introduction,” p. 155. 28 Johnson, “Introduction,” p. 167. 29 John Fowles, “Notes on an Unfinished Novel,” in Bradbury (ed.), The Novel Today, p. 147. 30 Bradbury, Modern British Novel, p. 408. 31 Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 3. 32 Bertens, Idea of the Postmodern, pp. 10–11. 33 Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” in Faulkner (ed.), English Modernist Reader, pp. 108–9. 34 Douwe W. Fokkema, Literary History, Modernism, and Postmodernism (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1984), p. 40. 35 John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligensia, 1880–1939 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), p. vii. 36 D. H. Lawrence, “Why the Novel Matters,” in Faulkner (ed.), English Modernist Reader, p. 145. For a fuller discussion of these and related concerns, see the Introduction to my Reading the Novel in English, 1950–2000 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 1–34.
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A Ackroyd, Peter BARRY LEWIS
Peter Ackroyd is a prolific writer whose novels, biographies, and works of non-fiction have attracted a wide audience and sustained acclaim. He started out as a poet and a critic, but soon found his niche as a novelist who delights in ransacking the past and rewriting its literary and cultural histories in a manner associated with postmodernist fiction. The majority of his novels center on London, as does most of his other work. The English capital is the site for delving into a number of recurring themes: the influence of place upon the psyche, the spiral nature of time, impersonation and imitation, the Catholic heritage of England, Englishness, occult beliefs, and strained father–son relationships. His characters are often transformations of real-world figures such as the poet Thomas Chatterton, the music hall performer Dan Leno, and the essayist Charles Lamb. Ackroyd was born on October 5, 1949 and brought up on a modest East Acton council estate in west London. His parents separated not long after he was born and his maternal grandmother played an important role in his upbringing. A precocious child, he excelled at school and entered Clare College, Cambridge in 1968 to study English literature. There he was exposed to the “Cambridge poets” group (J. H. Prynne and others) whose experimental approach toward language was later to inform his own poetry and fiction. His year of postdoctoral study in 1972 as a Mellon Fellow at Yale University furthered these interests. Here he came into contact with the poet
John Ashbery and drafted an aesthetic manifesto (Ackroyd 1976). It is London, though, that has had the biggest impact upon his writings. He often refers to it as the landscape of his imagination and it functions like a character in its own right in his work. Many of the subjects of his biographies have London in common, too. He has dealt with “Cockney visionaries” such as Dickens (1990) and Blake (1995); writers to whom the capital is significant, such as T. S. Eliot (1984) and Shakespeare (2004b); and the city itself (2000). Ackroyd is one of a number of contemporary British writers – among them Iain Sinclair, J. G. Ballard, and (to a lesser extent) Martin Amis – who focus upon London as a source of inspiration. These novelists follow in the footsteps, sometimes literally, of their literary ancestor Charles Dickens. They bring to their explorations of London a sense of the capital as a labyrinth of possibility as it stretches infinitely through space and time. Ackroyd’s first novel, The Great Fire of London (1982), picks up on the city’s historical echoes and artfully deploys Dickens’s Little Dorrit as an intertext. His later substantial biography of Dickens merges factual and imaginative material to examine its subject. Ackroyd’s novels show a fascination with the wide range of English discourses that have existed in history. A good example of his mastery of mimicry is Hawksmoor (1985). This compares and contrasts the opening decades of the eighteenth century, when the rational procedures of science began to supersede the more ancient forces of animistic magic, with the urban squalor of 1980s London. The chapters narrated in the
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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first person by Nicholas Dyer, loosely modeled on the historical figure of the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, present a convincing pastiche of the prose of the earlier period. Ackroyd spent six months in the British Library reading texts relevant to his setting. He recorded phrases and sentences into his notebooks until their language became second nature. In doing so, he followed the method established in his previous novel, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), of building upon a specific literary style as a template for his own inventions. It is a technique associated with T. S. Eliot. Eliot’s influence is particularly noticeable in Hawksmoor as events from the late sixteenth/early seventeenth century are juxtaposed with a series of murders in the present day. Subsequent fictions expand Ackroyd’s thematic and stylistic concerns. Several probe the subject of fakes, forgeries, and plagiarism (1987, 2004a). Some focus on the occult and the paranormal (1989, 1993, 1994). Other novels excavate the past to present alternate histories (1996, 1999, 2003, 2006, 2008). Perhaps his keynote novel, though not the most successful artistically or commercially, is English Music (1992). This novel features chapters that imitate the styles of many English writers, such as Bunyan, Defoe, Blake, and Carroll. It, too, is set in London, the source of Ackroyd’s vibrant muse. With unflagging vitality, he continues to celebrate the capital in his numerous books, reviews, television series, and plays for both radio and the stage.
Ackroyd, P. (1990). Dickens. London: SinclairStevenson. Ackroyd, P. (1992). English Music. London: Hamish Hamilton. Ackroyd, P. (1993). The House of Doctor Dee. London: Hamish Hamilton. Ackroyd, P. (1994). Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. London: Sinclair-Stevenson. Ackroyd, P. (1995). Blake. London: Sinclair-Stevenson. Ackroyd, P. (1996). Milton in America. London: Sinclair-Stevenson. Ackroyd, P. (1999). The Plato Papers. London: Chatto and Windus. Ackroyd, P. (2000). London: The Biography. London: Chatto and Windus. Ackroyd, P. (2003). The Clerkenwell Tales. London: Chatto and Windus. Ackroyd, P. (2004a). The Lambs of London. London: Chatto and Windus. Ackroyd, P. (2004b). Shakespeare: The Biography. London: Chatto and Windus. Ackroyd, P. (2006). The Fall of Troy. London: Chatto and Windus. Ackroyd, P. (2008). The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein. London: Chatto and Windus. Lewis, B. (2007). My Words Echo Thus: Possessing the Past in Peter Ackroyd. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Onega, S. (1999). Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd. New York: Camden House.
SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF); London in Fiction (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF)
Richard Aldington (1892–1962) left an extensive literary legacy. As poet, novelist, biographer, essayist, anthologist, critic, editor, and translator (from Greek, Latin, French, and Italian), he wrote assiduously for five decades. His breakthrough as a man of letters started with his association with Ezra Pound, H.D. (his first wife, to whom he was married for 25 years), and F. S. Flint. Under Pound’s leadership Imagism was launched, with Aldington contributing to all four of the Imagist anthologies published between 1914 and 1917. His army service in World War I interrupted his writing career, and he took time to readjust to civilian life. Aldington wrote biographies on, among others, Voltaire (1925), Remy de Gourmont (1928), the duke of Wellington (1946), D. H. Lawrence (1950), T. E. Lawrence (1955), and Robert Louis Stevenson (1957).
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ackroyd. P. (1976). Notes for a New Culture: An Essay on Modernism. London: Vision. Ackroyd, P. (1982). The Great Fire of London. London: Hamish Hamilton. Ackroyd, P. (1983). The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde. London: Hamish Hamilton. Ackroyd, P. (1984). T. S. Eliot. London: Hamish Hamilton. Ackroyd, P. (1985). Hawksmoor. London: Hamish Hamilton. Ackroyd, P. (1987). Chatterton. London: Hamish Hamilton. Ackroyd, P. (1989). First Light. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Aldington, Richard MICHAEL COPP
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ALDINGTON, RICHARD
Between 1929 and 1946 Aldington wrote eight novels and three collections of short stories. With the exception of the first novel, Death of a Hero (his greatest commercial success), less critical attention has been paid to these than to his poetry. In the Prologue to Death of a Hero Aldington informs of us of the outcome – his hero, George Winterbourne, dies at the end of the novel. It is through a fellow officer’s voice that we follow the causes that lead up to that death. The Prologue and Parts I and II constitute a wide-ranging attack on the values of Edwardian society. George’s parents, his fellow officers, his wife Elizabeth, his mistress Fanny, and various literary personalities are subjected to a fierce satirical assault. Part III concentrates on the front-line experience of Winterbourne, and is written in a more restrained mode, much of it strictly controlled documentary narrative. There is general agreement that this is the most successful part of a novel that is one of the outstanding fictions of World War I. Aldington continued the war theme in his collection of 13 stories, Roads to Glory (1930). He used the form to experiment with technique, for example, interweaving prose poems and realistic narrative. Much of Aldington’s fiction is satirical caricature. In The Colonel’s Daughter (1931a), Georgina Smithers, constrained by Victorian rules of conduct, wishes to marry, but convention prevents her from seeking a husband. Her lowly station in life, her dullness, and her plainness serve further to condemn her to spinsterhood, a social reality for so many young women who heavily outnumbered the eligible war survivors. The various subplots are treated by Aldington in a less angry manner than in Death of a Hero. Instead of interjecting his furious condemnation he allows the failings of his characters to be self-evident. The epilogue, a conversation between two Beckettian characters, Bim and Bom, provides an abrupt shift of tone, from romance to the absurd. All Men are Enemies (1933) and Women Must Work (1934) are also novels of social satire. In All Men are Enemies Antony Clarendon struggles to achieve a finer, more fulfilled life. Part 1 (1900–14) is firmly pastoral, as Aldington sets the natural cycle of organic growth against the hectic artificiality of a machine-mad society. The war years are represented by a fragmented collage of verse snippets, one for each year of the
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war (taken as a whole they comprise Aldington’s most formally modernist poem). Part 2, starting in 1919, and depicting the passing of the old order, is in sharp contrast. Antony, finding the contemporary world senseless, attempts to rediscover his youthful idealism, and his first love. Parts 3 and 4 continue this theme, but, with their surfeit of detail, dialogue, and authorial comment, are weaker than Parts 1 and 2. In Women Must Work, Etta Morrison, unlike Georgina in The Colonel’s Daughter, is an emancipated woman. When she moves to London she pretends that her illegitimate child’s father died in the war. She marries, is successful financially, and dominates her husband. Aldington’s message is that her success is illusory, based as it is on the deceptive goals of emancipation and a hollow supremacy. For many years Aldington lived abroad, mainly in America and France. His later years were blighted by the hostile reception of his biography of T. E. Lawrence in which Aldington sought to lay bare the truth as he saw it about this overmythologized hero figure. Toward the end of his life he achieved considerable success in the Soviet Union where a number of his books were translated in substantial editions. In February 1962 he was feted by the Soviet Writers’ Union on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. He died soon after this visit and was buried in Sury-en-Vaux. SEE ALSO: H.D. (AF); Lawrence, D. H. (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); World War I in Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Aldington, R. (1929). Death of a Hero. London: Chatto and Windus. Aldington, R. (1930). Roads to Glory. London: Chatto and Windus. Aldington, R. (1931a). The Colonel’s Daughter. London: Chatto and Windus. Aldington, R. (1931b). Last Straws. Paris: Hours. Aldington, R. (1932). Soft Answers. London: Chatto and Windus. Aldington, R. (1933). All Men are Enemies. London: Chatto and Windus. Aldington, R. (1934). Women Must Work. London: Chatto and Windus. Aldington, R. (1937). Very Heaven. London: Heinemann.
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Aldington, R. (1938). Seven against Reeves. London: Heinemann. Aldington, R. (1939). Rejected Guest. London: Heinemann. Aldington, R. (1946). The Romance of Casanova. London: Heinemann. Blayac, A., & Zilboorg, C. (eds.) ( [1993] ). Richard Aldington: Essays in Honour of the Centenary of His Birth. Montpellier: Universite Paul Valery. Cecil, H. (1995). The Flower of Battle: British Fiction Writers of the First World War. London: Secker and Warburg. Doyle, C. (1989). Richard Aldington: A Biography. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Fitzmaurice, G. (dir.) (1934). All Men are Enemies (script by S. Hoffenstein & L. Coffee). Fox. Kelly, L. (ed.) (1987). Richard Aldington: Papers from the Reading Conference. Reading: University of Reading. Kempton, D., & Stoneback, H. R. (eds.) (2003). Writers in Provence: Proceedings of the First and Second International Richard Aldington Conferences. SaintesMaries-de-la-Mer: Gregau. Kempton, D., & Stoneback, H. R. (eds.) (2005). New Places: Proceedings of the Third International Richard Aldington Conference. Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer: Gregau. Kempton, D., & Stoneback, H. R. (eds.) (2008). Locations and Dislocations: Proceedings of the Fourth International Richard Aldington Conference. SaintesMaries-de-la-Mer: Gregau. Klein, H. (ed.) (1976). The First World War in Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Parfitt, G. (1988). Fiction of the First World War: A Study. London: Faber and Faber.
Amis, Kingsley GAVIN KEULKS
One of England’s most popular, controversial, and versatile writers, Sir Kingsley Amis was born in London on April 16, 1922. From his earliest publication – Bright November (1947) – to the last during his lifetime – The Biographer’s Moustache (1995) – Amis functioned as a moral barometer for the rapidly shifting mores of his time. His more than 40 books include 24 novels, seven editions of poetry, four short story collections, and hundreds of reviews and essays; and his opinions were often central to post-World War II debates, ranging from university expansion and political correctness to the vitality of the comic and realistic novel.
Although Amis remained skeptical of the critical labels with which he was associated (Movement poetry; angry young men), his literary values confirmed the traditional realist precepts of these groups. Throughout his life he condemned narrative indulgence, taking special issue with such celebrated stylists as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, and Vladimir Nabokov. In his article “Communication and the Victorian Poet” (1954a) he explained that an orderly contract exists between reader and writer – a pact that must be preserved at all cost. He consequently faulted most modernist (and certainly postmodernist) authors for linguistic exhibitionism, for elevating technique over plot, tone of voice over characterization. Given the significance of the modernist and postmodernist periods to the publishing and higher education industries, Amis’s comments threatened to obscure his own artistry, detracting from the fact that he remains the greatest satirist since Evelyn Waugh and one of the most successful comic writers in history. Amis’s career can be effectively grouped into three periods. The first period encompasses the early work from Lucky Jim (1954) until the mid1960s. Beginning with The Anti-Death League (1966), however, Amis’s work becomes increasingly dark and meditative. Controversy deepens during this period as well, culminating in the furor surrounding Stanley and the Women (1984b), which struggled to find an American publisher because of its anti-feminist overtones. The last period of Amis’s career is distinguished by his most critically acclaimed novel – The Old Devils (1986) – and includes The Biographer’s Moustache and all posthumous publications. Throughout each of these periods Amis challenged himself to write in different genres, ranging from comic and satirical novels to more fantastical forms such as alternative world fictions, detective stories, murder mysteries, and ghost tales. Under two pseudonyms – William Tanner and Robert Markham – Amis wrote a critical study of the James Bond novels (The Book of Bond; or, Every Man His Own 007, 1965) as well as his own contribution to the series (Colonel Sun: A James Bond Adventure, 1968a). Among his nonfiction writing, he published a critical survey of science fiction (New Maps of Hell, 1960a); a handful of political pamphlets (Socialism and the
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Intellectuals, 1957; Lucky Jim’s Politics, 1968; An Arts Policy, 1979); a children’s book (We are All Guilty, 1992); and numerous light-hearted monographs on drinking (On Drink, 1972; Every Day Drinking, 1983; How’s Your Glass?, 1984a). While it is true that Amis wrote much that fell below his usual level of achievement, no one can deny his productivity or his influence, despite the critical reappraisals that haunted him from the mid-1980s until his death. Although Amis began his career as a poet in the late 1940s, fame would have to wait until 1954, when Lucky Jim was released. Over the course of his life, this novel would never go out of print, be translated into over 20 languages, and elevate him to the status of chief literary spokesman for his generation. As David Lodge and others noted, the novel perfectly depicts the conflicting values that suffused English culture during the 1950s. Due to the expanded opportunities afforded by the Education Act of 1944, scores of people, often from lower-middle-class upbringings, found themselves newly appointed to the professions. These people remained skeptical of the cultural values from which they were traditionally excluded, and in many ways Lucky Jim’s denunciation of snobbery, pretension, and hypocrisy crystallized their attitudes. A half-century after its release, the novel continues to receive mention as the greatest comic novel of the twentieth century, and its hero – Jim Dixon – ranks among the most popular antiheroes in contemporary literature. The four novels that followed Lucky Jim continued Amis’s assault on intellectual pomposity and affectation. Appealing to a form of middlebrow common sense, That Uncertain Feeling (1955), I Like It Here (1958), Take a Girl Like You (1960b), and One Fat Englishman (1963) satirized conventional platitudes regarding foreign travel, religion, immigration, and shifting gender relations, especially sexuality. Stylistically similar to Lucky Jim, these novels feature numerous verbal jokes, cultural puns, and situational humor, usually invoking dialects or accents. Many critics have come to recognize that such stylistic mimicry is one of Amis’s greatest achievements, but at the time some reviewers wondered whether Amis wasn’t simply recasting Lucky Jim with different characters and voices. Even more troubling, Amis’s satirical skills seemed to have grown diffuse: whereas the targets of Jim Dixon’s
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ire were clearly rendered and defined, the attitudes of lead characters like Patrick Standish (in Take a Girl Like You) and Roger Micheldene (in One Fat Englishman) led to speculation that Amis had started to champion the intellectual traits that Lucky Jim would have leveled. Discussions of artistic decline would plague Amis throughout his career, as critics continually questioned whether his satirical skills had devolved into misanthropy. Despite his comic brilliance, Amis certainly proved he could dive into the dark, as the works of his middle period confirm. The Anti-Death League is a deeply meditative inquiry into the potential meaninglessness of life, death, and faith. Ending Up is a poignant tale of friendship, aging, and loss, and netted Amis his first Booker nomination. The Alteration, which followed in 1976, was arguably the bleakest of Amis’s books to date. As Amis’s equally famous, equally controversial son, Martin, has noted, anger would continue to afflict Kingsley Amis’s subsequent novels, especially Jake’s Thing (1978) and the infamous Stanley and the Women. Both novels offer extended masculinist critiques of the shifting gender relations inspired by women’s liberation and the feminist movement. More worrisome, many felt the sexism of its characters had started to mirror Amis’s attitudes. Amis’s biographers – Eric Jacobs, Richard Bradford, and Zachary Leader – record the underlying reasons: during the composition of Stanley and the Women, Amis’s marriage to fellow writer Elizabeth Jane Howard dissolved, souring him on love. Separated since 1980, the couple made their divorce final in 1983, as the novel neared completion. As Martin Amis suggests in his memoir Experience (2000), Stanley and the Women functioned as a literary catharsis, exorcising Amis’s bitterness toward romance. Two years later he would publish his most acclaimed novel, The Old Devils, which garnered him the Booker Prize in 1986. Significantly, the book is dedicated to his first wife, Hilary (Hilly), whom Amis had married in 1948 and who was at the time married to Alastair Boyd, Lord Kilmarnock. When Amis’s marriage to Howard collapsed, the Kilmarnocks took him in, a surprising arrangement that he comically spoke of as “something out of an Iris Murdoch novel.” Triumphantly, the novel depicts the most constructive loving relationships in Amis’s canon,
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and its tonal and structural refinements remain without equal among his other works. No other work in this concluding period of Amis’s career ever equaled the quiet grandeur of The Old Devils. The Russian Girl (1992), a consideration of reconcilable differences in marriage, literature, and love, stands as the finest other novel of this period. Reflecting back upon a 40-year career, Amis also published numerous non-fiction works in the final decade of his life, reconfirming his staunch opinions. From 1988 to 1992 three anthologies appeared. Two assembled his essays and reviews (The Amis Collection, 1991a; The Pleasure of Poetry, 1990b); the other collected his personal favorites in poetry (The Amis Anthology, 1989). Amis was knighted in 1990, and in 1991 he published his Memoirs, inflaming some new controversies. Amis died on October 22, 1995, leaving behind two sons, Philip and Martin. A daughter, Sally, was later revealed to be another man’s child. Over the course of his lengthy career, Amis helped return the English novel to its realist roots, opposing the heavily allusive, technically complex work that defines the modernist and postmodernist periods. His comic satires remain among the most incisive and lively in twentieth-century literature, for they capture the contemporary world as it wished never to be seen: with its fragmented ideals and smug complacencies exposed. SEE ALSO: Amis, Martin (BIF); Angry Young Man Fiction (BIF); Campus Novel (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Amis, K. (1954a). Communication and the Victorian Poet. Essays in Criticism, 4, 386–99. Amis, K. (1954b). Lucky Jim. London: Gollancz. Amis, K. (1955). That Uncertain Feeling. London: Gollancz. Amis, K. (1957). Socialism and the Intellectuals. London: Fabian Society. Amis, K. (1958). I Like It Here. London: Gollancz. Amis, K. (1960a). New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction. New York: Harcourt Brace. Amis, K. (1960b). Take a Girl Like You. London: Gollancz. Amis, K. (1963). One Fat Englishman. London: Gollancz. Amis, K. (1965). The James Bond Dossier. London: Jonathan Cape.
Amis, K. (1966). The Anti-Death League. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, K. (as Markham, R.) (1968a). Colonel Sun: A James Bond Adventure. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, K. (1968b). I Want It Now. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, K. (1969). The Green Man. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, K. (1970). What Became of Jane Austen? And Other Questions. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, K. (1971). Girl, 20. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, K. (1972). On Drink. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, K. (1974). Ending Up. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, K. (1976). The Alteration. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, K. (1978). Jake’s Thing. London: Hutchinson. Amis, K. (1980). Russian Hide and Seek. London: Hutchinson. Amis, K. (1983). Every Day Drinking. London: Hutchinson. Amis, K. (1984a). How’s Your Glass? A Quizzical Look at Drinks and Drinking. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Amis, K. (1984b). Stanley and the Women. London: Hutchinson. Amis, K. (1986). The Old Devils. London: Hutchinson. Amis, K. (1988). Difficulties with Girls. London: Hutchinson. Amis, K. (1989). The Amis Anthology: A Personal Collection of Verse. London: Arena. Amis, K. (1990a). The Folks that Live on the Hill. London: Hutchinson. Amis, K. (1990b). The Pleasure of Poetry: From His Daily Mirror Column. London: Cassell. Amis, K. (1991a). The Amis Collection: Selected NonFiction 1954–1990. London: Penguin. Amis, K. (1991b). Memoirs. London: Hutchinson. Amis, K. (1992). The Russian Girl. London: Hutchinson. Amis, K. (1995). The Biographer’s Moustache. London: Flamingo. Amis, K. (1997). The King’s English: A Guide to Modern Usage. London: HarperCollins. Amis, M. (2000). Experience: A Memoir. London: Jonathan Cape. Bradford, R. (2001). Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley Amis. Chester Springs, PA: Peter Owen. Fussell, P. (1994). The Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jacobs, E. (1995). Kingsley Amis: A Biography. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Keulks, G. (2003). Father and Son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the British Novel Since 1950. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
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Leader, Z. (ed.) (2000). The Letters of Kingsley Amis. London: HarperCollins. Leader, Z. (2006). The Life of Kingsley Amis. London: Jonathan Cape. Lodge, D. (1966). The Modern, the Contemporary, and the Importance of Being Amis. In Language of Fiction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 243–67. McDermott, J. (1989). Kingsley Amis: An English Moralist. New York: St. Martin’s. Moseley, M. (1993). Understanding Kingsley Amis. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Salwak, D. (ed.) (1990). Kingsley Amis: In Life and Letters. New York: St. Martin’s. Salwak, D. (1992). Kingsley Amis: Modern Novelist. Lanham, MD: Barnes and Noble.
Amis, Martin GAVIN KEULKS
Born on August 25, 1949, the second son of writer Kingsley Amis and wife Hilary, Martin Amis has long lived a life of literary celebrity. Spanning three and a half decades, 11 novels, seven works of non-fiction, two short story collections, and nearly 400 reviews and essays, his career has been prolific, hugely profitable, and consistently controversial. His awards include the Somerset Maugham Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography, and his work is routinely shortlisted for other awards, most notoriously the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction. From the appearance of his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973), to his most recent book, The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom (2008), Amis has inflamed some of the most incendiary debates of the contemporary era. His words have prompted new considerations of realism, feminism, politics, and culture, and his personal life has provided fodder for gossip and tabloid journalism. As is true of anyone whose life has careened into fame, such assessments have not always been cordial. They have, however, always been lively, always been edifying, and easily confirm Amis’s status as one of England’s most important living writers. From the bleak satires of his early period through the sweeping epics of the 1980s, which solidified his reputation, to the ongoing evolution of his latest work, Amis routinely attracts international attention – sometimes for the
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wrong reasons. His well-publicized divorce and remarriage and the late discovery of an illegitimate daughter have sometimes overshadowed his novels. When he changed literary agents in the mid-1990s, securing a massive financial advance, he was accused of selfishness and greed by some prominent English writers. Such petit scandals aside, few writers can match the spectacle of Amis’s literary ascension throughout the 1980s. After establishing his name with a series of dark comedies and satires that centered upon hip, sarcastic, urban youths – The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies (1975), Success (1978), and Other People: A Mystery Story (1981) – Amis expanded his stylistic and thematic repertoire to produce his masterpiece, Money: A Suicide Note, in 1984. Twentiethcentury literary history stills bears the imprint of this work, which represents for many scholars the commencement of Amis’s middle – and decidedly major – period. Through the voice of its charming antihero narrator, John Self, the novel exposes the intricate betrayals and falsehoods that support a culture enslaved to money. The novel succeeds by blending the idiosyncratic with the universal: John Self ’s miscalculations and illusions are exponentially manifest in the wealthobsessed mindsets of England and America during this decade. Following a collection of essays (The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America, 1986) and a book of short stories grouped around the theme of nuclear weapons (Einstein’s Monsters, 1987), London Fields appeared in 1989, joining Money as two of the decade’s most incisive portraits of apocalyptic anxieties, nuclear fear, and egocentric individualism. Indeed, Amis considers these works to form – with The Information (1995) – an informal trilogy. Literary scholars have largely agreed, ranking this triptych of novels among Amis’s major achievements, a showcase for his distinctive themes, influences, and techniques. Of course such classifications obscure the intervening Time’s Arrow; or, The Nature of the Offence (1991), a taut yet forceful novel that examines Nazi atrocities through the structural lenses of reverse chronology and split consciousness. Such a work also exemplifies the grounds upon which Amis’s detractors have often congregated: some objected to Amis’s subjugation of history to style, labeling his efforts artistically callous or indulgent. Like Money, Time’s Arrow
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AMIS, MARTIN
is a tour de force of technique, a showcase for reimagining literary frameworks and forms. A highly influential, often imitated stylist, Amis has engendered more than his share of literary rivalry, and as is true of most authors, he has struggled to maintain the momentum of his middle, major period. Literary history features relatively few W. B. Yeatses or Saul Bellows, perennial producers of exceptional work, literary longevitists. Indeed the author of Yellow Dog (2003) bears little resemblance to the author of The Rachel Papers – as one would expect or hope, given the weight of experience. After refining his trademark characteristics and assuming the pinnacle of literary celebrity, Amis took a semi-hiatus from fiction after 1995, inaugurating a transitional period that would ultimately produce his best non-fiction writing. Although two works of fiction appeared – Night Train (1997) and Heavy Water and Other Stories (1998) – the triumph of this most recent period remains his memoir, Experience (2000), a poignant rumination upon the most pressing relationships in his life: those with his father, his mentors and friends, wives and children, and – perhaps most important – his own aging. Significantly, his authorial perspective is divided in Experience. Often he peers at the specter of literary immortality; other times he languishes upon lower terrain – mortality, celebrity, feuds. Of course, it is tempting to argue that there remains only one unsettled feud in Experience, and that is Amis’s quarrel with death. Besides Experience, the early years of the twentyfirst century witnessed the publication of two additional non-fiction books: a collection of previously published work – The War against Cliche: Essays and Reviews, 1971–2000 (2001) – and the controversial political memoir Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002). In 2003 Amis returned to fiction with Yellow Dog, an ambitious and at times sprawling novel that many people consider his least successful work. Fueling the controversies that his work always seems to inflame, the novel spawned new debates regarding the evolution of Amis’s career, his prodigious talent, and his literary reputation. Perhaps in time Yellow Dog will undergo a critical revaluation, but it remains for now the nadir of Amis’s career. Any lingering questions about the state of Amis’s talent were silenced with the appearance of House of Meetings (2006), a succinct political
novel that is also in many ways a companion text to Koba the Dread. It depicts the contrasting experiences and recollections of two half-brothers imprisoned in a Soviet gulag. As with many of Amis’s novels, the complexities of love suffuse the narrative, but whereas earlier works such as London Fields once sought to depict the symbolic “death of love,” later novels such as Yellow Dog and House of Meetings work to resuscitate it as a force of healing, equally personal and political. This is not to say that Amis has “softened” or mellowed as he’s aged – satirists in general do not. Rather, the author who once so gleefully discredited sentimentality and emotional cliche now sought to refine the moral and humanist imperatives of his writing. This reinvigorated moral humanism also figured more prominently in his non-fiction writings after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States and the 7/7 bombings in England. A series of essays – “Fear and Loathing,” “The Voice of the Lonely Crowd,” “The Palace of the End,” “The Age of Horrorism,” “Terrorism’s New Structure,” among others – described Amis’s conviction that Islamic extremism (or “Islamism,” as he termed it) ranked as the greatest threat in global politics. A smattering of book reviews and short stories appeared on similar topics, highlighted by “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta” and “The Unknown Known.” As with most of Amis’s writings, reactions to this overt politicizing were divided. Some people argued that it should be seen as extending the political commentary in his earlier work, when the recurring subjects were nuclear weapons and the shifting balance of power in the post-Cold War era. Other people lamented the swerve in Amis’s thinking from liberal castigator of greed, corruption, and hypocrisy to reactionary neoconservative alarmist, who often seemed to minimize the crucial distinction between Islamic faith and Islamic extremism. The strengths that serve Amis so well in his fiction – he is an exceptionally inventive stylist, following the tradition of James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov – sometimes work against him in these essays. “Islamism” and “Horrorism” are two such examples, as are more elaborate phrasings like “sourly mineral incredulity.” In 2008, the best of these writings were assembled in his most opinionated collection The Second Plane:
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ANGRY YOUNG MAN FICTION
September 11: Terror and Boredom, which was poorly received, especially in the US. Regardless of one’s political leanings, these writings did serve to confirm one inescapable fact: in addition to being viewed as one of England’s greatest living novelists, Amis now had to be considered one of its foremost men of letters too. Amis’s next major publication – a novel titled The Pregnant Widow – was published in 2010. Now that Martin Amis has assumed his position amid the established orders, the “older guard” of contemporary literature, it has become easier to regard him as a literary father in his own right, someone against whom younger writers are compelled to react or inveigh. It has also become easier to contextualize his achievements within literary genres and movements. After more than three decades of controversial, critically acclaimed, and popular work, Amis remains a writer who is not afraid to leverage his reputation and integrity by speaking his mind. In this regard, he remains also a writer in transition, one whose risk-taking has never failed to captivate readers’ interest and imaginations. Beneath the clamoring of controversy and the triumphalism of prizes that interest alone ensures an audience and, possibly, fame. Although he has written much that has fallen below his best efforts, he has remained a force in the literary vanguard for nearly four decades. As he continues to refine his legacy, one thing seems certain to persist: his words will be closely considered and debated. Few writers are afforded that luxury, and fewer still would ask for anything more. SEE ALSO: Amis, Kingsley (BIF); Chicklit and Ladlit (BIF); London in Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF)
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Amis, M. (1987). Einstein’s Monsters. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, M. (1989). London Fields. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, M. (1991). Time’s Arrow; or, The Nature of the Offence. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, M. (1993). Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, M. (1995). The Information. London: HarperCollins. Amis, M. (1997). Night Train. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, M. (1998). Heavy Water and Other Stories. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, M. (2000). Experience: A Memoir. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, M. (2001). The War against Cliche: Essays and Reviews, 1971–2000. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, M. (2002). Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, M. (2003). Yellow Dog. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, M. (2006). House of Meetings. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, M. (2008). The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, M. (2010). The Pregnant Widow. London: Jonathan Cape. Dern, J. A. (2000). Martians, Monsters, and Madonnas: Fiction and Form in the World of Martin Amis. New York: Peter Lang. Diedrick, J. (2004). Understanding Martin Amis. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Finney, B. (2008). Martin Amis. New York: Routledge. Keulks, G. (2003). Father and Son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the British Novel Since 1950. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Keulks, G. (ed.) (2006). Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Tredell, N. (ed.) (2000). The Fiction of Martin Amis: A Reader’s Guide to Criticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Angry Young Man Fiction
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
NICK BENTLEY
Amis, M. (1973). The Rachel Papers. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, M. (1975). Dead Babies. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, M. (1978). Success. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, M. (1981). Other People: A Mystery Story. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, M. (1982). Invasion of the Space Invaders. London: Hutchinson. Amis, M. (1984). Money: A Suicide Note. London: Jonathan Cape. Amis, M. (1986). The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America. London: Jonathan Cape.
The term “angry young man” refers to a loose grouping of British writers, mainly dramatists and novelists, who emerged in the mid- to late 1950s. As the term suggests, most of the writers associated with the group were relatively young and male, and their anger was generally directed toward what they perceived as the establishment or the prevailing ideologies of British society in the 1950s. That most of them (and their fictional heroes) came from working- or lower-middleclass backgrounds suggests that class distinction
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was one of the main causes of the anger they presented in their work. The term also refers to some of the characters that appeared in the texts they produced. Therefore, it assumed a wider cultural significance and was applied, often uncritically, to any young, predominantly white, male figure who had some sense of grievance against his parents’ generation, or the establishment, or both. The term was coined in 1956 after the opening of John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre and has been attributed by Harry Ritchie to the theater’s press officer at the time, George Fearon (Ritchie 26). The term related to the main protagonist in the play, Jimmy Porter, and was quickly taken up by the media to refer to those whose frustration and annoyance was perceived as symptomatic of a common feeling in certain quarters in the 1950s. Although it was never an organized group, several writers found themselves associated with the term, including the novelists Stan Barstow, John Braine, William Cooper, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey, and Keith Waterhouse; the dramatists John Arden, Harold Pinter, John Osborne, and Arnold Wesker; and the existential philosophers and cultural commentators Stuart Holroyd, Bill Hopkins, and Colin Wilson. Although the term was coined in the mid-1950s many writers became attached in hindsight to the new group, including those associated with the Movement poets and novelists that had emerged in the early 1950s such as Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, and John Wain. An early collection of essays under the title Declaration, edited by Tom Maschler (1957), brought together ideas by many in the group including Osborne, Holroyd, Hopkins, Wilson, and Wain, as well as others such as the filmmaker Lindsay Anderson, the theater critic Kenneth Tynan, and the novelist Doris Lessing. The anger expressed had complex causes but was linked by a general sense of disillusionment that many young, working- or lower-middle-class writers felt with the failure of the 1945 Clement Attlee Labour government to deliver its promise of establishing a more egalitarian and democratic society. Many in the late 1950s felt that the old class prejudices, which reserved the best jobs in government, industry, and public life for a privileged few, were still entrenched in British society. Although the general trend among the
“angry young men” was toward a resistance to dominant society, politically they were more diverse than one might expect. Many, like Kingsley Amis, had flirted with the Communist Party during their university days, and many in the group were associated with the rise of the British New Left in the second half of the 1950s. This was a group of intellectuals who coalesced (in a British context) around the academic journal Universities and Left Review (which later became the New Left Review) and included figures such as Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, Richard Hoggart, Ralph Samuel, and Stuart Hall. They were influenced by Marxist theory but tended to focus more on the cultural than the economic aspects of social class. It is unfair to say, however, that the group was wholly left-leaning politically. Many in the group tended, especially as they got older, to move to the right politically. Kingsley Amis, for example, became a supporter of the Conservative Party in the 1970s, and Philip Larkin claimed to be a fan of Margaret Thatcher. In the 1950s, the work produced by the “angry young men” tended toward realism as a literary (and filmic) mode. The settings of the plays and novels they produced tended to be urban, often Northern, and distinctly working class. In the theater, the term “kitchen-sink drama” was coined to express something of the tawdry domestic environment in which much of the action took place. Many of the “angry” writers adopted realism as a form that they felt best expressed the political commitment they wanted their writing to convey. This return to realism was in fact often articulated as a reaction against the modernist experimentalism of the pre-World War II literary establishment. After its initial radical experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s many of the “angry” writers felt modernism was too elitist and esoteric to communicate directly with a popular readership. Modernism was seen to be too closely associated with the established literary scene, which was often felt to be conservative and allied with establishment views of society. William Cooper, for example, regarded modernism as “an attack from the inside on intellect in general, made by intellectuals so decadent that they no longer mind if intellect persists – in fact some of them sound as if they would be happier if it didn’t” (1959, 36). The identification, however, of a return to realism in the “angry” texts is often complicated,
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ANGRY YOUNG MAN FICTION
especially upon close analysis of some of the writers’ works. For example, in his 1950s texts Alan Sillitoe often uses interior monologues and a mode of narration called free indirect discourse which was more associated with modernist than realist conventions; and the use of fantasy and dream narratives in Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar offers an alternative imaginative location to the gritty, Northern, working-class environment in which the character is placed. It is a mark of the fluid nature of the term that in the popular imagination “angry young men” was understood to refer not only to writers but also to the emblematic set of male heroes and antiheroes they produced: Arthur Seaton in Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), and the unnamed borstal boy of his short story The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959); Joe Lampton, the ambitious lowermiddle-class hero of John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957); Arthur Machin, the hard-playing and hard-drinking rugby player in David Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960); the jazz trumpeter Jimmy Porter in Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1957); and Billy Liar, the eponymous hero of Keith Waterhouse’s 1959 novel. Jim Dixon in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1953) and Charles Lumley in John Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953) were retrospectively associated with this group of antiheroes. As can be seen by this range of characters – Alan Sillitoe’s borstal boy is a far remove from Jim Dixon, the disillusioned university lecturer – their differences are often as great as their similarities, even if they share a distrust of authority and the old order. As well as the anger, it is important to contextualize the “angry young men” with respect to gender and age. Although the term clearly refers mainly to male writers, a few women writers were also associated with the group. Doris Lessing, for example, because of her association with left-wing politics, and works such as In Pursuit of the English (1960) that concentrated on working-class life in the Britain in the 1950s, were associated with the group. Shelagh Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey (1956) also became identified as “angry” writing, as did Lynne Reid Banks’s The L-Shaped Room (1960). The concentration in these novels of exploring the female experience of British working-class culture made them closely allied to the “angry” ethic, while at the same time
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identifying aspects of patriarchy and misogyny within working-class culture and the male writers who were recording it. Indeed, women were often seen as simply wives and mothers by the male writers, and thus allied to the forces of society that threatened to contain the potentially radical stances taken by the male protagonists. Lynne Segal, in “Look Back in Anger: Men in the Fifties” (1990), argues convincingly that the barely concealed misogyny in much “angry” writing was part of a resistance to changing models of masculinity, which sought to domesticate a generation of men who had been brought up to believe in the manliness and excitement of war. Women were too often presented as prizes for what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (27) calls the homosocial competition between rival male characters from different classes. The model for this is established in Lucky Jim, where Jim Dixon succeeds, eventually, in wresting the affections of the beautiful Christine away from his class enemy Bertrand Welch. This theme is repeated often enough to show the importance of gender in “angry” writing. Joe Lampton, in Braine’s Room at the Top, for example, sees his conquest of Susan Brown, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, as part of his process of climbing the class ladder. Much of the most interesting recent research on the “angry young men” has concentrated on the representation of masculinity in the texts, especially in relation to the way it was being redefined during this period, suggesting that much of the anger can be attributed to men trying to reassert their manhood as a consequence of the perceived feminization of a postwar society. Brook (2007), for example, is interested in the way masculinity becomes a complex subject in fiction in the 1950s and centered on the male body as a site for feeling and vitality; and Ferrebe (2005) explores the cultural and philosophical contexts informing the representation of masculinity in the “angry” novels. In terms of age, the phenomenon of the “angry young men” connected in the 1950s with an emerging sense of a youthful and rebellious cultural consciousness that was felt to be invading Britain, especially from America. Richard Hoggart (1957), for example, wrote of what he called the “shiny barbarism” (193) of American popular culture and its effect on the “Juke-Box boys” (246). He lamented an older sense of the
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organic working class that he felt was under threat from the new attractions of (Americanized) consumerism. Rock ’n’ roll and other new musical styles such as jazz were sweeping Britain and attracting youth in the late fifties. The concentration on fashion and looking good is a key feature, for example, of Arthur Seaton, the young rebellious character in Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Colin MacInnes, a writer not always associated with the “angry young men,” but clearly emerging from the same contexts and with a similar disgruntled attitude toward the establishment, focused on youth, homosexuality, and emerging black culture in his trilogy of London novels that included Absolute Beginners (1959) and City of Spades (1957). For MacInnes youth represented an oppositional and potentially radical voice that challenged the dominant ideologies and beliefs of 1950s Britain. As with gender, much recent critical work has been done on the place of youth and subcultures in the “angry” writing of the 1950s. Bentley (2007), for example, has identified British youth culture, with its gaze on America, as one of the ways in which frustration with the British establishment sought alternative cultural forms and values. MacInnes’s book also relates to another recent direction taken in the research done on the “angries”: the way in which race and ethnicity were represented. Although the dominant image of the “angry young men” is white British, the establishment of immigrant communities in Britain in the 1950s begin to interest those writers associated with the group. Sillitoe in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, for example, introduces a black character as the friend of one of Arthur Seaton’s brothers; and despite the racial banter that occurs, there’s a clear attempt to show the connections between the working classes across a racial divide. One of the most important 1950s writers in this context is Sam Selvon, a black Caribbean writer who came to Britain in the 1950s and, in his novel The Lonely Londoners (1956), attempted to articulate the experiences of the first generation of (usually male) immigrants that came to Britain during this period. His focus on urban working-class life in 1950s Britain has affinities with much of the “angry” writing of the period, although, like MacInnes, he has only recently been associated with the group.
SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Working-Class Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Amis, K. (1953). Lucky Jim. London: Gollancz. Banks, L. R. (1960). The L-Shaped Room. London: Chatto and Windus. Bentley, N. (2007). Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s. Oxford: Peter Lang. Bergonzi, B. (1993). Wartime and Aftermath: English Literature and Its Background 1939–1960. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bradbury, M. (2001). No, Not Bloomsbury? 1954–1960. In The Modern British Novel 1878–2001, rev. edn. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 313–360. Braine, J. (1957). Room at the Top. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Brannigan, J. (2002). Literature, Culture, and Society in Postwar England, 1945–1965. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen. Brook, S. (2007). Literature and Cultural Criticism in the 1950s: The Feeling Male Body. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Carpenter, H. (2002). The Angry Young Men: A Literary Comedy of the 1950s. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Cooper, W. (1959). Reflections on Some Aspects of the Experimental Novel. In J. Wain (ed.), International Literary Annual, no. 2. London: John Calder, pp. 29–36. Delaney, S. (1956). A Taste of Honey. London: Methuen. Ferrebe, A. (2005). Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction 1950–2000: Keeping It Up. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Head, D. (2002). Class and Social Change. In The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 49–82. Hewison, R. (1981). In Anger: Culture in the Cold War 1945–60. London: Methuen. Hill, J. (1986). Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956–1963. London: BFI. Hoggart, R. (1957). The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments. London: Chatto and Windus. Kalliney, P. J. (2006). Cities of Affluence and Anger: A Literary Geography of Modern Englishness. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Laing, S. (1986). Representations of Working-Class Life 1957–1964. London: Macmillan. Lessing, D. (1960). In Pursuit of the English. London: MacGibbon and Kee. MacInnes, C. (1957). City of Spades. London: MacGibbon and Kee.
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AWARDS AND PRIZES
MacInnes, C. (1959). Absolute Beginners. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Maschler, T. (ed.) (1957). Declaration. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Morrison, B. (1980). The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s. London: Methuen. Osborne, J. (1957). Look Back in Anger. London: Faber and Faber. Rabinovitz, R. (1967). The Reaction against Experiment in the English Novel 1950–1960. New York: Columbia University Press. Ritchie, H. (1988). Success Stories: Literature and the Media in England, 1950–1959. London: Faber and Faber. Sedgwick, E. K. (1985). Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press. Segal, L. (1990). Look Back in Anger: Men in the Fifties. In Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men. London: Virago, pp. 1–25. Selvon, S. (1956). The Lonely Londoners. London: Alan Wingate. Sillitoe, A. (1958). Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. London: W. H. Allen. Sillitoe, A. (1959). The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. London: W. H. Allen. Storey, D. (1960). This Sporting Life. London: Longman. Wain, J. (1953). Hurry On Down. London: Secker and Warburg. Waterhouse, K. (1959). Billy Liar. London: Michael Joseph. Wilson, C. (2007). The Angry Years: The Rise and the Fall of the Angry Young Men. London: Robson.
Awards and Prizes RICHARD TODD
In his 2005 study of today’s prize culture, The Economy of Prestige, James F. English argues that even if literary prizes (in the sense of “the Greek drama and arts competitions in the sixth century BC”) seem always to have been with us, their “stunning rise . . . over the past hundred years is one of the great untold stories of modern cultural life” (2005b, 1). This is certainly true when one considers fiction awards and prizes in Britain and what is customarily known as “the Booker-eligible world” since about 1980. The rise and increasing complexity of this cultural phenomenon during the past 30 years has, it may be argued, proved even more stunning.
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To illustrate this claim, a mark of the change that has taken place in the first decade of the twenty-first century is that a subgenre of academic discourse on literary prizes has evolved. In 2003 Oxford Brookes University acquired the Man Booker archive from Booktrust, a symbolic move in which the academic environment became part of the prize world’s hitherto cultural establishment and commercial space. A conference was held to mark the event, and a selection of essays from that conference later appeared (G€ ortschacher & Klein 2006). In 2006 a conference was held at the Sorbonne in Paris, under the auspices of the ERCLA research center (Ecritures du Roman Contemporaine de Langue Anglaise), the purpose of which “was to try to understand the impact of literary prizes on the market of literature in Great-Britain [sic] and Commonwealth countries” (Guignery 11). In the British book trade the term “Bookereligible” has for some years been preferred to “Commonwealth” in an attempt to avoid any sense of Anglocentrism. Whatever the preferred terminology, the explanation for its existence as a category may be sought in a longstanding feature of the Anglophone publishing world, where for many years US fiction was specially copyrighted, and as a result was excluded from the terms of eligibility of the Booker Prize when it was first set up in 1969. Since 2002 it has been known as the Man Booker prize, but the Booker label has tended to stick (Turner 596). Although, as has been noted, the past century has seen a striking series of developments, until about 1975 the actual handing over or “bestowal” of a given award was a fairly low-key affair. For those readers accustomed during the 1980s and 1990s to the high-profile televised celebratory dinner, in the case of the Booker culminating in what was usually a cliff-hanging speech at the end of which the winner is announced, this low-key approach may seem strange. Although throughout the past century prizes have been awarded for particular categories of writing, the rise and rise of the Booker during the 1980s prompted a more politicized approach to prize-giving, and the rise of what may be called “special interests” or even “logrolling” may be noted here. Literary prizes have been marked since the 1980s by sums of prize money that (even adjusted to the values of the time) could not have been dreamed of before
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1950, and what is more, the effect on sales can be (but has not consistently been) staggering, with revenues to publishers, and thus royalties due to prize-winning authors, exceeding by several times the monetary value of the award itself. More recently still, the real winners, since the abolition of retail price maintenance on books in the UK in 1996, have been neither authors nor publishers, but booksellers. A painful event occurring in the ceremony of the 2008 Wales Book of the Year, transmitted by the BBC on July 2, 2008, serves to indicate the plethora of awards now available, as well as illustrating what has come to be a format pioneered by the Booker panel in the late 1970s. A dinner is enjoyed by scores of invited guests. Unlike the Academy Awards, the setting is not theatrical but convivial, united with the Oscars only in the tension that builds up as a series of shortlisted authors is revealed, the speech from the chair sometimes reaching agonizing lengths for the participants (shortlisted writers, entourage, publishers, agents, and those who have bet on the outcome). Whereas the Oscar award ceremony is “diluted” by the baffling variety of awards, a typical ceremony such as the Welsh one (apparently not the only one to go horribly wrong) is possibly still more fraught with tension because in the vast majority of cases only one person will leave as winner. In this event, the Welsh culture minister Rhodri Glyn Thomas inexplicably read out the name of the runner-up instead of the winner. The duped Tom Bullough left the ceremony in a huff, without waiting to see the £10,000 cheque going to Dannie Abse for The Presence or, apparently, claiming his £1,000 consolation cheque for The Claude Glass. As the description of the format of the Wales Book of the Year ceremony indicates, it is the Man Booker ceremony format that is the big daddy of them all. To paraphrase James English (2005b, 197–8), the annual dinner and award ceremony has long been predicated on finding a prestigious location (for many years London’s Guildhall, more recently the British Museum). It is customarily televised live in prime time: indeed the very phenomenon of televising the ceremony, and the concomitant media and global interest, is crucial to today’s prize culture. Recent Man Booker sophistications include what English calls “a roving floor reporter covering the live action.” Ex-
tracts from and expert commentary on each shortlisted title are presented by a studio team, often also set up in the chosen location. English is anxious to stress that a meta-commentary of “the television coverage of the event has itself apparently become a cultural product worthy of critical scrutiny” (198; emphasis original). In this context it is worth taking note of one of Robert McCrum’s observations in an article marking his standing down as The Observer’s literary editor in May 2008 after more than 10 years on the job, which is the increasing use, and even intermittent reputability, of the blogosphere: commentators who are not professional critics have an increasingly greater say on all aspects of literary fiction, and such a say is not limited to professional journalists and/or critics. Some doomsayers even foresee, if not actually the end of the culture of professional criticism, then certainly an era in which what they consider unprofessional blogs are increasingly given authority. The early days (the early 1980s) are now largely remembered by single televised moments, such as (in 1983) the very telegenic Selina Scott’s asking the chair of the Booker judges, Fay Weldon, “whether she had read all the shortlisted books ‘all the way through’ ” and attempting to solicit an opinion from the late Angela Carter, another judge; or (in 1985) Hermione Lee’s astonishing coup in tracking down the one-off winner Keri Hulme to Salt Lake City, Utah, for a brief live telephone interview (Todd 1996, 74). The evanescence of these moments, and of the whole ceremony and the meta-ceremonies surrounding it, has of course been made retrievable by the increasingly professional and creative use of television and the Internet. The one constant feature of the Booker ceremony, and the events leading up to it, has been crisply summarized: its purpose, from its foundation by Tom Maschler and Martyn Goff, has been not only “to promote the cause of serious fiction” but, at the same time almost by definition, “to provoke rows and scandals, which may, in due course, promote the cause of serious fiction” (Lawson 12, quoted in English 2005b, 213), and “it’s the rows that keep the Booker going” (Lawson 12, quoted in Todd 1996, 64 n. 10). (Updates from this era are recorded in Todd 2006, 8–19 and Norris 20–36.) There can have been little public ceremony attending the prizes established in the first half
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AWARDS AND PRIZES
of the twentieth century. The James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1918) and Hawthornden Prize (1919) are early twentieth-century examples of low-key ceremonies, although the prize money (£20,000 and £10,000 respectively) has soared to dizzying heights in the twenty-first century. Postwar (and increasingly less low-key ceremonial award) examples include: the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, which is awarded to fiction or poetry (it was founded in 1942 by the widow of the eponymous war victim; now £5,000); the Somerset Maugham Award (1947: stipulates an age limit of 35, may be awarded to more than one person, and is to be used for travel – the total fund is now £12,000); and the W. H. Smith Literary Award (1959: operated initially according to Booker-eligible criteria but is now open to world fiction and fiction in translation). (See English 2005b: 201 and the exhaustive catalogue in Turner 573–613 – which shows the exponential rise in the number of prizes over the past decade, and how prize award money has been increased to match the Man Booker’s £50,000.) The Booker also began (in 1969) modestly in terms of ceremony and prize money (then a tenth of what it is now). It is generally accepted (Todd 1996; English 2005b; etc.) that the Booker was founded because of Maschler and Goff’s perception that no high-profile literary award such as France’s Prix Goncourt (1903) and Italy’s Premio Strega (1947) existed in Britain, an award in which national literary prestige was intended to take pride of position over prize money; and it is true that although the prize money for these awards ranged from the unspectacular to the nugatory, the effect on sales was staggering. The last 40 years have shown how variable the relationship between prize money and sales can be where the Booker is concerned. It cannot be doubted that the Booker initiative (applicable to a much wider, Booker-eligible, reading constituency, although the early winners were almost invariably British) is probably the single most significant cause of the unprecedented levels to which the Anglophone reading public now reads “quality fiction.” Certain literary prizes in the early twentieth century stipulated conditions to be met by the winner. Thus the prize money of the Somerset Maugham Award, as already indicated, is intended to enable the winner to travel abroad (Turner 570). An innovative award, the David Cohen Prize for Literature, was founded in 1993;
21
it is made every two years and amounts to £40,000. The beneficiary is a distinguished senior writer (the first was V. S. Naipaul, and in 1995 the prize went to the late Harold Pinter; the 2009 winner was Seamus Heaney). The winner of the David Cohen Prize for Literature chooses the recipient of the Clarissa Luard Award, which is worth £12,500. This award is funded by Arts Council England and is given to a literature organization that supports young writers or an individual writer under the age of 35. These remarkably philanthropic terms contrast with what may be termed the “special interests” lobby. Two special interest lobbies in particular may be noted here: the Orange Prize for Fiction and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The Orange Prize (briefly renamed the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction) was first awarded in 1996 to Helen Dunmore for A Spell of Winter. It has since spawned several subcategories, such as the Harper’s Bazaar Orange Broadband Short Story Competition, the Penguin/Orange Readers’ Group Prize, and the Reading Group Book of the Year. Subsequent high-profile winners of the Orange Prize have included Rose Tremain’s The Road Home (2008), Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2006), and Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces (1997). There is a six-title short list, and a long list (the procedure is similar in nature to, and may even have contributed to, a recently introduced feature of the Man Booker) is announced some weeks previously. The two obvious differences from the Man Booker are that the Orange is an all-women prize, and the terms of eligibility extend to the US. It was set up in response to a sense among a number of senior figures in the book trade that women were underrepresented in Britain’s prize culture as it then was, and that there was room for a prize that recognized English-language fiction from all over the world, not just the Bookereligible parts of it. An earlier web page distanced the ceremony from the by then traditional blacktie dinner, and described the award ceremony as “funky,” “informal,” and accompanied by “lots of finger food” – a glorified reception rather than a glorified dinner (Todd 2006, 14). The prize money remains at £30,000. The Orange Prize gained notoriety from its initiation, with a minority of women writers, most notably A. S. Byatt, refusing to have their work considered, on the grounds that the main message sent out by the conditions
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AWARDS AND PRIZES
of eligibility was “ghettoization.” This has proved a legitimate argument but not one generally subscribed to. A year before the Orange Prize was set up, the most lucrative prize in the English-speaking world was launched, not from London but from Dublin. The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, however, is open to writers from all over the world, providing the title has been translated into English. The winners since the inception of the award have been predominantly novelists. The website is extremely informative and interactive, and since this prize stands rather at the edge of the remit “Fiction Awards and Prizes in Britain,” little more will be said here, other than that nominations are made mainly by public libraries worldwide, and that the prize money is D 100,000. There is no doubt that winners and shortlisted writers benefit financially from literary prizes: even such a high-profile fiasco as humiliated Tom Bullough at the beginning of July 2008 was within a month being reported in The Bookseller as having enhanced sales of The Claude Glass significantly. This prompts the question who is actually the winner in an apparently win–win situation, and the answer must be the retail sector itself. The same issue of The Bookseller reported that Borders in Cardiff saw a huge increase in sales of The Claude Glass, with the store’s David Hughes actually attributing the commercial success of the paperback version to Rhodri Glyn Thomas’s gaffe. In other words, large though prize money amounts have become (many are now five-figure sums in sterling), they can be – and sometimes are perversely – dwarfed by sales, and thus royalties. One of the (Man) Booker awards of which this was true is probably the 1993 win by Roddy Doyle for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, which within a year had sold 360,000 copies in hardback and within the calendar year 1994 355,000 in paperback, a gross revenue by the end of 1994 of £6 million (Todd 1996, 20). Doyle would have netted well over £750,000 in 1994: a conservative estimate assuming the standard hardback and paperback royalties, and their so-called “escalators” (royalty percentages rise by up to 5 percent when a certain threshold of sales is reached). That is around 50 times the amount of the award money itself by 1994 standards. And this doesn’t take account of subsidiary rights such as translations, radio and television adaptations, and even film rights. Other
notable commercial successes include Salman Rushdie’s 1981 winner Midnight’s Children, and A. S. Byatt’s 1990 win Possession. However, with the abolition of retail price maintenance in Britain in 1996, everything began to change, first slowly, then dramatically. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, retail chains such as Waterstones were offering 30 to 40 percent discounts on prize-winning and/or shortlisted titles (more often in paperback) or grouping them together in a “3 for 2” offer; and the online supplier Amazon was following suit. As a result, the picture that is now emerging is that the real power – which has always tended to be with the retailer – has become entrenched as never before. While it is still possible for individual authors who win or are shortlisted for literary prizes to earn enormous amounts, in a more average or conventional situation their income through royalties has decreased considerably (Todd 2005). SEE ALSO: Awards and Prizes (WF); Globalization and the Novel (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Most if not all of the prizes mentioned here have their own websites. However, as their contents change from year to year, website references are given only in instances where the URL may be considered “stable.” BBC News (2008). Error as Book Award Announced (July 2). At http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/ wales/7485572.stm, accessed July 3, 2008. English, J. (ed.) (2005a). Companion to Contemporary British Literature. Oxford: Blackwell. English, J. (2005b). The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. G€ ortschacher, W., & Klein, H. (eds.) (2006). Fiction and Literary Prizes in Great Britain. Vienna: Praesens. Guignery, V. (2006). Introduction: The Infinite Journey of Books. In Guignery & Gallix (2006), pp. 11–19. Guignery, V., & Gallix, F. (eds.) (2006). Pre- and PostPublication Itineraries of the Contemporary Novel in English. Paris: Editions Publibook. Lawson, M. (1994). Never Mind the Plot, Enjoy the Argument. Independent, p. 12 (Sept. 6). McCrum, R. (2008). A Thriller in Ten Chapters. Observer, ch. 8 (May 25). At www.guardian.co.uk/
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books/2008/may/25/fiction.culture, accessed Jan. 24, 2010. Norris, S. (2006). Recontextualising the Booker. In G€ ortschacher & Klein (2006), pp. 20–36. Todd, R. (1996). Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today. London: Bloomsbury.
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Todd, R. (2005). Literary Fiction and the Book Trade. In English (2005a), pp. 19–38. Todd, R. (2006). How Has the Booker Prize Changed Since 1996? In G€ ortschacher & Klein (2006), pp. 8–18. Turner, B. (ed.) (2007). The Writer’s Handbook 2008. London: Macmillan.
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B Bainbridge, Beryl VIRGINIA RICHTER
Beryl Bainbridge’s fiction centers on crisis, ranging from private incidents – teenage rebellion leading to incest or murder (An Awfully Big Adventure, 1989; Harriet Said, 1972), twisted love relationships (Sweet William, 1975), disintegrating families suddenly confronted with violence and death (The Dressmaker, 1973; Injury Time, 1977) – to highly public and even “national” disasters such as Robert F. Scott’s doomed Antarctic expedition (The Birthday Boys, 1991) or the sinking of the Titanic (Every Man for Himself, 1996). Bainbridge’s work can be divided into roughly two groups. The first, which includes most of her earlier fiction, draws on workingclass life in her native Liverpool. These texts are partly based on autobiographical experience, but they also incorporate historical characters transposed into the Bainbridge universe of stifling working-class domesticity, such as Hitler in Young Adolf, depicted on a spurious visit to his relatives living in Liverpool in 1910. Bainbridge’s interest in historical characters and events deepened in the second group of her novels, written mostly from the 1990s onwards and including, in addition to the books on Scott and the Titanic, Master Georgie (1998), set during the Crimean War, and According to Queenie (2001), about the relationship between Samuel Johnson and Hester Thrale, viewed through the eyes of Thrale’s daughter Queenie. Her latest novel, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress (2008), is the first to move beyond an exploration of Englishness and to turn
to an American topic, the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Born in Liverpool on November 21, 1933, Bainbridge disclosed early the two aspects of her talent that would dominate her career: an aptitude for performing and for writing. Aged 15, she ran away from home and joined the Liverpool Repertory Theatre (the setting for An Awfully Big Adventure). Her career as an actress included an appearance in the popular television series Coronation Street. In the 1960s, Bainbridge decided to focus on her literary work. After experiencing initial rejection by publishers, critics, and the public alike – mostly because her characters were considered “repellent” – her third novel Harriet Said, in fact the first to be written, was accepted by Duckworth, initiating a successful publishing partnership which lasted into the late 1990s. Harriet Said introduces a typical Bainbridge configuration: two adolescent girls bent on collecting “Experience” begin to stalk a middle-aged neighbor; their growing obsession with his far from glamorous sexual life culminates, unexpectedly and chillingly, in his wife’s murder at the hands of the naive narrator. Repression, neurotic sexuality, self-deception, the desire to break free, and the unpredictability of life are leitmotifs in Bainbridge’s work. At first sight, her novels follow a trajectory from marginalized, troubled characters to figures occupying major positions in British intellectual history, such as Samuel Johnson, or embodiments of heroism, such as the explorer Captain Scott. However, by consistently adopting the perspective of subaltern characters, for example young
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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BAINBRIDGE, BERYL
Queenie Thrale or the crew members of Scott’s Antarctic voyage, the shortcomings of these “great” British heroes are disclosed, their respective claim to fame debunked as the effect of a selfserving, neurotic personality. In all her writings, the British class system is regarded from a dispassionate, ironically subversive position. This critical concern for the iniquities of British society and history is carried over into Bainbridge’s non-fiction, as in her travelogue English Journey in which she retraces J. B. Priestley’s classic Depression-era journey. Apart from her fiction, her non-fictional explorations of contemporary England, and her theater reviews (now collected in Front Row, 2005), Bainbridge is also known for her work for television, both as a presenter and a scriptwriter. Over the years, Beryl Bainbridge has established herself as a leading English novelist, achieving both critical and commercial success. Five of her books were shortlisted for the Booker Prize; for Every Man for Himself she received the Whitbread Novel Award, and for Master Georgie she was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and the W. H. Smith Literary Award. In 2000, Bainbridge was made a Dame of the British Empire. Her novels, unostentatious and economical in style, and often bleak in their outlook, capture their readership by the author’s sharp, unflinching observation, her precise rendering of dialogue, and, last but not least, her (often black) humor. SEE ALSO: Feminist Fiction (BIF); Historical Fiction (BIF); Working-Class Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bainbridge, B. (1967). A Weekend with Claude (Rev. edn. 1981). London: Hutchinson. Bainbridge, B. (1968). Another Part of the Wood (Rev. edn. 1979). London: Hutchinson. Bainbridge, B. (1972). Harriet Said. London: Duckworth. Bainbridge, B. (1973). The Dressmaker. London: Duckworth. Bainbridge, B. (1974). The Bottle Factory Outing. London: Duckworth. Bainbridge, B. (1975). Sweet William. London: Duckworth. Bainbridge, B. (1976). A Quiet Life. London: Duckworth.
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Bainbridge, B. (1977). Injury Time. London: Duckworth. Bainbridge, B. (1980). Winter Garden. London: Duckworth. Bainbridge, B. (1984a). English Journey; or, The Road to Milton Keynes. London: Duckworth. Bainbridge, B. (1984b). Watson’s Apology. London: Duckworth. Bainbridge, B. (1985). Mum and Mr. Armitage. London: Duckworth. Bainbridge, B. (1986). Filthy Lucre; or, The Tragedy of Andrew Ledwhistle and Richard Soleway. London: Duckworth. Bainbridge, B. (1987). Forever England: North and South. London: Duckworth. Bainbridge, B. (1989). An Awfully Big Adventure. London: Duckworth. Bainbridge, B. (1991). The Birthday Boys. London: Duckworth. Bainbridge, B. (1993). Something Happened Yesterday. London: Duckworth. Bainbridge, B. (1994). Collected Stories. London: Duckworth. Bainbridge, B. (1996). Every Man for Himself. London: Duckworth. Bainbridge, B. (1998). Master Georgie. London: Duckworth. Bainbridge, B. (2001). According to Queeney. London: Little, Brown. Bainbridge, B. (2005). Front Row: Evenings at the Theatre. London: Continuum. Bainbridge, B. (2008). The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress. London: Little, Brown. Becket, F. (2005). Singular Events: The “As If” of Beryl Bainbridge’s Every Man for Himself. In N. Bentley (ed.), British Fiction of the 1990s. London: Routledge: pp. 179–91. Grubisic, B. J. (2008). Understanding Beryl Bainbridge. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Marsh, H. (2008). Life’s Nasty Habit: Time, Death and Intertextuality in Beryl Bainbridge’s An Awfully Big Adventure. Critical Engagements: A Journal of Criticism and Theory, 2, 85–110. Newell, M. (dir.) (1995). An Awfully Big Adventure. Portman Productions/BBC Films. O’Brian, J. (dir.) (1988). The Dressmaker. Film Four International. Richter, V. (1996). Grey Gothic: The Novels of Beryl Bainbridge. In I. Maassen & A. M. Stuby (eds.), (Sub)versions of Realism: Recent Women’s Fiction in Britain. Heidelberg: Universit€atsverlag Winter, pp. 159–72. Walker, C. (dir.) (1998). Beryl Bainbridge. The South Bank Show. London Weekend Television.
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BALLARD, J. G
Wenn€ o, E. (1993). Ironic Formula in the Novels of Beryl Bainbridge. Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. Whatham, C. (dir.) (1980). Sweet William. Boyd’s Company/ITC.
Ballard, J. G SEBASTIAN GROES
J. G. Ballard could best be described as a visionary anthropologist whose fiction explores contemporary social trends by projecting them into extreme situations. From his reinvention of the science fiction genre in the early 1960s to his exploration of sexual perversion in Crash (1973) and his meditations on “meaningless” violence in the twenty-first century, Ballard’s idiosyncratic, often controversial, body of work is one of the most original and powerful to have emerged from the postwar period. James Graham Ballard was born in Shanghai, China in 1930, and grew up in a suburban enclave of wealthy colonial emigrants. Key cultural influences were the American cinema, comic books, and classic children’s adventure novels, and all were to have a role in shaping Ballard’s imagination. In 1942 his comfortable upbringing came to an abrupt halt when World War II came to Shanghai and the Ballard family was interned in a Japanese camp, which formed the basis for Ballard’s bestselling and critically acclaimed novel, Empire of the Sun (1984). This experience made a lasting impression on his imagination, and the work that was to follow stages obsessive, repetitive transfigurations of his war ordeal. When Ballard returned to England after the war, he felt, and would remain, an outsider, both in terms of his Englishness and, later, in his relationship to the literary establishment. Ballard lived and wrote in Shepperton, a Thames-side town at a safe distance from London’s literary circles. After abandoning his medical studies and a brief career in the Royal Air Force, he started publishing science fiction stories in New Worlds, an avant garde magazine for speculative fiction. In 1962 the magazine published Ballard’s manifesto, “Which Way to Inner Space?” in which he urges writers to explore the complexities and contradictions of the modern self rather than the
extraterrestrial worlds of traditional science fiction. Ballard himself put this into practice in short story collections such as The Voices of Time (originally published as The Four-Dimensional Nightmare, 1963) and (post-)apocalyptic disaster novels such as The Drowned World (1962), a prophetic work set after the polar ice caps have melted. In 1964, Ballard’s wife died suddenly of pneumonia during a holiday in Spain, forcing him to bring up their three children on his own. He produced three more short story collections during the decade but the publication of the radically experimental exploration of modern life in 15 “condensed novels” (on pornography, American imperial power, sexual perversion, Vietnam, and dead American idols such as JFK and Marilyn Monroe), The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), brought the author greater literary acclaim and renown: the first American edition was banned by court order and pulped by Doubleday. Ballard’s reputation as an important if controversial author was cemented with the cautionary novel Crash (1973), a work now regarded as a postwar classic, which explores the disturbing sexual power of the car crash. The novel is symbolic of the decentering of anthropocentric thinking in postmodernity, while foregrounding the “death of affect,” the Ballardian notion that we have become desensitized through the overwhelming sensory violence inflicted on us by mass media. Ballard’s characters no longer distinguish between the human body and the car, and between body fluids and engine coolant. This is part of an increasing inability to distinguish between “the real” and fiction in a postwar period shaped by technologies that fuse (military) violence, science and technology, Hollywood, advertising, and pornography into a complex and surreal world. Crash also mythologizes London’s peripheral areas, and Heathrow Airport in particular. In an interview Ballard states: “In the suburbs you find uncentred lives. The normal civic structures are not there. So that people have more freedom to explore their own imaginations, their own obsessions. . . . There’s a sort of airport culture – with its transience, its access to anywhere in the world. Social trends of various kinds tend to reveal themselves first in the suburbs” (Sinclair 84). Concrete Island (1974), in which an architect becomes trapped in a slice of no man’s land
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BALLARD, J. G
wedged in between London’s motorways, continues Ballard’s meditation on modernity by rewriting Robinson Crusoe. The wealthy residents of a hypermodern tower block regress into violence and anarchy in High-Rise (1975), which forms both a criticism of utopian experiments in postwar town planning and housing, and of the decline in spirituality in the postmodern world. In the surreal novel The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) the deranged pilot Blake crashes an airplane into the Thames and wakes to finds himself possessing divine powers, which allow him to transform Shepperton from a consumerist hell into a Blakean utopia. Ballard reached a mainstream audience with the bestselling and critically acclaimed novel Empire of the Sun (1984), which concerns how the comfortable Shanghai life of the fictional character Jim is dismantled by World War II when he gets separated from his parents and needs to fend for himself in a Japanese internment camp. In 1987 this novel was turned into a Hollywood blockbuster film by Steven Spielberg. Ballard continues this semiautobiographical mode in The Kindness of Women (1991), which chronicles his life following his wartime experiences in China. Running Wild (1988) investigates why a group of children in a gated community murder their parents and is the first of a series of quasi-detective novels that explore how the contemporary culture of leisure and boredom leads to random eruptions of “meaningless” violence. Ballard’s parodies of airport novels, Cocaine Nights (1996a) and SuperCannes (2000), both explore the Mediterranean scene of the nouveau riche, whose amoral, desensitized culture leads to racism, adultery, and murder. This dark undercurrent within late capitalism comes “home” to Britain in Millennium People (2003), which depicts the revolt of residents in a bourgeois gated community, and in Kingdom Come (2006), which connects random violence to the globalized consumer culture. Although at first his reputation as a science fiction writer hampered his critical reception by the academe, the late 1990s and, in particular, the early 2000s have seen an increased and serious critical appreciation of Ballard’s work, with the publication of several monographs and edited collections, and a conference, on the author’s work. In 2008, Ballard published the memoir Miracles of Life, which gives us yet another version
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of the life of one of the most fascinating and original literary imaginations present in English postwar fiction. Ballard died from prostate cancer on April 19, 2009. SEE ALSO: Censorship and the Novel (BIF); London in Fiction (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF); Science Fiction (BIF); Sinclair, Iain (BIF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ballard, J. G. (1962). The Drowned World. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Ballard, J. G. (1963). The Four-Dimensional Nightmare. London: Gollancz. (Subsequently published as The Voices of Time.) Ballard, J. G. (1970). The Atrocity Exhibition. London: Jonathan Cape. Ballard, J. G. (1973). Crash. London: Jonathan Cape. Ballard, J. G. (1974). Concrete Island. London: Jonathan Cape. Ballard, J. G. (1975). High-Rise. London: Jonathan Cape. Ballard, J. G. (1979). The Unlimited Dream Company. London: Jonathan Cape. Ballard, J. G. (1984). Empire of the Sun. London: Gollancz. Ballard, J. G. (1988). Running Wild. London: Century Hutchinson. Ballard, J. G. (1991). The Kindness of Women. London: HarperCollins. Ballard, J. G. (1996a). Cocaine Nights. London: Flamingo. Ballard, J. G. (1996b). A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews. London: HarperCollins. Ballard, J. G. (1996c). Which Way to Inner Space? [1962] In Ballard (1996b), pp. 195–8. Ballard, J. G. (2000). Super-Cannes. London: Jonathan Cape. Ballard, J. G. (2001). The Complete Short Stories. London: Flamingo. Ballard, J. G. (2003). Millennium People. London: HarperCollins. Ballard, J. G. (2008). Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton: An Autobiography. London: Fourth Estate. Baxter, J. (2009a). J. G. Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London: Continuum. Baxter, J. (2009b). J. G. Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship. Aldershot: Ashgate. Gasiorek, A. (2005). J. G. Ballard. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
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BANVILLE, JOHN
Luckhurst, R. (1997). The Angle between Two Walls: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Pringle, D. (1979). Earth is the Alien Planet: J. G. Ballard’s Four-Dimensional Nightmare. San Bernadino, CA: Borgo. Sinclair, I. (1999). Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-Mortem on J. G. Ballard’s “Trajectory of Fate. London: BFI. Spielberg, S. (dir.) (1987). Empire of the Sun. Amblin Entertainment.
Banville, John HEDDA FRIBERG-HARNESK
John Banville’s reputation as one of Ireland’s finest prose artists has grown steadily since his debut in 1970, and few were surprised when The Sea won the 2005 Man Booker Prize. Banville’s novels, taking shape in language as elegant as any written in the transatlantic world today, open up – to paraphrase Banville on Beckett – to life’s chaos and painful comedy. They enact the “tension between art and nature” (Imhof 234) and record “the life of the imagination” (McMinn 1). Their cold vision is warmed by humor and intellectual passion. Born in 1945 in Wexford in the Irish southeast, Banville studied with the Christian Brothers and at St. Peter’s College there. His parents were Martin and Agnes Banville. As a boy, John was taken by Joyce’s Dubliners, whose “grayed-over tone caught exactly the ennui and paralysis of the lower-middle class milieu” in which he “was struggling to grow up” (Banville 2004, 26). Although Banville shuns the overtly autobiographical, a Wexford light filters through novels such as Birchwood (1973) and Eclipse (2000a) and the sandy dunes of Rosslare give The Sea (2005b) its salt-bleached shade. As a young man, Banville (who did not attend a university) worked for Aer Lingus, the Irish airline. Offered cut-rate travel, he could spend time in Greece, Italy, and the US. In San Francisco in 1968 he met his wife, American textile artist Janet Dunham. Back in Dublin, he published his first book, the short story collection Long Lankin (1970), and worked for the Irish Press and the Irish Times, where he became literary editor in 1998. He has contributed to the New York Review of
Books since 1990. With his wife, Banville has two grown sons. He also has two daughters from his relationship with Patricia Quinn, former head of the Arts Council of Ireland. While some critics have deplored a perceived lack of “Irishness” in Banville’s work, others have praised its “European” qualities and his affinity to such writers as Fowles and Nabokov. As for the high modernists, Banville denies Joyce as a major influence, but acknowledges indebtedness to Henry James and Samuel Beckett (Schwall 17). Banville’s first novel, Nightspawn (1971), is a psychological spy thriller set in Greece. In Birchwood, he gives the Anglo-Irish “big house” genre a postmodernist turn. In a surreal nineteenth-century Irish setting, the narrator, Gabriel Godkin, tells the history of his family and ancestral house. As Gabriel leaves home to travel through an Ireland torn by famine and unrest, an ironically distorted, disturbing, version of Irish history is presented. In his “science tetralogy” Banville focuses on the historical figures of Copernicus, Kepler, and, more indirectly, Newton, and in Mefisto (1986) he returns, with a Faustian young mathematician Gabriel Swan, to the realm of pure imagination. The masterly “European” novels, Doctor Copernicus (1976) and Kepler (1981), are works of historiographic metafiction which, while reinventing the lives of the two astronomers, raise epistemological and ontological questions. Returning to a contemporary Irish setting, The Newton Letter (1982) revisits the big house genre. Here, a “post-peasant Catholic” (Banville 2000c, 516) historian, viewing the big house tradition through a different lens than did Godkin in Birchwood, helps set the scene for a culture clash. With the “art trilogy,” Banville’s production enters a new phase, moving “from ‘world pictures’ to ‘pictureworlds’ ” (Berensmeyer 204). In The Book of Evidence (1989), based on a 1982 Dublin murder, Freddie Montgomery confesses to having killed a woman because of a “failure of imagination” (215). In the dreamy Ghosts (1993), Freddie reappears, having served his prison term. Sitting Prospero-like on an island, he controls the story of a group of shipwrecked actors. In Athena (1995), where Freddie makes a third appearance, art and forgery are central concerns. While Banville’s later novels – The Untouchable (1997), Eclipse, and Shroud (2002) – turn inward,
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“toward singular consciousnesses or voices” (Hand 2006, p. viii), they also turn outward to engage with twentieth-century figures such as the Cambridge Five spy Anthony Blunt (The Untouchable) and critic Paul de Man (Shroud), and to spin stories of spying, acting, crime, and betrayal. These novels can be seen to form a new trilogy, one of guises and simulacra (see Friberg 248 n.). In the first, Victor Maskell negotiates his many selves in a life of scholarship, homosexuality, and high treason. Eclipse, with its troubled father–daughter relationship, is told by Alex Cleave, an actor with stage fright; and Shroud, primarily set in Antwerp and Turin and narrated by the formidable, protean, impostor Axel Vander, is a self-invented man’s tale. With Shroud, Banville seems to have taken certain narrative concerns as far as they go, and The Sea signals a new turn. Set in Wexford, this is a comparatively straightforward story about memory and grief. Compared to Axel Vander, Max Morden is an altogether more “human” protagonist, inside whom “the past beats . . . like a second heart” (2005b, 13). Banville also writes for the stage (notably The Broken Jug, 1994a; God’s Gift, 2000b; and Love in the Wars, 2005a – English versions of plays by Heinrich von Kleist) and the screen. As Benjamin Black, he has launched a line of noir crime fiction including Christine Falls (2006) and The Silver Swan (2007), both set in the 1950s and centered on Dublin pathologist Quirke. The Lemur (2008) is set in contemporary New York. SEE ALSO: Beckett, Samuel (BIF); Irish Fiction (BIF); Joyce, James (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Banville, J. (1970). Long Lankin. London: Secker and Warburg. Banville, J. (1971). Nightspawn. London: Secker and Warburg. Banville, J. (1973). Birchwood. London: Secker and Warburg. Banville, J. (1986). Mefisto. London: Secker and Warburg. Banville, J. (1989). The Book of Evidence. London: Secker and Warburg. Banville, J. (1994a). The Broken Jug. Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery.
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Banville, J. (1994b). Seachange. Dublin: Radio Telefıs Eireann. Banville, J. (1997). The Untouchable. London: Picador. Banville, J. (2000a). Eclipse. London: Picador. Banville, J. (2000b). God’s Gift. Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery. Banville, J. (2000c). The Revolutions Trilogy, comprising Doctor Copernicus, Kepler, The Newton Letter. London: Picador. Banville, J. (2001). Frames Trilogy, comprising Athena, The Book of Evidence, Ghosts. London: Picador. Banville, J. (2002). Shroud. London: Picador. Banville, J. (2003). Prague Pictures. London: Bloomsbury. Banville, J. (2004). [No title.] Bloomsday Magazine, p. 26. Banville, J. (2005a). Love in the Wars. Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery. Banville, J. (2005b). The Sea. London: Picador. Banville, J. (as Black, B.) (2006). Christine Falls. London: Picador. Banville, J. (as Black, B.) (2007). The Silver Swan. London: Picador. Banville, J. (as Black, B.) (2008). The Lemur. London: Picador. Berensmeyer, I. (2000). John Banville: Fictions of Order. Heidelberg: Universit€atsverlag Winter. D’hoker, E. (2004). Visions of Alterity. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Friberg, H. (2007). Sites of Memory in John Banville’s The Sea. In H. Friberg, I. Gilsenan-Nordin, & L. Yding-Pedersen (eds.), Recovering Memory: Irish Representations of Past and Present. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Hand, D. (2002). John Banville: Exploring Fictions. Dublin: Liffey. Hand, D. (ed.) (2006). John Banville Irish University Review, 36(1). Imhof, R. (1989). John Banville: A Critical Introduction. Dublin: Wolfhound. McMinn, J. (1999). The Supreme Fictions of John Banville. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Schwall, H. (1997). An Interview with John Banville. European English Messenger, 4(1), 13–19.
Barker, Pat ANNE WHITEHEAD
Pat Barker’s writing powerfully explores themes of trauma and recovery, and the violence that war has inflicted on individuals throughout the twentieth century is of central importance in her work.
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Barker addresses the effects of trauma in her novels through characters whose pasts have not been laid to rest, and ghosts appear throughout her fiction to indicate a disturbance of temporality. The history of twentieth-century Britain represents for Barker a history of traumatic experience, which encompasses not only the two World Wars, and the Falkland, Gulf, and Northern Ireland conflicts, but also the long-term effects of economic recession. In this context, the task of the novelist is to recover from this history the suffering of those whose lives have been marginalized by official, national narratives. Viewed in this light, Barker can be located as a leading voice among a number of contemporary British novelists, including Graham Swift, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro, whose writing explores the spectrality of history and the local impact of broader historical changes. Born Patricia Margaret Drake on May 8, 1943, Barker grew up near the industrial town of Middlesbrough in northeast England. Barker seems to have been affected by the history of World War I from an early age: her grandfather had a bayonet wound, although he did not talk about the war, while her stepfather had served in the trenches as a boy of 15. Another early influence came from her grandmother’s first husband who had been a spiritualist medium. There were books on spiritualism around the house, which seem to have made a lasting impact on Barker’s imagination and are felt as an undercurrent in her work in recurrent motifs of haunting. Attending a creative writing course at the Arvon Foundation in Yorkshire in 1979, Barker was taught by Angela Carter who encouraged her to write about the topics she knew best. Her early fiction correspondingly addresses working-class lives in northeast England. In Union Street (1982), Blow Your House Down (1984), and Liza’s England (originally published as The Century’s Daughter, 1986), Barker represents an alternative front line in which women battle against poverty for survival and suffer the traumas of rape, murder, abortion, and prostitution. Although Liza’s England represents Barker’s closest tribute to Carter (Liza, like Fevvers in Nights at the Circus, is a “midnight child”), it also marks the distinctiveness of Barker’s voice: her novels remain predominantly realist in style and incorporate extensive speech and dialogue. Thus they lend
themselves well to film adaptation, most notably in Gillies Mackinnon’s Regeneration. Barker’s second group of novels explore the relation between masculinity and war. The Man Who Wasn’t There (1988) narrates three days in the life of 12-year-old Colin Harper, who has never known his father and fills his absence with fantasies derived from war films. Barker demonstrates that the Hollywood version of war presents a highly idealized version of masculinity. The Regeneration trilogy extends Barker’s critique of war and masculinity. Regeneration (1991) focuses on the relationship between W. H. R. Rivers and his patient Siegfried Sassoon, and brings to light the ways in which the traumatic responses to World War I effected a crisis of masculinity. The Eye in the Door (1993) examines the mobilization of gender in the discourse of war, so that pacifism was aligned with homosexuality and thereby demonized and criminalized. In The Ghost Road (1995), winner of the 1995 Booker Prize for Fiction, Rivers’s memories of his prewar experiences in Melanesia offer him an alternative model of masculinity and war, allowing him to challenge dominant narratives of patriotism. Although Barker’s shift from women’s experiences to themes of masculinity has been seen as a break in her writing, it is clear that the themes of gender, class, and trauma remain constant across her work. In her next phase of writing, Barker set her novels in the present and explored ideas of regeneration in relation to the landscapes of northeast England. Her work of this period also displays a fascination with the child murderer. Another World (1998) is set in Newcastle and Barker focuses on derelict areas of the cityscape to explore ideas of economic and urban regeneration. Border Crossing (2001) highlights the question of accountability in questioning whether Danny Miller, who murdered an elderly woman when he was a child, should be deemed responsible for his actions and stand trial. The setting shifts to the rural landscape of Northumberland, which is seen not as a pastoral retreat but as infected with violence. This is echoed in Double Vision (2003), in which the war reporter Stephen Sharkey, haunted by what he has witnessed in Afghanistan, seeks peace in Northumberland. Again, Barker makes clear that the region is haunted by its own violent past and can offer little solace. If Barker’s
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recent fiction draws attention to her as a regional writer, it is to refigure the “border” as a site not of marginality but of dissidence and transgression. The northeastern landscapes are not distant from the concerns of the metropolitan center, but forcibly bring them back into view. Barker’s latest novel, Life Class (2007), returns to the setting of World War I. Barker pays particular attention to the intersection between art and medicine and probes the detachment from suffering that is required in both disciplines. Although this interest informs both Regeneration and Double Vision, Barker has intimated that this focus is also central to her next novel, which suggests that Life Class marks a new phase in her writing. Again, however, the novel does not depart from her central interests but remains intimately concerned with gender, class, war, trauma, and the possibility of recovery or regeneration. SEE ALSO: Carter, Angela (BIF); Feminist Fiction (BIF); Historical Fiction (BIF); Working-Class Fiction (BIF); World War I in Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Barker, P. (1982). Union Street. London: Virago. Barker, P. (1984). Blow Your House Down. London: Virago. Barker, P. (1986). The Century’s Daughter. London: Virago. (Reissued as Liza’s England, 1996.) Barker, P. (1988). The Man Who Wasn’t There. London: Penguin. Barker, P. (1991). Regeneration. London: Penguin. Barker, P. (1993). The Eye in the Door. London: Viking. Barker, P. (1995). The Ghost Road. London: Viking. Barker, P. (1998). Another World. London: Viking. Barker, P. (2001). Border Crossing. London: Viking. Barker, P. (2003). Double Vision. London: Hamish Hamilton. Barker, P. (2007). Life Class. London: Hamish Hamilton. Brannigan, J. (2005). Pat Barker. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mackinnon, G. (dir.) (1997). Regeneration. Artificial Eye. Monteith, S. (2002). Pat Barker. Plymouth: Northcote House. Monteith, S., Jolly, M., Yousaf, N., & Paul, R. (eds.) (2005). Critical Perspectives on Pat Barker. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
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Barnes, Julian MERRITT MOSELEY
One of the most celebrated British novelists from the generation of celebrated novelists born between 1945 and 1950 (e.g., Amis, McEwan, Ackroyd), Julian Barnes is noted for his intellectual qualities, his cosmopolitan interests, and his restlessly inventive approach to fiction. Though he has written important non-fiction and four detective novels, his exemplary achievement is in what the British call the “literary” novel (by contrast with the “popular” novel). Julian Barnes’s works may well be the defining illustration of the literary novel. Born on January 19, 1946, in Leicester, he was the younger son of parents who both taught French. When he was 10 the family moved to Northwood, a northern suburb of London. He commuted by train to the City of London School and then went on to Magdalen College, Oxford. He spent one year, 1966–7, teaching English at a school in Rennes, France, and in 1968 graduated with a BA in modern languages. Barnes then worked first as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary, then as a journalist in London, for the Times Literary Supplement, The Observer, and the Tatler. Something of a late starter by contrast with precocious contemporaries like Amis, he published his first novel in 1980; in fact he published two. One was Metroland (1980b), a coming-of-age book about a Frenchobsessed, middle-class youth from the north London suburbs and his adjustment to life. The author has said that the seven- or eight-year gestation of this book was the result of lack of confidence. The other was Duffy (1980a), a detective thriller published under the name Dan Kavanagh. Barnes has said that he used a pseudonym to avoid confusion with his mainstream fiction (Smith 74). The Kavanagh name is a tribute to his wife, Pat Kavanagh, whom he married in 1979 and to whom most of his books are dedicated. He eventually published three more Duffy novels – Fiddle City (1981), Putting the Boot In (1985), and Going to the Dogs (1987) – which, by repeating a main character, sharply diverge from the pattern, in his mainstream novels, of doing something quite different with each one. Between 1980 and 1984 he published another Duffy book and another mainstream novel, Before
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She Met Me (1982). None of the early books, though well received, created much of a critical stir. That changed in 1984 with Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), which was an immense critical success and was on the short list of finalists for the Booker Prize. Barnes has said “it’s the book that launched me” (Smith 74). On the strength of his growing achievement in fiction he largely retired from journalism in 1986, the year in which Staring at the Sun (1986) was published. Since then he has published one more Duffy book, Going to the Dogs (Putting the Boot In had appeared in 1985); six literary novels; three books of non-fiction essays; a book of short stories; and Nothing to be Frightened Of (2008), which is part autobiography and part philosophical meditation. Like many first novels the charming Metroland incorporates autobiography and coming-of-age themes. First-person narrator Christopher Lloyd moves through three phases; in the first, youth and school days, he and his friend Toni mock middle-class English culture by deploying French language and culture, seeking to epater le bourgeois; in the second, living in Paris in 1968, he has an affair with a French girl and meets his future wife; in the third, now “grown up” and back in Metroland, he endures Toni’s mockery for selling out to bourgeois values, but seems to choose contented acceptance over permanent rebellion. Metroland won the Somerset Maugham Award for a first novel. When Christopher learns that his wife has been unfaithful, he decides that it is nevertheless “all right” (1980b, 163). In Before She Met Me (1982), by contrast, Graham Hendrick becomes obsessed with his wife’s “infidelities” – peculiar ones, as these affairs all happened before they met – to the point of mania. Having ended his own first marriage for Ann, an actress, he finds himself driven to learn more about Ann’s affairs during her acting career, including both real and on-screen ones; finally he seeks out films throughout London to watch her in flagrante, in celluloid artifice, and he ends in disaster. Before She Met Me is a subtle, troubling, and morbidly funny study of jealousy and the reptilian brain. Flaubert’s Parrot was the first of Barnes’s books to be widely celebrated and the first to attract the charge that it is not really a novel. Admittedly, its construction, with chapters on “The Flaubert
Bestiary,” “Braithwaite’s Dictionary of Received Ideas,” and “Examination Paper,” gives ammunition to critics who call it a book of essays. It grew out of a projected biography of Gustave Flaubert, Barnes’s master; and it developed into a brilliantly original book that combines facts and speculations about Flaubert, art, love, and the possibilities of finding the truth about the past with the poignant personal story of the narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, an English widower whose pursuit of Flaubert is a medicine for, or a device for forgetting, his own sadness, including a modest parallel with the events of Madame Bovary. Staring at the Sun disappointed many reviewers because it was so different from Flaubert’s Parrot. Another triptych like Metroland, it is the story of Jean Serjeant, covering her 99-year life. Her life is devoid of world-historical events; its satisfactions are modest. She demonstrates the kind of courage that ordinary lives require, living without much love or consolation, but with resolve and integrity. Jean is briefly married, but comes to think of marital sex as just part of running the house, and compares men (favorably, at least) with mosquitoes. The novel avoids any of the self-referential fabulation of Flaubert’s Parrot, and the author has said that he thinks it was underrated because readers saw it as less adventurous than its predecessor. The next novel took many more obvious risks. A History of the World in 10 12 Chapters (1989) was, like Flaubert’s Parrot, accused of not being the novel it claimed to be. Its 10 chapters are enormously disparate (from the story of a woodworm on Noah’s ark to an account of heaven), and linked only loosely by persistent themes of the difficulty of understanding the past, the presence of reindeer and woodworms, and different versions of the “ark.” The half chapter is, to all appearances, in the voice of Julian Barnes and is a moving celebration of love, particularly as a stay against “history” – that is, the long parade of hatred and injustice – and a refuge from relativism and indecidability. Talking It Over (1991) followed. Another study of marital stress and infidelity, it was distinguished by its method: three primary voices, those of Stuart, his wife Gillian, and Oliver, Stuart’s friend and ultimately successful rival for Gillian’s love, talk directly to the reader. Reminiscent of the alternative versions of Flaubert’s story, these three
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(and a few minor speakers) give different accounts of what happened and, more importantly, how it felt and how it should be judged. The story and its presentation challenge the reader’s allocation of sympathy in this complex affair. In 1992 Barnes published his most unexpected novel yet, The Porcupine. It appeared first in Bulgaria, in Bulgarian, and is his most overtly political book. Written when communist regimes were falling all over eastern Europe, The Porcupine is the story of a deposed leader, Stoyo Petkanov, in a country much like, though never identified as, Bulgaria. What is seems to show is that life and history are complicated and that, though the end of communism counts as progress, whatever succeeds it is also compromised. And Petkanov is a more interesting and larger figure than those who replace him. England, England (1998) combines the life story of Martha Cochrane with a satire on a larger-than-life tycoon, Sir Jack Pitman, who launches a tourist venture consisting of an alternative England located on the Isle of Wight. Building on market research showing the 50 characteristics respondents associated with England – (1) Royal Family; (3) Manchester United Football Club; (17) Shakespeare; (49) Not Washing/Bad Underwear – the new England is so successful it supplants the old one, which reverts to a rural state under the name Albion. Like Flaubert’s Parrot, England, England was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Love, Etc. (2000) is a sequel to Talking It Over, showing Stuart’s growing self-awareness and growing ruthlessness and his schemes to replace Oliver as Gillian’s husband: that is, his plan to reverse the motion of Talking It Over and return to the status quo ante. It employs the same documentary style – of characters speaking directly to the reader – as its predecessor. In 2005 Barnes published Arthur and George, another striking departure, being a historical novel about the separate lives of a famous man, Arthur Conan Doyle, and an obscure one, George Edalji; when George is unjustly accused of a horrible crime, apparently in part because he is of mixed race, the famous author intervenes to try to restore justice, in a role like that of Anatole France in the Dreyfus affair. The results for Edalji are ambiguous. Barnes has built the novel on a basis of fact and documentation, and there is
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considerable interesting material on Conan Doyle’s later infatuation with spiritualism. Like many of his books, including England, England, this one investigates the difficulty of establishing the truth and the real. Barnes has written two books of short stories: Cross Channel (1996), all of which are in some way about encounters between the English and the French, and The Lemon Table (2004), many of which are about aging and decline. His elegant journalism appears in Letters from London (1995), thoughtful and often very funny dispatches written while he was London correspondent for the New Yorker, and in Something to Declare (2002). This is a more miscellaneous collection, including memoir, book reviews, and reporting (on the Tour de France, for instance), but all of it about France, a crucial aspect of Barnes’s life and work. The Pedant in the Kitchen (2003) is about cooking. Nothing to be Frightened Of (2008) is an unusual combination of a memoir, in which his philosopher brother plays an important role; a revealing discussion of French author Jules Renard; and most of all a personal meditation on aging and death and its finality. There is much here about faith: the book opens with “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him” (1). Christopher Lloyd was thinking about God and death in Metroland –“the arrival in my head of the fear of Big D, and the departure of God” (53) – and it is one of the achievements of Nothing to be Frightened Of that it invites the reader to think back over his career, to reflect on the persistence of this concern with last things in Barnes’s fiction running alongside his continued exploration of love, his determined intelligence, and a fluidity of exploration of the formal possibilities of the modern novel. Barnes lives in London, combining the cheerful pessimism derived from his agnostic fear of death with a saving dedication to art that is evidenced in his own appreciation of artists like Flaubert and his production of original and profound fictions. SEE ALSO: Mystery/Detective/Crime Fiction (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Barnes, J. (as Kavanagh, D.) (1980a). Duffy. London: Jonathan Cape.
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Barnes, J. (1980b). Metroland. London: Jonathan Cape. Barnes, J. (as Kavanagh, D.) (1981). Fiddle City. London: Jonathan Cape. Barnes, J. (1982). Before She Met Me. London: Jonathan Cape. Barnes, J. (1984). Flaubert’s Parrot. London: Jonathan Cape. Barnes, J. (as Kavanagh, D.) (1985). Putting the Boot In. London: Jonathan Cape. Barnes, J. (1986). Staring at the Sun. London: Jonathan Cape. Barnes, J. (as Kavanagh, D.) (1987). Going to the Dogs. London: Viking. Barnes, J. (1989). A History of the World in 10 12 Chapters. London: Jonathan Cape. Barnes, J. (1991). Talking It Over. London: Jonathan Cape. Barnes, J. (1992). The Porcupine. London: Jonathan Cape. Barnes, J. (1995). Letters from London. London: Picador. Barnes, J. (1996). Cross Channel. London: Jonathan Cape. Barnes, J. (1998). England, England. London: Jonathan Cape. Barnes, J. (2000). Love, Etc. London: Jonathan Cape. Barnes, J. (2002). Something to Declare. London: Picador. Barnes, J. (2003). The Pedant in the Kitchen. London: Guardian. Barnes, J. (2004). The Lemon Table. London: Jonathan Cape. Barnes, J. (2005). Arthur and George. London: Jonathan Cape. Barnes, J. (2008). Nothing to be Frightened Of. London: Jonathan Cape. Gitzen, J. (2001). How to Be Postmodern: The Fiction of Julian Barnes and Alain de Botton. Essays in Arts and Sciences, 30(Oct.), 45–61. Guignery, V. (2006). The Fiction of Julian Barnes: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Henke, C. (2003). Remembering Selves, Constructing Selves: Memory and Identity in Contemporary British Fiction. Journal for the Study of British Cultures, 10(1), 77–100. Higdon, D. L. (1991). “Unconfessed Confessions”: The Narrators of Graham Swift and Julian Barnes. In J. Achison (ed.), The British and Irish Novel Since 1960. New York: St. Martin’s, pp. 174–91. Janik, D. I. (1995). No End of History: Evidence from the Contemporary English Novel. Twentieth Century Literature, 41(Summer), 160–89. McGrath, P. (1987). Julian Barnes. Bomb, 21(Fall), 20–3.
Millington, M. I., & Sinclair, A. S. (1992). The Honourable Cuckold: Models of Masculine Defence. Comparative Literature Studies, 29(19), 1–19. Moseley, M. (1997). Understanding Julian Barnes. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Pateman, M. (2002). Julian Barnes. Tavistock: Northcote House. Schiff, J. (2007). A Conversation with Julian Barnes. Missouri Review, 30(3), 60–80. Sesto, B. (2001). Language, History, and Metanarrative in the Fiction of Julian Barnes. New York: Peter Lang. Smith, A. (1989). Julian Barnes. Publishers Weekly, 236(Nov. 3), 73–4. Stout, M. (1992). Chameleon Novelist. New York Times Magazine pp. 29, 68–72, 80 (Nov. 22). Wilson, K. (2004). Julian Barnes and the Marginalization of Metropolitanism: The Suburban Centre in Metroland and Letters from London. In L. Philips (ed.), The Swarming Streets: TwentiethCentury Representations of London. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 153–67.
Beckett, Samuel PATRICK A. McCARTHY
Samuel Barclay Beckett, the younger son of William Frank and Maria Roe Beckett, was born on Good Friday, April 13, 1906, in Foxrock, south of Dublin. He came to regard the date as significant because it linked his birth with suffering and death. In Company the narrator, also born on Good Friday (“You first saw the light and cried at the close of the day when in darkness Christ at the ninth hour cried and died,” 4: 447), conjures up a scene, described previously in The End and Malone Dies, in which a small boy walking “hand in hand” with his mother asks if the sky “is not in reality much more distant than it appears.” She replies angrily, shaking off his hand and making “a cutting retort [he has] never forgotten” (4: 428). Scenes like this in his works imply that Beckett’s childhood, as recalled much later, was often unhappy. Even so, he was close to his brother, Frank, and to his father, a quantity surveyor for a Dublin construction firm. Like his father, Beckett excelled at sports, including swimming, golf, rugby, tennis, boxing, and above all, cricket; the two also enjoyed long hikes. Their shared interests, and Bill Beckett’s acceptance of their differences, helped to establish a bond of
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genuine affection between father and son. Beckett’s relationship with his rigid and devout mother, however, was riddled with conflict and guilt. As Malone says of his own mother, “We were not often of the same mind” (2: 261). At age 13 Beckett was sent to the Portora Royal School, in Enniskillen; four years later he entered Trinity College Dublin, where he excelled in French and Italian and became infatuated with another student, Ethna MacCarthy. “The Alba,” a character in Dream of Fair to Middling Women and More Pricks Than Kicks, is based on Ethna while another character, “the Smeraldina,” is drawn from Beckett’s first cousin Peggy Sinclair, whose family lived in Kassel, Germany. In 1928 he and Peggy fell in love when she visited Ireland. Unlike his relationship with Ethna, which remained platonic despite his wishes, the relationship with Peggy quickly became sexual. Beckett characterized their fictional counterparts accordingly: the Alba is chaste and intelligent, the Smeraldina sensual. He visited Kassel several times, continuing after the love affair with Peggy ended on New Year’s Eve 1929, and was distressed by Peggy’s struggle with tuberculosis from 1930 until her death in May 1933. The Alba and the Smeraldina offer opposing caricatures of women in the early fiction, but in Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) Beckett combines memories of Ethna MacCarthy with those of Peggy Sinclair in creating Krapp’s more complex memories of a woman he once loved. In November 1928 Beckett moved in Paris to serve as an exchange lecturer at the Ecole Normale Superieure. One of his first acquaintances there was Thomas MacGreevy, the previous lecturer, who became his closest friend. Through MacGreevy he met James Joyce, who suggested that Beckett – then just 22 – contribute an article on Joyce’s Work in Progress, installments of what later became Finnegans Wake, to a book of essays intended to explain and publicize the project. When Beckett’s “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico. Joyce” appeared in May 1929, Joyce was impressed with the essay (although he found the part on Bruno weak) and asked Beckett to help in translating the Anna Livia Plurabelle episode of Work in Progress into French. In 1930, however, Joyce broke off contact with Beckett for two years after Beckett told Joyce’s troubled daughter Lucia that he was not romantically interested in her. Even so,
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Beckett regarded Joyce as a role model and began imitating his mannerisms and style of dress. Yet his own work is fundamentally different from Joyce’s: in a 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, Beckett contrasted his dissatisfaction with language with the “apotheosis of the word” in Work in Progress (Beckett 2009, 519). Joyce’s development of the full resources of the word and Beckett’s parsimonious style are two faces of modernist literature. After publishing an obscure poem about Descartes, “Whoroscope” (1930), with mock erudite notes – perhaps parodying The Waste Land in that respect – Beckett began writing a critical monograph, Proust, which appeared in 1931. By then he was a lecturer at Trinity, but he was unsuited for academic life, and after a year he resigned. For several years afterwards Beckett suffered from depression, partly for personal reasons: the rupture in his relations with Joyce; the deaths of Peggy Sinclair and Bill Beckett; disagreements with his mother about everything, including his writing; and debilitating physical ailments. Moreover, despite early success in Paris, his writing career sputtered when he returned to Dublin. He could not find a publisher for Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written 1931–2), a picaresque satire in which the protagonist is named Belacqua after an indolent character in Dante’s Purgatorio; other rejections followed until the 1950s, when the success of Waiting for Godot helped to secure a market for his other works. The publication of a story collection, More Pricks than Kicks, in 1934 might have reassured Beckett if not for the poor sales and his anxiety about the impression the book would make on those close to him. (The portrayal of Peggy Sinclair as the Smeraldina seems particularly insensitive.) Belacqua is again the protagonist, and we follow his misadventures through the penultimate story, “Yellow,” where he dies of a heart problem that his doctors had failed to notice: “They had clean forgotten to auscultate him!” (they had not listened to his heart, 4: 212). In the final story, “Draff,” we learn belatedly that Belacqua’s second wife, Thelma nee bboggs, had been killed on her honeymoon at the end of “What a Misfortune” and that the widow who is shocked at reading his obituary in the paper, even though she placed it herself, is the Smeraldina, “the only sail in sight” after Thelma’s death (4: 213). Innovative and irreverent, More Pricks had the honor of being banned
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in Ireland but did little to establish Beckett as a fiction writer. In 1934 Beckett moved to London to undergo psychoanalysis with Dr. Wilfred Bion at the Tavistock Clinic in order to explore the basis of his abnormally fast heart rate. He told MacGreevy that his heart problems, narcissism, and isolation all stemmed from arrogance and feelings of superiority (2009, 258–9), and he soon described such a narcissistic character in Murphy (1938), his first published novel. The emphasis on Murphy’s mind, the “little world” to which Murphy claims to belong – “I am not of the big world, I am of the little world” (1:107) – anticipates the inward turn of Beckett’s narratives in the 1940s, and chapter 6, which describes how Murphy’s mind imagines itself, is an example of the reflection on the self that continues through Stirrings Still (1988). In Murphy, which is set mainly in London and was composed there in 1935–6, Beckett also used minute details (one of the characters calls them “demented particulars,” 1:11) with an assurance not seen before in his fiction. Beckett returned to Paris in October 1937 and lived there for virtually the rest of his life. In January 1938, while recuperating in the hospital after being stabbed by a pimp who later said that he didn’t know why he had done it, Beckett was visited by friends, including James and Nora Joyce as well as Peggy Guggenheim, with whom he had had a brief affair. Another visitor, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, had met Beckett in 1929 and remembered him when she saw a newspaper story about the attack. Soon they became a couple, and they lived together for 50 years, although they did not marry until 1961. Suzanne was an essential part of Beckett’s life, even after they stopped having sexual relations (he filled the void with other women). Several years older than Beckett, she was a mother figure who believed in his work as May Beckett never had, as well as an independent woman whose opinions he respected. When World War II began, Beckett was in Dublin but returned at once to Paris. Two years later, after his friend Paul Leon was arrested by the Germans, he joined the Resistance, but eventually the group was infiltrated and betrayed. In August 1942, warned that the Gestapo would soon arrest them, he and Suzanne left Paris and spent the next two years in Roussillon, in Vichy France. There, Beckett worked on his next novel, Watt, partly to
keep his mind occupied. Watt seems to have been the most difficult novel for him to write, and the notebooks show that it only slowly assumed its published form (the famous Addenda are virtually all remnants of discarded drafts). Watt is not easily described, but it is among other things a failed quest for meaning in a world that seems incomprehensible. Watt himself is a straight man who observes human behavior as if from the outside: “Watt had watched people smile and thought he understood how it was done” (1: 187). Completed in the mid-1940s, Watt was not published until 1953, after the three novels that constitute Beckett’s greatest achievement in fiction: Molloy, Malone meurt (Malone Dies), and L’Innomable (The Unnamable). Like virtually all his works between Watt and From an Abandoned Work (composed 1954–5), Beckett wrote these novels in French, partly to free himself from familiar phrases and rhythms in English: he claimed that “en franc¸ais c’est plus facile d’ecrire sans style” (in French, it is easier to write without style: Ackerley & Gontarski 206). Later, he wrote sometimes in English, sometimes in French, almost always translating the texts himself, so that each work extends beyond the bounds of either version. In translating, Beckett often introduced intriguing differences between the French and English versions. Molloy, referring to the sequence of novels of which his narrative is the first, says either “Cette fois-ci, puis encore une je pense, puis c’en sera fini je pense, de ce mondela aussi” (1988 [1951] ) or “This time, then once more I think, then perhaps a last time, then I think it’ll be over, with that world too” (2:4). The passages are almost identical except for the insertion of “then perhaps a last time,” indicating that before Beckett translated Molloy into English, the series that he had planned to end with Malone meurt had been extended to L’Innomable. Another crucial addition appears at the end of the series: L’Innomable concludes, “dans le silence on ne sait pas, il faut continuer, je vais continuer” (1953, 262), but The Unnamable ends, “in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” (2:407; my emphasis). At times, Beckett keeps both languages in sight: a phrase in L’Innomable, “en faisant bien attention” – paying close attention (1953, 118) – becomes “on the qui vive” in The Unnamable (2:338), and “le struggle for life ou elan vital,” in Malone meurt (1951, 130),
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is barely altered to “the elan vital or struggle for life” in Malone Dies (2:236). Beckett’s translation may introduce a new overtone, as when Malone’s “Alors je jouerai tout seul, je ferai comme si je me voyais” (Then I shall play all alone, I shall act as if I saw myself: 1951, 10) – becomes “Then I shall play with myself” (2:175) or when, in the second part of Molloy, “la vie est une bien belle chose, Gaber, une chose inou€ıe” – life is a very beautiful thing, Gaber, an incredible thing (224) – alludes, in English, to Keats’s Endymion: “life is a thing of beauty, Gaber, and a joy for ever” (2:158). In either language, the novels parody narrative progression, the quest for knowledge, even the possibility of saying anything clearly or accurately, and the existence of two versions of each text further complicates the reader’s search for definitive meanings. Between Malone meurt and L’Innomable, Beckett wrote En attendant Godot, a simple play that, under that title and as Waiting for Godot, became the most famous play of the twentieth century (well enough known to be parodied on Sesame Street) and a major reason for the critical praise that contributed to Beckett’s selection for the Nobel Prize in 1969. Although he thought his novels and shorter fiction were more important, the dramatic works – including mimes, radio plays, television plays, and a film – presented Beckett with formal problems that were more manageable than those of fiction; moreover, directing productions of his own plays allowed him to maintain control over his work much as selftranslation did. The concern with control may also be seen in the tendency of his works, dramatic and otherwise, to become more focused or economical. Of the longer plays, Godot (first performed 1953) has five characters, Endgame (1957) four, Happy Days (1961) two. Some of the finest of the later plays are varieties of monologue: Not I (1972), A Piece of Monologue (1979), Rockaby (1981), and Ohio Impromptu (1981), for example. Likewise, the fiction written after The Unnamable, from Texts for Nothing (composed in French, 1951) through How It Is (published in French, 1961; English, 1964), and on to the “second trilogy” of Company (1980), Ill Seen Ill Said (1981), and Worstward Ho (1983), is invariably reduced to a single voice. The focus on voice in Beckett’s fiction and drama alike indicates an overlapping of genres, as does the fact that some
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of the fictional monologues (especially Company) have been adapted for the stage, while A Piece of Monologue, without stage directions, could easily have been published as fiction. The pivotal turn in Beckett’s work came after the end of the war, when his realization of his own “folly” allowed him to write “Molloy and the others.” Again, the contrast with Joyce is important: Beckett later said that Joyce went “as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it,” whereas Beckett’s “own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.” Knowlson remarks that for Beckett this meant embracing a darkness that extended to “folly and failure, impotence and ignorance” (319). Beckett described his concept of art as failure in an exchange with Georges Duthuit, “Three Dialogues” (1949), saying that he preferred “the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express’ (4:556). Failure, fragmentation, weakness, and incomprehension become the norm in Beckett’s fiction from the 1940s on, as announced by such titles as Texts for Nothing, Imagination Dead Imagine, Enough, Ping, Lessness, Fizzles, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho, whose narrator aims to “Try again. Fail again. Fail better” (4:471). To put it differently, the prose represents a movement toward what Beckett called the “literature of the non-word” (2009, 520). In The Unnamable, the narrator cannot imagine existence without words – “you must say words, as long as there are any” (2:407) – and words flow from him as incessantly as tears. How It Is, Beckett’s next long work, reads quite differently, for instead of a voice that cannot stop speaking we have one that stops and starts, speaking in bursts of unpunctuated blocks of words, the white space between blocks perhaps indicating silence while the narrator catches his breath. The voice necessarily begins again and again (the French title, Comment c’est, means “how it is” but also puns on commencer and commencez, infinitive and imperative forms of “begin”), its clusters of words are never complete, and there is no more than a remnant of narrative even though one is implied by its tripartite structure, broken into “before Pim with
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Pim after Pim” (2:411); yet the obligation to speak continues throughout the novel and the remainder of the Beckettian corpus. The narrator of The Unnamable surely speaks for Beckett when he says that he must “speak of things of which [he] cannot speak” and that he “will never be silent. Never” (2:285–6). S. E. Gontarski has observed that in his later “closed space” fiction, “Rather than rejecting language, [Beckett] seems to have continued to explore its tenacious power to represent even as it was being reduced, denuded, stripped bare” (1996, p. xvii). Language continued to have a hold on Beckett, even in Ill Seen Ill Said, where, when he searches for a word, it is “the wrong word,” as in “On its what is the wrong word its uptilted face obscure graffiti” (4:465); Flaubert’s search for le mot juste long abandoned, the wrong word will have to do. Yet in a late work such as Company, when “the eye closes and freed from pore the mind inquires, What does this mean? What finally does this mean that at first sight seemed clear?” the mind does not shut down altogether: “No. Unhappily no. Pangs of faint light and stirrings still. Unformulable gropings of the mind. Unstillable” (4:433–4). When Beckett died on December 22, 1989, five months after Suzanne, he left behind a body of work that is remarkable, and probably unmatched, for its candid examination of the “unformulable gropings of the mind” and the limitations of language. “Now that I’m entering night I have kinds of gleams in my skull. Stony ground but not entirely,” says the narrator of Enough (1967), adding, “Given three or four lives I might have accomplished something” (4:366). What Beckett accomplished in his single life is considerable. His example influenced other fiction writers and dramatists, including such nouveau roman writers as Claude Mauriac and such playwrights as Harold Pinter; moreover, beginning in the 1950s, Beckett has been studied by an ever-growing community of scholars whose interest attests to his standing as a major writer. The first book-length study of his writings, Hugh Kenner’s Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study, appeared in 1961 (an updated version with a supplementary chapter was published in 1967), and there soon followed studies by Ruby Cohn (Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut, 1964), John Fletcher (The Novels of Samuel Beckett, 1964;
Samuel Beckett’s Art, 1967), Raymond Federman (Journey to Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Early Fiction, 1965), Ihab Hassan (The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett, 1967), and others. The number of books on Beckett, which now exceeds that on any other twentieth-century writer apart from Joyce, includes three substantial biographies, the most thorough and accurate of which is James Knowlson’s Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (1996). The biannual Journal of Beckett Studies – founded in 1967 by James Knowlson, subsequently edited by John Pilling and, later, by S. E. Gontarski, and now published at the University of Edinburgh with Anthony Uhlmann as chief editor – remains the journal of record for Beckett studies, while the annual volumes of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, founded in 1991 by Marius Buning and now edited by Sjef Houppermans, feature articles in French and English on topics of special interest to Beckett scholars. SEE ALSO: Irish Fiction (BIF); Joyce, James (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS All quotations from Beckett’s English works are from Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition, 4 vols., ed. P. Auster (2006). Abbott, H. P. (1996). Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ackerley, C. J., & Gontarski, S. E. (2004). The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove. Beckett, S. (1951). Malone meurt. Paris: Minuit. Beckett, S. (1953). L’Innomable. Paris: Minuit. Beckett, S. (1988). Molloy [1951; French text]. Paris: Minuit. Beckett, S. (2006). Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition 4 vols. (ed. P. Auster). New York: Grove. Beckett, S. (2009). The Letters of Samuel Beckett vol. 1: 1929–1940 (ed. M. D. Fehsenfeld & L. M. Overbeck). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brater, E. (1994). The Drama in the Text: Beckett’s Late Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press. Brienza, S. D. (1987). Samuel Beckett’s New Worlds: Style in Metafiction. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Cohn, R. (2001). A Beckett Canon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
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Cousineau, T. J. (1999). After the Final No: Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Gontarski, S. E. (1996). Introduction. In S. Beckett, Nohow On: Three Novels. New York: Grove. Gontarski, S. E. (ed.) (in press). A Companion to Samuel Beckett. Oxford: Blackwell. Hill, L. (1990). Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knowlson, J. (1996). Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. New York: Simon and Schuster. Locatelli, C. (1990). Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett’s Prose Works After the Nobel Prize. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. McCarthy, P. A. (ed.) (1986). Critical Essays on Samuel Beckett. Boston: G. K. Hall. Murphy, P. J. (2009). Beckett’s Dedalus: Dialogical Engagements with Joyce in Beckett’s Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. O’Hara, J. D. (1997). Samuel Beckett’s Hidden Drives: Structural Uses of Depth Psychology. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Pilling, J. (1997). Beckett Before Godot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pilling, J. (2006). A Samuel Beckett Chronology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rabinovitz, R. (1992). Innovation in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Ricks, C. (1993). Beckett’s Dying Words. Oxford: Clarendon.
Bennett, Arnold RANDI SALOMAN
Enoch Arnold Bennett (May 27, 1867–March 27, 1931) was a British novelist, critic, essayist, and playwright. He was born in the town of Hanley, Staffordshire, in the heart of the “Potteries” district of northern England – a region so named for its industrial character and preeminence in the making of ceramics. This area was immortalized by Bennett as the “Five Towns” of his best-known works, which include the novels Anna of the Five Towns (1902a), The Old Wives’ Tale (1908b), Clayhanger (1910a), Hilda Lessways (1911), and These Twain (1916), along with numerous short stories. His representations of life in the region in which he grew up were largely influenced by the naturalism of the French writers who inspired Bennett, most notably Balzac, Zola, de Maupassant, Flaubert, and the Goncourt brothers.
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Bennett was educated in local schools and raised in the Wesleyan Methodist tradition. His father qualified as a solicitor late in life, having previously worked as a potter and a schoolmaster. As an adolescent, Arnold, the eldest of the Bennetts’ six children, worked in his father’s office. Bennett would later use the knowledge he gained from this apprenticeship to create vivid portraits of solicitors in works like Whom God Hath Joined (1906), a novel which traces two divorce cases through the courts. The fixation on parent–child relationships in Bennett’s work, and on the tyranny of overbearing fathers in particular, has been frequently noted. So too has the concern with – and genuine feeling for – the mundane details of everyday life, which characterizes Bennett’s particular strain of realism, and clearly differentiates him from his high modernist contemporaries and successors. At the age of 21, Bennett moved to London and began work as a solicitor’s clerk. In 1893 he took an editorial position at the literary magazine Woman. He would later become editor-in-chief of this publication, leaving only after the publication of his first novel, A Man from the North (1898). This book was largely autobiographical, following a young would-be author as he moves from the Five Towns to London and takes up an office job, struggling for a while to keep up his writing, but eventually abandoning it. While the novel met with only moderate critical success, it was enough to provide Bennett with the means and the confidence to focus full-time on his writing. In 1903, Bennett moved to Paris, where he lived and worked for eight years before returning to England by way of a tour of America, documented in Those United States (1912b). In 1907, he married Mary Marguerite Soulie (b. 1874), a French actress. The couple separated legally in 1921. In 1926, Bennett had a daughter, Virginia Bennett, with Dorothy Chesterton Bennett (1891–1978), who took Bennett’s name by deed poll. Bennett enjoyed widespread popularity along with significant financial success in the early decades of the twentieth century, producing over three dozen novels, along with several volumes of short stories and essays. The Old Wives’ Tale, generally considered his masterpiece, was published in 1908. This book, inspired by Maupassant’s Un vie, chronicles the lives of sisters Constance and Sophia Banes. Constance remains
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BERGER, JOHN
in the Five Towns family home, eventually taking over her parents’ tailoring business with the help of her husband Samuel, the store’s long-time employee, while Sophia seeks her fate in Paris, first through marriage, then as a hotel-keeper. Bennett was also an accomplished journalist, writing for Academy and other publications, a prolific book reviewer, being especially known for the reviews he produced for the Evening Standard’s “Books and People” section, and a playwright, achieving moderate success with works such as Milestones (1912a). In addition, he produced self-help books (How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, 1908a; Literary Taste: How to Form It, 1910b; and several others) and travel books, along with five volumes of letters, three of personal journals, and an autobiography. His professionalism helped Bennett to achieve the degree of success he did, but also left him open to charges (which he did little to dispel) of being a middle-class “hack” interested only in a paycheck and not in literature per se. This was a misguided charge, but it stuck, particularly after Virginia Woolf attacked the Edwardian writer in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1950 [1924] ). Declaring Bennett and his contemporaries John Galsworthy and H. G. Wells to be “materialists” unconcerned with the inner lives of their characters, Woolf created a portrait of Bennett and his writing that was far from the reality. While Bennett was committed to the exterior of his characters and to material conditions in a way that Woolf and her contemporaries were not, it was because he believed in the need to understand outside circumstances in order to understand interiors – and because he believed that interiors were inaccessible to a certain degree (and hence could be understood only through inference and surmise) – that Bennett insisted on understanding not only his characters but their surroundings. Nonetheless, Bennett’s popularity took a sharp dive after Woolf’s dismissal, and his reputation has yet to recover from the unfortunate blow. There are promising signs, however. Recently critics such as Kurt Koenigsberger and Randi Saloman have begun to consider Bennett’s work on its own merits. John Carey declared Bennett the hero of his study of modernism, Intellectuals and the Masses (1992). Robert Squillace (1997) has produced a provocative monograph offering new insight into Bennett’s novels.
SEE ALSO: Edwardian Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bennett, A. (1898). A Man from the North. London: John Lane. Bennett, A. (1902a). Anna of the Five Towns. London: Chatto and Windus. Bennett, A. (1902b). Grand Babylon Hotel. London: Chatto and Windus. Bennett, A. (1906). Whom God Hath Joined. London: David Nutts. Bennett, A. (1908a). How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. London: New Age. Bennett, A. (1908b). The Old Wives’ Tale. London: Chapman and Hall. Bennett, A. (1910a). Clayhanger. London: Methuen. Bennett, A. (1910b). Literary Taste: How to Form it. New York: George H. Doran. Bennett, A. (1911). Hilda Lessways. London: Methuen. Bennett, A. (1912a). Milestones. New York: George H. Doran. Bennett, A. (1912b). Those United States. London: Martin Secker. Bennett, A. (1916). These Twain. London: Methuen. Bennett, A. (1918). The Pretty Lady. London: Cassell. Bennett, A. (1923). Riceyman Steps. London: Cassell. Bennett, A. (1930). Imperial Palace. London: Cassell. Carey, John. (1992). Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939. London: Faber and Faber. Drabble, M. (1974). Arnold Bennett. New York: Knopf. Hynes, S. (ed.) (1968). The Author’s Craft and Other Critical Writings of Arnold Bennett. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Squillace, R. (1997). Modernism, Modernity and Arnold Bennett. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Woolf, V. (1950). Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown [1924]. In The Captain’s Death Bed. New York: Harcourt.
Berger, John CHARITY SCRIBNER
For more than a half century, John Berger has held a unique position in British and European culture, making his mark in literature, the visual arts, and mass media. Testing aesthetic models and advancing a socialist critique, his work establishes vital links between modernism and some of the most recent tendencies in performance and cinema.
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BERGER, JOHN
Berger produced several works of fiction and art criticism in the late 1950s and 1960s, but he first attracted widespread national and international attention with Ways of Seeing (1972b), a widely influential project on visual culture that was broadcast on British television and concomitantly published as a bestselling paperback. Ways of Seeing investigates the field of vision and especially the masculine gaze in both high art and commercial advertising. In this project, Berger was one of the first – in Britain or abroad – to engage Walter Benjamin’s seminal thought on art and the techniques of mechanical reproduction. He was also one of the first to bring the early writings of the Frankfurt School to bear on postwar society. Despite his interdisciplinary range, Berger can perhaps best be described as a storyteller, particularly as Benjamin understood it: his essays, drawings, and screenplays all use narrative techniques to transmit experience and wisdom from the past into the present. Berger was born in London in 1926 and came of age during World War II. After serving in the British Army from 1944 to 1946, he enrolled in art school and began to exhibit paintings in English galleries. The New Statesman published much of his early writing – reviews and essays edited with the red thread of Marxism. From the start, Berger’s work demonstrated a commitment to social justice; his first novels, written in a naturalist style, thematized problems in public health, labor relations, and immigration in Britain. The sharp leftist slant of A Painter of Our Time (1958) was held suspect by Cold War censors and was briefly withdrawn from circulation. Later, when his novel G. (1972a), a postmodern exploration of revolution and language, was granted the Booker Prize, Berger donated half of the award to the Black Panthers. Although Berger remains a prominent voice in English literature, he has lived and worked in a farming village in France since the 1970s. He has collaborated with filmmakers and photographers to document vestigial peasant cultures in Europe and his trilogy Into Their Labors (1979–90) surveys the passage of generations from the country to the city. The first of these three novels, Pig Earth (1979), draws from French oral traditions and is inflected with elements of magical realism. Once in Europa (1987) and Lilac and Flag (1990) move
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out across the continent, uniting the stories of migrating workers from east and west into complex narratives about recent European history, up to and beyond the collapse of communism. Into Their Labors became a rich resource for the UK-based theatre company Complicite (originally the The^atre de Complicite), which adapted it into the multimedia performance The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol, which toured in Britain and abroad from 1994 to 1996. The series Here Is Where We Meet, held in London in 2005, staged a major retrospective of Berger’s collaborations and commitments, both political and aesthetic. The survey spanned his studies of Picasso and Titian, through his literary oeuvre, to his influence on younger writers, such as Michael Ondaatje and Emine Sevgi Ozdamar. The 2005 series highlighted Berger’s later works, including To the Wedding, the 1995 novel about love and AIDS that functions as a loose allegory of the new Europe. New works of creative nonfiction, based in part on his own family’s lives, were collected and published under the series’ title Here Is Where We Meet (2005). The stories demonstrate a new level of Berger’s creative maturity, as they imbricate strands of his earlier thought on narration and art. Besides his influence on the writers Ondaatje and Ozdamar, Berger’s thought has instilled itself into a wide range of art and cultural criticism, including the work of Susan Sontag. His work has been widely translated; A Seventh Man (1975), for example, was translated into Turkish, Portuguese, and Panjabi. In recent interviews Berger has mentioned his own indebtedness to the fiction of Arundhati Roy, the poetry of Gareth Evans, and the photography of Sebasti~ao Salgado. In 2008 Berger followed through with an experimental novel, From A to X, which was nominated for a second Booker Prize, but received criticism for rehashing material from previous projects. Like Into Their Labors and Here Is Where We Meet, the later novel ventures a pastiche of locations and historical moments; here radical Islam and Chavezist cynicism are entered into an experimental fiction that returns to Berger’s favored conflict between brute power and the oppressed multitudes. Taken as a whole, Berger’s work stands out in twentieth-century and contemporary culture for its aesthetic innovation, capacity for empathy, and critical vision.
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BOLGER, DERMOT
SEE ALSO: Censorship and the Novel (BIF); Critical Theory and the Novel (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF); Working-Class Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Berger, J. (1958). A Painter of Our Time. London: Secker and Warburg. Berger, J. (1960). Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing. London: Methuen. Berger, J. (1972a). G. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Berger, J. (1972b). Ways of Seeing. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Berger, J. (1975). A Seventh Man. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Berger, J. (1979). Pig Earth. London: Writers and Readers. Berger, J. (1980). About Looking. London: Writers and Readers. Berger, J. (1987). Once in Europa. New York: Pantheon. Berger, J. (1990). Lilac and Flag. New York: Pantheon. Berger, J. (1995). To the Wedding. New York: Pantheon. Berger, J. (1996). Pages of the Wound. London: Bloomsbury. Berger, J. (2005). Here Is Where We Meet. New York: Pantheon. Berger, J. (2007). Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance. New York: Pantheon. Berger, J. (2008). From A to X. London: Verso. Berger, J., & Bielski, N. (1987). A Question of Geography. London: Faber and Faber. Dyer, G. (1986). Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger. London: Pluto. Hitchcock, P. (2001). They Must Be Represented? Problems in Theories of Working-Class Representation. PMLA, 155(1), 20–32. McBurney, S. (dir.) (1994). The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol. The^atre de Complicite. Papastergiadis, N. (1993). Modernity as Exile: The Stranger in John Berger’s Writing. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Scribner, C. (2003). Second World, Second Sex, and Literature on the European Left. Comparative Literature, 55(3), 217–28.
Bolger, Dermot WILLIAM A. JOHNSEN
Dermot Bolger was 9 years old in 1968 when universal secondary education finally became the
law in Ireland. This belated upgrade (well behind other modern nations) perhaps explains his bold conviction that what he needed to do to become a writer after secondary school at Beneavin College was practice, not more school. He worked variously as a factory hand and as a driver/librarian for a mobile library until he could support himself by writing. It may explain as well his remarkable non-competitive attunement to the hidden lives of others, especially those who don’t go to university. He writes of and for this new generation, bringing it into the mainstream of Irish literature. He currently lives in Finglas, the Dublin working-class suburb where he was born in 1959. Night Shift, Bolger’s first novel (1985), concerns Donal Flynn, who works the press at a welding rod factory. He is 18, married, and lives with his young wife in a caravan at the bottom of her parents’ garden. The novel describes Donal’s gradual maturing, as he outgrows the “night shift” of single males’ carousing in favor of his marriage. But Donal’s growth is too gradual, too late. After his last night out he returns home to learn that his wife, anxious for his return, has lost their baby in a fall down the stairs. At the hospital we find our own vicarious interest in Donal’s night life has also left us unprepared for the realization that Elizabeth has grown apart from him; and we are unprepared as well for her resolute gesture of giving him back his ring, telling him that she is leaving him to take better care of herself. Unlike such novels as Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, where women are viewed as accessories or liabilities to a central male character gratifyingly resembling the author, this first novel so knowing about young men’s lives turns against its own knowledge to observe that even a decent (and improving) young man can forfeit the love of a good woman forever. The Journey Home (1990), Bolger’s second novel, established him in Ireland and Europe as the voice of protest against Irish complacency toward a sordid politics corrupting public life. The 2008 publication of The Journey Home in America restores for readers outside the market of Penguin UK a proper historical perspective on the fierce national resentment and self-criticism of the Irish 1980s so muted in Roddy Doyle’s fiction, with which Bolger’s own is often compared.
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BOLGER, DERMOT
Bolger’s novels are always formally inventive; this novel begins with Hano and Katie running from their murder of a member of a corrupt political family; we read several concurrent narratives (one from beyond the grave) in each chapter, which bring each character up to date on each other’s past lives. Part I and sections of Part III of The Woman’s Daughter (1991), Bolger’s third novel, first appeared separately in 1987, introducing the author’s lifelong interest in extrasensory experience and his characters’ hidden lives. The narrative’s intricate connection of abused daughters across generations in the same family stands for a spiritual connection between them, even a haunting of the present by the past. A proper reading of Bolger will include his poetry and drama of this period, which share characters among them. A Second Life (1994) is one of Bolger’s greatest novels. Sean Blake’s consciousness hovers above “his” car accident, but also senses a pained spirit haunting the nearby Botanical Gardens. Like many who have experienced near-death, Blake recuperates reluctantly, feeling haunted by both his biological mother who gave him up for adoption, and this unknown past spirit. Sean’s mother is also haunted, “hearing” his car crash in Dublin although she lives in England. As Sean works his way back to her, the novel brings her story forward: how she was forced into an institution for unwed mothers and forced to give up her child. Sean wrests himself away from researching someone else’s life to working harder on sorting out his own. He finds his mother days too late, but arranges a tender, magnificent reconciliation scene, taking his family to the graves of his grandparents who had cast his mother out, and releases his mother’s ashes there. Bolger is never afraid of including strong emotions and strong endings in his fiction, or of seeming sentimental or to pander to popular feelings. A Second Life was published just before a long-delayed 1994 public investigation in Ireland into how women were institutionalized for real or imaginary sins. The 10 years following A Second Life (Father’s Music, 1997b; Temptation, 2000; and The Valparaiso Voyage, 2001) have consolidated Bolger’s national and European reputation as a highly regarded novelist constantly extending his range of subject and form. The Family on Paradise Pier
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(2005), a chronicle of twentieth-century Ireland and its entanglements in European wars and politics as seen by a disintegrating Irish Protestant family, is Bolger’s most ambitious novel to date. The main character Eva first appeared as a formative influence on Hano in The Journey Home; her character is based on a real-life mentor (Sheila Fitzgerald) of several Irish writers and artists, including Bolger himself. Bolger is both elucidative and critical in his depiction of the public spirit of this Protestant family as each member tries to find a role in a society moving away from them. A shared memory of the family’s recreational use of Paradise Pier haunts and strengthens each character. Bolger has always been dismissive of sectarian or confessional divisions in Ireland, and hostile to labels such as “working class” and “Anglo-Irish.” In 1993 he described “postcolonial literature” as inappropriate to Irish writing, “a decomposing chicken in search of its head” (1993, p. xiii). Yet he has forthrightly identified himself with an Irishness as inclusive as James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom. In his important play In High Germany, an Irishman working abroad finds an authentic national identity solely in the multinational and multiracial national soccer team. The public recognition of Bolger’s novels for contributing to a more inclusive identity for Irish fiction is paralleled by the critical acclaim and success of his plays; he became a member of Aosdana (Ireland’s national academy of artists and intellectuals) in 1991. He has given tireless, unselfish support to fellow writers throughout his career as a publisher and an impresario of new writing. He founded the influential Raven Arts Press in 1977 (when he was 18), publishing first novels by Patrick McCabe and Eoin McNamee, first books by Colm Toibın and Fintan O’Toole, and major books by Sebastian Barry, Anthony Cronin, Paul Durcan, Francis Stuart, and Michael Hartnett. He devised and edited two novels, Finbar’s Hotel (1997) and Ladies’ Night at Finbar’s Hotel (1999), gathering one chapter each from fellow Irish writers. Attributed to all of them collectively, these novels do not propose the parlor game of guessing which author has written individual chapters, but encourage a more generous, comradely sense of Irish writing, thoroughly in spirit with the temper of Bolger’s work.
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BOWEN, ELIZABETH
SEE ALSO: Doyle, Roddy (BIF); Irish Fiction (BIF); Joyce, James (BIF); Working-Class Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bolger, D. (1985). Night Shift. Dingle: Brandon. Bolger, D. (ed.) (1986). The Bright Wave: Poetry in Irish Now. Dublin: Raven Arts. Bolger, D. (1991). The Woman’s Daughter [1987], expanded edn. New York: Viking. Bolger, D. (1990). The Journey Home. New York: Viking. Bolger, D. (1992a). A Dublin Quartet (The Lament for Arthur Cleary; In High Germany; The Holy Ground; One Last White Horse). London: Penguin. Bolger, D. (1992b). Emily’s Shoes. New York: Viking. Bolger, D. (ed.) (1993). The Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction. London: Picador. Bolger, D. (1994). A Second Life. New York: Viking. Bolger, D. (1995). A Dublin Bloom: An Original Free Adaptation of James Joyce’s “Ulysses. London: Nick Hern. Bolger, D. (1997a). “April Bright” and “Blinded by the Light”: Two Plays. London: Nick Hern. Bolger, D. (1997b). Father’s Music. London: Flamingo. Bolger, D. (1998). Taking My Letters Back: New and Selected Poems. Dublin: New Island. Bolger, D. (2000). Temptation. London: Flamingo. Bolger, D. (2001). The Valparaiso Voyage. London: Flamingo. Bolger, D. (2004). From These Green Heights. Dublin: New Island. Bolger, D. (2005). The Family on Paradise Pier. London: Flamingo. Bolger, D. (2009a). The Consequences of Lightning. Dublin: New Island. Bolger, D. (2009b). The Townlands of Brazil. Dublin: New Island. Bolger, D., Doyle, R., Enright, A., Hamilton, H., Johnston, J., O’Connor, J., & Toibın, C. (1997). Finbar’s Hotel. London: Picador. Bolger, D., Binchy, M., Boylan, C., Donoghue, E., Haverty, A., Nı Dhuibne, E., O’Riordan, K., & Purcell, D. (1999). Ladies’ Night at Finbar’s Hotel. London: Picador. Foster, R. F. (2007). Luck and the Irish. London: Penguin. Imhoff, R. (2002). The Modern Irish Novel. Dublin: Wolfhound. Paschel, U. (1998). No Mean City? The Image of Dublin in the Novels of Dermot Bolger, Roddy Doyle, and Val Mulkerns. New York: Peter Lang.
Bowen, Elizabeth MARGARET SCANLAN
Born in Dublin in 1899, novelist Elizabeth Bowen died in Kent in 1973; she is buried in Ireland near the site of the demolished family home, Bowen’s Court. Half-orphaned at 13, she lived as she had grown up, “on both sides of the [Anglo-Irish] hyphen.” Educated at English schools, she married an Englishman, Alan Cameron, in 1923; the couple lived in Oxford until 1935, when Cameron accepted a position with the BBC in London. After inheriting Bowen’s Court in 1930, the author spent extended holidays at this beloved but financially ruinous “big house,” where her guests included Virginia Woolf, Rosamond Lehmann, and Isaiah Berlin. During World War II, Bowen divided her time between London, where her Regent’s Park house was bombed twice, and neutral Eire, where she wrote undercover reports on Irish morale for the British Ministry of Information. At a time when Churchill debated seizing the Irish “treaty ports” lost in 1938, Bowen’s counsels about respecting its neutrality reflect her affection for Ireland and considerable political canniness. Still, as late as 2004, the question of whether this “English spy” counts as an Irish writer was debated in the Irish Times. Bowen’s first short story collection, Encounters, was published in 1923; her first novel, The Hotel, in 1927; her work of the 1930s and 1940s – To the North (1932), The House in Paris (1935), The Death of the Heart (1938), The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945), The Heat of the Day (1949) – was her most popular and remains her bestknown. After Cameron’s death in 1952, Bowen published only three more novels, A World of Love (1955), The Little Girls (1964), and Eva Trout (1969); A Day in the Dark and Other Stories appeared in 1969. From 1950 until her final illness she taught in American universities and colleges – Vassar and Bryn Mawr, Princeton and Stanford, the universities of Wisconsin and California, Berkeley – supplementing her income with lectures and magazine articles. Nonetheless she was forced to sell Bowen’s Court, razed by its new owner in 1960. Like the author, the archetypal Bowen character is an outsider. Portia, a recently bereaved teenager in The Death of the Heart, reminds everyone in her half-brother’s elegant London
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BOWEN, ELIZABETH
house of his late father’s foolish affair with a young woman from a flower shop. Like 9-yearold Leopold in The House in Paris, born to a young unmarried Englishwoman of good family some eight months after the suicide of his French Jewish father, these aliens are surrounded by well-bred people with secrets concerning sex and history. Around them flow the rituals and polite conversations of upper-middle-class life, to which the outsider listens with desperate attention for answers to questions no one dares ask directly. The Bowen novel of manners is, in the author’s phrase, about “life with the lid on,” but cruelty, betrayal, even violence, seethe just below the decorative surface (Glendinning 82). Portia falls in love, only to be devastated at discovering how entangled the shallow young man is with her sister-in-law; Leopold, yearning to see the mother from whom he has been separated since his infancy, travels to Paris only to receive a last-minute telegram canceling the visit. The Last September (1929) ends as the IRA burn down the elegant big house in which it is set; in To the North, a young woman made homeless by her sister-in-law’s decision to remarry kills herself and her estranged lover in a highspeed car crash. The Heat of the Day, set in wartime London, may be Bowen’s most accomplished novel. By turns love story and documentary, the novel carries traces of the gothic and spy fiction, as well as her distinctive novel of manners. The melodramatic question on which the plot turns, whether Stella Rodney ought to sleep with a British intelligence agent, Harrison, in order to postpone the arrest of her lover, Robert Kelway, a Dunkirk veteran spying for the Nazis, gives Bowen full scope to explore the uncertainties of identity, betrayal, and love. In a crucial episode, Stella visits the Irish estate her son has recently inherited from his long-dead father’s family. Here a recurrent Bowen theme, Anglo-Irish alienation, deepens anxiety that the English who survive the wartime destruction at home also face the collapse of values that gave their culture coherence. For two decades after her death Bowen was largely forgotten, often dismissed as one more conventional female novelist of manners. However, recent criticism of The Heat of the Day and the later, more experimental Eva Trout offers a vision of Bowen as a psychologically complex, stylistically accomplished, and politically astute writer who
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deserves to be read in the context of her contemporaries Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett, even as “the Other of James Joyce” (Bennett & Royle, p. xv). SEE ALSO: Irish Fiction (BIF); London in Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bennett, A., & Royle, N. (1995). Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel: Still Lives. New York: St. Martin’s. Bowen, E. (1923). Encounters. London: Sidgwick and Jackson. Bowen, E. (1927). The Hotel. London: Constable. Bowen, E. (1932). To the North. London: Gollancz. Bowen, E. (1935). The House in Paris. London: Gollancz. Bowen, E. (1938). The Death of the Heart. London: Gollancz. Bowen, E. (1945). The Demon Lover and Other Stories. London: Jonathan Cape. Bowen, E. (1949). The Heat of the Day. London: Jonathan Cape. Bowen, E. (1955). A World of Love. London: Jonathan Cape. Bowen, E. (1964). The Little Girls. London: Jonathan Cape. Bowen, E. (1965). A Day in the Dark and Other Stories. London: Jonathan Cape. Bowen, E. (1969). Eva Trout. London: Jonathan Cape. Clifford, B., & Lane, J. (1999). Elizabeth Bowen: “Notes on Eire” Espionage Reports to Winston Churchill, 1940–2. Aubane, Co. Cork: Aubane Historical Society. Corcoran, N. (2004). Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return. Oxford: Clarendon. Ellman, M. (2003). Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow across the Page. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Glendinning, V. (1979). Elizabeth Bowen. New York: Knopf. Halperin, J. (1998). Eminent Georgians: The Lives of King George V, Elizabeth Bowen, St. John Philby, and Nancy Astor. New York: St. Martin’s. Hoogland, R. C. (1994). Elizabeth Bowen: A Reputation in Writing. New York: New York University Press. Irish Political Review (2004). Martin Mansergh and The Irish Times: A Polemic. Irish Political Review (June). At www.atholbooks.org/mansergh_polemic.php, accessed June 16, 2008.
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Jordan, H. B. (1992). How Will the Heart Endure? Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lee, H. (1981). Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation. London: Vision. McCormack, W. J. (1993). Dissolute Characters: Irish Literary History through Balzac, Sheridan Le Fanu, Yeats and Bowen. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Moynahan, J. (1995). Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Walshe, E. (ed.) (1998). Elizabeth Bowen Remembered: The Farahy Addresses. Dublin: Four Courts.
Boyd, William CHRISTINE BERBERICH
One of Britain’s most prolific and successful contemporary writers, William Boyd was born in Accra, Ghana, in 1952. His parents were Scottish expatriates, and Boyd grew up in the British expatriate communities of Ghana and Nigeria. At the age of 9, his parents sent him to attend Gordonstoun boarding school in Scotland. His education was completed with a diploma of French studies from the University of Nice, a BA and MA in English and philosophy from the University of Glasgow, and studies toward a DPhil in English literature at Jesus College, Oxford. Between 1980 and 1983, Boyd worked as a lecturer in English literature and critical theory at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. Boyd’s career as a novelist and writer took off in 1981 with the publication of his first novel, A Good Man in Africa (1981a), which won the Whitbread Novel Award and the Somerset Maugham Award. This successful first novel was followed in 1982 with the publication of An IceCream War (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Stars and Bars (1984), The New Confessions (1987), Brazzaville Beach (1990; winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the McVitie’s Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year), The Blue Afternoon (1993; winner of the Sunday Express Book of the Year award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction 1995), Armadillo (1998a), Any Human Heart (2002; winner of the Prix Jean Monnet), Restless (2006; winner of the Costa Book Award:
Novel), and Ordinary Thunderstorms (2009). In addition to his acclaimed fiction, Boyd has also produced several volumes of short stories – On the Yankee Station (1981b), The Destiny of Nathalie “X” (1995), Fascination (2005b), and The Dream Lover (2008) – a memoir of his school days (School Ties, 1985), the memoir Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928–1961 (1998b), and a collection of non-fiction writing, Bamboo, in 2005. Additionally, Boyd made a name for himself as a successful screenwriter, adapting not only his own novels (A Good Man in Africa and Stars and Bars) but also those of, for example, Mario Vargas Llosa (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter) and Evelyn Waugh (Scoop and Sword of Honour), as well as writing and directing the film The Trench. Boyd’s success is mainly due to his versatility. His novels reflect his own international upbringing with a variety of settings ranging from Africa, to America, and changing British settings. His largely realist narrative employs varying narrative strategies to explore a wide variety of political and social events of the twentieth century. His second novel, An Ice-Cream War, for example, is a biting anti-war satire. Additionally, the novel introduces a new stylistic device by focusing on a variety of central characters rather than on a single protagonist. Brazzaville Beach sees a departure from Boyd’s previous approaches by introducing a female protagonist for the first time and combining two different narrative strands, one largely set in England, the other in Africa. Hope Clearwater, the protagonist, leaves England and a failed marriage behind to study primates in Africa. The narrative does not only show succinct insights into the competitiveness of and the manipulation prevalent in animal research, but also shows the spiraling violence of the civil war raging in the African country that eventually ends up with Hope as a victim of kidnapping. Boyd thus seems to draw a parallel between human violence (the civil war) and the escalating violence among the chimpanzees as witnessed by Hope at the research station. The narrative strands alternate between a first-person one that recounts Hope’s reasons for leaving England behind and a third-person one outlining her African experiences. Boyd similarly employs this technique of varying narrative levels in Restless, which also has two female protagonists: the
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first-person narrative of Ruth is firmly set in 1970s Oxford where she is trying to come to terms with the unraveling second narrative strand, her mother Eva Delectorskaya’s memoirs of her own secret involvement in the British secret service during World War II. Armadillo, by contrast, takes Boyd to a new and diverse topic. The protagonist Lorimer Black has taken on a new name to hide his east European gypsy origin. While many of Boyd’s earlier novels deal with the figure of the British expatriate, Armadillo, by contrast, focuses on the experiences of European immigrants into Britain. Identity stands at the forefront of this novel, as most of its characters are trying to be someone they are not – either disguising or trying to forget their origins or their past. Boyd’s work also reflects the influence of a variety of twentieth-century writers. A Good Man in Africa, for example, shows the influence of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Kingsley Amis. Any Human Heart, in another stylistic departure written in the form of a diary that spans the best part of the twentieth century, pays homage to the literary elite of the twentieth century. The protagonist, Logan Mountstuart, records meetings with, for example, celebrated writers such as Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell (whom Boyd professed himself an admirer of). In the case of Powell, Boyd’s diligent attention to research and detail can also be seen, as the sightings of Powell Mountstuart referred to in his “diary” can actually be found in Powell’s own memoirs. The sheer breadth and scope of Any Human Heart, covering social, historical and cultural events of twentieth-century Britain, also lends itself to a comparison with Powell’s own magnus opus, A Dance to the Music of Time. Although Boyd’s work harks back to the realism of the nineteenth century rather than bearing resemblance to its postmodernist contemporaries, the sheer versatility of the author’s themes and topics as well as his stylistic divergences make him a truly exciting and immensely readable contemporary writer who has proven over and over again that he deserved to be included in Granta magazine’s 1983 list of “most promising British novelists” (Elices 19). SEE ALSO: Powell, Anthony (BIF); Waugh, Evelyn (BIF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Biswell, A. (2001). William Boyd. In M. Moseley (ed.), British Novelists Since 1960. 4th series. Detroit: Gale, pp. 31–40. Boyd, W. (1981a). A Good Man in Africa. London: Penguin. Boyd, W. (1981b). On the Yankee Station. London: Penguin. Boyd, W. (1982). An Ice-Cream War. London: Penguin. Boyd, W. (1984). Stars and Bars. London: Penguin. Boyd, W. (1985). School Ties. London: Penguin. Boyd, W. (1987). The New Confessions. London: Penguin. Boyd, W. (1990). Brazzaville Beach. London: Penguin. Boyd, W. (1993). The Blue Afternoon. London: Penguin. Boyd, W. (1995). The Destiny of Nathalie “X.” London: Penguin. Boyd, W. (1998a). Armadillo. London: Penguin. Boyd, W. (1998b). Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928–1961. Cambridge: 21 Publishing. Boyd, W. (2002). Any Human Heart. London: Hamish Hamilton. Boyd, W. (2005a). Bamboo. London: Bloomsbury. Boyd, W. (2005b). Fascination. London: Penguin. Boyd, W. (2006). Restless. London: Bloomsbury. Boyd, W. (2008). The Dream Lover. London: Bloomsbury. Boyd, W. (2009). Ordinary Thunderstorms. London: Bloomsbury. Dunn, D. (1993). Divergent Scottishness: William Boyd, Allan Massie, Ronald Frame. In G. Wallace & R. Stevenson, The Scottish Novel Since the 1970s. New Visions. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 149–69. Elices, J. F. (2006). The Satiric Worlds of William Boyd. A Case-Study. Berne: Peter Lang. Ross, T. (1997). High Brow Adapter: Interview with William Boyd. Creative Screenwriting, 4(2), 37–43. Vitoux, P. (2000). The Uses of Parody in William Boyd’s The New Confessions. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 42(1),79–92.
Brooke-Rose, Christine GRAEME HARPER
Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose was born in Geneva in 1923. A literary experimentalist like her late, younger contemporary, B. S. Johnson, she views the writing of fiction as an intellectual as well as creative exploration. Her English father, Alfred Northbrook Rose, died in 1934. Her mother, Evelyn Blanche Brooke, was an American of
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Swiss parentage, who later became a Benedictine nun. Raised in Brussels, but traveling frequently, Brooke-Rose was schooled in Folkestone, Kent. During World War II she worked in the intelligence branch of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) at Bletchley Park, Britain’s primary code-breaking station. She undertook undergraduate studies at Somerville College, Oxford (1946–9), then, from 1950 to 1954, she attended University College London, where she completed a doctoral thesis drawing on her interest in philology and literature. Brooke-Rose’s first published work, Gold (1955), is a poem with religious themes. This was followed by her first novel, The Languages of Love (1957), a satirical work, written in part to counter the stress induced by the near-fatal illness of her then husband, the Polish writer Jerzy Pietrkiewicz. In 1958 she published her second novel, The Sycamore Tree (1958b), a reasonably conventional book in which she investigates gender stereotyping. In that year she also published the critical work A Grammar of Metaphor (1958a), which looked at the classification of metaphor. These works encapsulate the combination of creative and critical interests that have continued throughout Brooke-Rose’s career. The 1960s saw her publish a number of novels, beginning with The Dear Deceit (1960), in which the machinations of narrative are questioned, and ending with Between (1968), a present-tense narration employing a number of European languages, as the story follows the travels of a female translator. The notion of being between languages – a fact of Brooke-Rose’s own life – is key here. Other novels of this period include The Middlemen: A Satire (1961), which garnered suggestions of smugness in the author’s writing, Out (1964), and Such (1966). Such is the most notable, and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. It is an investigation of scientific and literary truth. Following the 1970 publication of Go When You See the Green Man Walking, a collection of short stories, Brooke-Rose published two books focusing on the work of poet Ezra Pound: A ZBC of Ezra Pound (1971) and A Structural Analysis of Pound’s Usura Canto: Jakobson’s Method Extended and Applied to Free Verse (1976). Brooke-Rose was by then working in France, as university lecturer (1969–75) and, later, professor (1975–88), at the University of Paris VIII,
Vincennes. She had not abandoned critical work during the preceding 10 years and had, in 1967, published an English translation of Alain RobbeGrillet’s In the Labyrinth (1959), which won the Arts Council Translation Prize in 1969. Thru (1975), a novel about a university classroom, features non-fictional text interspersed with fictional text, diagrams, and curricula vitae in its investigation of consciousness, while Amalgamemnon (1984) is a playful novel that mixes the thoughts of a woman who is about to lose her job as a professor of literature and history with textual references to the work of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus and the burble of callers from a radio talk-show program. Amalgamemnon, Xorandor (1986), Verbivore (1990), and Textermination (1991b) are what Brooke-Rose considers the “Intercom Quartet,” a set of novels that concern media and communications technology. A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (1981) and Stories, Theories and Things (1991a) were also published. Remarkably, her output of fiction appeared only to increase following her seventieth birthday, with the publication, in quick succession, of the novels Remake (1996), Next (1998), and Subscript (1999). Remake is an autobiographical novel, exploring the life of an “old lady of seventy-two,” with the narrator (who is Brooke-Rose herself) deciphering messages and interrogating events, and exploring the machinations of memory. As with much of her fiction, intersections between humans and science form the basis of Remake, as it does in Subscript – in particular the working of genetics and human memory. In Next the author combines a journey into the lives of London’s homeless with a murder mystery and, through the use of free indirect speech, an exploration of anonymity. Brooke-Rose’s most recent works are Invisible Author: Last Essays (2002), and Life, End of (2006), in which her own life and that of the “old lady” in the work are not joined by the intrusion of “I,” yet are so remarkably close that the book becomes both constructed fiction and revealed autobiography – and an incredibly vibrant conversation between these positions. SEE ALSO: Johnson, B. S. (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF)
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BROOKNER, ANITA
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Birch, S. (1994). Christine Brooke-Rose and Contemporary Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press. Brooke-Rose, C. (1955). Gold. Aldington: Hand and Flower. Brooke-Rose, C. (1957). The Languages of Love. London: Secker and Warburg. Brooke-Rose, C. (1958a). A Grammar of Metaphor. London: Secker and Warburg. Brooke-Rose, C. (1958b). The Sycamore Tree. London: Secker and Warburg. Brooke-Rose, C. (1960). The Dear Deceit. London: Secker and Warburg. Brooke-Rose, C. (1961). The Middlemen: A Satire. London: Secker and Warburg. Brooke-Rose, C. (1964). Out. London: Michael Joseph. Brooke-Rose, C. (1966). Such. London: Michael Joseph. Brooke-Rose, C. (1968). Between. London: Michael Joseph. Brooke-Rose, C. (1970). Go When You See the Green Man Walking. London: Michael Joseph. Brooke-Rose, C. (1971). A ZBC of Ezra Pound. London: Faber and Faber. Brooke-Rose, C. (1975). Thru. London: Hamish Hamilton. Brooke-Rose, C. (1976). A Structural Analysis of Pound’s Usura Canto: Jakobson’s Method Extended and Applied to Free Verse. The Hague: Mouton. Brooke-Rose, C. (1981). A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brooke-Rose, C. (1984). Amalgamemnon. Manchester: Carcanet. Brooke-Rose, C. (1986). Xorandor. Manchester: Carcanet. Brooke-Rose, C. (1990). Verbivore. Manchester: Carcanet. Brooke-Rose, C. (1991a). Stories, Theories and Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brooke-Rose, C. (1991b). Textermination. Manchester: Carcanet. Brooke-Rose, C. (1996). Remake. Manchester: Carcanet. Brooke-Rose, C. (1998). Next. Manchester: Carcanet. Brooke-Rose, C. (1999). Subscript. Manchester: Carcanet. Brooke-Rose, C. (2002). Invisible Author: Last Essays. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Brooke-Rose, C. (2006). Life, End Of. Manchester: Carcanet. Canepari-Labib, M. (2002). Word-Worlds: Language, Identity and Reality in the Work of Christine Brooke-Rose. Oxford: Peter Lang.
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Friedman, J., & Martin, R. (eds.). (1995). Utterly Other Discourse: The Texts of Christine Brooke-Rose. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive. Little, J. (1996). The Experimental Self: Dialogic Subjectivity in Woolf, Pym, and Brooke-Rose. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Brookner, Anita ROBERT ELLIS HOSMER, JR.
Anita Brookner, born in London on July 16, 1928, the only child of middle-class Polish Jews, was educated at James Allen’s Girls’ School, King’s College, London, and the Courtauld Institute, and first made her mark as an art historian. She spent three postgraduate years in Paris, her only extended time out of Britain, researching her dissertation on Jean-Baptiste Greuze. Her mentor, Anthony Blunt, himself a distinguished scholar of the work of Nicholas Poussin, encouraged her Francophile leanings. She ascended the academic ladder quickly, moving from the University of Reading (1959–64) to the Courtauld Institute, where she taught from 1964 until her retirement in 1988. Her tenure at the Courtauld was interrupted only by her appointment to the Slade Professorship at Cambridge (1967–8); she was the first woman to hold the position. Her distinguished work on eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury French artists, particularly Greuze, David, and Ingres, and her considerable talents as an instructor earned Brookner a first-class reputation at the Courtauld and among generations of students, many of whom went on to hold major appointments at great museums and universities in the UK and abroad. Challenged by a summer break in her schedule in 1981, Brookner decided to write a novel. The result, A Start in Life (1981), is the first of 24 published; she produced one a year until 1999 – the year 2000 broke the spell, but five more have appeared since 2001, the most recent, Strangers (2009). For her, writing fiction was not far removed from writing art history: both activities are exercises in problem solving. Intermittently, collections of her essays appear, mostly on French writers, painters, or philosophers, and she reviews fiction frequently for The Spectator. She lives quietly in an elegant flat in Chelsea, writing in another flat next door.
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Brookner grew up in a secular Jewish household with parents who, according to her, were really not suited for child-rearing. Members of the extended family as well as refugees from Hitler’s Continental atrocities frequented the Brookner household, but it was a quiet life. The effect on the young woman was telling: she has often talked about her feelings of isolation and alienation, and attributed them not only to her heritage but also to her choice of profession. As a Jew and as a woman she had two strikes against her in making her way in the world of Protestant white male privilege. Brookner pursued her graduate work and career path in the 1950s and 1960s, in the days before feminism had achieved at least some of its goals, and in an academic world of considerable bias and unpleasantness. Notably, though, Brookner has never complained or lamented her lot; nor does she see herself as a victim – quite the contrary. Literature, both English and French, was another important influence on Brookner’s development. Growing up, she read all of Dickens’s novels and believed that the moral universe of his fiction was an existential reality: the realization that such was not the case was a profound ontological and intellectual shock, one whose repercussions reverberate not only in her life but in her fiction as well. Time and again the protagonists in her novels either fail to recognize that fact of life or they apprehend it too late to translate it into everyday life. French literature – eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury masters like Diderot, Stendhal, Constant, Baudelaire, and Zola – has influenced Brookner to such an extent that describing her books as “French novels” may be the most apt characterization. Not so much the substance of the masters – though in a number of cases that does matter, for example, Zola’s concern with what she has called “the heroism of everyday life” (1971, 91), which resonates in her own fiction – as the evocative, chaste precision and purity of the style that filters into her novels. And the apparently antithetical, floral elements derived from Collette and Proust, which grace Brookner’s prose, demonstrate her indebtedness to that Continental tradition of letters as well. Another French element – existentialist philosophy – gives both structural backbone to characterization and a certain pervasive bleakness to
Brookner’s fiction; and another English element, Henry James, haunts her pages, not just the psychological insight and style of the Master, but the narrative trajectory he charted for Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, which might also be Brookner’s: to tell the story of “ a certain young woman affronting her destiny” (James 1908, p. xii). Brookner’s women are not often so young, but nonetheless James’s trajectory for Isabel is Brookner’s for many of her characters. Brookner is likely best known for her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac (1984), which established her reputation as a novelist. Her protagonist, a romance novelist named Edith Hope, has been sentenced to exile at a Swiss hotel for “an unfortunate lapse”: she left her fiance standing at the register office on their wedding day. After serving her sentence in the midst of a gallery of other women, Edith returns home, having rejected the marriage proposal of a very Jamesian gentleman, a little wiser for the experience. Edith is very much a sister to the protagonists of the three novels that preceded Hotel: a middle-aged woman with a divided soul and heritage, someone who has lived according to the dictates of an outmoded code; disappointed and alienated, but managing to soldier on. Edith is the savvy sister, though, a woman who has taken her suitor’s injunction (“assume your own centrality”: 95) to heart, but not quite as he wished. Hotel du Lac is in many ways the touchstone for all of Brookner’s fiction. As other novels came out, each amplified and extended the basic concerns of that Booker Prize-winning novel – and in a style that is perhaps unrivaled in contemporary English prose fiction. The female portrait that is the subject sometimes became a double female portrait as in Brief Lives (1990), Falling Slowly (1998), and Leaving Home (2005); or a male portrait as in Lewis Percy (1989), The Next Big Thing (2002), and Strangers (2009). In other cases, the individual portrait became a group portrait of both women and men as in Family and Friends (1985) and A Family Romance (1993). Brookner’s most recent novel, Strangers, is the story of Paul Sturgis, a retired bank manager who dreams of escape from a sedate life. Two women disrupt things, one a middle-aged divorcee, the other an old girlfriend. The novel generated some familiar response with a number of critics complaining that Strangers is an altogether too
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familiar repetition of the novel she has been writing from the beginning. Her consistent concern with the existential dilemma created when a certain kind of person attempts to negotiate life without compromise in the contemporary world has produced fictions of elegant fugal variation on the subject. Brookner has written an elegant, incisive portrait of a certain person, whether female or male, from the beginning. Her deepest and most sympathetic concern lies with chronicling the life story without illusion, without sentiment, without false comfort. The result is an elegant, often tragic, fiction of depth, dimension, and resonance. SEE ALSO: James, Henry (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Alexander, C. M. (2002). Understanding Anita Brookner. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Brookner, A. (1971). The Genius of the Future: Studies in French Art Criticism: Diderot, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Zola, the Brothers Goncourt, Huysmans. London: Phaidon. Brookner, A. (1980). Jacques-Louis David. London: Chatto and Windus. Brookner, A. (1984). Hotel du Lac. London: Jonathan Cape. Brookner, A. (1985). Family and Friends. London: Jonathan Cape. Brookner, A. (1989). Lewis Percy. London: Jonathan Cape. Brookner, A. (1990). Brief Lives. London: Jonathan Cape. Brookner, A. (1993). A Family Romance. London: Jonathan Cape. Brookner, A. (1994). A Private View. London: Jonathan Cape. Brookner, A. (1998). Falling Slowly. London: Viking. Brookner, A. (2002). The Next Big Thing. London: Viking. Brookner, A. (2005). Leaving Home. London: Viking. Brookner, A. (2009). Strangers. London: Random House. Guppy, S. (1987). The Art of Fiction, No. 98: Anita Brookner. Paris Review, 104, 1–23. At www. theparisreview.org/media/2630_BROOKNER2.pdf, accessed Mar. 4, 2010. James, H. (1908). The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vols. 3–4: The Portrait of a Lady. New York Edition. New York: Scribner’s.
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Byatt, A. S LYNN WELLS
A. S. Byatt is one of Britain’s most accomplished writers of contemporary fiction, combining postmodern self-consciousness about the ability of language to represent reality with a vivid sense of characterization and narrative engagement. Noted for her allusive and intellectual style, Byatt is nonetheless a bestselling author, her popularity secure since her 1990 novel Possession: A Romance won the Booker Prize. Although she is often cited as a feminist writer owing to her focus on female characters and issues related to women’s lives, Byatt is openly ambivalent about feminist theory, which she feels can lead critics to interpret texts too narrowly, without sensitivity to historical context. Born Antonia Susan Drabble in Sheffield, England in 1936, Byatt became a self-styled “greedy reader” as a child, devouring texts by Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Virginia Woolf, and others. She was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge in the 1950s where, under the influence of F. R. Leavis, she developed a passionate belief in the moral importance of literature. When she married Ian Byatt in 1959, with whom she would have a son and a daughter, she was no longer eligible to hold a doctoral fellowship and left her studies. After her divorce, she was married in 1969 to Peter Duffy, and had two more daughters. Her son Charles was killed at the age of 11 in an automobile accident. Until 1983 when she was able to become a professional writer, Byatt made her living by teaching in various universities; her familiarity with academic settings and the debates surrounding contemporary literary theory since the 1960s is evident in many of her works. She herself has written literary criticism, including books on two of her most important influences, Iris Murdoch and George Eliot. Impressively prolific, she continues to publish novels, novellas, books of short fiction, and essays about literature, splitting her time between her London home and a cottage in the south of France. Byatt’s first two novels, The Shadow of a Sun (1964) and The Game (1967), received mixed reviews, and were deemed inferior to the work of her famous sister, novelist Margaret Drabble. Her reputation rose, though, with the publication
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of The Virgin in the Garden (1978), the first novel in a planned quartet about siblings Stephanie, Marcus, and Frederica Potter, a circle of related characters, and their experiences throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The two sisters serve as models of the choices and barriers facing women of their generation, as Stephanie chooses domestic responsibility and Frederica pursues a life of intellectual and artistic independence. Both Virgin and its successor, Still Life (1985), hearken back to the realist novels of the nineteenth century by incorporating the richness of social life, especially the family, and psychologically rounded characters. Yet each of the texts also has elements of postmodern self-reflexivity: the action in Virgin centers around the production of a pageant, while Still Life abounds with discussions of aesthetic theory in relation to painting. While critics responded positively to both of these novels, they also found it difficult to position them clearly in either the realist tradition or the innovations of contemporary fiction. Critics also commented on the conflict between realism and postmodernism in the final two novels of the quartet. The third novel, Babel Tower (1996), deepens Byatt’s experimentation with self-conscious fiction: it combines a main narrative about Frederica’s life, and particularly her divorce trial, following the sudden death of her sister at the end of Virgin, with a second narrative line constructed around a novel-within-the novel, Babbletower, a viciously satiric reflection on the dangers of individual and sexual freedom set during the Reign of Terror, by a charismatic rebel named Jude Mason, who is being prosecuted for obscenity. The final text in the quartet, A Whistling Woman (2002), concludes the series by using the developing medium of television as an internal mirror of the radical changes taking place in the late 1960s; Frederica hosts a series entitled Through the Looking-Glass, designed to challenge establishment thinking. Seemingly stable and unquestionable truths of British society come under siege in scenes about the formation of an “anti-university” and of a reclusive cult led by a psychiatric patient. Both texts were praised for their ambitious subject matter and complex narratives, but some reviewers were critical of Byatt’s overly intellectual and allusive style. Possession, on the other hand, was enthusiastically received by critics, reviewers, and readers,
who were enamored with Byatt’s skillful interweaving of self-conscious techniques, historical detail, narrative suspense, and steamy romance. The novel is structured around two sets of characters: Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, late twentieth-century academics steeped in the skepticism of postmodern theory, and Christabel Lamotte and Randolph Henry Ash, Victorian poets whose clandestine affair is discovered accidentally by Roland through a series of letters. In the course of reconstructing the poets’ relationship, Maud and Roland find themselves rethinking concepts that their culture has rejected – coherent selfhood, romantic love, artistic originality, and the power of language to reflect reality – and achieve a compromise vision that recaptures positive elements from the past while allowing them to remain conscious of their contemporary worldview. Critics were impressed – and sometimes even deceived – by the authentic-sounding Victorian poems and narratives written by Byatt and included in the text. The Hollywood film version of Possession, made in 2002, gave the text a more distinctly American flavor, and renewed Byatt’s popularity with a wider audience. Byatt’s success with Victorian-based narratives continued with Angels and Insects, which comprised two novellas, Morpho Eugenia, about an upper-crust family with a terrible sexual secret, and The Conjugial Angel, about spiritualism, seances and Tennyson’s best friend, Arthur Hallam. The first novella gained a wider popular audience through the visually compelling 1995 film, Angels and Insects. A more recent novel, The Biographer’s Tale (2000a), was not a critical success, however. Readers found the elaborate story of Phineas G., a disgruntled student of literary theory who sets out to rediscover the world through the reading and writing of biographies, too dense and intellectual. Byatt’s newest novel, The Children’s Book, an overt response to the fantasy literature fad started by the popularity of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, has been praised for its erudition and evocation of a magical world, yet, like much of her work, is considered too challenging for many readers. Throughout her career, Byatt has turned periodically to the short story genre, producing collections such as Sugar and Other Stories (1987), The Matisse Stories (1993), The Djinn in the
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Nightingale’s Eye (1994), Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998), and The Little Black Book of Stories (2003). While Byatt’s fame derives primarily from her novels, her short fiction also receives high critical praise, demonstrating her literary versatility and wide-ranging imagination. SEE ALSO: Critical Theory and the Novel (BIF); Drabble, Margaret (BIF); Feminist Fiction (BIF); Historical Fiction (BIF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Alfer, A., & Noble, M. J. (eds.) (2001). Essays on the Fiction of A. S. Byatt: Imagining the Real. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Byatt. A. S. (1964). The Shadow of a Sun. London: Chatto and Windus. (Reissued with an introduction as The Shadow of the Sun. London: Vintage, 1991.) Byatt, A. S. (1967). The Game. London: Chatto and Windus. Byatt, A. S. (1978). The Virgin in the Garden. London: Chatto and Windus. Byatt, A. S. (1985). Still Life. London: Chatto and Windus. Byatt, A. S. (1990). Possession: A Romance. London: Chatto and Windus.
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Byatt, A. S. (1991). Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings. London: Chatto and Windus. Byatt, A. S. (1992). Angels and Insects. London: Chatto and Windus. Byatt, A. S. (1993). The Matisse Stories. London: Chatto and Windus. Byatt, A. S. (1994). The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye. London: Chatto and Windus. Byatt, A. S. (1996). Babel Tower. London: Chatto and Windus. Byatt, A. S. (1998). Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice. London: Chatto and Windus. Byatt, A. S. (2000a). The Biographer’s Tale. London: Chatto and Windus. Byatt, A. S. (2000b). On Histories and Stories. London: Chatto and Windus. Byatt, A. S. (2002). A Whistling Woman. London: Chatto and Windus. Byatt, A. S. (2003). The Little Black Book of Stories. London: Chatto and Windus. Byatt, A. S. (2009). The Children’s Book. London: Chatto and Windus. Campbell, J. (2004). A S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Haas, P. (dir.) (1995). Angels and Insects. Playhouse International Pictures/Samuel Goldwyn. Kelly, K. C. (1996). A S. Byatt. New York: Twayne. La Bute, N. (dir.) (2002). Possession. USA Films. Todd, R. (1997). A S. Byatt. Plymouth: Northcote House.
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C Campus Novel IAN CARTER
In David Lodge’s Deaf Sentence one professor tells another that “‘It wouldn’t surprise me if we both turn up lightly disguised in a campus novel one of these days’” (2008, 286). This novel must be recent, for though “campus fiction” often is used today to describe imaginative literature set in British universities, the term’s origins are American (Edemarium 155). Thus its growing presence against the native descriptor “university novels” (Kenyon 1980) signifies changes over time within British academic life – and in novelists’ responses to these changes. Three features mark fictional accounts of British university life. First, conservative comedy is the dominant mode (Moseley 18–19). Second, some institutions are massively overrepresented relative to staff and student numbers. Thus 145 out of 204 novels published between 1945 and 1988 were set in just two smallish universities – Oxford (principally) and Cambridge (Carter 4). Third, most novels were written by English graduates, and many authors themselves taught in university English departments. If they were not members of English departments, most were in any case associated with the humanities; fictions written by natural, life, and social scientists are not common. Not surprisingly, therefore, and taking succor from particular readings of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869), many fictions conjure universities as English humanistic culture’s inmost keep, with embattled scholars fighting dog-
ged rearguard actions against assaults from proletarians, scientists, women, and foreigners. Given British society’s abiding obsession with social class, the proletarian threat is prime, with British university novelists contemplating their system’s grudging movement in the twentieth century’s second half from small-scale elite recruitment toward mass higher education. Mortimer Proctor’s (1957) account makes the Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian English university novel celebrate elite undergraduate liberal education in the ancient English universities: in Oxford particularly, that “indispensible nursery of rulers and administrators” (Stewart 29); and in “the other place,” Cambridge. Celebrated examples here include Max Beerbohm’s delectably macabre comedy Zuleika Dobson (1911) and Oxford passages in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), that overblown elegy for a dead social world. Though novels based on authors’ rosetinted recollections of undergraduate life still leave the presses in our time, not all recollections have been rosy. Plots in Philip Larkin’s Jill (1946) and Raymond Postgate’s The Ledger is Kept (1953) are built around Northern working-class undergraduates deeply alienated from – and by – Oxford’s patrician pretension; while Cambridgeeducated Tom Sharpe’s farce Porterhouse Blue (1974) settled accounts with a college still hated in long retrospect. Recent American critics (Rossen 1993; Showalter 2005) exclude novels of undergraduate experience from British campus fiction, restricting this term to novels treating university
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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teachers’ joys and troubles. Both take C. P. Snow’s The Masters (1951) to have inaugurated this new form, though his The Light and the Dark appeared four years earlier. But giving Snow priority raises issues about genre, for these critics are obliged to ignore a string of earlier novels – Adam Broome, The Oxford Murders (1929) and The Cambridge Murders (1936); J. C. Masterman, An Oxford Tragedy (1933); Michael Innes, Death at the President’s Lodging (1936); Dilwyn Rees, The Cambridge Murders (1945) – which examined university teachers’ lives: and, for some, their improbably violent deaths. These books exploited the Oxbridge colleges’ advantages for golden age whodunit writers, as locked gates restricted casts of suspects and motives for murder fermented among college fellows’ attenuated charities. It has been customary for literary scholars to denigrate whodunits as “light fiction”; but the historian J. C. Masterman was a college head who would serve, in his turn, as Oxford’s vice chancellor. His thriller was built around the issue of Oxbridge hubris which would be developed not only in C. P. Snow’s several Cambridge novels but also in his own halffictionalized warning against his own university’s academic complacency (Masterman 1952). Clearly enough, to set a cordon sanitaire around “serious” literary fiction is to miss much of interest in novels about university life. The same holds for what happened when novelists began to explore life, as student or staff member, in universities outside Oxford or Cambridge. Fictions set in ancient Scottish and Irish universities are scarce (though for an account of bohemian student life in Trinity College Dublin see J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, 1955; and see Mary Kelly’s Dead Man’s Riddle, 1957, for Edinburgh). But a stream set in civic (“redbrick”) English universities – places haunted fictionally by “the essential malaise of a provincial university” for Philip Hobsbaum (144) – started to appear at the mid-century. Both Rossen and Showalter take Kingsley Amis’s overrated Lucky Jim (1954) to be the harbinger here, but Michael Innes’s whodunit The Weight of the Evidence (1944) got there a decade earlier. In Old Hall, New Hall (1956) – almost certainly spurred by his visit to the precocious Keele University – Innes also produced the first novel about what came to be called “new universities” in the wake of the 1963 Robbins Report. Growing from kernels in
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disgraced gentry mansions, and often located close to attractive towns and cities as “Baedeker universities,” these institutions’ physically isolated park-like campuses evoke campus fiction in the American mode. Their most celebrated depiction remains Malcolm Bradbury’s sour The History Man (1975). The Robbins Report sought to expand significantly the proportion of any age cohort enjoying university education. From the mid-sixties onward, many novelists’ accounts of student and staff life turned on what they thought of this idea, ranging from crusty reaction in Simon Raven’s Places Where They Sing (1970) to mild celebration in John Wain’s Where the Rivers Meet (1988). (Following Raymond Williams’s Second Generation (1964), Wain’s book is unusual in depicting an Oxford where car factories bulk no smaller than colleges.) But by international standards students in this expanded cohort still were cosseted with low fees and generous maintenance grants. As expansion continued toward a mass higher education system, with numerous polytechnics now upgraded to become “new new universities,” humanists’ halcyon days faded. From 1981 the first Thatcher government cut university funding and imposed burdensome new managerial imperatives. Disaffected novelists responded with a string of dystopian farces, notably Andrew Davies’s A Very Peculiar Practice (1986) and A Very Peculiar Practice: The New Frontier (1988), and Frank Parkin’s The Mind and Body Shop (1987). This convulsion past, British university fiction faded. Born from anti-German sentiment in World War I (Baldick 1983), the notion that English literature embodied Englishness dissolved (Connor 72). And as the British university system continued to expand, that universities might serve as English culture’s strongest bastion also atrophied. With few novels of note appearing in recent years among undistinguished whodunits focused on Oxbridge social privilege rather than academic issues, today the British university novel is moribund. Only a couple of fine books disturb these generalizations. The important Spanish writer Javier Marıas’s All Souls (1992) brought a European perspective to Oxford and found it wanting, while David Lodge’s Thinks (2001) conjured universities’ particular current purpose – to advance human thought through research-based teaching – in debates among philosophers and
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developmental psychologists over the nature of consciousness (and thus of thought) in the fictional “new new” University of Gloucester. Whether writing under his own name or as Michael Innes, Oxford-based J. I. M. Stewart wrote more twentieth-century British university novels than any other person; and they still bear reading today. But David Lodge’s ability to construct novels of ideas that also satisfy readers’ textual pleasure makes him the most important figure active in British university fiction today, whether he spends his time striking ironies from earlier literary work – notably Joyce’s Ulysses (Lodge 1965) and early Victorian “condition of England” novels (Lodge 1988) – or using his professorial practice to embody current critical controversies over structuralism (Lodge 1975), linguistics (Lodge 2008), or literary theory’s Tower of Babel (Lodge 1984). He has no peer, and no challenger looms on the horizon. Marıas brought Spanish experience to the British university novel, but most fictional comparisons have been drawn with America. Important examples from British writers include Malcolm Bradbury’s Stepping Westward (1965), Wilfred Sheed’s A Middle-Class Education (1967), and David Lodge’s Changing Places (1975). Most British writers found things odd – and, not infrequently, rebarbative – while exploring American academic difference; though Lodge was smitten with Euphoria State (the University of California, Berkeley). But one sharp contrast between American campus fiction and British university fiction must strike the reader. It concerns gender. Over the years, many women have set fictions in British universities: Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night (1935), A. S. Byatt’s Still Life (1985) and Possession (1990), Barbara Pym’s Crampton Hodnet (1985) and An Academic Question (1986), and Iris Murdoch’s The Book and the Brotherhood (1987) provide examples. What one misses here, by comparison with work by Alison Lurie, Amanda Cross, and Valerie Miner for example, is American feminists’ crusading imperative to identify and assault structural barriers inhibiting academic women’s progress in the academy. Fictionally at least, British university feminism is a feeble animal, seeking change no more radical than individual women’s advancement on men’s terms (Carter 159–76). Ruth Dudley Edwards’s Cambridge-set
Matricide at St. Martha’s (1994) is a striking example of this weakness, returning us to twentiethcentury British university fiction’s misogynous main line with massed women still conjured as a barbarous horde threatening culture’s citadel. SEE ALSO: Angry Young Man Fiction (BIF); Mystery/Detective/Crime Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Amis, K. (1954). Lucky Jim. London: Gollancz. Baldick, C. (1983). The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–1932. Oxford: Clarendon. Bevan, D. (ed.) (1990). University Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Bradbury, M. (1965). Stepping Westward. London: Secker and Warburg. Bradbury, M. (1975). The History Man. London: Secker and Warburg. Carter, I. (1990). Ancient Cultures of Conceit: British University Fiction in the Post-War Years. London: Routledge. Connor, S. (1996). The English Novel in History, 1950–1995. London: Routledge. Edemarium, A. (2007). Who’s Afraid of the Campus Novel? In M. Moseley (ed.), The Academic Novel: New and Classic Essays. Chester: Chester Academic, pp. 154–63 Hobsbaum, P. (1964). University Life in English Fiction. Twentieth Century, 173, 139–47. Kenyon, J.P. (1980). Lucky Jim and After: The Business of University Novels. Encounter, 54, 81–4 Lodge, D. (1965). The British Museum is Falling Down. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Lodge, D. (1975). Changing Places. London: Secker and Warburg. Lodge, D. (1984). Small World. London: Secker and Warburg. Lodge, D. (1988). Nice Work. London: Secker and Warburg. Lodge, D. (2001). Thinks. London: Secker and Warburg. Lodge, D. (2008). Deaf Sentence. London: Harvill Secker. Marıas, J. (1992). All Souls (trans. M. J. Costa). London: Harvill. Masterman, J.C. (1952). To Teach the Senators Wisdom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moseley, M. (2007). Introduction: Definitions and Justifications. In M. Moseley (ed.), The Academic Novel: New and Classic Essays. Chester: Chester Academic, pp. 3–19 Proctor, M. (1957). The English University Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Robbins, L. (1963). Report of the Committee on Higher Education. London: HMSO. Rossen, J. (1993). The University in Modern Fiction: When Power is Academic. New York: St. Martin’s. Showalter, E. (2005). Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Snow, C.P. (1951). The Masters. London: Macmillan. Stewart, J.I.M. (1978). Full Term. London: Gollancz. Watson, G. (1978). Fictions of Academe: Dons and Realities. Encounter, 51(5), 42–6.
Carswell, Catherine MARGERY PALMER McCULLOCH
Catherine Carswell was one of a number of women writers who expanded the traditional boundaries of fiction in the early twentieth century by introducing female perspectives on a changing modern world and new styles of writing relevant to female themes and values. She was born Catherine Roxburgh Macfarlane in Glasgow in 1879 to a prosperous and deeply religious family who lived modestly and encouraged their daughters to become educated and self-supporting. Catherine studied music at the Frankfurt Conservatorium at the turn of the century and English literature at Glasgow University, although as was common at the time she did not take a degree. Her subsequent life, like the lives of many contemporaneous female characters in fiction, might be described as a “counternarrative” in the way it went against conventional social expectations of women. Having made an impulsive marriage with a man who was confined to a mental hospital when he attempted to kill her upon her becoming pregnant, she made legal history by fighting successfully to have the marriage annulled. She then supported herself and her daughter as a journalist, writing fiction reviews for the Glasgow Herald and, later, drama criticism for The Observer as assistant to St. John Ervine. D. H. Lawrence’s early novels were among the fiction she reviewed and she was famously dismissed by the Glasgow Herald for allowing her review of The Rainbow (soon to be banned as an obscene publication) to be published without the sanction of the editor. While living in Glasgow she began a relationship with the painter Maurice Greiffenhagen who had
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come to Glasgow School of Art as head of the life class, and in 1912 she left the city for London. She later married Donald Carswell, a friend from her Glasgow years. Carswell’s two novels Open the Door! which won the Melrose Prize for fiction when it was published in 1920, and its epistolary successor The Camomile (1922), grew out of this early tempestuous personal life. She had been introduced to Lawrence in 1914 shortly before her Rainbow review and dismissal, and they became friends and correspondents until his death in 1930. He was aware of the autobiographical nature of Open the Door! and took a particular interest in it, reading and commenting on drafts, urging her to complete it. Similarly, she commented on his Women in Love and it was to Carswell that he turned in the later 1920s for help with the typing of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. After Lawrence’s death she wrote a memoir of him from the perspective of their friendship and in refutation of the unflattering Son of Woman by Middleton Murry, who succeeded in having Carswell’s memoir temporarily withdrawn. In addition to their exploration of female identity and sexuality, Open the Door! and The Camomile are both fine novels of middle-class Glasgow, something of a rarity in Scottish fiction. Open the Door! in particular maps the West End of the city with its neo-gothic university and Kelvingrove Park and river, the department stores of Sauchiehall Street and the Art School sitting high on the brow of the street behind. Its narrative is fluid, with dramatic scenes and lively dialogue between characters as well as passages of interior narration focused on the heroine Joanna. The main theme of The Camomile is its heroine’s wish to be a writer and this too is played out through the creation of an interactive social scene which belies the novel’s epistolary form. Although Carswell was not personally involved with the initial stages of the Scottish literary renaissance initiated by Hugh MacDiarmid in the post-1918 period, her two novels and the essay, “Proust’s Women,” she wrote for C. K. Moncrieff’s Marcel Proust: An English Tribute (1923) are now recognized as important early contributions to it. The biography of Robert Burns which Lawrence encouraged her to write and which she published in 1930 brought her into closer contact with the literary revival and thereafter she became a regular contributor through reviews and articles on Scottish
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literature. Ironically, her novelistic Life of Burns brought her notoriety as well as a public profile when pre-publication excerpts were printed in the Daily Record and readers and Burns Club members were outraged by her characterization of Burns and the various women he was involved with as living sexual beings. “Such Trash,” “Womanhood Degraded,” “Piece of Fiction” shouted the headlines in the correspondence pages of the newspaper. She wrote to S. S. Kotelianski that she had received “an anonymous letter containing a bullet, which I was requested to use upon myself that the world might be left ‘a brighter cleaner and better place’” (McCulloch 2002). Because of her barrister husband’s lack of success and her consequent need to keep working as a journalist, Carswell never did write the further novel she often mentioned in letters to friends. Her final work consisted of fragments for an autobiography, left unfinished when she died in 1946, weakened by the privations of wartime and illness. Yet this book, published by her son as Lying Awake, makes its own contribution to the story of women’s lives in the early years of the century in its collage of interactive reflections on childhood and the invisibility of female old age; on the psychological differences between men and women and the “irritability of diffidence” in the struggle to write; on the unreliability of memory: “To be bound for ever by the arbitrary accident of one’s memories,” she commented, “what an idea of immortality!” (Carswell 1950). Her small but significant contribution to women’s studies and Scottish writing ensures that she herself will not be readily forgotten. SEE ALSO: Feminist Fiction (BIF); Lawrence, D. H. (BIF); Scottish Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Anderson, C. (ed.) (2001). Opening the Doors: The Achievement of Catherine Carswell. Edinburgh: Ramsay Head. Carswell, C. (1920). Open the Door! London: Melrose. Carswell, C. (1922). The Camomile: An Invention. London: Chatto and Windus. Carswell, C. (1930). The Life of Robert Burns. London: Chatto and Windus. Carswell, C. (1932). The Savage Pilgrimage: A Narrative of D. H. Lawrence. London: Chatto and Windus.
Carswell, C. (1950). Lying Awake: An Unfinished Autobiography and Other Posthumous Papers (ed. J. Carswell). London: Secker and Warburg. McCulloch, M. P. (1997). Fictions of Development 1920–1970. In D. Gifford & D. McMillan (eds.), A History of Scottish Women’s Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 360–72. McCulloch, M. P. (2002). Catherine Carswell: Correspondent of D. H. Lawrence, Biographer of Robert Burns, and Epistolary Novelist. Journal of European Studies, 32(2–3), 165–75. Pilditch, J. (2007). Catherine Carswell: A Biography. Edinburgh: John Donald.
Carter, Angela KURT KOENIGSBERGER
The richness and capaciousness of Angela Carter’s fiction sometimes evokes nothing so much as the circus ring in her novel Nights at the Circus (1984) which serves as a microcosm of the world at large. Indeed, Carter envisioned the capacities of fiction to be as expansive as the world itself. She contended that “fiction can do anything it wants to do. I think it can do more things than we tend to think it can.” Her idea of the novel in particular was positively unbounded: “anything that wants to call itself a novel is a novel, by definition” (1985b [1984] ). On the other hand, Carter’s stories and novels present models of the world that are frequently intimate and bounded: her work eschews carefully plotted generic closure in favor of a series of carefully crafted set pieces and tableaux. Perhaps the best way to grasp the shape of her fiction across her career is to understand it as a series of tightly woven exhibitions strung together – along with significant collections of fragments of other narratives, poetry, and popular culture opened to narrative view. Her substantial body of fiction, written over a span of three decades, evinces a stubborn resistance to the generic and substantive bounds of bourgeois fiction, demonstrating that narrative can display previously unexplored possibilities. To the extent that her writing systematically breaches norms of genre and decorum, her narrative exhibitions have been understood as subversive, usually of patriarchy, sometimes of Western capitalism, always of prescriptions for the forms of fiction. Her picaresque fiction is not about causal connection and temporal development but rather
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effected through about synchronic displays – from the gothic puppet show of The Magic Toyshop (1967) to exuberant music hall performance in Wise Children (1991). Carter’s life was spent substantially in contact with the written word, and despite her early death at age 51, it was unusually productive. Born Angela Stalker in 1940, she began her writing career as a reporter in 1959. After marrying in 1960 she attended the University of Bristol from 1962 to 1965, where she read English, concentrating on medieval English literature. In 1966 she published her first novel, Shadow Dance (titled Honeybuzzard in the US). In 1968 she won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for The Magic Toyshop (1967) and her third book Several Perceptions (1968) garnered the 1969 Society of Authors’ Somerset Maugham Award – both top awards for work by a writer under 35. The Maugham Award (the prize for which subvents foreign travel) served as the impetus to three years (1969–72) spent in Japan, during which time she broke off her marriage, before a formal divorce in 1972. The years in Japan also served to reorient her writing. In a 1982 essay on James Joyce’s Ulysses, Carter noted the extent to which Britain’s political and cultural geocentrism constrained the imagination and its expression in English: “we carry our history on our tongues,” she wrote, “and the history of the British empire came to exercise a curious kind of brake upon our expression in the English language.” She admired Joyce because he “disestablished English,” rendering it “demotic” (Carter 1997a), and Carter’s years outside the British Empire appear to have disestablished her own narrative practices and brought her to celebrate lowbrow forms and languages. Having published six novels in the years 1966–72, including The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), conceived wholly in Japan, Carter returned to Britain where she produced just three more novels – The Passion of New Eve (1977; set in the US), Nights at the Circus (winner of the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize), and Wise Children. She increasingly attended to the form of the short story and a number of other popular genres, including radio plays, screenplays (including for Neil Jordan’s Company of Wolves), several children’s books, an operetta libretto adapting Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a stage play, a raft of journalism, and edited collections of stories in Wayward Girls and
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Wicked Women (1986) and The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990). Over these decades, she held a number of visiting professorships and fellowship and writerin-residence posts in Britain, the United States, and Australia. She died in February 1992 of lung cancer. If, particularly after 1972, Carter embraced lower modes and styles – from the gothic and the grotesque to the scatological and the carnivalesque – the ideas she espoused and assailed across her career were serious indeed, particularly those surrounding Western capitalism and male privilege. Since 1992, Carter has belatedly come to be one of the British authors most written about by students. Her novels have remained continuously in print, while her journalism, short stories, and dramatic work have been collected posthumously in three substantial volumes, all available in paperback. Also published posthumously was The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1992), edited by Carter but introduced by Marina Warner. Carter’s long association with the Virago Press, founded in 1973 as a feminist publishing house, has to a significant extent oriented the attention to her work – especially in the context of publications such as The Sadeian Woman (1979b), a spirited book-length essay defending pornography from feminist and materialist perspectives. Carter’s novels are roughly divisible in three: (1) the early domestic fiction, including the gothic Magic Toyshop and the so-called “Bristol trilogy” of Shadow Dance, Several Perceptions, and Love (1971); (2) science fiction and fantasias, including the postapocalyptic Heroes and Villains (1969), the nightmarish The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, and The Passion of New Eve, a gender-reassignment fantasy; and (3) the final two carnivalesque novels, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children, which along with her stories helped Carter earn her reputation as a magical realist. The stories themselves are largely a
product of the period following her residence in Japan, and show a concerted effort to work over archetypal stories (“Ashputtle; or, The Mother’s Ghost”), historical scenes (“The Fall River Axe Murders”), and dramatic vignettes (“In Pantoland”) to yield fresh nuances, new aspects, and rich revisions of received narratives. Most spectacular among these efforts are the revisions of traditional fairy tales collected as The Bloody Chamber (1979a), which offer alternative telling of stories such as Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, Red Riding Hood, and Puss-in-Boots.
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Few of Carter’s novels have strong plotlines that emphasize causal relations among events or a movement toward the traditional patterns of New Comedy. To the extent that the novels share trajectories, they are those that suggest loss and render plot subordinate to surprise and sensation – The Magic Toyshop’s gothicism ends with a conflagration and revelation of incest (a theme also evoked in Wise Children); The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and The Passion of New Eve are both structured around mourning for a bizarre and ambiguously gendered love object (the former’s Albertina explicitly recalls Proust’s Albertine) amid apocalyptic scenes. Even where a conventional romantic plot seems to be satisfied it is cross-cut by epistemological uncertainty and existential ambiguity – in Carter’s novels, even the most self-aware and confident of protagonists are fundamentally challenged, unmade, and remade by circumstances. An epigraph to Heroes and Villains, from Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, stands as a marker of Carter’s approach from an early period: “The Gothic mode is essentially a form of parody, a way of assailing cliches by exaggerating them to the limit of grotesqueness.” It is this emphasis on monstrous excess at the level of narrative discourse that overruns attention to story in Carter’s fiction. Where Carter’s fiction offers clear plot lines, they tend to be borrowed and crammed with ironically recycled materials, most obviously in her rewriting of fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber. Across her corpus, Carter displays a vast collection of narrative material much as her characters compulsively collect and reveal things to view. Indeed, the dominant narrative mode across Carter’s fiction is the presentation of tableaux that stave off the march of time and the artificial imposition of closure, which Carter took to be “storytelling in its purest form[:] the strategies writers have devised to cheat the inevitability of closure” (1992). Carter’s exhibitions always involve a significant collection of bodies, things, and energies, and they combine in surprising ways as the displays unfold serially. In Several Perceptions, there is a fixation on the zoo and liberating a badger. In Love, the protagonists’ temperaments contrast between a spare aesthetic and one cluttered with found objects. Beyond the Magic Toy Shop’s dark puppet shows, there are a stereopticon museum of model desire devices in The
Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and a startling collection of wax effigies in The Passion of New Eve. In readings of her fiction that foreground psychodynamic readings (especially those emerging from her feminist allegiances), such collections are indices to individual psychic formations and states, while geopolitical readings (particularly those responding to Carter’s socialism and exploration of broad cultural dynamics) tend to emphasize collections as dramatizations and displacements of imperial and neocolonial aspirations and frustrations. Nights at the Circus might stand as Carter’s most dramatic exhibition in these respects, replete with depictions of a bordello, circus, community of clowns, assemblage of Faberge eggs, panoptical prison, anthropological and ethnographic curiosities, and collection of freakish women serving as fetish objects. The latter, a perverse house of erotic display, is described by the narrator as a “lumber room of femininity, this rag-and-bone shop of the heart” (Carter 1984). The line borrowed from W. B. Yeats’s poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” illustrates a good deal of Carter’s method: she transforms the phrase “rag-and-bone shop of the heart” – a locution literally about a collection of recycled bits, and in Yeats’s usage about his wornout fund of poetic power – into a phrase about women whom male society has used, and used up, in pursuit of its romantic ideals in support of its presumed creative authority. She refigures, moreover, the poem of which the line is a part. Nights at the Circus treats as a serious philosophical question the premise of Yeats’s poem: what happens when the objects of a collection burst the bounds of the idea that controls them? What happens when the circus animals refuse to be bound to the imaginative work of the circus ring, break their chains, and desert the show? What happens to gender relations when women break the bounds of their marriages, prisons, and whorehouses, and tell their own life stories? What happens when the narrative of national progress – that of the American circus proprietor Colonel Kearney, who is determined to drive elephants across Siberia in a patriotic echo of Hannibal’s feats and an enactment of the spread of “White History” – suffers disruption by other political, cultural, and temporal orders? While Nights at the Circus is perhaps the most sustained narrative exhibition posing these questions, the stories in The Bloody Chamber also
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work toward these ends, collecting old stories and re-presenting them by selecting and rearranging elements to pose new possibilities. In her introduction to The Virago Book of Fairy Tales, Carter faulted nineteenth-century collectors of fairy tales for their “excision of references to sexual and excremental functions, the toning down of sexual situations and the reluctance to include ‘indelicate’ material – that is, dirty jokes – [which] helped to denaturize the fairy tale and, indeed, helped to denaturize its vision of everyday life” (1990). One way of viewing the fractured fairy tales that make up The Bloody Chamber is as an effort to renaturalize a vision of everyday life that moves beyond constraining myths – of gender or capitalism – and to restore more flexible and accessible forms of accessing everyday life. Carter argues that “The fairy tale, as narrative, has far less in common with the modern bourgeois forms of the novel and the feature film than it does with contemporary demotic forms” (1990), and it is not surprising that her later writing career should have preferred demotic forms – stories, children’s books, screenplays, radio and stage plays – to the bourgeois form of the novel that dominated her early career. These forms – grotesque and carnivalesque displays and exhibitions of cultural materials, designed precisely to unmake the authority of established narrative exhibitions – are, finally, principled, rich, and wide-ranging but also risk appearing undisciplined and sometimes overwrought. Ultimately, where some of Carter’s contemporaries and friends – Julian Barnes or Salman Rushdie – offered playful revisions of stories and collections of their own (e.g., Barnes’s ark stories in A History of the World in 10 12 Chapters), Carter’s work is marked by an unapologetic revel in the full messiness of the rag-and-bone shop of Western narrative traditions, where fiction can do more than we think it can, and anything can be a novel. SEE ALSO: Fantasy Fiction (BIF); Feminist Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Carter, A. (1966). Shadow Dance. London: Heinemann. (Published in US as Honeybuzzard.) Carter, A. (1967). The Magic Toyshop. London: Heinemann.
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Carter, A. (1968). Several Perceptions. London: Heinemann. Carter, A. (1969). Heroes and Villains. London: Heinemann. Carter, A. (1971). Love. London: Hart-Davis. Carter, A. (1972). The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. London: Hart-Davis. Carter, A. (1974). Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces. London: Quartet. Carter, A. (1977). The Passion of New Eve. London: Gollancz. Carter, A. (1979a). The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. London: Gollancz. Carter, A. (1979b). The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History. London: Virago. Carter, A. (1982). Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings. London: Virago. Carter,A.(1984).NightsattheCircus.NewYork:Penguin. Carter, A. (1985a). Black Venus. London: Chatto and Windus. (Published in US as Saints and Strangers.) Carter, A. (1985b). Interview with John Haffenden [1984]. In J. Haffenden (ed.), Novelists in Interview. New York: Methuen, pp. 76–96. Carter, A. (1990). Introduction. In The Virago Book of Fairy Tales London: Virago. Carter, A. (1991). Wise Children London: Chatto and Windus. Carter, A. (1992). Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings. London: Chatto and Windus. Carter, A. (1993). American Ghosts and Old World Wonders London: Chatto and Windus. Carter, A. (1995). Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories London: Chatto and Windus. Carter, A. (1996). The Curious Room: Collected Dramatic Works London: Chatto and Windus. Carter, A. (1997a). Envoi: Bloomsday [1982]. In Carter (1997c), pp. 536–41. Carter, A. (1997b). Introduction to Expletives Deleted [1992]. In Carter (1997c), pp. 604–8. Carter, A. (1997c). Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings [1964–92] (ed. J. Uglow). London: Chattoand Windus. Day, A. (1998). Angela Carter: The Rational Glass Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gamble, S. (1997). Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Jordan, N.(dir.) (1984). The Company of Wolves. ITC Entertainment/Palace Production. Lee, A. (1997). Angela Carter. New York: Twayne. Munford, R. (ed.) (2006). Re-Visiting Angela Carter: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pitchford, N. (2002). Tactical Readings: Feminist Postmodernism in the Novels of Kathy Acker and Angela Carter Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.
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Sage, L. (1994). Angela Carter. Plymouth: Northcote House. Tucker, L. (ed.) (1998). Critical Essays on Angela Carter. New York: G. K. Hall.
Cary, Joyce JOHN EUSTACE
Joyce Cary (Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary) was born to Anglo-Irish parents in Derry on December 7, 1888. Though his family moved to London shortly after his birth, Cary maintained an intimate connection to Ireland for much of his life, and a particular connection to Inishowen, where the Carys had lived as members of the Protestant Ascendancy from the early seventeenth century until the Irish Land Act of 1882 led to economic hardship. Arguably, Cary’s sense of himself as an Anglo-Irishman – attached to both yet belonging fully to neither culture – contributed to his ability to identify and empathize with different subject positions, a characteristic that marks his early fiction set in Africa as well as his more mature, multivoiced trilogies. He studied painting in Paris and Edinburgh during the first decade of the twentieth century, but eventually resigned himself to reading law at Oxford. His results were less than exemplary as his determination to be a professional writer interfered with his studies. After a stint with the Red Cross in Montenegro and a failed attempt to secure employment in Ireland, he enlisted in Nigerian political service as an assistant district officer. He occupied various positions in West Africa from 1914 until early 1920, before returning to Oxford to establish himself as a writer. Aissa Saved, published in 1932, was the first of the 15 novels that followed until his death in 1957. Two more novels, The Captive and the Free (1959) and Cock Jarvis (1974), were published posthumously. Cary’s early writing career was dedicated to the subject of West Africa, informed by his experiences in the Nigerian political service with its Lugardian imperative of “indirect rule.” After Aissa Saved, he published An American Visitor (1933), The African Witch (1936), and Mister Johnson (1939). His African fiction, while problematic on some levels, particularly in its oversimplified representations of Africans, is marked
by a characteristic ambivalence to the imperial project as a whole. Mister Johnson – which was eventually adapted into a film by Bruce Beresford – is particularly successful in this regard, though Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe felt the need to respond to its oversimplifications of African culture by writing his landmark novel, Things Fall Apart (1959). Informed by his childhood experiences in Ireland, Cary’s novels Castle Corner (1938), based on Castle Cary in Inishowen, and A House of Children (1941b), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, signaled a shift to the seemingly less problematic setting of Europe, and specifically to England in Charlie Is My Darling (1940). His growing popularity as a writer accompanied the shift. With the exceptions of The Moonlight (1946) and A Fearful Joy (1949), Cary’s remaining novels, and most significant achievements, make up two trilogies that explore philosophical and political issues. In a structure that belies the complexity of his narrative and thematic vision, each novel in each trilogy is dedicated to one of three main characters representing a philosophical or political principle. The first trilogy – consisting of Herself Surprised (1941a), To Be a Pilgrim (1942), and The Horse’s Mouth (1944) – places Sara Monday (Herself) in a dialectical love triangle with conservative Thomas Wilcher (Pilgrim), and the simultaneously creative and destructive artist, Gulley Jimson (Horse). It explores through a dialogical narrative the relationships between freedom, preservation, and destruction. The second and much darker trilogy – consisting of Prisoner of Grace (1952), Except the Lord (1953), and Not Honour More (1955) – places Nina Woodville (Prisoner) in a love triangle with left-wing politico Chester Nimmo (Except) and the almost fascistically conservative Jimmy Latter (Honour). Through its dialogical narrative, it explores the political and moral implications of all relationships, and, more precisely, the potential human cost of conflicts between the radical and the reactionary in contemporary England. Though on many levels the second trilogy is superior to the first as a cohesive unit, it has not garnered as much popular or critical attention, perhaps because it lacks the life-affirming humor and optimism of its precursor. The Horse’s Mouth remains Cary’s most popular and successful work, aided in part by Alec Guinness’s very successful
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adaptation for the 1958 film directed by Ronald Neame. As Alan Bishop noted in the biography published during the centenary year of Cary’s birth, critical reception of the author’s work has always been mixed, partly because he does not fit easily into any literary school. He has not received the critical attention that some of his contemporaries have, despite his success and his influences on prominent writers who followed him. And what criticalattentionhe does receive continuestowane. His African fiction receives the majority of the continued critical output, much, however, following on the heels of the dismissive but highly influential treatment of it as racial romance in Abdul JanMohamed’s Manichean Aesthetics (1983). SEE ALSO: Achebe, Chinua (WF); Irish Fiction (BIF); West African Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bishop, A. G. (1988). Gentleman Rider: A Life of Joyce Cary. London: Michael Joseph. Cary, J. (1932). Aissa Saved. London: Ernest Benn. Cary, J. (1933). An American Visitor. London: Ernest Benn. Cary, J. (1936). The African Witch. London: Gollancz. Cary, J. (1938). Castle Corner. London: Gollancz. Cary, J. (1939). Mister Johnson. London: Gollancz. Cary, J. (1940). Charlie Is My Darling. London: Michael Joseph. Cary, J. (1941a). Herself Surprised. London: Michael Joseph. Cary, J. (1941b). A House of Children. London: Michael Joseph. Cary, J. (1942). To be a Pilgrim. London: Michael Joseph. Cary, J. (1944). The Horse’s Mouth. London: Michael Joseph. Cary, J. (1946). The Moonlight. London: Michael Joseph. Cary, J. (1949). A Fearful Joy. London: Michael Joseph. Cary, J. (1952). Prisoner of Grace. London: Michael Joseph. Cary, J. (1953). Except the Lord. London: Michael Joseph. Cary, J. (1955). Not Honour More. London: Michael Joseph. Cary, J. (1959). The Captive and the Free. London: Michael Joseph. Cary, J. (1974). Cock Jarvis: An Unfinished Novel (ed. A. G. Bishop). London: Michael Joseph.
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Echeruo, M. (1979). Joyce Cary and the Dimensions of Order. London: Macmillan. JanMohamed, A. (1983). Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Neame, R.(dir.) (1958). The Horse’s Mouth (screenplay by A. Guinness). Knightsbridge Films.
Censorship and the Novel ADAM PARKES
“All books now seem to me surrounded by a circle of invisible censors,” Virginia Woolf confided to her diary in August 1939 (1984, 229). Written on the eve of World War II, these words summon up an entire culture of censorship that shaped the context in which modern British novelists worked in the first half of the twentieth century. After the end of World War II in 1945, Britain saw widespread social and political changes, including the founding of the welfare state, the break-up of the empire, mass immigration from former colonies, and a more liberal moral climate, which led to the relaxation of censorship laws. One significant literary result of these postwar developments was the new Obscene Publications Act of 1959, followed by the long-awaited publication of D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover after the celebrated trial of 1960 (preceded by a similar verdict in the US in 1959). Before these landmark events, however, novelists such as Lawrence, Joyce, and Woolf herself had labored under the threat of censorship not only by public officials but by editors, publishers, and printers who feared inciting government action or harbored their own moral or political objections to what they considered offensive or obscene literature. Censorship was always in the air. As well-known legal events make clear, however, the forces of censorship surrounding the modern novelist were often far from invisible. Before Lady Chatterley went to trial, British courtrooms hosted numerous obscenity cases including those of Lawrence’s earlier novel, The Rainbow, in 1915, and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness in 1928, while Joyce’s Ulysses was the subject of famous court cases in the United States in 1921 (when it was banned) and 1933 (when the ban was lifted). The British censors had numerous legal means at their disposal. Novels could be
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prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, stopped in the post under the 1908 Post Office Act, or intercepted by customs officials on the look-out for illicit publications from abroad. In 1910, moreover, Britain had signed an International Agreement for the Suppression of Obscene Publications (1910), aimed at the international trade in indecent materials. The role played by the customs service was graphically illustrated in 1923 when 499 copies of Ulysses were burned at Folkestone. But literary censorship was hardly confined to a few dramatic incidents. In 1929, British Home Secretary Sir William Joynson-Hicks boasted that the last six years had seen 73 prosecutions in connection with the importation or sale of allegedly indecent literature. And the grip of literary censorship in the English-speaking world was tightened by similar levels of activity across the Atlantic, where the New York postal authorities suppressed the serial version of Ulysses three times before the book went to court in 1921. What were censors, visible or invisible, afraid of? Sex, first of all – or, more precisely, representations of sexual acts. Sexuality, too, insofar as this meant frank, troubling, or unusual representations of modern sexual identities and relations, including homosexuality and lesbianism (the central subject of the Hall trial). To put it another way, censors were worried about obscenity, defined by Lawrence (1959) as that which belongs off-stage, and pornography. In the trials of Ulysses and Lady Chatterley, indecency was central: when, in 1934, US Attorney Martin Conboy appealed Judge M. Woolsey’s 1933 decision permitting the importation of Ulysses, he spent two days in court reading aloud passages that he deemed obscene, including substantial portions of Molly Bloom’s celebrated monologue in “Penelope.” Sexual obscenity, however, wasn’t always the primary target of official censorship in the modern period. Political sedition (a traditional concern of governments) was a common preoccupation, especially during the two World Wars, as illustrated in the Defence of the Realm Act of 1914, which was used to suppress writings that deviated from the official views of the wartime British government. Indeed, during the first war, British postal authorities stopped searching for indecent materials partly in response to the sheer pressure of work but also because the war had
virtually ended the international trade in such wares. But even as the search for indecency recommenced after the war’s end, sedition would continue to attract official attention throughout the 1920s, as recently opened archives make plain. With the growing threat of class warfare in the wake of the Russian Revolution (1917), a threat brought to life by the General Strike (1926), and in the face of mounting resistance to British rule in Ireland and India, the authorities responded by closely monitoring so-called seditious foreign publications, especially those that linked the struggle for Indian independence with class struggle. According to a secret Home Office file, the publications of the Indian Communist Party were of particular concern, while a similar problem in Ireland was also noted. Home Office documents at the National Archives in London include one file of 74 items referring to a total of 9,708 copies of books and pamphlets in various languages, which were stopped in the post from October 1922 to January 1923. Another file, dated October 16, 1922, contains an alphabetized list of 573 items seized under existing warrants against revolutionary publications from numerous countries in Europe and beyond. The modern censor’s other major preoccupation was blasphemy, which seems to point away from the social and political concerns of sex and sedition but actually leads back to them. Echoing ancient biblical prohibitions, anxieties about blasphemy reflect the origins of the modern British state in the religious and political conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; as far as the censorship of modern literature is concerned, however, it took specific institutional forms, incarnated in legislation governing the theater. The Licensing Act 1737 (amended in the Theatres Act 1843) required all plays to be licensed by the Office of the Lord Chamberlain before they were performed. Of the 19,304 plays submitted for censorship between 1852 and 1912, only 103 were refused a license (Findlater 1967), but that small percentage contained some famous names including that of Oscar Wilde, whose play Salome was banned in 1892 because it represented biblical characters. Intriguingly, the Salome case suggests that blasphemy was inseparable from other moral and political issues. What made Wilde’s play seem especially offensive to official eyes was its imbrication of religious themes with transgressive
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CENSORSHIP AND THE NOVEL
sexual material, particularly incest, and dubious foreign influences. Thus the Examiner of Plays, Edward Pigott, commented, “The piece is written in French – half Biblical, half pornographic – by Oscar Wilde himself: Imagine the average British public’s reception of it” (Stephens 112). Here Pigott articulates a sexually charged xenophobia that reared its head once again in 1914, in a libel suit against Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, and in 1918, when the actress Maud Allan sued Noel Pemberton Billing, MP, for attacking her revival of Wilde’s play as perverted. For Billing, staging an immoral play by an immoral author meant assaulting the British state when its very survival was at stake. Thus wartime morality was used to justify sexual persecution and literary censorship. This complex of social, political, and religious forces converged on the two most important modern British novelists to suffer the direct consequences of censorship: D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce. As an Irish Catholic whose works frequently linked sexual themes with politics and religion, Joyce attracted the suspicion of censors throughout his career, and not only in England: Irish censorship laws were even stricter, especially after the passage of the 1929 Censorship of Publications Bill, and the major legal actions brought against Joyce’s works occurred in the US. While Joyce’s inability to find a publisher for Ulysses meant that all but a few early episodes remained unpublished in Britain until 1936, his entire career had been dogged by moral and political censorship, from early skirmishes with academic officialdom in Dublin to the long struggle to see his early collection of stories, Dubliners, into print. Grant Richards, who eventually published Dubliners in London in 1914, refused it in 1906 on the grounds of indecency, blasphemy, and antiBritish sentiments; the Dublin publisher Maunsel & Co. turned it down in 1912 because it seemed anti-Irish. Joyce, however, developed ever more creative ways of responding to censorship. Critics have read both Stephen Dedalus’s defense of art in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and the famous schema for Ulysses, which emphasizes the novel’s complexity, as Joycean strategies of self-defense against official censorship (Marshik 2006; Vanderham 1998). Ulysses itself resists censorship via formal and stylistic experimentation, as in the “Cyclops” episode, which trans-
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forms Joyce’s earlier exclamation against a “oneeyed printer” who objected to Dubliners into the basis of stylistic parody: Joyce counterpoints an anonymous, one-eyed, first-person narrator to a third-person voice characterized by hyperbole, long-windedness, and other forms of stylistic cyclopism. Indeed much of the second half of Ulysses seems to have been written with censorship in mind. In “Circe,” an episode set in a brothel and featuring a trial in which the hero, Leopold Bloom, is accused of various sexual crimes, Joyce responds to the ongoing censorship of the novel by opening up the text to the full range of modern eroticism or, to put it another way, the unconscious. And when Joyce uses a British soldier named Private Carr as a mouthpiece for obscenity, he combines his assault on moral and religious censorship with political satire. Punching Stephen’s lights out in drunken fisticuffs, Joyce’s “artist of the obscene” (Kenner 127) dramatizes the obscene violence of British imperialism in Ireland. Lawrence’s battles with censorship had also begun early. Sons and Lovers (1913) was banned from public libraries in England and The Rainbow was banned at an obscenity trial in 1915. The Rainbow ban made it virtually impossible for Lawrence to publish in Britain until the end of the war; Lady Chatterley’s Lover, published in Italy in 1928, remained contraband for another 32 years. Lawrence, who regarded Joyce’s “Penelope” episode as pornographic, was considered guilty of a combination of moral and political offenses. His novels, with their prominent sexual content, seemed obscene: in 1915, the authorities were particularly concerned with a lesbian episode in The Rainbow, while Lady Chatterley’s Lover featured numerous sexual encounters. Lawrence’s representation of sex, like Joyce’s, also seemed blasphemous and, in the context of World War I, unpatriotic. Ursula Brangwen, the young heroine of The Rainbow, explicitly rejects the values of democracy and imperialism for which the war was supposedly fought, and tells her soldier-lover, Anton Skrebensky, that she hates soldiers. Ursula’s and Anton’s violently charged relationship ends with a moonlit sex scene in which she annihilates his soul; the novel itself concludes with a symbolic vision of a rainbow promising a mystical religion of sexual regeneration at odds with the purposive ideologies of militarism,
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imperialism, and capitalism that official censorship was meant to protect. Rather than retreating from the forces of censorship, Lawrence continued to attack its central premises, writing not only novels about sex but such essays as “Pornography Propos of Lady Chatterley’s and Obscenity” and “A Lover” (both written in 1929), which attacked censorship while promoting his own ideas about sexual regeneration. Like Joyce, Lawrence engaged in formal experimentation to subvert censorship, exploiting his own polemical tendencies (for which Joyce and other modernists would censure him) to open up his novels to vatic outbursts that violate moral and aesthetic expectations together. Thus Lady Chatterley ends with a prophetic letter by the gamekeeper, Mellors, declaring that he and Connie have recreated reality through sex. In their different ways, then, Joyce and Lawrence made censorship a crucial theme in the modern novel. The cases of these two novelists have also raised important practical and theoretical questions about the social function of literature, precisely because they highlight debates about what sort of effects literature might have, how it produces them, and on whom. Judges, lawyers, editors, publishers, and critics involved in censorship cases often debated the relation between art and obscenity, asking, for example, whether artistic merit might be granted to a work as a whole if some of its parts were obscene. Thus, in the context of censorship, a question frequently posed by literary modernism – what is the status of the part or fragment? – could become a matter of social contestation. Censorship also put pressure on questions of authorial intention and artistic purpose. Sir Chartres Biron, the judge who presided over the Well of Loneliness trial in 1928, declared authorial intention immaterial to the case – an uncanny anticipation of the New Critical dogma that an author’s intentions were irrelevant to the meaning (or merit) of a literary work. Ironically, it was at the end of the 1950s, when New Criticism was at the peak of its influence in the Anglo-American academy, that the British and American bans on Lady Chatterley were lifted partly in deference to authorial intention: in 1959, US Judge Frederick Bryan argued that in this case, as in that of Ulysses, the author’s “sincerity and honesty of purpose” were essential to the “literary and intellectual merit” of the work
(Lawrence 1959, 126). By a fine irony, modernism was now sanctioned partly on the grounds that it might contribute to the moral improvement of society. Most crucially of all, major censorship cases often revolved around questions of audience. The Hicklin ruling of 1868, which guided subsequent court cases in Britain and America, defined obscenity as the tendency “to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall” (Parkes 4). What this meant, for British and US judges in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was that the courts had to consider the young reader. The editors of the Little Review, the New York magazine that serialized the early episodes of Ulysses, landed in court on just these grounds: the case began when a lawyer complained that his minor daughter had received an unsolicited copy of the installment containing part of “Nausicaa,” in which a young woman exhibits her underclothes while the hero, Bloom, masturbates. Morris Ernst, the lawyer who defended Ulysses in court in 1933, tried to redefine the reader in question as the “average” or “normal” man (Vanderham 97), an argument that Judge Woolsey found persuasive. But, in the age of growing democracy and freedom from traditional social constraints, the question of who counted as normal readers became increasingly uncertain. When the chief prosecutor asked at the 1960 trial of Lady Chatterley, “Is it a book that you would . . . wish your wife or your servants to read?” (Rolph 17), he unwittingly exposed the social and political biases of received legal opinion. The court’s decision to allow Lawrence’s novel into the public domain suggested, among other things, that previous definitions of the audience for modern literature had considered only a part of a much larger socio-political whole. Was literature for men, or for women? Was it for the intellectuals, or the masses? As recent scholarship suggests, the story of censorship and the novel in modern Britain hardly begins or ends with Joyce and Lawrence. Indeed, these authors have become renewed objects of suspicion, especially Lawrence, famously denounced by the feminist critic Kate Millett (1970) as a purveyor of violent misogyny (an accusation from which Lawrence’s reputation still hasn’t fully recovered). While recent studies have
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deepened our understanding of particular obscenity trials involving Joyce and Lawrence (Parkes 1996; Vanderham 1998), scholars have also broadened the scope of inquiry, by examining a wider range of authors, from the aesthetes and decadents of the nineteenth century to the New Critics of the twentieth, and by considering forms of social and cultural censorship not directly institutionalized in obscenity law: the circles of censorship that Woolf called invisible. In my book (Parkes 1996), I argue that authors from Wilde to Woolf not only provoked official censorship but also participated in debates about modern forms of sexuality and gender, sometimes challenging and rewriting received scripts for the gendered and sexualized aspects of British selfhood. Relating censorship to social purity movements and prostitution debates, Celia Marshik (30) similarly emphasizes how modernism was decisively shaped by a “censorship dialectic” formed by “ongoing negotiations between . . . writer[s] and resistant audiences.” For Allison Pease (83), who sees modernism as the product of bourgeois Enlightenment ideology, modern writers made obscenity “safe for the middle classes,” and so defused its subversive potential, by subjecting pornographic elements to the aesthetic control of high modernist form. While these accounts differ in their assessment of modernism’s social and political subversiveness, they all resist or complicate the received liberal view of the battle against literary censorship simply as a struggle for freedom of expression (see, for example, Ernst & Schwartz 1964; De Grazia 1992). Instead, these studies consider how modern authors engaged in sometimes damaging but often fruitful dialogue with censorship in its different forms, visible and invisible. Future scholarship is likely to consider the persistence of traditional religious imperatives, especially when combined with new geopolitical developments, as exemplified by the now expired Islamic fatwa against Salman Rushdie for publishing The Satanic Verses (1988). The theoretical dimensions of censorship and obscenity are likely to receive further attention, as well. Future studies remain to be written, however, on the means by which diverse forms of censorship, legally institutionalized and socially inscribed, are manifested and resisted in the fiction of the modern period, which will reveal new information about less well-known authors targeted by
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official censors, such as the revolutionary feminist author Naomi Mitchison (whom the authorities considered prosecuting in June 1935), and which may also reexamine the ways in which writers like Jean Rhys, committed to telling the other side of the story, rewrite inherited narratives about British culture and society. SEE ALSO: Censorship and Fiction (WF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS De Grazia, E. (1992). Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius. New York: Random House. Ernst, M., & Schwartz, A. U. (1964). Censorship: The Search for the Obscene. New York: Macmillan. Findlater, R. (1967). Banned! A Review of Theatrical Censorship in Britain. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Franke, D. (2008). Modernist Heresies: British Literary History, 1883–1924. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Hunt, L. (ed.) (1993). The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800. New York: Zone. Joyce, J. (1990). Ulysses. New York: Vintage. Joyce, J. (1996). Dubliners: Text and Criticism (ed. R. Scholes & A. W. Litz). New York: Penguin. Joyce, J. (2003). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (ed. S. Deane). New York: Penguin. Kenner, H. (1987). Ulysses. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. La Capra, D. (1982). Madame Bovary on Trial. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ladenson, E. (2007). Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from “Madame Bovary” to “Lolita.” Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lawrence, D. H. (1959). Sex, Literature and Censorship (ed. H. T. Moore). New York: Viking. Lawrence, D. H. (1989). The Rainbow (ed. M. KinkeadWeekes). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, D. H. (1995). Sons and Lovers (ed. D. Trotter). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lawrence, D. H. (2002). Lady Chatterley’s Lover and A Propos of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (ed. M. Squires). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marsh, J. (1998). Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Marshik, C. (2006). British Modernism and Censorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Millett, K. (1970). Sexual Politics. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Mullin, K. (2003). James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parkes, A. (1996). Modernism and the Theater of Censorship. New York: Oxford University Press. Pease, A. (2000). Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rolph, C. H. (ed.) (1990). The Trial of Lady Chatterley: Regina v. Penguin Books Limited. London: Penguin. Stephens, J. R. (1980). The Censorship of English Drama, 1824–1901. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vanderham, P. (1998). James Joyce and Censorship: The Trials of “Ulysses.” New York: New York University Press. Woolf, V. (1984). The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 5 (ed. A. O. Bell & A. McNeillie). San Diego: Harcourt Brace.
Chicklit and Ladlit IMELDA WHELEHAN
“Chicklit” and “ladlit” are two terms that have become inextricably linked: it could be argued that “chicklit” spawned the need for the term “ladlit,” but if one looks at representative works of fiction in each genre, one discovers important critical distinctions. “Chicklit” is the descriptive term used to categorize a highly successful romantic fiction genre that came into being in the wake of the success of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996). Earlier references to chicklit carried different connotations than those now associated with the term: in particular Cris Mazza and Jeffrey DeShell’s anthology Chick Lit: Postfeminist Fiction (1995) deployed the term ironically to indicate that the writings in their collection went beyond the normal themes associated with feminist fiction. Interestingly, this perceived tension between chicklit and feminism has endured, even while feminism haunts its subtexts like a guilty conscience. “Chick” in the context of chick lit is mobilized as playful and “postmodern”; others would take it more literally, and critics applied it to suggest that such fiction is retrogressively feminine. Bridget Jones’s Diary remains for most the touchstone of what chicklit is, even though it could be argued to be the
exception to this classification – the paradigm in a genre that almost universally lacks the irony of tone adopted in Bridget Jones’s Diary. That the term “chick” (dismissed during the height of second-wave feminism as derogatory and infantilizing) can be once more applied to women in the 1990s might be perceived to be a symptom of the waning of feminism’s political and ideological power: it can certainly be attributed to the rise of the “new lad” as a media phenomenon in the UK, reinforced by a celebration of a more adolescent masculinity in the bestselling men’s magazines of the decade, such as Loaded. “Chick” is used to suggest that this postfeminist generation of women are more at ease with their femininity, less political about their identity, yet successful in their careers and able to pursue their ambitions in that arena. As a readerly “label” it also announces a resurgence of women as a targeted separate consumer group just as “chick flick” has become attached to particular film genres, such as romantic comedies and costume dramas. The genre not only courts women readers exclusively, just as mass market romance always has; more specifically, it was initially directed at the twenty- to thirty-something market as an antidote to the rather dated platitudes and whimsical plotting of many Harlequin romances. The novels favor the first-person confessional narrative, or one whose point of view is channeled through the central heroine; very often they incorporate varieties of first-person forms such as diaries, emails, letters, texts, or a combination of all of these (see Marian Keyes, This Charming Man, 2008, as an example), using disclosures about the heroine’s own frailties and anxieties to draw in the reader’s sympathies and sense of identification. The implied reader is privileged as a confidante and the character most often comes across as an emotionally honest woman who lives in an urban environment (normally a capital city) and usually works in a media, fashion, publicity, or PR-related job. The thrust of the romance narrative takes a contemporary twist: the women are serial daters and are emotionally nourished by a close group of friends (often including gay men, but rarely lesbians, Adele Parks’s Tell Me Something, 2008, being one exception). They perceive themselves to be flawed and therefore unable to compete on equal terms in the dating market and
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CHICKLIT AND LADLIT
for this reason are usually on a prolonged but rather lacklustre quest for self-improvement, dramatized by abortive diet regimes, neglected gym membership, and fashion disasters, but also manifested in the quest to acquire cultural capital – to seem to be better informed about “serious” matters – and an addiction to self-help manuals. The future Mr. Right is fascinated by the heroine’s innate virtues and is able to see through the falsehoods and caprices of ideal-type femininity and love her in spite of her perceived faults and in spite of her attempts at self-improvement or adherence to strict dating rules. Online reader responses to chicklit suggest that its realism and authenticity as well as its humor and lighthearted approach to key relationship dilemmas are valued. Confidently post-feminist in its ideological appeal, it suggests that feminist truisms have little application for the new generation of women who instead turn back to more “traditional” images of femininity for affirmation and reject what they see as “have it all” feminist brainwashing. If anything, chicklit heroines are perceived to be burdened by the choices feminism has won them; there is a marked, if not always fully articulated, nostalgia for some “natural order” of the sexes, which is perceived as lost and at the heart of many a young woman’s dating failures and fear of remaining single. Ladlit shares the confessional narrative tendency; but whereas chicklit speaks to a homosocial readership, ladlit is consumed by both sexes, and is more likely to gain literary or at least middlebrow status and critical recognition. Ladlit is associated with texts rather than authors (with perhaps one exception) and does not impact upon the reputation or critical reception of the author in the same way as chicklit; nor does it condemn work to the genre fiction designation. Nick Hornby, like Helen Fielding in the case of chicklit, in some senses represents the purest form of the ladlit genre, even though his first book Fever Pitch (1992) is a memoir, and it is his work that is most commonly used to summarize ladlit’s distinguishing narrative features. While confessional writing is often associated with the “feminine,” the use of the confessional in ladlit situates a tension associated with the masculine voice in this genre. The central characters’ inability to express or explore their emotions is the key source of the book’s dynamics and yet the first-person
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narrative represents the protagonist’s journey toward honest expression of his feelings and a clearer understanding of what it is to be a man in the contemporary world. Whereas chicklit narratives display “emotional intelligence” in abundance, ladlit is about navigating a path through the mystifying process of growing out of adolescence and into adult responsibility – something it is implied women do naturally and painlessly. Ladlit is typically more introspective in this way, its humor sharper, darker, and rather world-weary; unlike the chicklit heroine who is surrounded by her “alternative family” of friends, the ladlit hero is essentially alone. Hornby’s second book, High Fidelity (1995), features the protagonist dissecting his past relationships after a recent break-up, and in doing so recognizing the rituals that he, as a man, observes and is equally entrapped by. Writers such as Hornby and Tim Lott exploit both firstand second-person narrative address, as more direct engagement with the reader; in this way readers are also sometimes implicated in a mode of discourse with which they may feel uncomfortable or alienated, but which changes as the narrative progresses. In the case of both Hornby’s High Fidelity and Lott’s White City Blue (1999), for instance, the central character is stuck in a kind of belated adolescence and defined by his dysfunctional relationship with his closest friends with whom he shares little of importance, tending to channel social interaction through shared love of music or football and through mutual insults. In Lott’s novel this nostalgia for boyhood commonality is emphasized by the friends’ obsession with a particular adventure which they celebrate annually and which ritual will threaten Frankie Blue’s relationship with Veronica. The climax is reached when the protagonists begin to verbalize their emotions and enter coupledom willingly. Ladlit both explores masculinity and yet shows it to be an elusive construction; central characters demonstrate the shortcomings of traditional notions of the “masculine,” which seem inapplicable to their own lives or experiences, and masculinity comes to be defined as a lack – a refusal to grow up, accept responsibility or self-determination. Yet ladlit protagonists often look to the lives and attitudes of the previous generation of men and reflect longingly on their fathers’ secure sense of identity, which further emphasizes a disjunction
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between the two generations and a consciousness of “masculinity in crisis” coming to the fore in 1990s popular culture and social criticism. While feminism supposedly empowered women, increasing their educational and career choices, it is suggested that men are correspondingly abandoned with the failure of the “new man” model of the 1980s, which is discarded as soft and unerotic only to be replaced provisionally by the new lad. These characters are lost in the contemporary world, not only because their male bonds don’t nourish them, but because they seem unable to satisfy the needs of their lovers or themselves; generally not successful breadwinners or careeroriented individuals, they lack the direction in their lives that feminism supposedly provided to a generation of women. Ladlit is neither a celebration nor a critique of traditional masculinity; the male characters’ confessional testimonies situate, disarmingly, the flaws of “classic” masculine qualities of reticence and emotional constipation by explaining frankly their causes and the reasons for their perpetuation. The term “lad,” unlike “chick,” does suggest a collective slang term for youngish men, but specifically a particular type of young man who celebrates and prolongs the period of carefree irresponsibility where sports, cars, and the objectification of women comprise the lads’ worldview, and where alcohol and drugs, sharing trivia and lists, enable homosocial male gatherings to exist without any homoerotic undertones. At a key point the protagonist’s dissatisfaction with this lifestyle will come to the surface and inevitably he will, at least temporarily, break with his friends, the better to assess his future. While the chicklit heroine may lack confidence, she is most often certain that her future will involve a monogamous relationship; ladlit heroes have yet to be convinced of this. White City Blue ends with a wedding framed at one and the same time as an existential leap of faith and a sell-out to a dominant romantic myth; what such texts share with chicklit, ultimately, is a commitment to the existence of romantic love and monogamy, whether or not these things last a lifetime. Chicklit and ladlit are highly compatible with marketing trends in modern publishing, which seek a hook on which to hang a number of thematically linked titles – another example would be the “misery memoir” (or “mislit”) –
and readers are therefore encouraged to buy a new title because it is like something that has gone before. Such category-heavy marketing suits the Amazon-buying generation, who on purchasing a single title will find a host of recommendations offered to them on the basis of shared generic characteristics as well as on the basis of what other readers have bought. In the case of chicklit, the cover designs have become something of a cliche with the predominance of pastel backgrounds, drawings of make-up, handbags, and shoes, or simple line drawings of young women on the cover. Design solutions such as this allow identification with something emphatically not chicklit except by association; so, for example, Jane Austen’s oeuvre has been repackaged in a “chicklit” format by one canny publisher. While some chicklit authors are known for regularly writing out of the mold – Marian Keyes’s inclusion of alcoholism, depression, and more recently domestic violence and transvestism is a notable example – the category is not defunct but contains increasing multitudes and subcategories, such as mumlit or henlit, widowlit or tart noir. Ladlit has not had the same reach, and perhaps remains a distinctive characteristic of 1990s male writing, temporarily linked to chicklit, since such symmetry is irresistible; but without the concrete genre associations the term has declined in usage. Chicklit has come to define contemporary romance narratives to a large extent, providing the most robust challenge to the hegemony of Harlequin mass market books for many decades, and the brand migrates well to similar productions in film and television. Chicklit, like the glossy magazines its heroines devour, can be obsessively brand- and body-aware; it slips more easily into the category of a “product” that may be tied in to other products: sold taped to the front of a glossy magazine or in conjunction with chocolate bars and other consumables. Readers and critics alike, spurred on by Helen Fielding’s appropriation of Pride and Prejudice, see in chicklit a link with generations of women who have written romances and who have striven simultaneously for self-determination and romantic fulfillment. Ladlit’s history is shorter perhaps, though many identify links with male writing of the 1950s, specifically that of Kingsley Amis. While Bridget Jones’s strident Englishness belies the ability of the genre to travel across the Atlantic
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C H I L D R E N ’S A N D Y O U N G A D U L T F I C T I O N
and beyond, ladlit retains a Britishness that requires another term in the US (“dicklit,” for example). National variations aside, these narrative forms have shaped the popular fiction of a generation. The vexed question of the value of either chicklit or ladlit will continue, no doubt; in the meantime one can note that their shared concerns offer a reflection on the demographic realities of the increasingly common singleton navigating a self-conscious path through the confusing landscape of postmodern heterosexual choices. SEE ALSO: Feminist Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ferrebe, A. (2005). Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction, 1950–2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ferris, S., & Young, M. (2005). Chick Lit: Popularizing Fiction for Women. London: Routledge. Fielding, H. (1996). Bridget Jones’s Diary. London: Picador. Frears, S.(dir.) (2000). High Fidelity. Dogstar Films. Gayle, M. (1998). My Legendary Girlfriend. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Green, J. (2001). Babyville. London: Michael Joseph. Head, D. (2005). Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hogan, P. J. (dir.) (2009). Confessions of a Shopaholic. Touchstone Pictures. Hornby, N. (1995). High Fidelity. London: Gollancz. Keyes, M. (1995). Watermelon. Dublin: Poolbeg. Keyes, M. (2008). This Charming Man. London: Penguin. Kidron, B. (dir.) (2004). Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. Working Title Films. Kinsella, S. (2000). Confessions of a Shopaholic. London: Black Swan. Knights, B. (ed.) (2008). Masculinities in Text and Teaching. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lott, T. (1999). White City Blue. London: Penguin. Maguire, S. (dir.) (2001). Bridget Jones’s Diary. Little Bird. Mazza, C., & DeShell, J. (eds.) (1995). Chick Lit: Postfeminist Fiction. Tallahassee, FL: Fiction Collective Two. Moody, N. (ed.) (2004). Chicklit [special issue]. Diegesis, 8. O’Farrell, J. (2000). The Best a Man Can Get. New York: Doubleday. Parks, A. (2008). Tell Me Something. London: Michael Joseph.
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Parsons, T. (1999). Man and Boy. London: HarperCollins. Showalter, E. (2002). Ladlit. In Z. Leader (ed.), On Modern British Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, C. J. (2007). Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit. London: Routledge. Smyczynska, K. (2007). The World according to Bridget Jones. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Weitz, C., & Weitz, P. (dirs.) (2002). About a Boy. Universal Pictures. Whelehan, I. (2002). Helen Fielding’s “Bridget Jones’s Diary”: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum. Whelehan, I . (2005). The Feminist Bestseller. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Children’s and Young Adult Fiction RODERICK McGILLIS
Juliet Dusinberre’s study of early modernism and its relation to nineteenth-century children’s literature, Alice to the Lighthouse (1987), argues that the experimentation in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books informs a liberated literature for children that in turn informs much of the experimental sensibility we see in early modernist fiction by the likes of Woolf and Joyce. Of course, nineteenthcentury children’s literature also paves the way for much of what we see in twentieth-century writing for the young. The work of Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, Charles Kingsley, Mary Molesworth, Oscar Wilde, and others paves the way for the new century. Two early twentieth-century texts are particularly formative for what follows: Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908) and E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It (1902), both of which owe a debt to Carroll and MacDonald. Grahame’s animal fantasy reinscribes themes of nostalgia and home and national politics that prepare the way for a range of novels from A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh books, to Arthur Ransome’s “Swallows and Amazons” series, to Brian Jacques’s long-running Redwall series. On the other hand, Nesbit’s reality-tinged fantasy prepares for a whole range of books that look less nostalgically on the world of childhood. Nesbit offers preparation for time-slip fantasy by the likes of Diane Wynne-Jones and C. S. Lewis, the skewed historical romances of Joan Aiken, and
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also a wry reflection that results much later in a focus on the realities of childhood in what we now term “young adult fiction.” The history of British and Irish children’s literature in the twentieth century is a baggy monster. But the loosely connected adventures of Ratty, Mole, Toad, and Badger in Grahame’s book focus to a large extent on home, both the home as a safe and reassuring place for the individual and also the familiar surrounding of the community. Home is both nature itself and the civilized places we fashion from nature, the communities we build. Grahame’s emphasis on nature reverberates in the brilliant animal story Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson (1927). Until recently, books for children have regularly celebrated the virtues of fresh air and country life whether they present the world of animals or human beings. The work of David Almond participates in a continuing tradition in English literature of envisioning nature and humanity as inextricably connected, so connected that the world is imbued with spirit – fantasy and reality connect intimately. The Wind in the Willows is about home, departure from home, and homecoming. As we see in Badger’s dwelling, the places in which we live have deep connections to history, and history is a recurring interest of children’s books. Jill Paton Walsh’s Goldengrove (1972) and Unleaving (1976) are two books that differ markedly from Grahame’s animal fantasy, but which share an interest in the past, and in place as situating identity and stability. Indeed, the interest in place – the Riverbank, the Hundred Acre Wood, the coast of Cornwall, Green Knowe, Alderley Edge, Ely Cathedral and the fen land in the east of England, Narnia, Hogwarts and its environs, and so on – derives from the romantic sense of the genius loci, the local spirit that invests particular places with a numinous power. We see this in Wordsworth’s poetry and in the many Victorian children’s books that take sustenance from this poetry. This interest in the genius loci forms something of a tradition in British children’s books, finding its most powerful voice, perhaps, in the work of Alan Garner. The most prominent of Garner’s books is The Owl Service (1967). In this book, three young teenagers share a strange adventure in a Welsh valley; they find themselves re-enacting actions first performed by characters
in the medieval Mabinogion. The connection between persons and place is formative, testing, and necessary for any sense of assurance. Homes and specific places may be uncanny in the Freudian sense; they may be both comforting and familiar and disturbing and strange. Even picture books as benign as Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), or Graham Oakley’s Church Mice series (1970–2000) have a doubleness that situates place as both familiar and strange. Another picture book artist we might include here is Raymond Briggs, whose Snowman (1978) and Fungus the Bogeyman (1977) transform the familiar into the unfamiliar. Fungus also begins a contemporary interest in and acceptance of scatological themes in children’s books that we see in the Irish writer Roddy Doyle (The Giggler Treatment, 2000), and in the popular picture book, The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew It Was None of His Business by Werner Holzwarth & Wolf Erlbruch (2001). Another example is Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes (1982). Special places serve to ground characters in ways that are both reassuring and potentially disorienting. An unusual, but compelling example is Jill Paton Walsh’s A Parcel of Patterns (1984), set in seventeenth-century Derbyshire. A village becomes quarantined after a parcel of patterns brings the plague, effectively turning the familiar home into a strange and dangerous place. The place, in other words, may be comforting and familiar, a home sweet home, or it may be uncanny and disturbing, a home that dislocates and defamiliarizes, as in recent books by Neil Gaiman, Coraline (2002) and Wolves in the Wall (2003). We expect places in children’s books to be reassuring, and the first half and more of the twentieth century delivers reassuring places. The focus on the comforts of home is especially evident in books for younger children, as Milne’s Pooh books (1926 and 1928) make clear. Christopher Robin and his friends play freely in their benign outdoors where even gorse bushes do not inconveniently ruffle Winnie when he tumbles out of a tree, and a flood serves as an occasion for messing about in boats. And when the day is done, Christopher has his bath and a story from his father. The kind of safe environment – an environment that may offer adventures but adventures that will deliver happy endings – that we see in Milne’s books also forms the chronotope for
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Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons (1930) and its sequels in which the Walker and the Blackett children explore the Lake District and have adventures without fear of losing the comforts of home. A working-class version of gentle adventures and homely virtues is found in Eve Garnett’s stories about the Ruggles family, beginning with The Family from One End Street (1937). We can also see the importance of home in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, published in the same year as the first Ruggles book. The darkening sense of home and the world is apparent in more recent books such as J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books (1997–2007) and Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy (1995–2001). Early in the century, Rudyard Kipling began an exploration of the homeland in his books that take British history for their subject, Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910). Thus began a century of children’s books that investigate British history. The most prominent of the writers of historical fiction for children are Geoffrey Trease, Rosemary Sutcliff, Leon Garfield, Jill Paton Walsh, and Kevin Crossley-Holland. These writers explore the history of Britain from the time of Beowulf to the near past. England’s experiences of World War II find treatment in Jill Paton Walsh’s The Dolphin Crossing (1967) and Fireweed (1970), Robert Westall’s The MachineGunners (1975), and Terry Pratchett’s Johnny and the Bomb (1996). Other writers such as William Mayne (Earthfasts, 1966) and Jamila Gavin (Coram Boy, 2000) also treat the past in novel ways. Gavin’s Coram Boy reflects what we would call in critical discourse a postcolonial sensibility. Historical fiction sometimes connects with that most elegant of British concerns – fantasy. For example, Alison Uttley’s A Traveller in Time (1939), Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958), and Penelope Farmer’s Charlotte Sometimes (1969) use the notion of a time slip to transport characters into the past. Other books present the past pervading the present, for example, William Mayne’s Earthfasts and Penelope Lively’s The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (1973). Treatments of history that did not happen, or alternate history, are the concern of writers such as Joan Aiken, Peter Dickinson, and Robin Jarvis. And the origins of modern Britain in the stories of King Arthur receive both realistic and fantastic treatment in works such as Sutcliff’s The Sword
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and the Circle (1981) and its sequels, T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone (1938) and its sequels, and Susan Cooper’s Over Sea, Under Stone (1965) and its sequels. Fantasy is one of the strongest aspects of British children’s fiction. Nineteenth-century writes such as John Ruskin, Frances Browne, Lewis Carroll, and George MacDonald established patterns for children’s fantasy that writers in the twentieth century continue to expand. Ruskin and Browne begin the recasting of the fairy tale as established by Perrault and the Grimm Brothers, and rewritings and reinventions of the fairy tale surface in such twentieth-century British writers as A. A. Milne, Walter de la Mare, and Joan Aiken. Picture books too engage in the revisioning of fairy tales; two prime examples are Fiona French’s Snow White in New York (1986) and Anthony Browne’s Hansel and Gretel (1981). The influence of the traditional tales is evident in many children’s writers from C. S. Lewis to Terry Pratchett. Following the nineteenth-century practice of collecting traditional tales, represented famously by Andrew Lang’s colored fairy books, the twentieth century gave us many anthologies of folk and fairy tales, both local to England and Ireland, and worldwide. Anthologies of strictly local tales, for example Virginia Haviland’s Favourite Fairy Tales Told in Ireland (1961), or the several anthologies prepared by Alan Garner (e.g., Lad of the Gad and Fairy Tales of Gold, both 1980), participate in a celebration of Ireland and England respectively. Lewis Carroll arguably lies behind all fantasy literature that comes after the two Alice books, but he is associated most closely with nonsense and adventures in alternate worlds or dream worlds. His influence is evident on such writers as Mervyn Peake, Spike Milligan, Michael Rosen, and Jeanette Winterson. Fantasists such as Diana Wynne Jones and Terry Pratchett also evidence Carroll’s influence. C. S. Lewis echoes the E. Nesbit story, “The Aunt and Amabel” (in The Magic World, 1912), when he has Lucy enter Narnia through a wardrobe, but the entering of another world through a hole of some sort may well find its source in the first Alice book (1865). The influence of George MacDonald is arguably as pervasive as that of Carroll. MacDonald’s influence is twofold: The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and The Princess and Curdie (1883) inaugurate a secondary world fantasy made famous by
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Tolkien and his many followers; and his At the Back of the North Wind (1871) inaugurates a kind of fantasy tinged with realism that we see in E. Nesbit and many fantasies that follow by the likes of Jill Paton Walsh, Penelope Lively, Penelope Farmer, Peter Dickinson, Susan Cooper, Melvin Burgess, J. K. Rowling, Philip Pullman, and Charles Butler. To take just one example, Melvin Burgess’s Lady: My Life as a Bitch (2001) deals with adolescent struggles with family, school, peer pressure, and sexuality, and it does so with both humor and insistent materiality. Sandra Francy, the book’s protagonist, finds her transformation into a dog more interesting than she could have imagined. Burgess is also the author of Junk (1996), arguably the most powerful example of young adult fiction in Great Britain. Junk is about heroin addiction among teenagers; it is Trainspotting (1993) for younger readers. Young adult fiction deals with the realities of being a young person in contemporary times. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) is often mentioned as an early British example, but many examples exist of books that deal with such sensitive subjects as rape, divorce, racism, drug addiction, delinquency, sexual preference, eating disorders, and so on. The Irish writer Siobhan Parkinson’s Breaking the Wishbone (1999) tells the story of a group of homeless teenagers on the streets of Dublin. Perhaps more well known are the novels of Aidan Chambers. His books Dance on My Grave (1982) and Postcards from No Man’s Land (1999) deal frankly with matters of sexual orientation. Another novel, Breaktime (1978) experiments with the form of the novel in ways reminiscent of Laurence Sterne. As young adult books have developed, the stuff of everyday reality grows darker, as a book such as Alan Gibbons’s Caught in the Crossfire (2003) demonstrates. This is a post 9/11 examination of race and racial targeting in England; its depiction of racial tension between Muslim and non-Muslim groups is tense and tragic. In this book, home and the homeland are no longer comfortable and safe. Another book that treats the same subject is Richard MacSween’s Victory Street (2004). The subject of race has become familiar in children’s literature in these times of postcolonial self-consciousness and multicultural self-congratulation. As the nineteenth century turned into the
twentieth, books by the likes of G. A. Henty and Bessie Marchant dealt with the various regions of the British Empire, but in 1901 Kipling published Kim, a novel about India and the Russians and English who maneuver for power in that country. Four years later, Frances Hodgson Burnett published A Little Princess (an expansion of Sara Crewe, 1888), in which the Indian servant Ram Dass figures prominently. Much time would elapse before Asia and other parts of imperial Britain’s colonies or former colonies found their way into children’s literature. In Britain, the experience of the Caribbean and South Asian diasporas are now available in books for young readers. Jamila Gavin’s trilogy chronicling the lives of the Singh family over two generations and from one continent to another – The Wheel of Surya (1992), The Eye of the Horse (1994), and The Track of the Wind (1997) – is a masterful depiction of the effects of imperial expansion. The Caribbean diaspora is the subject of books such as Errol Lloyd’s Many Rivers to Cross (1995) and Floella Benjamin’s Coming to England (1995). These and many more books about the West Indian experience in England are discussed in Karen SandsO’Connor’s study, Soon Come Home to This Island: West Indians in British Children’s Literature (2007). Books dealing with the experiences of various diasporic groups have complicated the vision of home and homeland that seemed so cozy in books by Grahame or Potter or Milne. As SandsO’Connor notes, books about West Indians and Britain are not about making a home in either the West Indies or Britain, but rather they “are about the homecoming of an idea, the idea that Britain is not alone in the world and cannot continue to act as if, like Robinson Crusoe, it is” (166). SEE ALSO: Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); Fantasy Fiction (BIF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Benjamin, F. (1995). Coming to England. London: Pavilion. Briggs, R. (1977). Fungus the Bogeyman. London: Hamish Hamilton. Briggs, R. (1978). The Snowman. New York: Random House.
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Browne, A. (1981). Hansel and Gretel. London: Julia McRae. Burgess, M. (1996). Junk. London: Anderson. Burgess, M. (2001). Lady: My Life as a Bitch. London: Anderson. Burnett, F. H. (1905). A Little Princess. London: Frederick Warne. Chambers, A. (1978). Breaktime. London: Bodley Head. Chambers, A. (1982). Dance on My Grave. London: Bodley Head. Chambers, A. (1999). Postcards from No Man’s Land. London: Bodley Head. Cooper. S. (1965). Over Sea, Under Stone. London: Jonathan Cape. Dahl, R. (1982). Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes. New York: Knopf. Doyle, R. (2000). The Giggler Treatment. New York: Scholastic. Dusinberre, J. (1987). Alice to the Lighthouse. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Farmer, P. (1969). Charlotte Sometimes. London: Bodley Head. French, F. (1986). Snow White in New York. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gaiman, N. (2002). Coraline. New York: HarperCollins. Gaiman, N. (2003). Wolves in the Wall. New York: HarperCollins. Garner, A. (1967). The Owl Service. London: Collins. Garner, A. (ed.) (1979). Fairy Tales of Gold. London: HarperCollins. Garner, A. (ed.) (1986). A Bag of Moonshine. London: HarperCollins. Garnett, E. (1937). The Family from One End Street. London: Frederick Muller. Gavin, J. (1992). The Wheel of Surya. London: Methuen. Gavin, J. (1994). The Eye of the Horse. London: Methuen. Gavin, J. (1997). The Track of the Wind. London: Methuen. Gavin, J. (2000). Coram Boy. London: Mammoth. Gibbons, A. (2003). Caught in the Crossfire. London: Dolphin. Golding, W. (1954). The Lord of the Flies. London: Faber and Faber. Grahame, K. (1908). The Wind in the Willows. London: Methuen. Haviland, V. (1961). Favorite Fairy Tales Told in Ireland. Boston: Little, Brown. Holzwarth, W., & Erlbruch, W. (1994). The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew It Was None of His Business. St. Albans: David Bennett. Kipling, R. (1901). Kim. London: Macmillan. Kipling, R. (1906). Puck of Pook’s Hill. London: Macmillan. Kipling, R. (1910). Rewards and Fairies. London: Macmillan.
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Lively, P. (1973). The Ghost of Thomas Kempe. London: Heinemann. Lloyd, E. (1995). Many Rivers to Cross. London: Methuen. MacSween, R. (2004). Victory Street. London: Anderson. Mayne, W. (1966). Earthfasts. London: Dutton. Nesbit, E. (1902). Five Children and It. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Nesbit, E. (1912). The Magic World. London: Methuen. Parkinson, S. (1999). Breaking the Wishbone. Dublin: O’Brien. Pearce, P. (1958). Tom’s Midnight Garden. London: Oxford University Press. Potter, B. (1902). The Tale of Peter Rabbit. London: Frederick Warne. Pratchett, T. (1996). Johnny and the Bomb. London: Doubleday. Ransome, A. (1930). Swallows and Amazons. London: Jonathan Cape. Sands-O’Connor, K. (2007). Soon Come Home to This Island: West Indians in British Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge. Sutcliff, R. (1981). The Sword and the Circle. London: Bodley Head. Tolkien, J. R. R. (1937). The Hobbit. London: Allen and Unwin. Uttley, A. (1939). A Traveller in Time. London: Faber and Faber. Walsh, J. P. (1967). The Dolphin Crossing. London: Macmillan. Walsh, J. P. (1969). Fireweed. London: Macmillan. Walsh, J. P. (1972). Goldengrove. London: Macmillan. Walsh, J. P. (1976). Unleaving. London: Macmillan. Walsh, J. P. (1983). A Parcel of Patterns. Harmondsworth: Puffin. Westall, Robert. (1975). The Machine-Gunners. London: Macmillan. White, T. H. (1938). The Sword in the Stone. London: Collins. Williamson, H. (1927). Tarka the Otter. London: Putnam’s.
Coe, Jonathan PAMELA THURSCHWELL
At their most accomplished, Jonathan Coe’s novels deftly combine popular sensibility and avant garde panache, postmodern experimentation and nineteenth-century storytelling, ferocious political rage with an apparent willingness to do anything for a laugh. His books are intricately plotted and have been labeled Dickensian, but owe
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at least as much to the digressive brilliance of eighteenth-century authors such as Henry Fielding and Lawrence Sterne, who, like Coe, saw the interconnections between the absurd and the poignant. Perhaps Coe’s greatest achievement to date is to have revitalized the nineteenth century “condition of England” novel for the twenty-first century. Novels such as the marvelous What a Carve Up! (1994b) hit post-Thatcherite England where it hurt, charting the breakdown of the postwar social democratic consensus in Britain and its effect on individual lives. What a Carve Up! is the story of one filthy-rich and ruthless family, the Winshaws, who between them manipulate various aspects of 1990s Britain including politics, banking, battery farming, the National Health Service, the art world, the media, and the arms trade. Their stories are told by hapless writer Michael Owen who is engaged in writing an unauthorized biography of the Winshaws and whose personal sufferings and defeats are inextricably linked to the family. With its shifting time frame, intertextual references, and generic leaps from social realism to farce to horror, What a Carve Up! was memorably described by Terry Eagleton as “one of the few pieces of genuinely political PostModern fiction around” (12). There is, however, another, more traditional side to Coe’s writings, one that is steeped in nostalgia for a lost childhood innocence, and simpler, more sustaining versions of Englishness. His representations of contemporary life look back to an idealized pre-World War II version of English society. Coe has called himself a “provincial novelist,” and clearly has a deep attachment to the Midlands where he grew up. A pervasive sense of loss of community hovers over his work; Margaret Thatcher famously said “There is no such thing as society,” and Coe’s politically and emotionally isolated characters feel the effects of that enforced loss. Born in Birmingham in 1961, Coe attended King Edward’s School, which is the basis for the boys’ school in The Rotters’ Club (2001). He went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, and completed a PhD on Henry Fielding at Warwick University. He taught English at Warwick, but has also worked as a musician and composer, and has written two film biographies (of Humphrey Bogart and James Stewart). An overview of Coe’s works immediately shows that his literary influ-
ences are many and varied, ranging from Greek mythology, to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and European novelists, to modernism and surrealism. (The final section of The Rotters’ Club is written in the form of one long streamof-consciousness sentence in tribute to Molly Bloom’s monologue at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses.) Coe is undoubtedly a literary writer, yet his passionate attachment to music and film comes through in his work at least as loudly as his exuberant borrowings from the British and European canon. His third novel, The Dwarves of Death (1990), featured chapter epigraphs from the rock band The Smiths and is structured in the form of a popular song, including a hilarious musical middle-eight set piece in which the main character spends most of one Sunday hopelessly waiting for a London bus. What a Carve Up! and The House of Sleep (1997) make extensive use of Coe’s arcane knowledge of film and film genre, from Carry On to Cocteau. Coe’s compulsive use of cinema in his works goes far beyond any symptomatic postmodern breakdown between high and popular culture. Rather, he uses film to stage provocative arguments about what it means to write novels that matter in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst century, suggesting that genre clash may be the only appropriate way today to encompass the chaos of modern life. In What a Carve Up! a young documentary maker deftly takes apart the apparent project of the book, arguing that there is nothing left for the political novelist to say: “any serious modern artist who wants to use narrative ought to be working in film” (1994b, 276). Alongside his concern for the structures of recent history Coe focuses on the clueless individual caught in history’s web. His novels feature unreliable protagonists and narrators who are only half-aware of the historical or emotional storm clouds gathering around them. In the final section of The Rotters’ Club, for instance, Coe has his adolescent hero Ben Trotter finally consummate his apparently hopeless love for the theatrical Cicely. The setting for their encounter is election day, 1979 under a poster of Margaret Thatcher, which hangs in Ben’s brother’s bedroom. It is clear to the reader, but not to the ecstatic Ben, that Ben’s love affair, like the country, is headed for troubled waters. Coe ceaselessly returns to characters who find intimacy terrifying or impossible: actually talking to someone means
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COLONIAL FICTION
you can’t predict how they will respond, whereas a character such as What a Carve Up!’s protagonist Michael Owen, who obsessively rewatches the same scene from the same old movie, and tries to turn off his next door neighbor with his TV remote control, has no such fears. From Coe’s early novels An Accidental Woman (1987) and A Touch of Love (1989), through his short story “9th and 13th” about a pianist who imagines an entire relationship with a woman he meets briefly while playing piano in a bar, to the awkward sleepobsessed misfits of The House of Sleep, Coe’s characters only clumsily make contact with others, or fantasize in disastrously mistaken ways about the content of others’ minds and desires. It is Coe’s surprising juxtapositions of these themes – the isolated, depressed, barely functioning individual in the face of larger political and historical forces; the frantic modern mediations of television, film, or music, as refracted through complicated semi-Victorian plotlines; the spiraling comedy of the misplaced footnote or badly written sex scene shading into the tragic unnecessary death or thwarted love – that gives Coe his distinctive brilliance. But the character of Coe’s work has also shifted since his 2004 prize-winning biography of B. S. Johnson, the British modernist writer of the 1960s and 1970s who resembled Coe in presenting a paradoxically common sense English version of experimental writing. Johnson’s creed, “telling stories is telling lies,” leads him, like Coe, to stop mid-sentence to point out, in disgust, the sheer unlikeliness of his fictional assertions (Coe does this in A Touch of Love, 34). Coe’s most recent novel, The Rain Before It Falls, a somber tale of the passing down of family tragedy, was heavily influenced by the mid-century novels of Rosamond Lehmann, suggesting different rhythms of writing, a new focus on women, and the possibility of whole new directions for the future. SEE ALSO: Johnson, B. S. (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Coe. J. (1987). The Accidental Woman. London: Duckworth. Coe. J. (1989). A Touch of Love. London: Duckworth. Coe. J. (1990). The Dwarves of Death. London: Fourth Estate.
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Coe. J. (1991). Humphrey Bogart: Take It and Like It. London: Bloomsbury. Coe. J. (1994a). James Stewart: Leading Man. London: Bloomsbury. Coe. J. (1994b). What a Carve Up! London: Viking. (Published in US as The Winshaw Legacy.) Coe. J. (1997). The House of Sleep. London: Viking. Coe. J. (2001). The Rotters’ Club. London: Viking. Coe. J. (2004a). The Closed Circle. London: Viking. Coe. J. (2004b). Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson. London: Picador. Coe. J. (2005). 9th and 13th. London: Penguin. Coe. J. (2007). The Rain Before It Falls. London: Viking. Coe. J. The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim. London: Viking. Connolly, T. (dir.) (1999). Five Seconds to Spare [film of The Dwarves of Death]. Scala Wildgaze. Eagleton, T. (1994). Theydunnit. London Review of Books, p. 12 (Apr. 28). Holgate, A. (2007). What a Turn-Up (August 19). At http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/ arts_and_entertainment/books/article2265191.ece, accessed Sept. 2, 2008. Mengham, R. (2001). Fiction’s History. Leviathan, 1, 110–13. Thurschwell, P. (2006). Genre, Repetition and History in Jonathan Coe. In P. Tew & R. Mengham (eds.), British Fiction Today. London: Continuum, pp. 28–39.
Colonial Fiction RICHARD RUPPEL
Colonial fiction may be defined as fiction set in what was once the colonial world, the world that European powers colonized starting in the “Age of Discovery” and ending in the mid twentieth century, when Europe divested itself of its colonies. In this fiction, typically, white, male protagonists leave Europe as explorers, adventurers, soldiers, traders, administrators, or, occasionally, exiled criminals to encounter a foreign world of exotic jungles, deserts, illnesses, and, especially, peoples and cultures. These fictions commonly represent the colonial world in conventional terms, which may or may not correspond to the colonial world that can be recovered in letters, newspaper accounts, and other records available both in the European home country and in the former colony itself. These conventions were, and continue to be, influential in shaping perceptions of the lands and peoples of the former colonies.
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Great Britain began telling itself colonial stories even before it became a colonial power. Shakespeare’s The Tempest, written at the very beginning of the seventeenth century, before England had settled colonies in North America or begun its conquest of India, can be read as a colonial allegory. Prospero and his daughter, Miranda, are shipwrecked on an island, where Prospero frees one of its inhabitants, Ariel, who agrees to become Prospero’s servant. The other “native,” Caliban, is less tractable. Although he is taught English and is well treated, he repays Prospero’s kindness by attempting to rape Miranda, so Prospero keeps him enslaved by force. Prospero’s magic gives him the power to control the island, just as superior technologies and weapons would give European countries control of their colonial possessions. Ariel represents the “Westernized natives” that appear in later narratives – a more or less willing Friday figure who accepts his servitude with little schooling. Prospero needs only to offer occasional threats to keep Ariel in line, and he promises to free Ariel once Prospero accomplishes his plans to regain his authority back in Italy. Caliban, on the other hand, represents the treacherous other who must be subdued by force given his openly expressed desire to rape a white woman. As in so many later colonial stories, Prospero brings reason, morality, and order to the island – to his proto-colonial outpost – rewarding the subservient and punishing those who resist his authority. The next important colonialist work, Oroonoko (1688) by Aphra Behn, is also one of the earliest English novels. Unlike the vast majority of colonial fictions, the protagonist here is an African; and though the narrator is English, several of the English characters are introduced as villains. Despite these divergences from the general trends in colonial fiction, Oroonoko never questions the institution of slavery, and the two protagonists, Oroonoko and Imoinda, are so exceptional in their physical beauty, intelligence, and nobility, that they cannot be seen as arguments against European imperialism. They cannot, in other words, be seen as representative, non-European characters. But Oroonoko does provide the earliest representation of the noble savage in the English novel. The most influential work of colonial literature, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), was published just as Britain was building its empire in
North America, the Indian subcontinent, and elsewhere, but it touches upon no English colonial possessions at all. Crusoe is captured and enslaved in North Africa, settles in the Portuguese colony of Brazil, and is shipwrecked on a deserted island that he eventually claims as his own colonial possession. Despite its lack of direct concern with Britain’s colonies, however, Robinson Crusoe is the seminal work of colonial fiction. It includes nearly all of the features we have come to associate with the genre. After Crusoe saves Friday from his enemies – who, like Friday, are native to South America and who are just about to kill and eat him – Friday is given and immediately accepts his status as Crusoe’s servant. In what has become its most famous scene, Friday prostrates himself before Crusoe and places Crusoe’s foot on his head. Crusoe gives him – and Friday accepts – the name “Friday” – not a name either of them, or contemporary readers, would have accepted had Friday been a white man. Crusoe teaches Friday English, though he never thinks of learning Friday’s language, and Friday quickly embraces Christianity. Friday is distinguished from his peers physically, morally, and intellectually, and he serves Crusoe loyally, cheerfully, and amusingly until he is killed in a sequel novel, The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Friday is the original for a long line of “native sidekicks,” from Rudyard Kipling’s Gunga Din, to Joseph Conrad’s Dain Waris in Lord Jim. Many other features of Robinson Crusoe became conventions of colonial fiction. European moral superiority and, especially, the absolute truth of the Christianity Crusoe embraces over the course of the novel remain unquestioned in the colonial works that follow. When Crusoe escapes captivity early in the novel and sails along the African coast, the forbidding landscape and people are represented as strange, even fantastic. Crusoe domesticates his island, becomes its lord, and claims it absolutely as his own – practices that are repeated and remain unquestioned in both the reality and fiction of colonial conquest. Women have almost no role in the novel – Crusoe’s relationship with Friday is far more compelling than his one romantic relationship with a woman. Indeed, the marginalization or complete absence of women is a key feature of the vast majority of colonial fiction, which is written by men for an audience of men and boys.
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COLONIAL FICTION
Britain’s conquest of India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries fueled popular interest in the Indian subcontinent. Sir Walter Scott’s The Surgeon’s Daughter (1827) includes “Oriental” despots, a dashing English hero, and a young Englishwoman who must be saved from being enslaved by a lustful sultan. Philip Meadows Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug (1839), a popular sensation and a favorite of Queen Victoria, traces the life of Ameer Ali, a member of the Thuggee clan who waylays, robs, and kills travelers in southern India. The British Empire reached its height at the end of the nineteenth century, and Rider Haggard wrote the most popular African fiction of that period. King Solomon’s Mines (1885) concerns an “Oriental” despot, King Twala; a superior African servant of the English protagonists, Umbopa, who gains the kingship of Kukuanaland after the evil King Twala is killed; and a romance between a white protagonist, Captain Good, and a beautiful African, Foulata. Like most such interracial romances in colonial fiction, this one is doomed – Foulata dies in a struggle with an evil African witch, Gagool. Haggard’s She (1887) concerns another doomed biracial romance, this one between the protagonist Leo Vincey and the African Ustane, a deadly African landscape, and racist representations of Africans; but Haggard here introduces a twist on the “Oriental” despot: She is an immortal white woman, Ayesha. Rudyard Kipling’s fiction was even more popular than Haggard’s. His Plain Tales from the Hills (1888b), a collection of short stories published when he was only 22, made him famous. Kipling’s colonial fiction focuses on the expatriate English community in India – its administrators, soldiers, journalists, and adventurers – and includes all the colonialist conventions: fiercely loyal Indian servants, treacherous “Westernized natives,” deprecated “half-castes,” doomed biracial romances, corrupt Indian rulers, antagonistic landscapes, and an unshakable faith that the English were India’s natural rulers. Although Kipling’s fiction is often read as thoroughly pro-imperial and racist, his representations of Indian culture, especially in his best novel, Kim (1901), are comparatively nuanced and sympathetic. Many of Kipling’s stories, however, and the hundreds of popular fictions like them, represent
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the colonial world in the same stereotypical terms: corrupt native rulers oppress their people, represented as downtrodden, long-suffering, and trapped in a static culture. Characters of mixed race, referred to derogatorily as “half-castes” and nearly always the subject of ridicule, as well as characters identified as “Westernized natives,” are either mocked for their imperfect efforts to align themselves with and imitate European culture or are treated as sinister – men whose outward acceptance of Western language, culture, and religion masks their treacherous allegiance to their native culture. The many Friday figures of colonial fiction represent the opposite of the “Westernized native”; they are loyal and happily subservient. In their most characteristic act, they die in defense of their white master. Non-white women are represented as alluring but taboo; love affairs between white men and non-white women, though not unusual, are almost never successful. The nefarious tropical landscape is another trope of this literature; jungles are “poisonous” and are often inhabited by “bushmen” scarcely differentiated from the jungle itself. The above tropes, combined with an underlying confidence in white racial superiority, made colonial fiction a dependable promoter of Britain’s imperial conquests. But there were always countertrends. Philip Meadows Taylor was married to Mary Palmer, whose ancestry was both English and Indian; and his representations of Indian life in his novels are well informed and sympathetic. Kipling’s stories contain all the standard colonial tropes, yet he could also represent India and Indians with great warmth and, contrarily, English men and women as strikingly cold. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) is paradoxical in this regard in that it both reproduces and undercuts conventional representations of the colonial world; while several critics (beginning with the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe) have dismissed it as a racist text, others have deemed it the greatest work of anti-colonial English fiction. Although Heart of Darkness blandly mocks Westernized natives – one is described as “a dog in a parody of breeches” another as an overfed “boy” – and sometimes represents Africans as mere accessories of the forbidding jungle, it also fundamentally undermines all colonial conquests, and its depiction of discarded, dying African workers is one of the most potent
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anti-colonial scenes in English literature. The murderous, rapacious Kurtz, the European at the heart of the novella who rules his bit of the Congo with extreme brutality, highlights the dubious nature of the colonial aim of bringing light and civilization to the dark corners of the world. Conrad’s four Malay novels, Almayer’s Folly (1895), An Outcast of the Islands (1896), Lord Jim (1900), and The Rescue (1920) also can be classified as colonial fictions that both promote and undercut conventional representations of colonial situations. The most important of the four, Lord Jim, is, like Heart of Darkness, an interrogation of the possibility that even the most wellintentioned, enlightened Englishmen have the capacity or right to rule in a colonized world. The protagonist, Jim, who becomes Tuan (or, in English, “Lord”) Jim in the fictional Malay village of Patusan, begins his rule successfully but, like Kurtz, ultimately brings ruin to his community and destroys himself. The conventions of colonial literature persist in popular novels and, especially, film. But the counter-trend that treated these conventions with growing skepticism is prevalent in some of the most significant fiction of the twentieth century. Two later modern novels, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) and George Orwell’s Burmese Days (1934), anticipate the end of British rule on the Indian subcontinent and feature British protagonists caught in a dysfunctional colonialist web of corruption and racial bigotry. In A Passage to India, the protagonist Cyril Fielding takes a job in India as a school headmaster and befriends an Indian doctor, Aziz, who is accused of assaulting an Englishwoman, Adela Quested. By taking sides with Aziz, Fielding finds himself at odds with the expatriate English community. The novel debates the possibility of successful friendships between Indians and Britons, meanwhile debunking various entrenched colonialist tropes. Aziz, scorned as a “spoilt, Westernized native,” is a better surgeon than his English superior, Major Callendar; and the chief of police is convinced of Aziz’s guilt because he takes it for granted that all non-white males lust after white women. In reality, Aziz finds Adela unattractive; and the British policeman, blinded by his sense of racial superiority, cannot fathom that standards of beauty differ from one culture to another. Aziz is found innocent, yet the novel, despite this positive res-
olution, ends on a note of skepticism regarding the possibility of bridging the British/Indian social and political divide. Burmese Days, a bleak satire on English rule in Burma, is far less hopeful. The protagonist, John Flory, a timber merchant, hates colonial rule in Burma but does not have the courage to oppose it openly or to leave the country. He befriends Dr. Veraswami, who loves all things English and may become the first Burmese native invited to join the English Club in the fictional Burmese district of Kyauktada. The novel mocks the notions of British racial superiority and the benefits of British rule, and ends darkly, with Flory’s suicide. By the last third of the twentieth century, the colonial era – during which European and other dominant nations took administrative, financial, military, and social control of countries in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific Islands – was over, as former colonies gained their independence. But the effects of colonialism persist, and many of those effects were anticipated by Conrad’s Nostromo (1904), the first important postcolonial novel. Set in the fictional Latin American nation of Costaguana, Nostromo reveals how former colonial powers dominate the economies and politics of former colonies. As in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, the Europeans in Costaguana, who dominate the local economy, believe they are bringing order and progress. In fact, they bring only slight material prosperity, do little to improve the situation of the common people, and are themselves morally corrupt. In the end, many destroy themselves. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), set in Nigeria in the late nineteenth century and focused on the life of Okonkwo, a powerful but flawed Igbo warrior, is the first canonical novel in English to treat the colonial encounter entirely from the point of view of a colonized people. Igbo life is portrayed in all its rich complexity, while the English are represented as a corrosive power that destroys the balanced tribal life of Okonkwo’s people. Critics who analyze colonial literature (often identified as working within colonial discourse theory) have profoundly affected our understanding of colonial literature. By examining historical records, critics have unearthed the distance between the literary representations of the colonial encounter and its historical actuality. Drawing on the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and
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COLONIAL FICTION
others, they have revealed the ways colonial literature reflects a particular colonialist psychology, most often detrimental to both colonizers and colonized. They have explored gender and sexual relations, the role played by women and race, and the many other ways in which the long, complex history of Great Britain’s colonial encounters has been both recreated in and formed by its imaginative literature. SEE ALSO: Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the African Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/ Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Achebe, C. (1958). Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann. Achebe, C. (1977). An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Massachusetts Review, 18, 282–94. Brantlinger, P. (1988). Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bristow, J. (1991). Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World. New York: HarperCollins. Conrad, J. (1895). Almayer’s Folly. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Conrad, J. (1896). An Outcast of the Islands. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Conrad, J. (1898). An Outpost of Progress. In Tales of Unrest. London: T. Fisher Unwin. (First published in serial form in Cosmopolis in 1897.) Conrad, J. (1900). Lord Jim. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Conrad, J. (1902). Heart of Darkness. In Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories. Edinburgh: Blackwood. (First published in serial form in Blackwood’s Magazine, 1899.) Conrad, J. (1904). Nostromo. London: Harper. Conrad, J. (1920). The Rescue. London: J. M. Dent. Fanon, F. (2007). Black Skin, White Masks (trans. R. Philcox). New York: Grove. (Original work in French published, 1952.) Forster, E. M. (1924). A Passage to India. London: Arnold. Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge (trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith). New York: Pantheon. (Original work in French published 1969.)
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Gates, H. L. (ed.) (1985). Race, Writing, and Difference [special issue]. Critical Inquiry, 12(1). Green, M. (1979). Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire. New York: Basic Books. Greenberger, A. J. (1969). The British Image of India: A Study of the Literature of Imperialism, 1880–1960. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haggard, H. R. (1885). King Solomon’s Mines. London: Cassell. Haggard, H. R. (1887). She: A History of Adventure. London: Longman. (First published in serial form in The Graphic 1886–7.) Hobson, J. A. (1961). Imperialism: A Study [1902]. London: Allen and Unwin. Holden, P., & Ruppel, R. J. (eds.) (2003). Imperial Desire: Dissident Sexualities and Colonial Literature. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. JanMohamed, A. R. (1988). Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Kipling, R. (1888a). Plain Tales from the Hills. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink. Kipling, R. (1888b). The Story of the Gadsbys. Allahabad: A. H. Wheeler. Kipling, R. (1898). The Day’s Work. London: Macmillan. Kipling, R. (1901). Kim. London: Macmillan. Lane, C. (1995). The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lane, C. (ed.) (1998). The Psychoanalysis of Race. New York: Columbia University Press. Levi-Strauss, C. (1961). Tristes tropiques (trans. J. Russell). New York: Criterion. (Original work published 1955.) McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge. Miller, C. (1986). Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Orwell, G. (1934). Burmese Days: A Novel. New York: Harper. Parry, B. (1998). Delusions and Discoveries: India in the British Imagination, 1880–1930. London: Verso. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Sharpe, J. (1993). Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Singh, B. (1934). A Survey of Anglo-Indian Fiction. London: Curzon. Torgovnick, M. (1990). Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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COMPTON-BURNETT, IVY
Compton-Burnett, Ivy SARA CRANGLE
Ivy Compton-Burnett was born in 1884 and died in 1969. Her father was James Compton Burnett, a well-known British homoeopath. One of 13 children, Compton-Burnett spent most of her childhood in Hove in the south of England. She then moved to London, where she shared a flat for 30 years with Margaret Jourdain, a writer and authority on English furniture. The author of 20 novels published between 1911 and 1971, Compton-Burnett topped bestseller lists alongside Virginia Woolf and Agatha Christie in 1937. She was lauded by Arnold Bennett, Vita Sackville-West, and John Betjeman among others; in the USA, her popularity throughout the century is indicated by her mention in New York poet Frank O’Hara’s “Biographia Letteraria.” She was touted by the French nouveau roman movement, and translated into many European languages. She received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1955, an honorary doctorate at the University of Leeds in 1960, an OBE in 1967, and was made a companion of the Royal Society of Literature in 1968. A renowned London figure, ComptonBurnett was lampooned by cartoonists, photographed by Cecil Beaton for Vogue, and broadcast on BBC radio and television. Almost all of Compton-Burnett’s novels are set at the end of the nineteenth century in remote, impoverished country houses. Self-absorbed tyrants dominate the insular families therein; rare visitors are often married, thereby becoming part of an embittered whole. Although concerned with marriage and property like most domestic fiction, Compton-Burnett’s stories deliberately undermine the familial bond. As one character states in Two Worlds and Their Ways, “ ‘familiarity breeds contempt, and ought to breed it. It is through familiarity that we get to know each other’ ” (1949, 21). More spectacularly, her work features the worst of familial crimes, including will doctoring and matricide. Perpetrators go unpunished, while revelations and deaths facilitate new marriages of convenience. ComptonBurnett is sometimes considered camp, and is incessantly labeled witty. Her books are composed of intractable dialogues in which declarations, platitudes, and offhand statements are
openly and comically interrogated. Hers is the humor of disproportion: grandiose misdemeanors surface in conversations consumed with minutiae, and are usually taken in stride. Compton-Burnett’s novels are curiously, rigidly repetitive in style and content. Evading succinct labels, her work is variously compared to Plato’s dialogues, Greek tragedies, Anglo-Saxon minstrels, and the satires of Wilde and Waugh. Although primarily likened to Austen, ComptonBurnett’s writing is most readily perceived as a product of modernism, particularly due to her interrogation of language. Furthermore, her novels eschew traditions such as religion, marital fidelity, and moral judgment; she insists that vanity and self-preservation are social norms. Only the protagonist of her first novel, Dolores (1911), puts others first. Compton-Burnett later renounced Dolores; her second novel, Pastors and Masters (1925), followed a 14-year creative hiatus. In this book emerged the stichomythic banter and amoral plotlines that defined her career. Like Nietzsche, Compton-Burnett explores subjective truth, the will to power, and aphoristic statement; as one of her many insightful children remarks in The Present and the Past, “ ‘there is no such thing as truth. It is different in different minds’ ” (1953, 11). Her interest in evolutionary theory is often manifested as blatant social Darwinism; characters regularly claim they will not adapt themselves to others. In league with Freudian and Bergsonian theory, Compton-Burnett extends stream-of-consciousness narration by exposing and articulating unconscious or repressed desires. Indeed, she unabashedly investigates all aspects of human longing, including homosexuality and incest. And like the feminists of her era, Compton-Burnett highlights unequal gender relations. Although playing a public role of dated, prim governess, Compton-Burnett was an avid reader of contemporaries including Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, and Muriel Spark. Critics disagreed about her writing – alternately describing it as artificially wooden or astutely distilled – but Compton-Burnett clearly sought a place in a fictional heritage to which she was well attuned. She describes her books as something between novels and plays; her narrators rarely delineate character appearance, setting, or temporality.
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CONRAD, JOSEPH
Like Gertrude Stein, Compton-Burnett believes “ ‘the present is always the better thing’ ” – a statement from her novel Mother and Son (1955, 182) consistent with the veneration of the here and now throughout her work. In Compton-Burnett, meaning is tied to immediate, ephemeral dialogue, cogently rendered. Even children and uneducated servants speak with discerning alacrity. Conversations are brutally blunt, as when Juliet of Two Worlds and Their Ways states, “ ‘People say we should see ourselves just as others see us . . . But it is better to tell them how to see us, and save the effort. Especially as they are looking forward to our making it’ ” (75). Characters scrupulously assess motivation, even as rare narrative intrusions are heavily qualified, as in an instance in Elders and Betters where a character “seemed to try to give a smile to her sister” (1944, 95). Near paradoxically, this lack of presumption furthers narrative precision. Elizabeth Bowen encapsulates ComptonBurnett’s sharpness: “to read in these days a page of [her] dialogue is to think of the sound of glass being swept up one of these London mornings after a blitz” (1941, 84). In a critical work written during the height of Compton-Burnett’s success, P. H. Newby suggests that following global war, writers felt bewildered about the world, and wanted to write about childhood, a time of limited, insular experience in which moral judgment appeared unnecessary. Compton-Burnett certainly wrote fiction set in her own formative years, thereby evading address of both World Wars. But she also openly acknowledges in interviews that domestic totalitarianism is inextricable from political machinations. Compton-Burnett’s novels expose how tyranny exists within us all; she championed the humanity of her most tyrannical characters. While loyalty, meaning, and truth may be fleeting, for Compton-Burnett wit sustains. SEE ALSO: Feminist Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF)
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Bradbury, M. (1973). Unhappy Families Are All Alike: New Views of Ivy Compton-Burnett. Encounter, 40(1), 71–4. Burkhart, C. (ed.) (1972). The Art of I. Compton-Burnett: A Collection of Critical Essays. London: Gollancz. Burkhart, C. (ed.) (1979). Ivy Compton-Burnett Issue [special issue]. Twentieth-Century Literature, 25(2). Compton-Burnett, I. (1929). Brothers and Sisters. London: Heath Cranton. Compton-Burnett, I. (1944). Elders and Betters. London: Gollancz. Compton-Burnett, I. (1947). Manservant and Maidservant. London: Gollancz. Compton-Burnett, I. (1949). Two Worlds and Their Ways. London: Gollancz. Compton-Burnett, I. (1953). The Present and the Past. London: Gollancz. Compton-Burnett, I . (1955). Mother and Son. London: Gollancz. Compton-Burnett, I. (1957). A Father and His Fate. London: Gollancz. Crangle, S. (2007). Ivy Compton-Burnett and Risibility. In M. MacKay & L. Stonebridge (eds.), British Fiction After Modernism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 99–120. Gentile, Kathy Justice. (1991). Ivy Compton-Burnett. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Grieg, C. (1972). Ivy Compton-Burnett: A Memoir. London: Garnstone. Kermode, F. (1963). The House of Fiction: Interviews with Seven English Novelists. Partisan Review, 7(6), 61–82. Kiernan, R. (1990). Frivolity Unbound: Six Masters of the Camp Novel. New York: Continuum. Liddell, R. (1955). The Novels of I. Compton-Burnett. London: Gollancz. Liddell, R. (1986). Elizabeth and Ivy. London: Peter Owen. McCarthy, M. (1970). The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Newby, P. H. (1951). The Novel: 1945–1950. London: Longmans, Green. Sackville-West, E. (1949). Inclinations. London: Secker and Warburg. Spurling, H. (1984). Ivy: The Life of Ivy ComptonBurnett. New York: Knopf.
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Conrad, Joseph
Asoka, R. T. (1995). Ivy Compton-Burnett and the English Domestic Novel. New Delhi: Prestige. Bowen, E. (1950). Ivy Compton-Burnett. In Collected Impressions. London: Longmans, Green, pp. 82–91.
JOHN G. PETERS
Joseph Conrad has come to be seen as one of the most important British novelists of the twentieth
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century. His formal innovations and skeptical view of the world have influenced generations of subsequent writers, and his work has remained at the center of numerous critical debates since his time. Conrad was born J ozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on December 3, 1857, in Berdycz ow, a largely Polish part of Ukraine, to Apollo Korzeniowski (1820–69) and Ewa Korzeniowska (nee Bobrowska, 1833–65). After the partitions of the eighteenth century, the previously autonomous country of Poland was divided between Russia, Prussia, and Austria–Hungary. Conrad’s parents, in particular his father, were part of the Polish resistance movement against Russian rule, and in late 1861 Apollo was arrested for seditious activities. The following year, Conrad’s parents were exiled to Vologda, a remote part of northern Russia. While in exile, Conrad’s mother contracted tuberculosis and died. His father also contracted tuberculosis and was allowed to return to Poland in 1868, where he died the following year. Thereafter, Conrad was raised by his mother’s family, especially his maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski (1829–94), who was to have a particularly strong influence on him. At 15, Conrad decided that he would like to become a sailor, and two years later his uncle agreed and subsequently sent him to Marseilles, France to train for the merchant marine service. In late 1877 Conrad discovered that he could not join the French merchant marine as planned without the permission of the Russian consul, who would not give his consent. As a result, a few months short of his twenty-first birthday, Conrad, who spoke no English, decided to join the British merchant marine service. His next 17 years were spent as a member of the British merchant marine, first as a sailor, then a mate, and eventually a captain. The experience was to serve as raw material for a number of his fictions. In 1889, while on holiday in London, Conrad took a step that would forever alter his life: he began writing what would later become his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, not in his native Polish nor even in his second language, French, but in English. It would take him roughly six years to complete the novel. In 1895 the simultaneous publication of Almayer’s Folly and sudden dearth of maritime positions pushed Conrad into a new career as a full-time writer. The reception of his
first novel set a pattern that continued for the next 20 years: it was well received by reviewers but did not sell particularly well. During these years, Conrad often struggled with depression, financial difficulties, and physical ailments, but at the same time he also produced no fewer than 10 literary masterpieces: The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” “Youth,” Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, “Typhoon,” Nostromo, The Secret Agent, “The Secret Sharer,” and Under Western Eyes. Not until the publication of his novel Chance (1913) did Conrad achieve the financial security and popularity he had desired for so long. The latter part of Conrad’s life is marked by near-universal acclaim and at the same time by what many regard as a decline in the quality of his work. Conrad’s last completed novel was The Rover, which was published in late 1923. He was at work on another novel, Suspense, when he died of a heart attack on August 3, 1924. Joseph Conrad wrote during the modernist period and was one of its innovators. The period is known for its revisionist view of the nature of the world and for its formal experimentation. Like so many other modernists, he questioned many of the longstanding assumptions concerning the Western view of the world. He had no confidence in the Western world’s privileged position and did not believe the Western worldview was the only viable one. Like many modernists, Conrad questioned the possibility of transcendental meaning. Contrary to his literary predecessors, he often eschewed chronological narrative and instead represented time as fractured. Similarly, he often employed multiple narrators. By these means he was attempting to represent how human beings typically experience events, that is, via multiple sources and in an achronological sequence. Calling Conrad a modernist writer is something of an anachronism, however, as the other modernists produced their most important works some 10 or more years after he began writing. Conrad was thus not only an innovator among the modernists but also an anomaly among his contemporaries. He was a friend and admirer of Henry James, and collaborated with Ford Madox Ford on a number of fictional projects. Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly (1895), is set in the Malay Archipelago. Kaspar Almayer dreams of wealth and leaving the East to live in Amsterdam. From the outset, Almayer’s dreams
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CONRAD, JOSEPH
clearly have no basis in reality and have a crippling effect on him. The novel is unusual for its time in that Conrad questions the ascendancy of Western civilization in Nina Almayer’s rejection of her father’s Western heritage and in Almayer’s defeat at the hands of non-Western forces. Almayer’s Folly was the first of a trilogy written in reverse chronological order. The second was Conrad’s next novel, An Outcast of the Islands (1896), set some years before the action of Almayer’s Folly. In this novel, Conrad simultaneously subverts the romance tradition while once again subverting the presumed superiority of Western civilization. Peter Willems, the novel’s antihero, is caught embezzling funds from his employer and is subsequently dismissed. After quarreling with his halfcaste wife, he leaves her for a Malay woman, A€ıssa, who later convinces Willems to betray to Syed Abdulla the secret passage into Sambir, thus breaking the trading monopoly of Tom Lingard, Willems’s former benefactor. Once again, the non-Westerners prevail, and Willems’s feelings of superiority due to his European heritage are undermined by his moral degeneracy. Conrad’s next novel, The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897), often considered his first masterpiece, investigates the necessity of human solidarity for survival in an indifferent universe. The crew of the Narcissus must weather a severe storm as well as the pressure brought to bear on their solidarity by a black crew member, James Wait. His race strains bonds of solidarity, as does his assertion of illness, which prevents him from performing his fair share of the work. The crew is torn between resenting him and feeling an obligation to him as a fellow crew member. The storm brings out the necessity of cooperative effort for the crew’s mutual survival and conversely the danger to the community of those like James Wait and another character, Donkin, who fail to cooperate. The storm episode becomes a microcosm of the plight of humanity, which Conrad feels must demonstrate solidarity in the face of a universe indifferent to its existence. Conrad then published a volume of stories, Tales of Unrest (1898). The gem of this collection is “An Outpost of Progress,” a story that looks at Europe’s “civilizing” activity in the Belgian Congo and in this sense looks forward to Heart of Darkness. Two traders, Carlier and Kayerts, alone in the center of Africa, become increasingly de-civilized, until
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Kayerts accidentally kills Carlier during a dispute over some sugar. Kayerts then hangs himself just after hearing the whistle of the arriving company steamer. Rather than being an outpost of progress, the station becomes an outpost of regress and thus calls into question the Western civilizing mission and accompanying view of Western superiority. Conrad’s next work was “Youth” (first published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1898), which looks back wistfully at the contrast between youthful exuberance and mature experience in the face of the inexorable movement toward the death of all things. Heart of Darkness (first published in 1899, also in Blackwood’s Magazine), which followed, is probably Conrad’s best-known and most widely read work. Set in the Congo, Conrad again subverts the Western civilizing mission and Western superiority by showing the barbarian behavior of his European characters; but Heart of Darkness goes further and considers the question of human nature itself. In the end, the narrator, Marlow (who also appears in “Youth”), in his meditation on the larger-thanlife character of Kurtz, discovers that there is no inherent value in the universe and that all systems of meaning are merely contingent. Lord Jim (1900), Conrad’s next work and a masterpiece of literary modernist experimentation, once again takes up and undermines the romance genre. Jim, who sees himself as a heroic individual, fails to act heroically when the crucial moment arrives, and spends the rest of his life trying to recover from his failure. Marlow, who narrates Lord Jim, is torn between the realization that romantic ideals are hopelessly flawed and at the same time indispensable. “The End of the Tether” (1902), which concerns protagonist Captain Whalley’s moral fall, followed. In 1903, Conrad published Typhoon and Other Stories, which included “Amy Foster” and the eponymous title story, among others. “Amy Foster” considers the tragic history of Yanko Goorall, a Pole shipwrecked on the English coast, who is mistrusted, misunderstood, and mistreated by the local population only to die alone, even after his marriage to a local Englishwoman, Amy Foster. Many view Yanko’s experience as a gloss on Conrad’s own experience, despite his marriage to an Englishwoman, of alienation and otherness within his
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adopted British homeland. The collection’s centerpiece, “Typhoon,” follows the actions of Captain MacWhirr, a man who sees only what is right before him, and his officer Jukes, who believes him to be the stupidest of men. MacWhirr’s very obtuseness, however, becomes a virtue in helping his ship make it through a powerful storm. The tale’s descriptions of storm and sea, along with those contained in Nigger, are among the greatest in British fiction. Nostromo, which many consider to be Conrad’s finest novel, appeared in 1904. In this work, Conrad explores a South American revolution and the social, political, and economic issues surrounding it. Conrad condemns both the revolutionaries and the government, whose actions destroy friends, foes, and bystanders alike. Nostromo also explores the damaging effects of material interests, as the silver from the silver mine becomes the focus, and primary desire, of most of the novel’s characters, ultimately proving to be their moral and physical undoing. At the same time, the novel demonstrates the damaging effect of fixed ideas, which cloud the judgment of many of the characters. Conrad followed Nostromo not with a work of fiction but with a memoir, The Mirror of the Sea (1906), a collection of reminiscences of his earlier seagoing adventures. In 1907 Conrad published The Secret Agent, in which he once again investigates how political intrigues, whether revolutionary or conservative, destroy families and individuals. A detached, mordantly ironic narrator surveys a collection of sham revolutionaries who are wholly ineffectual, and a collection of government authorities who flout the very laws they purport to uphold. In the foreground of this London political scene is the double (or perhaps triple) agent, Adolf Verloc, who is commissioned to blow up the Greenwich Meridian Observatory by Mr. Vladimir, a high-ranking Russian embassy official, in order to cast blame on the revolutionaries and create a more repressive environment for radicals in Britain. Verloc enlists his intellectually challenged brother-in-law, Stevie, to deliver the bomb, only to have Stevie inadvertently detonate it, blowing himself up. When Verloc’s wife Winnie discovers what has happened to her brother, she murders Verloc, and later commits suicide. What begins as politi-
cal satire ends up as the darkest of domestic tragedies. Conrad next published the collection A Set of Six (1908), in which the two most successful stories are “Il Conde” and “The Duel.” Conrad’s most productive period concluded in 1911 with the appearance of Under Western Eyes, a novel that considers the effects of betrayal and revolution on Razumov, a Russian student. Razumov returns to his rooms one evening only to find there Haldin, a fellow student, who confesses his assassination of a prominent minister that morning. Razumov, fearing he will be implicated in the murder, decides to turn in Haldin to the authorities. Afterwards, unable to concentrate on his studies, Razumov agrees to work for the authorities as a double agent. Eventually, he discovers that he cannot live this life of deception and confesses his role to the revolutionaries, one of whom deafens Razumov, who is then run over by an oncoming tram that he cannot hear. The novel ends with Razumov living a secluded life in rural Russia, physically crippled but spiritually at peace, as he discovers that political ideals have no value without a commensurate dedication to humanity. Even more graphically than in Nostromo and The Secret Agent, Conrad demonstrates here the extent to which individuals are crushed beneath the weight of warring political movements and are victimized by politics in general. Under Western Eyes was followed by A Personal Record (1912), an autobiography that focuses primarily on Conrad’s decision to pursue a life at sea and on his decision to write his first novel. That same year Conrad published ’Twixt Land and Sea, a collection of three stories, the most important of which is “The Secret Sharer,” which follows the action of a young captain in his first command, who discovers a man, Leggatt, hanging onto the ship’s ladder. Leggatt has escaped from his ship after killing an insubordinate crew member during a storm. The young captain secretes Leggatt, a kind of second self, in his cabin and later allows him to escape to a nearby island. The captain’s experience with Leggatt and his successfully bringing the ship out of a dangerous maneuver are milestones in the young captain’s rite of passage. The publication of Conrad’s wildly popular novel Chance in 1913 begins the later phase of Conrad’s career, which many view as marking a
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decline in his artistic achievement. Chance follows the romance of Captain Anthony and Flora, the psychologically damaged daughter of a financier, who has been convicted of fraud. Victory, which followed Chance in 1915, and which like it was a popular, if not a critical, success, considers the effects of Axel Heyst’s attempts to pass through life as a bystander rather than as an actor in events. After Heyst rescues Lena, an exploited member of a traveling orchestra, and carries her off, a group of ruffians arrive on his island. During an ensuing confrontation, the ruffians are killed, but Lena also dies during the conflict, and only then does Heyst despair at his missed opportunity to participate in life and he subsequently takes his own life. Another collection of stories, Within the Tides, appeared in 1915. In 1917 Conrad published The Shadow-Line, probably the most successful of his later works, in which the author investigates once again a male protagonist’s progress from youth to maturity. A young captain in his first command must weather the rampant illness among his crew while his ship is caught in a deadly calm. By successfully overcoming the crisis, the captain gains the necessary experience and confidence in himself to become worthy of the position he holds. Conrad’s next novel was The Arrow of Gold (1919), a romance set during the Carlist conspiracy. The following year Conrad completed The Rescue, a novel he had begun some 23 years earlier. The novel is the third in his Malay trilogy, begun with his first two novels. Set before the time of those novels, it tells of Tom Lingard who attempts to help his friend and deposed Malay prince Hassim regain his throne. When Lingard chooses to come to the aid of a European ship stranded on a sandbar, he sets in motion a chain of events that ends with the collapse of his plans and the death of Hassim. In the end, The Rescue demonstrates the difficulty of any permanent communion between East and West. In 1921, Conrad published Notes on Life and Letters, which brought together a collection of earlier non-fiction prose pieces. Conrad’s last completed novel was The Rover (1923). Set in Napoleonic France, the novel chronicles a sea rover, Peyrol, who has returned to France to retire but is eventually drawn back into connections with those around him. Peyrol ends his life by taking the place of Lieutenant Real on a
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suicide mission to deceive the English, thus sacrificing himself for the sake of the next generation. Four of Conrad’s works were published posthumously: Suspense (1925a), an unfinished novel set in Napoleonic France just prior to Napoleon’s return from Elba; Tales of Hearsay (1925b), a collection of stories; “The Sisters” (1928), a short fragment of a novel; and Last Essays (1926), a collection of miscellaneous essays from the late period of his life. At the time of his death, Conrad was acknowledged as the most prominent figure in British letters and he has since come to be recognized as one of the most important and influential figures in twentiethcentury literature. SEE ALSO: Colonial Fiction (BIF); Ford, Ford Madox (BIF); James, Henry (AF); London in Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Baines, J. (1959). Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Berthoud, J. (1978). Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brooks, R. (dir.) (1965). Lord Jim. Columbia Pictures. Conrad, J. (1895). Almayer’s Folly. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Conrad, J. (1896). An Outcast of the Islands. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Conrad, J. (1897). The Nigger of the “Narcissus.” London: Heinemann. Conrad, J. (1898). Tales of Unrest. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Conrad, J. (1900). Lord Jim. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Conrad, J. (1902). Youth and Two Other Stories. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Conrad, J. (1903). Typhoon and Other Stories. London: Heinemann. Conrad, J. (1904). Nostromo. London: Harper. Conrad, J. (1906). The Mirror of the Sea. London: Methuen. Conrad, J. (1907). The Secret Agent. London: Methuen. Conrad, J. (1908). A Set of Six. London: Methuen. Conrad, J. (1911). Under Western Eyes. London: Methuen. Conrad, J. (1912a). Some Reminiscences. London: Eveleigh Nash. Conrad, J. (1912b). Twixt Land and Sea. London: J. M. Dent. Conrad, J. (1913). Chance. London: Methuen.
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Conrad, J. (1915a). Victory. London: Methuen. Conrad,J.(1915b).WithintheTides.London:J. M.Dent. Conrad, J. (1917). The Shadow-Line. London: J. M. Dent. Conrad, J. (1919). The Arrow of Gold. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Conrad, J. (1920). The Rescue. London: J. M. Dent. Conrad, J. (1923). The Rover. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Conrad, J. (1925a). Suspense. London: J. M. Dent. Conrad, J. (1925b). Tales of Hearsay. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Conrad, J. (1926). Last Essays. London: J. M. Dent. Conrad, J. (1983–2007). The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad (ed. F. Karl, L. Davies, J. Stape, G. Moore, & O. Knowles). 9 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Conrad, J., & Ford, F. M. (1901). The Inheritors. London: Heinemann. Conrad, J., & Ford, F. M. (1903). Romance. London: Smith, Elder. Conrad, J., & Ford, F. M. (1924). The Nature of a Crime. London: Duckworth. Coppola, F. F. (dir.) (1979). Apocalypse Now. Omni Zoetrope. Ehrsam, T. (1969). A Bibliography of Joseph Conrad. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow. Fleishman, A. (1967). Conrad’s Politics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gillon, A. (1982). Joseph Conrad. Boston: Twayne. Guerard, A. (1958). Conrad the Novelist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hampton, C. (dir.) (1996). The Secret Agent. Fox Searchlight Pictures/Capitol Films. Hitchcock, A. (dir.) (1936). Sabotage. Gaumont-British Picture Corporation. Hay, E. (1963). The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Karl, F. (1969). A Reader’s Guide to Joseph Conrad, rev. edn. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Moser, T. (1957). Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Najder, Z. (2007). Joseph Conrad: A Life (trans. H. Najder). Rochester, NY: Camden House. Peters, J. (2001). Conrad and Impressionism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peters, J. (2006). The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, R. (dir.) (1977). The Duellists. Paramount/ Enigma Productions. Sherry, N. (1966). Conrad’s Eastern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sherry, N. (1971). Conrad’s Western World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Teets, B. (1990). Joseph Conrad: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland.
Teets, B., & Gerber, H. (1971). Joseph Conrad: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings about Him. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Watt, I. (1979). Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Crace, Jim PHILIP TEW
Jim Crace is a successful British writer of fiction who lives somewhat unfashionably – for a leading cultural figure – in Birmingham, his adopted home. Born in 1944, he first came there as a student in the 1960s and continues to exhibit a fierce loyalty to the city. After graduating, he traveled on VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) to Africa, teaching school on his return; both of these experiences are reflected in an early short story, “Cross Country.” Crace became a journalist working for national newspapers such as The Guardian and The Telegraph. As part of his creative ambitions of this period, he joined a social group (which included Melvyn Bragg) of young writers drinking together in Soho, in whom Ian Hamilton, editor of the New Review, took a personal interest. Crace’s first major publication was an award-winning story, “Annie, California Plates,” published in the New Review. Later anthologized, it charts the progress of a car as its various drivers take on board new passengers. In this early piece Crace introduces the beginnings of an uncanny, fantastical element that stretches and yet acclimatizes the reader’s sense of disbelief, a strategy strongly characteristic of his later fiction. Known in literary circles for his self-effacing modesty, Crace staunchly refuses to regard his own life as either important or central to his fiction. Nevertheless he draws imaginatively upon the hinterland of the northern edge of London close to where he grew up in Enfield, a once highly industrialized borough whose urban sprawl abuts the almost idyllic countryside on the borders of Middlesex, Essex, and Hertfordshire. Here his father worked as a groundsman, teaching his son a love of ecology and of all things natural, and, as a local activist in the Labour Party, passing on his leftist radicalism. Crace’s fiction creates imaginary landscapes, first seen in his first book, Continent (1986), a
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series of interrelated stories all set on an imaginary sixth continent. This book earned Crace the Whitbread Award for First Novel, the David Higham Prize for Fiction, and the Guardian Fiction Prize, and it features the rhythmic, almost poetic, and often whimsical prose that would come to characterize his later work. Crace’s fictional world is distinctive and its realities interfused with strong elements of the fantastical, described whimsically as “Craceland” in Adam Begley’s perceptive profile, “A Pilgrim in Craceland” (2002). Craceland’s landscapes are vivid, impacting upon characters who appear to be victims of a larger physical and emotional turmoil, often lost in the almost primeval contention of such forces. In describing these Crace draws variously on his travels to Africa, Cornwall and the Scilly Isles, and the coast of America’s eastern seaboard to evoke unfamiliar environments both urban and natural. Crace’s subsequent novels are varied. The Gift of Stones (1988) describes the destruction of a Stone Age village based on working stone whose productivity is displaced by bronze implements. Disabled after the amputation of an arm, the central, unnamed storyteller leads his people into the unknown after discovering his own gift for narrative. Storytelling’s necessary yet deceptive salvations are a recurrent theme of Crace’s works. Arcadia (1992) is concerned with the false idyll of the rural derived from childhood maternal tales that seduces aging commercial magnate, Victor, to create a myth around his country origins from which his mother escaped. Crace here adapts various concepts and observations of urban theorist Jane Jacobs concerning the vitality of cities and their possibilities as environments in which to explore the anti-pastoral. Crace describes in Arcadia the destruction of the traditional market and the development of a sterile shopping mall. Quarantine (1997) focuses on spirituality rendered through Crace’s agnostic skepticism. The novel charts the self-sacrifice of Christ who is on a pilgrimage and far from divine as he encounters an unscrupulous trader, Musa, who will purvey his story of being resurrected by an accidental intervention of this unwilling savior. Being Dead (1999) describes the murder of two academics, and details the decomposition of their lifeless bodies. Another part of the narrative recovers both their last day and their initial anti-romantic encounter as
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students in the landscape where they will die. Set in the unnamed City of Kisses, which seems both eastern European and South American, Six (2003) – entitled Genesis in North America – concerns the life of an actor, who is procreatively (and therefore Darwinistically) successful, with a child born to each woman with whom he copulates. However, such apparent success is offset by his failure in relationships (most of them casual, brief, or both) and his lack of knowledge about many of his offspring. The Pesthouse (2007) is a post-apocalyptic narrative that describes pestilence and an unlikely couple’s eastward quest through America, in which modernity has been abandoned and superstition and violent threat destabilize any certainties in the protagonists’ lives. Quarantine and Signals of Distress (1994) evoke two historical settings, Judea at the time of Christ and early nineteenth-century Cornwall, both of which remain wild, untamed, and always potentially hostile. In such settings Crace’s fiction deals with archetypal situations and characters, traders and customers, lovers and rivals, fathers and sons, political oppressor and victim of torture, idealist anti-slavery campaigner and slaver captain. In creating all of these locations he clearly draws upon the intensity of his passion for wildlife, landscape, and walking, and occasionally demonstrates his personal capacity for impulsive falsehoods. Crace offsets his often grandiloquent themes, such as death, belonging, desire, rivalry, spirituality, and malevolence with an almost compulsive delight in creating the detail of exotic customs, lives, and encounters that are transmuted into the mundane. In a manner unusual in English contemporary writing his fiction synthesizes an earthy descriptiveness with the implicit concerns and the symbolic possibilities inherent in quotidian human interaction. Each of his novels revolves around a conceit or pursues through characters and events a central conceptual idea. Personally he is determinedly English in a left-liberal tradition, doggedly maintaining a sense of his working-class roots and proud of his unfashionable normality. As a consequence, in a homeland still obsessed with class and celebrity, he is perhaps regarded more highly in Europe and in America than in Britain. While in Britain Quarantine was Whitbread Novel of the Year and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, in America Being Dead was
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awarded the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2007 the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin acquired Crace’s archive and in spring 2008 he was visiting Distinguished Writerin-Residence at the university’s James Michener Center for Writers. SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Begley, A. (2002). A Pilgrim in Craceland. Southwest Review, 87(2–3), 227–40. Constable, J., & Aoyama, H. (2001). Testing for Mathematical Lineation in Jim Crace’s Quarantine and T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 15, 35–52. Crace, J. (1986). Continent. London: Heinemann. Crace, J. (1988). The Gift of Stones. London: Secker and Warburg. Crace, J. (1992). Arcadia. London: Jonathan Cape. Crace, J. (1994). Signals of Distress. London: Viking. Crace, J. (1995). The Slow Digestions of the Night. London: Penguin. Crace, J. (1997). Quarantine. London: Viking. Crace, J. (1999). Being Dead. London: Viking. Crace, J. (2001). The Devil’s Larder. London: Viking. Crace, J. (2003). Six. London: Viking. (Published in US as Genesis. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.) Crace, J. (2007). The Pesthouse. London: Penguin. Fitzgerald, C. A. (2004). Poppy Love: Fathers Find Salvation in Two New Novels. Gettysburg Review, 17(1), 151–7. Lane, R. J. (2003). The Fiction of Jim Crace: Narrative and Recovery. In R. J. Lane, R. Mengham, & P. Tew (eds.), Contemporary British Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, pp. 27–39. Teske, D. (2002). Jim Crace’s Arcadia: Public Culture in the Postmodern City. In S. Onega & J. A. Stotesbury (eds.), London in Literature: Visionary Mappings of the Metropolis. Heidelberg: Universit€atverlag Winter, pp. 165–82. Tew, P. (2006). Jim Crace. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tew, P. (2007). A Conversation between Jim Crace and Philip Tew. Critical Engagements, 1(1), 333–56. Tew, P. (2009). Jim Crace’s Enigmatical Pastoral. In D. James & P. Tew (eds.), New Versions of Pastoral: PostRomantic, Modern, and Contemporary Responses to the Tradition. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, pp. 230–44.
Critical Theory and the Novel PATRICIA WAUGH
To try to draw together the broad constellation of practices known as “theory” and the loose aggregate of conventions constituting the genre of the novel is a complex business, but critical theory helped to shape the work of novelists since 1960, just as it helped to reshape a sense of the canonical histories of the novel as a genre. From the late 1960s, there was a pervasive rethinking of the very foundations and conditions of thought across all the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. In this sense, the theoretical turn was general, but its manifestations and objects were diverse, varying in important ways from discipline to discipline, and from one cultural and national context to another. But as with the broader “theoretical turn” of the 1960s, the literary or critical theory that flourished across departments of Anglo-American letters represented a revolt against positivist and empiricist assumptions in criticism. For poststructuralism, neoMarxism, psychoanalysis, and narrative theory were all depth models of knowledge that sought a reorientation toward the a priori as the search for underlying formal relations that might provide the conditions for grasping and expressing the phenomena of the world and of human experience. First, with the technical linguistics of Chomsky and, thereafter, with the more easily assimilable linguistics of Saussure, structuralism began as a revolt against empiricism through the positing of a system of logical or formal relations within language, a system of intellectual and rulegoverned operations that are given priority over any hypothetical or acclaimed empiricist relation of word to world. The poststructuralist turn that erupted out of this prison-house of language was shaped by the traditions of the discipline of English studies. This had been laid down in the 1920s within the broadly positivist (and organicist) orientation of the New Critics and I. A. Richards, the empiricism of F. R. Leavis, and the eclectic anti-Cartesianism of T. S. Eliot. Specifically, therefore, in English studies, the theoretical turn constituted a rebellion against what Paul de Man would refer to in Blindness and Insight (1993
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[1983] ) as the “aesthetic ideology” of modernist literary criticism, and more specifically, the rule of New Criticism (in America) and of the Eliot– Leavis hegemony (in Britain). For poststructuralists such as de Man, Marxists such as Terry Eagleton, and feminists such as Elaine Showalter, “aesthetic ideology” is that ethos of the promised cultural redemption to be effected through the organicist complexity of the literary text, engaged through the honed instruments of critical close reading. The literary aesthetic had been advanced as a potent curative that might redeem a fallen modernity and provide the means to overcome a crippling post-Cartesian “dissociation of sensibility.” In this Fall myth of modernity, famously adduced in T. S. Eliot’s essay on “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921), an increasingly cerebralized, post-Cartesian orientation toward abstract thinking (theory), is seen to be divorced from the sensuously experiential, the luminous detail, and the affective and tactile responsiveness to the contingencies of the human world of history. In Britain, in particular, therefore, the theoretical turn took the form of a revolt against the Leavisite “great tradition”: a philosophically naive mode of “expressive realism” or Kulturkritik. Leavis’s ideal of a common culture was now seen as the aesthetic smokescreen for an academic protection racket designed to safeguard the still hegemonic values of an increasingly beleaguered bourgeois class. The theory revolution developed rapidly via a somewhat strained and temporary alliance between the linguistic preoccupations and skeptical ironies of the poststructuralist turn and an increasingly complex (and politically activist) left culturalist identity politics, beginning with the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s movement, and national liberation movements (soon to be theorized under the umbrella of cultural theory), to produce that uneasy hybrid: the postmodern. Expressive realism was understood by academic theorists as the mimetic view that language delivers up truths about life and the human condition and that reality is a coherent whole standing behind its formulation in words. Within the terms of academic theory, therefore, fictional realism comes to be seen as a discursive mode in which there is an attempt to impose on the text this kind of illusory consensus about the real by suppressing and disguising the contra-
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dictions or aporias opened up in all discourses by the metaphoric and differential nature of a language that can finally never command the subject matter that it purports to represent. Realism claims to reflect a world that is, in fact, always already constructed. However, if it is impossible to move beyond and outside of our instruments of interrogation (primarily language), then we are caught within incommensurable language games only ever offering a knowledge of the world relative to the scope of their conceptual frameworks. Delusory too, therefore, is our naive and logocentric faith in the capacity of language to mirror nature and our belief that the meaning of the word somehow has its origin in the nature of the real and can therefore reflect its structures in the mind as a metaphysics of presence. Now we can see that truth is a kind of fiction, reality also an appearance, depth only ever another surface, history an endless regress of texts, and reading always a mode of misreading. We inhabit not the real, but always our representations of it. What is evident throughout the period, however, is that theory, despite its more immediate academic contexts and its often idealist claims to stand outside of history, is shaped by the very historical conditions and cultural changes that also shape the forms and preoccupations of the novel. The processes of globalization and diversification that provide the historical identity of the period are equal if not more powerful pressures on the forms and modes of its fiction. Novelists are almost never card-carrying theorists; many sought to assimilate textual self-referentiality into a fictional tradition where realism tempers romance, and where ethical commitment is allied with a broadly empiricist tradition: this is as perceptible in novelists as different as Virginia Woolf (with her Bloomsbury affiliations with G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell’s Cambridge realism) and George Orwell (whose work continuously makes a connection between the theory of intellectuals and a misplaced faith in abstract argument that is ultimately complicit with totalitarianism). This fictional orientation meshed with a mainstream intellectual tradition broadly liberal in ethos; concerned with moral considerations and the ongoing need for contracts that provide for the protection of human rights; and requiring the belief that being reasonable requires assertions to be supported by verifiable evidence
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that is not simply the property of a particular language game or cultural group, but is, as far as possible, universalizable and applicable to all human beings. In the writing of George Orwell, there is a skepticism about rationalistic grand narratives: this tradition already preferred to do its social theorizing in a piecemeal and tentative fashion through “ordinary language” or fiction, rather than through grand theory and technical vocabularies, jargon, neologism, and global pronouncement. A. S. Byatt’s work, for example, is a testimony to the kind of cautious response of writers to the more academic modes of the theoretical turn: taught by Leavis at Cambridge, Byatt in her very first novel, Shadow of a Sun (1964), featured a central character, a critic, evidently modeled on the great man, and similarly driven by a puritanical moral ferocity about literature; it is a moral aesthetic, however, that is depicted in this first novel as finally destructive of the literary imagination. Yet her later novels, Babel Tower (1996), Possession (1990), and A Whistling Woman (2002) are equally skeptical about the effects of the linguistic skepticism of the theoretical turn that replaced Leavisism. Academic theory is exposed for its vanity, blindness, and, in Possession, duplicity and greed. Indeed, Byatt’s mode of contested and conflicted realism is fairly representative of the literary responsiveness of the majority of British and Irish novelists to the theory revolution of the last 40 years. Interestingly, too, the conflicted engagement with literary theory often runs alongside a similarly complex engagement with new scientific theories in the period: a pervasive strain is the Darwinist picture of the human as a stripped down animal, a vulnerable biological creature, naked and bereft of certain belief. It is a picture that reflects the growing biologization, medicalization, and scientization of culture at this time (a shift first noted in Foucault’s works of the 1960s). Samuel Beckett, William Golding, Iris Murdoch, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, and John Banville, to name but a handful, all mediate such a picture, and their work serves as a valuable reminder to academic literary theorists that the other theory revolution of the period – also overturning positivism – has been in the sciences, in the turn away from a strict positivism and a more expansionist return to a biological and naturalist paradigm of knowledge and
values. This has been variously expressed in the ultra-Darwinism of Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary psychology of Stephen Pinker, the neuroscientific constructions of the mind of the 1990s, and the pervasive preoccupation with the body, genetics, and the neo-Darwinist understanding of the mind as the brain. While academic critics have remained largely preoccupied with the postmodern or textualist turn in the period, writers such as Byatt, Amis, McEwan, David Lodge, Fay Weldon, Jeanette Winterson, Ishiguro, and many others were often as much preoccupied with the new theories in the life sciences as with theory, as in literary or critical theory. A major theme of this writing, indeed, has been the recognition that both kinds of theory tend to present life through metaphors of linguistic codes, scriptoral tropes, and notions of rewriting and re-engineering lifescripts. So even the linguistic turn in literary studies is arguably as much an outgrowth of developments within British society and the broader culture of knowledge, as of a more narrowly defined academic theory. By the late 1970s, changes brought about by globalization, subcultural formations, and shifting cultural identities were giving rise to new stylistic experiments in the novel and the forging of new fictional languages: the grotesque metafictional slapstick of Martin Amis; the exuberant Rabelaisian vulgarity of Angela Carter; Salman Rushdie’s unique mixing and mingling of Hindi, Urdu, and English intonation and phonology to create a hybrid language (Angrezi) and with it a new mythology of the mongrel. The linguistic experimentalism of these writers hugely influenced the next generation of novelists such as Will Self, Hanif Kureishi, Arundhati Roy, Zadie Smith, Hari Kunzru, Nicola Barker, and Ian Sinclair and, after 1980, the British novel began to look more variegated, hybrid, linguistically playful, and self-conscious. The impulse came not only from writers from outside the British Isles but from those who felt internally colonized within it. Writers such as James Kelman and Irvine Welsh began to experiment with Scottish vernacular and, like Rushdie, to globalize the local. In the early 1980s, Kelman began experimenting with free indirect discourse, mixing standard and vernacular languages, without implying the usual hierarchization. By the time of How Late It Was, How Late, which won the Booker
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Prize in 1994, he had developed a unique modernist vernacular that bestowed on the disinherited and the underclass an inner life as real as that of Joyce’s Bloom or Beckett’s tramps and loners. Either way, the linguistic self-reflexivity is a product of history as much as, if not more so than, simply academic theorizing. But theory has always had a complex relation with the genre of the novel: in significant ways, the novel developed in part as a response to theory in the guise of the eighteenth-century obsession with intellectual explanatory systems, the offspring of the early Enlightenment marriage of Cartesian rationalism and Baconian scientific empiricism. One system, in particular, Adam Smith’s Theory of the Moral Sentiments (1759), was definitively associated with the novel genre. Sentimentalism as a systematization of knowledge of the nature and effects of human affect was increasingly engaged as a means of resisting the machinic and socio-biological logic of the Hobbesian “scientific” theory of human nature. For the empathetic and the sentimental were seen to require a heightening and disciplining into a theoretical system if they were to be elevated above the contingencies of individual feeling into a more scientific or metaphysically coherent order that might provide a substantial enough secular substitute for the moral practices of the religious life: one that would also counter the Hobbesian mechanical picture of the necessity for a Leviathan, providing the foundational planks for a theory of liberal democracy. The novel as a genre achieved legitimation as a serious art form in its perceived function as a significant vehicle for the investigation of this system of affects and of its moral and political implications, and of the education of its readers into a more self-conscious, that is to say, more theoretical awareness, of the processes and uses of the educated heart and the feeling brain. But in providing educative interrogation, eighteenth-century novels by Defoe, Sterne, Richardson, and others both engage and dissipate the systematic formation of this object as presented in the writings of the philosophers: Fielding famously insisting in Tom Jones (1729) that he was writing a history and not a system. Indeed, theorization as self-reflexive distance from and resistance to such abstraction seems fundamental to fiction from the very first: the novel genre develops as a dialectical interplay of
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contingency and abstraction. Caught between an orientation to the experientially and historically contingent and the narrative impulse to plotted causality or formal coherence, novels are inevitably, perhaps inherently, skeptical, and therefore at some level intrinsically ironic. Weaving worlds of words, novelists were from the very first selfconscious of that unbridgeable and eminently ironizable gap between the linguistic and the phenomenal, between systems of signs and human behaviors, between cultural codes and conventions and essences and universals. The formal poeticity of the novel, in contra-distinction to the non-poeticity of the philosophical or purely theoretical tract, arises out of what the formalist theorists have described as the feeling of the word as a word, and not simply the naming or representation of an object, the word as a weighty thing with a value always exceeding its representative function. Indeed, with reference to the theory of the moral sentiments, Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), for example, plays brilliantly on the verbal associations of “transport” as Yorick sets off in his carriage on his grand tour of enlightenment, but also in and as a construct of that linguistic vehicle for affective and imaginative “transport” that is the narrative of the text we are reading. Through the metafictional transgression of levels of ontology and an insistent and ironic linguistic self-consciousness (handkerchiefs repeatedly substituted for words as language fails to encapsulate feeling), Sterne explores the limitations and aporias in the overformulated theorization of the affective and moral imagination, just as his novel Tristram Shandy (1760) derives its comedy from the unintended consequences of the human pursuit of and obsession with systems and with theories. But it is the extent to which the activity of theorizing in the humanities and social sciences (at least) has itself become a theoretically selfconscious flight from Theory (as system) that perhaps most differentiates the positioning of the novel in and in relation to the current Age of Theory from its earlier counterpart in the Age of Systems. Indeed, by the 1980s, both the novel and theory seemed equally preoccupied with the sense that one of the cumulative effects of modernity is that, more and more, knowledge reflexively enters and shapes experience in the world and is then shaped by it in an unprecedentedly self-conscious
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fashion: history might provide the ground for the rise of particular theories – as with feminism and postcolonialism and postmodernism – but history is only ever to be experienced in the disembedded orders of late modernity as already, thoroughly, and irrevocably, theorized: there is no space outside of theory. The work of philosophy or systematic theory, the linguistic practices of the novel, and the movements of history seek a curious intimacy, sharing an intensified linguistic skepticism and a preoccupation with the setting up and the concomitant breaking down of delusory systems, plots or fictions. A theoretical selfconsciousness about fictions begins to embed itself experientially in existential modes of historical and subjective or personal awareness and, even without the explicit turn to theory in the academy, to enter and pervade the forms and preoccupations of fiction, as of historical experience (in the preoccupation with lives as stories or narratives, disruptable by traumas or available for liberatory rewriting). It is perhaps not surprising that Rushdie’s tropes of “migrancy” and “hybridity” soon became powerful and popular metaphors to describe contemporary experience and were taken up and extended by novelists and academic theorists alike. The novel, like the nation, becomes disseminated, no longer parochial or stranded in this or that ghetto of nation, race, or single intellectual or literary tradition. The international and transnational novel becomes a significant sign of the times: born out of a convergence of globalized capital, cultural diasporas, and traveling theory, it is perhaps the strongest testimony of the capacity of the novel to resist the singular and the systematic and to revel in what Bakhtin celebrates as the polyglot and the polyphonic, the resistance to the monologic and the reductionisms of intellectual elites. And yet, many novels – even those by migrant writers – also stood back with equal skepticism from the infatuation with hybridity, intuiting perhaps a continuing exoticization and appropriation of postcolonial experience. Kazuo Ishiguro has brilliantly fictionalized this controversial debate from the perspective of the writer in The Unconsoled (1995). He began the novel after an exhausting promotional world tour and the novel is a brilliant meditation on the tension between historical and intellectual ideas about the creative arts and the varieties of new
external pressures on the contemporary writer in an internationalized culture market: the conflicting demands of political representation, ethical obligation, and the commercial implications of producing creative work within a global economy. In Jameson’s reading in Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), all contemporary discourses are caught in a flight from propositional truth, foundations or origins, affirmative content or closure, and show a pronounced preference for modes of self-reference, indeterminacy, undecidability, and intertextual excess as a repudiation of the autonomy of the individual text or subject or author. Jameson provided one of the most resonant images of this cultural condition of late capitalism in his description of the architect and developer John Portman’s Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Las Vegas, viewed as an icon of and testimony to the incapacity of the human mind to grasp the great global networks in which we are caught as individual subjects. To walk through the hotel is to become acutely self-conscious of the disjunctive relations between body, space, and time in the contemporary world. Not surprisingly, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as the stable maps of the world shifted, fiction too became self-reflexively preoccupied with the problematic nature of representation: again this metafictional turn is as much a product of changing times as of changing intellectual theories. Numerous writers explored the connections between the temporally and spatially disorientating experience of the fabricated worlds of postmodernity, and the ontology of the novel as a textual world axiomatically constructed out of other textual worlds. Even before the appearance of the generation of Peter Ackroyd, Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, and Martin Amis, prominent novelists such as Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, William Golding, and John Fowles were playing out textualist anxieties with a plethora of metafictional devices and motifs: labyrinths, mirrors, mise-en-abyme effects, characters reading texts in which they appear, authors stepping into their fictions. By the 1980s, the perception of the fabricated, constructed, and provisional nature of the world had become normalized and domesticated and there is hardly a novelist who does not, in some way, register this change: from conflicted realists such as A. S. Byatt, John Banville, and
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Brigid Brophy to more overt experimentalists such as Samuel Beckett, J. G. Ballard, and B. S. Johnson, to transnational and migrant writers such as Kiran Desai, Ben Okri, and Hanif Kureishi. So-called postmodernism soon manifested itself as more zeitgeist than theoretical insight. For as early as the 1970s, the theoretical assault on metalinguistic foundations was developed into the postmodern insistence that objects of knowledge are not so much entities on which language reflects as artifacts actually constructed through and within language. In such a condition, fiction, as a world-creating activity, inevitably takes a turn toward philosophical self-interrogation of its own epistemological and ontological status, while philosophy and criticism, as metalinguistic discourses, have to confront the demise of any secure claim to objectivity or validity in interpretation or evaluation. For if language no longer refers to a realm that is independent of language, then any attempt to stand outside, and to offer critique, of a particular cultural or philosophical perspective is no longer simply to offer a different version of the world but actually to construct a wholly alternative one. Each world becomes a construction comprehensible only within its own terms for, if there is no independent reality against which to compare the perspectives, each becomes a discrete language game and it is no longer possible to determine the validity of any claim independently of the cultural or linguistic context in which it is made. Accordingly, novelists begin to experiment, for example, with effects of infinite regress: Beckett’s narrators endlessly telling themselves stories that are made to correspond, through their own conceptualizations, with the apparent structures of their lives, which turn out to be simply the stories they are narrating. Or they may transgress ontological levels between story and discourse as in Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), which pastiches the style of numerous Victorian novels through the discourse of an author who sometimes appears in the novel as a character, sometimes uses and abuses the omniscience of the implied author of realism, and sometimes personalizes himself as a narrative construction of the post-Barthesian age of authorial death. Such techniques continue in the work of a new generation of writers (many of whom have been formally taught theory in English degree programs) such as Zadie Smith, David
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Mitchell, Ali Smith, Nicola Barker, and many non-British writers such as Arundhati Roy, J. M. Coetzee, and Paul Auster. Yet this problematization of representation, of fictions, of systems, was always already at the heart of the novel, as we have seen with reference to the eighteenth century. Even before the academic turn to theory, an intensified and deconstructive interrogation of fictionality and of the uses and abuses of system entered and, arguably, even gave birth to the novel. Even Derrida famously admitted his inability to write on Beckett’s already deconstructionist fictions, fearing exposure of his own philosophical practice as a platitudinous metalanguage (Attridge 60). He seems to intuit that the deconstructive resistance to closure was all along the definitive feature of the novel. Many of the concerns of poststructuralist theory were already explicitly engaged in fictional narratives that were raising important questions about linguistic self-referentiality, foundationalism, truth, value, authorial voice, and subjectivity, well before Continental philosophy began to be imported and transformed into the so-called theory revolution of the 1970s. One thinks here of the complex teleological games of Muriel Spark, from her very first novel in 1957; of Iris Murdoch’s fictionalized critiques of ordinary language philosophies from 1954; of the linguistic experimentalism of writers such as B. S. Johnson, Christine Brooke-Rose, Alan Burns, Ann Quin, and Rayner Heppenstall throughout the 1960s. Indeed, Johnson, Brooke-Rose, Jonathan Culler, Shlomith Rimmon, and, on occasion, Roland Barthes, were all participants in Frank Kermode’s literary theory seminars that ran between 1967 and 1974 at University College London (discussed in the preface to his Essays on Fiction 1971–82 of 1983). For the theoretical preoccupation with fictionality in its proto-theory modes emphatically and self-consciously enters critical thinking – in the writing of Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin, for example – shortly after World War II, but as a response to the dangerous aestheticization of politics in ideologies of fascism. Interestingly, this preoccupation with fictions was also the starting point for one of the most influential and imaginative theories of the novel that emerged in the postwar period, and which, like the earlier Bakhtinian dialogics and the Lukacsian theorization of realism, profoundly shaped thinking
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about the genre. This was Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending (1967), which explored the dangers of an unbridled fictionality as a desire to project consolatory plots and fictions onto history in the form of degenerate myths. But Kermode’s influential theory also arose out of his engagement with and support for the fictional writing of novelists such as Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch as well as the poetics of Wallace Stevens. Novelists from the late 1950s – for example, Muriel Spark in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Abbess of Crewe (1974), and Not to Disturb (1971); Iris Murdoch in A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970), The Black Prince (1973), and The Sea, The Sea (1978); John Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Magus (1966), and Daniel Martin (1977); William Golding in Free Fall (1959) and Darkness Visible (1979) – are equally concerned with the recognition that indiscriminate aestheticization facilitates playing God with the real. Novels such as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Murdoch’s A Severed Head (1961), ostensibly about trivial love affairs, charismatic schoolmistresses, and the adulterous deceptions of the high bourgeoisie, are also studies of the psychological and myth-making imperatives of power politics and totalitarianism. Each of these fictions embodies a theoretical reflection on fictionality that is in turn theorized by academic theories of the novel, which also arise out of a shared historical situation that has helped to propel the selfreflexively critical or theoretical turn. For the emergence of an anti-Theory theory of the novel from within the novel functions as a reminder that novels serve an important ethical and interrogative function in a world that increasingly, and dangerously, neglects to discriminate between different orders of fictionality. Kermode’s theory of fictions is a theory of the novel for a theoretical age, where fictional self-consciousness as a mode of anti-Theory theorizing protects against dangerous tendencies toward myth-making. Authentic fiction manages to achieve a balance between a formal consolation provided by the illusion of correspondence between desire and the world, and an ethical refusal of such consolation that reminds us that in the end fictional form is inevitably a mode of aesthetic seduction. Kermode’s theory of the novel reflects the problematization of positivism that afflicts intellectual thought increasingly by the 1960s (in, for
example, the writing of Karl Popper, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Thomas Kuhn) and gives rise to a fully fledged theoretical turn in the 1970s: the recognition that there is always an aesthetic dimension to knowledge. But his theory of the novel also reflects a longstanding intellectual and novelistic tradition concerned with the absolute need for ethical and epistemological discrimination of fictions: one that has never been naively reflectionist, holding up the mirror to nature, but has always looked inward to the way in which its own forms mediate and construct the real. The novel is also a mode of theory, just as theory is a kind of fictionalizing. SEE ALSO: Critical Theory and Fiction (WF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Migration, Diaspora and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Anderson, B. (1983). Imaginary Communities. London: Verso. Attridge, D. (ed.) (1992). Acts of Literature. London: Routledge. Bakhtin, M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Barthes, R. (1974). S/Z. New York: Hill and Wang. Bhaba, H. (ed.) (1990). Nation and Narration. London: Routledge. Brooks, P. (1992). Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Byatt, A. S. (1964). Shadow of a Sun. London: Chatto and Windus. Byatt, A. S. (1990). Possession: A Romance. London: Chatto and Windus. de Man, P. (1993). Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Eliot, T. S. (1951). The Metaphysical Poets. In T. S. Eliot: Selected Essays, 3rd edn. London: Faber and Faber, pp. 281–92. Gadamer, H.-G. (2004). Truth and Method, 2nd edn. London: Continuum. Genette, G. (1988). Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Halperin, J. (ed.) (1974). The Theory of the Novel: New Essays. New York: Oxford University Press. Ishiguro, K. (1995). The Unconsoled. London: Faber and Faber.
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Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Kelman, J. (1994). How Late It Was, How Late. London: Secker and Warburg. Kermode, F. (1967). The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kermode, F. (1983). Essays on Fiction, 1971–82. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Kuhn, T. (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Leavis, F. R. (1948). The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad. London: Chatto and Windus. Lukacs, G. (1963). The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. London: Merlin. McKeon, M. (ed.) (2000). Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Miller, J. Hillis (2001). Deconstruction and Literature. In T. Cohen (ed.), Deconstruction and the Future of the Humanities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Popper, K. (1963). Conjectures and Refutations. London: Routledge. Rushdie, S. (1992). Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta. Said, E. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf. Showalter, E. (1999). A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bront€e to Lessing. London: Virago. Sterne, L. (2001). A Sentimental Journey (ed. P. Goring). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Waugh, P. (ed.) (2006). Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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D Doyle, Roddy DERMOT MCCARTHY
Roddy Doyle’s career and reputation are closely associated with the “new Ireland” of the 1990s, but he has hardly been a cheerleader for the culture of consumption and indiscriminate development that his country’s recent economic prosperity spawned. Doyle’s writing engages Irish society and culture at a consistently oblique angle of reflection. His highly successful entertainments range from comic realism to historical farce and magic realism, nostalgia to satire, children’s fiction, and memoir. Doyle’s novels, plays, short stories, and screenplays have provoked a culture of denial to confront marital breakdown, spousal abuse, alcoholism, inner-city poverty, social marginalization, and racism. Born in Dublin in 1958, Doyle focuses on Dublin and Dubliners in all of his writing. His first three novels, the highly popular Barrytown Trilogy (The Commitments, 1988; The Snapper, 1990; and The Van, 1991) brought him immediate notoriety with their distinctively “vernacular” style: short, staccato sentences; vivid, vulgar, as well as trenchant and comical, dialogue; the precise notation of social realia, occasionally evoking subtle emotional or symbolic meaning from common domestic details; and the use of pop music as a leitmotif that meshes the public–historical–discursive and personal–private– inarticulate. With its “uncensored” presentation of working-class experience, the trilogy also signaled Doyle’s abiding moral concern with children and adolescents, married women, the family,
and community; with class divisions and social coherence; self-esteem and self-understanding; unemployment and poverty; individual identity, self-growth, and hope for the future. The Barrytown Trilogy’s success derived from its cross-over effect as both popular entertainment and “serious” fiction. All three novels eventually became successful films and their unflinching engagement with issues of unemployment, globalization, and cultural homogenization, the widening gap between the haves and have-nots in Irish society, as well as between generations and genders, and urban and rural sensibilities established Doyle as the preeminent storyteller of contemporary urban Ireland. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993), for which he received the Booker Prize in 1993, dispelled any sense that Doyle’s writing was confined to the horizontal axis of social realism. This story of a young boy’s coming of age while witnessing his parents’ growing disaffection took Doyle’s combination of pathos and slapstick comedy, verbal humor and wit, social satire and note-perfect transcription of the music of everyday to a new level; the presentation of Paddy’s perspective, thoughts, emotions, and language is a masterpiece of compassionate imagination. The growth of imagination and narrative technique in Paddy Clarke paid further dividends in Doyle’s next novel, The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996). Based on the character of Paula Spencer, the abused, alcoholic wife in Family, his BBC television docu-drama of 1994, Woman remains Doyle’s most daring and experimental work, a controversial intervention in Irish public
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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DRABBLE, MARGARET
discourse that threw very cold water on a society delusional with self-congratulation and social complacency. The complexity of characterization resulting from an increasingly sophisticated manipulation of the first-person narration, in conjunction with his trademark social realism, resulted in one of the most important Irish novels of the period. Doyle adapted Woman into a successful play in 2003 and Paula Spencer (2006), his most recent novel, continues her story. In A Star Called Henry (1999) Doyle began another trilogy and continued to experiment with a self-conscious and unreliable narrator, but with a radical departure in subject matter. This mild foray into magic realism disappointed many readers who were loath to see him abandon his trademark documentary realism; but the real objection was to his blasphemous treatment of the Easter Rising and the War of Independence, modern Ireland’s nationalist founding myth. But if Henry is an example of postmodern historiographical metafiction, it also continues Doyle’s preoccupation with working-class history and experience. Henry is Doyle’s most artfully ambitious work to date. Oh, Play That Thing (2004), its successor and sequel, takes Henry to jazz age America, where character and novelist get lost in a new world that remains alien to both. Returning to the home ground of his fiction, in the short stories of The Deportees (2007) Doyle writes about the new racial and ethnic communities – Nigerian, Polish, Romanian, Russian – living and working in Dublin, and in Paula Spencer he successfully braids his longstanding class-based concern with social inclusion with his new interest in issues of race and ethnicity. Doyle’s total body of work is the most influential by a writer of fiction to circulate in Irish civil discourse over the past two decades. His writing coheres around his abiding respect for the dignity of the individual in the struggle to achieve individuation against all those forces, historical, ideological, or religious, which attempt to coerce the individual to accept the way things are or have been as “natural” or the way they have to be. Doyle’s fiction is the product of the compassionate imagination of one of contemporary Ireland’s most important and talented witnesses. SEE ALSO: Irish Fiction (BIF); Working-Class Fiction (BIF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Doyle, R. (1988). The Commitments. London: Heinemann. Doyle, R. (1990). The Snapper. London: Secker and Warburg. Doyle, R. (1991). The Van. London: Secker and Warburg. Doyle, R. (1993). Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. London: Secker and Warburg. Doyle, R. (1994). Family [screenplay]. BBC Television. Doyle, R. (1996). The Woman Who Walked into Doors. London: Jonathan Cape. Doyle, R. (1999). A Star Called Henry, vol. 1 of The Last Roundup. London: Jonathan Cape. Doyle, R. (2002). Rory & Ita. London: Jonathan Cape. Doyle, R. (2004). Oh, Play That Thing, vol. 2 of The Last Roundup. London: Jonathan Cape. Doyle, R. (2006). Paula Spencer. London: Jonathan Cape. Doyle, R. (2007). The Deportees and Other Stories. London: Jonathan Cape. Frears, S. (dir.) (1993). The Snapper. BBC Films/ Screen 2. Frears, S. (dir.) (1996). The Van (screenplay by R. Doyle). Ireland: Deadly Films/BBC Films/Fox Searchlight. McCarthy, D. (2003). Roddy Doyle: Raining on the Parade. Dublin: Liffey. Parker, A. (dir.) (1991). The Commitments (screenplay by D. Clement, I. La Frenais, & R. Doyle). Beacon Communications/First Film Company/Dirty Hands Productions. Wheeler, P., & Newman, J. (2004). An interview with Roddy Doyle. In S. Monteith, J. Newman, & P. Wheeler, Contemporary British and Irish Fiction: An Introduction through Interviews. London: Hodder and Stoughton, pp. 54–70. White, C. (2001). Reading Roddy Doyle. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Drabble, Margaret MARTINE WATSON BROWNLEY
Over a long and productive writing career dating from the early 1960s, Margaret Drabble has been best known for novels that trace the lives of her generation of educated women and the different challenges that these women faced as they matured. Drabble is a distinguished contemporary woman of letters; in addition to her 17 novels, she has also produced biography, literary criticism and scholarship, journalistic
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commentary, and other fictional and non-fictional prose. Born in Sheffield on June 5, 1939, Drabble was the second daughter in a family of four children. Her father was a barrister and then a judge, and her mother an English teacher; the novelist A. S. Byatt is her elder sister. Educated at The Mount, a Quaker boarding and day school for girls in York, she received a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she read English and graduated in 1960 with a starred first. After graduation she married and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon with her husband, the actor Clive Swift. When she became pregnant early in the marriage and was unable to continue acting, she turned, in frustration, to novel writing. With the success of her early novels, she moved to London and became a full-time writer while taking care of their three children. Divorced in 1975 after 15 years of marriage to Swift, she married the biographer Michael Holroyd in 1982. Drabble’s literary career began at a propitious time for a novelist with her interests. Having received her Cambridge degree in 1960, she left acting for writing just as the second wave of the women’s movement was igniting. Since then, her subjects have followed her own experiences and her times. From her first novel, A Summer Bird Cage (1963), Drabble has chronicled the lives of educated women, mainly middle or upper middle class (or those who aspired to be such). Beginning in the 1960s with young university graduates negotiating conflicts between marriage and career aspirations and between personal autonomy and family bonds, her protagonists have grown older along with Drabble herself, and their problems – personal, familial, social, and political – have changed in accordance with their age and their era. During the 1970s and 1980s her protagonists settled into middle age. By 1996, with The Witch of Exmoor, in which the titular character is a grandmother, she moved to chronicle the difficulties and the pleasures of old age for women. In addition to tracing the development of her own generation of women over the course of her career, Drabble gradually expanded the scope of her primarily domestic early novels to address central cultural, social, and political issues. At the same time her literary technique changed to incorporate more sophisticated manipulations of
points of view, and her characteristic humor sharpened into a more biting irony. Crucial to her movement in these directions were The Waterfall (1969), the most formally experimental novel she has written, and The Needle’s Eye (1972) and The Realms of Gold (1975), which expanded her geographical foci toward African concerns. The Ice Age (1977) focused directly on the economic and social disintegration Britain faced during the mid-1970s. In The Radiant Way (1987) and A Natural Curiosity (1989), the first two volumes of a trilogy, she traced the lives of three middle-aged women friends to present a sweeping panorama of the English nation in the 1980s. The Gates of Ivory (1991), which completed the trilogy, in many ways remains the most ambitious novel Drabble has produced so far. Although still anchored in England, this work also employed Southeast Asian settings to consider Pol Pot and the Cambodian genocide. Aside from The Red Queen (2004), which featured eighteenth-century Korean as well as contemporary materials, Drabble’s later novels have used mainly English locales. Whether Drabble’s focus is the obstacles that contemporary life presents to intelligent women or the politics of a disintegrating national or international order, she has always been a novelist committed to exploring ideas. She explained in an interview that, as a writer, she is “not interested in storytelling,” but “interested in stories as vehicles for ideas” (Kenyon 41). In several of her recent novels, questions about evolution and natural selection play a central role. Another constant in her fiction has been class conflict, which she has continued to examine from various perspectives. Finally, she has focused on problems of freedom and the ramifications of determinism, offering sophisticated and nuanced analyses of what personal autonomy could actually mean for individuals, particularly, but not exclusively, women. Traditionally, the works of women novelists have tended to be overread as autobiography, but in Drabble’s case, interviews and other writings have highlighted the centrality of autobiographical elements in her novels. Most obviously, her Afterword to The Peppered Moth (2001) discusses this work as a novel in which she is attempting to come to terms with her mother, a difficult woman who suffered from depression. Bad mothers and ongoing conflicts between mothers and daughters recur in Drabble’s novels, as do depressives.
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Similarly, her novels often explore complicated sororal and quasi-sororal relationships in ways that directly and indirectly reflect the fraught relationship she and her sister Byatt have maintained throughout their lives. Along with London, the north of England, where she grew up, has been a frequent setting for her fiction. A number of commentators have connected the abiding concern with morality and social justice that marks her works with the Nonconformist religious outlook characteristic of parts of the north as well as with the Methodism of her mother’s family. Equally important influences on Drabble as a novelist have been the tradition of English literature. Her knowledge of this tradition is wide and deep, and her novels are filled with allusions to earlier and contemporary literature. In addition to biographies of Edwardian author Arnold Bennett (1974a) and her older contemporary Angus Wilson (1995), she has written about or edited volumes on figures ranging from Jane Austen (1974b) and William Wordsworth (1966) to Thomas Hardy (1976). A Writer’s Britain: Landscape in Literature (1979) analyzed the importance of setting to the tradition. Between 1980 and 1987, she published no novels, instead concentrating for part of that time on producing a new edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature (1985), which received excellent reviews. Drabble’s early work garnered widespread popular and critical acclaim relatively quickly. Recognition of her achievements in various forms increased during the 1970s, peaked during the 1980s, and declined afterward. Her early novels received a number of awards, among them the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize (1966), the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1968), and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1973). The bulk of critical work on Drabble appeared in the 1970s and the 1980s, with substantially fewer treatments after those decades. She received her first honorary degree from the University of Sheffield in 1976. Subsequently, such honors for her cluster in the late 1980s and into the mid1990s: University of Manchester, 1987; University of Keele, 1988; University of Bradford, 1988; University of Hull, 1992; University of East Anglia, 1994; University of York, 1995. In 1980 she was named a Commander of the British Empire.
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Drabble’s first novels were welcomed with enthusiasmandexcitementbymanyyoungwomenof her generation, especially peers who were delighted to find novelistic treatments of experiences like their own. They responded eagerly to Drabble’s protagonists, who tended to be survivors who managed to cope despite sometimes daunting circumstances or hostile environments. Although these women have remained faithful readers of Drabble as her novels tracked the vagaries of mid-life and aging, neither her early nor her later works seems to have attracted as substantial an audience among younger readers. Although some commentators have criticized her novels for being excessively journalistic, because many of her works so successfully represent the experiences of one particular generation in such rich historical detail, they will almost certainly remain important to social historians of this period. Their potential for lasting literary impact remains unclear at this point. During the early years of Drabble’s career, much critical ink was spilled over her relationship to feminism. Reluctant to be pigeonholed as a “women’s novelist” because of the subject matter of her first works, and initially hesitant to claim feminism, she has now for a long time answered to both. Critics have long recognized and lauded Drabble’s abilities in writing the novel of manners as well as her penetrating psychological realism. However, questions continue to be raised about the effectiveness of some of her later novels, both those in which she aims to offer contemporary panoramas of English society and her rarer fictional forays into larger cross-cultural concerns. Some find her primary strength to be in the domestic and predominantly comic novel and believe that her attempts in mid- and later career to broaden her literary scope were misplaced. Another major point of critical disagreement concerns Drabble’s relationships to modernist and postmodernist fiction. Some critics see her as a novelist centered in traditional social realism and limited accordingly, while others find evidence of modernist experimentation in her work. More recently, still others have analyzed her intrusive narrators, her refusals of narrative closure, and related elements in her work as postmodern in both spirit and execution. Interviews over many years have shown how Drabble’s literary, social, and political views have
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evolved or changed. Her enormous capacity for continuing growth and development has made evaluations of her work date fairly quickly. In literary assessments, for example, the critical consensus that she was a novelist of maternity crumbled as she moved on to chronicle the lives of middle-aged and older women. Critical work on her novels now spans almost half a century, and although this body of work clearly reveals changes in critical trends and fashions, accurate evaluation of Drabble’s artistic accomplishments remains elusive. SEE ALSO: Byatt, A. S. (BIF); Feminist Fiction (BIF)
Drabble, M. (2004). The Red Queen: A Transcultural Tragicomedy. London: Viking. Kenyon, O. (1989). Margaret Drabble. In Women Writers Talk. New York: Carroll and Graf, pp. 25–52. Myer, V. (1991). Margaret Drabble: A Reader’s Guide. London: Vision. Packer, J. (1988). Margaret Drabble: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland. Rose, E. (ed.)(1985). Critical Essays on Margaret Drabble. Boston: G. K. Hall. Sadler, L. (1986). Margaret Drabble. Boston: Twayne. Soule, G. (1998). Four Women Novelists. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow.
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
JAMES GIFFORD
Creighton, J. (1985). Margaret Drabble. London: Methuen. Drabble, M. (1963). A Summer Bird Cage. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Drabble, M. (1966). Wordsworth. London: Evans. Drabble, M. (1969). The Waterfall. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Drabble, M. (1972). The Needle’s Eye. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Drabble, M. (1974a). Arnold Bennett: A Biography. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Drabble, M. (ed.)(1974b). Lady Susan; The Watsons; Sanditon. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Drabble, M. (1975). The Realms of Gold. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Drabble, M. (ed.)(1976). The Genius of Thomas Hardy. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Drabble, M. (1977). The Ice Age. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Drabble, M. (1979). A Writer’s Britain: Landscape in Literature. London: Thames and Hudson. Drabble, M. (ed.)(1985). The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 5th edn. (6th edn. 2000) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Drabble, M. (1987). The Radiant Way. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Drabble, M. (1989). A Natural Curiosity. London: Penguin. Drabble, M. (1991). The Gates of Ivory. London: Viking. Drabble, M. (1995). Angus Wilson: A Biography. London: Secker and Warburg. Drabble, M. (1996). The Witch of Exmoor. London: Viking. Drabble, M. (2001). The Peppered Moth. London: Viking.
Lawrence Durrell bridged high modernist and postmodern fiction. His primary contribution to twentieth-century writing is his lush and experimental prose, which works in tandem with minimalist plots, carefully planned formal experimentation, and his revisions to the novel form. He is unique in British fiction for his peculiar position in between most major movements and for a style that contradicted predominant aesthetic tastes yet was popular and celebrated. While terse prose and realism dominated late interbellum writing, Durrell produced lush and surreal fiction, marking him as an early English surrealist and one of the most successful. In contrast to the surrealists, he immediately abandoned their communist ideology for anarchoindividualism, and his writing remained densely allusive and highly crafted in the modernist tradition, in many ways akin to the work of Djuna Barnes and Henry Miller. While he was often criticized as apolitical, Durrell’s individualist politics – similar to Herbert Read’s “Politics of the Unpolitical” – led to unique representations of World War II. The war appears in relation to the characters and location, rather than the reverse. George Orwell denounced this as “a return to the 20s” (1937), meaning that such work failed to respond to social circumstances. Nonetheless, Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying appears to borrow from the bohemian section of Durrell’s Pied Piper of Lovers, and Durrell responded in his second novel, Panic Spring (Gifford 2008a).
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Durrell’s 16 novels are all set in “exotic” locations, ranging from India to the Mediterranean and North Africa. Several others remain unpublished. Yet, he was not pandering to British colonialist tastes. Nearly all locations in his works, except Istanbul, are places where he had extended residences. He integrates a darkly ironic sense of empire, but his works are often subjected to postcolonial critiques of imperialism (Manzalaoui 1962). Durrell’s fame peaked with his Alexandria Quartet, four novels that stylistically rebut the angry young men. He went on to Hollywood film projects, which proved incompatible with his experimental style. His later fiction became less popular in proportion to its increasing social critiques and experimental style. His Revolt of Aphrodite (1974), a pair of science fiction novels, uses a complex formal structure to critique a “Big Brother”-like transnational corporation that operates independent of politics and the state. This work demonstrates Durrell’s admiration for Orwell’s 1984 but also his sense of Orwell’s limitations for focusing on the nation state. Durrell’s anarcho-individualism is akin to yet incompatible with the socialist stance Orwell took against fascism, capitalism, and communism. Durrell’s Avignon Quintet (1992), his last major work, uses a highly complex structure and overtly postmodern aesthetics to integrate his interest in Eastern philosophy and religion with the destruction caused by World War II. Durrell was born in India in 1912 and was sent “home” to England in 1923 by parents who had never been there. He left 12 years later, residing in Britain infrequently, but served Britain in several diplomatic capacities. Ubiquitously known as a British colonial writer, Durrell fell foul of a migrant law aimed at reducing immigration from India and Pakistan in 1968, after which he could not enter Britain without a visa (Ezard 2002). He was a British non-patrial without the right to enter or settle. Durrell lived primarily in the Mediterranean from 1935 until his death in 1990. Durrell began publishing poetry in 1931, and his first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers (1935), recounts his Indian childhood and unwanted relocation to England (Gifford 2008a). He moved to the Greek island Kerkyra in 1935 and wrote his next two novels, Panic Spring (1937) and The Black Book (1938). The latter strongly influenced
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English surrealism and was banned in Britain and the United States. Richard Aldington, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and Henry Miller are alluded to heavily in these first novels; Miller and Eliot praised The Black Book exceptionally. Durrell’s lifelong interest in and deep familiarity with Elizabethan drama is also evident. Durrell was in Greece during the German and Italian invasions in World War II, initially on Kerkyra, then in Athens as senior press officer to the British Embassy, Kalamata as director of the British Institute, and finally evacuated to Crete. Much of his work involved producing anti-fascist propaganda (Stephanides 2008). As with his friend George Seferis, the Nobel Laureate in the Greek government in exile, Durrell evacuated to Cairo during the bombardment of Crete. He was senior press officer during the war in Cairo and relocated to Alexandria where he served the British Foreign Office in intelligence and propaganda. There he knew Olivia Manning, who housed his first wife in Jerusalem when their marriage failed. In the postbellum period, Durrell rapidly returned to Greece with the British Foreign Office on Rhodes during the accretion of the Dodecanese islands to Greece. He was then in Argentina during Peron’s first term, in Yugoslavia under Tito, and on Cyprus during Enosis, where he finished the preparatory work for the Alexandria Quartet while working as the director of public relations for the British government. He fled Cyprus and abandoned his home when he became a target of bombings. He subsequently completed the four books of The Alexandria Quartet between 1957 and 1960 after settling in southern France in 1956. In 1957, Durrell’s annus mirabilis, he published Justine, the first volume of The Alexandria Quartet; White Eagles over Serbia, a spy thriller set in the Balkans; Bitter Lemons, his semi-fictional life on Cyprus; and his first collection of Antrobus stories, a satire of the British Foreign Office. These are his most famous works, particularly Justine and Bitter Lemons. The Quartet is set in the years surrounding World War II in Egypt. Its style is densely allusive, and the first three volumes repeat the same scenes from different perspectives with conflicting senses of truth; the fourth volume temporally progresses but refuses to resolve the multiple narratives. The Quartet aimed to redirect the modern novel form by emphasizing spatial
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and allusive structures, which disjointed the ordering impulse of stream of consciousness and psychologicaldevelopment.Aftersignificantrevisions, the four books appeared in a final omnibus edition in 1962. While its allusive and psychoanalytic contents are modernist, its narratological and formal innovations are linked with postmodernism (Herbrechter 1999; Skordili 2002). Postcolonial work on the Quartet began immediately (Manzalaoui 1962), and it was significant in early gay and lesbian studies criticism (Boone 1989). Durrell’s political context remains overlooked, and most critical work assumes he was naive with regard to indigenous cultures and supported imperialism. Recent scholarship differs. Haag 2004 demonstrates that the Hosnani family in the Quartet, part of Egypt’s Coptic minority, strongly resembles the Jewish family of Durrell’s third wife, Claude Vincedon (Menasce), an Alexandrian Zionist who edited his novels while writing her own comic novel of wartime Alexandria, The Rum Go, and a Zionist novel, A Chair for the Prophet. The resemblances are strong with regard to Zionist support for the creation of Israel, and “Whenever Chaim Weizmann, leader of the World Zionist Organisation and the eventual first president of Israel, visited Alexandria, he would ‘invariably’ stay at the home of Baron Felix de Menasce” (Haag 2004). This significantly impacts postcolonial readings, although Durrell shifted his Zionist sympathies after his wife’s death in 1967. After Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan Heights in the same year, Durrell abandoned his Zionist filmscripts and novel, and did not resume such projects. In 1968, Durrell published the first volume of The Revolt of Aphrodite, his second major novel series, although this was not well received. Like Orwell’s 1984, it depicts a world-controlling international firm that dominates national governments and mass culture, commodifying both. The novel series reflects Durrell’s early anarcho-libertarian views in relation to Miller and Herbert Read (Gifford 2008b). In 1974, Durrell began his most ambitious novel series, The Avignon Quintet, completing it in 1985. Although the third volume, Constance, was nominated for the Booker Prize, the series was not received as well as his earlier works. The writing was highly experimental for the time and is demanding for the reader, during a period of
mainstream return to realism. Nonetheless, the Quintet marks a major development in postmodernism (Herbrechter 1999). Durrell also wrote travel narratives, though these are typically described as “foreign residence books.” Bitter Lemons is the most famous, and was awarded the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize. Despite its opening assertion that “this is not a political book,” it is Durrell’s most political travel work and was written after he fled Cyprus and during the Suez crisis while living with Claude Vincedon. Durrell is notably bitter about British colonial policy in the book, but his sympathy for the Turks, Greeks, and British has made it difficult for any group to accept. In tandem with Egyptian reactions to The Alexandria Quartet, Bitter Lemons receives much postcolonial critique. In both works, the tensions between irony, critique, and colonial bias are debated and no satisfactory conclusion has been reached in scholarship (Hitchens 1997 [1989] ). Durrell was first influenced by the literary milieu of London, but early trips to France shifted his focus to European literature. He was also active as a poet, particularly in the first half of his career. He read widely and deeply in psychoanalysis, beginning in the early 1930s, which influenced his plots, themes, and narrative structures (Skordili 2002). In 1935, Durrell began a 45-year correspondence with the American writer, Henry Miller, which led to significant interactions with the artists in the Villa Seurat circle and surrealism. Durrell developed strong ties with Greek modernists at the same time and, after moving to southern France, became active in French literary circles. Durrell’s influence is broad. Anthony Burgess’s second wife Liliana Macellari translated Justine into Italian in 1959, and mutual allusions appear in their works. Similarly, Julio Cortazar’s first wife Aurora Bernardez translated the Quartet into Spanish while he wrote Rayuela, which incorporates passages from Durrell (Sligh 1998). A. S. Byatt alludes to the Quartet in Possession, and Kathy Acker quotes from it in her cut-and-paste novel Don Quixote. William S. Burroughs also praised the work at the 1962 International Writers’ Conference and used it in his own cut-up work. M. G. Vassanji borrows several of Durrell’s character names in his novels and drew
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the title for his No New Land (1991) from Durrell’s translations of Cavafy. The influence of Durrell’s late fiction is less clear, although allusions to his Avignon Quintet are numerous. Despite his unique political associations and heavy reliance on psychoanalytical and philosophical thought, Durrell’s primary impacts on twentiethcentury literature remain stylistic and formal. SEE ALSO: Colonial Fiction (BIF); Miller, Henry (AF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Orwell, George (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Boone, J. (1989). Mappings of Male Desire in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. South Atlantic Quarterly, 88(1), 73–106. Chamberlin, B. (2007). A Chronology of the Life and Times of Lawrence Durrell. Kerkyra: Durrell School of Corfu. Dasenbrock, R. W. (1987). Lawrence Durrell and the Modes of Modernism. Twentieth-Century Fiction, 33(4), 515–527. Durrell, L. (1957). Bitter Lemons. London: Faber and Faber. Durrell, L. (1962). The Alexandria Quartet. London: Faber and Faber. Durrell, L. (1974). The Revolt of Aphrodite. London: Faber and Faber. Durrell, L. (1992). The Avignon Quintet. London: Faber and Faber.
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Ezard, J. (2002). Durrell Fell Foul of Migrant Law. Guardian (Apr. 29). At www.guardian.co.uk/uk/ 2002/apr/29/books.booksnews, accessed Feb. 17, 2010. Gifford, J. (2008a). Preface. In L. Durrell, Pied Piper of Lovers. Victoria, BC: ELS Editions, pp. vii–xvii. Gifford, J. (2008b). Surrealism’s Anglo-American Afterlife. Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal, 5, 36–64. Haag, M. (2004). Alexandria: City of Memory. London: Yale University Press. Herbrechter, S. (1999). Lawrence Durrell, Postmodernism and the Ethics of Alterity. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Hitchens, C. (1997). Hostage to History [1989]. London: Verso. MacNiven, I. (1998). Lawrence Durrell: A Biography. London: Faber and Faber. Manzalaoui, M. (1962). The Curate’s Egg. Etudes Anglaises, 15(3), 248–260. Orwell, G. (1937). Back to the Twenties. New English Weekly, 12(2), 30–31. Pine, R. (1994). Lawrence Durrell: The Mindscape. New York: St. Martin’s. Skordili, B. (2002).The Case of the Missing Green Fingerstall. In C. Alexandre-Garner (ed.), Lawrence Durrell Revisited. Nanterre: Universite Paris X, pp. 155–166. Sligh, C. (1998). Reading the Divergent Weave: A Note and Some Speculations on Durrell and Cortazar. Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Journal, NS 6, 118–132. Stephanides, T. (2008). Autumn Gleanings (ed. R. Pine). Kerkyra: Durrell School of Corfu.
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E Edwardian Fiction RICHARD A. KAYE
Edwardian fiction remains one of the least critically explored and arguably the most contradictory of rubrics in the study of British literature. Although the chronological expanse of the category could not be clearer, falling between the death of Victoria in 1901 and the ascension to the throne of King George V in 1910, the term remains elusive. For many commentators Edwardian fiction is a murky interregnum between the robust heyday of Victorian fiction and the golden era of modernist innovation, a formally tame holdover and depreciation of Victorian realist values. Yet if one includes both realist and modernist texts, the range of achievement in British fiction in the decade and a half of the twentieth century is extraordinary, with early peaks represented by Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900), Henry James’s The Sacred Fount (1901), Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), and Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (1903), the intervening years studded by major writing by E. M. Forster and May Sinclair as well as Galsworthy’s multivolume Forsyte Saga, H. G. Wells’s series of novels addressing sex and society, and Arnold Bennett’s Five Towns trilogy, then concluding with Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913) – and if we follow most literary historians who extend Edwardian fiction until World War I – Virginia Woolf ’s The Voyage Out (1915) and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), the latter a selfconsciously metahistorical meditation on the waning days of the perfect Edwardian idyll and
the first self-consciously “Edwardian” fictional work. As if to signal the passing glory of rulingclass authority, this would be the last time in which a royal name leant itself to a period of British literature (although the post-Edwardian term “Georgian” does identify a school of poetry). But the shifts in the Edwardian era resonated at a far deeper level than monarchal changes in power, while the precise markers of “Edwardianism” remain intangible. That a new historical epoch had begun is suggested by Rebecca West’s comment on the mood in 1900 during the Second Boer War. “We were an old civilization,” she reflected, “but we had to start again” (72). With memorably precise imprecision, Woolf heralded an ending when she famously declared that “on or around December 1910 human character changed,” by which she may have meant the death of King Edward (in which case she was signaling the end of a historical Edwardianism) or she may have been referencing the 1910 opening of the first post-impressionist exhibition in London (in which case, a distinct beginning). As this likely allusion to the invasion of advanced French painting hints, the radical developments of the period were not confined to Britain and were not only literary. Nor were such changes only artistic. And, of course, all pivotal change did not commence in 1910 – in fact, it is possible to date several crucial intellectual transformations back at least a decade. The year 1900 saw paradigm-shifting work by the philosopher Bergson, the quantum-theory physicist Max Planck, and the psychoanalyst Freud, whose Interpretation of Dreams (1901) signaled an attempt
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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at disseminating psychoanalytic ideas among a broader reading public. Freud’s insights dovetailed with – and helped to shape – much of the increasingly psychological fiction of the era. Einstein began publishing his mathematical findings in the first years of the century. In much of the fiction of the period, there is a new emphasis on psychological reality as determining daily life. Gustav Klimt and Pablo Picasso radically transformed painting in the century’s first decade, in works that reflect the divide between realist and modernist concerns so crucial in British fiction. Indeed, Picasso’s early commitment to sentimental naturalism mirrored the techniques of such novelists as Bennett, Forster, Sinclair, and Galsworthy, while his 1907 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon signaled a revolutionary turn into subjectivist cubist aesthetics that served as an analogue to modernist writing. It is in part the radicalism of the arts throughout Europe in the first decade of the twentieth century that has led many observers to accentuate the tameness of Edwardian era fiction in the work of novelists such as Bennett and Galsworthy. Most critics have stressed Edwardian fiction’s earnestly modest achievements, with Lascelles Abercrombie maintaining that writers of the period offered a restrained continuation of fundamental realist conventions but few innovations. For Richard Ellmann, a key aspect of Edwardian fiction is a secularist outlook that continues to echo with an earlier era’s religious perspective: “The central miracle for the Edwardians is the sudden alteration of the self ” (156–7) while “secular miracles” are evident in insistently invoked material symbols – the silver in Conrad’s Nostromo, the golden bowl that symbolically unifies Henry James’s novel, and even in the full “view” that actually and metaphorically opens up for Lucy Honeychurch in Forster’s A Room with a View (1908). For Frank Kermode, the Edwardian stress on conversion held significant global implications, revealing a “sense that one was entering a new age, in which some transformation of the British might be necessary if they were to maintain their hitherto effortless superiority” (36). Evident in the “English novel circa 1907,” he contends, is an “increasingly felt need to abandon not only official morality but also cultural isolation” (35). From this perspective Kipling’s Kim (1901), with its white, Indian boy-hero who moves
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chameleon-like through two cultures, is a paradigmatic text. Jane Eldridge Miller, meanwhile, argues that in Edwardian fiction we can see the social, legal, and political forces that prompt forward-thinking novelists to abandon plots beginning in romance and ending in marriage for narratives stressing marital discord, divorce, and female independence. Other observers such as Sandra Kemp, Charlotte Mitchell, and David Trotter, in their compendious Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction (1997) accentuate a new, benevolent focus on the lives of the suburban middle class, a group flummoxed by urban life. A central division in fiction of 1900–14 lies between popular realist novelists such as Kipling, Galsworthy, Sinclair, and Bennett, absorbed in topicality, and “high art” experimenters such as Woolf, Conrad, Lawrence, James, and Joyce, with their focus on the intricate inner lives of their characters and the subjective nature of experience. Adding to this sense of divergent aspirations in fiction, writers of modernist leanings were appalled by the swelling audiences that hungered for the detective stories, romance fiction, ghost tales, and spy thrillers that gushed from publishers’ lists (although modernist writers also dabbled in these supposedly “low” genres). The years 1900–10 witnessed an outpouring of bestsellers by Marie Corelli, Conan Doyle (whose Sherlock Holmes “returns” from the dead in 1905), Rider Haggard, and the Baroness Orczy, whose Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) became an enduringly popular fictional account of a league of English gentlemen who rescue aristocratic targets of the French Revolution. Yet a stress on the tensions between commercially successful realists and coteriedependent modernists simplifies the literary topography of the period. The genre-crossing Conrad wrote not only “romances” such as Lord Jim and difficult modernist fiction such as Nostromo but Chance (1913) – a novel that, with its theme of female independence and its multiple narrators, is arguably the work of the period that most strenuously sought to merge “Edwardian” and “modernist” preoccupations. Furthermore, many novelists such as May Sinclair and Forster saw themselves, if not as formal innovators, as keenly cognizant and even supportive of their more experimental modernist colleagues. Sinclair’s The Divine Fire (1904) dramatized the rift between elitist art and mass-market demands
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with its tale of a London poet who refuses to commercialize his “classical” verse for the marketplace. (The novel itself became a bestseller.) The divide between the Edwardian realists and modernist experimenters was never a simple opposition, as novelists of largely realist inclinations drew on modernist techniques and acted as mediators for ideas basic to modernism. Bennett, whose fiction Woolf criticized for its dated materialism, wrote appreciatively of Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922), her first formally experimental novel, as well as of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). In Rebecca West’s telling, James’s The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Golden Bowl (1904) were “among the few novels that are on as aesthetic a level as the world’s greatest poems,” yet she was unperturbed that the Master’s novels were not popular: “They came to have their influence in another way. They were read by most novelists who had the ear of the general public” (99–100). One common critical mistake is to see Edwardian fiction as fitfully aiming to evolve toward modernist technique, its artistry at worst an exhausted Victorian doggedness and at best merely semi-modernistic. Edwardian fiction was distinctive, rather, for the ways in which it registered a variety of un- or anti-Victorian inventions, ideas, and social attitudes encompassing all aspects of Edwardian life, from the way individuals shopped (the period witnessed the introduction of the department store) to attitudes about the status of women in the workforce, marriage, and divorce (women in greater numbers now demanded the vote and there was a rise in divorce cases). Even formally conservative works of fiction were searchingly absorbed in burning social issues. In the Edwardian novel there is a recurring concern with socially marginal groups, utopian political causes, and more egalitarian social arrangements. Many of the novels of the period were preoccupied with class conflict and cross-class romance (Forster’s Howards End, 1910), the venality of capitalist overreaching (Conrad’s Nostromo, 1904), and marriage as a precarious or limited institution, especially for women (evident in hundreds of novels of the period). Although Kipling and Conrad set their fictions in exotic locales, even works of fiction set in the customary Edwardian realm of the country house might acknowledge a global reality. H. G. Wells’s The Passionate Friends (1913), part of a series of what
Wells called “discussion novels” dealing with marriage, moved from a bucolic English countryside to the African veldt and Alpine glaciers in a tale of a high-born gentleman’s infatuation with a politically engaged young woman. Edwardian novels calibrated social, historical, and political crisis in ways ignored or rendered elliptical in such brilliantly difficult modernist works as Nostromo or The Golden Bowl. Writers such as Forster, Bennett, and Galsworthy demonstrated a devotion to sustaining realist conventions, bringing familiar narrative tactics to bear on troubling social issues and to the predicaments of marginal groups, from working-class clerks to alienated artists. To be sure, this concern with disenfranchised figures was not without elements of reactionary skepticism. In Howards End, which focuses on a fissure within England’s middle class (between the culturally high-minded Schlegel sisters contrasted with the crassly acquisitive Wilcoxes), the desperate aspirations of the lowerclass bank clerk Leonard Bast cannot find fulfillment. Even the twentieth century’s first great working-class novel, Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913), with its meticulous attention to the daily life of a Midlands family in a coalmining town, subsumes the possibilities for working-class solidarity under an absorption in the artistic independence of its would-be sensualist protagonist Paul Morel. It is a fate that is mirrored in that of Joyce’s proudly solitary Stephen at the conclusion of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914), with his self-exaltation into “silence, exile, and cunning.” Unlike their modernist colleagues, Edwardian novelists fret that the socially marginal cannot be absorbed, stabilized, or gentrified into the middle class. More explicitly than either Victorian or modernist writers, Edwardian novelists explored the limitations of modern marriage and the concomitant aspirations of women for full social equality, although, as Miller notes, when it came to women’s writing it was not so much the ideology or institution of matrimony that was targeted as particular marriages. A double standard is forcefully accentuated in Howards End when Margaret Schlegel, distressed that her husband will not allow her pregnant, unmarried sister to spend a night at his country house, accuses him of hypocrisy: “You have had a mistress – I forgave you. My sister has a lover – you drive her from the house.
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EDWARDIAN FICTION
Do you see the connection?” (300). Adultery moved center stage as a complicating topos for fiction, signifying a social dilemma for Edwardian writers and for modernists a vexing problem of epistemology, of what can and cannot be known. The betrayal of James’s Isabel Archer, trapped in a prison-like marriage to a sadist in The Portrait of a Lady (1880), gives way to the difficult to detect, twinned adulteries of The Golden Bowl, in which adulterers are not melodramatic sinners like Portrait’s diabolical Osmond but morally nuanced schemers. Edwardian writers such as Galsworthy and Bennett depicted divorce not only as a personal misfortune but as a viable solution. In Galsworthy’s The Country House (1907), a mother strenuously seeks to engineer the divorce of her son’s mistress so as to allow for the woman’s marriage to her son. More shockingly, his Man of Property (1906) depicted a rape within marriage. Yet, in keeping with the premium Edwardian fiction placed on an unavoidable social obligation, The Forsyte Saga refused to sentimentalize the adulterous Irene, concentrating much of its sympathetic attention on the baffled, rejected passion of her cuckolded husband Soames. Cognizant of these tensions in attitudes about the status of women, many early twentiethcentury women writers articulated a “second wave” of feminist concerns that continued the “new woman” experiments of the 1890s in ways that garnered new audiences. “She read all things that dealt with modern women,” observes the narrator of the heroine of Lawrence’s The White Peacock (1985 [1911], 123). In Women and Labour (1911), the South African feminist Olive Schreiner exhorts women to embrace new technologies so as to liberate themselves into the workforce. In fact, a rapidly increasing number of women were entering industry, a topic that became a popular theme in the fiction by Edwardian women novelists and a development that threatened a once rigid gender divide. In Violet Hunt’s The Workaday Woman (1906), an independent female character is described by another as “one of those women who ought to be a man” (3). Modernists exploited this new blurring of gender roles. James’s The Sacred Fount (1901) is a first-person account of intrigue during a country-house weekend told by a mysterious narrator whose sex is almost undetectable.
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Edwardian novelists also explored the thematics of sexual ambiguity. In James’s fiction, especially, one finds a new fascination with the indefinite, keenly observing bachelor type – Strether of The Ambassadors (1903) chief among them. The single gentleman, so evocative of gothic homosexual anxiety at the fin de siecle in the fiction of Stevenson and Wilde, becomes a more socially viable figure in the Edwardian period. For while the homosexually inflected aesthetic and decadent movements were dissipated after the Wilde trials of the 1890s (Forster spoofed the epigram-dispensing aesthete in the figure of Cecil Vyse in A Room with a View), homosexual concerns continued to claim a hold on the British literary imagination. The socialist and sexual visionary Edward Carpenter had an indelible impact on the most remarkable work of homosexual fiction to be written in the prewar period, Forster’s Maurice, completed in 1914 but not published until shortly after the author’s death in 1971. When his college lover marries, the novel’s hero becomes disgusted with the betrayals and snobberies of his upper-class milieu and chooses a working-class male lover. The bachelor-narrator of Lawrence’s first novel, The White Peacock (1911), Cyril Beardsall, described as “like one of Aubrey Beardsley’s long lean ugly fellows,” is a more sensual descendant of the 1890s male aesthete (249). Cyril offers descriptions of hawthorn buds “tight and hard as pearls” and “tender budded trees” that “shuddered and moaned,” and partakes of a homoerotic swimming idyll with the novel’s handsome hero (17). A defining feature of Edwardian fiction is a keen consciousness of historical transition and trauma coupled with an ambivalent attitude toward new formal experiments in fiction. Perhaps the two most representative figures of this outlook are Forster and Sinclair, whose fictions are poised between two epochs in literature. Like Bennett, Forster was especially sensitive to the tensions between a history-cognizant realism and the incipient experimentalism of modernist writers. With the exception of A Passage to India (1924), all of his fiction was composed before World War I. The humanist faith and relatively unexperimental formal designs that permeate his novels, coupled with a hatred of English narrowmindedness and smug class loyalty, make him the
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quintessential Edwardian fiction writer. Although he was a self-described “Austenite,” Forster’s fiction harbors experimental elements, usually in disturbances of conventional expectations in plot. The fifth chapter of his Cambridge novel The Longest Journey begins with the sentence “Gerald died that afternoon” (1962 [1907], 55) – a jarringly early death on a symbolically serene Edwardian setting (a university playing field) of what promised to be a decidedly central character. Howards End begins with a marriage and ends with the death of a would-be husband (Leonard Bast) along with an out-of-wedlock birth of his and Helen Schlegel’s child. That Forster was both bold in his choice of subject matter and reliant on the dated plot contrivances is apparent in the contradictory responses to Helen’s pregnancy. Edmund Gosse complained that the book was “sensational and dirty and affected” for introducing into fiction a “high-born maiden who has had a baby” (Charteris 323), while Katherine Mansfield quipped that shecouldnever becertain if Helen had been impregnated by Leonard Bast or his “fatal umbrella,” adding that “Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. See this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea” (81). Like Forster, Sinclair was a novelist who occupied the literary terrain between a socially aware (in her case, feminist) realism and the challenge of modernist experimentation. The author of two books on the Bront€es, an admirer of T. S. Eliot and Freud, Sinclair supported the suffrage struggle, although she later turned from political commitments to what she considered more total dedication to literary vocation. (A highlight of her career was her coining of the term “stream of consciousness” in a consideration of new writing in a review in The Egoist of Dorothy Richardson’s 1918 modernist masterpiece Pilgrimage.) Her novels The Helpmate (1907), The Judgment of Eve, and Kitty Tailleur (both 1908) all courted controversy with their questioning of marriage, a reflection of Sinclair’s involvement in the women’s suffrage movement. Like Forster, whose postEdwardian, mystical A Passage to India is his most formally ambitious work, Sinclair’s greatest novel, Mary Olivier: A Life (1919), appeared after the war. As with Forster, her partial embrace of modernist technique came after a protracted apprenticeship in modernism, particularly through
the work of Joyce, to whose Portrait of the Artist this novel is often compared. Both popular and avant garde novelists sought to infuse new energy into one of the great modes of the nineteenth-century fiction, the Bildungsroman, a tradition that accentuated the bruising encounter between personal ideals and social constraint. H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909) and Bennett’s Clayhanger (1910) were other notable novels of education. Wells claimed his novel followed “on Dickens–Thackeray lines,” but while its hero, George Ponderevo, achieves a characteristically Victorian social rise (from servant to pharmaceutical genius to battleship builder), the novel reflects a typically Wellsian absorption in science in the Einstein era. Bennett’s novel contained a vivid portrait of a young man confronting an autocratic father whose philistine values stymie his son’s ambitions. The story is echoed in Hilda Lessways (1911), the heroine of which is Clayhanger’s future wife. Compton MacKenzie’s Sinister Street (1913) is a similarly double-gendered Bildungsroman focusing on a brother and sister. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) are novels of education featuring artists whose conflicts with family and society push them deeper into an isolation that is depicted as essential for a searching male artist. Other literary genres thrived. The theme of filial rebellion and thwarted youth characterized not only fiction (as in Butler’s assertively antiVictorian The Way of All Flesh, 1903) but autobiographical works as well. Gosse’s Father and Son (1907), a corrosively intimate autobiography, detailed a childhood constricted by fanatical evangelicalism. Some of the most impressive achievements in Edwardian fiction lay in the area of the short story, among them Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) and Lawrence’s The Prussian Officer (1914). Katherine Mansfield’s collection of stories and sketches, In a German Pension (1911), satirized the habitues of a Bavarian watering-hole, expressing anti-German antipathies that would explode in the Great War, while the tales of “Saki” (Hector Hugh Munro) brought an equally malicious irony to short fiction. Max Beerbohm almost single-handedly kept alive the comic novel with Zuleika Dobson (1911), a satire of Oxford men smitten with a beautiful temptress. The Edwardian era was the great age of children’s
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EDWARDIAN FICTION
literature, reflecting a burgeoning fascination with childhood as a separate state, epitomized in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan; or, The Boy who Wouldn’t Grow Up (first staged in 1904), a fantasy of unending youth that proved so alluring that the poet Rupert Brooke reported attending the performance 12 times. Other highlights of children’s literature included Kipling’s Just So Stories (1902) and Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children (1906), Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), and Frances Hogdson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911). After the war, modernist critics targeted the crude materialism of Edwardian fiction as well as its failure to register the complex interiority of fictional subjects. In Woolf’s influential essay, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1923), the term “Edwardian” was deployed derisively so as to establish a viable modernist credo against what she considered the excessively superficial detail of novelists such as Bennett and Wells, who, Woolf insisted, were so mired in an exhausted realist tradition that they failed to see that human character had fundamentally changed. Bennett responded to Woolf’s attack, although he claimed he had never read what he called her “book” on his writing. As Samuel Hynes has observed, Bennett depicted his dispute with Woolf in class terms, representing himself as an unsophisticated writer who had been attacked by the high-born Mrs. Woolf. Woolf’s anti-Edwardian critique was echoed in Lawrence’s 1928 attack on Galsworthy, whose Man of Property (1906) Lawrence had admired but whose subsequent Forsyte volumes Lawrence skewered as “class-bound” and “nastily sentimental” (1950, 224–5). Today, the word “Edwardian” suggests a brittle grasp on reality, a fussily quaint faith in realism, a refusal to surrender the Victorian past, trembling uncertainty before enormous societal shifts, colonial adventure at the brink, and historical selfdelusion. “Edwardianism” conjures up cricket matches on flawless summer afternoons, dancing past midnight at the Ritz, and the discreet pleasures of Clubland, all accompanied by the selfconfidently nationalistic music of Edward Elgar. In the unforgiving retrospective comprehension of later generations, Edwardian writing evinces a debilitating self-satisfaction, the pastoral preciosities of which are evoked in the last lines of Rupert
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Brooke’s poem “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” (“Stands the Church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?”), just as Brooke summons up an image of iconically handsome Edwardian youth bound for self-willed slaughter in World War I. The title of a recent historical account of the twentieth century by A. N. Wilson, After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World (2005), serves as a reminder that Edwardians were the first generation to live in the shadow of a towering era of British global power, technological prowess, and literary splendor. At the same time, literary critics have elevated the reputations of several Edwardian writers, rehabilitating Sinclair, mostly forgotten at the time of her death in 1946, as a serious novelist, and exonerating Kipling of the charge of simplistic jingoism. World War I shattered Edwardian certainties. In West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918), the first novel to depict shell-shock, an ex-combatant suffers psychic paralysis and is unable to accept the country-house world he left behind. A rural manor is also the setting of Wells’s 1916 Mr. Britling Sees It Through (a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic), amid honeysuckle and dog rose as weekend visitors arrive for day-long hockey matches and night-long revelry. Late in the evening, however, the celebrated writer Britling lies awake and broods as Germany marches into Belgium and the perfect English idyll tumultuously ends. Britling struggles to adjust his precarious, privileged perspective to the actualities of war: “He did not really believe with his eyes and finger-tips and backbone that murder, and destruction, and agony on a scale monstrous beyond precedent were going on in the same world as that which slumbered outside the black ivy and silver shining window-sill that framed his peaceful view” (207). The country refuge that had served as a living, undestroyed symbol of a “true” England in Howards End – the definitive Edwardian symbol – had now became an emblem of anti-pastoralism, the prison-house of an upper class that cannot grasp a new world of change, tragedy, and loss. Well before modernist opinion cast its unforgiving retrospective glare, Edwardian novelists themselves offered a searing assessment of the too innocent, fragile world they had inherited, shaped, and finally chose to disavow.
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SEE ALSO: London in Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Batchelor, J. (1982). The Edwardian Novelists. London: Duckworth. Bergonzi, B. (1973). The Turn of a Century: Essays on Victorian and Modern English Literature. New York: Barnes and Noble. Bloom, H. (ed.) (2005). Edwardian and Georgian Fiction. New York: Chelsea House. Charteris, E. (1931). The Life and Letters of Sir Edmund Gosse. London: Heinemann. Ellmann, R. (1990). The Two Edwards [1959]. In A Long the River Run. New York: Random House. Forster, E. M. (1962). The Longest Journey [1907]. New York: Vintage. Forster, E. M. (1975). Howards End [1910]. London: Penguin. Hunt, Violet. (1906). The Workaday Woman. London: T. Werner Laurie. Hunter, J. (1982). Edwardian Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hynes, S. (1967). The Edwardian Turn of Mind. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kemp, S., Mitchell, C., & Trotter, D. (1997). An Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press. Kermode, F. (1983). The English Novel, circa 1907. In The Art of Telling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lawrence, D. H. (1950). John Galsworthy. In Selected Essays. New York: Penguin. Lawrence, D. H. (1985). The White Peacock [1911]. Oxford University Press. Mansfield, K. (2006). Journals. London: Persephone. Miller, J. E. (1994). Rebel Women: Feminism, Modernism and the Edwardian Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Trotter, D. (1993). The English Novel in History, 1895–1920. London: Routledge. Wells, H. G. (1986). Mr. Britling Sees It Through [1911]. London: Hogarth. West, R. (1986). 1900. New York: Crescent. Wilson, A. N. (2005). After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Woolf, V. (1923). Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. London: Hogarth.
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F Fantasy Fiction W. A. SENIOR
The fantasy novel necessarily violates one or more principles of realism, generally through magic. Its genesis in the nineteenth century arises from a reaction against the tenets of the age of reason and the mechanization of the industrial revolution, both of which combined to deny any numinous view of the world and to threaten its ecological health. The rise of fantasy in the mid twentieth century, reflected in the success of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, is a continuation of this reaction against a worldview based solely on reason and science. More recently, the popularity of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (2001) testifies to a need for a view of life that endows it with moral and organic significance. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels (1997–2007) and films are credited not only with bringing a new readership to fantasy but also with inspiring a whole generation of readers. In The Fantasy Literature of England Colin Manlove argues that British fantasy’s primary characteristics are its great diversity and the pleasure of making something new and remarkable (1999, 191). The twentieth-century British and Irish fantasy novel finds its roots in the earlier literature, history, folklore, myths, and geography of the British Isles as well as in the names of places and people derived from Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Latin, and other languages and heritages. Central to much British fantasy fiction is the Matter of Britain: the collected legends and tales that deal
with the early history of Britain and different branches of the Arthurian corpus. Medieval romances, particularly Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, provide such traditional elements as the quest, the journey to a magic land where time often runs more slowly than in the primary world, the importance of landscape, and the polysemous narrative, all of which are also strongly present in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590–6). John Milton in Paradise Lost (1667) and Paradise Regained (1671) created a massive Christian cosmogony from which later writers would borrow. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the supernatural gothic works of Horace Walpole, Matthew G. Lewis, Charles Maturin, and others contributed further conventions to modern fantasy. In the nineteenth century early forms of modern fantasy penned by authors such as Mary Shelley, William Morris, George MacDonald, and John Ruskin proved influential. In the early twentieth century, works such as those by the Decadent writer Edgar Jepson (1863–1938), children’s fantasy by A. A. Milne (1882–1956), the adventures of Allan Quatermain by H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925), and Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist (1926) established a foundation for British and Irish fantasy upon which others in more recent decades have built. The predominant twentieth-century fantasy is the quest story, a stepped narrative in which the hero or heroine, along with a group of companions, goes on a journey of increasingly dangerous and challenging adventures and foes, culminating in a wasteland symbolic of death. Many take place in a magical secondary
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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world while others are portal fantasies. The monomythic protagonist is often a common person, such as Dorothy in Frank Baum’s Oz narratives, who must fulfill a larger purpose, often adumbrated by an ancient prophecy, by making crucial choices and acting within an ethical framework while undergoing a series of tests. During a grueling voyage across an unfamiliar and vast landscape, quest fantasy heroes acquire magical talismans, guide figures, protectors, and unexpected aid or information as they approach a malefic power, or dark lord. After the final conflict, from which the protagonists emerge triumphant, often with the help of their companions, they return home to their communities. However, in addition to the quest structure many other subgenres, such as sword and sorcery, animal, humorous, posthumous, commodified, and urban, expand the fantasy narrative (see Clute & Grant 1999 and Stableford 2005). Perhaps the first important fantasist of the twentieth century is the prolific Irish writer Lord Dunsany (Edward John Plunkett, 1878–1957), whose early contributions to science fiction and fantasy appear in five collections of short stories: The Gods of Pegana (1905), Time and the Gods (1906), The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories (1908), The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth (1910), and A Dreamer’s Tales (1910). Dunsany, who greatly influenced Tolkien and Lewis, drew heavily on such nineteenth- century writers as Edgar Allan Poe, William Morris, George MacDonald, William Butler Yeats, and Celtic mythology and folklore. Various scholars argue that in Dunsany’s work lie the foundations of much modern fantasy: the development of a highly articulated secondary world, a celebration of pastoral life, criticism of modern technology, an imaginative twist on the quest structure, and an intimate attention to names, details, and language. The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924) is a watershed event in the history of fantasy, and other of Dunsany’s novels (The Charwoman’s Shadow, 1926; The Curse of the Wise Woman, 1933) continued to make innovations within the genre. J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973), the preeminent fantasist of the twentieth century and a scholar of medieval languages at Oxford, asserted two guiding principles behind the creation of his tales of Middle-earth: the desire to create an English
mythology, and the desire to delve into this mythology through philology since Tolkien believed that words contain stories and glimpses of lost peoples, times, and places. The Silmarillion (1977) and the other volumes of The History of Middle-earth relate the creation of Middle-earth and its history, sourced in the Finnish Kalevala, Norse mythology, Anglo-Saxon elegiac poetry, and various other medieval texts. Middle-earth offers an expansive tapestry of English geography from the pastoral Shire, which resembles the bucolic west Midlands of Tolkien’s youth; to the great woodlands of the Old Forest and Fangorn, reminiscent of British primeval forests; to the wonder and call of the sea, so central to the literature and life of the island nations. The Hobbit (1937), while a children’s book, is a model secondary world quest fantasy which offers the structural plan for Tolkien’s epic The Lord of the Rings (1954–5). Each has as its hero a hobbit, a figure of the average person, and begins in a peaceful and stable setting, the Shire. Bilbo and Frodo must each leave home and pursue a quest, which begins with the simplest of challenges and enemies and leads to others more difficult and threatening. Each acquires a guide (Gandalf), an alter ego (Gollum), and various companions; and each makes difficult choices that will affect the fate of all involved. Most significantly, both Bilbo and Frodo fail in their attempts to fulfill their quests. Major tensions explored in these narratives include knowledge versus ignorance, activity versus passivity, generosity versus greed, the communitarian spirit versus self-gratification and isolation, courage versus cowardice, and individualism versus corporate facelessness. Much the same could be said of C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), Tolkien’s friend and fellow member of the Inklings, an Oxford literary group that also included Charles Williams and Owen Barfield. Where Tolkien drew mainly from myth and language, Lewis is one of the great Christian apologists of modern fantasy. Best known for the portal fantasies that make up the Chronicles of Narnia and the Ransom trilogy, a science-fantasy amalgam, Lewis, like Tolkien, was an important scholar, the author of such studies on medieval and Renaissance literature as The Allegory of Love (1936) and The Discarded Image (1964).
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FANTASY FICTION
The center of Lewis’s Narnia is Aslan the lion, a wisdom and Christ figure that links the various novels in the series and that provides the denouement of most of the novels. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) establishes the model for the adventures that follow. World War II has begun, and the four Pevensie children are evacuated from London to escape the Blitz. In the old country house where they are sheltering, they fall through a portal in a wardrobe to Narnia, which is besieged by a seemingly endless winter caused by the White Witch. Thus, the disturbance afflicting the primary world is mirrored in a symbolic fashion in the secondary one. The children begin a quest through a magical fantasyscape to help their friends and to end the unnatural winter. During their travels, they acquire guides, gifts of magical objects, and knowledge as they meet with an array of magical and mythical creatures: talking animals, dwarves, tree nymphs, and even Father Christmas. Edmund, the younger boy, falls prey to the White Witch and must be rescued by Aslan, who sacrifices himself but is resurrected according to an ancient prophecy. In the final battle, he reappears to turn the tide and leave Narnia to heal under the rule of the Pevensies. After many years, they stumble back into the wardrobe to find that almost no time has passed and that they are children once again in their own world. Prince Caspian (1951) takes place a year later in the primary world but centuries later in the secondary, reflecting the fantasy convention that time runs at a different pace in the secondary world, and the Pevensies must help Caspian recapture the prosperity of their past rule. Aslan reappears to guide the heroes but becomes a more elusive and mystical character. The other five books in the series (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, The Horse and His Boy, The Magician’s Nephew, The Last Battle) introduce other children from the primary world who pursue their own quests as Lewis explores the greater geography and history of Narnia. Another variation in the fantasy novel comes from Mervyn Peake (1911–68) in the Gormenghast Trilogy of Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950), and Titus Alone (1959), which lacks any actual magic and takes place in a world tangential to ours. Peake, an important illustrator of such works as Alice in Wonderland and Treasure Island,
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spent part of his childhood in China, and biographers have noted the influence of the walled city of Peking in Gormenghast, the massive labyrinthine castle. Although populated by a lengthy list of dramatis personae, all linked closely to Gormenghast, the trilogy’s primary focus on description, not on sequential action, reflects Peake’s fascination with visual depictions of place as its protagonist, Titus Groan, struggles to establish his rule. While it contains elements of gothic conflict and the quest/exile story, the narrative is often difficult to follow, inconsistent, and often allusively allegorical (names such as Sourdust, Sepulchrave, Flay, and Swelter predominate), even if it is an imaginative tour-de-force compounded of the sublime, the surreal, and the exotic. Another contemporary of Tolkien and Lewis was T. H. White (1906–64), whose Once and Future King (1958) retells Malory’s Morte d’Arthur and is the basis of the musical and film Camelot (1967). The book has a convoluted publication history but is composed of three earlier works written over the previous two decades: The Sword in the Stone (1938), The Queen of Air and Darkness/The Witch in the Wood (1939), The Ill-Made Knight (1940), and The Candle in the Wind (1958); there is also another conclusion, The Book of Merlyn (1977), published posthumously. The first book recounts the education of Arthur, called Wart, under the tutelage of Merlin, who is aging backwards toward infancy, and concerns Wart’s transformation into various animals and the lessons he learns about people and power. The second book introduces Arthur as king and many of the conflicts within the Arthurian canon with Morgause and Mordred, the Knights of Orkney, and the sundering of the Round Table. The third recounts White’s version of the Lancelot–Guenevere tale. The Candle in the Wind concludes with Arthur, now weary of war and its destruction, preparing for the final battle of Camlann, though the text does not relate the battle or its aftermath. An Irish fantasy fictionist of note, Morgan Llywelyn (b. 1937), who wrote more than 30 novels, began primarily as a historical novelist. It was only in the 1990s that she started to write in a fantasy vein for children and young adults. In Celtic fantasies such as The Horse Goddess (1983), The Isles of the Blest (1989), Finn Mac Cool (1994),
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and Red Branch (1989), Llywelyn retells the stories in The Mabinogion by mixing history and Celtic myth and featuring figures such as Brian Boru, Cuchulain, Grania, druids, and Viking warriors. Similarly, Susan Cooper (b. 1935) re-envisions the Arthurian tale through a Celtic prism in The Dark is Rising sequence: Over Sea, Under Stone (1965), The Dark is Rising (1973), Greenwitch (1974), The Grey King (1975), and Silver on the Tree (1977). Other prominent fantasy writers have injected humor into their novels. Diana Wynne Jones’s (b. 1934) output cannot be categorized except by its experimental and whimsical nature. The Dalemark Quartet is a conventional quest fantasy; the Chrestomanci sequence, however, takes place in nineteenth-century England and a world parallel to it. The two novel series Howl’s Moving Castle (1986) and Castle in the Air (1990) play with the standards of the portal fantasy while Archer’s Goon (1984) might be considered a hybrid science-fantasy. Another humorous fantasist is Terry Pratchett (b. 1948), whose Discworld series begins with The Colour of Magic (1983) and The Light Fantastic (1986) and encompasses more than 25 titles that satirize and undercut the standard elements of quest and sword and sorcery fantasy. The darker side of fantasy appears in the Elric of Melnibone series of Michael Moorcock (b. 1939), a massively prolix writer associated with the rise of New Wave science fiction in the 1960s and the editor of the British science fiction magazine New Worlds. Moorcock here revises the tenets of sword and sorcery fantasy: instead of being a decent average person, the protagonist Elric is a weak and tortured albino who is dominated by his magical sword, Stormbringer (which drinks the souls of those it slays), and who is unable to remain anything but an untrustworthy loner. Elric becomes the model for similarly conflicted heroes such as Corum, Hawkmoon, and Von Bek in Moorcock’s multiverse. Another grim voice comes from Robert Holdstock (1948–2009), who earned an MSc in medical zoology and whose most renowned work, the Mythago Cycle – consisting of Mythago Wood (1984), Lavondyss (1988), The Hollowing (1993), and Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn (1997) – is informed by the magical properties of the English heartwood. In Ryhope Wood the past lives
through the creation of myth-imagoes generated by the collective unconscious of those who can find their way into the wood. Mythago Wood introduces Steven Huxley, who has just returned home from World War II. Gradually he becomes entranced by the wood and begins to explore it as he searches for Guiwenneth, a mythago he has raised. As he passes through portals within the wood, he encounters a savage world peopled with beings from English prehistory and history: Neolithic tribes, Saxon peasants, Norman knights, Robin Hood figures, and traditional nature figures. Ryhope is a mindscape, limited physically to a square mile, but within its mythic borders without physical bounds. As the twenty-first century begins, authors such as Neal Gaiman (b. 1960) and Susannah Clarke (b. 1961) look back to older models and works to write transformative fantasies, while others such as China Mieville (b. 1972) and the New Weird movement open new venues and worlds for readers of fantasy fiction. SEE ALSO: Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (BIF); Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Science Fiction (BIF); Speculative Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Attebery, B. (1992). Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Brooke-Rose, C. (1981). The Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, especially of the Fantastic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clute, J., & Grant, J. (eds.), (1999). The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 2nd edn. London: Orbit. Dunsany, Lord A. (1905). The Gods of Pegana. London: Elkin Matthews. Dunsany, Lord A. (1924). The King of Elfland’s Daughter. London: Putnam’s. Holdstock, R. (1984). Mythago Wood. London: Gollancz. Hume, K. (1984). Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature. New York: Methuen. Irwin, W. R. (1975). The Game of the Impossible. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Jackson, R. (1981). Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. New York: Methuen. Jones, D. W. (1986). Howl’s Moving Castle. New York: Methuen.
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Jones, D. W. (2006). The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: The Essential Guide to Fantasy Travel [1996], rev. edn. London: Puffin. Lewis, C. S. (1998). The Chronicles of Narnia. London: Collins. Llywelyn, M. (1983). The Horse Goddess. London: Macdonald. Manlove, C. N. (1975). Modern Fantasy: Five Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manlove, C. N. (1983). The Impulse of Fantasy Literature. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Manlove, C. N. (1999). The Fantasy Literature of England. New York: St. Martin’s. Mendlesohn, F. (2008). Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Moorcock, M. (1972). Elric of Melnibone. London: Hutchinson. Moorcock, M. (1987). Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy. London: Gollancz. Peake, M. (1946). Titus Groan. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Peake, M. (1950). Gormenghast. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Peake, M. (1959). Titus Alone. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Pratchett, T. (1983). The Colour of Magic. Gerrards Cross: Smythe. Prickett, S. (2005). Victorian Fantasy, 2nd edn. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Pullman, P. (2001). His Dark Materials Trilogy [1995–2000]. London: Scholastic. Rabkin, E. (1976). The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Schlobin, R. (ed.), (1982). The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Stableford, B. (2005). Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow. Swinfen, A. (1984). The Defence of Fantasy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Todorov, T. (1973). The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (trans. R. Howard). Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University. Tolkien, J. R. R. (1937). The Hobbit. London: Allen and Unwin. Tolkien, J. R. R. (1965). The Lord of the Rings. 3 vols. New York: Ballantine. Tolkien, J. R. R. (1966). On Fairy Stories. In The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine, pp. 33–99. Tolkien, J. R. R. (1977). The Silmarillion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. White, T. H. (1958). The Once and Future King. London: Collins.
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Yolen, J. (1981). Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie, and Folklore in the Literature of Childhood. New York: Philomel.
Farrell, J. G. RALPH CRANE
James Gordon Farrell was born in Liverpool, England on January 25, 1935, and grew up in Lancashire and Ireland. He began writing at an early age, contributing to the school magazine while at Rossall School in Lancashire, and the Oxford Opinion as an undergraduate at Brasenose College, Oxford. In 1963 Farrell’s first novel, A Man from Elsewhere, was published by New Authors, an imprint of the Hutchinson Group, to generally favorable reviews. Set in the summer of 1961, the book portrays the intellectual disillusionment of the postwar communist journalist Sayer, sent on a mission to discredit the elderly and dying Regan, a famous writer who had previously defected from the Communist Party. Although Farrell later disowned this book, which has strong echoes of Camus and Sartre, it is a good first novel, deserving of critical attention in its own right, as well as in the context of Farrell’s larger oeuvre. His second novel, The Lung (1965), published two years later, is a Beckettian black comedy which draws on Farrell’s own experiences in an iron lung. The failed hero of the novel, Martin Sands, temporarily confined by polio to a hospital, confronts the misunderstandings of his past, lost opportunities, and the question of his own sanity. On the strength of his first two novels Farrell was awarded a Harkness Fellowship in 1966 and spent the next two years in New York. Farrell’s third novel, A Girl in the Head (1967) is “an under-appreciated masterpiece . . . at least the equal of the magnificent fiction which came after it” (Ackerley 26). It recounts the bizarre adventures of Boris Slattery during one summer as he wanders around Maidenhair Bay, musing on the past and the apparently random contingencies that caused him to alight from a train in this seaside town many years earlier. In the fiction that followed A Girl in the Head Farrell moved away from the contemporary
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settings of his first three novels to the past and to a historical form of the novel he would make his own. Troubles (1970), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), which won the Booker Prize, and The Singapore Grip (1980) – commonly referred to as Farrell’s “Empire Trilogy” – are the novels that brought him commercial success in the 1970s and the works on which his critical reputation has largely rested since. Each is concerned with a particular moment in the decline of the British Empire – the Irish Civil War of 1919–21, the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and the fall of Singapore to the Japanese in 1942 – and explores the effects of those events on the characters who are caught up in the course of history. Troubles tells the tragicomic tale of Major Brendan Archer’s extended visit to the decaying Majestic Hotel after World War I where, having traveled to Ireland in order to claim his bride, Angela, he finds himself caught up in the Irish struggle for independence and a witness to the collapse of British rule in Ireland. In The Siege of Krishnapur Farrell turned to another significant moment in the decline of the British Empire, which chronologically precedes Troubles. The action of this novel, set during the Indian Mutiny of 1857–8, takes place in the fictitious town of Krishnapur where a group of British administrators, members of the local military garrison, and their families, are besieged in the Residency compound. Under the command of the Collector, Mr. Hopkins, they hold out for three months against repeated sepoy attacks before a relief force arrives to rescue them. Farrell shows that while the British may have survived this particular skirmish, they have already begun to lose the ideological war that would continue for almost a century, before being brought to a sharp conclusion by the fall of Singapore in 1942. In The Singapore Grip, through the concerns of Matthew Webb, who arrives in Singapore having inherited his father’s business interests, and the Major (from Troubles, who returns as a minor character in this novel), considerable emphasis is placed on the way Blackett and Webb Ltd. treat their native workforce, and. more generally, the way the colonial enterprise exploits its colonies. In this final novel of his Empire Trilogy, the naive zeal that had characterized the representatives of the Empire in The
Siege of Krishnapur and Troubles gives way to the ruthless economic exploitation of businessmen like Walter Blackett, who, unlike the Collector or the Major, are immune to the suffering of the colonized. Farrell accidentally drowned in 1979, at the age of 44, while fishing off rocks near the home he had recently bought on the Sheep’s Head peninsula on Ireland’s west coast. He left an unfinished novel, which was prepared for publication under the title The Hill Station (1981) by his friend John Spurling. Though evidently sketched on a smaller scale than the three volumes of his Empire Trilogy, this novel, set in Simla, the summer capital of the British Raj, in 1871, would undoubtedly have brought fresh dimensions to Farrell’s treatment of Empire. Instead, Farrell’s early death robbed contemporary fiction of one of its most promising novelists. SEE ALSO: Colonial Fiction (BIF); Historical Fiction (BIF); Irish Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ackerley, C. (1999). A Fox in the Dongeon: The Presence of Malcolm Lowry in the Early Fiction of J. G. Farrell. In R. J. Crane (ed.), J. G. Farrell: The Critical Grip. Dublin: Four Courts, pp. 19–35. Binns, R. (1986). J. G. Farrell. London: Methuen. Crane, R. J. (ed.) (1999). J. G. Farrell: The Critical Grip. Dublin: Four Courts. Crane, R. J., & Livett, J. (1997). Troubled Pleasures: The Fiction of J. G. Farrell. Dublin: Four Courts. Farrell, J. G. (1963). A Man from Elsewhere. London: New Authors. Farrell, J. G. (1965). The Lung. London: Hutchinson. Farrell, J. G. (1967). A Girl in the Head. London: Jonathan Cape. Farrell, J. G. (1970). Troubles. London: Jonathan Cape. Farrell, J. G. (1973). The Siege of Krishnapur. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Farrell, J. G. (1978). The Singapore Grip. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Farrell, J. G. (1981). The Hill Station: An Unfinished Novel and an Indian Diary, with two appreciations and a personal memoir (ed. J. Spurling). London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Greacen, L. (1999). J. G. Farrell: The Making of a Writer. London: Bloomsbury. McLeod, J. (2007). J. G. Farrell. Tavistock: Northcote House.
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FEMINIST FICTION
Morahan, C. (dir.) (1988). Troubles. London Weekend Television. Prusse, M. C. (1997). “Tommorrow is Another Day”: The Fictions of James Gordon Farrell. T€ ubingen: Francke.
Feminist Fiction IMELDA WHELEHAN
The term “feminist fiction” is extremely difficult to delimit or define. It can mean the work of a woman writer who identifies herself and her work as feminist; it can refer to fiction that directly challenges the social and political status quo, particularly as it affects women’s access to opportunity. Equally, it can be a term applied to work by a writer who either does not declare her politics or denies her feminist credentials, but is read by critics to be feminist in intention, either at the time of publication or retrospectively. Feminist fiction is associated primarily with the emergence of the second wave of feminism (or women’s liberation movement) in the mid-1960s, when the term was used with critical approbation; while not used extensively in the earlier part of the twentieth century, the term also applies to earlier writers, especially those aligned with the suffrage and other left-leaning political movements, which were producing work that could be seen to be politically aligned with the struggle for women’s rights and for equal access for women to education and the professions. The notion that literature is inherently political is carried through into second-wave thinking, and critics such as Judith Fetterley, in The Resisting Reader (1978), insist upon this. Although Fetterley’s text is largely about reading maleauthored texts “against the grain,” the model of reading as a political act transfers to criticism itself so that the feminist critic becomes deeply self-conscious about her place in the academy and very much aware of her responsibility to read and write about women’s writing – from discovering neglected classics of previous centuries to providing a model with which to analyze contemporary literature. From this perspective feminist fiction can be regarded as being in the eye of the beholder – the critic or general reader – rather than being defined by the specific intentions of the author.
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The most famous British feminist writer of the first half of the twentieth century is undoubtedly Virginia Woolf. Her most overt feminist statements on the social and moral position of women are to be found not in her fiction, however, but in her essays, A Room of One’s Own (1929), a series of lectures she delivered to female students at Girton College, Cambridge, and Three Guineas (1938). At the heart of A Room of One’s Own is the argument that women must have money and a room of their own if they are to write at all; this materialist analysis of the process of creativity insists that whether or not one can write is a political matter as much as it is about talent or creative drive. Further, Woolf’s description of both the literal and metaphorical exclusion of women from seats of learning comprises an early critique of the ways in which ideologies of male dominance and privilege operate to reinforce perceptions that women make lesser writers. Anticipating the work of later critics such as Mary Ellmann, she identifies the ways in which women writers’ work is often denigrated as trivial or narrow in scope because it often focuses on the domestic and personal. Looked at another way, given the history of social and ideological constraints upon women, the association of women’s writing in particular with the domestic and with personal relationships is entirely logical and inevitable. From this perspective, feminist critics examined the positive and political impact of women writers’ scrutiny of the domestic, married, and family life. Rebecca West, Woolf’s contemporary and the author of the novel The Return of the Soldier (1918), identified with the staunchly feminist voice in A Room of One’s Own. West, herself a contributor to the feminist weekly The Freewoman (1911–12), was profoundly influenced by the suffrage movement; other writers in this camp include Vera Brittain, a novelist and activist, perhaps best known for her memoir Testament of Youth (1933), and Winifred Holtby. Other writers of the period, among them Storm Jameson, were passionately socialist and pacifist in their politics, and their work was profoundly affected by their generation’s experience of World War I. Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) was radical in its assertion of the biological origins of lesbian sexuality, and the novel was a plea for
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acceptance of the “invert,” a categorization of the homosexual designated in the sexology of KrafftEbing, which Hall embraces in order to portray Stephen Gordon, her central character, as essentially a male soul trapped inside a woman’s body, who is given “masculine” physical characteristics and desires for “feminine” women, rather than “inverts” like herself. Although neither a radical nor a political text in other ways, the book was prosecuted for obscenity in its year of publication, a ban that lasted for 20 years in Britain. A landmark lesbian text, though rarely studied now, it contributed to a significant lesbian tradition in British writing. Virginia Woolf had a profound impact on the development of feminist criticism, and on the direction of feminist fiction in the twentieth century. By the time feminism’s second wave had begun to filter into the academy, critics recognized that women’s writing was still deemed to be generally of lesser aesthetic quality and as having a narrower, more parochial focus than men’s writing, and this encouraged the tendency to engage with women’s writing in its own terms, as a category in its own right. Women’s fiction courses increased in popularity at universities and authors were correspondingly given more critical attention than they might have received in broader “contemporary fiction” courses, with a number of positive effects, including the identification of recurring tendencies and themes in writing by women, which prompted a swell in critical monographs and anthologies devoted to such topics. In the 1970s and 1980s, establishing such courses and generating feminist readings was regarded as a political act in itself, a redressing of perceived patriarchal imbalances in the study of English literature in the academy. Feminist presses, such as Virago (established in 1973) and the Women’s Press (established in 1978) provided rich pickings for such study; and while their feminist intentions did not guarantee those of the author, the practice of feminist criticism became more sophisticated and influential in the context of literary studies as a whole. Angela Carter is an example of one writer who began her career just before the rise of feminist politics in the UK, but who seemed to be nourished by this wave of activism. Always happy to acknowledge the politics implicit in her fiction, Carter viewed her challenge as to communicate
her feminism in such a way as not to compromise her creative energies. Carter’s strategies of appropriation, subversion, and narrative experimentalism have been revealed to be particularly effective and provocative – a famous example is her rewriting of popular fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber (1979a). Carter was in some ways ahead of her time, particularly in her deployment of devices associated with magical realism, a form that had not been much in evidence in AngloAmerican writing at the time. Carter is also a useful exemplar of the conflicts and pitfalls in dubbing any writer a feminist writer, in that her book The Sadeian Woman (1979b), which explores the erotics of Sade’s work in an attempt to appropriate positive sexual expression for women, landed her at the center of heated pornography debates during the 1980s on both sides of the Atlantic. Some feminist commentators of the time saw her work as a betrayal of feminism, particularly in its portrayal of violence against women, despite her own political and ideological declarations. The anthology Tales I Tell My Mother (1978), by Zoe Fairbairns, Sara Maitland, Valerie Miner, Michele Roberts, and Michelene Wandor, was a project dedicated to producing feminist short stories that grew out of their own writing collective and is an example of one way feminist strategies are used to creative as well as political ends. Michele Roberts, who began her writing career with the publication of the novel A Piece of the Night (1978), is an author whose feminism comes through the pages of her books as she explores images of sisterhood, sexuality, domesticity, and religion. More recently she has offered her own ironic intervention into the genre of chicklit in Reader, I Married Him (2005). Pat Barker, who began her writing career at around the same time as Roberts, was encouraged by Angela Carter to write fiction; and while she is best known for her Regeneration trilogy (and won a Booker Prize for the final novel in the series, The Ghost Road, 1995), her early novels were gritty socialist-realist accounts of women’s lives set in an urban northern English landscape. Union Street (1982) is a series of connecting stories rather than a novel per se, covering women’s experiences from rape and childbirth to prostitution, illness, and death across the ages; women in this work are portrayed as trapped within their bodies and
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FEMINIST FICTION
within a patriarchal system that assigns them the role of care-giver in an environment where material means of support are always unstable and irregular. Other women writers feared that the category of woman or feminist writer would pigeonhole or even ghettoize them. Doris Lessing is a notable example of a novelist who disliked the retrospective association of her Golden Notebook (1962) with feminism; other important writers such as Iris Murdoch also disavowed feminism, even though in her case her admiration for Simone de Beauvoir rendered her disavowal questionable. Fay Weldon’s early work showed a marked engagement with the themes of early second-wave feminism and yet she has often been quoted in the broadsheet press as being critical of feminism; novels such as The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983) both challenge and recreate the ideal feminine form in Ruth’s attempt to refashion herself in the likeness of her husband’s lover. Big Women (1997) is in part a roman-a-clef: its description of the rise of the feminist publishing house Medusa has clear links with the history of the Virago Press. The experience of otherness or displacement in Britain and Ireland is recorded by many writers of diverse ethnicities and backgrounds. Irish writer Edna O’Brien’s first novel The Country Girls (1960) described the struggles during the 1950s of two rural Irish girls who, after a spell in a convent boarding school, end up in Dublin eager to experience life. Its sexually charged content and irreverence toward the Roman Catholic Church was enough to get it, and the subsequent two books in the trilogy, banned, and even burnt, in 1960s Ireland. Buchi Emecheta’s work seems to echo her own experiences as a Nigerian woman bringing up a large family on an estate in urban Britain, particularly in her semi-autobiographical In the Ditch (1972). Suniti Namjoshi’s Feminist Fables (1981) offers a feminist fusion of tales from numerous cultural sources, while her Conversations of Cow (1985), in a magic-realist vein, details the travels of an Indian lesbian named Suniti and a Brahmini lesbian cow. Joan Riley’s The Unbelonging (1985) is a starkly realist novel that details father–daughter incest when an 11-yearold girl is transported from Kingston, Jamaica to live with a parent she barely knows. Comedian, actor, and writer Meera Syal’s first novel, Anita and Me (1996), in common with Emecheta, uses
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semi-autobiographical sources to describe the life of a young Asian girl growing up in the Midlands. Landmark lesbian publications from the latter part of the twentieth century include Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), which follows the childhood and early adulthood of Jeanette, whose confidence and determination to thrive beyond her domineering mother and a suffocating religious upbringing provide an antidote to more traditional coming-out stories. Scottish author Ellen Galford, meanwhile, rewrote and embellished history in novels such as Moll Cutpurse (1984) to create a lesbian historical romance. At the century’s end, Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet (1999) offered a “queering” of the increasingly popular neoVictorian novel genre in its account of young oyster girl Nan King’s love for a male impersonator and her subsequent adventures in 1890s London. In common with Galford, she inserted the figure of the lesbian into historical writing as a way of asserting her presence, however suppressed, in history. The challenges these latter texts offer to perceptions of lesbian identity lend themselves to feminist, and lesbian-feminist, readings and interpretation. Asking the question “Are Women’s Novels Feminist Novels?” Rosalind Coward (1980) associates feminist novels most specifically with the bestselling “consciousness-raising novels” produced in the US and mainly published during the 1970s, although she writes with some skepticism about the fusion of politics and entertainment in such books. Writing in 1980, Coward does not see feminist politics as coexisting with books selling thousands of copies to people who might be reading them for any number of reasons; in this critique she raises the issue of purpose and intent, and also implicitly reveals a bias toward high literary art. Latterly, readerly engagement and interpretation have come to the fore, and the strict boundaries between high and low literature have softened to show the numerous ways in which women’s writing can negotiate feminist politics. As feminist criticism matured so it widened its purview to that of genre and popular forms of writing: from being openly dismissive of massmarket forms such as the romance, critics reevaluated such texts from the point of view of audience intervention and appropriation. More
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overtly feminist writers also intervened in historically “male” genres, such as science fiction and crime fiction; and in creating a woman’s voice, often through central female characters, the boundaries of such genres have shifted to encompass the dominant concerns of women’s writing: human reproduction, the patriarchal ordering of the workplace, forging a female identity beyond marriage, sexuality, and personal choice. This allowed for utopian and dystopian imaginings of a different social arrangement or, in the case of crime fiction, a renewed scrutiny of the justice system and its treatment of women on both sides of the law. Zoe Fairbairns’s Benefits (1979) is a dystopian novel in which the government attempts to return women to their reproductive role (anticipating some of the themes of Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, 1985); it expresses ambivalence toward the welfare state, which can be a key support to women but, equally, can dictate norms that repress. Crime fiction and romance are two other genres upon which feminism has had an impact, with writers such as Sarah Dunant in her early fiction and P. D. James (in An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, 1972) showing how the insertion of a woman at the heart of a crime narrative transforms its shape and concerns. Scottish writer Emma Tennant is an example of one who rewrites the romance for a twentieth-century audience, and is most well known for her literary “sequels,” such as Pemberley (1993) and Emma in Love (1996). It is important to acknowledge how profoundly feminism has affected the way we read, just as it has impacted upon the fate of women writers previously suppressed or pushed to the margins of literary study. And twentieth-century writers have themselves contributed to a rethinking of the literary canon; we need think only of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which acts as a postcolonial counterpoint and critique of Jane Eyre in giving voice to the “madwoman” Bertha Mason. Jane Eyre is channeled by Daphne Du Maurier in Rebecca (1938); more recently Sally Beauman’s Rebecca’s Tale (2001) gives voice to the first wife of Maxim De Winter. Both Jane Eyre and Rebecca (in common with Pride and Prejudice for the chicklit genre), remain fluid and malleable ur-texts for contemporary women’s writing. As feminism waned as a political force, “postfeminist” perspectives questioned the need to
segregate women writers or to study them as a category: at its worst women’s writing as a category did not always provide nourishment for lesbian or working-class writers or for women of color. For many commentators the time for overtly feminist fiction is past, but the legacy of feminist criticism and its transformation of literary study remains. Equally, its impact on the literary industry and on women-only literary prizes such as the Orange Prize for Fiction suggests a continuing awareness that women writers do not enter an even playing field, even though somewriters, such asA.S.Byatt,donotpermittheir work to be entered for such awards. The woman as author continues to figure as a character in novels by women, examples being Fleur Talbot in Muriel Sparks’s Loitering with Intent (1981) and Maud Bailey in A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990), suggesting a continuing engagement with and concern for the status of the women writer in twentieth-century culture, and a covert acknowledgment that even now gender remains an important feature in publishing and literary scholarship. Despite major social advances in the economic and social position of women, Virginia Woolf’s account of the very different experiences of the women writer has continuing resonance today. SEE ALSO: Chicklit and Ladlit (BIF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Mystery/Detective/Crime Fiction (BIF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (BIF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Atwood, M. (1985). The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Barker, P. (1982). Union Street. London: Virago. Beaumanm, S. (2001). Rebecca’s Tale. London: Little, Brown. Brittain, V. (1933). Testament of Youth. London: Gollancz. Carter, A. (1979a). The Bloody Chamber. London: Gollancz. Carter, A. (1979b). The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History. London: Virago. Clay, C. (2006). British Women Writers 1914–1945. Aldershot: Ashgate. Coward, R. (1980). Are Women’s Novels Feminist Novels? Feminist Review, 5, 53–64.
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FIGES, EVA
Cranny-Francis, A. (1990). Feminist Fiction. London: Polity. Du Maurier, D. (1938). Rebecca. London: Gollancz. Dunant, S. (1991). Birth Marks. London: Penguin. Eagleton, M. (1996). Working with Feminist Criticism. Oxford: Blackwell. Eagleton, M. (2005). Figuring the Woman Author in Contemporary Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ellmann, M. (1979). Thinking about Women [1968]. London: Virago. Fairbairns, Z. (1979). Benefits. London: Virago. Fairbairns, Z., Maitland, S., Miner, V., Roberts, M., & Wandor, M. (1978). Tales I Tell My Mother. London: Journeyman. Felski, R. (2003). Literature After Feminism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fetterley, J. (1978). The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Galford, E. (1984). Moll Cutpurse: Her True Story. Edinburgh: Stramullion. Hall, R. (1928). The Well of Loneliness. London: Jonathan Cape. James, P. D. (1972). An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. London: Faber and Faber. Joannou, M. (2000). Contemporary Women’s Writing: From “The Golden Notebook” to “The Color Purple. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lessing, D. (1962). The Golden Notebook. London: Michael Joseph. O’Brien, E. (1960). The Country Girls. London: Hutchinson. Rhys, J. (1966). Wide Sargasso Sea. London: Deutsch. Riley, J. (1985). The Unbelonging. London: Women’s Press. Roberts, M. (1978). A Piece of the Night. London: Women’s Press. Roberts, M. (2005). Reader, I. Married Him. London: Little, Brown. Russ, J. (1984). How to Suppress Women’s Writing. London: Women’s Press. Tennant, E. (1993). Pemberley; or, Pride and Prejudice Continued. London: Sceptre. Tennant, E. (1996). Emma in Love. London: Fourth Estate. Wandor, M. (ed.), (1983). On Gender and Writing. London: Pandora. Waters, S. (1998). Tipping the Velvet. London: Virago. Watkins, S. (2001). Twentieth-Century Women Novelists: Feminist Theory into Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Weldon, F. (1983). The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Weldon, F. (1997). Big Women. London: Flamingo.
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West, R. (1918). The Return of the Soldier. London: Nisbet. Winterson, J. (1985). Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. London: Pandora. Woolf, V. (1929). A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth. Woolf, V. (1938). Three Guineas. London: Hogarth.
Figes, Eva JULIETTE WELLS
Eva Figes has had a distinguished career as a writer of fiction, memoir, and literary criticism. As a novelist, she is best known for exploring the quotidian aspects of women’s experience throughout history and for her tendency toward experimentalism in narrative, qualities that have led to comparisons with Virginia Woolf. Figes’s background as a child refugee from the Holocaust, to which she has repeatedly returned in her non-fiction writings, resulted in a lifelong concern with the expressiveness of language, as well as an interest in representing in fiction collisions between identities and the guilt experienced by survivors of great tragedy. Eva Unger was born in 1932 in Berlin, the first child of prosperous and assimilated German Jews who sheltered her effectively from the anxieties and horrors of the era. Her father was interned in Dachau in 1938 but released the same year; his professional connections made possible the family’s emigration to England in 1939. A sensitive and literary child, Figes endured antiGerman and anti-Semitic prejudice at school, while at home she coped with her parents’ suffering of uncertainty about their relatives’ fates. She took refuge in reading and literary composition, pursuits that led to a scholarship to attend Queen Mary College of the University of London. She graduated with a BA with honors in English literature in 1953 and remained in London. Married to John George Figes from 1954 until their divorce in 1963, she has two children who are both noted writers: Orlando Figes specializes in Russian history, while Kate Figes has written extensively on the experience of motherhood. Figes’s literary career began as an editor and then an author of children’s books; she also worked as a translator, primarily of contemporary
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German literature. Several of her early novels combine aspects of her own experience with tone and techniques inspired by her reading, particularly of Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka. Equinox (1966) depicts a woman’s gradual disintegration as her marriage falls apart, while Konek Landing (1969) portrays a devastated survivor of the Holocaust. The theme of authorship is central to B (1972), a novel that foregrounds Figes’s characteristic interest in metafiction. Less overtly autobiographical are Winter Journey (1967; recipient of the Guardian Fiction Award) and Days (1974), each of which centers on the interplay between present time and memory for a single character. Figes’s concern with the oppression of women, which she examined in her celebrated polemic Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in Society (1970) and returned to in Sex and Subterfuge: Women Novelists to 1850 (1982), is crucial to nearly all her fiction from the late 1970s onward. Yet Figes has resisted the label of feminist, commenting that in her fiction she is “more concerned with women’s emotions. Women don’t stop feeling vulnerable because of feminism” (Graeber 9). Nelly’s Version (1977), one of her most enduringly popular novels, takes its main character’s amnesia as a starting place for exposing the constraints imposed on women by convention. Waking (1981), Ghosts (1988), and The Knot (1996) each offers a fragmentary portrait of a contemporary woman’s life and consciousness, while historical women feature in The Seven Ages (1986) and in The Tree of Knowledge (1990), the narrator of which is one of Milton’s daughters. Gender issues are more muted in Light (1983), Figes’s most critically acclaimed novel, which depicts a day in the life of Claude Monet, and in The Tenancy (1993), a novel of suspense. As a novelist, Figes stated early in her career, she considers herself to be European rather than English: “I am a European survivor, wrestling with a different reality [than England’s]. A piece of shrapnel lodges in my flesh, and when it moves, I write” (1978b, 29). Figes has returned to her personal history in three memoirs: the acclaimed Little Eden: A Child at War (1978a), which treats her difficult adjustment to England as a young emigre; Tales of Innocence and Experience: An Exploration (2003), in which grandmotherhood causes her to reconsider her
own childhood as well as the literary status of grandparents; and Journey to Nowhere: One Woman Looks for the Promised Land (2008), which incorporates a polemic about the present-day Middle East. Both Figes’s fiction and non-fiction are distinguished by her resistance to conventions, whether literary or social. In style, her writing often blurs the boundary between prose and poetry, most effectively in Light, where her impressionistic prose ideally suits her subject matter. She has experimented extensively with fictional structures and scope, sometimes containing a novel in a single day (as in Winter Journey and Light) or year (Equinox) of a protagonist’s life, sometimes spanning a lifespan (Waking and Winter Journey) or millennia (Seven Ages and The Tree of Knowledge). Her steady interest in representing the experience of both ordinary and extraordinary women places her among the most important feminist novelists of the late twentieth century. SEE ALSO: Feminist Fiction (BIF); Historical Fiction (BIF); Jewish Fiction (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Figes, E. (1966). Equinox. London: Secker and Warburg. Figes, E. (1967). Winter Journey. London: Faber and Faber. Figes, E. (1969). Konek Landing. London: Faber and Faber. Figes, E. (1970). Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in Society. London: Faber and Faber. Figes, E. (1972). B. London: Faber and Faber. Figes, E. (1974). Days. London: Faber and Faber. Figes, E. (1977). Nelly’s Version. London: Secker and Warburg. Figes, E. (1978a). Little Eden: A Child at War. London: Faber and Faber. Figes, E. (1978b). The Long Passage to Little England. Observer (London), p. 29 (June 11). Figes, E. (1981). Waking. London: Hamilton. Figes, E. (1982). Sex and Subterfuge: Women Novelists to 1850. London: Macmillan. Figes, E. (1983). Light. London: Hamilton. Figes, E. (1986). The Seven Ages. London: Hamilton. Figes, E. (1988). Ghosts. London: Hamilton. Figes, E. (1990). The Tree of Knowledge. London: Sinclair-Stevenson.
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Figes, E. (1993). The Tenancy. London: SinclairStevenson. Figes, E. (1996). The Knot. London: Sinclair-Stevenson. Figes, E. (2003). Tales of Innocence and Experience: An Exploration. London: Bloomsbury. Figes, E. (2008). Journey to Nowhere: One Woman Looks for the Promised Land. London: Granta. Graeber, Laurel (1988). New Beginnings in Middle Age. New York Times Book Review, p. 9 (Sept. 25).
The Film Industry and Fiction DEBORAH CARTMELL
The most obvious manifestation of the coming together of fiction and the film industry is in the film adaptation of a literary work. From its very beginnings, film turned to literature for both stylistic features and for actual stories, which led to big box office returns but received few artistic or academic plaudits. Prominent among the very first films were adaptations of literature, such as King John (1899), Alladin and the Wonderful Lamp (1900), Scrooge; or, Marley’s Ghost (1901), Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes (1902), and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903). However, the film industry’s reliance on literature was seen by many as a major weakness. On the whole, cineastes in the first half of the twentieth century were deeply suspicious of film adaptations of literature (or the narrative film). It was felt that films, rather than borrowing – or desecrating – wholesale narratives, should not copy, but should extend and translate narrative and other literary devices. For example, Sergei Eisenstein, in his often quoted essay, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” demonstrates the indebtedness of D. W. Griffith to Dickens in the director’s use of “optical quality,” “frame composition,” “close-up,” and “the alteration of emphasis by special lenses” (213). While it is true to say that film borrowed extensively from the novel, especially the nineteenth-century novel, critics were concerned that an overreliance on another art form would condemn film as inferior, merely a copy of what was overwhelmingly regarded as an infinitely superior medium. In order for film to be esteemed as “the new literature” it was imperative that it sever itself from literature, so as to be an art form in its own
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right. Snobbery about literary and/or narrative films prevailed throughout the twentieth century, and, while film gradually was welcomed into the pantheon of art, the literary adaptation was excluded. The art historian Erwin Panofsky (1974) is regarded as the first critic to claim film as an art form (Levin 1996). In “Style and Medium in the Moving Pictures” (first published in 1937 and last revised in 1947), presupposing the subservience of sound to visuals, Panofsky found the literary film the most distasteful of all genres, insisting that the greater the literary text used, the worse the film. Similarly, adaptations are unworthy of mention in Arnold Hauser’s final volume of The Social History of Art (1951), in spite of the last section being entitled “The Film Age.” Nonetheless, there were some admirers of the film adaptation of literature in the first half of the twentieth century. Surprisingly, among the first is the Renaissance critic, Allardyce Nicoll, who not only suggested that film was the “new Shakespeare” but that Shakespeare on film potentially could be more “Shakespearean” than a production in Shakespeare’s own time. Film critic Andre Bazin, writing almost 20 years before Roland Barthes’s influential essay “The Death of the Author” (1977 [1968] ), saw the refusal to regard adaptations as serious films or as serious readings of literary texts as due to an unwillingness to let go of the romantic idea of the author, of an “individualist conception” of the “author” and the “work” that, he points out, became legally defined only at the close of the eighteenth century (2000 [1948] ). While literary and film intellectuals were condemning film adaptations as belittling the potential of cinema, some promoters and producers took the opposite approach, that adaptations of “literature” by such figures as Shakespeare, Dickens, or Tolstoy elevated cinema to a higher cultural plane. For example, Frank L. Dyer, in 1910, then president of the Motion Pictures Patents Company, encouraged the adaptation of works of classic writers such as Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, and Robert Browning, as a way of lifting the cultural status of the cinema to the level of art (Uricchio & Pearson 48). This populist approach, which clearly saw cinema as mass entertainment with little or no artistic merit, clearly fuelled attacks on literary adaptations. Criticism came from both writers on film as well
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as writers on and of literature. Virginia Woolf, who like other modernist authors was influenced by film techniques in her own writing, was appalled by cinematic adaptations of literature. In her essay, “The Cinema” (1950 [1926] ), she writes of the barbaric, predatory, and “male” cinema preying upon and destroying the infinitely superior, delicate, and “female” literary text. Significantly, the first issue of the influential literary journal, Scrutiny, edited by F. R. Leavis, features an article on film which referred to it as “The Art Form of Democracy?” The author, William Hunter, who enlarged the essay into a short book in the same year (1932), argued that the narrative film (and even more so with the advent of talking pictures), appeals to the lowest common denominator, threatening what he refers to as the “ ‘efficacy’ of words” (11). The article’s placement in the first issue of Scrutiny serves as a warning to literary scholars to beware of narrative film. Unsurprisingly, any discussion of film adaptation of literature was banned from subsequent issues of the journal, indeed from literary studies as a whole, for most of the twentieth century. Disgust for the literary adaptation reaches its apex in Aldous Huxley’s diatribe on “the feelies” (the thinly disguised “talkies”) in Brave New World, in which Othello is totally unrecognizable in the adaptation entitled “Three Weeks in a Helicopter, ‘AN ALL-SUPER-SINGING, SYNTHETIC-TALKING, COLOURED, STEREOSCOPIC FEELY. WITH SYNCHRONIZED SCENT-ORGAN ACCOMPANIMENT’ ” (1988 [1932], 145). Hostility to adaptation was, on one level, rooted in artistic elitism, fearful of a form of entertainment that is genuinely socially leveling in its affordability and accessibility. Film’s reductio ad absurdum of literature is a frequent theme in the rising genre of the Hollywood novel, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon (1941) and Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939), in which Hollywood becomes the new Babylon (see Richardson 1973 for a discussion of this genre). Many established writers, such as William Faulkner, Dylan Thomas, and even Aldous Huxley, actually worked as adapters; but for the most part (with the exception of some writers, for instance Graham Greene), in the first half of the twentieth century, the majority did it with a feeling of embarrassment and self-loathing, admitting to mercenary rather than artistic motives.
There is no doubting the popularity, influence, and long shelf life of film adaptations of canonical literature. For instance, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944), David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), and Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) are among the numerous adaptations valued today as great cinema. Equally, adaptations such as ITV’s Brideshead Revisited (1981) or the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice (1995) are among the most memorable programs for television. However, in spite of its continued popularity with cinema goers, literature on screen or literary adaptations have remained in what Timothy Corrigan (2007) has identified as the “gap” for most of the twentieth century. The reasons for the exclusion of screen adaptations from both literary and film studies are various. First, early twentieth-century champions of film saw adaptations as “impure cinema”; the mixture of two art forms was seen to be to the detriment of film’s potential. Additionally, writers and literary critics considered film adaptations to be abominations, crude usurpations of literary masterpieces that threatened both literacy and the book itself. Another reason for the lack of critical acceptance of adaptations is that there were a number of examples, then as today, that were poor and deserved a bad press. Furthermore, until the twenty-first century, much of the criticism was woefully predictable, judging an adaptation’s merit by its faithfulness to its literary source or, even more vaguely, to the “spirit” of the book. Prejudice that money and art cannot mix prevailed, primarily in literary studies, accounting for another reason why films (or “pure cinema”) and film adaptations of literary works (“impure cinema”) were excluded from the curriculum. Film adaptation called attention to the absence of a single artist; and the belief that art cannot be art if it is mass produced also accounts for its exclusion, particularly in literary studies. “Logocentricism,” a belief that the word is primary and that literature is more authentic than film, also prevented adaptations from receiving serious critical attention. A tendency to regard adaptation as “appropriation” has led to emotive words such as “violation,” “vulgarization,” and “betrayal” bedeviling criticism, emphasizing what has been lost rather than what has been gained. Finally, the study of literature on screen has largely concentrated on canonical texts that make
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THE FILM INDUSTRY AND FICTION
a screen adaptation a very difficult act to follow. Adaptations that have usurped their “originals” in the minds of their audience – films like The Wizard of Oz (1939), from the novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, or To Have and Have Not (1941), adapted from an Ernest Hemingway novel of the same name (1937) – have failed to receive critical attention as adaptations. As a result, “bad” adaptations receive more coverage than “good” ones. In the midst of this mood of hostility, George Bluestone produced the first full-length study of literature on screen, Novels into Film, in 1957. The book begins by considering similarities between literature and film and ends by insisting that they must be judged as separate entities. While Bluestone has done much to raise awareness of the field, his focus is primarily on canonical authors and his perspective is, accordingly, heavily weighted on the side of literature. Referring to adaptations as “mutations,” he betrays his preference for the literary over the filmic, confidently asserting that modern literature and film cannot cross over and claiming that it would be as absurd to translate Proust or Joyce to film as it would be to convert Charlie Chaplin to print (63). The assumption that fiction and film studies must be concerned with canonical writings has generated an approach to the subject that taxonomizes adaptations, categorizing them in terms of their proximity to the source text. For instance, Jack Jorgens divides Shakespeare adaptations into “theatrical,” “realist,” and “filmic” (7–35), while Geoffrey Wagner divides adaptations into “transposition,” which involves minimum interference with the “original”; “commentary,” in which a text is altered for new emphasis; and “analogy,” where a film departs substantially from a novel or play in order to produce “another work of art” (227). Kamilla Elliott has introduced six categories or ways of approaching adaptation: “psychic” (seeing films as endeavoring to capture an “authorial spirit”); “ventriloquist” (regarding an adaptation as propping up a novel); “de(re) composing” (considering the film’s changes to its literary source in an appeal to new audiences); “genetic” (looking at common features between a film and a book, in particular, narrative); “incarnational” (maintaining that a film brings a book to life); and “trumping” (examining the ways in which an adaptation tries to outdo the
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novel). These categories, however useful, are acknowledged by their authors to be critical constructs, and, as such, are open to reorganization. Elliott’s work has been especially helpful in calling attention to the evolution of screen adaptation in earlier inter-art affinities and inter-art analogies, with especial attention to the illustrated novel of the nineteenth century. Recently, Robert Stam (2005) has replaced “fidelity criticism” with the employment of Gerard Genette’s five types of transtextual relations, reading adaptations as “palimpsests,” films in which older texts can be read or seen beneath the new. “Intertextuality” refers to quotations, allusions to other texts; “paratextuality” to the “texts” surrounding the work, such as illustrations, epigraphs, DVD extras, credits, and the merchandise associated with a film; “metatextuality” to the readings or critiques of the source novel or play in the film; and “architextuality” to the relation of a text to a genre or genres that frame the text. Stam finds Genette’s final category, “hypertextuality,” to be the most relevant to adaptation. “Hypertextuality” is the relation of one text, the “hypertext,” to an earlier “hypotext,” which is transformed (via, for instance, parody, spoof, sequel, or translation) by the hypertext. Liberating the concept of the adaptation by acknowledging that there can be no indisputable point of origin, Stam argues that, as texts, screen adaptations should be regarded within an “ongoing whirl of intertextual reference and transformation” (Stam & Raengo 2005, 31). While canonical writers such as Shakespeare, Austen, and Dickens have their place within the canon of literature on screen studies, Thomas Leitch (2007) widens the field from the simple case study to include illustrations, comic strips, video games, and true stories. Linda Hutcheon, in A Theory of Adaptation (2006), argues that film adaptation is only the tip of the iceberg and that, as a central mode of storytelling, it can be traced across other media, from roller-coasters to opera. Hutcheon points out that an adaptation, by its very nature, makes explicit that all art is based on other art. Clearly, the advent of cinema transformed the novel. Equally clearly, fiction has dictated the direction of Hollywood cinema. However, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there are still many who, fresh from the agony of
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viewing a film that has desecrated a favorite novel, regard film and literature as parasites that eat away at each other. The argument that fiction is being dictated to and diluted by the lure of movie rights (or that novelists are writing to be viewed rather than read) is much more apparent now than it was a century ago. And it is still argued that, as long as film is regarded as a subcategory of literature, it can never fulfill its potential (see Patterson 2008). The late twentieth century and early twenty-first have witnessed the rise of adaptation studies in academia, but also the growing phenomenon of the author biopic in Hollywood. From Shakespeare in Love (1996) and the Doctor Who episode “The Shakespeare Code” (2007), to Finding Neverland (J. M. Barrie, 2004), Miss Potter (Beatrix Potter, 2006), Becoming Jane (Jane Austen, 2007) and Miss Austen Regrets (2008), it seems that authors are not just authors; one by one, they are becoming rising stars of television and film. SEE ALSO: Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Modern Fiction in Hollywood (AF); Television and Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Barthes, R. (1977). The Death of the Author [1948]. In Image, Music, Text (ed. and trans. S. Heath). London: Fontana, pp. 142–8. Bazin, A. (2000). Adaptation; or, The Cinema as Digest [1948]. In J. Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation. London: Athlone, pp. 19–27. Bluestone, G. (1957). Novels into Film: The Metamorphosis of Fiction into Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cartmell, D., & Whelehan, I. (eds.), (1999). Adaptations from Text to Screen, Screen;1; to Text. London: Routledge. Cartmell, D., & Whelehan, I. (eds.) (2007). The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Corrigan, T. (2007). Literature on Screen, a History: In the Gap. In Cartmell & Whelehan (2007) pp. 29–43. Eisenstein, S. (1963). Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today [1944]. In J. Leyda (ed.), Film Form. London: Dennis Dobson. Elliott, K. (2003). Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fitzgerald, F. S. (1941). The Last Tycoon. New York: Scribner’s.
Hauser, A. (1951). The Social History of Art, vol. 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Hunter, W. (1932). Scrutiny of Cinema. London: Wishart. Hutcheon, L. (2006). A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routlege. Huxley, A. (1988). Brave New World [1932]. London: Random House. Jorgens, J. (1977). Shakespeare on Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Leitch, T. (2007). Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From “Gone with the Wind” to “The Passion of the Christ. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Leitch, T. (2008). Adaptation Studies at a Crossroads. Adaptation, 1(1), 63–77. Levin, T. Y. (1996). Iconology at the Movies: Panofky’s Film Theory. Yale Journal of Criticism, 9(1), 26–55. McFarlane, B. (1996). Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nicoll, A. (1936). Film and Theatre. London: Harrap. Panofsky, E. (1974). Style and Medium in the Moving Picture [1937]. In G. Mast, M. Cohen, & L. Braudy (eds.), Film Theory and Film Criticism: Introductory Essays, 4th edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Patterson, J. (2008). By the Book. Guardian (Mar. 15). At www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/mar/15/fiction, accessed Feb. 17, 2010. Philips, G. D., & Tibbetts, J. C. (2005). Appendix: Scenes from a Hollywood Life: The Novelist as Screenwriter. In J. C. Tibbetts & J. M. Welsh (eds.), Novels into Film, 2nd edn. New York: Facts on File, pp. 517–21. Richardson, R. (1973). Literature and Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sanders, J. (2006). Adaptation and Appropriation. Abingdon: Routledge. Stam, R. (2005). Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Stam, R., & Raengo, A. (eds.) (2004). A Companion to Literature and Film. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Stam, R., & Raengo, A. (eds.) (2005). Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Uricchio, W., & Pearson, R. E. (1993). Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wagner, G. (1975). The Novel and the Cinema. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
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FIRBANK, RONALD
West, N. (1939). The Day of the Locust. New York: Random House. Woolf, V. (1950). The Cinema [1926]. In The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays. London: Hogarth, pp. 160–71.
Firbank, Ronald DAVID MALCOLM
Ronald Firbank’s writings are neither fully canonical nor uncanonical. He often appears in literary histories in footnotes to discussions of the modernist period. Yet in the 1920s his novels sat next to Joyce’s on the shelves of Shakespeare and Company in Paris, and he has always had important admirers. In 1929 Evelyn Waugh wrote that he was “a figure of essential artistic integrity and importance” (176). In the same year E. M. Forster, despite reservations about his work, declared, “Yes, he has genius” (118). In 1949 Edmund Wilson wrote of his novels: “They are extremely intellectual and composed with the closest attention. . . . They have to be read with care, and they can be read again and again” (492). In Prancing Novelist (1973), her long examination of Firbank’s life and work, the experimental novelist Brigid Brophy insists that Firbank is “a very good writer,” and, equally importantly, a major figure in the development of twentieth-century fiction’s abandonment of realist aspirations and conventions: “Firbank saw straight when contemporaries of his, even talented ones, were circling in a fog” (pp. xii–xiv). Frequently compared to a range of major writers – Ben Jonson, Jane Austen, Edward Lear, Oscar Wilde, Aldous Huxley, and Waugh – Firbank has recently been taken up by writers on homosexual fiction, and his work is seen as an important forebear of the modern gay novel. Allan Hollinghurst (2000), who includes extensive references to him and his fiction in his novel The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), insists that his novels are “works of remarkable economy, brilliant humor, and disconcerting pathos” (p. vii). Ronald Firbank was born in 1886 into a wealthy London family, although his grandfather had risen from coalminer to wealthy railway contractor in the mid nineteenth century. Ronald Firbank attended Cambridge University,
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where he led a life reminiscent of the aesthetes of the 1890s, and converted to Catholicism in 1907. He spent the years of World War I in Oxford, alienated from the militarized Britain around him. Both before and after the war Firbank spent much time abroad (in Spain, Italy, France, and the Middle East). He was also a noted figure in bohemian London, cultivating an outrageously effeminate persona. His novels were mostly published at his own expense. His work met with the enthusiasm of the American man of letters Carl Van Vechten, who arranged for the publication of Firbank’s seventh novel, under the title of Prancing Nigger, in the USA in 1924. For the British edition, Firbank reverted to the original title Sorrow in Sunlight. In poor health for most of his life, Firbank died of pneumonia, or debility brought on by heavy drinking, in Rome in 1926. The story materials of Firbank’s fiction are varied, comic, and deliberately offensive of conservative norms. His characters (often female) are frequently outsiders and deviant, both by standards within the worlds of the texts, and by those of contemporary cultural norms. Miss O’Brookomore in Inclinations (1916) desires to live a lesbian idyll with Miss Collins. Miss Sinquier in Caprice (1917) is a provincial clergyman’s daughter who wants to make a career as an actress. The driving force of much of the action in Valmouth (1919) is a black masseuse, Miss Yaj~ navalkya, and much of that action centers on an interracial mesalliance in a world of languid centenarians. The eponymous figure in Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926) baptizes a dog (much to the hierarchy’s dismay) and is an overt homosexual. Indeed, heterosexual and homosexual irregularities permeate Firbank’s texts, and the sexual orientation of his characters is often flexible. His settings are either documented and almost probable, as in Inclinations, or highly improbable and undocumented, as with the orientalist Pisuerga of The Flower beneath the Foot (1923) and the lascivious Cuna-Cuna of Sorrow in Sunlight. Critics frequently point to the technical innovations of Firbank’s fiction. These are threefold: an extensive use of dialogue at the expense of narrative exposition; an extreme degree of narrative elision; and an attempt to bring the language of prose close to the language of poetry. Inclinations
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and Valmouth, for example, contain long passages of meandering and, in terms of the novel’s action, irrelevant dialogue. V. S. Pritchett (1953, 229) admired Firbank’s innovations in this matter, arguing that he “laid down the pattern for contemporary dialogue” by giving an impression of unshaped conversation. The elliptical nature of Firbank’s narratives is also extensively discussed by critics (for example, Potoker 1969, 36–7). In Valmouth, the reader must infer Niri-Esther’s liaison with and marriage to Dick. In Sorrow in Sunlight, Charlie Mouth’s corruption in Cuna-Cuna, the Mouth family’s social rejection, and Edna’s seduction by Vittorio are exiguously recounted. Firbank’s fiction, too, is full of passages that are not narrative but lyric in mode. Thus, the narrator of Sorrow in Sunlight exclaims, “The strange sadness of evening, the detresse of the Evening Sky! Cry, cry, white Rain Birds out of the West, cry . . .!” – here language itself and its phonological organization are foregrounded, and narrative function is attenuated. Despite neglect, Firbank is an important twentieth-century novelist. Like many of his contemporaries, he takes the conventions of the nineteenth-century novel and breaches them continually and intelligently; this is why he appeals to later experimentalists such as Brophy. It must be emphasized, too, that he is a comic writer. The bending of conventions, the shameless lubricity, and the outrageous improbability of Firbank’s created worlds are very funny. In addition, he continually putsthe traditionally subaltern,the female, the homosexual,andthenon-European,atthecenterof his work. As Brophy remarks, “Firbank’s fictions emancipate both women and proletarians” (406). In 1951, Leslie A. Fiedler was adamant: “We need all the Firbank we can get” (381). SEE ALSO: Edwardian Fiction (BIF); Forster, E. M. (BIF); Hollinghurst, Alan (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Benkovitz, M. J. (1969). Ronald Firbank: A Biography. New York: Knopf. Brophy, B. (1973). Prancing Novelist: A Defence of Fiction in the Form of a Critical Biography in Praise of Ronald Firbank. London: Macmillan.
Davies, G., Malcolm, D., & Simons, J. (eds.) (2004). Critical Essays on Ronald Firbank, English Novelist, 1886–1926. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen. Fiedler, L. A. (1951). The Relevance of Irrelevance. Nation, pp. 381–2 (Apr. 21). Firbank, R. (1905). “Odette D’Antrevernes: A Fairy Tale for Weary People” and “A Study in Temperament.” London: Elkin Matthews. Firbank, R. (1915). Vainglory. London: Grant Richards. Firbank, R. (1916). Inclinations. London: Grant Richards. Firbank, R. (1917). Caprice. London: Grant Richards. Firbank, R. (1919). Valmouth. London: Grant Richards. Firbank, R. (1920). The Princess Zoubaroff. London: Grant Richards. Firbank, R. (1921). Santal. London: Grant Richards. Firbank, R. (1923). The Flower beneath the Foot. London: Grant Richards. Firbank, R. (1924). Sorrow in Sunlight. New York: Brentano. Firbank, R. (1926). Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli. London: Grant Richards. Forster, E. M. (1936). Ronald Firbank. In Abinger Harvest. New York: Harcourt Brace, pp. 115–21. Hollinghurst, A. (2000). Introduction. In R. Firbank, Three Novels. London: Penguin, pp. vii–xxiv. Horder, M. (ed.) (1977). Ronald Firbank: Memoirs and Critiques. London: Duckworth. Potoker, E. M. (1969). Ronald Firbank. New York: Columbia University Press. Pritchett, V. S. (1953). Firbank. In Books in General. London: Chatto and Windus, pp. 229–34. Waugh, E. (1929). [Untitled critique.] In Horder (1977) pp. 175–9. Wilson, E. (1950). A Revival of Ronald Firbank. In Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties. New York: Farrar, Straus, pp. 486–502.
Fitzgerald, Penelope PETER WOLFE
Penelope Knox Fitzgerald (1916–2000) has been attracting readers for many reasons, the most basic of which is her family of origin. Both of her grandfathers were bishops (of Manchester and of Lincoln, Penelope’s birthplace). This eminence carried forward. After spending some years writing parodies and theater reviews for Punch, her father, Edmund Valpy Knox, became the magazine’s editor, a post traditionally honored by the unofficial title “King of Fleet Street.”
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The years drained some glory from this distinguished legacy. But even though Penelope had to scramble for scholarships to finish her degree, she graduated from Oxford in 1938 with honors. The tenacity that helped steer her through university held up. In 1944 she married Desmond Fitzgerald, a major in the Irish Guards. She needed all her mettle to keep the marriage afloat. An alcoholic who drifted from job to job until he stopped working altogether, Desmond left Penelope with the chores of raising three children and supporting the family. Apart from telling an interviewer that Desmond “didn’t have much luck in life,” Penelope said little about her sad marriage. But Desmond pervades her fiction in the likeness of the many of those “born to be defeated” who win our admiration for their courage in the face of failure and loss. Penelope Fitzgerald has a great gift for imagining herself in other people’s shoes without patronizing them. This great gift might have been lost to us had Mariner Books, a paperback division of the Houghton Mifflin Company, not republished The Blue Flower (1995) in a modest run of 13,000 copies in 1997. In 1998, Flower became the first novel written by a foreigner to win America’s National Book Critics Circle Award, beating works by native-born headliners such as Philip Roth and Don DeLillo. The book also did well commercially, selling 100,000 copies and building a market for her earlier work. This success was no fluke. Flower reimagines the life of Friedrich, or Fritz, von Hardenberg (1772–1801), the romantic poet from Germany later known as Novalis. The book contains biographical data. But it is no biography. Nor was it intended to be one. Flower is more than a collection of facts, insights, and ideas. Its epigraph, from von Hardenberg, “Novels arise from the shortcomings of history,” points to a lesson that goes to the heart of Fitzgerald’s artistry: that every true tale needs a jolt of fiction, usually in the form of imaginative energy or narrative design; no historian can imagine a single turn of human inconsistency. The genre Fitzgerald often used to lead our sympathies to exciting new places is the historical novel. Thus Fitzgerald set her 1986 novel Innocence in the mid-1950s because its Italian characters, who now move about freely, can still remember
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German troops taking over the public offices of their cities and setting curfews. Most of the traumas of postwar reconstruction have waned – but only to give way to new ones. Though Mussolini is mentioned, the Italy of Innocence faces anxieties caused by the Cold War. A character’s reference to “a third world war” stands as just one example of the impact of Soviet imperialism. Yet the book unfolds during “the years of the Italian economic miracle.” By 1949, the year Italy joined NATO, the Marshall Plan had already helped the country recover from the havoc of war – but at a high cost; Italians of all political persuasions were grumbling that their country had become a client state of America. The Gate of Angels (1990) finds Fitzgerald on familiar turf – a shaky, ill-defined border between a vanishing world and one groping to be born. Set in 1912 England, it straddles the lost Victorian world of earnestness and the clash of World War I. Victorian propriety, though maligned as prudish and philistine, had created a mood of timelessness, the sense of a safe, self-regulating world. The transfer of faith from religion to science in the early years of the twentieth century, one of the chief events in all of British history, pervades the action of Fitzgerald’s 1990 novel. Later in the century, it would lead to both chaos theory and Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Fitzgerald references these developments not because she wants to write philosophy. Rather, she’s describing the intellectual firestorm that blazed around Cambridge in 1912, where the novel, a love story as well as a period piece, both begins and ends. Along with Gate, The Beginning of Spring (1988), Fitzgerald’s personal favorite among her books, comprises her brilliant, barbed farewell to the new-old century she was born into. The novel carries forward from Innocence a growing interest in foreign cultures, one that would crest in The Blue Flower (1995). Among other things, Spring reframes a question that has been puzzling Westerners for centuries: is Russia part of Europe, or does it have its own unique identity? Fitzgerald poses this question thoughtfully. While referring to Russia’s simplicity and inherent goodness, she also describes the impact of change upon these virtues. Her nuanced, historically correct portrait also shows business crossing international frontiers. Her main character, Frank Reid, owner of
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a Moscow print works here in 1913, not only deals with firms in Finland and Japan; he even has to hire the company’s first cost accountant to keep pace with innovations in bookkeeping. But his stiffest challenges come from elsewhere. While reeling from the sudden, unannounced departure of his wife, he must deal with Moscow, a manufacturing hub, a capital city, and a metropolis that feels like a village. Lacking fixed edges, Moscow is always on the go, toward spring, toward communism, and toward some new problem that even fast thinking and a wad of rubles cannot always fix. Fitzgerald’s maturity of style and emotional range are clearly displayed in Spring, as in her other historical novels. Though often scorned as a branch of gothic romance, historical fiction can deliver the rewards of both fiction and nonfiction. When well done, it illuminates history and transcends it (“Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history”). Some writers today see history as fiction and adopt the attitude that because we can’t always know what happened we can invent it. Any historical setting can be imagined into existence. What counts, as Henry James enjoyed saying, is the quality of the imagining. Bolstering the historian’s analytic flair with a journalistic awareness of the story she’s telling, Penelope Fitzgerald meets James’s requirement with much to spare. SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Acocella, J. (2000). Assassination on a Small Scale. New Yorker, pp. 80–8 (Feb. 7). Brookner, A. (2000). Moscow Before the Revolution. Spectator, pp. 29–30 (Oct. 16). Byatt, A. S. (2001). Introduction. In P. Fitzgerald, The Means of Escape. Boston: Mariner, pp. ix–xxx. Fitzgerald, P. (1979). Offshore. London: Collins. Fitzgerald, P. (1980). Human Voices. London: Collins. Fitzgerald, P. (1982). At Freddie’s. London: Collins. Fitzgerald, P. (1986). Innocence. London: Collins. Fitzgerald, P. (1988). The Beginning of Spring. London: Collins. Fitzgerald, P. (1990). The Gate of Angels. London: Collins. Fitzgerald, P. (1995). The Blue Flower. London: Flamingo.
Fitzgerald, P. (2000). The Means of Escape. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Fitzgerald, P. (2008). So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald. London: Fourth Estate. Himmelfarb, G. (2000). A God-Haunted Family. New Republic, pp. 59–69 (Oct. 16). King, N. (1992). The Heart Has Its Reasons. Washington Post Book World, p. 1 (Feb. 23). Lesser, W. (2002). Penelope. In Z. Leader (ed.), On Modern British Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 107–25. Penelope Fitzgerald Papers. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas–Austin. Raban, J. (1999). The Fact Artist. New Republic, pp. 39–42 (Aug. 2). Wolfe, P. (1997). Understanding Penelope Fitzgerald. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
Ford, Ford Madox SARA HASLAM
Ford Madox Ford is known, in the main, for his two acknowledged masterpieces, The Good Soldier and the four novels that, together, make up Parade’s End: Some Do Not . . ., No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up –, and Last Post. The Good Soldier is counted among the classics of modernism. Rebecca West cited the “wonders of its technique” in her contemporary review. Students of the period read the novel at first for these wonders, contending with its quintessentially unreliable narrator, John Dowell, as well as his tale of social disintegration, sexual intrigue, and violent death. Anthony Burgess called Parade’s End “the finest novel about the First World War.” Its perfectly weighted opening sentence introduces a text that is now familiar to many. Ford’s oeuvre includes a further nearly 80 books, however, and spans a great range of genres. Born in 1873, Ford was first published in 1891. He wrote fiction, fairy tales, poetry, and biography at the start of his career, caught and inspired by an extraordinary combination of late nineteenth-century influences. Most notably, this early work revealed a dedicated attention to his Pre-Raphaelite beginnings; Ford’s grandfather Ford Madox Brown illustrated his first publication, a fairy tale called The Brown Owl (1891), and Edward Burne-Jones the later The Queen Who Flew (1894). Within little more than a decade, Ford became an editor, critic, and memoir writer too. His circle
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of interest widened quickly, owing to the range of influences on which he could draw, but more particularly to the writers – Joseph Conrad preeminent among them – that he soon met. (While Ford’s best-known books are populated in the main by lonely protagonists, with loose, or disintegrating, ties to the world, his writing life is characterized by its strong, though shifting, networks of artists who had, as he put it, “studied their Flaubert.”) The volumes of his trilogy England and the English were “boomed” from 1905. His “kaleidoscopic” London is a long way from fairy tales, and was called by the Daily Mail “the latest and truest image of London, built up out of a series of negations, that together are more hauntingly near to a composite picture of the city than anything we have seen before.” Both The Good Soldier (1995 [1915] ) and Parade’s End (2002b [1950] ) display similar series of multiple, fragmented perspectives, and the landscape of war becomes prominent in Ford’s work after 1915 – an effective context, or metaphor, for his explorations of individual psychology, as well as of relationships between individuals and nations. It is his rendering of this landscape that prompts judgments like Graham Greene’s “there is no novelist of this century more likely to live than Ford Madox Ford”; yet it never quite replaces the jeweled vision of the early fairy tales, or the historical romances like Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (1911), in which William Sorrell travels back to the Middle Ages and finds his soul eased by the comparative simplicity and freedom of life. Indeed, those early notions are themselves longlived, reworked into poems like “On Heaven,” published in 1913 and much admired by Ezra Pound – he called it the “most important poem in the modern manner” – or “Latin Quarter” (1936), and the lovers’ precious “velvet blackness” found there. Ford Madox Ford was called Ford Hermann Hueffer when he was born, in Merton, Surrey, on December 17, 1873. On that day, Dante Gabriel Rossetti prophesied that he would bring “glory to whichever of his two countries he may choose to adopt . . .” His father, Francis H€ uffer before he anglicized his name, was German, a music critic for The Times; his mother Catherine was Ford Madox Brown’s daughter, and a painter herself. Ford first traveled when he was very young to visit his H€ uffer relations in Europe; this route (London
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and Paris, through to the Rhine and Alsace-Lorraine) became one he would love, and was also one that, perhaps, sowed the seeds for his ideas about relationships in literature for the rest of his life. He believed in a “Republic of Letters,” and always stressed the special nature of the association between writers, and between European and trans-European literatures. The critic Vita Fortunati offers a different model for Ford’s statement between the two wars that “wherever there were creative thinkers was my country”: the community of artists that was the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Ford published a book about Rossetti in 1902, and one about the Brotherhood in 1907. The familial links with the Brotherhood began early: Madox Brown was Dante Gabriel’s mentor and friend; and Ford’s aunt had married William Michael Rossetti – the families would holiday together when the children were young. This became his first, strong, creative network. But while it helped him to develop a visual technique that would be with him until the 1930s (A. S. Byatt has recently examined his use of “color words,” starting with the simple, pure tones of the fairy tales), as well as his ideas about artistic republics, there was an emotional cost to this kinship that would affect him as strongly to the end of his life. His childhood identification of his Rossetti cousins as “horrible monsters of precocity,” and “marvels of genius,” when compounded by the tragic early death of his demanding and judgmental father, contributed to a severe lack of self-confidence. The most serious effects of this particular family romance can be witnessed in his agoraphobic breakdowns in the early years of the twentieth century. A late chapter of Return to Yesterday, Ford’s memoir of the years 1894 to 1914, describes some of the resultant cures, and the “wickedly unskilful doctoring,” to which he was subjected at the time. When his father died in 1889 there was no money (Ford would struggle with financial insecurity for most of his life). He went to live with his beloved Madox Brown. The strength of the bond he shared with his grandfather is shown in the name Ford eventually took, with surprising delay – considering the one he was born with and the cultural climate – postwar, in 1919. Madox Brown remained the most significant force in Ford’s creative life until, in 1898, he met and soon began to collaborate with Conrad. By this time, Ford had
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also married, in somewhat dramatic fashion. He had eloped with Elsie Martindale and was living in Romney Marsh, the hub of the most productive of his literary networks, which would come to include, as well as Conrad, the American writer Stephen Crane, H. G. Wells, and Henry James. But it was his meeting of Conrad that has been called the “crucial event in both men’s literary lives.” Ford learned much of his craft from this great writer, and developed an impressionist technique alongside him. He later said that his “literary friendship” with Conrad had been “for its lack of jealousy a very beautiful thing.” This is not to say the relationship with Conrad was easy. They wrote The Inheritors together (1901), then Romance (1903), but quarreled too, and broke with each other in 1909. (Ford nevertheless published a memoir of Conrad in 1924.) When Ford fell out with his fellow writers and friends, as he also did with Henry James, and with his great friend Arthur Marwood – upon whom he based Christopher Tietjens, the protagonist of Parade’s End – it was generally about one of two things: money, or the socially complicated (and emotionally painful) relationships Ford had with the women in his life. The first of Ford’s editorial ventures, the English Review, emerged from discussions with Marwood, Conrad, Edward Garnett, and H. G. Wells when Ford and Elsie spent time in London in 1904. Ford wanted to become involved more widely in the literary scene, and also wanted to promote exciting modern writing. Though this review, which Ford founded in 1908, having moved back to London, has been described as “one of the best literary magazines ever to appear in these islands” (publishing new writers like Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis as well as established figures such as Hardy), for the period of his editorship from December 1908 to February 1910 it was a financial disaster. That he met and began an affair with the writer Violet Hunt at the same time, though his marriage had by this time failed, put too big a strain on his relationships with Wells and Garnett, and then with Conrad, Marwood, and James too. And I used the phrase “socially complicated” deliberately. Literary London may not have been ready for his attempts to divorce Elsie (with whom he had two daughters, Christina and Katharine), or for his long affairs with Hunt and others, but his relationships with what Joseph
Wiesenfarth (2005) has termed the “regiment” of his women formed the other most significant of Ford’s creative networks. These relationships must be taken seriously in artistic, as well as biographical, or even moral, terms. Though it was partly the case that a new love affair seemed to stimulate the desire to write – a lover was often also a muse – this was not the whole truth of the matter. Ford worked tirelessly to support the work of those in whom he believed (as those writers he edited knew, this was not restricted to lovers). Even as his relationship with Violet Hunt disintegrated, he wrote to Lucy Masterman about how good Hunt’s latest novel was as he corrected its proofs. And Ford also learned from Hunt, and from novelist Jean Rhys, as well as from Stella Bowen and Janice Biala, the latter both important artists who rejuvenated his style. Bowen and Biala, in their turn, acknowledged an extensive debt to him; Hunt (1926) and Rhys (1928), on the other hand, published accounts of their lives with Ford that nearly destroyed his reputation. By the time Ford began work on the first of the books that would make his name, The Good Soldier, his relationship with Violet Hunt was starting its decline. The novel’s opening chapters came out in the Vorticist magazine, Blast, on June 20, 1914. Less notably, he was also soon busy writing (somewhat idiosyncratic) propaganda for his good friend C. F. G. Masterman’s wartime propaganda bureau. He believed in the cause at first, and joined up, at the age of 41, in July 1915. But like most others, Ford had a miserable and tragic experience of war. He got his commission as a second lieutenant in the Welch Regiment (Special Reserve). “Here I am and hard at it – 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. everyday . . . Literature seems to have died out of a world that is mostly interesting from its contours,” he wrote from Cardiff, where he trained before leaving for France on July 13, 1916. As might be expected on this date, his destination was the Somme. His age meant that, although he asked to be at the front – and was for about two months – he was stationed mainly with the battalion transport. This did not mean that he avoided bombardment. Such positions were regularly shelled, and only a few days after he arrived he was blown up by one such shell; he landed on his face, suffering concussion and mouth injuries. In an impressive section of Parade’s End, Christopher Tietjens is also blown up. His experience is
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a curious and liberating one. He finds that, surprisingly, he is still alive, and, full of adrenaline and feelings of indestructibility he rescues those men of his who lie around him, carrying them, pulling them from the disgusting viscous mud like an avenging angel. The indulgence of his physicality leads, by the end of the tetralogy, to a sexual fulfillment unavailable to him (but enjoyed elsewhere by his taunting, vicious, and stunning wife) before the war. This is how Tietjens is moved into, and begins finally to inhabit, the modern, postwar world. It was not so for Ford. In Sussex, postwar, Ford was haunted. It Was the Nightingale (1934) records that Red Ford (the house he shared with Bowen), was “filled with a horde of minor malices and doubts.” Ford feared that the “shadows were alive . . . and that the dark, gleaming panes of the window hid other, whispering, beings that jeered” behind his back. In the earlier, and important, stylistic essay “On Impressionism” (1914), glass works very differently from the way it does in this memoir. In 1914 it is brightly, cheerfully, reflective, and, as a symbol, denotes the active and creative mind’s capabilities of being in two different places at once – places of time as well as of space. The clouded window panes of Red Ford are a postwar mutation, torturing the shell-shocked writer with what he does not, any longer, know about himself. Ford lost portions of his memory in the war, some of which never came back. (His hearing was also damaged, and he cannot quite catch what the ghosts are saying either.) Ford’s doubts about his failing memory, and thus his ability to reflect and, ultimately, to write, are a terror. Parade’s End helped to exorcise them, as did the country to which he went for succour. His instinct was to grow vegetables, cook good and simple food, and to merge in some way with the nourishing soil – a crucial stage in the journey to his beloved Provence. By the time Parade’s End appeared in print, things were better for Ford (unlike most of the great books about World War I, it took less than 10 years to produce). Biographer Max Saunders (1996) writes that he was “back in the thick of contemporary literature,” partly as a result of editing the Transatlantic Review in Paris, publishing Hemingway, Stein, and Carlos Williams, for example. As the tetralogy appeared Ford was truly feted in New York in particular. (New York Essays
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and the travel book New York is Not America were both published in 1927.) For a while his money troubles went away. He never, however, lived in England again. His long and fulfilling relationship with Stella Bowen survived an affair with Jean Rhys while they were all living in Paris in the mid1920s, but then he traveled to the USA in 1926 and 1927 without her and their daughter, Esther Julia, and it was destroyed by the distance and by further liaisons abroad. Until Ford met the last great love of his life, Janice Biala, on May Day, 1930, marking the start of the decade that induced most of his memoirs, he moved between Paris, Provence, and America, always writing (he published poetry, fiction, and criticism in this period alone), always finding and often becoming a hub of artistic conversation and endeavor wherever he was based. Ford and Biala’s home became Villa Paul, on Cap Brun, for much of the remainder of his life. He was happy here, cooking, writing, and tending his garden, but he was suffering periods of painful and debilitating heart trouble. His illnesses did not prevent further travel to work at Olivet College, Michigan – he met the young Robert Lowell, who became an influential admirer, during one trip – and in New York. Ford completed one of his most important critical books, The March of Literature (1939), while he was at Olivet, and remained with Biala in New York for the autumn and winter of 1938. True to form, a new literary group was begun in the city early the next year at his suggestion, to promote William Carlos Williams, and “serious creative Literature in America.” The group came to include Ezra Pound, e. e. cummings, Allen Tate, Sherwood Anderson, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Williams himself, and there was talk about turning it into another review. In what James Joyce called “possibly the last public act of Ford’s life,” he wrote on May 10 to the Saturday Review to celebrate Finnegans Wake, and protest against the tone of the review the editor had published. Ford died at Deauville, having just reached France from America, on June 26, 1939. He is buried on the cliffs above the town. SEE ALSO: Conrad, Joseph (BIF); London in Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Rhys, Jean (WF); Wells, H. G. (BIF); World War I in Fiction (BIF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Conrad, J., & Ford, F. M. (1901). The Inheritors. London: Heinemann. Conrad, J., & Ford, F. M. (1903). Romance. London: Smith, Elder. Ford, F. M. (1891). The Brown Owl. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Ford, F. M. (1894). The Queen Who Flew. London: Bliss, Sands and Foster. Ford, F. M. (1896). Ford Madox Brown. London: Longmans, Green. Ford, F. M. (1902). Rossetti. London: Duckworth. Ford, F. M. (1906). The Fifth Queen. London: Alston Rivers. Ford, F. M. (1907a). The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. London: Duckworth. Ford, F. M. (1907b). Privy Seal. London: Alston Rivers. Ford, F. M. (1908). The Fifth Queen Crowned. London: Alston Rivers. Ford, F. M. (1910). A Call. London: Chatto and Windus. Ford, F. M. (1911). Ladies Whose Bright Eyes. London: Constable. Ford, F. M. (1924). Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance. London: Duckworth. Ford, F. M. (1927). New York is Not America. London: Duckworth. Ford, F. M. (1930). The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad. London: Constable. Ford, F. M. (1933). The Rash Act. London: Jonathan Cape. Ford, F. M. (1934a). Henry for Hugh. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Ford, F. M. (1934b). It Was the Nightingale. London: Heinemann. Ford, F. M. (1938) Provence. London: Allen and Unwin. Ford, F. M. (1939). The March of Literature. London: Allen and Unwin. Ford, F. M. (1965). The Letters of Ford Madox Ford (ed. R. Ludwig). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ford, F. M. (1995). The Good Soldier [1915] (ed. M. Stannard). New York: Norton. Ford, F. M. (2002a). No Enemy [1929] (ed. P. Skinner). Manchester: Carcanet. Ford, F. M. (2002b). Parade’s End [1950] (ed. M. Saunders), comprising Some Do Not . . . [1924], No More Parades [1925], A Man Could Stand Up [1926], and The Last Post [1928]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Ford, F. M. (2003). England and the English [1907] (ed. S. Haslam), comprising The Soul of London [1905], The Heart of the Country [1906], and The Spirit of the People [1907]. Manchester: Carcanet.
Haslam, S. (2002). Fragmenting Modernism: Ford Madox Ford, the Novel and the Great War. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hunt, V. (1926). The Flurried Years. London: Hurst and Blackett. Rhys, J. (1928). Postures. London: Chatto and Windus. (Reprinted as Quartet. London: Deutsch 1969.). Saunders, M. (1996). Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Saunders, M. (ed.) (1997) Ford Madox Ford: Selected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet. Saunders, M. (gen. ed.) (2002– ). International Ford Madox Ford Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Saunders, M., & Stang, R. (eds.) (2002). Ford Madox Ford: Critical Essays. Manchester: Carcanet. Wiesenfarth, J. (2005). Ford Madox Ford and the Regiment of Women. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Forster, E. M. PETER CHILDS
Edward Morgan Forster is most well known for the handful of novels he published in his lifetime but he was also successful as a short story writer, biographer, critic, librettist, and travel writer. His four early novels situated him as an astute observer of contemporary manners and mores, which he chiefly portrayed in social comedies that have a lineage from the fiction of Jane Austen to the plays of Oscar Wilde. He shared with the latter a frustration over the unacceptability of writing openly about homosexuality and his early work concerned the restrictions placed on personal freedom by English sensibilities. However, his later work, especially his last novel A Passage to India (1924), has much in common with the experimentations of modernism in its use of symbolism and what Forster calls “rhythm” in his book on fiction Aspects of the Novel (1927). Forster, who lived most of his later life at King’s College, Cambridge, was one of the less prominent figures in the Bloomsbury Group, a lifelong member of the Labour Party, and an agnostic. He was also an avowed liberal humanist who believed strongly in personal relationships, famously writing in “What I Believe” (1939) that he would sooner betray his country than his friend. His early novels and stories use Italy, and to a lesser extent Greece, as a vibrant, life-affirming antithesis to the stultifying repression of
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FORSTER, E. M.
Edwardian England. His homosexual novel, Maurice (1971), written in 1913–14, was published only posthumously. Born in London on January 1, 1879, the year before his father’s death, Forster was educated at private schools in Eastbourne and Tunbridge Wells. Raised by his mother, with whom he remained close up to her death in the mid1940s, Forster inherited £8,000 in 1887 from his great-aunt, Marianne Thornton, about whom he later wrote a “domestic biography.” From 1897, he attended King’s College, Cambridge where he read classics and history, partly under the supervision of the paganist and political activist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, a fellow Bloomsbury set member and long-term friend of whom Forster also wrote a biography. At Cambridge, Forster similarly came under the influence of the philosopher G. E. Moore and the aesthetic belief that the highest purpose of living is to contemplate beauty in art and to cultivate friendships in life. Forster was elected to the “Apostles” circle of Cambridge intellectuals and through them met members of what was to become the Bloomsbury Group, which included Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and John Maynard Keynes. After Cambridge, he undertook a one-year tour of Italy and Austria with his mother in 1901, and around this time he also began writing. The next year he taught at the Working Men’s College and subsequently at the extra-mural department of the Cambridge Local Lectures Board, teaching Italian art and history. His first story “Albergo Empedocle” appeared in Temple Bar in December 1903 and in the following year he started contributing stories to the Cambridge-based journal Independent Review, but Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) was Forster’s first published novel. It is a narrative revolving around Anglo-Italian contrasts that sets the passionate world of Italy Forster had seen on his travels against the cool, reserved values of suburban England. A social comedy for most of its length, it ends as a tragedy with death and frustrated love as the English, briefly taken out of themselves, return to their unadventurous lives in the southern counties. In the year of its publication, Forster spent several months in Nassenhalde, Germany, as tutor to the Countess von Arnim: an experience that, like his friendship with Virginia and Vanessa Stephen (later Virginia
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Woolf and Vanessa Bell), would inform his portrait of the Schlegel sisters in Howards End. In 1907 he worked as a private tutor for an Indian Muslim, Syed Ross Masood, with whom he developed a close, loving friendship and to whom A Passage to India is dedicated. Also in 1907, Forster published the novel of his Cambridge days, The Longest Journey, which remained his favorite novel despite its comparatively low critical standing. It tells the story of an orphaned undergraduate and then struggling writer, Rickie, who abandons his close friend Ansell for a loveless marriage but is then partially enlightened by the free spirit of his wayward, pagan Wiltshire half-brother Stephen. At this time, Forster also associated more often with the Bloomsbury Group, becoming a close friend of the Woolfs, Strachey, and Fry. The following year Forster published his second Anglo-Italian novel, A Room with a View (1908): a story of misunderstandings and English snobbery which this time ends happily as the heroine Lucy Honeychurch realizes in time her love for the impulsive George Emerson over the effete intellectual Cecil Vyse. While mocking the romantic novel, Forster here adheres to its conventions. The story clearly centers on a young woman whose passions are aroused by a holiday abroad, where she meets the man she will eventually marry after certain hurdles, social and personal, have been overcome. The book therefore has its tongue in its cheek much of the time and it is the social comedy of the characters and situations that are of chief interest rather than the romance. Forster’s narrator sits above the characters and recounts events in a consistently ironical tone. The novel’s title plays with the sense of a “view” as an opinion or prejudice, which may be poor and partial or generous and open. English interiors are contrasted with Italian exteriors, just as in Lucy’s surname the sweet taste of honey is contrasted with the constraint and sobriety of the church. Lucy’s surname is a portmanteau word and represents her choice between Cecil and George, England and Italy, convention and passion. The novel has been considered Forster’s finest, because it appears a perfectly drawn study of manners and morals, class and social comedy. It is just as arguably a slight work and its charms cannot perhaps compensate for its lack of ambition or its literary conservatism.
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However, Forster’s early novels did not sell well and it was in 1910 that he had his first considerable success with the book that secured his reputation: Howards End. Concerning sections of the middle classes, this is a “condition of England” novel that focuses on the question: who will inherit Howards End, Forster’s metonym for England based on his childhood home of Rook’s Nest. The story centers on the relationship between the intellectual German Schlegel sisters and the practical, male-dominated, business-oriented Wilcox family. The Wilcoxes are a thriving but none too cultured unemotional middle-class family with a successful domestic and imperial business. They stand for industry and finance, commerce and capital: an outer life of “telegrams and anger” that embodies the Protestant work ethic and masculine endeavor. The Schlegels, Margaret, Helen, and Tibby, are young intellectual Londoners of German descent. They stand for the “inner world” of personal relationships and humane liberal culture. Forster suggests in the novel that while he prefers and values more highly the life of the Schlegels, it cannot subsist without that of the Wilcoxes. In the novel, ambitiously if not wholly convincingly, Forster attempts to find a way for Wilcox money to become the support for Schlegel culture, and also for the future of rural England to be wrested from urban, commercial interests and placed once more in the hands of the yeomanry. Howards End has partly become famous for its epigraph, “Only connect,” which stands as a call across Forster’s writing to seize the day and unite the spiritual and the material sides to life. A novel of the bourgeois and bohemian classes with little to say about the upper and lower sections of society, Howards End nevertheless remains an important study of the “death of Liberal England” and of the twilight years before the Great War. It is a successful anatomy of the red rust and portable luggage of industrial England’s slide through change and transition, comparable to other contemporary works by Wells and Lawrence for example, but it is also a novel intimately and illuminatingly concerned with the connections between private and public worlds. Now an established novelist, the hitherto prolific Forster was to publish only one more novel in the rest of his life, though he remained an active, thoughtful, and highly admired writer. The year
1911 saw the release of a collection of his short stories as The Celestial Omnibus. In 1912–13 he made his first visit to India, with R. C. Trevelyan, Dickinson, and G. H. Luce, and soon after Forster began writing an early draft of A Passage to India. He also worked on the homosexual novel that was not published until after his death, Maurice: A Romance. This novel, circulated privately at the time, is a story of cross-class love that for the only time in Forster’s long fiction explicitly eschews the traditional orthodoxy of heterosexual romantic encounters for the homosexual love that Forster himself desired. Forster did find love, after the war started when he began working for the International Red Cross in Alexandria and fell for a young man called Mohammed El-Adl, with whom he had his first sexual experiences. In Egypt, Forster also became a stronger supporter of the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy. He returned to England in 1919, after the war, but set off traveling again in 1921. On this trip to India he worked as the private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas Senior, and his letters home from the two Indian trips were later published as The Hill of Devi (1953). In 1922 he published Alexandria: A History and a Guide, but copies were burned before distribution and the book was not republished until 1938. Pharos and Pharillon, Forster’s essays on Alexandria, together with some translations of Cavafy’s poems, was published in 1923. Over this time, Forster had been reworking his Indian novel, which was finally published in 1924, 14 years after Howards End. A Passage to India begins as the story of Adela Quested and Mrs. Moore’s journey to India to visit Adela’s betrothed, Ronny, who is also Mrs. Moore’s son. There they meet a college teacher Mr. Fielding, to some extent Forster’s surrogate in the novel, the Brahman Hindu Dr. Godbole, and the Muslim Dr. Aziz, whose alleged assault on Adela is the fulcrum of the narrative. A Passage to India makes extensive use of the technique of “rhythm” by which Forster, and his critics, denote the structural use in fiction of leitmotifs or “repetition with variation.” Rhythm depends upon reiterated words and phrases that accumulate resonances through the repeated use of expressions, incidents, or characters to create a pulsating effect in the evolution of a text’s themes. It is apparent in the use made of the
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FORSTER, E. M.
echo that haunts Adela and Mrs. Moore after their visit to the Marabar Caves. The entire book is in fact highly structured to create patterns, repetitions, and symbolic impact. For example, it foregrounds a tripartite structure of “Mosque,” “Caves,” and “Temple”: three Indian spaces representing Islam (a monotheistic religion), Jainism (atheistic), and Hinduism (polytheistic). The book also follows a seasonal pattern in its three parts, from cold weather to hot weather to the rains. The other key element to the book’s construction is the central symbol of the Marabar Caves, which has been interpreted in many ways. First, they appear as hollow, empty spaces to match Forster’s perception of metaphysical emptiness in a godless universe. Second, they arguably express Forster’s view of India as a place of mystery and nullity to the British Raj. Third, the hollow caves can be read as a symbol of the main textual absence in the book, its missing center: the enigma of what happened to Adela. A Passage to India was widely acclaimed but Forster gave up extended fiction because he felt he could not write openly and honestly about (homo)sexual relations. In 1927 he gave the Clark Lectures at Cambridge University that were published as Aspects of the Novel the same year. He was also offered a fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge on the strength of them. In 1928, a new assembly of short stories was published, The Eternal Moment: a second collection of six stories that turn away from realism toward the styles of fantasy and romance. In 1934, the year he published his first biography, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Forster became the first president of the National Council for Civil Liberties, an unsurprising decision for someone who had argued against the suppression of Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness in 1928 and later spoke in defense of the overturning of the ban on D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960. Two years after the Dickinson biography, in 1936, he published his first assembly of essays and occasional pieces, Abinger Harvest. His mother died in 1945 and in the same year he was elected an honorary fellow at King’s, which entitled him to live at the college, as he did for the rest of his life. In 1947 he embarked on lecture tours in the United States, and two years later he refused a knighthood from the king. The same year he wrote the libretto for Benjamin
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Britten’s opera Billy Budd, based on Hermann Melville’s novel. The year 1948 saw the publication of the assembly of his two short story volumes as Collected Short Stories, while 1951 saw the release of Forster’s second collection of essays and articles, Two Cheers for Democracy, and 1953 the important publication of The Hill of Devi. This is Forster’s account of the visits he made to the small Indian princely state of Dewas Senior in 1912–13 and, more importantly, 1921. It is composed primarily of letters sent home but is supplemented by later commentary. On his first visit, Forster went as a guest but on his second he served as private secretary to the maharajah, for which on his departure he was awarded the highest honor of the state: the reigning Prince’s Tukoji Rao III Gold Medal. The book is principally concerned with the day-to-day activities of the court, the way in which the state was ruled and administered. Never that sure what he was doing, Forster likened it to a Gilbert and Sullivan opera. Devi, Residence of the Goddess, is the sacred mountain that looms over the capital city of Dewas Senior. At its summit, inhabited by an ancient object of great significance if not power, like the Kawa Dol at the Marabar, is the cave of Chamunda. As this detail implies, the book is an intriguing exercise in cultural difference as well as travel writing but for many readers its foremost interest will lie in the light it sheds on Forster’s final novel. For example, he writes: “I began [A Passage to India] before my 1921 visit, and took out the opening chapters with me, with the intention of continuing them. But as soon as they were confronted with the country they purported to describe, they seemed to wilt and go dead and I could do nothing with them. I used to look at them of an evening in my room at Dewas, and felt only distaste and despair. The gap between India remembered and India experienced was too wide. When I got back to England the gap narrowed, and I was able to resume.” The opening chapter of the third section of A Passage to India, “Temple,” is also illuminated by reading Forster’s account in The Hill of Devi of the Gokul Ashtami festival that he attended in Dewas in August 1921 and used as a model for Godbole’s ceremony. Forster’s final book in his lifetime was Marianne Thornton (1956), a biography of the great-aunt whose gift of £8,000 had allowed
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Forster to afford to go to Cambridge and subsequently to become a writer. In 1969 Forster was awarded the Order of Merit. He died the following year in the home of friends on June 1. The years 1971 saw the publication of his Maurice and 1972 the release of his remaining, largely unpublished, short stories in The Life to Come. Forster’s unfinished novel Arctic Summer was published in 1980 and his selected letters were released in two volumes in 1983. He remains one of the best regarded English novelists of the twentieth century despite effectively ceasing to write fiction halfway through his life. SEE ALSO: Censorship and the Novel (BIF); Edwardian Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF); Woolf, Virginia (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Beauman, N. (1993). Morgan: A Biography of E. M. Forster. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Beer, J. (ed.) (1985). A Passage to India: Essays in Interpretation. London: Macmillan. Bradshaw, D. (ed.) (2007). The Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Childs, P. (ed.) (1999). Post-Colonial Theory and English Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Das, G. K. (1977). E. M. Forster’s India. London: Macmillan. Forster, E. M. (1905). Where Angels Fear to Tread. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Forster, E. M. (1907). The Longest Journey. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Forster, E. M. (1908). A Room with a View. London: Edward Arnold. Forster, E. M. (1910). Howards End. London: Edward Arnold. Forster, E. M. (1911). The Celestial Omnibus. London: Edward Arnold. Forster, E. M. (1922). Alexandria: A History and a Guide. London: Whitehead Morris. Forster, E. M. (1923). Pharos and Pharillon. London: Hogarth. Forster, E. M. (1924). A Passage to India. London: Edward Arnold. Forster, E. M. (1927). Aspects of the Novel. London: Edward Arnold. Forster, E. M. (1928). The Eternal Moment and Other Stories. London: Sidgwick and Jackson.
Forster, E. M. (1934). Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. London: Edward Arnold. Forster, E. M. (1936). Abinger Harvest. London: Edward Arnold. Forster, E. M. (1939). What I Believe. London: Hogarth. Forster, E. M. (1951). Two Cheers for Democracy. London: Edward Arnold. Forster, E. M. (1953). The Hill of Devi. London: Edward Arnold. Forster, E. M. (1956). Marianne Thornton. London: Edward Arnold. Forster, E. M. (1971). Maurice. London: Edward Arnold. Forster, E. M. (1972). The Life to Come and Other Stories. Edward Arnold. Forster, E. M. (1980). Arctic Summer and Other Fiction. London: Edward Arnold. Furbank, P. N. (1978). E. M. Forster: A Life. London: Secker and Warburg. Herz, J. S. (1993). A Passage to India: Nation and Narration. Boston: Twayne. Jay, B. (1998). E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. Harmondsworth: Icon. Royle, N. (1999). E. M. Forster. Plymouth: Northcote House. Stape, J. H. (1998). E. M. Forster: Critical Assessments. Robertsbridge: Helm Information. Tambling, J. (ed.) (1995). E. M. Forster. London: Macmillan. Trotter, D. (1993). The English Novel in History. 1895–1920. London: Routledge.
Fowles, John BROOKE LENZ
Renowned for his erudition, his experimentation with literary form, and his exceptional storytelling abilities, John Fowles was unique in his generation ofEnglish authors for achieving (andmaintaining) both popular success and critical acclaim. Though his work peaked in critical reputation by the early 1990s, Fowles remains one of the most popular and important authors of postwar British fiction. Born March 31, 1926, in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, England, Fowles felt suffocated by the suburban conformity of his early life with his parents Robert John Fowles and Gladys May (Richards) Fowles, much preferring the quiet life of rural Devon, where his family evacuated during World War II and where he would discover his abiding reverence for nature. He attended Bedford School, served two years compulsory service in the Royal
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Marines, and briefly attended the University of Edinburgh. Fowles then attended New College, Oxford, where he discovered the French literature (particularly Celtic romance) and existentialist philosophy that would influence all his writing. After leaving Oxford, he accepted teaching posts at the University of Poitiers, France, and then at a boarding school in Spetsai, Greece. Deeply moved by Greek landscape and culture, Fowles also met his future wife, Elizabeth (Whitton) Christy, at the school. This tumultuous affair weathered several difficult years while Fowles taught at Ashridge College and then at St. Godric’s College, London. Elizabeth and John Fowles were married on April 2, 1954. The publication of his first novel allowed Fowles to write full-time, and the couple eventually moved to Lyme Regis, Dorset, where he would write most of his major work. Although he was always conscious of his Englishness and became absorbed in the history of the town, serving as curator of the Lyme Regis Philpot Museum for a decade, Fowles felt himself an “exile” in England and considered his ideas more consistent with European values. After Elizabeth’s sudden death from cancer in 1990, Fowles married family friend Sarah Smith in 1998. He died on November 5, 2005, after a long illness. Throughout his career, Fowles wrote fiction that explored profound questions of human existence and relationships. Especially intrigued by the work of Sartre, Camus, and Jung, he created situations in which his characters’ personal and cultural values would be tested, especially in their interactions with mysterious women. In The Collector (1963), his first published novel, this interaction occurs between butterfly collector Frederick Clegg and art student Miranda Grey. Having admired Miranda from afar, Clegg decides to kidnap her and keep her in a basement after suddenly winning the football pools. A psychological thriller inspired by both the Bluebeard legend and a newspaper clipping of a similar kidnapping, The Collector offers both Clegg’s and Miranda’s version of events, highlighting the differences in the social, political, and aesthetic environments of the two characters and emphasizing their inability to communicate across these boundaries. Although Miranda begins to develop some existential awareness, both characters’ opinions and actions are ultimately determined by their social locations, and Miranda’s developing
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authenticity is abruptly halted with her death from pneumonia and neglect. As his most conventional novel, The Collector introduces some of Fowles’s most consistent concerns, most notably with social conditioning versus individual authenticity, free will, and personal integrity. Yet The Magus (1977 [1965] ), published as his second novel but begun a decade earlier and revised and republished a decade later, offers a much more complex investigation of these existential concerns. The novel details the experiences of Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman of Fowles’s generation who, like his author, takes a teaching position at a boarding school on a Greek island. There he enters the mysterious world of Bourani, a villa owned by the enigmatic Maurice Conchis. Under Conchis’s direction, Nicholas negotiates a series of bizarre episodes, most of which revolve around the intoxicating Lily (also called Julie, and based on Sanchia Humphreys, a student Fowles encountered at Ashridge College), whom Nicholas covets despite his commitment to his Australian girlfriend, Alison (based, like most of Fowles’s heroines, on his wife Elizabeth). This “godgame” radically destabilizes Nicholas’s affected principles, forcing him to confront his own lack of personal authenticity. Inspired by a variety of sources and experiences, including Richard Jefferies’s Bevis, Henri Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, and Fowles’s own experiences on Spetsai, The Magus puzzled many readers and critics familiar with The Collector, particularly because of its ambiguity, complexity, and indeterminate ending. However, the revised version, with its clarified themes and enhanced eroticism, remains one of his most popular works. Fowles’s most successful work was his next novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). Inspired by a persistent vision of a woman staring out to sea, The French Lieutenant’s Woman combines a story set in Victorian Lyme Regis with an intrusive modern narrator, who comments on the action, questions the nature of fiction, occasionally inserts himself into the story as a character, and constructs alternative endings. The story chronicles the existential awakening of Charles Smithson, an amiable but unremarkable gentleman, who is seduced out of his conventional existence by the alluring Sarah Woodruff. With its implicit comparison of historical mores and
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values and its metafictional concerns, the novel flustered the literary establishment in England, but became wildly popular in the United States. It won several awards, and was made into an Oscarnominated film in 1981, featuring a screenplay by Nobel laureate Harold Pinter. Fowles’s subsequent novels, while less provocatively seductive, focus even more crucially on the hazard of existence, the burdens of social conditioning,thechallengesofexistentialawareness, and the importance of personal authenticity and meaningful relationships. Written under the working title “Variations,” Fowles’s next published work, The Ebony Tower (1974), includes the title novella, a Breton lai translated from Marie de France, and a number of shorter stories that resonate thematically with one another and with his earlier works. The most obvious resonances occur in the title novella, in which art critic David Williams travels to France to interview exiled artist Henry Breasley, a kind of inarticulate Conchis figure who presides over a mysteriously erotic domain that challenges David, through his interactions with Breasley’s assistant Diana, to live authentically. David fails to rise to the challenge, and returns to his comfortable but inauthentic existence. The collection’s other stories catalogue similar failures of imagination but gesture toward more authentic possibilities; however, the obscurity of these tales has both intrigued and frustrated readers and critics. Likewise, Fowles’s next novel, Daniel Martin (1977a), has drawn both praise for its social consciousness and ambition, and criticism for its comparatively stolid and lengthy explication. As his most personal work, the novel follows the development of its eponymous protagonist, a Hollywood screenwriter summoned to his native England by the impending death of an old friend. Dissatisfied with his empty accomplishments, Dan decides to write a novel exploring the forces that have shaped his life in order to find a more fulfilling and authentic path. Critical in this enterprise are two romantic interests, Dan’s actress girlfriend Jenny and his former lover and sisterin-law, Jane. As both Fowles and Dan pursue “whole sight,” the novel investigates how various forces contribute to the perception of experiences and considers the ways in which an individual might achieve personal and artistic authenticity. Fowles’s next novel, Mantissa (1982a), offers a stark contrast to Daniel Martin. A parody of
poststructuralism, Mantissa takes place entirely within the head of its protagonist, author Miles Green, as he debates the nature of fiction with his muse, Erato. As a playful attack on literary criticism and a defense of Fowles’s highly eroticized views on writing, Mantissa received predictably negative reviews, but offers his most overtly postmodern and mischievous investigation into the nature of fiction and freedom. Inspired by a persistent vision of silhouetted travelers and set inthe eighteenth century, Fowles’s last published novel, A Maggot (1985), follows the investigation of a mysterious gentleman’s disappearance by lawyer Henry Ayscough. A historical novel informed by the perspective of its modern narrator and the conventions of detective novels and science fiction, A Maggot includes historical texts both real and invented, along with the depositions of several characters. The most important of these comes from Rebecca Lee, a former prostitute who in the novel becomes the mother of historical Shaker leader Ann Lee. Combining elements of all Fowles’s earlier fiction, A Maggot investigates problems of perception, social consciousness, creativity, and authenticity. Though he secured his literary reputation as a novelist, Fowles worked in a number of forms, and his non-fiction and occasional writings provide important insights into his popular and influential fiction. The most significant of these writings include The Aristos (1964), a philosophical treatise inspired by Heraclitus; Wormholes (1998), a collection of essays; The Tree (1979), a reflection on nature; and his critically acclaimed Journals (2003, 2006). He has also published a number of shorter works, often accompanied by photography, and a collection of poetry. His voluminous papers are housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, and posthumous publication of new work remains a possibility. SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF); Mystery/ Detective/Crime Fiction (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF); Science Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Acheson, J. (1998). John Fowles. New York: St. Martin’s. Aubrey, J. (1991). John Fowles: A Reference Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
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Aubrey, J. (ed.) (1999). John Fowles and Nature: Fourteen Perspectives on Landscape. Madison, NJ. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Barnum, C. (1988). The Fiction of John Fowles: A Myth for Our Time. Greenwood, FL: Penkevill. Conradi, P. (1982). John Fowles. New York: Methuen. Cooper, P. (1991). The Fictions of John Fowles. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Fawkner, H. W. (1984). The Timescapes of John Fowles. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Foster, T. C. (1994). Understanding John Fowles. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Fowles, J. (1963). The Collector. Boston: Little, Brown. Fowles, J. (1964). The Aristos. Boston: Little, Brown. Fowles, J. (1969). The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Boston: Little, Brown. Fowles, J. (1973). Poems. New York: Ecco. Fowles, J. (1974). The Ebony Tower. Boston: Little, Brown. Fowles, J. (1975). Shipwreck. Boston: Little, Brown. Fowles, J. (1977a). Daniel Martin. Boston: Little, Brown. Fowles, J. (1977b). The Magus [1965], rev. edn. Boston: Little, Brown. Fowles, J. (1978). Islands. Boston: Little, Brown. Fowles, J. (1979). The Tree. New York: Ecco. Fowles, J. (1980). The Enigma of Stonehenge. New York: Summit. Fowles, J. (1982a). Mantissa. Boston: Little, Brown. Fowles, J. (1982b). A Short History of Lyme Regis. Boston: Little, Brown. Fowles, J. (1984). Thomas Hardy’s England. Boston: Little, Brown. Fowles, J. (1985). A Maggot. Boston: Little, Brown. Fowles, J. (1990). Lyme Regis Camera. Boston: Little, Brown. Fowles, J. (2003, 2006). The Journals, 2 vols. (ed. C. Drazin) London: Vintage. Garard, C. (1991). Point of View in Fiction and Film: Focus on John Fowles. New York: Peter Lang. Green, G. (dir.) (1968). The Magus. Blazer. Huffaker, R. (1980). John Fowles. Boston: Twayne. Knights, R. (dir.) (1984). The Ebony Tower. Granada Television. Lenz, B. (2008). John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Loveday, S. (1985). The Romances of John Fowles. New York: St. Martin’s. Olshen, B. N. (1978). John Fowles. New York: Ungar. Onega, S. J. (1989). Form and Meaning in the Novels of John Fowles. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press. Palmer, W. J. (1974). The Fiction of John Fowles: Tradition, Art, and the Loneliness of Selfhood. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
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Pifer, F E. (ed.) (1986). Critical Essays on John Fowles. Boston: G. K. Hall. Reisz, K. (dir.) (1981). The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Juniper Films. Relf, J. (ed.) (1998). Wormholes. New York: Henry Holt. Salami, M. (1992). John Fowles’s Fiction and the Poetics of Postmodernism. London: Associated University Presses. Tarbox, K. (1988). The Art of John Fowles. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Vipond, D. L. (ed.) (1999). Conversations with John Fowles. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Warburton, E. (2004). John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds. New York: Viking. Wilson, T. M. (2006). The Recurrent Green Universe of John Fowles. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Woodcock, B. (1984). Male Mythologies: John Fowles and Masculinity. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble. Wyler, W. (dir.) (1965). The Collector. Collector Company.
Frayn, Michael MERRITT MOSELEY
Michael Frayn is a man of letters best known as a playwright and a novelist. He began his writing career, though, as a much admired author of topical satirical essays and was credited as one of the fathers of the “satire boom” of the 1960s; he has won fame as a translator, particularly of Anton Chekhov, and two of his books, including one published in 2006, are works of philosophy. Frayn was born on September 8, 1933, in Mill Hill, a northern suburb of London, in a family he places somewhere between lower-middle and middle-middle class. He received his secondary education first in a fee-paying school and then at the Kingston Grammar School. There he wrote poetry, edited a school magazine, and was, like many writers of his generation, a youthful communist. He earned a state scholarship to study at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, but deferred his entry to do his required national service, which proved a boon, since he was taught Russian as a military translator (a study which prepared him for his translations of Chekhov). Entering Cambridge in 1954, he studied moral sciences, or philosophy. He wrote for the literary magazine and for Footlights!, the annual Cambridge student review. Upon graduation in 1957
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he began to write for the Guardian, first reporting and soon writing humorous columns. He ceased to write a regular column in 1968, though he has since returned to it occasionally. By that time he had begun to publish fiction, his first novel, The Tin Men (1965), being followed quickly by The Russian Interpreter (1966), Towards the End of the Morning (1967), and A Very Private Life (1968). His first plays were performed in 1970 and for several years he wrote steadily and successfully for the theater, his first really sensational hit coming in 1982 with Noises Off. There were translations of Chekhov and his first philosophical work, Constructions (1974), during the late 1970s and 1980s; then, in 1989, he returned to fiction with The Trick of It. He has continued this versatile career. “Late” Frayn would include his play Copenhagen (1998), which won the US Tony Award for best play, and the novels Headlong (1999), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Spies (2002), the Whitbread Novel of the Year. Frayn’s novels cannot be easily or neatly summed up, as they differ so strongly from one another, though they are usually inventive, intelligent, and predominantly comic, and they show a continuing interest in how ordinary people do their work. The Tin Men is a farcical treatment of advertising and market research, casting an early sardonic look at cybernetics; a misunderstood visit by the queen triggers the hectic action. It won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Hawthornden Prize. The Russian Interpreter, a thriller about an Englishman over his head in Russia, obviously relies on Frayn’s Russian language skills and his disillusioning Russian visits. Paul Manning, the innocent abroad, is easily manipulated both by Russians and by an amoral Englishman who claims to be his old university friend. Towards the End of the Morning (published in the US as Against Entropy) takes a gently jaundiced look at the newspaper business, revealing an office full of idle and not very competent journalists, getting through their day, and the disruption that ensues when a new man arrives and works with ambition and drive. A Very Private Life begins strikingly: “Once upon a time there will be a little girl called Uncumber.” Frayn goes on to depict a dystopian future of human alienation in which the privileged people live hermetically sealed lives, connected by something like the
Internet, and shows that efforts to make contact with a wider world, like Uncumber’s, are doomed. Sweet Dreams is a fantasy about the afterlife, suggesting that heaven is a modest improvement on the earthly life – the departed character Howard Baker can now speak foreign languages and revise embarrassing moments of his life – but is otherwise like New York except populated by earnest social liberals of the sort Howard has known in England. The Trick of It (1989), published after a long fictional hiatus mostly devoted to the theater, is a darkening campus comedy about a literary critic who marries the author who has been his subject. Far from helping his research program, his marriage disrupts it, produces marital rivalry in which he tries to become a novelist, and ends in career disaster. A Landing on the Sun (1991) is an engrossing and touching exploration of the mysterious death of a civil servant. An investigator assigned to learn the truth about a civil servant’s suicide learns of a secret love affair and his own relationship to the dead man’s family and their sadness. Now You Know (1992) is more political than most of Frayn’s books. It turns on a campaign for transparency in public life waged by a brash man, uncouth but irresistible, called Terry Little, and the complications that sexual desire, with its privacy and secrecy, introduces into a demand that everything be publicly known. Headlong is the richest of Frayn’s novels. It was criticized by some as “difficult,” because it includes much art history and Flemish history; it focuses on a lost Brueghel painting and the machinations of an academic who believes he has found it. The farcical account of how he attempts to acquire it includes the vortex of lying, then lying more to cover the original lies, that Frayn sees in most farce. Spies is simultaneously a nostalgic study of youth in a London suburb during World War II, a thriller about suspected spies and multiple forms of betrayal, and a subtle investigation of identity. Frayn’s newspaper columns have been published in five collections. His book The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of the Universe (2006) is philosophy. But most of his output is in the form of stories – many for the theater, but including 10 of the sharpest and most satisfying novels of the past 40 years.
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SEE ALSO: Campus Novel (BIF); Fantasy Fiction (BIF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Frayn, M. (1965) The Tin Men. London: Collins. Frayn, M. (1966) The Russian Interpreter. London: Collins. Frayn, M. (1967) Towards the End of the Morning. London: Collins. (Published in US as Against Entropy.) Frayn, M. (1968) A Very Private Life. London: Collins. Frayn, M. (1973) Sweet Dreams. London: Collins. Frayn, M. (1974) Constructions. London: Wildwood House. Frayn, M. (1982) Noises Off: A Play in Three Acts. London: Methuen. Frayn, M. (1989) The Trick of It. London: Viking. Frayn, M. (1991) A Landing on the Sun. London: Viking. Frayn, M. (1992) Now You Know. London: Viking. Frayn, M. (1998) Copenhagen. London: Methuen. Frayn, M. (1999) Headlong. London: Faber and Faber. Frayn, M. (2002) Spies. London: Faber and Faber.
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Frayn, M. (2006) The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of the Universe. London: Faber and Faber. Hitchens, C. (2002) Between Waugh and Wodehouse: Comedy and Conservatism. In Z. Leader (ed.), On Modern British Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 45–59. Kahan, M. (2000) Michael Frayn. Bomb, 73, 54–9. Lyall, S. (1999). Enter Farce and Erudition: Ambiguity Fires a Novelist and Playwright. New York Times, pp. EI, 3 (Oct. 25). At www.nytimes.com/1999/10/ 25/theater/enter-farce-and-erudition-ambiguityfires-a-novelist-and-playwright.html? pagewanted¼1, accessed Mar. 4, 2010. Moseley, M. (2006) Understanding Michael Frayn. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Page, M. (1994) File on Frayn. London: Methuen. Page, M. (1998) Michael Frayn (8 September 1933– ). In M. Moseley (ed.), British Novelists Since 1960. 2nd series. Detroit: Gale, pp. 128–37. Wilders, J. (2002) Michael Frayn (1933– ). In J. Parini (ed.), British Writers, supplement VII. New York: Scribner’s, pp. 51–65. Worth, K. (1983) Farce and Michael Frayn. Modern Drama, 26 (March), 47–53.
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G Galloway, Janice DOROTHY McMILLAN
Janice Galloway, born in 1955, was brought up in Saltcoats, Ayrshire, by her mother, whose life was a constant struggle after she left her destructive, drunken husband. Galloway’s childhood was dominated by a much older sister who returned, having left her own husband and child, to tyrannize the household. Yet, love of reading and music provided freedoms in the midst of emotional and material deprivations. At her secondary school, Ardrossan Academy, she was encouraged intellectually and musically by a charismatic teacher, Ken Hetherington. She studied music and English at Glasgow University and taught in Ayrshire for 10 years before The Trick is to Keep Breathing kickstarted her writing career in 1990. Since then Galloway has made herself into an impressively professional woman of letters, indeed of more than letters for her repertoire includes short stories; poems; theatrical, operatic, and sculptural collaborations; editing and music reviewing, as well as four novels, The Trick, Foreign Parts, Clara and This Is Not About Me in which the various interests converge. Literary, visual, and musical experiments inform the techniques of the four long fictions; and the long and short fictions assist each other, since Galloway often suggests that women’s lives are best represented as a series of short stories or vignettes with repeated epiphanies or clarifications, rather than as plot-driven toward definitive closure. She exploits the visual possibilities of the page, and the structure of Clara roughly follows Robert Schumann’s song cycle
Frauen Liebe und Leben (Woman’s Life and Love). Galloway’s determination to transform rather than be limited by conventions, whether literary, typographical, political, or sociological, characterizes her feminism which may, given the depressing nature of some her subject matter, at times seem down, yet is never out. Galloway refuses to be limited by fixed categories – Scottish novelist, Glasgow novelist, woman novelist. In various interviews she insists that she simply gets on with it – if critics find schools and patterns that is their affair. She admits the significance for her work of Alasdair Gray and Marguerite Duras, admires Catherine Carswell and Jessie Kesson, but insists that nothing that a writer reads or experiences is ever wasted. The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989) deals with the breakdown, hospitalization, and possible recovery of schoolteacher Joy Stone after her married lover and colleague, Michael Fisher, drowns in a hotel pool during their holiday in a foreign resort. Joy teaches in a secondary school, and having abandoned her cottage to dry rot, lives in a depressed Glasgow overspill council estate on the outskirts of an unnamed Ayrshire town. Her existence is ignored by the minister officiating at her lover’s funeral and this precipitates a crisis of identity. The novel’s typographical tricks (Sterne filtered through Alasdair Gray) figure the fragmentation of the self, but even more daringly Galloway forces Plathian confessional fiction to accommodate social and political critique. Foreign Parts (1994) charts the driving holiday in France of Cassie and Rona, single women in their late thirties. Cassie’s life with Chris, her
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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GALSWORTHY, JOHN
former partner, is invoked through holiday snapshots, the more distant past of World War I by a visit to a war cemetery and by two letters home by Rona’s grandfather from the trenches where he died. This novel too revivifies convention as memorials of men and the male form of the road novel are pressed into celebration of the resilience of female friendship. Clara (2002b) follows the nineteenth-century pianist and composer, Clara Wieck Schumann, from her childhood, dominated by her musicteacher father who vows to make her famous, to the death in a lunatic asylum of her husband Robert, the now celebrated composer. Galloway focuses on the struggle of Robert and her father to possess Clara, forcing her to negotiate the conflicting demands of music and love, work and motherhood. Thus revisionist biography allows examination of the history of female creativity. Galloway’s short stories in Blood (1991) and Where You Find It (1996) are also experimental, often disturbingly so. Generically the stories are slippery, veering from realism to the creepy fantasy of “After the Rains,” a story of transformations of human to inhuman – a flower, a washing machine, and worse, after a period of ceaseless rain. But even the realist stories teeter on the brink of the surreal, as if our lives require constant effort to keep them this side of normality. There is the couple whose love is controlled by the kind of shop they live above – bliss above the baker’s, revulsion above the butcher’s; the girl who makes heart-shaped ham sandwiches for her lover’s “piece” on Valentine’s day. The narrating voice is unsettling, usually but not always female; some sympathy is allowed to male positions: in “Hope” the narrator shuts his eyes against the oppressive, cloying presence of his partner, Hope: “Sooner or later I will have to open my eyes” (1996, 83). This Is Not About Me (2008) is another transformational novel, more than a memoir in its exploration of the forces that constrain talent and ambition, although it offers a modestly hopeful account of the survival of creativity against the odds. The title disclaims autobiographical truth, insisting on the constructedness, the fictionality of the account. Yet the vulnerability and the feisty resilience of “Janice Galloway” are the primary characteristics of her creator’s writing and it is impossible not to feel that we are admiring the girl and the writer simultaneously. Galloway has nev-
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er caught better the distinctive Scottish English of her upbringing with the terrible, inescapable cliches that the old use to reduce the self-esteem and expectations of the young: “I wish I didny have you trailing my heels all the time” (59); “You that’s supposed to be clever” (115), “you and your fancy ideas” (308). The whole of Galloway’s work insists that these “fancy ideas” are just what we should be holding on to. SEE ALSO: Carswell, Catherine (BIF); Feminist Fiction (BIF); Gray, Alasdair (BIF); Scottish Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Galloway, J. (1989). The Trick is to Keep Breathing. Edinburgh: Polygon. Galloway, J. (1991). Blood. London: Secker and Warburg. Galloway, J. (1994). Foreign Parts. London: Jonathan Cape. Galloway, J. (1996). Where You Find it. London: Jonathan Cape. Galloway, J. (2002a). Boy Book See. Glasgow: Mariscat. Galloway, J. (2002b). Clara. London: Jonathan Cape. Galloway, J. (2008). This Is Not About Me. London: Granta. Jackson, L. (ed.) (2004). Exchanges: Reading Janice Galloway’s Fictions. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Review. Janice Galloway: A Web Archive. At www. galloway.1to1.org, accessed Jan. 28, 2010. McGlynn, M. (2001). Janice Galloway. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 21(2), 7–39. Metzstein, M. (1993). Of Myths and Men: Aspects of Gender in the Fiction of Janice Galloway. In The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 136–46.
Galsworthy, John TRACY HARGREAVES
John Galsworthy owes what he termed his “passport . . . for the shores of permanence” (Marrot 497) to two trilogies, The Forsyte Saga (1922) and A Modern Comedy (1929). Through his Forsytes, Galsworthy observed the feuding dynamics of the intergenerational middle-class family to explore and symbolize the cultural and moral dynamics of England from the late Victorian to the modern period (1886 to the late 1920s).
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Aesthetics, sexual desire, the location of home, and a number of class-based issues percolate through the two trilogies, marking the boundaries of transitional cultural change. Galsworthy was born on August 14, 1867 into a wealthy middle-class family. He was educated at Harrow School and, with the intention of entering his father’s profession, went on to read law at New College, Oxford. Although he was called to the Bar, Galsworthy realized that the law was not his vocation and, following a fortuitous meeting with Joseph Conrad (the pair remained lifelong friends), and with the encouragement of his wife, Ada, he began writing. Galsworthy’s output was prolific and varied: poetry, essays, short stories, plays, and fiction. His naturalistic drama was well received: his first play, The Silver Box (1906), was produced by the influential Vedrenne–Barker partnership at the Court, later the Royal Court Theatre. Galsworthy’s compassionate commitment to prison reform was explored in Justice (1910). The play prompted a correspondence and series of meetings with Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, who later announced reforms for the treatment of prisoners in solitary confinement (Gindin 206–7). But it is as the creator of the Forsytes that Galsworthy really distinguished himself. The Forsyte Saga comprised The Man of Property (1906), “Indian Summer of a Forsyte” (1915), In Chancery (1920), “Awakening” (1920), and To Let (1921). A Modern Comedy comprised The White Monkey (1924), “A Silent Wooing” (1927), The Silver Spoon (1926), “Passers By” (1927), and Swan Song (1928). Galsworthy followed the trilogies with a collection of stories outlining the fates and quirks of minor Forsyte characters, On Forsyte Change, published in 1930, before completing a final trilogy of novels, Maid in Waiting, Flowering Wilderness, and Over the River, devoted to the Cherrells, “the older type of family with more tradition and sense of service than the Forsytes” (Marrot 630) – the kind of family that Virginia Woolf explored in The Years (1937), which was written with the express intention of rejecting Galsworthy’s popular example. Galsworthy’s first Forsytes were created in a short story, “The Salvation of Swithin Forsyte” in A Man of Devon (1901) and in an unfinished play, The Civilized (1901–2), which features James
Forsyte and his wife Emily. While writing The Man of Property in 1905, Galsworthy mooted the idea of at least two more volumes. In any event, he did not return to the Forsytes until 1915 when, during his profound despair about World War I, he wrote his rustic “Indian Summer of a Forsyte,” first published in Five Tales (1918) and eventually included as a connecting interlude between The Man of Property and In Chancery in The Forsyte Saga in 1922. Galsworthy’s hitherto celebrated reputation had been suffering something of a decline during World War I; his contemporary, Hugh Walpole, thought that Galsworthy was “shrivelled up like a pea” (Hart-Davis 152), though he would change his mind, telling Galsworthy a decade later, “I don’t expect you realise what a help your quietness and dignity is to many of us” (Marrot 610). Katherine Mansfield, reviewing his World War I novel Saint’s Progress, thought he had come to a standstill (Gindin 392). But Galsworthy’s instincts were different and prescient: “The idea of making The Man of Property the first volume of a trilogy cemented by Indian Summer of a Forsyte and another short episode came to me on Sunday, July 28th, and I started the same day. This idea, if I can ever bring it to fruition, will make The Forsyte Saga a volume of half a million words nearly; and the most sustained and considerable piece of fiction of our generation at least” (Marrot 443). Though he declined to read the novels as a “study in transition,” through both form and content, Galsworthy nonetheless maintained a dialogue between late nineteenth- and twentieth-century sensibilities, morality, and taste in his Forsyte novels, describing them in his Preface to Heinemann’s 1925 edition of the novels as “an intimate incarnation of the disturbance that Beauty effects in the lives of men” (p. xi). And yet, Soames, once the villain of the piece in The Man of Property, does come to maturity as the upholder of late Victorian certainty and clarity through the volatility and nihilism of postwar modernity. Though parodied for their snobbish middlebrow appeal in George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), the Forsyte novels were among the most popular bestsellers of the 1920s, selling in six figures on both sides of the Atlantic. They came to be associated with a very particular notion of Englishness, as Siegfried Sassoon wrote to Galsworthy’s wife Ada: “I take my hat off to him
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and all his Forsytes; that that family is becoming part of national consciousness, I am surer than ever” (Marrot 511). The Man of Property was conceived, according to Galsworthy, in “satiric mood,” as a scathing indictment of materialism and the propertyowning classes, fuelled, he told Edward Garnett, by a desire to “defeat Forsyteism” (Marrot 169). The focus of Galsworthy’s sharp critique was the apparently impregnable property-worshipping, materialistic Forsyte family, a “formidable unit of society, so clear a production of society in miniature” (1987a, 11). Soames Forsyte, a solicitor and art collector, is really at the center of this first novel, and it is his delusional and hubristic belief that he could possess his wife, the arrestingly beautiful Irene, that is the driving force of the novel and, indeed, of the first trilogy. The vulnerable Irene is coerced into marrying Soames who, with his possessive instinct, turns out to be incapable of feeling love; he collects and displays Irene as though she, too, were a work of art. His tragedy, Galsworthy said, was that Soames was essentially unlovable, but it also lies in his realization that Irene is simply not his to possess and what he most wants is precisely what he cannot have. In order both to control and to better display her, he commissions a new architect, the fiance of his cousin June Forsyte, to design and build a house in the country for her. Bosinney’s costs escalate in the pursuit and purity of his vision, much to the abstemious Soames’s irritation; when it’s clear that Irene and Bosinney are in love, Soames’s jealousy reaches its peak and he rapes Irene, an act then legal within marriage. Distraught, Irene leaves Soames and tells Bosinney who, distracted by his grief and anger, is killed (or commits suicide – Galsworthy wanted it to remain vague) in a collision with a hansom carriage. Irene then leaves Soames for good. In the subsequent novels she is rehabilitated in the family through her connection with Soames’s uncle, Old Jolyon, and his cousin, Young Jolyon, Soames’s free-spirited artist cousin who understands the aesthetic rather than commercial appeal of art. No respecter of class, Young Jo leaves his first unhappy marriage and sets up home with his children’s governess, Helene, fathering two illegitimate children. When Helene dies, Young Jo and Irene begin a courtship and they, too, marry for love, while Soames makes a cynical
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second marriage to the equally cynical and socially aspirant Annette. Both couples have children: Irene and Young Jo the innocent, trusting Jon; Soames and Annette the modish, selfish Fleur. This next generation fall in love when they meet in their cousin June’s art gallery. Every effort is made to keep them apart and, in the end, the family secret – Soames’s marriage to, and rape of, Irene – is exposed. Jon dutifully marries a rather ill-defined character, Ann Wilmot, Fleur an aristocratic philanthropist, Michael Mont. It was, Conrad wrote to Galsworthy following the publication of In Chancery in 1920, “A great Saga!” (Marrot 496). Hardy wrote to congratulate Galsworthy following the publication of To Let that this was one of “the best of the Forsyte chronicles,” telling him, “you have made me feel very sorry you have finished with the family” (Marrot 510). But he had not. A Modern Comedy (1929) sustains an interest in the Forsyte family, particularly the brittle and brilliant Fleur and her relationships with Michael and with Soames, but the impulse to social justice that Galsworthy had explored in his dramatic works is also evident in this trilogy, which makes excursions outside the Forsyte and Mont families to consider the fate of an unemployed working-class couple the Bickets, the General Strike of 1926, slum housing, insider share dealing, and women’s sexual morality, which is literally put on trial in the court case that Fleur brings against a bohemian aristocrat, Marjorie Ferrar. Galsworthy had a vexed and difficult relation with modernism, which he diagnosed as a nihilistic culture in the second trilogy, A Modern Comedy; even his desire to resurrect the “threedecker” novel suggests a wish to recuperate the Victorian novel against modernism’s search for new forms to document new experience. What began as satire turned to sentiment and this, for a disappointed D. H. Lawrence, marked a failure of nerve as it all “fizzled out” (1967, 122); his nostalgic celebration of an unchanging pastoral suggests the desire to see an unchangeable England tenanted by the Forsytes: Winifred Forsyte’s son Val limps back from the Boer War wounded by his arrogant skirmish but is eventually redeemed by his work on the land; the thoroughly decent Jon Forsyte, product of a thoroughly decent marriage, returns from his troubled traveling to farm in Sussex with a sense of rightful possession: “What
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an air of having been there forever!” (1987b, 573). Balanced against this is Galsworthy’s impulse to use the novel as a force that might prompt social change, particularly in A Modern Comedy: better housing and the need for slum clearance, and justice for the working class. At the height of modernism, he remained faithful to his sense of his own strengths, as he had written to Edward Garnett in 1905: “my strength – if any – lies in writing to a polemical strain through character” (Marrot 175). But it was also his earnest polemicist strain (tempered, perhaps, by his belief in philanthropic intervention) that earned him Virginia Woolf’s acerbic dismissal, in 1923, of his clumsiness (for her) as a writer: “A sensitive man like Mr Galsworthy could scarcely step out of doors without barking his shins upon some social iniquity” (386). He was, though, a figure of great humanity and compassion, supporting abolition of the censorship of plays, the minimum wage, women’s suffrage, divorce law reform, prison reform, slaughterhouse reform, and the humane treatment of animals (Gindin 1987). Galsworthy was elected the first president of the International PEN Club in 1921. In 1929 he was awarded and accepted the Order of Merit (he had turned down a knighthood in 1918) and, in 1932, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Too ill to collect it in person, Galsworthy died from a suspected brain tumor on January 31, 1933. His obituary notices claimed him as an “English institution” with the Forsytes representing “to future generations . . . the best evidence of what, in a certain age, a certain class and type of Englishman was” (Gindin 5). The Forsyte Saga was adapted and broadcast by BBC Radio in 1945, 1968, and 1990. MGM produced That Forsyte Woman, starring Greer Garson and Errol Flynn in 1949. The popularity of The Forsyte Saga enjoyed a stunning renascence in 1967 when the BBC screened a massively popular and award-winning 26episode adaptation of the novels (now available on DVD); a third of the British nation tuned in when the series was repeated on BBC 1 in 1968 when, famously, church services and pub opening times were rescheduled to accommodate viewing. According to Audience Research Reports, the series produced the second highest levels of satisfaction in the BBC’s television history; in the first six months of its screening,
it was easily the most consistently highly rated program on the BBC. A Granada Television adaptation in 2002 was inevitably less favorably compared to this earlier, iconic adaptation. SEE ALSO: Conrad, Joseph (BIF); Edwardian Fiction (BIF); Woolf, Virginia (BIF); World War I in Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Barker, D. (1963). A Man of Principle: A View of John Galsworthy. London: Allen and Unwin. Batchelor, J. (1982). The Edwardian Novelists. London: Duckworth. Du Pre, C. (1976). John Galsworthy: A Biography. London: Collins. Frechet, A. (1982). John Galsworthy: A Reassessment (trans. D. Mahaffey). London: Macmillan. Galsworthy, J. (1934). Letters from John Galsworthy 1900–1932 (ed. E. Garnett). London: Jonathan Cape. Galsworthy, J. (1935). End of the Chapter. London: Heinemann. Galsworthy, J. (1987a). The Forsyte Saga [1922]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Galsworthy, J. (1987b). A Modern Comedy [1929]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Galsworthy, J. (1999). Five Plays (ed. B. Nightingale). London: Methuen. Gindin, J. (1987). John Galsworthy’s Life and Art: An Alien’s Fortress. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Hargreaves, T. (2007). Nostalgic Retrieval: Sexual Politics, Cultural Aesthetics and Literary Form in John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga. English, 56(215), 127–46. Hart-Davis, R. (1985). Hugh Walpole: A Biography. London: Hamish Hamilton. Lawrence, D. H. (1967). John Galsworthy. In Selected Literary Criticism, ed. A. Beal. London: Heinemann. Marrot, H. V. (1935). The Life and Letters of John Galsworthy. London: Heinemann. McDonald, J. (1986). The “New Drama” 1900–1914: Harley Granville Barker, John Galsworthy, St. John Hankin, John Masefield. London: Macmillan Education. Morris, M. (1967). My Galsworthy Story. London: Peter Owen. Mottram, R. H. (1956). For Some We Loved: An Intimate Portrait of Ada and John Galsworthy. London: Hutchinson. Reynolds, M. E. (1936). Memories of John Galsworthy by His Sister. London: Robert Hale.
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GIBBON, LEWIS GRASSIC
Sauter, R. H. (1967). Galsworthy the Man. London: Peter Owen. Woolf, V. (1988). Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown [1923]. In The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3 (ed. A. McNeillie). London: Hogarth.
Gibbon, Lewis Grassic MARGERY PALMER McCULLOCH
Lewis Grassic Gibbon was the pen name adopted by James Leslie Mitchell for the Scottish fiction he published between Sunset Song in 1932 and his untimely death from peritonitis on February 7, 1935. He was born into a farming family in Aberdeenshire on February 13, 1901 and spent his childhood from the age of 8 in Arbuthnott in the neighboring Howe of the Mearns. He himself did not wish to work on the land, and left home to train as a journalist in Aberdeen. He had strong socialist commitments, and when sent to cover the formation of an Aberdeen soviet after the Russian Revolution in 1917, his enthusiasm resulted in him being (temporarily) elected to the new committee. Later, he again became involved with communist sympathizers when working in Glasgow. He left journalism in 1919 and joined the Royal Army Service Corps, serving in the Far East. When this engagement came to an end and employment opportunities in civilian life were few, he entered the Royal Air Force in a clerking capacity, eventually setting up home in Welwyn Garden City. Gibbon was already developing a reputation as a writer under his own name of Mitchell when his first Scottish novel appeared in 1932, astonishing and puzzling its readers. This was the period of the interwar revival in Scottish writing, popularly known as the Scottish Renaissance, a movement initiated in the early 1920s by the poet Hugh MacDiarmid. Writers associated with the revival were in regular contact with each other, but this new arrival – although clearly from the northeast of the country – was entirely unknown. One reviewer wrote to a friend: “get hold of a novel Sunset Song by L. G. Gibbon, whoever he or she may be. It seems to me the pioneer of something new and interesting in Scottish letters. Perhaps the first really Scottish novel” (McCulloch & Dunnigan 2003). Sunset Song was the first book of Gibbon’s ideological trilogy A Scots Quair, followed by
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Cloud Howe in 1933 and Grey Granite in 1934. With its evocative narrative of Chris Guthrie, a young woman torn psychologically between her love of her land and the Scots language, and the English education that stimulates her mind, it has remained the most popular book of the trilogy (and in a recent poll, the most popular Scottish book of all time). Yet the trilogy needs to be read as a whole if the true scale of Gibbon’s achievement is to be appreciated. One outstanding quality is his development of a narrative medium adapted from the stream-of-consciousness technique associated with the fiction of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, while at the same time transforming the basic English language used by adding Scots-language vocabulary and idioms from northeast speech; and, most importantly, by allowing the rhythms of that northeast speech to interact with the adapted Joycean stream of consciousness. James Kelman was later to talk about giving equality of dialogue to the urban, working-class characters in his fiction by removing the standard English narrative voice. Gibbon’s achievement, half a century earlier, was to convince his readers that they were hearing the thoughts and experiences of his northeast Scottish characters told by themselves in their own language. In this first book he succeeded in revitalizing vernacular Scots for use in modernist fiction as MacDiarmid had done previously in relation to modernist poetry. The achievement of A Scots Quair, however, goes beyond narrative form. Gibbon believed in the Marxist view of the historical process as twofold: on the one hand, it was deterministic, not subject to human control. Yet, as he wrote in his essay “Religion,” he believed also that “men are not merely the victims, the hapless leaves storm-blown, of historic forces, but may guide if they cannot generate that storm” (Gibbon & MacDiarmid 1934). While A Scots Quair is in some respects a chronicle trilogy, documenting the decline of farming in the northeast, the move of the people from the land into small factory towns in the countryside, then into the large industrial city, it is not a descriptive account of this movement, but one that brings out its inevitability in the context of the historical process while at the same time showing the ways in which individual characters intervene to shape it and themselves in positive or negative ways. The
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GLOBALIZATION AND THE NOVEL
intrusion of World War I into the community is an important determining episode of this kind in Sunset Song, while in Cloud Howe, which contains a section relating to the General Strike of 1926, industrial relations and religion both come under scrutiny. Narrative form and political ideology come together in a particularly innovative way in the final book Grey Granite, where Gibbon succeeds in transferring his stream-of-consciousness narrative and Scottish linguistic medium from the countryside to the urban context, communicating in their own voices the thoughts of the slum people of PaldyParish and the unemployment marchers from the factories. The conclusion of the trilogy is openended, with Ewan, the son of Chris and her first husband (who was shot as a deserter in the war) setting out on the Hunger March to London. Despite his early death, Gibbon left a lasting contribution to twentieth-century writing. A Scots Quair is both a work of “living history,” and, in its last book in particular, an unusually strong proletarian novel. It also demonstrates that modernist fiction need not be incompatible with ideological commitment. SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Scottish Fiction (BIF); WorkingClass Fiction (BIF); World War I in Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Campbell, I. (1985). Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Gibbon, L. G. (1932). Sunset Song. London: Jarrolds. Gibbon, L. G. (1933). Cloud Howe. London: Jarrolds. Gibbon, L. G. (1934). Grey Granite. London: Jarrolds. Gibbon, L. G. (1946). A Scots Quair: A Trilogy of Novels, comprising Sunset Song, Cloud Howe, Grey Granite. London: Jarrolds. Gibbon, L. G., & MacDiarmid, H. (1934). Scottish Scene; or, The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Albyn. London: Jarrolds. Gifford, D. (1983). Neil M. Gunn and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd. Malcolm, W. K. (1984). A Blasphemer and Reformer: A Study of James Leslie Mitchell/Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. McCulloch, M. P., & Dunnigan, S. M. (Eds.) (2003). A Flame in the Mearns: Lewis Grassic Gibbon:
A Centenary Celebration. Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies. McCulloch, M. P. (Ed.) (2004). Modernism and Nationalism: Literature and Society in Scotland 1918–1939: Source Documents for the Scottish Renaissance. Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies. Munro, I. S. (1966). Leslie Mitchell: Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd.
Globalization and the Novel MICHAEL VALDEZ MOSES
When applied to twentieth-century fiction, the term “globalization” denotes, among other things, the diminishing importance of the cultural, generic, and linguistic boundaries that have traditionally demarcated national literatures. The “globalization of the novel” describes a prolonged and ongoing historical process in which a new kind of “world literature” emerges, one in which the cosmopolitan, international, or global novel assumes a central place. While the globalization of the novel is a particularly notable feature of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary history, it should be noted that the increasing hybridization and cross-fertilization of the novel as a literary form begins well before 1900. Literary history has always been characterized by the frequent and productive exchanges of literary genres and styles across cultural and linguistic borders. In the fourteenth century, for example, Geoffrey Chaucer borrowed many of his literary models from French and Italian sources, including the works of Guillaume de Loris, Jean de Meun, Dante, and Petrarch. And in the nineteenth century, the publication of Walter Scott’s Waverley in 1814 launched an international craze for a new genre, the historical novel, which by century’s end had been widely imitated and adapted by writers throughout Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and even Asia. The twentieth-century globalization of the novel thus marks not a unique or unprecedented phenomenon, but rather a significant acceleration of the processes of literary and cultural exchange between different cultures, peoples, and national literatures, as well as a notable expansion of the international networks of cultural and artistic transmission.
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GLOBALIZATION AND THE NOVEL
While the globalization of the novel is understood to be primarily a literary and artistic phenomenon, it is often related to and considered part of a more general process of political, economic, and cultural Westernization. The worldwide popularity of Hollywood films and television programs, American fast food, popular music, and styles of dress in the developing and non-Western worlds, and the increasing prevalence of the English language in international commerce, science, electronic media, and entertainment, provide some of the more noteworthy and controversial instances of an alleged hegemony of contemporary Western culture. Those critics hostile to the considerable influence of modern Western cultural norms throughout the world have frequently described globalization as a form of cultural imperialism. Other critics and social commentators, especially those more favorably disposed toward Western culture, have countered that the exchanges between Western and non-Western, modern and traditional societies have been reciprocal (if not entirely symmetrical), and that globalization signals not only the impact of modern Western societies on their nonWestern and traditional counterparts, but also the influence of the latter on the former. When viewed not simply as a contemporary phenomenon, but instead as a slowly unfolding cultural process that has taken place over several centuries, globalization appears to be a crucial aspect and cultural consequence of modernization. Globalization is closely associated with and dependent upon several key historical changes that typify modernity. Among these critical developments are: the rise of modern theoretical science (and its attendant application in the form of new technologies); the increasing delegitimation of non-democratic forms of political life and the growing international acceptance of universal norms of “human rights” (slavery, aristocracy, monarchy, and theocracy become ever rarer as well as theoretically and practically indefensible); the gradual secularization of political life (religions continue to thrive and proliferate, but modern regimes grant that belief is a matter of private conscience, that political authority no longer rests solely on a “revealed” truth or “divine right,” and that the ruler is no longer “sacred”); and the increasing role of market economies (which displace forms of commercial life crucially
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dependent upon slavery, manorialism, mercantilism, or centrally planned economies). Social theorists have also associated globalization with other significant features of modernity, for example the shift from rural and agricultural societies to urban and industrial (or post-industrial) ones, the development of mass literacy, and the rise of increasingly powerful, centralized, sovereign, and often imperialistic nation states. The relationship between the novel and globalization is necessarily a very complicated one, if only because globalization is itself such a complex of unpredictable, sometimes conflicting, and diverse social phenomena. But at the very least, the twentieth-century novel has served as a culturally important means of representing the often traumatic and frequently violent transitions that mark the historical shift from traditional societies to modern life. From at least the time of Walter Scott to the present day, the novel has provided one of the most culturally influential means by which writers have imagined and represented the process of the global spread of modern culture, a process that has frequently entailed the destruction of premodern or anti-modern forms of human existence. Scott dramatized the historical disappearance of the seventeenth-century Scottish Covenanters (radical Protestant dissenters) and the decline of the Highland clans of eighteenth-century Scotland in Old Mortality (1816) and Waverley. And Scott’s twentiethcentury Anglophone heirs have often relied upon his basic narrative formula even while drastically reshaping the form and style of the novel to suit their own needs. In The Last September (1929), Elizabeth Bowen chronicled the decline and destruction of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy during the years of the Irish War for Independence. In his Alexandria Quartet, Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960), Lawrence Durrell told the story of the decay and final collapse of an increasingly archaic and politically corrupt, if artistically and culturally alluring, Mediterranean culture rooted in a mix of ancient cultural and religious practices, prior to, during, and immediately following World War II. Chinua Achebe, in Things Fall Apart (1958), chronicled the destruction of Ibo tribal society in the face of incursions by Christian missionaries and British imperialists in Nigeria at the beginning of the last century, while Brian
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Moore, in his novel, Black Robe (1985), portrayed the unintentional annihilation of Huron society that accompanied the proselytizing efforts of seventeenth-century Jesuits eager to convert New World tribes to the Catholic faith. And in An Artist of the Floating World (1986), Kazuo Ishiguro dramatized the destruction of the cultural and social world of imperial Taisho Japan that followed in the wake of World War II. Scott’s nineteenth-century generic innovation has in fact decisively influenced a diverse array of modern novelists from around the world, including Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt), Shusaku Endo (Japan), Halld or Laxness (Iceland), and Ng~ug~wa Thiong’o (Kenya), whose novels have been composed in Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, Icelandic, and English and G~k~ uy~ u respectively. And yet despite the considerable aesthetic, cultural, and ideological differences between these various writers, they are united by a common desire to movingly portray both the attractions and defects, the consolations and pitfalls of many different forms of premodern life that have been swept away in the course of the seemingly universal and irreversible triumph of global modernity. We soon discover that narrowly “national” categories of literature, which were generated and institutionalized by nineteenth-century literary critics and historians (many of whom were influenced by the ideals of romantic nationalism), fail to provide a helpful matrix in which to place many of the most prominent “English” or “British” novelists of the twentieth century. Their lives, careers, and even their works turn out not to epitomize an essential or invariable “Englishness,” but instead the vagaries and unpredictable consequences of cultural globalization. Joseph Conrad was born J ozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in what had formerly been Poland, but which in 1857 (the year of his birth) was part of the Russian Empire. His first language was Polish, his second French, and many years after he had achieved international literary fame as a naturalized British subject, the “English” novelist spoke his third language in unidiomatic fashion and with such a pronounced accent that he routinely avoided giving public speeches. Samuel Beckett was born in Ireland (at the time still part of the United Kingdom), and though he began his career writing in English, turned to
writing primarily in French after moving permanently to Paris in the late 1930s. Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest and educated in Austria; although he eventually became a naturalized British subject and was named a Commander of the British Empire, he wrote his most famous novel, Darkness at Noon (1940), in German (though it was first published in English translation in London) and its predecessor, The Gladiators (1939), in Hungarian. Salman Rushdie was born and educated in Bombay before attending Cambridge University and settling in England, only to relocate to the United States later. Like his contemporary, V. S. Naipaul, who has drawn upon his Trinidadian upbringing for much of his early fiction, Rushdie is one of Britain’s most famous writers, and also like Naipaul, has made much of his non-English (Indian) upbringing and cultural background in his novels, which have only occasionally been set in the United Kingdom. While the translation from one language into another has for several centuries helped to increase the circulation of literary works, in the twentieth century the success of “major” world novels has depended more than ever on their appealing to a global audience of readers, and thus on their translation into one or more major “world” languages. Even a writer such as Ng~ ug~, who in the 1970s announced that he would henceforth cease to compose his works in English in order to resist what he regards as Western cultural imperialism and the colonization of the African mind, has allowed his fiction to be translated into English. The critical success and international visibility of his “translated” G~k~ uy~ u novels, such as Caitaani mutharabi-Ini (1980), which appeared as Devil on the Cross in 1982, and Matigari ma Njiruungi (1986), which was published in English in 1989 as Matigari, have in turn helped him obtain academic appointments and allowed him access to an international circuit of literary and academic conferences, festivals, book fairs, publishing events, creative writing workshops and MFA (Master of Fine Arts) programs, guest lectures, professional and literary associations, writer’s colonies and retreats that provide critical, commercial, and artistic support for the itinerant set of “world” novelists and writers to which he belongs. In short, contemporary writers of the global novel, who hail from almost every geographical region and language group, do not
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move from one country to another, or change languages only as a consequence of political persecution, unwanted social upheavals, or economic earthquakes (although this is indeed often the case); they also become transient intellectuals and cosmopolitan artists in the course of doing their jobs, meeting their public, pleasing their agents and publishers, and cultivating a global network of academic and journalistic critics. The globalization of the novel should thus be understood as the consequence of an ever wider and ever more rapid circulation of writers and literary forms through a complex transnational network of cultural exchanges that characterizes modernity. Social theorists have described globalization in terms of flows – the increasingly rapid movements of people, capital, information, idioms, technologies, commodities, and cultural products across national and political borders. To be sure, throughout recorded history, writers, especially insofar as they have often come from the political, economic, and cultural elites of their respective societies, have tended to be more mobile, more cosmopolitan, and more open to foreign influences than the great mass of people who have enjoyed less privileged lives. Chaucer and Milton, for example, traveled extensively in Europe, and were instrumental in introducing non-British literary and cultural influences into England. But what was once the distinctive prerogative of a cosmopolitan elite has increasingly become the commonly shared experience of inhabitants of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including millions of ordinary people whose lives have by no means been advantaged. Accordingly, modern novelists have had to reimagine their readerships, to conceive of their audiences as no longer firmly bounded by national or even linguistic borders. Their targeted readership is receptive to the global novel in part because their everyday experience of transplantation, displacement, exile, expatriation, immigration, and cultural disorientation often mirrors that of the authors who appeal to them, and because those experiences are also represented vividly and dramatically in works of imaginative fiction. The twentieth-century world novel thus not only serves to depict the “globalized” realities of daily existence for millions of people around the planet, but it also provides a kind of guide, a literary “globalpositioningsystem”thatinsomelimitedbut
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nonetheless important way helps people immersed in the international flows of world culture to orient themselves and to make sense of their individual and collective predicaments. But if the global novel has served as a kind of cultural GPS, it is in part owing to the fact that it has simultaneously proved a vehicle by which the globalization of culture has been forwarded and accelerated. One might say that the invention of the compass has proved invaluable for those who might become lost, but it has also served as inducement for individuals to wander away from home and explore places entirely unknown to them. The global novel likewise marks a technical advance that allows individuals to imagine for themselves ways of life, modes of existence that are “foreign” or “alien.” (Because the novel is a relatively old literary form, the technical advances required for its success are easily forgotten; at the very least the rise of the global novel has depended upon advances in printing, mass literacy and education, transportation, communication, advertisement, and distribution that are themselves conspicuous features of global modernization.) Though less influential than modern world cinema, the global novel has proved a means by which people could become globalized; the experience of reading about “exotic” places, foreign peoples, and alien cultures has had the effect of making them less firmly wedded to and less bounded by their “own” indigenous cultures or traditional ways. It has encouraged them to become, if only in a virtual sense, more cosmopolitan, more worldly, more “modern.” Defenders of indigenous cultures, who fear that minority languages and unique forms of traditional cultural life will be overwhelmed by the forces of globalization, are understandably suspicious and often highly critical of the homogenizing cultural effects of the world novel. In their view, the erosion of the boundaries between distinctive national (or local) traditions poses a serious threat to the diversity of world culture. By contrast, defenders of cultural globalization note that the rise and spread of the global novel simultaneously decreases and increases cultural diversity: the differences between different national literary cultures declines, but the diversity and variants within each national culture grows. The homogenization of culture on a global scale must thus be seen as part of the same process by which local cultures become ever more diverse,
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hybridized, and heterogeneous. Finally, apologists for globalization point out that the global novel has become a means by which minority cultures might salvage their distinctive values, beliefs, narrative traditions, and cultural achievements in at least some form from complete cultural irrelevance, marginalization, or even annihilation. Just as Scott attempted to preserve (if only for posterity) the distinctive ways of life of the Scottish Highland clans, contemporary novelists such as James Welch, Keri Hulme, and Zakes Mda have attempted to capture for an international audience the unique history, manners, and tales of, respectively, the Blackfeet and Gros Ventre, Maori, and amaXhosa peoples. Critics of globalization counter that such acts of “preservation” are necessary only when a culture is on the verge of extinction and that to represent a vanishing people by means of novelistic representation is tantamount to turning their endangered cultures into objects in a literary museum. Defenders of globalization in turn suggest that it is the foes of cultural globalization who want to “freeze” distinctive minority cultures at a certain moment of their history, and thus to prevent them from evolving or interacting with foreign peoples and exotic cultures in new and productive ways. For the advocates of cultural globalization, that the introduction of the world novel could alter the traditional ways of a minority culture is only to permit the creative genius of its people to modify, transform, and renew their culture in unpredictable and inspiringly novel ways. SEE ALSO: Colonial Fiction (BIF); Expatriate Fiction (AF); Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Historical Fiction (BIF); Irish Fiction (BIF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the African Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/ Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso.
Appiah, A. (1993). In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Cantor, P. A. (2001). Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Casanova, P. (2004). The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cowen, T. (2002). Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Friedman, T. L. (1999). The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Garcıa Canclini, N. (1995). Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Garcıa Canclini, N. (2001). Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Moretti, F. (1996). Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcıa Marquez. London: Verso. Moses, M. V. (1995). The Novel and the Globalization of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Moses, M. V. (2001). Magical Realism at World’s End. Literary Imagination, 3(1), 105–37. Ng~ ug~wa Thiong’o (1986). Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey. Rushdie, S. (1991). Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Granta. Tomlinson, J. (1991). Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Tomlinson, J. (1999). Globalization and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Walkowitz, R. L. (2006). Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia University Press.
Golding, William KEVIN McCARRON
William Golding’s literary career is clearly divisible into three distinct phases. The first of these begins with Lord of the Flies (1954), The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959) and ends with the publication of The Spire in 1964. The second phase incorporates the volume of essays The Hot Gates (1965), the novel The Pyramid (1967) and the three short
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stories collected as The Scorpion God (1971). With the exception of the collection of essays A Moving Target (1982) and the travel book An Egyptian Journey (1985), the third phase comprises novels alone, beginning with the publication of Darkness Visible (1979). These were followed by Rites of Passage (1980), The Paper Men (1984), Close Quarters (1987), Fire Down Below (1989), and then the posthumously published The Double Tongue (1995). Golding was born on September 19, 1911 in St. Columb Minor, Cornwall. In 1930 he entered Brasenose College, Oxford, to read science, which he studied for two years before switching to English literature. After leaving Oxford in 1935, Golding moved to London, where he wrote, acted, and produced for a small, non-commercial theater. In 1939 he met Ann Brookfield whom he married September 30 that year. Shortly after the wedding, he took up a post as schoolmaster at Bishop Wordsworth’s School, Salisbury, teaching English and Greek literature in translation. After the outbreak of World War II, Golding joined the Royal Navy. The war was certainly Golding’s most important education. He later wrote in his essay “Fable”: Before the Second World War I believed in the perfectibility of social man; that a correct structure of society would produce goodwill; and that therefore you could remove all social ills by a reorganisation of society . . . but after the war I did not because I was unable to. I had discovered what one man could do to another . . . I must say that anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head. (1965, 87) In 1945 Golding returned to Bishop Wordsworth’s School to teach English and classics. While teaching he wrote several novels, all of which were rejected, and, in Golding’s later opinion, deservedly so. The book that was to make him a household name was itself rejected by 21 publishers, before being published by Faber on September 17, 1954. In Lord of the Flies a group of boys, the oldest of whom is 12 and the youngest 6, are marooned on an idyllic desert island, and almost immediately a battle for supremacy takes place between the principal characters. Violence
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and death follow. Lord of the Flies was as fine an adventure story as any published in the second half of the century, demonstrating an impressive ability to employ language that both provided narrative impetus while also evoking profounder, more theological implications. Lord of the Flies effectively “rewrote” R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858), offering a grim rejoinder to Ballantyne’s Christian optimism. Lord of the Flies was well received by the reviewers, and several very influential writers, including E. M. Forster, C. S. Lewis, and T. S. Eliot, were highly enthusiastic about the novel. In America the paperback edition attracted a huge cult following among university students, and from there it moved rapidly into the mainstream. Over the next 30 years the novel became a “set text” at secondary and tertiary level in America and Europe, and by the end of the twentieth century it had been translated into over 30 languages, including Russian, Icelandic, Japanese, Serbo-Croat, and Catalan, with worldwide sales estimated at over 10 million copies. Lord of the Flies is usually read as Golding’s commentary upon human evil, and almost certainly it would not have been written had Belsen and Auschwitz never existed, or indeed had Dresden never been bombed by the Allies, but a crucial aspect of the novel, and of the majority of its successors, was its indebtedness to an earlier literary source. Golding was always a “literary” writer with a somewhat austere and elevated sense of the writer’s responsibilities, and he was unashamed about writing “literature,” a deeply unfashionable stance in literary studies from the late 1960s onwards. All of Golding’s early novels, in particular, are “rewritings” of earlier texts, and Golding is actually closer in spirit to the iconoclastic cultural revisionism of later women writers such as Jean Rhys and Angela Carter than he is to his male peers such as John Braine, Kingsley Amis, and Allan Sillitoe. War is one of Golding’s central subjects and he invariably uses it to address questions of gender; indeed Golding’s searching evaluation of masculinity throughout his 1950s novels makes him one of the most radical writers of the immediate postwar years. Strikingly, the telos of Golding’s fiction is centered in revelation, not attainment or acquisition. In Golding’s fiction “success” for his male protagonists is always presented as a moment of revelation, an epiphany,
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never as a material acquisition, or as a favorable advance in society. His novels consistently imply the existence of a spiritual power, external to humanity, which in its numinous intangibility is directly opposed to a rational, scientific worldview that is conventionally gendered in our culture as masculine. Throughout Golding’s early fiction he suggests that the supernatural forces at the center of existence that his protagonists are eventually compelled to recognize are capricious and irrational, generating horror and fear as much as joy and peace. Although religion is a central issue in Golding’s fiction, it rarely manifests itself as conventional, contemporary Christianity. Golding’s primary religious concern is the nature of evil and, in particular, its often ambivalent causes and manifestations. During the period 1954–64, Golding’s five published novels are all densely textured, fablelike narratives, employing brutally limited and strikingly unconventional narrative perspectives. He demonstrated throughout this period an unmatched ability to infuse pragmatic and minutely observed detail with a visionary significance. In these novels Golding depicted isolated man stripped of social encumbrances, indeed usually in extremis, while alluding throughout to, and usually subverting, his literary predecessors who included H. G. Wells, Ambrose Bierce, and Dante. While his peers were describing parochial communities of considerable limitations, Golding was writing aggressively bold fables, which claimed for themselves a universal and an eternal applicability underpinned by Greek myths and legends, echoing their harsh, primitive tone. Particularly during this period Golding’s was an art of essences; he strove to depict what lay beneath, or above, the observable surface of life. If contemporary society had no fictional interest for him it was because, unfashionably, he prioritized what he perceived as humanity’s eternal spiritual struggle, its craving for religious enlightenment, over its desire for social cohesion. Golding’s principal achievement in his early fiction was to develop innovative formal techniques that enabled him to incorporate his unique religious vision into the traditional forms of the English novel. While his earlier fiction often suggests that humanity is composed equally of good and evil, the later fiction implies that existence itself is
similarly constructed. Golding’s fictional modalities, therefore, move from fable to fantasy, and his emphasis shifts from psychology to ontology. In his later novels, particularly Rites of Passage, The Paper Men, Close Quarters, and Fire Down Below, he demonstrated a previously unsuspected gift for comedy, but to the end of his career his mythic and allegorical universe remained one where damnation and salvation are still possible, and where the actions of a single individual have an effect on the world. Having published five novels in 10 years, over the next 15 years Golding published only one book, a volume of short stories, The Scorpion God, and a collection of essays. In 1979, however, he published the bleak and disturbing fantasy Darkness Visible. Unpredictable as ever, he immediately followed this with Rites of Passage, a lively and often comic novel, although not without a characteristically tragic dimension, which recounted the sea voyage of the arrogant young Edmund Talbot as he sailed to Australia in 1815. The novel was immensely successful with both the critics and the public, winning the Booker Prize, and giving Golding the largest readership he had enjoyed since Lord of the Flies. This novel can be read as both Bildungsroman and K€untslerroman, as Talbot becomes both a better man and a better writer. It gave rise to two sequels, and all three novels were published in 1991 as the single volume To the Ends of the Earth. Golding was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1955. His first and only play, The Brass Butterfly, received its first performance in Great Britain at the New Theatre, Oxford, on February 24, 1958. In 1961, Golding resigned as a schoolteacher, a job he claimed never to have enjoyed and, after spending the 1961–2 academic year at Hollins College in Virginia, America, left teaching forever. He was made an honorary fellow of Brasenose College in 1966, and an Honorary DLitt by Sussex in 1968. He was made a CBE in 1966. In 1983 Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 1988 he was knighted, becoming Sir William Golding. He died suddenly of a heart attack, aged 81, on the morning of June 19, 1993. He was buried in the churchyard at Bowerchalke, Cornwall. In 1995, The Double Tongue, set in Delphi during the first century BC, the second draft of which Golding had just completed at the time of his death, was
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posthumously published to generally favorable reviews. In its extraordinary control and ingenious use of narrative perspective Golding’s early fiction extended the formal boundaries of fiction, and made a significant contribution to Britain’s literature. Golding returned to the past in search of the stories that still reverberate through our culture, which he then used to create myths for a modern age. His characters are never helpless victims of socio-economic forces beyond their control. They live in a world where tragedy is not just present, but actively inscribed in the nature of things, a world in which one must choose, and where the consequences of the wrong choice can be fatal. For all its tragedy and pessimism, therefore, it can be seen as a world that has meaning, one that affirms and celebrates the unique humanity of every individual. SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF); Wells, H. G. (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Boyd, S. J. (1988). The Novels of William Golding. Brighton: Harvester. Brook, P. (dir.) (1963). Lord of the Flies. Two Arts. Crompton, D. (1985). A View from the Spire. Oxford: Blackwell. Dick, B. (1987). William Golding. Boston: Twayne. Gindin, J. (1988). William Golding. London: Macmillan. Golding, W. (1954). Lord of the Flies. London: Faber and Faber. Golding, W. (1955). The Inheritors. London: Faber and Faber. Golding, W. (1956). Pincher Martin. London: Faber and Faber. Golding, W. (1959). Free Fall. London: Faber and Faber. Golding, W. (1964). The Spire. London: Faber and Faber. Golding, W. (1965). Fable. The Hot Gates. London: Faber and Faber. Golding, W. (1979). Darkness Visible. London: Faber and Faber. Golding, W. (1980). Rites of Passage. London: Faber and Faber. Golding, W. (1984). The Paper Men. London: Faber and Faber. Hodson, L. (1969). William Golding. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd. Hook, H. (dir.) (1990). Lord of the Flies. Castle Rock.
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Johnston, A. (1980). Of Earth and Darkness: The Novels of William Golding. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Kinkead-Weekes, M., & Gregor, I . (1984). William Golding: A Critical Study. London: Faber and Faber. McCarron, K. (1995). The Coincidence of Opposites: William Golding’s Later Fiction. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Redpath, P. (1986). William Golding: A Structural Study of His Fiction. London: Vision. Tiger, V. (1974). William Golding: The Dark Fields of Discovery. London: Calder and Boyars.
Graves, Robert NANCY ROSENFELD
Robert von Ranke Graves, born July 24, 1895, grew up in Wimbledon, England; as a result of his experiences and injuries in the trenches of the Western Front in World War I, he chose to leave England and seek a rural way of life. In 1929 Graves moved to the small mountain village of Deya, Mallorca, which was his home until his death on December 7, 1985. Graves is best known as the author of historical novels. His I, Claudius (1934), produced as a BBC television series in the 1970s, and its sequel Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina (1956) made his name a household word. Yet Graves was a twentieth-century Renaissance man: his body of work includes poetry (Graves viewed himself as a poet first and foremost), more than a dozen historical novels, autobiography, studies of mythology and ethnography, writing guides, translation, social commentary, literary criticism. Graves’s autobiography Good-Bye to All That (1929) is one of the most influential memoirs to come out of World War I. His Greek Myths (1955) remains a basic text in comparative literature studies. Generations of aspiring poets have sought guidance in The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1948). As a writer of historical novels, Graves believed that one possible version of an event should be privileged above another, not necessarily because it can be proven true via the historian’s tools, but because it is truer in spirit. In his 1938 poem “The Devil’s Advice to Story-Tellers” he argues that “Nice contradiction between fact and fact/Will make the whole read human and exact” (ll. 21–2).
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Graves himself contended that the border between autobiography and fiction is not always clear; in Good-Bye to All That he notes: “The memoirs of a man who went through some of the worst experiences of trench-warfare are not truthful if they do not contain a high proportion of falsities” (1929, p. vi). Graves’s novels may be said to reflect a blurring of boundaries between fiction, autobiography, and historiography. Prior to the composition of I, Claudius Graves posited the project as an “interpretive biography,” according to a 1929 diary entry. Graves biographer Miranda Seymour notes that he was first drawn to the character of a possible hero or heroine by sensing the presence of a mystery. How, for example, could one explain Claudius’s metamorphosis from a mild, kindly man into a bloody-minded tyrant? (1996, 214). This was the pattern for Graves’s composition of historical novels: upon sensing the presence of a historical puzzle, he would immerse himself in all available writings from and about the personage and period. (Indeed, the fact-checker employed by Graves to search out classical errors in the manuscript of I, Claudius found almost none.) Having studied the personage and period as only a polymath can, Graves then felt justified in creating a character and telling his or her story via solving the mystery that had originally awakened his interest. In his depiction of Claudius and of Belisarius (Count Belisarius, 1954) Graves clearly aimed to revise earlier historiography. Seneca, Stoic philosopher and politician (4 BCE–65 CE), had satirized the deification of Claudius. While the sixth-century Byzantine historian Procopius had effectively destroyed Belisarius’s reputation as a military leader in the eyes of his contemporaries, Winston Churchill is said to have studied Graves’s Belisarius as a source of strategy during World War II. Graves’s experience of trench warfare on the Western Front during the Great War permanently impaired his health and shaped his view of current and historical events for the rest of his life: he did not believe that the injury and death of millions of young people in the “war to end all wars” had been justified. Yet Graves was proud of his regiment, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and retained a lifelong admiration for and love of combat soldiers, those who bear the brunt of the fighting bravely and uncomplainingly. Graves’s evocation of military
life in his novels is convincing, whether in the story of Belisarius or of a British soldier in the American Revolutionary War. As were all of Graves’s novels, Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth (1940) and Proceed, Sergeant Lamb (1941) were based upon copious reading of history and literature. In The White Goddess Graves explicated a theory of poetics according to which the source of true poetry, that is “Muse poetry,” is the relationship of the poet with a woman in whom the Goddess currently resides – she who is mother, lover, and layer-out, and thus presides over birth, love, and death. This theme, central to his poetic practice, shapes two of his better-known novels. Wife to Mr. Milton: The Story of Marie Powell (1944) tells of the life and times of John Milton during the English Civil War period from the viewpoint, not of the bard, but rather of his first wife. King Jesus (1947), based on a plethora of preChristian and biblical sources, is a controversial retelling of Jesus’s life and death, in which the conflict between patriarchal power and ancient matriarchal traditions is played out; with Jesus’s death, the victory of the patriarchal tradition is said to be complete. Among the general public, Robert Graves’s readers perceive his novels as convincing, unorthodox, and a “good read.” Scholars number his historical novels among the most erudite representatives of this genre composed during the twentieth century. SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); World War I in Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Forster, E. M. (1969). Aspects of the Novel. London: Arnold. Fussell, P. (2000). The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press. Graves, R. (1929). Good-bye to All That: An Autobiography. London: Jonathan Cape. (Rev. edn. New York: Doubleday, 1957.) Graves, R. (1934). I, Claudius. London: Barker. Graves, R. (1940). Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth. London: Methuen. Graves, R. (1941). Proceed, Sergeant Lamb. London: Methuen. Graves, R. (1944). Wife to Mr. Milton: The Story of Marie Powell. New York: Creative Age.
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Graves, R. (1947). King Jesus. London: Cassell. Graves, R. (1948). The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. London: Faber. Graves, R. (1954). Count Belisarius. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Graves, R. (1955). The Greek Myths. London: Penguin. Graves, R. (1956). Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Graves, R. (1965). Mammon and the Black Goddess. London: Cassell. Graves, R. (2000). The Complete Poems (ed. B. Graves & D. Ward). Manchester: Carcanet. Graves, R. P. (1986). Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic 1895–1926. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Klein, H., (ed.) (1976). The First World War in Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. London: Macmillan. Seymour, M. (1996). Robert Graves: Life on the Edge. London: Doubleday.
Gray, Alasdair STEPHEN BERNSTEIN
A key figure in the late twentieth-century rejuvenation of Scottish fiction, Alasdair Gray has exhibited his diverse talents in novels, short stories, poetry, drama, criticism, polemic, painting, drawing, and book illustration and design. Gray’s writing is notable for its mixture of literary genres; its focus on politics at all levels, from personal relationships to governments; and its constant attention to the consequences of human efforts to achieve a utopian reality. Several of Gray’s novels also feature various metafictional elements. He is fond of appending explanatory notes, acknowledgments, postscripts, and sections of self-conscious “Critic-Fuel” itemizing sources. Many of his books end with the word “goodbye,” a habit Gray appears to have observed in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds. As these features coalesce, Gray’s strongest works are nearly encyclopedic in sweep, compendia of wit, analysis, and wild invention. Born in Glasgow in 1934, Gray has lived in the city virtually his entire life, and it provides a key setting for many of his works. His interest in art and writing date from a very early age and he published his first fiction in a school magazine as a teenager. In the 1950s he attended the Glasgow School of Art and then embarked upon the multifaceted creative career he has pursued ever since, taking other work as necessary along the way.
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Gray was variously employed as an artist during the 1960s and 1970s, a period during which his literary output was limited to television and radio plays while he worked on his first novel. Lanark appeared in 1981 and soon garnered him international attention. The epic narrative is divided into four books, two recounting the life of a frustrated and disturbed Glaswegian art student named Duncan Thaw, the other two (which bookend the Thaw narrative) telling the story of his posthumous alter ego Lanark in Unthank, a dystopic city of the future. The volume is replete with footnotes, running titles, illustrations, and even a hostile author figure. In his second novel, 1982 Janine (1982), Gray would take his experimentation even further. The first-person narrative recounts the life of Jock McLeish, a bitter alcoholic in the security business, as he spends a night in a hotel room. To balance his self-loathing McLeish fantasizes about Janine, an alter ego subjected to various pornographic humiliations. At his nadir McLeish’s competing thoughts are represented typographically to dazzling effect. If Lanark was ultimately an account of bemused exhaustion, 1982 Janine ends with encouraging renewal and affirmation. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s Gray published several shorter novels largely based on the scripts he had written a couple of decades earlier. The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1985) and McGrotty and Ludmilla (1990a) are political satires demonstrating the consequences of overreaching, while Something Leather (1990b) is a not wholly successful account of several contemporary Glasgow women linked through sadomasochism. A History Maker (1994) is a more complex comic work examining the problems inherent in a future utopia where technology has eliminated most work. Set on a much smaller scale, Mavis Belfrage (1996) employs its melancholy realism to tell the story of the ultimately unhappy relationship between a staid Scottish college instructor and one of his less inhibited students. In the midst of the decade during which Gray published these novels he also published a third major work, Poor Things (1992). The book poses as the memoirs of a nineteenth-century Scottish doctor, edited by “Alasdair Gray,” who provides an introduction, footnotes, and illustrations. At the heart of the resultant collection of documents
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is the wildly ambiguous story of a Frankensteinlike brain transplant that may or may not have actually occurred. Gray uses this inventive framework to focus on many of his usual concerns: the roles of men and women, problems of equality, the responsibilities of governments, the plight of the colonized, and the meaning of war. Gray repeats several of Poor Things’ tactics in his most recent novel, Old Men In Love (2007). In this case the found narratives are authored by John Tunnock, a retired schoolteacher who has died under mysterious circumstances. Gray again poses as editor and interpolates Tunnock’s diary with his unfinished attempts to dramatize the worlds of Socrates, Fra Lippo Lippi, and Henry Prince (a rogue Victorian minister). The volume closes with an epilogue by Sidney Workman, a Gray-hating pedant who argues that the volume’s contents are explained by Gray’s own paucity of ideas and his resultant publication of unfinished work. While not exhibiting the exhilarating freshness of Gray’s best work, the novel nonetheless displays nearly all of his strengths as a writer. Gray’s literary career also includes two poetry collections, a play, a volume of literary history, a literary anthology, three books of political writing, and five collections of short stories. His approach to fiction has always been so inclusive of different genres that his other work, even the non-fiction, is thematically, if not always stylistically, consonant with his novels. SEE ALSO: Fantasy Fiction (BIF); Historical Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF); Science Fiction (BIF); Scottish Fiction (BIF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bernstein, S. (1999). Alasdair Gray. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Crawford, R., & Nairn, T. (eds.) (1991). The Arts of Alasdair Gray. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gray, A. (1981). Lanark. Edinburgh: Canongate. Gray, A. (1983). Unlikely Stories, Mostly. Edinburgh: Canongate. Gray, A. (1984). 1982 Janine. London: Jonathan Cape. Gray, A. (1985). The Fall of Kelvin Walker. Edinburgh: Canongate.
Gray, A. (1990a). McGrotty and Ludmilla. Glasgow: Dog and Bone. Gray, A. (1990b). Something Leather. London: Jonathan Cape. Gray, A. (1992). Poor Things. London: Bloomsbury. Gray, A. (1993). Ten Tales Tall and True. London: Bloomsbury. Gray, A. (1994). A History Maker. Edinburgh: Canongate. Gray, A. (1996). Mavis Belfrage: A Romantic Novel with Five Shorter Tales. London: Bloomsbury. Gray, A. (2000). The Book of Prefaces. London: Bloomsbury. Gray, A. (2003). The Ends of Our Tethers: Thirteen Sorry Stories. Edinburgh: Canongate. Gray, A. (2007). Old Men In Love: John Tunnock’s Posthumous Papers. London: Bloomsbury. Gray, A., Kelman, J., & Owens, A. (1985). Lean Tales. London: Jonathan Cape. Miller, G. (2005). Alasdair Gray: The Fiction of Communion. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Moores, P. (ed.) (2002). Alasdair Gray: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography. London: British Library.
Green, Henry MARINA MAcKAY
Henry Green began his career only in the aftermath of modernism’s canonical achievements, producing most of his major work between the late 1930s and the early 1950s. This belatedness means that he does not fit easily into conventional narratives of literary modernism, which tend not to look beyond the 1910s and 1920s, and helps to explain his relative obscurity. For the same reason, though, he is potentially a significant figure because his powerfully idiosyncratic fiction helps to show how English literary modernism survived the deaths of its most famous practitioners. His characteristic prose style is instantly recognizable but hard to generalize about, moving as it does with artful unpredictability between romantic cadenzas and comic bathos, between extreme authorial self-effacement and blurting revelation. His subject matter is easier to describe: “Living” is the title of one of his best-known and most experimental novels, but it could stand for all his novels, with their reverential attention to the unlikely poetry of everyday life. “I was born a mouthbreather with a silver spoon in 1905,” he wrote in the opening line of
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his 1940 memoir Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait (1940, 5). Henry Vincent Yorke, as Green was christened, was indeed born with a silver spoon in his mouth, the third child of an aristocratic mother and a father who was both country squire at the family estate and a successful industrialist with business interests at home and abroad. Among Vincent Yorke’s assets was the Birmingham factory where the young Henry Green would undertake two years of manual work. In an era of economic recession, this was an act of social slumming with political implications from which Green would distance himself with comic selfmockery when he retrospectively accounted for the motivations that had brought him to Birmingham. “I had a sense of guilt whenever I spoke to someone who did manual work,” he wrote in Pack My Bag: “As was said in those days I had a complex and in the end it drove me to go to work in a factory with my wet podgy hands” (195). This move to the blighted industrial Midlands followed a conventionally elite education at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, where Green had enjoyed friendships that would survive long beyond university with his future fellow novelists Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. However ironically Green treated his youthful class consciousness when he wrote about it after the fact, what makes him entirely distinctive among major mid-twentieth-century British novelists, and what the contrast with Waugh and Powell helps to make starkly explicit, is his extraordinary social range. So, for example, although the protagonist of his precocious first novel Blindness (1926) – a novel about a schoolboy blinded in a freak train accident on his way home from a posh public school to his family’s country house – shares his privileged social background with his author, Green soon demonstrated his extraordinary sensitivity to the texture of working-class life as seen from the inside in Living (1929), a novel based on the time he had spent in Birmingham. In a telling reversal of the English novel’s traditional priorities, the main characters in Living are working-class men and women, whose economic, romantic, and familial aspirations and apprehensions are regarded with total seriousness, even as the novel’s semi-comic interludes are supplied by the faintly preposterous lives of their upper-class employers. In his next novel, Party Going (1939), Green wrote with a more predict-
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able intimacy about the bright young things of his own social circle. Party Going describes a group of rich friends on their way to a vacation in the south of France: the descent of fog traps them in a London railway station where they flirt and squabble their way through an afternoon and evening, until the fog lifts at the end of the novel and they finally get away. Even when judged by Green’s own standards, Party Going is extremely opaque: it is full of insistently recurrent images that invite symbolical readings but which lead nowhere; it is an unmistakably death-haunted and almost metaphysically ominous novel about the trivial concerns of uncompromisingly shallow people. In Loving (1945) Green returned again to the conditions and concerns of working-class people, in a novel centered on the lives of the servants in an Anglo-Irish “big house” during World War II. This, and the two other novels Green wrote around the same time, Caught (1943) and Back (1946), are perhaps the most compelling British novels to come out of World War II. In view of the 10 years that separated his prewar novels Living and Party Going, the war represented a time of unusual productivity for Green, despite the addition to the ongoing demands of the family business of his duties as an auxiliary fireman in London: a suicidally dangerous job during the Blitz. Directly out of this war work came Caught, set during the first year of the war, from the so-called “Phoney War” through the London Blitz. The novel tells the story of two psychologically damaged firemen, the working-class regular Pye and the upper-class auxiliary Roe, and, through its temporal distortions, its emphasis on the subjectivity and unreliability of perception, and its dislocating, hallucinatory atmosphere, it puts what are recognizably modernist formal techniques into the service of conveying the crushing psychic costs of war. The still more disturbing and defamiliarizing Back is about a shell-shocked amputee who, newly repatriated from a German prisoner-of-war camp, becomes convinced that his dead lover – whose death coincided with his being taken prisoner – is still alive. Green had seen shell-shock at first hand as a boy when, during World War I, his family’s country house was converted into a convalescent home for traumatized officers. He described this episode with painful vividness when he completed Pack My
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Bag at the end of the 1930s, as if preparing for the Second World War by recalling the tragedies of the First. Underscoring the continuities of violence that span the first half of the century, for the characters in Back the two World Wars continually merge into one another. The more high-spirited Loving and Concluding (1948) formally and thematically form something of a pair. These two novels are set in country houses usurped from their traditional masters: in Loving, the servants run the house in every sense – the aristocratic owners, the aptly named Tennants, are kept continually in the dark about the erotic and larcenous goings-on of their supposed subordinates; in the semi-futuristic Concluding, the owners of the country estate have been evicted by a totalitarian government that has appropriated the manor house for use as a girls’ school. Both novels, too, are whimsically fantastical and otherworldly: all the girls in Concluding’s school have names beginning with M, for example, while the opening and ending of Loving explicitly recall the traditional fairy tale bookends of “once upon a time” and “happily ever after.” Nonetheless, through their timely address to the overthrow of the prewar economic elite to which Green belonged, Loving and Concluding anticipate the social concerns of his final two novels, which are set in Green’s immediate present of the postwar settlement. The social comedies Nothing (1950) and Doting (1952) are in their way as wittily observed as any of Green’s earlier novels, but they present a bleak picture of life in Britain in the years of postwar austerity. This was the period of Clement Attlee’s Labour government, elected in 1945 on the wartime promise of a more equitable society, and committed in principle and practice to the redistribution of wealth. In Nothing, the generational gap between those who came of age before the war and the welfare state and those who came of age afterwards becomes unbridgeable: the young look down contemptuously on their useless elders, with their tangled and promiscuous erotic lives and their habitual complaints about a government intent on depleting their unearned wealth; the old are appalled by the priggish youngsters, with their sexless seriousness and their office jobs in the vastly expanded government sector. A failed effort to bridge the gap between the prewar and postwar eras comes
in Doting when a middle-aged man develops a crush on a beautiful young woman. With its connotations of senile dotage as well as of passionate attachment, the title gives away Green’s bleak sense of how futile and misguided are all efforts to connect with postwar life and with those young people for whom this age of austerity is the only reality imaginable. Isolated by his growing deafness and debilitated by chronic alcoholism, Green ended his career as a writer prematurely. He lived more than another 20 years after the publication of Doting, but completed no significant further work before his death in 1973. Although admired immensely in his own lifetime, he has never enjoyed a stable posthumous critical reputation, and, despite his idiomatic narrative voice, his extraordinary ear for the nuances for speech, and a talent for social comedy no less brilliant than those of Waugh and Powell, he never commanded a wide audience to start with. His works drift into and out of print as they get periodically rediscovered by new generations of critics, but even in a purely academic context he is a troubling figure, the kind of writer who challenges rather than confirms conventional reading strategies. In the end, what makes him critically seductive is also what makes him critically challenging: that his books are, as Treglown writes of the baffling Party Going, “well protected against tidy explication” (109). But if Green’s resistance to interpretation suggests his obscurity and complexity, it also helps to explain why those profoundly original novels he wrote have never entirely disappeared. SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (BIF); Powell, Anthony (BIF); Waugh, Evelyn (BIF); WorkingClass Fiction (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Green, H. (1926). Blindness. London: J. M. Dent. Green, H. (1929). Living. London: J. M. Dent. Green, H. (1939). Party Going. London: Hogarth. Green, H. (1940). Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait. London: Hogarth. Green, H. (1943). Caught. London: Hogarth. Green, H. (1945). Loving. London: Hogarth. Green, H. (1946). Back. London: Hogarth. Green, H. (1948). Concluding. London: Hogarth. Green, H. (1950). Nothing. London: Hogarth.
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Green, H. (1952). Doting. London: Hogarth. Green, H. (1992). Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green (ed. M. Yorke). London: Chatto and Windus. Holmesland, O. (1985). A Critical Introduction to Henry Green’s Novels: The Living Vision. London: Macmillan. Mengham, R. (1982). The Idiom of the Time: The Writings of Henry Green. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. North, M. (1984). Henry Green and the Writing of His Generation. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Odom, K. C. (1978). Henry Green. Boston: Twayne. Treglown, J. (2000). Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green. London: Faber and Faber.
Greene, Graham BRIAN DIEMERT
Born October 2, 1904, Graham Greene was, before his death on April 3, 1991, hailed by English reviewers as “our best living novelist.” The epithet is debatable, but Greene’s prolific career – in fiction, journalism, criticism, cinema, even drama (eight plays), and poetry (Babbling April, 1925, is his first book) – undoubtedly made him a leader in British letters and fundamentally defined a particular milieu commentators dubbed “Greeneland,” a seedy world of ambiguous corruption through which redemptive possibilities are obscurely felt. Greene scoffed at the notion of “Greeneland,” arguing his descriptions reflected his reality, but an inclination to write about politically and religiously troubled locations, which he often visited with uncanny timing, gave his work an undeniable stamp. Greene is often identified with Catholicism and leftist politics, but his place in both camps is debatable. The fourth of six children, Greene was marked in his youth by his experience at Berkhamsted School where his father was headmaster. A recurring image in Greene’s fiction is a “green baize door”: just such a door separated his family’s domestic abode from the school and its dormitories where Greene lived with the other boys (1971, 11). As the headmaster’s son, he was never fully accepted by his peers, so the “normal” indignities of school life were compounded by bullying and his deep feeling of separation from his family. His unhappiness reached such proportions that
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suicide – Russian roulette is mentioned in his autobiographical work “The Revolver in the Corner Cupboard” and in A Sort of Life (1971) – seemed a reasonable option. Through his older brother Raymond’s intercession with his parents, Greene was sent to Kenneth Richmond, a London psychoanalyst. While in London, Greene developed an appreciation for London’s culture and a lifelong interest in dream analysis (evident in the posthumously published, Dream Diary, 1992). He went on to Balliol College, Oxford, where he read history, before he embarked on a career in journalism at the Nottingham Journal and then at The Times. Journalism remained Greene’s greatest source of income until the late 1940s, but the most significant experience of his twenties was meeting Vivienne Dayrell-Browning, a Roman Catholic with whom he fell desperately in love. Greene converted to Catholicism so he could marry Vivienne, but by the end of the 1930s and with two children, Lucy Caroline and Francis, the marriage was all but over (as Catholics, they never divorced). Later regular romantic partners were Dorothy Glover, Catherine Waleston (whose story is told in William Cash’s The Third Woman, 2000), and Yvonne Cloetta, who lived with Greene from the mid-1960s to the end of his life. Cloetta and many of Greene’s friends have published memoirs of Greene, but the broader story, or rather, stories, are told by Norman Sherry, Michael Sheldon, and, to a lesser extent, A. J. West. Sherry’s three volume Life (1989, 1995, 2004) is the authorized biography because Greene, impressed by Sherry’s work on Joseph Conrad, asked him to write the biography and granted him unique access to papers, letters, and interviews. Quoting heavily, Sherry made full use of his privileges and produced a thorough, largely uncritical, biography. Sheldon’s (1995) book, on the other hand, is deeply problematic, and one wonders why he devoted so much time to an author he so obviously dislikes. West’s (1997) briefer text doesn’t pretend to be a complete biography, but is highly readable and even useful. No consideration of Greene’s life and career, however, can do without his occasionally dubious autobiographical writings, which include two books, A Sort of Life and Ways of Escape (1980, but cobbled from previous journalism and introductions to his collected works),
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journals, and several essays, most notably “The Lost Childhood” and “The Revolver in the Corner Cupboard.” That Sherry’s work on Conrad excited Greene’s interest is telling because Greene’s work shares much of Conrad’s sensibility. Other influences are abundant, including T. S. Eliot, but Greene never aspired to the high modernism of writers such as Joyce, Woolf, or Dorothy Richardson, who, he felt, produced two-dimensional characters. Like others of his generation, he preferred realism and the “old dictatorship, the detached and objective treatment” (1969a, 116). He drew on Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, and Conrad for his models, but his book reviews also reveal his love of popular romance writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Rider Haggard, and James Buchan. Marjorie Bowen’s The Viper of Milan (1906), which Greene credits with introducing him to adventure romance, is little read now (except perhaps by Greene scholars), but Greene felt it explained his schooldays’ miseries, and, indeed, Greene’s lasting affection for nineteenth-century romance fiction is evident throughout his work. As a young writer, Greene had no intention of addressing issues of religious faith or politics. In the late 1920s and 1930s, he just wanted to be successful. And through much of his career he dealt with the old problem of trying to reconcile fiction’s popular genres with “serious” literature. For more than 30 years Greene sought to keep these two separate in his work by calling several books “An Entertainment.” With Travels with My Aunt (1969b) he acknowledged the label’s futility and abandoned it. Nonetheless, the distinction proved a boon to critics. For example, R. W. B. Lewis (1957), a fine critic of American literature, argued that Greene’s “entertainments” were rehearsals for his more serious “Catholic” novels. Hence, A Gun for Sale (1936) looked toward Brighton Rock (1938), The Confidential Agent (1939) led to The Power and The Glory (1940), and The Ministry of Fear (1943) anticipated The Heart of the Matter (1948). The later texts formed a kind of Catholic trilogy, Lewis argued, that developed the concerns introduced in their corresponding predecessors. The notion of a “trilogy” soon collapsed as Greene’s career developed, but Lewis’s essay helped establish the vocabulary for serious comment on Greene’s fiction that was echoed by A. A. De Vitis and
other critics to cement the view that Greene’s fiction fell into two camps – lesser and more important work. The novels that engaged Catholicism (though they all do to varying degrees) were regarded for much of Greene’s lifetime as superior; consequently, he was, and occasionally still is despite his dismissal of the idea, often treated as a “Catholic novelist.” This perception pushed him to the heights of literary and popular fame when Time magazine featured him on the cover of the October 29, 1951 issue: the occasion was the appearance of The End of the Affair (1951), one of his most highly regarded novels. The End of the Affair is Greene’s first novel to feature first-person narration and recalls in tone, if not plot, The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, whose work Greene admired greatly and later edited for the Bodley Head. The novel combines the realism of the Blitz with the magical aspects of Catholicism (something, Greene speculated in The Lawless Roads, his 1939 travel book about Mexico, that the church had sadly lost), but it also offers one of Greene’s few successful female characters. Indeed, it is something of a cliche among critics to say that Greene’s female characters function largely as wide-eyed innocents, “waif” is the often-used term, in the midst of tormented male characters: “why can’t you go back home for ever and let me be?” (1970 [1938], 179), Pinkie records as a message for Rose in Brighton Rock. That novel ends with Rose about to play the record the now dead Pinkie made for her – “the worst horror” – but John Boulting’s film is evasive and preserves Rose’s innocence at the end with, it is implied, divine intervention. Greene accepted this cinematic travesty because he thought viewers would realize that Rose would eventually hear Pinkie’s curse. Whether Greene would accept the ending of the 1999 otherwise fine adaptation of The End of the Affair is another matter. (Not surprisingly, because Greene worked as a film critic and screenwriter, many of his books have been adapted to the screen, but few, with the exception of Carol Reed’s The Third Man and The Fallen Idol, based on “The Basement Room,” have been wholly successful.) Any reading of Greene’s fiction reveals the limitations of his female characters – Elizabeth in The Man Within, Rose from Brighton Rock, Helen from The Heart of the Matter, Phuong in The Quiet American – the list goes on and back
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through Greene’s canon. The fact is that Greene does not usually handle women well, so Sarah in The End of the Affair stands apart from his normal sketching of women characters. Still, Greene’s fiction, like Conrad’s, explores the multiple ambiguities of men’s choices in a masculine environment. In some ways, his first published novel offers a template. The Man Within (1929) embodies themes of betrayal, especially between fathers and sons, and self-torment. Andrews and Carlyon form the figurative son–father pair while Elizabeth completes the triangular structure Greene so often used (another female character, Lucy, provides an archetypal contrast to Elizabeth). Greene might have prevented The Man Within from being reprinted except for its status as his first published novel, but its successors, The Name of Action (1930) and Rumour at Nightfall (1931), remain rare finds because Greene did prohibit their reprinting. Neither is awful, but they reflect their young author’s stylistic weaknesses clearly, and neither was commercially successful. Consequently, Stamboul Train (1932) was a deliberate bid for popularity. With the Orient Express as a container for his characters, Greene employed the strategy used by Vicki Baum in Grand Hotel and others in the 1930s; that is, several disparate characters become a microcosm of the larger society, but their stories seldom intersect. The book also reflects the 1930s preoccupation with frontiers and the difficulty of entering foreign space. Stamboul Train gives us several characters who are germinal to Greene’s later fiction, the best of whom is his Dr. Czinner – a Balkan revolutionary returning, Lenin-like, to his homeland. His vaguely Marxist ideals arouse our sympathy, but Czinner is stopped at the border and, after the confessional scene that Greene often employed (that is, Czinner and Anne, a fellow passenger, find themselves hiding in a small barn exchanging confidences), executed. Stamboul Train’s real importance lies in the fact that its success encouraged Greene and, though it came to be viewed as a minor novel within the larger oeuvre, it helped define him as a novelist. Its successor, It’s a Battlefield (1934), also employs an array of characters – none of whom can be considered central – to examine current political and social conditions, as Conrad did in The Secret Agent (whose influence here is especially obvious). Politics are never far from Greene’s work,
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but this novel was consciously political, for the Depression showed capitalism in crisis. Fascism was on the rise in Europe, and communism seemed successful in Russia: between these two ideological structures, there seemed little room for compromise, so British culture in the 1930s was permeated by ideological division, most visible in debates about the Spanish Civil War (1936–9). Characteristically, Greene preferred not to commit himself to either ideological position and sought a third position which he linked to the church. It may be ungenerous to describe Greene as “a man of the 1930s,” as Roger Sharrock does (17), but there can be no doubt that ideological conflicts (political and religious) are the bedrock of Greene’s plots throughout his career. After his frantic prewar pace (nine novels, two travel books, a biography of the earl of Rochester (unpublished until 1974), scads of film reviews, and even more book reviews), Greene’s writing career slowed in the 1940s, but three of his best novels were published then (The Power and the Glory; The Ministry of Fear, 1943; and The Heart of the Matter, 1948). Naturally, the war substantially deterred creative work, and Greene, like many writers, initially worked in the Ministry of Information, but he was soon recruited by his sister Elizabeth to British Intelligence and stationed in Sierra Leone, West Africa, from which he reported on coastal shipping. This tedious experience, however, offered time to write The Ministry of Fear, and to gather material for one of his most acclaimed novels, The Heart of the Matter, which features a Catholic policeman, Scobie, whose feelings of pity blur with love to lead him into moral, ethical, and religious crises because he is drawn into an adulterous affair with the waif-like Helen. Unable to extricate himself from the dilemma and, aware that his failure to participate in the eucharist will give him away, Scobie clumsily plans for a death that won’t appear to be suicide. The central importance of Catholicism in the novel confirmed Greene’s status as a “serious” novelist, but the book has not aged well and Scobie’s torment, at least its religious component, now seems ridiculous. Greene’s work with intelligence ended when he abruptly resigned from his post, now in the Iberian section, prior to D-Day in 1944, and, because his supervisor and friend Kim Philby was later exposed as a spy, Greene’s departure has led
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to speculation that he had “intuited” Philby’s compromised status and chose not to betray his friend. Greene often referred in fiction and essays to E. M. Forster’s piece, “What I Believe” – “if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country” (1965 [1938], 76) – and the reference seems telling because Greene offered the same thought in “The Spy,” his preface to Philby’s 1968 memoir, My Silent War (Greene 1969a, 311). In the 1980s, Greene visited Philby in Moscow prior to the latter’s death in 1988. That these visits occurred on the eve of perestroika and glasnost, like his previous and equally fortuitous visits to Kenya, Vietnam, Cuba, the Congo, Haiti, South America, and elsewhere, in moments of heightened political tension, fed speculation that Greene’s resignation from intelligence lacked the sharp break he often claimed. Hard evidence in the matter is unavailable, but it seems reasonable to assume that Greene had numerous acquaintances, if not friends, in the service with whom he kept in touch. After the war, Greene’s status with the public and academics grew. The first book on his work, by Kenneth Allott and Miriam Farris, was published in 1951 but scholarly articles on aspects of his fiction had been appearing since the early 1940s. His successful collaboration with Carol Reed, especially on The Third Man, stimulated Greene to produce stories for film, some of which, while not intended as novels, have appeared. Among these, The Third Man (1950) is the most successful, but The Tenth Man, published in 1985, and more recently, No Man’s Land (2004) are important additions to Greene’s canon. In the 1950s, he continued to produce exceptional work. The End of the Affair has been mentioned, but The Quiet American (1955) and Our Man in Havana (1958) are remarkable for different reasons. The first, growing out of several visits to Vietnam in the early 1950s (nicely documented for Paris Match and reprinted in Judith Adamson’s collection of Greene’s journalism, Reflections, 1990), is prophetic of American fortunes in Vietnam. As in The End of the Affair, a first-person narrator, the cynical British journalist Fowler, is used to tell the story of the callow American Pyle, whose faith in Cold War rhetoric proves fatal for him and, implicitly, his country. Fowler, however, is not without blame because Pyle’s relationship with
Fowler’s Vietnamese mistress, Phuong, encourages a jealousy in Fowler that taints both his actions and the narration. Our Man in Havana, on the other hand, in contrast to the popular, but two-dimensional, work of Ian Fleming, gives us the comical story of Wormold, a vacuum-cleaner salesman and would-be spy in late-1950s Cuba who, once recruited, sends his supervisors diagrams, based on vacuum-cleaner parts, that are meant to describe missiles and their installations. Impressed, his bosses want more, and, anxious for the extra income so he can send his daughter to private school, Wormold develops a complicated fictional network of spies that becomes all too real when the Soviets take his intercepted reports seriously. In the 1960s, Greene wrote novels set in the Congo (A Burnt-Out Case, 1961), Haiti (The Comedians, 1966), and Latin America (Travels with My Aunt), while also publishing two volumes of short fiction. He remained as productive in the 1970s, offering his memoir, A Sort of Life, The Honorary Consul (1973), and perhaps his last great novel, The Human Factor (1978), which, recalling Philby, deals with the life of a double agent, Maurice Castle, working in South Africa. After the The Human Factor, Greene produced only one novel of note, Monsignor Quixote (1982), a kind of picaresque dialogue between Father Quixote and his friend “Sancho” a former communist mayor of El Toboso. The two journey through post-Franco Spain in an old car named Rocinante. Shadowing Cervantes’s tale, Greene explores territory he had probed since the 1930s – the complex relationship between politics and religion, between Catholicism and communism. After Monsignor Quixote, Greene’s publications seemed increasingly the leftovers of a vibrant career. His last, short novel, The Captain and the Enemy (1988), deals with Nicaragua in the 1970s; and The Last Word and Other Stories (1990) ranges from the 1920s to the 1980s. Since Greene’s death several useful collections of occasional writing have appeared. Greene was remarkably productive: he claimed 500 words a day to be his routine, though in later years this number dropped (Donaghy, p. xi). To say he was always a man of the 1930s may not be fair, but certainly his preoccupations – politics, religion, commitment, betrayal, travel – arise out of a thirties sensibility. Greene was not a technical
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innovator and, after some brief experiments in the thirties, largely rejected the modernist play with form and language, but his work embodies his era, and his life makes him, as it does for Paul Theroux in Picture Palace, suitable for fiction. Early criticism focused on Greene’s religious preoccupations and his relation to Catholicism has been the subject of several fine discussions such as Lewis’s essay (1959), Lodge’s essay (1986 [1966]), and Philip Stratford’s book (1964). Many studies review Greene’s entire career, and several are notable, especially A. A. De Vitis’s (1986), Judith Adamson’s (1990), and Roger Sharrock’s (1984). Maria Couto’s fine book on politics and religion (1988), Adamson’s work on Greene and film (1984), and Brian Diemert’s book on Greene’s thrillers and 1930s are narrower in focus (1996). SEE ALSO: Conrad, Joseph (BIF); The Film Industry and Fiction (BIF); Ford, Ford Madox (BIF); James, Henry (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Adamson, J. (1984). Graham Greene and Cinema. Norman, OK: Pilgrim. Adamson, J. (1990). Graham Greene: The Dangerous Edge: Where Art and Politics Meet. London: Macmillan. Allain, M.-F. (1981). The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene by Marie-Fran¸coise Allain (trans. G. Walman). London: Bodley Head. Allott, K., & Farris, M. (1951). The Art of Graham Greene. New York: Russell and Russell. Cloetta, Y. (2005). In Search of a Beginning: My Life with Graham Greene (as told to M.-F. Allain). London: Bloomsbury. Couto, M. (1988). Graham Greene: On the Frontier: Politics and Religion in the Novels. New York: St. Martin’s. De Vitis, A. A. (1986). Graham Greene, rev. edn. Boston: Twayne. Diemert, B. (1996). Graham Greene’s Thrillers and the 1930s. Kingston, Ont.: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Donaghy, H. J. (ed.) (1992). Conversations with Graham Greene. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Forster, E. M. (1965). What I Believe [1938]. In Two Cheers for Democracy. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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Greene, G. (1929). The Man Within. London: Heinemann. Greene, G. (1932). Stamboul Train. London: Heinemann. Greene, G. (1934). It’s a Battlefield. London: Heinemann. Greene, G. (1935). England Made Me. London: Heinemann. Greene, G. (1936). A Gun for Sale. London: Heinemann. Greene, G. (1939). The Confidential Agent. London: Heinemann. Greene, G. (1940). The Power and the Glory. London: Heinemann. Greene, G. (1943). The Ministry of Fear. London: Heinemann. Greene, G. (1948). The Heart of the Matter. London: Heinemann. Greene, G. (1950). “The Third Man” and “The Fallen Idol.’’ London: Heinemann. Greene, G. (1951). The End of the Affair. London: Heinemann. Greene, G. (1955). The Quiet American. London: Heinemann. Greene, G. (1958). Our Man in Havana. London: Heinemann. Greene, G. (1961). A Burnt-Out Case. London: Heinemann. Greene, G. (1966). The Comedians. London: Bodley Head. Greene, G. (1969a). Collected Essays. London: Bodley Head. Greene, G. (1969b). Travels with My Aunt. London: Bodley Head. Greene, G. (1970). Brighton Rock [1938]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Greene, G. (1972). A Sort of Life [1971]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Greene, G. (1978). The Human Factor. London: Bodley Head. Greene, G. (1980). Ways of Escape. Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys. Greene, G. (1982). Monsignor Quixote. Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys. Greene, G. (1990). Reflections (sel. and intro. J. Adamson). Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys. Greene, G. (2007). Graham Greene: A Life in Letters (ed. R. Greene). London: Little, Brown. Lewis, R. W. B. (1959). Graham Greene: The Religious Affair [1959]. In The Picaresque Saint: Representative Figures in Contemporary Fiction. Philadelphia: Lippincott, pp. 220–74. Lodge, D. (1986). Graham Greene [1966]. New York: Columbia University Press. Repr. in The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays
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on Fiction and Criticism [1971]. London: Ark, pp. 87–118. Sharrock, R. (1984). Saints, Sinners and Comedians: The Novels of Graham Greene. Tunbridge Wells: Burns and Oates. Sheldon, M. (1995). Graham Greene: The Enemy Within. New York: Random House. Sherry, N. (1989, 1995, 2004). The Life of Graham Greene. Vol. 1: 1904–1939. Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys. Vol. 2: 1939–1955. New York: Viking. Vol. 3: 1955–1991. New York: Viking. Smith, G. (1986). The Achievement of Graham Greene. Brighton: Harvester. Stratford, P. (1964). Faith and Fiction: Creative Process in Greene and Mauriac. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. West, W. J. (1997). The Quest for Graham Greene. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Gunn, Neil M. MARGERY PALMER McCULLOCH
Neil M. Gunn was one of the writers associated with the Scottish literary revival in the post-1918 period, initiated by the poet Hugh MacDiarmid and popularly known as the Scottish Renaissance. He was born on November 8, 1891 in Dunbeath, a small fishing and crofting village on the Caithness coast of northeast Scotland. One of a family of nine children, including seven sons, his early childhood was spent in Dunbeath until, at the age of 13, he was sent south to Galloway to live with his sister and her husband. Later he joined the Civil Service and spent several years in London and Edinburgh before returning to Caithness as an excise officer in 1922. Gunn’s childhood in the straths and fishing coasts of Caithness left a powerful impression on his imagination, and his fiction is alive with a boy’s sense of the richness of his environment, and with the daring and skill of the fishermen who (like the scientists and heroes Gunn considered them to be) guided their boats through sea storms to the safety of harbor. In adulthood, his new experience as excise officer of conditions in Caithness provided him with the additional economic and social information he would need to form him as a novelist of the Highlands. Gunn’s serious writing career began in the early 1920s. His early short stories were published in the
little magazines edited by MacDiarmid who also described his first novel The Grey Coast (1926) as “something new, and big, in Scottish literature” (Grieve 269). One of the notable beliefs of the revival movement was that artistic renewal must be accompanied by renewal in the life of the country as a whole; and among its objectives was the regeneration of the Highlands and their culture, for long an area of emigration and economic and social decline. As a Highlander, Gunn was therefore an important member of the movement, and his fiction, and the many articles on conditions in the Highlands that he published in the Scots Magazine in the 1930s, helped raise the profile of this neglected area in public perception. His own public profile was heightened when his novel Morning Tide (1929) became a Book Society choice for 1931; and the success of Highland River (1937), which won Edinburgh University’s James Tait Black Memorial Prize, enabled him to resign from the Civil Service and become a full-time writer. Highland River is the novel in which Gunn shows most overtly his relationship with modernist fiction, and especially with the presentation of time and memory as found in the fiction of Marcel Proust and the philosophical writings of Henri Bergson. Its narrative is structured anachronistically, with the experiences of the boy Kenn and his adult self flowing backwards and forward into each other without formal demarcation. In a related way, the influence of Jung’s writings on race memory and the collective unconscious is seen in the way the boy intuitively learns the history of his people through his attachment to his river (which becomes for him the river of life), through the evidence of their existence in the natural world around him, and in his instinctive sense of the special nature of certain ancient sites. As the narrative shows how boy and adult are one, so Kenn grows to realize his at-oneness with the people of his past. Gunn followed Walter Scott as novelist of the Highlands, but his approach to his subject was very different from Scott’s romantic period fiction and was rooted in the Scottish modernist belief in renewal. For Gunn, Scott’s fiction was “storytelling or romance set in a void” (McCleery 123), while his own belief was that a secure future could be built only on an understanding of the past and a revitalization of the link between past,
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present, and future. This belief is given form in the three linked novels Sun Circle (1933), Butcher’s Broom (1934), and The Silver Darlings (1941), which explore historical events that resulted in the scattering of the Highland people and the destruction of their Celtic culture: the coming of the Vikings and of Christianity in the ninth century, and the notorious Sutherland Clearances in the early nineteenth. The epic Silver Darlings (probably his most famous book) dramatizes the triumph of the people over the disaster of the Clearances as a result of their success in the new herring fishing industry, while at the same time portraying the growth to maturity of its young hero Finn not only through his mastery of the sea but, significantly, through his rediscovery of the culture of his Celtic ancestors, thus restoring a broken link in the chain of his identity. Gunn published 20 novels between 1926 and 1954. Although the most significant deal explicitly with the reimagining of Highland life, he also explored conditions of urban life in sections of Wild Geese Overhead (1939), The Serpent (1943), The Drinking Well (1946), and The Lost Chart (1949). The Green Isle of the Great Deep (1944) is a dystopian fable set, ironically, in the Gaelic paradise of Tir-nan-og. Gunn’s post-World War II fiction increasingly explored the search of the individual for philosophical integration and his final book, a philosophical autobiography The Atom of Delight, was published in 1956. He died on January 15, 1973. SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Scottish Fiction (BIF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Gifford, D. (1983). Neil M. Gunn and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd. Grieve, C. M. ( MacDiarmid, H.) (1926). Contemporary Scottish Studies. London: Leonard Parsons. Gunn, N. M. (1929). Morning Tide. Edinburgh: Porpoise. Gunn, N. M. (1926). The Grey Coast. London: Jonathan Cape. Gunn, N. M. (1933). Sun Circle. Edinburgh: Porpoise. Gunn, N. M. (1934). Butcher’s Broom. Edinburgh: Porpoise. Gunn, N. M. (1937). Highland River. Edinburgh: Porpoise. Gunn, N. M. (1941). The Silver Darlings. London: Faber and Faber. Gunn, N. M. (1944). The Green Isle of the Great Deep. London: Faber and Faber. Gunn, N. M. (1952). Bloodhunt. London: Faber and Faber. Hart, F. R., & Pick, J. B. (1981). Neil M. Gunn: A Highland Life. London: John Murray. McCleery, A. (ed.) (1987). Landscape and Light: Essays by Neil M. Gunn. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. McCulloch, M. (1987). The Novels of Neil M. Gunn: A Critical Study. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. McCulloch, M. P. (2004). Modernism and Nationalism: Literature and Society in Scotland 1918–1939: Source Documents for the Scottish Renaissance. Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies. McCulloch, M. P. (2009). Scottish Modernism and Its Contexts 1918–1959: Literature, National Identity and Cultural Exchange. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pick, J. B. (ed.) Neil M. Gunn: Selected Letters. Edinburgh: Polygon. Price, R. (1991). The Fabulous Matter of Fact: The Poetics of Neil M. Gunn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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H Hamilton, Patrick ROSEMARY ERICKSON JOHNSEN
Patrick Hamilton, novelist and playwright, was an important voice of the interwar period. He shared the interest in leftist politics common to writers of the time, but he gave expression to a distinctive group of people on the margins of English society, eschewing coal miners and the middle classes alike to focus on those he called the “semi-proletariat.” The enduring interest of Hamilton’s novels resides in his distinctive prose style and in his characteristic settings of pubs, boarding houses, and cafes populated by lower-middle-class characters trying to maintain their respectability. Although he is perhaps most widely known for his stage plays Rope and Gas Light, Hamilton thought of himself primarily as a novelist. His fiction has enjoyed periodic bursts of renewed interest since his last novel, published in 1955; his place in the early twenty-first century seems secure on three fronts: as a chronicler of lower-middle-class London, as a leftist novelist, and as an author with keen insights into the obsessive, often alcoholic, personality. Anthony Walter Patrick Hamilton was born March 17, 1904, at Hassocks, Sussex, the last of three children. The large fortune his father inherited was largely squandered by the time Hamilton was born, and his childhood was spent in a series of short-let houses and respectable boarding houses, the kind in which residents were referred to as “paying guests.” These early experiences, along with his exposure to the theater through his sister’s acting career, inform his first three novels; his theater contacts gave him the
sharp grasp of dramatic construction that made his stage and radio plays so successful. Hamilton’s first novel, Monday Morning (1925), was accepted by Constable when he was only 20 years old. That novel and Craven House (1926) were based on his experiences in an Earl’s Court residential hotel and a Kew boarding house, respectively. The final novel of his early period, Twopence Coloured (1928), followed the fortunes of a young actress. The last of these, along with his Marxist dystopia of 1939, Impromptu in Moribundia (1939b), are the least-studied of his novels; this may be because they depart from his usual formula of richly materialist presentations of the lives of ordinary lower-middle-class characters. The 1926 publication of The Midnight Bell marked the arrival of Hamilton’s major period. His work enjoyed commercial and critical success, although he himself continued to inhabit the milieu of his fiction: cheap hotels, boarding houses, undistinguished pubs, cheap cafes. Following a 1932 traffic accident in which he, as a pedestrian, suffered life-threatening injuries, and his mother’s suicide in 1934, Hamilton’s drinking tipped over into alcoholism, which he would fight until his death in 1962. The pub trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky (1935), chronicles the lives of three characters whose paths intersect in the pub that gives its name to the first novel of the trilogy. The first novel tells the story of waiter Bob; the second that of the prostitute Jenny, with whom Bob becomes obsessed; and the third that of the good but plain barmaid Ella. The trilogy offers a minutely observed subsection of London, political commentary on the lives of the respectable (and
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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not so respectable) working poor, and insight into patterns of alcohol consumption. Following the trilogy, Hamilton published his two masterpieces, Hangover Square (1941) and The Slaves of Solitude (1947). The first is set in the period leading up to Britain’s declaration of war against Germany, and features a cast of drifters and filmstar wannabes in Earls Court and Brighton. The schizophrenic protagonist plans to murder the woman who torments him, but his mental illness (exacerbated by his heavy drinking) mean that the crime is almost endlessly deferred. Finally he acts, just as Chamberlain’s declaration of war is being broadcast on the radio; he reaches his sought-after haven of Maidenhead only to find that it is “no good.” His suicide rates no headline, given world events. The Slaves of Solitude is a remarkable novel of life on the home front, featuring middle-aged Enid Roach stranded in a boarding house in Thames Lockdon (modeled on Henley-on-Thames) because she has been bombed out of her London flat. Her encounters with the fascist-inclined boarding-house bully Mr. Thwaites, the German expat Vicki Kugelmann, and the American Lt. Pike all provide a way for Hamilton to explore World War II as it was experienced by ordinary people living far away from the main action. Hamilton’s final project was a series of novels about the psychopathic criminal Ralph Ernest Gorse; the series was intended to take readers from Gorse’s school days to his end on the gallows. The concept was ahead of its time, and the first two novels generated unenthusiastic reviews from critics and friends who could not accept the “motiveless” crimes portrayed, and Hamilton’s advanced alcoholism made it difficult for him to sustain quality work on the project. The first novel of the trilogy received praise for its portrait of Brighton, but few reviewers seem to have grasped the overall plan Hamilton had for examining the “modern” psychopath. The second novel, Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse (1953), was made into a highly successful television series by London Weekend Television in 1994. The final published piece, Uknown Assailant (1955), was a dispiritingly skimpy end to Hamilton’s writing career. The author died in 1962. Scholarly work on Hamilton includes three doctoral theses (two in the UK, one in the USA), several book chapters and journal articles, and
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many general-audience reviews and appreciations. Hamilton’s supporters include Doris Lessing and Graham Greene. The success of the 2005 BBC adaptation of the pub trilogy, plus recent reissues of several titles in the USA, suggest that Hamilton’s work may finally be on the verge of receiving the canonical status it deserves. SEE ALSO: Politics and the Novel (BIF); Working-Class Fiction (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS French, S. (1993). Patrick Hamilton: A Life. London: Faber and Faber. Hamilton, B. (1972). The Light Went Out: A Biography of Patrick Hamilton. London: Constable. Hamilton, P. (1925). Monday Morning. London: Constable. Hamilton, P. (1928). Twopence Coloured. London: Constable. Hamilton, P. (1929a). The Midnight Bell. London: Constable. Hamilton, P. (1929b). Rope: A Play, with a Preface on Thrillers. London: Constable. Hamilton, P. (1932). The Siege of Pleasure. London: Constable. Hamilton, P. (1934). The Plains of Cement. London: Constable. Hamilton, P. (1935). Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky: A London Trilogy, comprising The Midnight Bell, The Siege of Pleasure, and The Plains of Cement. London: Constable. Hamilton, P. (1939a). Gas Light: A Victorian Thriller in Three Acts. London: Constable. Hamilton, P. (1939b). Impromptu in Moribundia. London: Constable. Hamilton, P. (1941). Hangover Square. London: Constable. Hamilton, P. (1943). Craven House [1926], rev. edn. London: Constable. Hamilton, P. (1947). The Slaves of Solitude. London: Constable. Hamilton, P. (1951). The West Pier. London: Constable. Hamilton, P. (1953). Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse. London: Constable. Hamilton, P. (1955). Unknown Assailant. London: Constable. Harding, J. (2007). Patrick Hamilton: A Critical Study. London: Greenwich Exchange. Jones, N. (1991). Through a Glass Darkly: The Life of Patrick Hamilton. London: Scribner’s. Rattenbury, A. (1996). Literature, Lying and Sober Truth: Attitudes to the Work of Patrick Hamilton
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and Sylvia Townsend Warner. In J. Lucas (ed.), Writing and Radicalism. London: Longman, pp. 201–44. Thomas, D. (1987). The Dangerous Edge of Things. Encounter, 69(2), 32–40.
Historical Fiction ELODIE ROUSSELOT
Historical fiction is a subgenre of fiction that is set in a recognizable historical period and which presents a fictionalized account of key historical events or figures of that period. Early instances of the genre include some of the founding works of Western literature, such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, but it is in the nineteenth century, in the work of British and European authors, that historical fiction would be most prominently developed. Sir Walter Scott, for instance, appropriated the form and used it to promote a sense of Scottish national and cultural identity in the nineteenth century, as is visible in his Waverley novels (1814). In the twentieth century, however, important political events in the wake of both World Wars and the dismantling of the British Empire complicated the need to develop a common set of cultural images on which to establish a national identity; as a result, the place and function of historical fiction in British literature also became more complex. The returns to the past in literary works of the period partly had to do with a fascination with previous eras of uncontested British cultural and political superiority, but they also indicated a wish to understand the changed state of affairs in the present. These narratives tend to highlight parallels throughout history between tragic events of the past and those of the present by focusing on the role and responsibility of mankind in both. This is visible in such works as William Golding’s The Spire (1964), which returns to fourteenth-century England to narrate the construction of the spire of Salisbury Cathedral; the tale emphasizes the destructive nature of one man’s singlemindedness and the disregard for the cost of human lives involved in the building of the religious monument. Iris Murdoch’s The Red and the Green (1965) is set in early twentiethcentury Ireland and recounts the events of the Easter Rebellion of 1916. Both texts return to
well-established events in British history to illuminate little-known aspects of their development, or to adopt a lesser-known perspective on those events. This is also the case of Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger (1992), which is set in the mid eighteenth century and revisits the slave trade from the perspective of a surgeon on board a slave ship. More recently, however, and since the advent of postmodernism in the 1960s in art, literature, cultural and historical studies, the traditional divide between historical fiction as “dramatized” representation of the past and history as its “true” depiction has been thoroughly challenged. In historical studies, Hayden White (1978) has emphasized the need for historians to recognize the literariness of their work, its dependence on principles of narration and utterance, and therefore the ideological implications underpinning their representation of the past. In parallel to this, historical fiction has attempted to deviate from its tacit requirement to respect “historical authenticity”: instead of abiding by the known facts about key historical events or figures, recent historical fiction has shown a keener interest in probing the very concept of “historical truth” and its mechanics of representation. The impact of postmodernism on the writing of historical fiction in the 1970s and 1980s has been commented upon by literary critic and theorist Linda Hutcheon (1988), who coined the expression “historiographic metafiction” to describe this particular kind of postmodern historical novel. In total contrast to the historical fiction produced in the earlier part of the twentieth century, historiographic metafiction is a self-conscious, or self-reflexive, type of historical novel: the process of historical research and writing is often key to its concerns and centrally staged in the plot of the novel, but it rarely leads to any clear historical finding or conclusion. This is due in part to the nature of the historical documents under examination: typically, the novel reveals how some of these have been in some way “falsified” or tampered with, while others, often of a more personal nature (such as letters, diaries, testimonies), are visibly foregrounded as biased, and therefore unreliable, sources of information. Consequently, any attempts at historical resolution are clearly discouraged, a stance that is also in line with postmodernist
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HISTORICAL FICTION
fiction more generally and its refusal of fundamental, or “essential,” truths. The metafictional nature of that kind of historical fiction is visible in its fascination with texts, documents, and narratives as fictional constructs. Historiographic metafiction therefore places a great emphasis on the discursive practices intrinsic to the writing of history, often at the expense of more conventionally teleological historical approaches (where the expected outcome influences and shapes the organization of the sequence of events leading up to that outcome). As a result, “history” is shown to be just as discursively constructed, or constructed through writing, as any other type of historical narrative, thus challenging once again the gap between history and historical fiction. Indeed, both history and historiography (the study of the writing of history) have become sites of predilection for postmodern interrogation, while historiographic metafiction has greatly contributed to destabilizing received notions about both history and fiction (Hutcheon 1988). This is visible in such texts as John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), a precursor of the genre in British literature, which evokes the historical and social mores of the nineteenth century in a self-conscious effort to highlight the narrative devices and authorial bias underpinning the writing of any story, and therefore the impossibility of ever achieving “historical authenticity.” In this respect, historiographic metafiction, like postmodernist fiction more generally, relies extensively on intertextuality and parody, in terms of its fascination both with its own status as a piece of fiction, but also with that of other texts and discourses, particularly those of a historical nature. Through parody and irony, historiographic metafiction returns to and draws from those historical texts and discourses in an endeavor to emphasize their problematic representation of the past; parody and irony thus become powerful narrative devices that allow the text simultaneously to return to, and to distance itself from, those traditional historical narratives it attempts to question (Hutcheon 1988). The authority of the latter is therefore both acknowledged and subverted: irony enables historiographic metafiction to appear to be endorsing the historical approaches promoted in those narratives, while at the same time undermining them. Furthermore, as this subversion takes place from within
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the parodied text/discourse, historiographic metafiction can address the latter effectively but without losing its distance from it. Parody and ironic intertextuality are also representative of the paradoxical nature of postmodern historical fiction, which draws from the very thing it seeks to contest, all the while refusing to adopt a clear discursive position. Here again John Fowles’s novel is a good example of such parodic intertextuality in its reliance on, and critical attitude toward, the narrative conventions of nineteenth-century realist fiction; Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) also uses intertextuality and metafiction in its return to World War II, and raises similar questions regarding the role of novelistic writing and subjective memory in the rendering of any historical event. Historiographic metafiction’s concern with contesting accepted notions of “historical truth” and historical representation has also found a natural affinity with twentieth-century feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial literary theories. The rejection of definitions of absolute “truths,” which is endemic to these theoretical approaches, is in keeping with the wish to challenge traditional narratives of the past and their patriarchal, capitalist, and Eurocentric constructions of history. Historiographic metafiction highlights the misogynistic, racist, and class bias within these historical discourses, and enables the views and perspectives of previously unheard minorities to be taken into consideration. Good examples of such fiction include Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), which merges the personal with the political in its attempt to encompass India’s twentieth-century history through the unlikely perspective of, among others, an illegitimate child born on the night of India’s independence in 1947; and Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989), which returns to seventeenth-century London to narrate the Civil War from the point of view of a fearsome, but ultimately forgotten, female character. In the last decade of the twentieth century, a new trend within historical fiction has come to critical attention: the “neo-Victorian” novel, with authors such as A. S. Byatt, Sarah Waters, Alasdair Gray, Peter Ackroyd, and Beryl Bainbridge. Typically, neo-Victorian fiction presents a fascination with reimagining the nineteenth century in its literary, artistic, socio-political, and historical
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contexts, often in a self-conscious attempt to play with the narrative conventions and social/cultural values prevalent at the time. Neo-Victorian novels thus concentrate on a period of British history which in recent years has come to be perceived as particularly significant in the construction of the nation’s sense of self and cultural identity; this is visible for instance in A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990), which re-examines the politics of nineteenth-century national cultural identity and canon formation in a tour de force work that challenges preconceived ideas about both academic research and the Victorian literary legacy. Similarly, Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things (1992) reconsiders the significance of nineteenth-century Darwinian theory in an attempt to question its persisting cultural presence in the present. More often than not, however, the Victorian ideological definitions of race, class, gender roles, and sexuality come under strict scrutiny, and are opened to parody through ironic intertextuality, in neo-Victorian fiction. As with historiographic metafiction, therefore, the neo-Victorian novel returns to the past to adopt some familiar postmodern tropes, and is similarly informed by contemporary gender, queer, and postcolonial theoretical discourses. This is the case in Fred D’Aguiar’s return to the legacies of slavery and nineteenth-century imperial discourses on race in his novel The Longest Memory (1994); and in Sarah Waters’s novels Affinity (2000) and Fingersmith (2002), which attempt to re-inscribe the lesbian experience into the nineteenth century, and to redefine accepted notions of female sexual identity. Most critical approaches to twentieth-century historical fiction therefore emphasize its formal links with postmodernism, and draw from recent literary theory in the examination of its content. Recently, however, the postmodern tradition has been criticized for failing to deliver the expected social and political change it had at first seemed to promise (Jameson 1991). Historiographic metafiction has come under similar criticism for lacking the subversive edge it had primarily claimed to possess, and for ultimately reinscribing, rather than challenging, the resistance of historical discourses to both rereadings and change (Kohlke 2004). This lack of transgressive drive is linked to what critics perceive as the failure to successfully challenge the mechanics of
historical representation, but also to what they describe as the irrepressible nostalgia of postmodern historicity, and ultimately its defense of traditionalist, rather than subversive, values. The neo-Victorian, or “retro-Victorian” (Shuttleworth 1998), trend is particularly targeted in this context, as it draws from a historical period still seen by many as the “Golden Age” of British arts and literature: attempts to revisit this period, even if motivated by a will to undermine or satirize the latter, indicate for some the recognition by contemporary authors of their Victorian predecessors’ literary superiority. Consequently, this also signifies the influence the Victorian era still holds over contemporary British cultural and national consciousness, and therefore re-establishes its importance. Similarly, the controversial perspective of the oppressed minorities adopted in such fiction has been dismissed as mere “political correctness,” a concept which by now is hardly considered revolutionary or rebellious, as it has informed much recent fiction. Critics have also identified an opportunistic drive in neo-Victorian fiction in what they see as the trend’s exploitation of its readership’s nostalgia and popular interest in all things Victorian; for this reason, once again, neo-Victorian fiction is deemed to be failing to fulfill its potential for radical subversion (Gutleben 2001). These claims of nostalgia and traditionalism need, however, to be considered in light of the paradoxical nature of postmodernism: indeed, the celebration, to an extent, of the Victorian tradition, together with its commercial reappropriation by the contemporary neo-Victorian novel, may be linked to the contradiction inherent in postmodern works which use and abuse the very structures and values they criticize. The return to the discourses of the past, and to those of the Victorian era in particular, could thus be far more complex and ambiguous than simply driven by nostalgia or traditionalism. It becomes clear in this context that the postmodern refusal to fully adopt or dispel either side of the contradiction, together with its willingness to exploit both, is key here, and reasserts the importance of the postmodern as a site of transgression and contestation (Hutcheon 1988). Current and future directions in the research in the field of historical fiction have confirmed this and indicated that contemporary historical novels go beyond nostalgia in their
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returns to the past by showing an interest in the implications of the latter for the present, and by challenging the claim that the past is not worth retrieving (Shiller 1997). Other critics have established the double process involved in contemporary historical fiction, whereby the relationship between a historical period and its postmodernist revisiting is seen to be affecting our perception of both elements: this moderates somewhat the claim of nostalgia, and replaces it with the concept of “refraction” in terms of historical knowledge and experience (Onega & Gutleben 2004). This idea is also developed in relation to contemporary historical fiction informed by a feminist sensibility: the latter enables the bridging of past and present in terms of definitions of femininity and gender roles, and the identification of the ideological pressures still at play on gender identity in the present (King 2005). Most importantly, however, recent political and cultural configurations have meant that the boundaries of national identity and national literature have been thoroughly redefined, mainly to include the artistic production of a culturally diverse society in a globalized age. In this respect, historical fiction takes on a new urgency in offering the possibility precisely to transcend those nationalistic and cultural boundaries: this is visible for instance in the development of the trend of neo-Victorian fiction in the work of non-British authors, and in texts not specifically set in Great Britain (such as Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda). Conversely, recent works by British authors find historical fiction a convenient means of addressing concerns about identity construction and cultural legacy in a society no longer solely defined by its nation-state status. This the case of British Caribbean author Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004), which describes the immigrant experience in post-World War II Britain from the multiple points of view of Jamaican settlers and British residents; the novel considers issues of race, war, and post-imperial politics in a way that is relevant to both 1940s London and a contemporary cultural and political reality. Historical fiction therefore reinscribes the past as an important means of defining the present, while its constantly evolving form and subject matter are reflective of the changing nature of the age, both past and present, it seeks to address.
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SEE ALSO: Globalization and the Novel (BIF); Historical Fiction (WF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Postcolonial Fiction of the African Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/ Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Byatt, A. S. (1990). Possession. London: Chatto and Windus. Connor, S. (1996). English Novel in History, 1950–1995. London: Routledge. D’Aguiar, F. (1994). The Longest Memory. London: Vintage. Fowles, J. (1969). The French Lieutenant’s Woman. London: Jonathan Cape. Golding, W. (1964). The Spire. London: Faber and Faber. Gray, A. (1992). Poor Things. London: Bloomsbury. Gutleben, C. (2001). Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Hutcheon, L. (1988). A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge. Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Jenkins, A., & John, J. (eds.) (2000). Rereading Victorian Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Jenkins, K.(ed.) (1997). The Postmodern History Reader. London: Routledge. King, J. (2005). The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Kohlke, M. L. (2004). Into History through the Back Door: The “Past Historic” in Nights at the Circus and Affinity. Women: A Cultural Review, 15(2), 153–166. Kucich, J., & Sadoff, D. F. (eds.) (2000). Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Levy, A. (2004). Small Island. London: Headline Review. Lukacs, G. (1962). The Historical Novel (trans. H. Mitchell & S. Mitchell). London: Merlin. (Original work published 1920.) McEwan, I. (2002). Atonement. London: Vintage. Murdoch, I. (1965). The Red and the Green. London: Chatto and Windus. Nicol, B. (2002). Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Onega, S., & Gutleben, C. (eds.) (2004). Refracting the Canon in Contemporary British Literature and Film. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
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Reisz, K. (dir.) (1981). The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Juniper Films. Rushdie, S. (1981). Midnight’s Children. London: Jonathan Cape. Shiller, D. (1997). The Redemptive Past in the NeoVictorian Novel. Studies in the Novel, 29, 538–560. Shuttleworth, S. (1998). Natural History: The RetroVictorian Novel. In E. S. Shaffer (ed.), The Third Culture: Literature and Science. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, pp. 253–68. Unsworth, B. (1992). Sacred Hunger. London: Hamish Hamilton. Waters, S. (2000). Affinity. London: Virago. Waters, S. (2002). Fingersmith. London: Virago. White, H. (1978). Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Winterson, J. (1989). Sexing the Cherry. London: Vintage. Wright, J. (dir.) (2007). Atonement. Universal Pictures.
Hollinghurst, Alan KAYE MITCHELL
Alan Hollinghurst was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire on May 26, 1954. He studied English at Oxford University, and worked at the Times Literary Supplement from 1982 to 1995 (latterly as deputy editor). After publishing a poetry collection, Confidential Chats with Boys in 1982, Hollinghurst switched to prose and, although he has published only four novels to date, has already established himself as one of the most acclaimed prose stylists of his generation, with frequent comparisons to illustrious literary forebears (and key influences) such as Henry James and E. M. Forster. In 1993 Hollinghurst was selected as one of Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists,” and in 2004 he won the Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty. The Jamesian influence is evident in Hollinghurst’s preoccupation with aesthetic and social judgment. That is to say: with beauty as a value in itself, with the precariousness of social status, and the subtle dynamics of wealth, class, ambition, and morality (in a secular sense). His educated, aspirational protagonists frequently display their rarefied tastes in architecture, classical music, and literature; and the self-conscious elegance of his prose emulates those with whom he is compared.
All of Hollinghurst’s novels represent homosexuality candidly and sometimes graphically. As he says: “from the start I’ve tried to write books which began from a presumption of the gayness of the narrative position” (Moss 2004). If his representations of cruising and public sex update the homophile tradition of literature to which he is indebted (Wilde, Firbank, Forster, et al.), his sexualizing of the aesthete is always also an aestheticizing of sexuality. In addition to his interest in the 1890s, Hollinghurst had a particular fascination with 1980s hedonism and consumption, with the politics (and, again, aesthetics) of Thatcherism. This is most evident in The Swimming-Pool Library and The Line of Beauty; and in both cases his depiction of the decade exhibits an interesting tension between admiration and critique. Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), is set in the summer of 1983, and follows events in the life of its protagonist, Will Beckwith: “My life was in a strange way that summer, the last summer of its kind there was ever to be. I was riding high on sex and self-esteem – it was my time, my belle epoque – but all the while with a faint flicker of calamity, like flames around a photograph, something seen out of the corner of the eye” (3). This revealing passage shows us at once Will’s self-absorption, his casual irresponsibility, his keen sense of the aesthetic (the future danger rendered in a resonantly pictorial metaphor), his education, even snobbery (the casual use of the French expression), and the emphasis on sexual hedonism and youth; it discloses the key themes of the novel – and of Hollinghurst’s subsequent fiction. We are left to construe for ourselves, through the course of the novel, why this is “the last summer of its kind there was ever to be”: we watch Will gradually come to an awareness of the gay history of which he is a product and a beneficiary, and the gay lifestyle that may bring responsibilities as well as pleasures. We know, as he does not, that a new disease, AIDS, is about to be diagnosed; AIDS is never mentioned here, but its shadow falls across the whole book. Hollinghurst produces an intriguing insight into the individualism of the 1980s and the hedonism and excess of the gay scene before AIDS, but the novel is also riven with questions of class and race as it examines the colonial history of Charles Nantwich,
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the old man whose life Will unexpectedly saves, and whose life story he begins to research. Hollinghurst resists the urge to make overtly political points (as David Alderson has written, there is “a sense in which politics are vulgar for Hollinghurst” (42)): Will doesn’t become a gay liberationist and there is little indication of his reaction to the knowledge that his own grandfather was responsible for the prosecution of gay men in the 1950s; ultimately he decides not to author Nantwich’s biography. Nevertheless, there is a creeping sense of the connectedness of everything and everyone, of the positive and negative effects of social and sexual networks, and the overlapping of the gay and straight worlds. The Folding Star (1994) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker. It focuses on Edward Manners who, while teaching English in a Flemish city, falls in love with one of his pupils, 17-year-old Luc. Clear parallels are made between Edward and a Belgian symbolist painter of the 1890s, Edgard Orst, with whom he becomes obsessed, and a notable emphasis on scopophilia and voyeurism emerges as Edward spies on Luc, seeks to frame and contain him, as Orst did his mistress. Against a background of museums, art history, and somewhat incongruous gay bars, Edward becomes the struggling artist trying to control his subject, the elusive Luc, whose upper lip looks as if it were “finished off impatiently with a palette-knife” (29). The Spell (1998) is the slightest of Hollinghurst’s novels, a kind of comedy of manners of the gay life. Through its focus on the relationships between Alex, his ex-lover Justin, Justin’s new boyfriend Robin, and Robin’s gay son, Danny, it examines questions around cruising, the difficulties of relationships between men of different ages and classes (Robin realizes, uncomfortably, “the class sense which tinted or tainted all his dealings with the world” (7)), the death of a lover from AIDS, and the differences between urban and rural life, heterosexual world and homosexual “scene.” It was followed by the book that brought Hollinghurst to public prominence, The Line of Beauty (2004), whose Booker Prize win garnered some unexpected tabloid attention; the novel was adapted for television in 2005. The Line of Beauty reprises Hollinghurst’s key themes of aestheticism (the protagonist is doing a PhD on James and
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style, and the word “beauty” is repeated throughout), homosexuality, and class, and marks a return to the 1980s setting of The Swimming-Pool Library. Reviewers tended to read its depiction of Thatcherism as satirical, yet the relationship of Nick Guest, a young gay man, with the family of a Tory MP, Gerald Fedden, is more ambiguous than that suggests. His “fantasy of belonging” in their world evinces a complex mixture of envy and criticism, despite his ultimate disillusionment, and confirms Hollinghurst’s talent in creating characters who teeter on the brink of complicity with the systems that seek to exclude or destroy them. SEE ALSO: Forster, E. M. (BIF); James, Henry (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Queer/ Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Alderson, D. (2000). Desire as Nostalgia: The Novels of Alan Hollinghurst. In D. Alderson & L. Anderson (eds.), Territories of Desire in Queer Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 29–48. Brooker, J. (2005). Neo Lines: Alan Hollinghurst and the Apogee of the Eighties. Literary Criterion, 40(3–4), 104–16. Chambers, R. (1993). Messing Around: Gayness and Loiterature in Alan Hollinghurst’s The SwimmingPool Library. In J. Still & M. Worton (eds.), Textuality and Sexuality. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 207–17. Hollinghurst, A. (1988). The Swimming-Pool Library. London: Vintage. Hollinghurst, A. (1994). The Folding Star. London: Vintage. Hollinghurst, A. (1998). The Spell. London: Vintage. Hollinghurst, A. (2004). The Line of Beauty. London: Picador. Mitchell, K. (2006). “Gay Book Wins Booker”: Alan Hollinghurst and the Narrative Construction of Homosexual Identity. In R. Mengham & P. Tew (eds.), British Fiction Today. London: Continuum, pp. 40–51. Moss, S. (2004). I Don’t Make Moral Judgments [interview]. Guardian (Oct. 21). At http://books. guardian.co.uk/bookerprize2004/story/ 0,14182,1332083,00.html, accessed Jan. 29, 2010. Sinfield, A. (2000). Culture, Consensus and Difference: Angus Wilson to Alan Hollinghurst. In A. Davies & A. Sinfield (eds.), British Culture of the Postwar. London: Routledge, pp. 83–102.
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Huxley, Aldous JAMES SEXTON
Aldous Huxley was descended from two eminent Victorian families – he was grandson of noted biologist and writer on science, Thomas Henry Huxley, and a great-nephew of Matthew Arnold. His Christian name commemorates a major character, Aldous Raeburn, in Marcella, a novel published by his aunt, Mary Ward, in the year of Huxley’s birth, 1894. Huxley’s father, Leonard, was editor of Cornhill, the venerable magazine once edited by Thackeray. Born in Godalming, Surrey, Huxley attended Eton, then took a first in English at Balliol College, Oxford in 1916. Two early blows – the death of his mother in 1908, poignantly alluded to in Antic Hay (1923) – and an attack of keratitis while a student at Eton, which left him nearly blind for the rest of his life – may have sharpened his tendency to rely overmuch on his own inner resources, effectively cutting him off from others. In 1919, his patroness, Lady Ottoline Morrell, prevailed over John Middleton Murry’s objections against taking on any “young Oxfords” at his review The Athenaeum, and soon Huxley was writing “middles” under the pen name Autolycus, Shakespeare’s “snapper-up of unconsidered trifles.” Between 1920 and 1923 the young polymath served as chief staff writer and editorialist for the British House and Garden magazine, art critic for the Bloomsbury-influenced Vogue (dubbed “Brogue” to distinguish it from the American edition), as well as music and drama reviewer for the Westminster Gazette. His first novel, Crome Yellow (1921), is a country-house symposium in the manner of Thomas Love Peacock, replete with antiquarian references and all too easily recognizable caricatures of Garsington regulars such as Bertrand Russell and the painters Dora Carrington, Dorothy Brett, and Mark Gertler. These portraits so offended Huxley’s patroness that several years passed before she again corresponded with him. The character Scogan, based partly on Russell and partly on H. G. Wells, approvingly describes a future sunlit Rational State, which has abolished democracy, the family, and viviparous birth. Before the mid-1930s, Huxley was attracted to the elitist state modeled on Wells’s versions of Plato’s Republic;
and under the influence of H. L. Mencken, he grew increasingly receptive to the idea of a state run by an intellectual aristocracy. Scogan’s strictures on architecture and painting also reveal him as an early version of Dostoevsky’s Euclidean mind, which advocates the tyranny of instrumental reason. He praises the architect of Crome for creating “aggressively a work of art. It makes no compromise with nature, but affronts it and rebels against it” (100). Similarly, cubist paintings, which are “exclusively of the human mind,” win his approval because they “banish Nature from Art” (252); and his comment on the superiority of the London Underground – with its “iron riveted into geometrical forms and straight lines of concrete” – prepares the way for the broader critique of American and Soviet industriolatry in Point Counter Point (1928), Music at Night (1930), and Brave New World (1932). His second novel, Antic Hay (1923), depicts the postwar world he described elsewhere at this time as “socially and morally wrecked. Between them the war and the new psychology have smashed most of the institutions, traditions, creeds, and spiritual values that supported us in the past” (Huxley 1922). Myra Viveash, one of the denizens of this fictional wasteland, is the prototype of vamps such as Lucy Tantamount (Point Counter Point) and Mary Amberley (Eyeless in Gaza), as well as Hemingway’s similarly named epitome of the lost generation, Lady Brett Ashley, in The Sun Also Rises (1926). Although few of the characters in Antic Hay have any ideals, one at least – Emily – elicits in the sensitive yet cynical protagonist, Gumbril, an openness to spiritual values. He briefly imagines a refuge from the jazz and foxtrot-distracted world of Viveash in the “crystal world” of Emily’s country cottage, where he experiences a mystical annunciation, described as “a faint sound of footsteps, something inexpressibly lovely . . . [yet] terrifying” (187). But Huxley’s early receptiveness to mysticism appears to have been nipped in the bud after his visit to India, for in 1926 he informs Mencken that “this rigmarole of Light from the East . . . is genuinely nonsense” (Bradshaw 1994, 21). The ideas of Huxley’s next guru, the science writer J. W. N. Sullivan, probably influenced the characterization of Calamy, the world-weary sensualist turned mystic, in his next novel, Those Barren Leaves (1925). Sullivan’s journalistic
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HUXLEY, ALDOUS
demonstration of the compatibility of “the new physics” with philosophical idealism made a significant, if brief, impression on Huxley, but the vitalist ideas of D. H. Lawrence soon gained a greater hold on his imagination. Mark Rampion, the character who embodies Lawrence’s “lifeworship” in Point Counter Point, accuses all political parties of savoring “the stink” of industrialism, and his protest against it in his painting of a nude family in a pastoral landscape, reinforces the attack on cubism, first seen in Crome Yellow. Huxley’s alter-ego, Philip Quarles, mordantly suggests a more fashionable portrait of life in the civilized world: the same family clothed in massproduced garments, sitting on an asphalt-covered bank – and all painted in the cubist manner – which prompts Rampion’s observation that such modern art is unparalleled for “sterilizing the life out of things” (420). Not until 1936 did Huxley again seriously explore the salutary possibilities of the “perennial philosophy” for which Sullivan’s elucidations of relativity and quantum theory, both in London’s highbrow press and in person with Huxley, had helped prepare the way. During his long literary career, Aldous Huxley published poetry collections, plays, essays, short fiction, travel narratives, and biography, but, like George Orwell, he is best remembered as the author of a hugely influential utopian satire. Brave New World began as a response to H. G. Wells’s utopia, Men Like Gods (1923), although, unlike Orwell, he was not indebted to Zamyatin’s We (1924), a novel he never read. However, in 1929 he reviewed Rene F€ ul€ op-Miller’s The Mind and Face of Bolshevism (1927), a work whose description of Soviet machine-worship may have contributed as much as Dickens’s Hard Times to his portrait of reified workers in Brave New World. Huxley became an innovative fictional stylist, effectively using the cinematic technique of montage for the purpose of exposition in the third chapter of Brave New World, thereby avoiding that major defect of most utopian novels – the tedious guided tour of utopian institutions. Using montage and intertextuality, Huxley did for the novel what Eliot had done for modern poetry in The Waste Land 10 years earlier, deliberately juxtaposing excerpts from, say, Shakespearean tragedy with the utopians’ behaviorist jingles in order to emphasize, in Baker’s phrase, “the erosion of cultural hierarchies” (259).
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In October 1931, Huxley confided to an interviewer that the main purpose of his writing was “the desire . . . to clarify a point of view to myself. I do not write for my readers; in fact, I don’t like thinking about my readers . . . I am chiefly interested in making clear a certain outlook on life.” He then summarized his entire literary output as “provisional work toward a definitive and comprehensive outlook on the world” (Huxley 1931, 15, 16). The provisional nature of most of the novels after 1925 is reflected in what becomes a structural staple in his middle and final periods. Each novel presents characters with opposing “outlooks” on the world. In each novel from Point Counter Point onward, a guru-figure becomes a spokesman for Huxley’s provisional philosophy. Taking a cue from Huxley’s often hostile assessment of Wells’s “aseptic” utopianism – the adjective is used by Mercaptan in Antic Hay – most critics have emphasized the anti-Wellsian quality of Brave New World. Firchow convincingly shows how the characterization of World-Controller Mustapha Mond owes as much to Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor as to Wells’s Samurai (33–4). However, critics have recently called attention to the congruence of Huxley’s and Wells’s views – especially during the height of the worldwide economic crisis around 1931. Bradshaw even calls Huxley a “card-carrying open conspirator” and suggests that, although Huxley’s original purpose in writing his famous utopia may well have been to travesty Men Like Gods, “parody soon gave way to hesitant prescription,” and that Mustapha Mond “acts as Huxley’s ideological spokesman” (1995, 161). That Huxley’s latest “provisional outlook” on the world became distinctly more Wellsian at this time is clear. Both advocated Soviet-style planning, rationalization, and greater authoritarianism, including measures to guard against the lowering of general intelligence caused by “differential birthrates.” Not surprisingly, one communist critic labeled both Huxley and Wells “Liberal Fascists” because of their support for “organized capitalism . . . Mondism” (Mirsky 34). Still, Huxley’s commitment to what he mockingly called “the great god Plan” (1994, 177) was fairly short-lived. In late 1935 he joined the Peace Pledge Union, producing in 1936 the anti-war tract “What are You Going to Do about It? The Case for Constructive Peace.” His most autobiographical novel, Eyeless in Gaza (1936), confirms
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his adoption of a committed, socially active position. Another guru emerges, the Buddhist, Dr. James Miller, whose ideas owe much to the “kinesthetic re-education” model of Huxley’s teacher, F. M. Alexander, who, according to Huxley’s wife Maria, had soon “made a new and unrecognizable person of Aldous . . . not physically only, but mentally and therefore morally” (Bedford 315). Dr. Miller’s pacifist platform is based on that of Canon Dick Sheppard, the Anglican cleric and founder of the Peace Pledge Union. Influenced by their ideas, Huxley can been seen to have entered a new phase: that of polemicist-prophet. Huxley’s protagonist and autobiographical alter-ego, Anthony Beavis (A.B.), rejects his past aesthete’s life and moves toward an ethical one, embodying the struggle between the two antithetical outlooks of the detached sensualistaesthete – A – and the ethical judge – B – in the main source for this novel, Kierkegaard’s Either/ Or (Wasserman 142). In After Many a Summer (1939), protagonist William Propter functions as a mouthpiece for the decentralist ideas of Ralph Borsodi, whose experiments at his “School for Living” convinced Huxley that decentralized production could be a viable alternative to mass production. Echoing F. M. Alexander, Propter insists that Good exists, on the physical level, as “the proper functioning of the organism,” and on the higher level, “ . . . as the experience of eternity . . . the transcendence of personality, the extension of consciousness beyond the limits imposed by the ego” (120). By the time Huxley came to write what he considered his best novel, Time Must Have a Stop (1944), he believed that in order to gain access to the Divine Ground, one must abandon the ego. The novel’s title signals Huxley’s by now consistent mystical position. The protagonist’s scapegrace uncle, Eustace Barnack, another sensualist aesthete, is presented with an opportunity to escape from his ego, but he fails what Huxley calls the “immensely stringent intelligence test” (2007, 386) that he describes in a tour de force chapter recounting his immediate after-death experience. The metaphor of the divine intelligence test conveys the main theme of Time Must Have a Stop. As Baker says in his essay on Huxley’s critique of Enlightenment reason, “The inevitable outcome of Huxley’s sweeping indictment of temporality and
desire [in the 1940s] . . . is the gradual displacement of narrative by . . . critical prose” (259). Late in his career, Huxley confessed to a television interviewer that he was not a “born novelist, but an essayist who writes novels” (1957). Huxley died on the day President Kennedy was assassinated, November 22, 1963. In an acceptance speech for an honor bestowed on him by the American Academy of Arts and Letters only six months earlier, Huxley, recalling Montaigne, refers to Island (1962) as “an essay in positive Utopianism” (2000, 1). It serves as the culmination of his writings from the socially committed, American period of 1937 onward. Yet few critics would disagree with Baker’s assessment of the work after 1939: by the early forties Huxley’s novels had become pretexts for discursive analyses of contemporary socio-economic, political, and religious issues. Narrative desire was, as a component of Utopian desire, partially recovered in Island, but Huxley’s creative energies as a novelist seemed to collapse into irretrievable decline ironically at the moment in which his critique of the Enlightenment’s faith in scientific thought had reached its clearest and most penetrating formulation. Once all human desire was construed as Sadean “craving,” anarchic and insatiably egoistic, Huxley’s “novel of social history” . . . was simply displaced by the desire to transcend the ego, art, and history itself. (259–60) SEE ALSO: Lawrence, D. H. (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Orwell, George (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (BIF); Wells, H. G. (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Baker, R. (1995). The Nightmare of the Frankfurt School: The Marquis de Sade and the Problem of Modernity in Aldous Huxley’s Dystopian Narrative. In B. Nugel (ed.), Now More than Ever: Proceedings of the Aldous Huxley Centenary Symposium, M€unster 1994. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, pp. 226–45. Bedford, S. (1973). Aldous Huxley: A Biography, vol. 1. London: Collins. Bradshaw, D. (1994). The Hidden Huxley. London: Faber and Faber.
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Bradshaw, D. (1995). Huxley’s Slump. In J. Batchelor (ed.), The Art of Literary Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 151–71. Dunaway, D. (1991). Huxley in Hollywood. New York: Harper and Row. Firchow, P. (1984). The End of Utopia. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Hemingway, E. (1926). The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner’s. Huxley, A. (1921). Crome Yellow. London: Chatto and Windus. Huxley, A. (1922). The Modern Spirit and a Family Party. Vanity Fair, 18, 55 (Aug.). Huxley, A. (1923). Antic Hay. London: Chatto and Windus. Huxley, A. (1925). Those Barren Leaves. London: Chatto and Windus. Huxley, A. (1928). Point Counter Point. London: Chatto and Windus. Huxley, A. (1931). Interviews with Great Scientists (VII): Aldous Huxley. Observer, pp. 15–16 (Feb. 1). Huxley, A. (1932). Brave New World. London: Chatto and Windus. Huxley, A. (1936). Eyeless in Gaza. London: Chatto and Windus. Huxley, A. (1939). After Many a Summer. London: Chatto and Windus.
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Huxley, A. (1944). Time Must Have a Stop. New York: Harper and Row. Huxley, A. (1957). [Interview.] Look Here (dir. D. Feldman). NBC Television Network. Huxley, A. (1962). Island. London: Chatto and Windus. Huxley, A. (1969). Letters of Aldous Huxley (ed. G. Smith). New York: Harper. Huxley, A. (1994). Political Plans. In Aldous Huxley’s Hearst Essays (ed. J. Sexton). New York: Garland. Huxley, A. (2000). Utopias, Positive and Negative. Aldous Huxley Annual, 1, 1–5. Huxley, A. (2000–2). Complete Essays (ed. R. Baker & J. Sexton). 6 vols. Chicago: Ivan Dee. Huxley, A. (2007). Selected Letters of Aldous Huxley (ed. J. Sexton). Chicago: Ivan Dee. Meckier, J. (1971). Aldous Huxley: Satire and Structure. London: Chatto and Windus. Mirsky, D. (1935). The Intelligentsia of Great Britain. New York: Covici, Friede. Murray, N. (2002). Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual. Boston: Little, Brown. Wasserman, J. (1996). Huxley’s Either/Or: The Case for Eyeless in Gaza. In J. Meckier (ed.), Critical Essays on Aldous Huxley. New York: G. K. Hall, pp. 132–148.
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I Irish Fiction OONA FRAWLEY
Irish fiction writers played important roles in major literary movements of the twentieth century. In the century’s early decades, Irish fiction moved away from the influence of a late Victorian, colonial sensibility and, in tandem with the dramatic movement prominent during this period of the Irish Literary Revival, toward the establishment of an Irish national literature. A preoccupation with nationhood, Irish identity, and the politics of independence was to provide ideological fodder not only for Irish fiction of those early decades, but also for writers of the latter half of the century, whose fiction often considered the impact of Irish history and the crises of identity that had resulted from it. Despite the prevalence of these preoccupations, however, the course of the twentieth century saw Irish fiction change directions, adopting and responding to international literary and ideological movements, most notably from modernism to postmodernism, and from colonialism to postcolonialism. The nineteenth century in Ireland had been a period of linguistic, political, and cultural flux, marked by severe famine and high levels of emigration; these factors inevitably marked the literature of the period – most obviously the “big house” novel and the tradition of Irish gothic fiction – and left a lasting legacy for the twentieth century. In the first decades of the twentieth century, while the period known as the Irish Literary Revival was still under way, poetry and drama
were the most prominent modes for Irish literature, with the Abbey Theatre providing a vehicle for playwrights such as Lady Augusta Gregory, W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, and Sean O’Casey. Prose fiction of the period received less attention until recently, though the work of George Moore – in story collections like The Untilled Field (1903) and in novels such as The Lake (1905) – demonstrated the shift that Irish fiction was undergoing from its nineteenth-century foundations: Moore’s work, even his late nineteenth-century novels, displays the influence of French realist fiction (particularly Flaubert and Zola), indicating an outwardlooking, internationalist trend for Irish fiction. Moore’s work also demonstrated the power of fiction to convey the stasis and moral servitude that hung over Ireland as a result of years of colonial oppression and control by the Catholic Church. Fiction, like other literature of the period, was seen to play an important role in providing political and social commentary, as well as in retrieving neglected Irish-language literary traditions. While dissociating himself from the revival, James Joyce wrote the stories that would comprise Dubliners, some of which appeared in the Dublin publication the Irish Homestead, in 1904–5. After a protracted battle with a London publisher, Dubliners was eventually published in 1914, followed by A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916. Joyce’s influence on Irish literature from this period is so significant that the publication of his stories can be seen to mark a turn in Irish literary studies toward prose. Dubliners presented a challenge to the relatively young genre of the
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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short story, as well as providing stark analyses of an urban Ireland that had been ignored in favor of idealized versions of rural Ireland in the literature of many of his contemporaries; while Portrait’s delineation of an early modernist aesthetic marked Joyce’s work as different from much of the writing being done by his peers in Ireland, and provided indications of the direction his fiction was to take. Even in his early years while he remained in Ireland, Joyce was not working in isolation, however; in addition to George Moore, James Stephens, Gerald O’Donovan, and Daniel Corkery produced noteworthy fictions in the first two decades of the century. Stephens’s The Crock of Gold (1912) in particular was stylistically innovative, uniting Irish mythological traditions and folklore with a mock philosophic quest tale. In its comic use of Irish material, Stephens’s novel distances itself from the seriousness with which such material had been treated by early revivalists, and represents another voice offering a challenge to nineteenth-century novel traditions while continuing to reclaim neglected Irish material. It was with the publication of Ulysses in 1922 that Irish fiction found its international reputation consolidated; Joyce’s epic was almost immediately regarded as the quintessential modernist text. Radically experimental and determinedly international in its allusions and outlook, Ulysses was also an inescapably Irish novel, with its Dublin setting and characters and its astute and often irreverent embodiment of Irish cultural, political, and religious life. Joyce’s reputation for stylistic experimentation, word play, and complexity was heightened by Finnegans Wake, published in 1939, which ensured his position as the most prominent Irish novelist, and arguably as the most important novelist of the twentieth century. While Joyce’s novels are very often considered within the context of an international modernism peopled by writers such as Woolf, Pound, and Eliot, the capacity of his work to embody modernism is mirrored in the work of fellow Irish writers as well. The most notable of these is Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett, whose early prose fiction owes direct debts to Joyce. Murphy (1938), Beckett’s first published novel, is experimental and allusive in form and style, full of puns and marked by a playful engagement with literary tradition. Even in Murphy, however, Beckett
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shows signs of the work that he would later produce; the novel is marked by philosophical crises of its protagonist and a concern with the absurd, with repetition, and with the workings of the mind between sanity and insanity. Conscious of the shadow cast over his work by Joyce, Beckett began a process of movement away from the full, all-inclusive prose style exhibited in Murphy; in his stories, in Mercier and Camier (1970), and in Watt (1953) we see a distinctive voice emerge that is cerebral – it is as if the battle enacted in Murphy between body and mind has ended, and the mind has won. Beckett’s representation of mind reaches its pinnacle in three novels often referred to as a trilogy: Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953). Over the course of these three texts we see Beckett move progressively farther away from the trappings of the novel form, dispensing with characterization, dialogue, and plot so that by the time we reach The Unnamable, we are in a realm radically different from Beckett’s earliest prose. Significantly, too, we have moved away from a focus on specifically Irish-based themes and settings. Like Joyce and Beckett, Brian O’Nolan also straddled the shift from modernism to postmodernism. Under the name of Flann O’Brien, O’Nolan published his masterpiece, At SwimTwo-Birds (1939); under the name of Myles na Gopaleen, O’Nolan wrote a long-term column for the Irish Times, collected in several volumes including The Best of Myles (1968). At Swim-TwoBirds remains a startlingly original novel, an explorative metafiction that entwines figures from medieval Irish myth and folklore with a plethora of other recycled characters; the wandering narrative sees characters rebelling against their author. O’Nolan remained in Ireland for his lifetime, unlike Joyce and Beckett in their selfdeclared exiles; but despite this difference he aligns himself with Joyce and Beckett in his radical experimentalism, mining a unique vein in Irish fiction prior to the mid-century. The formal experiment that distinguished Joyce, Beckett, and O’Nolan was not always mirrored in other Irish fiction of the same period, which nonetheless committed itself to often radical exposures of Irish culture and society: Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Faolain, and Liam O’Flaherty all produced notable fiction in this mid-century
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period. This type of exposure was particularly apparent among several women writers whose work remains important in creating and delineating a space for women in the Irish literary tradition. Among these are, notably, Kate O’Brien, whose The Land of Spices (1941) can be seen in useful contrast to Joyce’s Portrait as a consideration of the limited possibilities for a sensitive and bright young woman in Ireland. Mary Lavin and Molly Keane (publishing under the name of M. J. Farrell until 1981) were also significant story and novel writers who mapped out the frequent restrictions imposed by church, state, and social convention on women’s positions in twentieth-century Ireland. Elizabeth Bowen’s masterly short stories and novels capture the declining world of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy class of which she herself was a part, as in The Last September (1929), which chronicles a young woman’s final summer at an Irish estate as British rule ends and the Civil War erupts. Other of Bowen’s works are more international in scope, such as the haunting The House in Paris (1935) which, like all of Bowen’s best work, peers intently beneath the surface of characters’ experience and reveals intensely felt and lived emotional lives. Bowen’s attention to and innovative use of the short story form and her acute ability to focus on the interior consciousness of her characters sees her develop her own brand of modernism, with particular focus on the lives of women. If the period up until World War II was dominated by the experiments of Joyce and Beckett and the international significance of modern writing more generally, the postwar period in Ireland was dominated by a very different set of preoccupations and themes that reflected the changing concerns of the fledgling Irish state. Where earlier novels and stories mirrored the movement away from the colonial dynamic and also a breaking away from traditional stylistic and aesthetic forms, the postwar period presented new challenges to novelists. There was a sense, for many writers, of having to confront the legacy of Joyce, who seemed to many to have so mastered the novel form that there was little left that it could do. Instead of stylistic or formal experiment, this period was marked by a more considered and cautious realism; it was also marked by a more critical, less celebratory analysis of the Irish Free State and its perceived failures.
Edna O’Brien serves as an apt example of the shift in Irish fiction after the mid-century. O’Brien has acknowledged debts to Joyce (even publishing a biographical study of Joyce in 1999), and her work, when it emerged in the 1960s, provoked controversy for its sexual explicitness and its critiques of the Irish society. The Country Girls trilogy (1987 [1960–4]) was rooted in several themes of relevance to the period: the divide between rural and urban Ireland, as well as the position of women in those different societies. It also shattered certain myths upheld about “romantic Ireland,” particularly in relation to the family: O’Brien exposed a male-dominated culture in which women were abused, repressed and subject to violence, and unable – sometimes by law – to support themselves. Banned in Ireland for a time, The Country Girls was important in raising awareness of the plight of Irish womanhood as a construction of patriarchy, in literature as well as in reality. O’Brien’s work has continued to court controversy, as with the 1996 Down by the River, modeled on true events in which a young girl was raped, became pregnant, and was dragged into the spotlight when she was briefly prevented by the state from traveling to England for an abortion. Of other mid-century writers to emerge from the shadow of Joyce and to develop his own particular style, John McGahern was among the most prolific; McGahern produced six novels and five collections of short stories, as well as the remarkable Memoir (2005) published just before his death. McGahern’s realism and quiet exposure of Irish family and private life led to both great controversy and great acclaim. His second novel, The Dark (1965), was banned. A semiautobiographical coming-of-age novel which considered the claustrophobic tensions in a family home as well as layers of abuse, it caused a furore that forced McGahern to resign his position as a teacher and he subsequently left Ireland for a period of several years. The ban of The Dark lapsed in 1972, and McGahern’s work continued to garner acclaim, witnessed in the awards received by the 1990 publication of Amongst Women, which presented a study of an Irish father, a veteran of the war for Irish independence, and his relationship to his five children and their stepmother. Vividly drawn, Amongst Women, along with other of McGahern’s work such as his final novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun
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(2002), combines the sharp criticality of Joyce’s early realism with a tone that owes something to elegy; McGahern captures the intimacies and simple interactions of Irish rural life as well as its drawbacks, its claustrophobia, and its violences. McGahern’s legacy is witnessed in the work of fine short story writers such as Claire Keegan, whose collections (Antarctica, 1999, and Walk the Blue Fields, 2007) owe a great debt to the subtleties of McGahern and his focus on rural Ireland. While very different in tone and aesthetic aim, O’Brien and McGahern’s work share in a process of exposing unseen, unacknowledged or vanishing Irish realities through fiction. Indeed, critics of Irish literature in recent decades have detected a confessional strain, mirrored in the international fiction market’s preoccupation with memoir, and witnessed at its zenith in Frank McCourt’s bestselling (and, some critics have argued, fictionalized) memoir of his poverty-stricken Limerick childhood, Angela’s Ashes (1996). This strain remains apparent in a diverse range of prominent writers. Novelists such as Patrick McCabe (particularly in The Butcher Boy, 1992, and Breakfast on Pluto, 1998) have used black comedy to describe the legacies of domestic, state, and church abuse and the social ostracism cultivated by conventional Irish society in the mid twentieth century, while Colm Toıbın challenged the Irish canon to accommodate the abortion debate in Ireland (The Heather Blazing, 1992), homosexual love stories (The Story of the Night, 1996) and the AIDS crisis (The Blackwater Lightship, 1999). Toıbın’s international reputation soared after the turn of the century with the success of the 2004 multiaward-winning novel The Master, a fictional account of a period in Henry James’s life. Emma Donoghue’s breakthrough novel, Hood (1995), inserted Irish lesbian experience into the literary canon, and announced the arrival of another major author whose promise was confirmed by the historical novel Slammerkin (2000) and by a rash of impressive publications after the turn of the century. If authors such as McGahern found a way of negotiating with the shadow cast by Joyce and Beckett by returning to a more recognizably realistic tradition in story and novel, other writers such as Aidan Higgins, Desmond Hogan, and John Banville have grappled more directly with the legacy of their experimental forebears. Booker
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Prize winner John Banville’s work is, like Beckett’s, cerebral, and focuses on male protagonists with a precise narrative style that has echoes of both Joyce and, importantly, Nabokov; Banville has frequently demurred at the title of “Irish novelist,” preferring to situate his work and aesthetic in an international literary context. An acclaimed tetralogy constructed fictional lives of scientists – Doctor Copernicus: A Novel (1976), Kepler: A Novel (1981), The Newton Letter: An Interlude (1982), and Mefisto (1986); other important novels are The Book of Evidence (1989) and Athena (1995). More recently Banville has begun writing crime fiction, under the name of Benjamin Black. Banville’s tendency to move away from Irish subject matter is seen in other late twentieth century work. This marks a significant shift for Irish writing, which had spent so much of the early part of the century grappling with issues of Irish identity and statehood. That late twentiethcentury writing has gone in this direction is perhaps an indication that Ireland has entered into a truly postcolonial phase. The work of authors such as the New York-based Colum McCann and, after the turn of the century, Joseph O’Neill, embraces a global, postnational concept of identity, with characters experiencing multiple countries and time periods, often in the course of one novel. Joseph O’Connor reflects this international strain in novels such as the Nicaraguan-set Desperadoes (1993). O’Connor’s more recent novels embody another significant movement within late twentiethcentury Irish fiction, which examines critical periods in Irish history and challenges accepted versions of that history. Star of the Sea (2002) was groundbreaking in its attention to the period of the Famine of the 1840s; unlike O’Flaherty’s Famine (1940), Star of the Sea employs multiple linguistic, formal, and stylistic registers to construct a moving image of the world of 1840s Ireland. The sequel to Star of the Sea, Redemption Falls (2007), followed the lives of characters after emigration to the United States, thus examining another significant element of Irish cultural life largely unexamined in fiction. The fiction of Roddy Doyle also partakes of this historical reconsideration. While Doyle is best known for his hilarious, fast-talking protagonists of inner city Dublin (as in The Commitments, The Snapper, and The
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Van), his 2000 novel A Star Called Henry reassessed the foundational myth of the Irish state, implicitly critiquing the state for instituting a system of government that replicated the colonial regime and suppressed socialist elements that had contributed to the Easter Rising. Doyle’s commitment to representing in fiction ignored or repressed classes of Irish life continues in work that gives voice to recent immigrants to Ireland and comments on urban Celtic Tiger Ireland, and the racism and class biases to be found there. Among the most prominent of late twentieth century authors is Anne Enright, whose work captures the internationalist strain in Irish literature and the legacies of abuse and paternalism in Ireland in the twentieth century. From The Portable Virgin (1991) on, Enright’s voice has offered an acerbic and blackly comical look at sexuality, male and female relationships, and at the often bleak family structures of Irish life. In a field that has a tendency to be dominated by bestselling male authors – from Banville and O’Connor to Toıbın and Doyle – Enright is not the only recent woman author to achieve aesthetic and critical success. Mary Morrissey’s Mother of Pearl (1996) addressed itself to sectarianism, Catholicism, and myth, while Deirdre Madden’s searing One by One in the Darkness, published in the same year, similarly dealt with these legacies of colonialism and the consequences of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Irish women authors have had particular success internationally with “chicklit” and romance novels. Maeve Binchy, Marian Keyes, and Deirdre Purcell are notable examples. While Seamus Heaney’s achievements have meant that Northern Irish poetry has received more attention than prose, fiction that addresses the situation from the 1960s onward became more readily available and found wider markets after the Good Friday Agreement (1998). Jennifer Johnston and Bernard McLaverty’s fiction, popular for several decades, raised the profile of Northern Irish fiction writers, while, more recently, authors such as the already mentioned Madden, Sean O’Reilly, and Eoin McNamee (in Resurrection Man, 1994) have broadened the type of literature available on this topic and begun to address the legacies of the period. The end of the twentieth century saw a diverse field of Irish authors with diverse literary com-
mitments, reflecting Ireland’s shift over the course of the century from an occupied colony to an independent state that, by century’s end, was experiencing an economic boom. The fiction produced over the course of the century reflects these major shifts, and continues to be seen as an important site for the discussion and debate about Irish identity, as well as a fruitful site for formal and aesthetic experiment. SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Banville, J. (1989). The Book of Evidence. London: Secker and Warburg. Banville, J. (2000). The Revolutions Trilogy, comprising Doctor Copernicus, Kepler, The Newton Letter. London: Picador. Beckett, S. (1938). Murphy. London: Routledge. Beckett, S. (1953). Watt. London: Grove. Beckett, S. (1994). The Trilogy: Molloy, Molone Dies, The Unnamable. London: Calder. Bowen, E. (1929). The Last September. London: Constable. Brown, T. (2004). Ireland: A Critical and Social History, 2nd edn. London: Harper Perennial. Cahalan, J. M. (1988). The Irish Novel: A Critical History. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Cronin, J. (1990). The Anglo-Irish Novel, vol. 2: 1900–1940. Belfast: Appletree. Deane, S.(ed.) (1991–2002). The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Derry: Field Day. Donoghue, E. (1990). The Snapper. London: Secker and Warburg. Donoghue, E. (1991). The Van. London: Secker and Warburg. Donoghue, E. (1995). Hood. London: HarperCollins. Donoghue, E. (2000). Slammerkin. London: HarperCollins. Doyle, R. (1988). The Commitments. London: Heinemann. Eagleton, T. (1995). Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture. London: Verso. Enright, A. (1991). The Portable Virgin. London: Secker and Warburg. Foster, J. W. (1993). Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Foster, J. W. (ed.) (2006). The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Joyce, J. (1976). Finnegans Wake [1939]. London: Penguin. Joyce, J. (1986). Ulysses [1922]. London: Vintage. Joyce, J. (1992). A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man [1916]. London: Penguin. Joyce, J. (1996). Dubliners [1914]. London: Viking. Keegan, C. (1999). Antarctica. London: Grove. Keegan, C. (2007). Walk the Blue Fields. London: Grove. Kelleher, M., & O’Leary, P. (2006). The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kiberd, D. (1995). Inventing Ireland. London: Vintage. Kiberd, D. (2001). Irish Classics. London: Granta. Lloyd, D. (1993). Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment. Dublin: Lilliput. Longley, E. (1994). The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe. Madden, D. (1996). One by One in the Darkness. London: Faber and Faber. McCabe, P. (1992). The Butcher Boy. London: Picador. McCabe, P. (1998). Breakfast on Pluto. London: Picador. McCourt, F. (1996). Angela’s Ashes. London: HarperCollins. McGahern, J. (1965). The Dark. London: Faber and Faber. McGahern, J. (1990). Amongst Women. London: Faber and Faber. McGahern, J. (2005). Memoir. London: Faber and Faber. McNamee, E. (1994). Resurrection Man. London: Picador. Moore, G. (1903). The Untilled Field. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Moore, G. (1905). The Lake. London: Heinemann. Morrissey, M. (1996). Mother of Pearl. London: Jonathan Cape. O’Brien, E. (1987). The Country Girls Trilogy. London: Jonathan Cape. O’Brien, E. (1996). Down by the River. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. O’Brien, F. (1939). At Swim-Two-Birds. London: Longman. O’Brien, K. (1941). The Land of Spices. London: Heinemann. O’Connor, J. (2003). Star of the Sea. London: Secker and Warburg. O’Connor, J. (2007). Redemption Falls. London: Harvill Secker. Smyth, G. (1997). The Novel and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction. London: Pluto.
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Stephens, J. (1912). The Crock of Gold. London: Macmillan. To´ibın, C. (1992). The Heather Blazing. London: Picador. To´ibın, C. (2004). The Master. London: Picador.
Isherwood, Christopher CHRIS HOPKINS
Christopher Isherwood was a significant twentiethcentury literary figure in his own right and as a member of the “Auden group.” In his association with this group, Isherwood is strongly linked to a particular literary period, the 1930s, and its concerns. However, his own career as a writer falls into two periods: his work of the 1930s and his work after his move to the United States in 1939. W. H. Auden also moved from England to America in 1939 and both he and Isherwood then replaced political commitment with religious belief. While Auden returned to the Anglican belief in which he had been brought up, Isherwood discovered the Hindu spiritual tradition of Vedanta, which influenced much of his American writing. Two themes do, however, run clearly through both of Isherwood’s periods: his fascination with autobiography and the nature of the self, and a related desire to explore freely his identity as a homosexual. A concise account of his biography is thus particularly helpful to an understanding of his fiction. Isherwood was born on August 26, 1904. His father, a professional soldier, was posted to France in 1914, and killed a year later at Ypres. Thereafter, Isherwood was brought up by his mother, with whom he had a close yet antagonistic relationship. His father’s death in battle was often referred to, at home and school, as an absolute standard of heroic manliness. In 1918, Isherwood went to a public school, Repton, where he met another important influence and collaborator, Edward Upward. Here the two developed their shared sense of opposition to social convention. Isherwood later analyzed his rebellion as having begun there: “by denying your duty towards the Hero-Father, you deny the authority of the Flag, the Old School Tie . . . [and] the Land that Bore You” (Parker 2004b, 64).
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After Repton, Isherwood went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he joined Upward. Isherwood paid little attention to his official studies, instead developing further with Upward their identities as social outsiders. This contributed to their invention of the alternative world of Mortmere and to each writing stories set there. The collaboration confirmed the literary ambitions of both. Isherwood left Cambridge without a degree in 1925. His friendship with Auden led to his decision in 1929 to live in Berlin, where Auden was then living. Isherwood became a published author before his departure with All the Conspirators (1928). This was followed by The Memorial: A Portrait of a Family (1932), and by his first Berlin novel, Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935). Isherwood went to Berlin partly because he had heard from Auden about the sexual freedom possible in the Weimar Republic, especially for homosexuals. Berlin also offered escape of several kinds from his family and his Englishness, and possessed a culture of artistic experimentation. Isherwood’s period in Berlin coincided with the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise to power of Hitler and the once marginal Nazi party. His representation of this period in Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin (1939a) is undoubtedly regarded as his major achievement in fiction, one further magnified by the successful play and film adaptations by other writers, I am a Camera (1951, 1955) and Cabaret (1972). After 1933, when Berlin became riskier, Isherwood wandered Europe trying to establish a secure base for himself and his German lover Heinz Neddermeyer. This phase ended when Heinz was arrested by the Gestapo in 1937. In January 1938, Isherwood and Auden set off for the Far East to collaborate on a book, Journey to a War, about the Sino-Japanese war in Manchuria. In 1938 Isherwood also published Lions and Shadows, a fictionalized autobiography of his life during the 1920s. By 1939, with war between Britain and Germany inevitable, Isherwood and Auden left Europe for the US (a decision that led to much criticism, given their reputation as leftist and anti-fascist activists). Isherwood settled in Los Angeles and became a disciple of the Vedanta guru, Swami Prabhavananda. He also worked as a Hollywood scriptwriter, though not on many films of abiding interest. In 1946 he published Prater Violet. His subsequent novels were largely Vedantist and
consciously American in focus. These included The World in the Evening (1954), A Single Man (1964), and A Meeting by the River (1967). He also published a number of prose works that revisited his earlier autobiography in various forms: Down There on a Visit (1962), Exhumations (1966), Kathleen and Frank (1971), and Christopher and His Kind (1976). In 1953, Isherwood met Don Bacchardy, an artist, with whom he lived until his death on January 4, 1986. Stephen Wade rightly observes that “the boundaries between autobiography and fiction in Isherwood’s work are [comprehensively] blurred” (1) and that different ways of representing the self are the focus of much of Isherwood’s work. All the Conspirators is, like many first novels, about a young aspirant’s attempt to become an artist, but also deals with conflict between pre- and postWorld War I generations. The result of several revisions, the novel is uncertain in its attitude to its protagonist and its use of irony. Isherwood later thought it was overburdened by the influence of E. M. Forster, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Nevertheless, that very uncertainty of viewpoint formed the basis for the complex narration, irony, and exploration of moral ambiguity in his more mature fictions. His next novel, The Memorial: A Portrait of a Family, is a family saga centered on differing attitudes toward a war memorial. However, while still influenced by Forster, it is a much more assured novel than its predecessor and the two generations in conflict are each imagined with greater objectivity (though the thumb is still put on the scales on the side of the young). With these two novels also belongs the later, sophisticated fictionalized autobiography Lions and Shadows, which again deploys artful narration and irony to explore the interwoven fantasies and genuine discontents of a young Englishman of the 1920s called “Christopher Isherwood.” Next came Mr. Norris Changes Trains (US title, The Last of Mr. Norris). The protagonist is again a version of Isherwood, bearing the author’s middle two names, William Bradshaw. In fact, though, this seemingly blatant autobiographical gesture is actually a sign of greater artistry and there is more narrative distance between protagonist and author than in either of the two earlier novels. Bradshaw (the novel’s interest in trains and travel is surely not coincidental given that a “Bradshaw” was then a widely used guide to train timetables in
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Britain) is an extremely naive and often quite passive first-person narrator who does not show great understanding of much of what he witnesses. The novel is partly a parody of a political or spy thriller (a popular genre that fascinated many intellectuals in the 1930s) and partly a political allegory, following the fortunes of the frivolous, charming and entirely untrustworthy Mr. Norris. Apparently a communist, he is extremely nervous of borders and identity papers and, as it turns out, is a double agent involved both with the French secret service and the Nazi Party. At times, he is compared to Hitler (it may be that he is, following contemporary leftist analysis, a representation of fascism in that he flirts with a form of “socialism” but is in the end a servant of capitalism). Bradshaw finally sees through Norris, partly with the help of the heroic communist leader Ludwig Bayer (before Bayer is murdered by the Nazis). The complex narration and moral ambiguity here (which does not always obviously match the reader’s sympathy to the righteous characters) no doubt partly stems from Isherwood’s attitudes toward conventional heterosexual hero figures and partly from his doubts about an absolute political commitment that might tend to reduce the complexity, nuance, and even playfulness to which his conception of art gave a high value. Thus the novel in part enacts a debate over politics and aesthetics. These veins are developed with further complexity in Goodbye to Berlin, which is focused through another version of Isherwood, again called “Christopher Isherwood.” In fact, the narration employs brilliantly several different “Isherwoods” – as character, diarist, character-narrator, and authorial narrator. This allows a set of layered commentaries about experiencing – and, indeed, at the time, not experiencing – the gradual domination of Berlin and Germany by Nazism. The novel includes a whole cityful of displaced, decentered fantasists whose grip on reality is slight: these include communists, Nazis, and impoverished middle-class Germans, but also many English and American expatriates, notable among whom is the would-be filmstar Sally Bowles. In the Berlin of 1930–3 the allure of purposeless pleasure and the difficulty of finding any clear and solidly grounded purpose leads, as the novel imagines it, to the possibility of Nazi fantasies contaminating the entire nation’s view of reality.
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Prater Violet shares some themes with the Berlin novels, but is more conventionally serious: the protagonist Friedrich Bergmann, a film director, is kept sane in the mad Europe of the late 1930s by commitment to his art. There was a considerable pause before Isherwood published The World in the Evening, which uses some of the allegorical techniques of his 1930s novels, but with a new emphasis on inner and religious understanding. The protagonist, fittingly called Stephen Monk, explores his dissatisfactions with life and with conventional ways of understanding the relation of the self to others and to external “reality.” Isherwood was not happy with this novel and most critics agree; Wade, for example, judged it “too clumsily allegorical” (70). How-ever, the novel signaled a new kind of spiritual inquiry in Isherwood’s fiction and opened the way to the more highly regarded A Single Man and A Meeting by the River. A Single Man, recently filmed by Tom Ford has as its central figure a gay college lecturer named George, a single man in several senses: “unmarried . . . homosexual [and] an outsider” (Parker 2004b, 714). Isherwood’s final novel, A Meeting by the River, has similar interests and is written in the form of letters and a diary that compare the lives of two brothers, one living a secular life, the other about to become a Hindu monk. Isherwood was an important writer in several respects. In the 1930s he contributed to the enduring work of the Auden group and created an influential picture of prewar Berlin, while in the postwar period he pioneered the serious exploration of gay identity in his fiction and also sought to put the exploration of Vedantist spirituality at the center of his writing. SEE ALSO: Expatriate Fiction (AF); Forster, E. M. (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF); Upward, Edward (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Finney, B. (1979). Christopher Isherwood: A Critical Biography. London: Faber and Faber. Ford, T. (dir.) (2009). A Single Man. Weinstein/Fade to Black. Hynes, S. (1979). The Auden Generation. London: Faber and Faber. Isherwood, C. (1928). All the Conspirators. London: Jonathan Cape.
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Isherwood, C. (1932). The Memorial: A Portrait of a Family. London: Hogarth. Isherwood, C. (1935). Mr. Norris Changes Trains. London: Hogarth. (Published in US as The Last of Mr. Norris.) Isherwood, C. (1938). Lions and Shadows. London: Hogarth. Isherwood, C. (1939a). Goodbye to Berlin. London: Hogarth. Isherwood, C. (1939b). Journey to a War. London: Faber. Isherwood, C. (1946). Prater Violet. London: Methuen. Isherwood, C. (1954). The World in the Evening. New York: Random House. Isherwood, C. (1962). Down There on a Visit. New York: Simon and Schuster. Isherwood, C. (1964). A Single Man. New York: Simon and Schuster. Isherwood, C. (1966). Exhumations. New York: Simon and Schuster. Isherwood, C. (1967). A Meeting by the River. New York: Simon and Schuster. Isherwood, C. (1971). Kathleen and Frank. London: Methuen. Isherwood, C. (1976). Christopher and His Kind. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Page, N. (1989). Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Parker, P. (2004a). Christopher Isherwood. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edn.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parker, P. (2004b). Isherwood. London: Picador. Summers, C. J. (1980). Christopher Isherwood. New York: Ungar. Wade, S. (1991). Christopher Isherwood. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ishiguro, Kazuo LISA FLUET
The Anglo-Japanese novelist Kazuo Ishiguro is perhaps best known for his protagonists who devote themselves completely to a chosen professional role – as artist, butler, pianist, or detective – and whose first-person, confessional narratives paradoxically conceal more than they reveal about their past lives. Born in Nagasaki, Japan on November 8, 1954, Ishiguro moved with his family to Britain in 1960, and was educated in Surrey, at Stoughton Primary School and Woking County Grammar School. He later read English and philosophy at the University of Kent, in
Canterbury, graduating in 1978, and worked both as a community worker and a residential social worker in Glasgow and London. He then went on to study creative writing at the University of East Anglia under the guidance of Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter. In 1981, Ishiguro published three short stories in Introductions 7: Stories by New Writers. The following year he published his first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), which won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. Together with his next work, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year award and a shortlisted candidate for the Booker Prize, these two early novels featured Japanese protagonists who exemplify the formal aspects of firstperson narration from a position of cosmopolitan displacement and curiously detached affect: Etsuko, a Japanese widow living in England after the suicide of her elder daughter, Keiko, in A Pale View of Hills; and Masuji Ono, the artist of An Artist of the Floating World, living in Japan after World War II with conflicting memories of the hedonistic, “floating” world of prewar bohemian life, and of the propagandist role he played for imperial Japan during the war. The presence of an intriguingly unreliable first-person narrator is a narrative device that that Ishiguro would return to, albeit in altered form, in each of his subsequent novels. In 1983 Ishiguro was featured in Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists” issue; he would be featured again in Granta 10 years later, after the publication of his third novel, The Remains of the Day (1989). This novel – which won the Booker Prize for Fiction and was subsequently made into a film by Merchant Ivory from a screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala – is set in post-World War II England; its narrator, an elderly English butler named Stevens, is engaged, like Etsuko and Masuji Ono, in recalling his wartime past spent, in his case, in domestic service in England, working for an employer whose well-intentioned internationalism during the interwar period slowly but surely veered into sympathy for fascist Germany. The novel and film solidified Ishiguro’s growing reputation in the English-speaking world. Ishiguro’s most openly experimental novel to date, The Unconsoled (1995), followed. Winner of the Cheltenham Prize, this work depicts a concert pianist who arrives in an unnamed central European city ostensibly to give a lecture and a concert
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that will somehow save the city from an unspecified cultural crisis. Once there, he continually attempts to rehearse for the big event, yet is constantly drawn away from his agenda by errands and other demands on his time. As with the unreliability found in the earlier novels, here too the protagonist may, or may not, be accounting for his past life decisions and motivations accurately; and, as in the earlier novels, the trials and tribulations of many minor characters reflect and are an extension of the protagonist’s own. The Chekhovian subtleties of the earlier novels are here jettisoned for absurdities more likely to be encountered in works by Kafka or Dostoevsky. Ishiguro’s fifth novel, When We Were Orphans (2000), was shortlisted for both the Whitbread Novel Award and the Booker Prize for Fiction. In this novel Ishiguro revisits, as well as revises, the Victorian examples of both Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and the detective fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle, in that his orphaned detective protagonist, Christopher Banks, works to determine – in the blinkered fashion of all of Ishiguro’s protagonists – the whereabouts of his parents, both allegedly kidnapped in Shanghai years earlier. Banks’s investigative efforts coincide with the early years of the Sino-Japanese War, a circumstance that strangely remains in the background of his perceptions as he discovers the unexpected ways in which he is connected, via money and early family history, to Shanghai. The novel shares a setting, and some circumstances of plot and character, with Ishiguro’s later original screenplay for the film The White Countess (2005). Ishiguro’s most recent novel, Never Let Me Go (2005), depicts an alternative 1990s Britain in which human clones have been created for the purpose of harvesting organs for privileged humans. Here the dystopian aspects of the narrative of Kathy H., a clone “carer” who looks after other clones engaged in the donation process until they can “complete,” are merged with the more prosaic attributes of a boarding school novel. Kathy’s role as “carer” in the novel is arguably a reflection of a neglected aspect of Ishiguro’s biography: his early job as a social worker. For all of its differences from the earlier fiction, Never Let Me Go shares many attributes with the previous novels: a protagonist focused on a particular form of knowledge work, unreliability in narration, and a detached, displaced perspective that, in this in-
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stance, arises from the organ donors’ disenfranchised situation in the novel. At the same time, in its invocations of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and depiction of a specifically female, careeroriented protagonist – after an array of chronically busy career men – Never Let Me Go presents a remarkably nuanced depiction of the consolations, however fleeting, of the peculiar role that Kathy H. has chosen for herself. In 2009, Ishiguro published a short story collection, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, bringing his career back full circle to the short story form with which it began. Ishiguro lives in London with his wife and daughter and divides his time between writing fiction and original screenplays. SEE ALSO: The Film Industry and Fiction (BIF); Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Fluet, L. (2007a). Immaterial Labors: Ishiguro, Class, and Affect. Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 40(3), 265–88. Fluet, L.(ed.) (2007b). Ishiguro’s Unknown Communities [special issue]. Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 40(3). Ishiguro, K. (1981a). Getting Poisoned. In Introductions 7: Stories by New Writers. London: Faber and Faber, pp. 38–51. Ishiguro, K. (1981b). A Strange and Sometimes Sadness. Introductions 7: Stories by New Writers. London: Faber and Faber, pp. 13–27. Ishiguro, K. (1981c). Waiting for J. Introductions 7: Stories by New Writers. London: Faber and Faber, pp. 28–37. Ishiguro, K. (1982). A Pale View of Hills. London: Faber and Faber. Ishiguro, K. (1983). Summer After the War. Granta, 7, 120–37. Ishiguro, K. (1986). An Artist of the Floating World. London: Faber and Faber. Ishiguro, K. (1988). A Family Supper. In M. Bradbury (ed.), The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories. London: Penguin. Ishiguro, K. (1989). The Remains of the Day. London: Faber and Faber. Ishiguro, K. (1993). The Gourmet. Granta, 43, 89–127. Ishiguro, K. (1995). The Unconsoled. London: Faber and Faber.
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Ishiguro, K. (2000). When We Were Orphans. London: Faber and Faber. Ishiguro, K. (2005). Never Let Me Go. London: Faber and Faber. Ishiguro, K. (2009). Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall. London: Faber and Faber. Ivory, J. (dir.) (1993). The Remains of the Day (screenplay by R. P. Jhabvala). Columbia. Ivory, J. (dir.) (2005). The White Countess (screenplay by K. Ishiguro). Merchant Ivory. Lang, J. M. (2000). Public Memory, Private History: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Clio, 29(2), 143–65. Lewis, B. (2000). Kazuo Ishiguro. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Luo, S.-P. (2003). “Living the Wrong Life”: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Unconsoled Orphans. Dalhousie Review, 83(1), 51–80. Maddin, G. (dir.) (2003). The Saddest Music in the World (screenplay by K. Ishiguro & G. Maddin). Buffalo Gal. Matthews, S., & Groes, S. (eds.) (2009). Kazuo Ishiguro: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London: Continuum. McCombe, J. P. (2002). The End of (Anthony) Eden: Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and Mid-Century Anglo-American Tensions. Twentieth Century Literature, 48(1), 77–99. O’Brien, S. (1996). Serving a New World Order: Postcolonial Politics in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Modern Fiction Studies, 42(4), 787–806. Petry, M. (1999). Narratives of Memory and Identity: The Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Puchner, M. (2008). When We Were Clones. Raritan, 27(4), 34–49. Reitano, N. (2007). The Good Wound: Memory and Community in the Unconsoled. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 49(4), 361–86. Robbins, B. (2001b). Very Busy Just Now: Globalization and Harriedness in Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled. Comparative Literature, 53(4), 426–41. Robinson, R. (2006). Nowhere, in Particular: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled and Central Europe. Critical Quarterly, 48(4), 107–30. Shaffer, B. W. (1998). Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Shaffer, B. W., & Wong, C. (eds.) (2008). Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Su, J. J. (2002). Refiguring National Character: The Remains of the British Estate Novel. Modern Fiction Studies, 48(3), 552–80. Tamaya, M. (1992). Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day: The Empire Strikes Back. Modern Language Studies, 22, 45–56. Trimm, R. S. (2005). Inside Job: Professionalism and Postimperial Communities in The Remains of the Day. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 16(2), 135–61. Walkowitz, R. L. (2001). Ishiguro’s Floating Worlds. ELH, 86, 1049–76. Wong, C. F. (2005a.). Kazuo Ishiguro, 2nd edn. Tavistock: Northcote House. Wong, C. F. (2005b). Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. In B. W. Shaffer (ed.), A Companion to the British and Irish Novel, 1945–2000. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 493–503.
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J James, P. D. MARTIN PRIESTMAN
P. D. James holds an important place in the postwar repositioning of British crime fiction as serious literature, engaging convincingly with the contemporary world and filling out the classic whodunit formula with detailed psychological explorations of suspects and investigators alike. Born Phyllis Dorothy James in 1920, married in 1941 to Connor Bantry White and ennobled under Margaret Thatcher’s government as Baroness James of Holland Park in 1990, she published her first novel, Cover Her Face, in 1962. This established the series detective with whom her name is most associated: Detective Chief Inspector (subsequently Superintendent and Commander) Adam Dalgleish, who to date (2008) has featured in 14 of her 18 novels. The choice of a career policeman as her detective hero was not unprecedented, but helped to move the genre’s center of gravity away from the gentrified prewar world of acknowledged precursors such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Margery Allingham, whose well-bred sleuths are either amateurs or in somewhat tangential relations with the official police. Dalgleish retains some of his predecessors’ special status in being the man from London’s New Scotland Yard called in on investigations around the country, as well as a respected poet; this contrasts with the more locally based heroes of Ruth Rendell, Colin Dexter, Reginald Hill, and Ian Rankin, who take her step toward egalitarianism further. Also unlike most of these heroes, Dalgleish at first lacked a
regular foil for his idiosyncrasies, until A Taste for Death (1986) allowed the working-class Inspector Kate Miskin to introduce a sometimes angry counter-perspective in ways later echoed by Elizabeth George. The milieu typically explored by Dalgleish moves from Cover Her Face’s classic stately home to an isolated workplace, where suspects and victim are often professionally linked. Thus her second novel, A Mind to Murder (1963), is set partly in a psychiatric clinic, Shroud for a Nightingale (1971) in a nurses’ training school, The Black Tower (1975) in a home for the disabled, Death of an Expert Witness (1977) in a forensic laboratory, Devices and Desires (1989) in a nuclear power station, Original Sin (1994) in a publishing house, A Certain Justice (1997) in legal chambers, Death in Holy Orders (2001) in a theological college, and The Murder Room (2003) in a museum. The medical connections of the earlier settings reflect James’s own work for the National Health Service from 1949 to 1968, after which she became a Home Office civil servant and took on several other public service commitments. These parallel careers may account for her relatively light output of three or four novels per decade, but have also kept them grounded in a convincingly portrayed world where apparently high-minded professionalism regularly confronts more sordid realities. Another recurrent element is the coastal setting of Unnatural Causes (1967), The Black Tower, The Skull beneath the Skin (1982), Devices and Desires, Death in Holy Orders, and The Lighthouse (2006). Like the church crime scene in A Taste for Death,
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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such settings facilitate the firmly Christian meditations on death and human fallibility also implied in several titles derived from the Bible or high literature. James’s departures from the Dalgleish series are few but important. Most studies of the 1980s female private-eye subgenre dominated by American writers such as Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton give honorable mention to An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972) featuring Cordelia Gray, whose struggles against male power and gender prejudice established many of the subgenre’s ground rules. However, in its sequel The Skull beneath the Skin Cordelia becomes a more conventional kind of detective and disappears thereafter, perhaps to draw a firm line under her potential cooption to militant feminist causes which James rejected. Something of Cordelia’s lonely grit reappears in the heroine of Innocent Blood (1980), whose odyssey into her past made this one-off psychological thriller a massive success in the USA. Finally, The Children of Men (1992) marks James’s single venture into dystopian science fiction, though set near enough in the then future (2021) for its horrified vision of a complete collapse of human fertility to blend believably with its traditional Oxford setting. Apart from her fiction, James co-authored (with T. A. Critchley) The Maul and the Pear Tree (1971), a study of the 1811 Ratcliffe Highway murders, and published her narratively intricate “Fragment of Autobiography,” Time to be in Earnest, in 1999. The most successful film of her work is Children of Men (2006), directed by Alfonso Cuar on and starring Clive Owen; An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1982), directed by Chris Petit and starring Pippa Guard, has a cult following. On television, Death of an Expert Witness (Anglia ITV 1983) inaugurated a series of adaptations starring Roy Marsden as Dalgleish, replaced by Martin Shaw in Death in Holy Orders (2003) and The Murder Room (2004). An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (Ecosse Films 1997) inaugurated a 1997–2001 series starring Helen Baxendale as Cordelia Gray, though James withdrew her support when Cordelia became pregnant outside marriage (James 1999, 199). SEE ALSO: Mystery/Detective/Crime Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Gidez, R. B. (1986). P. D. James. New York: Twayne. James, P. D. (1962). Cover Her Face. London: Faber and Faber. James, P. D. (1971). Shroud for a Nightingale. London: Faber and Faber. James, P. D. (1972). An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. London: Faber and Faber. James, P. D. (1977). Death of an Expert Witness. London: Faber and Faber. James, P. D. (1980). Innocent Blood. London: Faber and Faber. James, P. D. (1986). A Taste for Death. London: Faber and Faber. James, P. D. (1989). Devices and Desires. London: Faber and Faber. James, P. D. (1992). The Children of Men. London: Faber and Faber. James, P. D. (1994). Original Sin. London: Faber and Faber. James, P. D. (1997). A Certain Justice. London: Faber and Faber. James, P. D. (1999). Time to be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography. London: Faber and Faber. James, P. D. (2001). Death in Holy Orders. London: Faber and Faber. Klein, K. G. (1988). The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Priestman, M. (2002). P. D. James and the Distinguished Thing. In Z. Leader (ed.), On Modern British Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 234–57. Rowland, S. (2001). From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Siebenheller, N. (1981). P. D. James. New York: Ungar.
Jenkins, Robin GERARD CARRUTHERS
Robin Jenkins, Scotland’s most celebrated novelist of the 1950s and 1960s, had a career that spanned four decades. Predominant themes across his work include the difficulty of moral discernment, the deceptive priorities of the human world, and the challenges posed by large-scale cultural forces to individuals. Born on September 11, 1912 in Cambuslang, Lanarkshire, and educated at the University of Glasgow, Jenkins began his career in 1936 as a primary school teacher. During World War II he registered as a conscientious objector and left
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Scotland in 1957 for most of the next decade. During this time he held teaching posts in Afghanistan, Spain, and Borneo, locations that provide the backdrop for a number of politically charged, arguably underappreciated novels. Some Kind of Grace (1960) seems to be a gripping thriller until this form gradually and cleverly turns into something else. It follows the quest for the central character’s friends, who have been murdered, seemingly, by supposedly wild tribesmen. Suspense is built as their possible fate is considered but then the novel changes direction to become a critique of the way in which Afghanistan historically has been a colonial football among competing major powers. The revelation of the suffering of the Afghans is eventually brought into focus as being more important than a few missing Westerners. An equally powerful novel, Dust on the Paw (1961), features a protagonist who combines huge affection for the Afghan people and land alongside a deep-seated Western racism that is only painfully and partially overcome through an exquisitely intense love story. Among a dozen of Jenkins’s “foreign” novels, The Sardana Dancers (1964) is a noteworthy performance in its fierce comparison of injustice toward the Catalans by the central Spanish government with the situation of Scotland within the United Kingdom. Jenkins’s “Scottish” fiction has garnered the most critical attention. His first published novel, So Gaily Sings the Lark (1950), is one of a number of works where the plot sees an urban setting exchanged for the idyllic Scottish wilderness, as a miner and his sweetheart find contentment living and working in a Highland forest. A couple of succeeding books are similarly and ferociously contemptuous of the literally unhealthy and equally cramped cultural condition of the central Lowlands of Scotland. The Thistle and the Grail (1954) is particularly iconoclastic as it pours acid over the national, male obsession with soccer. The Cone-Gatherers (1955) is Jenkins’s most celebrated novel. Here he moves toward a much more mythical kind of writing, albeit replete with irony, where the Scottish countryside, because of its human presence, is as darkly nefarious as anywhere in the city. Fairly obviously reprising Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, the text also “replays” a number of other narratives, in a kind of virtuoso juggling act, including the supernatural legend of the green man, the Arthurian quest
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for the Holy Grail, and the sacrifice of Christ to frame the story of the pathological slaying of Calum, a vulnerable man with the intellect of a child who is gathering cones in the woods of Argyllshire during World War II as part of the home-front effort. The Calvinist-minded, though atheistic, gamekeeper murderer wishes to purge his woods of the imperfection of the handicapped man. Even as this represents a horrifically clear vision of purpose, the surfeit of reference to other “stories” suggests that human narratives are glibly plentiful while never actually confronting the crooked, primal instincts that drive the worst excesses of human action. The Changeling (1958) is the harrowing story of a Glaswegian slum kid, Tom, taken on holiday to a Clyde island retreat by a well-intentioned teacher with his family. In the standard folk tale, a child is snatched by the fairies and replaced with a troublesome one. Tom’s teacher hopes briefly to remove his obstreperous pupil and return him reformed. The boy, however, does not alter in this new atmosphere but remains truculent and vulnerable, playing to type amid the growing, bourgeois distaste of the family, with the most tragic consequence. Fergus Lamont (1979) is Jenkins’s most extensive “condition of Scotland” novel, a superbly managed first-person Bildungsroman that concerns the difficulty of individualism, the long national decay of Scotland, and recent post-industrial decline. The Awakening of George Darroch (1985) is Jenkins’s only historical novel, though one of the most powerful produced in later twentieth-century Scotland. Centered on the Disruption of the Church of Scotland in 1843, it is the intense portrait of a man struggling with mortifying religious principle and his own opportunityadvancing charm and talents. Just Duffy (1988) is a modern-day, Glasgow-based version of Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Lunderston Tales (1996) features 13 loosely connected tales that reveal Jenkins’s strength as a short story writer and that revisit his persistent terrain of a claustrophobic social setting combined with large moral issues for the characters who inhabit it. Jenkins died in 2005.
SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Scottish Fiction (BIF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Carruthers, G. (2004). “Creation Festers in Me”: Calvinism and Cosmopolitanism in Jenkins, Spark and Gray. In G. Carruthers, D. Goldie, & A. Renfrew (eds.), Beyond Scotland: New Contexts for TwentiethCentury Scottish Literature. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Gifford, D. (2002). Scottish Fiction Since 1945 I. In D. Gifford, S. Dunnigan, & A. MacGillivray (eds.), Scottish Literature in English and Scots. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hart, F. R. (1978). Novelists of Survival. In The Scottish Novel: From Smollett to Spark. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jenkins, R. (1950). So Gaily Sings the Lark. Glasgow: William MacLellan. Jenkins, R. (1954). The Thistle and the Grail. London: Macdonald. Jenkins, R. (1955). The Cone-Gatherers. London: Macdonald. Jenkins, R. (1958). The Changeling. London: Macdonald. Jenkins, R. (1960). Some Kind of Grace. London: Macdonald. Jenkins, R. (1961). Dust on the Paw. London: Macdonald. Jenkins, R. (1964). The Sardana Dancers. London: Jonathan Cape. Jenkins, R. (1979). Fergus Lamont. Edinburgh: Waterfront. Jenkins, R. (1985). The Awakening of George Darroch. Edinburgh: Waterfront. Jenkins, R. (1988). Just Duffy. Edinburgh: Canongate. Jenkins, R. (1996). Lunderston Tales. Edinburgh: Polygon. Morgan, E. (1974). The Novels of Robin Jenkins. In Essays. Cheadle: Carcanet. Murray, I., & Tait, B. (1984). Robin Jenkins: Fergus Lamont. In Ten Modern Scottish Novels. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Norquay, G. (1993). Disruptions: The Later Fiction of Robin Jenkins. In G. Wallace & R. Stevenson (eds.), The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sellin, B. (1992). Histoire personelle et histoire collective dans les romans de Robin Jenkins. Etudes Ecossaises, 1, 315–22. Smith, I. C. (1995). Robin Jenkins’s “The ConeGatherers.” Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies.
Jewish Fiction € AXEL STAHLER
The beginning of the twenty-first century has seen what has been described as a dazzling show of productivity in British Jewish fiction. Moreover,
recent British Jewish writing appears to have developed a quality of its own which, to some extent, distinguishes it from its antecedents. The apologetic strain that has characterized much of the secular writing of British Jews since the early nineteenth century has given way largely to a new confidence which, in terms of postcolonial theory, has been called a form of writing back. Contemporary British Jewish writers are being credited with an “attitude” (Cheyette 1998) and their fiction is perceived to celebrate “the anarchic potential of the Jewish voice” (Weber 2007). There remains, however, a lingering doubt as to the reach and the resilience of this new-found freedom; a sense of exclusion from the mainstream of British cultural life seems to prevail, even if perhaps only subliminally. The resurgence of British Jewish literature appears to be very much a product of the debates on multiculturalism and the concomitant focus on religious and ethnic identities that have entered the British social and cultural agenda in various phases since the 1950s and that, especially for the last three decades, have shaped much of British literature. More recent policies of “community cohesion” which reaffirm notions of integration and, as some fear, of assimilation, monoculturalism, and nativism have reintroduced an element of uncertainty and antagonism that, once again, impresses on “ethnic” writers the ambiguity inherent in negotiating in their fiction conceptions of Englishness, or even Britishness, in relation to their own ethnic identities. In addition, recent perceptions of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict have impinged on attitudes toward Jews in Britain and have, to some extent, conditioned the literary response of Jewish writers who may feel their moral integrity to be challenged by finding themselves implicated in the controversial politics of Israel. Since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and previously in the period of the British Mandate for Palestine (1918–48), the notion and then the actuality of the Jewish state have had a significant impact on Jewish life in Britain. For British Jews the increasingly violent anti-colonial struggle of the Zionists in Palestine was as acute an embarrassment as the contentious politics of the state of Israel have been. It tested their loyalty severely – at least in the minds of their fellow British, a minority of whom responded with outbursts of anti-Semitism in 1947.
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JEWISH FICTION
In addition to external pressure, the foundation of Israel has also produced unease internally. With the establishment of the Jewish state, theoretically at least, galut was no more. Jewish exile was no longer a necessity, as indicated by the Hebrew word, but of choice. The Law of Return offers any Jew Israeli citizenship and indeed, for a while after the foundation of the Jewish state, shlilat ha-galut, the negation of the diaspora advocated by the “new” Israeli Jews, and their claims to the exclusive authenticity of their “Jewish” identity, were issues that severely strained the relationship between Israel and the diaspora that had contributed to its creation. Of course, contrary to the negationists’ claims, as well as more recent allegations that the diaspora was indeed vanishing, the Jewish diaspora seems to be hale and healthy, to which the vibrancy of Jewish cultural production in Britain and elsewhere testifies. While the existence of Israel certainly proved to be an important factor for Jewish lives in Britain, a serious literary engagement with the Jewish state surfaced surprisingly late in British Jewish fiction. The earlier literary engagement – in Brian Glanville’s The Bankrupts (1958) and Gerda Charles’s The Crossing Point (1960) or Frederic Raphael’s The Limits of Love (1960) and Chaim Bermant’s Jericho Sleep Alone (1964) – had little impact. In 1963 Alexander Baron voiced not only his own sentiments when he maintained that he was deeply interested in Israel but that it had not entered his imaginative world. It is only in more recent British Jewish writing, especially in response to the First Lebanon War (1982) and the subsequent deterioration of the situation in the Middle East, that a proper and often highly critical engagement with Israel, or Palestine, emerges which in turn is frequently referred back to reflections on Jewish existence in England. Clive Sinclair, for instance, addresses the issue of British anti-Semitism in a head-on fashion in Blood Libels (1985), while at the same time lashing out at Israeli transgressions. Less audaciously, but no less poignantly, Jonathan Wilson in The Hiding Room (1995) and Bernice Rubens in I, Dreyfus (1999) also engage with British anti-Semitism and Israel. Linda Grant, finally, in When I Lived in Modern Times (2000), while highly ambivalent toward Zionist self-fashioning and Israeli political expediency, construes a Jewish claim to postco-
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loniality by overtly suggesting that British Jews have been subject to an internal colonization. Grant’s more recent The People on the Street: A Writer’s View of Israel (2006), strongly reminiscent of Sinclair’s earlier Diaspora Blues: A View of Israel (1987), is a determined attempt to grapple with the contradictions of Jewish existence in Israel and the diaspora, and particularly those of the British Jew, “a category error,” as the author describes herself. Her insistence on the in-betweenness of the British Jew, suffering the seemingly irreconcilable contradictions of Jewishness and Britishness, encapsulates an ambiguity shaped by the particular national context in Britain that has informed Jewish writing in this country from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century. In British Jewish writing the assertion of Jewishness had been impeded considerably by the oppressive and overpowering idea of England in an era of imperial expansion. The apparent superiority of English patterns of identification and the pressure to assimilate left British Jews almost no viable alternative but to “commit” mimicry, a process that culminated in the conversion to Christianity, for instance, of writers Cecily Sidgwick, G. B. Stern, Naomi Jacob, and Muriel Spark. The failure of British Jewish literature to assimilate a monolithic and exclusive Englishness, or to be assimilated to it, originates in the homogeneity and intransigence of the constructions of the past that inform English national culture. To understand the development of twentiethcentury Jewish fiction in Britain it is therefore necessary to trace its antecedents. The very origins of British Jewish writing in the nineteenth century can be related to the struggle for emancipation. Early British Jewish writers, many of whom were women, explored Jewish themes but, frequently reworking prevalent English cultural images of Jewishness, construed in their apologetic fiction a largely private religious identity that was often presented alongside a public persona that seemed fully assimilable into English mainstream culture. With the influx of about 150,000 alien-seeming Jewish immigrants between 1881 and 1914, following several waves of persecution in eastern Europe, the pressure to present Jewish difference in terms of its assimilability increased. But there also arose critical and self-critical voices. Amy Levy and Julia Frankau (writing as Frank Denby)
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prefigured in their work the later emphasis on inbetweenness in that they questioned the assumptions of an English national culture as well as the complacent self-image of British Jewry. At the same time the evolving “ghetto” of the impoverished Jewish East End in London found literary attention, first sympathetically and apologetically, for instance in the fiction of Benjamin Farjeon and Israel Zangwill, but then, in the interwar years, increasingly critically. Writers like Simon Blumenfeld (Jew Boy, 1935) and Willy Goldman (East End My Cradle, 1940) reacted with their autobiographical works against the bourgeois trends in the previous generation, but concentrated on class difference rather than ethnicity. With Magnolia Street (1932) Louis Golding, writing about the fictitious community of Doomington, a rendering of Manchester, addressed British anti-Semitism with an assimilationist bias. World War II and the Holocaust were disruptive events that, initially even more than the foundation of the state of Israel, gave British Jewish fiction a new impulse. Indeed, the late 1950s have been credited with bringing forth a new wave of Jewish writing in Britain. This was a time of abrupt and far-reaching cultural change that affected the whole country and that saw the emergence and gradual ascendance of a plurality of ethnic voices. Specific to the success of British Jewish writers in that period was the context of their literary production, which was determined by the new discovery not only of their ethnicity but also of their working-class roots and their social commitment. They did not, however, develop identifiable group characteristics and were dependent on recognition beyond the relatively small Jewish community toward which they were highly ambivalent, frequently challenging its perceived complacency and hypocrisy (e.g., Brian Glanville, Frederic Raphael, and Bernard Kops) but also engaging with Jewish concerns in a more committed way (e.g., Chaim Bermant, Gerda Charles, Lionel Davidson, William Goldman, and Chaim Raphael). The literary response to the wide-ranging destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust was rather late, often indirect, and mostly by emigre writers with a personal connection like George Steiner, Thomas Wiseman, or Gabriel Josipovici and Eva Figes, although Louis Golding in particular addressed the question of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust early on in his non-fiction and
fiction (The Glory of Elsie Silver, 1946). The immediate concerns the Holocaust provoked were rather about a Yiddish culture that seemed to have been irretrievably lost. While in America Yiddishkayt exhibited a certain tenacity, in Britain Yiddish never achieved literary prominence, even though the Jewish Quarterly (established in 1953) had promoted notions of an important role for Yiddish in a postwar Jewish culture that was not necessarily to be centered on Israel. And although the East End poet Avram Stencl staunchly wrote in Yiddish there is not, as it has been observed in the Jewish American context, a multilingual dimension to British Jewish writing. English continued to be the language even of a number of Jewish writers who emigrated to Israel, among them Dennis Silk and Mordechai Beck. While they remained linguistically committed to England, for many British Jewish writers, turning to non-English territories in their fiction, especially to the diaspora and, less frequently, to Israel, became a way of sidestepping the hegemony of English, or even British, constructions of the past that excluded Jewishness. This phenomenon, designated by Bryan Cheyette as “extraterritoriality” (1996b), has been described as the defining characteristic of much of British Jewish writing in the latter half of the twentieth century, investing it with a critical potential that challenges rigid conceptions of history and established constructions of the past as well as essentialist conceptions of identity, of which the work of Ruth FainlightandElaineFeinstein orSimonLouvishand Clive Sinclair provides examples. The oppressiveness of a fixed Englishness which, in contrast to America, for a very long time did not permit or admit the shaping influence of ethnic minorities in Britain, has also been used to explain the success of Jewish emigre writers like Figes, Josipovici, and Steiner or Arthur Koestler, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and Dan Jacobson; precisely because they were not bound and bounded by the historical fixity of the dominant culture and its unremitting pressure of assimilation. But in contemporary British Jewish writing the “extraterritoriality” that still informs the more recent voices, for instance, of Elena Lappin, Jonathan Treitel, and Jonathan Wilson has been superseded by a succinct feeling of place connected to specific locations in Britain whose particularities are confidently explored in correlation with questions of belonging and alienation. Contemporary
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JEWISH FICTION
British Jewish writers like Naomi Alderman, David Baddiel, Lana Citron, Jeremy Gavron, Zoe Heller, Howard Jacobson, Anna Maxted, Charlotte Mendleson, William Sutcliffe, Adam Thirlwell, Lisa Appignanesi, Rachel Castell Farhi, Jenny Diski, and Tamar Yellin, many of whom are of a younger generation, explore critically the creative tension that is offered by different forms of identification in twenty-first-century Britain. There is not a very large body of Irish Jewish literature. This corresponds to the relatively small number of Jews in Ireland, not because, as Garrett Deasy maintains in Joyce’s Ulysses, Ireland had “never let them in,” but rather because the country’s economic situation was precarious and did not attract immigration. It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that a larger group of Jewish emigrants from Lithuania settled in the country. In 1954 David Marcus emerged as a writer with his first novel To Next Year in Jerusalem in which he draws the explicit analogy between the anti-colonial struggle in Ireland and in Mandate Palestine. More recently, the Israeli Irish writer Ronit Lentin has established herself as a critical voice in the post-Zionist debate. In 1960, Brian Glanville had claimed that there were Anglo-Jewish writers but “no such thing as Anglo-Jewish writing.” Indeed, to subsume a vastly incongruent group of writers under the heading of “British Jewish” entails the risk not only of misrepresenting their work but also of reducing them to a monolithic ethnicity. The limitations of such an approach are evident. Anita Brookner, for instance, has achieved mainstream fame by refusing to submit to the constraints of negotiations of ethnicity and, with only a very few exceptions, has written out of her work almost any reference to her own Jewishness. Still, there are common concerns and common traditions that suggest there is indeed something like British Jewish fiction. This, however, appears to be very much a work in progress. SEE ALSO: Working-Class Fiction (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Baron, A. (1963). On Being English and Jewish. Jewish Quarterly, 10, 6–10.
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Bermant, C. (1964). Jericho Sleep Alone. London: Chapman and Hall. Blumenfeld, S. (1935). Jew Boy. London: Jonathan Cape. Brauner, D. (2001). Post-War Jewish Fiction: Ambivalence, Self-Explanation and Transatlantic Connections. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cesarani, D. (ed.) (1990). The Making of Modern Anglo-Jewry. Oxford: Blackwell. Charles, G. (1960). The Crossing Point. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Cheyette, B. (1993). Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cheyette, B. (ed.) (1996a). Between “Race” and Culture: Representations of “the Jew” in English and American Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cheyette, B. (1996b). Englishness and Extraterritoriality: British-Jewish Writing and Diaspora Culture. Literary Strategies: Studies in Contemporary Jewry, 12, 21–39. Cheyette, B. (ed.) (1998). Contemporary Jewish Writing in Britain and Ireland: An Anthology. London: Halban. Cheyette, B. (in press). Diasporas of the Mind: BritishJewish Writing and the Nightmare of History. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gilbert, R. (2008). Contemporary British-Jewish Writing: From Apology to Attitude. Literature Compass, 5(2), 394–406. Glanville, B. (1958). The Bankrupts. London: Secker and Warburg. Glanville, B. (1960). The Anglo-Jewish Writer. Encounter, 24(2), 62–4. Golding, L. (1932). Magnolia Street. London: Gollancz. Golding, L. (1946). The Glory of Elsie Silver. London: Hutchinson. Goldman, W. (1940). East End My Cradle. London: Faber and Faber. Grant, L. (2000). When I Lived in Modern Times. London: Granta. Grant, L. (2006). The People on the Street: A Writer’s View of Israel. London: Virago. Marcus, D. (1954). To Next Year in Jerusalem. London: Macmillan. Raphael, F. (1960). The Limits of Love. London: Cassell. Rubens, B. (1999). I, Dreyfus. London: Little Brown. Sicher, E. (1985). Beyond Marginality: Anglo-Jewish Literature After the Holocaust. Albany: SUNY Press. Sinclair, C. (1985). Blood Libels. London: Allison and Busby. Sinclair, C. (1987). Diaspora Blues: A View of Israel. London: Heinemann. St€ahler, A. (ed.) (2007). Anglophone Jewish Literature. London: Routledge.
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Tylee, C. (2007). “A Work in Progress”: The Contemporary Jewish-British Family Saga. Literature and History, 16(1), 77–95. Valman, N. (2007). The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, D. (2007). Anglo-Jewish Literature Raises Its Voice. At www.jbooks.com/interviews/index/ IP_Weber_English_htm, accessed Sept. 15, 2008. Wilson, J. (1995). The Hiding Room. New York: Viking. Zatlin, L. G. (1981). The Nineteenth-Century AngloJewish Novel. Boston: Twayne.
Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer RALPH CRANE
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born in Cologne, Germany on May 7, 1927, and grew up in England after her Jewish family escaped Nazi Germany in 1939. Shortly after graduating from Queen Mary College, London in 1951 with an MA in English, she met and married Cyrus Jhabvala, and moved to India. She immediately immersed herself in her adopted country and began to write about both India and herself in India. Jhabvala’s first four novels – To Whom She Will (1955), The Nature of Passion (1956), Esmond in India (1958), and The Householder (1960) – are all domestic comedies revolving around the lives of urbanized middleclass Delhi families. While the first two novels are gentle comedies of manners in an Austenish mode, her third novel, Esmond in India, takes a darker direction with the first of the detailed studies of displaced Europeans in India that characterize her later Indian fictions. Following the publication of The Householder, a deft comedy of married life, she was approached by the filmmakers Ismail Merchant and James Ivory to write the screenplay for their adaptation of the novel, thus beginning an enduring collaboration that has produced over two dozen films and earned Jhabvala two Academy Awards. Jhabvala’s changed attitude toward India following her first trip back to Britain in 1960 is reflected in her next novel, Get Ready for Battle (1962), which moves away from domestic comedy to a much darker portrayal of India’s elephantine social problems. In her next three novels and her first two collections of stories she also moves
away from the interest in India that had hitherto marked her fiction to an interest in Europeans in India. In A Backward Place (1965), for example, she considers the effects India has on the three main female European characters in the novel. In A Stronger Climate (1968) all nine stories are concerned with Europeans in India, which is also the focus of many of her later stories, as well as her next two novels, A New Dominion (1972) and the Booker Prize-winning Heat and Dust (1975), which also reveal her intertextual interest in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924). During 25 years in India Jhabvala produced eight novels and four collections of short stories as well as a number of screenplays, all with Indian settings, that have earned her a reputation as a major writer of India. Her geographical shift to America in 1975 was mirrored by a shift in the geography of her fiction. Her next four novels – all set predominantly in America – explore in detail the sense of dislocation that Jhabvala, like so many of her European characters, has experienced. In Search of Love and Beauty (1983), which looks at a group of German and Austrian refugees in New York, is a cathartic book in which the novelist explores her European Jewish heritage. Three Continents (1987), her weakest and bleakest novel, examines once more the effects of India on the lives of Westerners, but without any fresh insights, while Poet and Dancer (1993), which continues the shift away from India as a location, again fails to achieve the heights she reached in her earlier fiction. In Shards of Memory (1995), however, Jhabvala returns to form. In this family saga of the Kopf and Keller families and their involvement with “the Master,” the latest of Jhabvala’s many dubious guru figures, the focus is less on whether or not “the Master” is a fraud, and more on the importance of family ties explored in all her American novels. East into Upper East (1998), a collection of stories written over two decades, focuses on the dislocation and cross-cultural themes that have characterized all her fiction to date. In the nine chapters of the quasi-autobiographical My Nine Lives (2004), Jhabvala deliberately blurs the boundary between autobiography and fiction, offering nine life stories, any of which she might have lived, though none is actually the story of her own life. Moving freely between Britain, America, and India, and focusing on European refugees
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who have escaped Nazi Germany as well as spiritual questers in India, this book is an engaging retrospective of Jhabvala’s career as a writer of fiction. SEE ALSO: Colonial Fiction (BIF); The Film Industry and Fiction (BIF); Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Forster, E. M. (BIF); Jewish Fiction (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Agarwal, R. G. (1990). Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: A Study of Her Fiction. New Delhi: Sterling. Crane, R. J. (ed.) (1991). Passages to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. New Delhi: Sterling. Crane, R. J. (1992). Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. New York: Twayne Gooneratne, Y. (1991). Silence, Exile and Cunning: The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 2nd edn. New Delhi: Orient Longman. Jhabvala, R. P. (1955). To Whom She Will. London: Allen and Unwin. (Published in US as Amrita.) Jhabvala, R. P. (1956). The Nature of Passion. London: Allen and Unwin. Jhabvala, R. P. (1958). Esmond in India. London: Allen and Unwin. Jhabvala, R. P. (1960). The Householder. London: John Murray. Jhabvala, R. P. (1962). Get Ready for Battle. London: John Murray. Jhabvala, R. P. (1963a). The Householder [screenplay] (dir. J. Ivory). Merchant Ivory. Jhabvala, R. P. (1963b). Like Birds, Like Fishes. London: John Murray. Jhabvala, R. P. (1965). A Backward Place. London: John Murray. Jhabvala, R. P. (1968). A Stronger Climate: Nine Stories. London: John Murray. Jhabvala, R. P. (1971). An Experience of India. London: John Murray. Jhabvala, R. P. (1972). A New Dominion. London: John Murray. (Published in US as Travelers.) Jhabvala, R. P. (1975). Heat and Dust. London: John Murray. Jhabvala, R. P. (1976). How I Became a Holy Mother and Other Stories. London: John Murray. Jhabvala, R. P. (1983). In Search of Love and Beauty. London: John Murray. Jhabvala, R. P. (1986). A Room with a View [screenplay] (dir. J. Ivory). Merchant Ivory. Jhabvala, R. P. (1987). Three Continents. London: John Murray.
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Jhabvala, R. P. (1992). Howards End [screenplay] (dir. J. Ivory). Merchant Ivory. Jhabvala, R. P. (1993). Poet and Dancer. London: John Murray. Jhabvala, R. P. (1995). Shards of Memory. London: John Murray. Jhabvala, R. P. (1998). East into Upper East: Plain Tales from New York and New Delhi. London: John Murray. Jhabvala, R. P. (2004). My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past. London: John Murray. Shahane, V. A. (1976). Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann. Sucher, Laurie (1989). The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: The Politics of Passion. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Williams, H. M. (1973). The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Calcutta: Writers Workshop.
Johnson, B. S. PHILIP TEW
Bryan Stanley Johnson was born in 1933 into a working-class west London family just six years before the outbreak of World War II. After graduating in English as a mature student at King’s College London in 1959, he was to become a controversial and versatile figure contributing widely to the literary and cultural scene in Britain in the 1960s and early 1970s variously as a novelist, poet, director of short films, television program maker, and journalist. Throughout his life he remained acutely aware of the class privilege that permeated British intellectual life and society more generally, combatively insisting on the creative worth of his artistic projects and his proletarian sensibilities. The war disrupted both his emotional development and his education; he was evacuated to High Wycombe, a phase obsessively described in Trawl, a Bildungsroman about Johnson’s introspection and evisceration of his life’s betrayals while on a trawler in the Barents Sea. Alienated and estranged, he focuses intensely upon the wartime separation from his mother and his self-centered account of his various relationships with women. Like almost all of his writing Johnson recounts actual experiences, combining technical innovation and close autobiographical detail. In B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading Philip Tew (2001) examines how this compulsion
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is repeated broadly in Johnson’s oeuvre. Even in an early story from Statement against Corpses, biographical experience dominates; “Clean Living is the Real Safeguard” describes the Blitz, its effect on ordinary Londoners, and, after the protagonist returns home from evacuation, how he slashes his wrists at school because of his rejection by a girl at the behest of her middle-class parents, a poignant act given Johnson’s eventual suicide. Another early story, “Shela-Na-Gig,” which is set in Lelyn, Wales, where Johnson spent summers as a mature student, describes driving to Dorset during which time he encounters the sheela-na-gig, a distinctly pagan representation of death and procreation. After picking up a female hitchhiker he undergoes an epiphany, sensing an elemental oneness. This hints at the lifelong interest in the occult and mysticism revealed in Jonathan Coe’s biography, Like a Fiery Elephant (2004), which details Johnson’s rumbustious qualities, and his emotional vulnerability. Johnson is now remembered as a significant postwar British experimental novelist. Each of his fictions attempts different strategies to approach what he imagined to be a complex, yet literal, verisimilitude. In his experimentation he drew upon the innovations of Laurence Sterne and was influenced by, variously, Rayner Heppenstall, the stylistic intensity of the postwar French scene with its existential philosophy, the nouveau roman, and New Wave cinema. Travelling People (1963) adopts multiple viewpoints and writing styles. A set of graying to black pages offers homage to Tristram Shandy. Albert Angelo (1964a), Johnson’s fictional account of supply teaching in north London, is typographically and narratively innovative: proleptic holes cut whimsically through two pages; columns for real-time dialogue, action and thought; and an apotheosis, or breakdown of the narrative when the author/narrator apparently abandons his project. Trawl (1966) intensifies the confessional and diary modes with sexual explicitness and description of the quotidian banalities that nevertheless cumulatively convey a sense of intensity. The next three novels confirmed Johnson’s avant garde status, each highly technically innovative, based on various conceits that are articulated partly through the typographical and physical layout of the book. The Unfortunates (1999 [1969]), a “book-in-a-box,” has unbound chap-
ters that, apart from “FIRST” and “LAST” (surely indicating the fixed coordinates of birth and death), can be shuffled in any order. Johnson here memorializes the life of Tony Tillinghast, a friend who had died of cancer. As the reader gradually realizes, Johnson recovers the past on a trip to report on a professional football match in Nottingham, where Tony had worked as an academic. The unusual formal aspects stress randomness and contingency. Variability of viewpoint provides the structural logic of House Mother Normal (1971a), in which, with differing levels of senility indicated by increasing blank spaces on the page, inmates of a residential home recount their experiences of abuse by the House Mother over the same day. Every one of their fragmentary narratives is allocated an equal number of pages, apart from the House Mother, whose description ends controversially with an abnormal act, that of coupling with her dog in an act of bestiality supposedly to entertain her elderly charges, or at least evoke some response. She alludes to being a puppet of the author, as does the eponymous hero of Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry (1973c). The latter’s plot concerns the resistance to authority by a disgruntled clerk, his career evoking Johnson’s own pre-university days when he worked as an accounts clerk, bank junior, and clerk at Standard Oil. Christie adapts the double-entry system to revenge himself on society for slights and diminishment of his rights, moving toward a one-man terror campaign. Johnson famously expounds his notion that the contemporary novel should be short, brutal, and full of archetypal confrontations symbolically rendered. Although not as literalist as previous novels, most of the action is rooted in events with personal or historical provenance, and such verisimilitude even includes the narrative’s reflections on various terror groups that characterized the social and political struggle after 1968, and the best way to manufacture Molotov cocktails. Johnson collaborated with Margaret Drabble to produce London Consequences (1972), a narrative combining unattributed chapters by 26 different novelists in a variety of styles, with a prize offered for anyone identifying the authorship of each one accurately. Johnson’s last novel, the first of an intended trilogy, was published posthumously. See the Old Lady Decently (1975b) is a memento mori, written after his
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mother’s death from cancer, seeming to celebrate, but more precisely to critique, her life and times from the viewpoint of the oppressed. Johnson reminds the reader of his or her mortality, rails against the historical repression of capitalist Britain and its imperialist endeavors, including the suppression of the unionists on General Strike and the cruel complacencies found in the colonies, in which the details of exact location are excised to convey the implacable and recurrent nature of imperial criminality. Academic interest in Johnson has much increased after the millennium. Johnson, who died in 1973, is still regarded by many as the quintessential British experimental or avant garde writer of his time. SEE ALSO: Coe, Jonathan (BIF); Critical Theory and the Novel (BIF); Drabble, Margaret (BIF); London in Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Coe, J. (2004). Like a Fiery Elephant: The Life of B. S. Johnson. London: Picador. Hassam, A. (1986). True Novel or Autobiography? The Case of B. S. Johnson’s Trawl. Prose Studies, 9(1), 62–72. Higdon, D. L. (2001). Johnson’s Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry. Explicator, 60(1), 49–52. Johnson, B. S. (1963). Travelling People. London: Constable. Johnson, B. S. (1964a). Albert Angelo. London: Constable. Johnson, B. S. (1964b). Poems. London: Constable. Johnson, B. S. (1966). Trawl. London: Secker and Warburg. Johnson, B. S. (1970). You’re Human Like the Rest of Them. In New English Dramatists 14. London: Penguin. Johnson, B. S. (1971a). House Mother Normal. London: Trigram. Johnson, B. S. (1971b). Instructions for the Use of Women; or, Here, You’ve Been Done. For Bolocks Please Read Blocks Throughout. Mean Point of Impact. In Penguin Modern Stories 7. London: Penguin, pp. 115–34. Johnson, B. S. (1972a). A Dublin Unicorn. Nottingham: Byron. Johnson, B. S. (1972b). Poems Two. London: Trigram. Johnson, B. S. (ed.) (1973a). All Bull: The National Servicemen. London: Allison and Busby.
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Johnson, B. S. (1973b). Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? London: Hutchinson. Johnson, B. S. (1973c). Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry. London: Collins. Johnson, B. S. (1973d). Everybody Knows Somebody Who’s Dead. London: Covent Garden. Johnson, B. S. (1974). Down Red Lane. Stand, 15(2), 8–18. Johnson, B. S. (1975a). B. S. Johnson. In Penguin Modern Poets 25: Gavin Ewart, Zulfikar Ghose, B. S. Johnson. London: Penguin, pp. 115–59. Johnson, B. S. (1975b). See the Old Lady Decently. London: Hutchinson. Johnson, B. S. (1999). The Unfortunates [1969], rev. edn. (ed. J. Coe). London: Picador. Johnson, B. S., & Drabble, M. (eds.) (1972). London Consequences. London: Greater London Arts Association. Johnson, B. S., & Ghose, Z. (1964). Statement against Corpses. London: Constable. Johnson, B. S. (1964). The Evacuees (photos by J. T. Oman). London: Hodder and Stoughton. Levitt, M. P.(1981–2). The Novels of B. S. Johnson: Against the War against Joyce. Modern Fiction Studies, 27(4), 571–86. Review of Contemporary Fiction (1985). B. S. Johnson/ Jean Rhys Number [special issue], 5(2). Tew, P. (2001). B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tew, P. (2002). B. S. Johnson. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 22(1), 7–58. Tew, P. (2005). B. S. Johnson and the BBC: The Initial Contacts. In C. Den Tandt (ed.), Reading without Maps: Cultural Landmarks in a Post-Canonical Age. Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang, pp. 119–33. Tew, P., & White, G. (eds.) (2007). Re-Reading B. S. Johnson. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Joyce, James MARGOT NORRIS
James Joyce was born in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin, Ireland, on February 2, 1882, and died in Zurich, Switzerland, on January 13, 1941. His father came from a well-to-do Cork family that invested him with the means and standing to consider himself “a gentleman.” A boisterous, entertaining character, he failed to develop a sustained career or profession. Joyce’s mother was a cultured, even-tempered woman whose efforts to maintain her family in middle-class comfort and respectability were eroded by
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sustained pregnancies and debts that consumed her husband’s legacy and drove the family into deeper and deeper poverty. By the time Joyce was 12 years old, the family had 10 surviving children, 11 mortgages, and no remaining property. As the eldest child, James Joyce felt the family decline in his own fortunes. An early beginning at a prestigious Jesuit boarding school led to a poverty-stricken adolescence, marked by evictions to more and more squalid quarters and the death of a beloved brother from typhoid. The family’s ambitions for his education nonetheless managed to keep Joyce in Jesuit schools, and his education at Belvedere College (1893–8) and University College Dublin (1898–1902) trained him in the Latin classics and in the rigors of scholastic thinking. He supplemented his formal education with wide reading in Continental literature available at the Capel Street library, which exposed him to a tradition of progressive literary realism that influenced his own writing. An unsuccessful sojourn in Paris to study medicine was interrupted by his mother’s terminal illness and death, and Joyce spent the next year in desultory activity which included a brief stay at the Martello Tower with his friend Oliver St. John Gogarty. He was saved from this spiritual vagrancy by meeting a young Galway woman named Nora Barnacle with whom he first “went walking” on June 16, 1904 – a date later memorialized as the day on which the action of his novel Ulysses is set. The relationship resulted in an ill-planned elopement to the Continent that eventually saw the couple settled first in Pola, and then in Trieste on Italy’s Adriatic coast. During the next decade, Joyce worked as an instructor for the Berlitz language school, a position for which his university study in modern languages had prepared him well. Although Nora’s adjustment was more difficult, the city, whose cosmopolitan population of eastern and western Europeans gave it a lively intellectual and political complexity, suited Joyce well. Although he had begun writing and publishing stories while still in Dublin, the Trieste period allowed him time to undertake serious and sustained writing even as his domestic life was eventful and sometimes rocky. Joyce drank heavily and, like his father, incurred debt. His brother Stanislaus eventually joined him and Nora and 1905 saw the birth of their son Giorgio. Later, two of Joyce’s sisters
also joined them. In the midst of this lively domestic scene – stabilized by Stanislaus’s responsible management – Joyce finished the stories for his collection called Dubliners and his autobiographical novel, Stephen Hero, which became A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce’s first publication, a small book of poetry titled Chamber Music, appeared in 1907. Two other collections of poetry were published in later years, Pomes Pennyeach in 1927 and Collected Poems in 1937. Joyce also wrote a study of love titled Giacomo Joyce during his early Trieste period, and later produced a series of articles for the Triestine newspaper Il Piccolo della Serra. In spite of an early book contract for Dubliners, publication was delayed for years by wrangles over censorship issues with Joyce’s publisher. These frustrations, among others, inspired a brief, unsuccessful relocation to Rome, a sojourn that led to the conception of a daughter, Lucia, and Joyce’s conception of the story “The Dead,” and the germ for what would later become his novel Ulysses. A productive period ensued after the family’s return to Trieste, and, by the end of 1913, Joyce’s luck turned with the tides of modern literary history. Joyce was contacted by the poet Ezra Pound, the informal talent scout and fundraiser for innovative writers, who had heard about Joyce from the poet W. B. Yeats. Pound encouraged Joyce to send his work to the “little magazines” that were then publishing experimental writing, and soon chapters of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man appeared in The Egoist. In 1914 Dubliners was published at last, but war was breaking out in Europe, and by 1915 the Joyces, whose Irish nationality made them British citizens, relocated to neutral Switzerland for the duration of World War I. The family spent four years in Zurich, a city with a lively avant garde theater scene – important to Joyce, a great lover of drama who had written a play called Exiles during his Trieste years. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published in 1916, and Joyce turned in earnest to his sprawling new novel, Ulysses. When the war ended in 1918, the Joyces returned to Trieste but found the postwar city uncongenial. At Pound’s suggestion they moved to Paris, a haven for expatriate writers. There they quickly assembled a circle of friends and colleagues that included Sylvia Beach, whose bookstore and lending library –
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Shakespeare and Company – came to Joyce’s rescue when obscenity concerns made commercial publication of his new novel unlikely. Beach offered to bring the book out and the first copies of Ulysses came off the press on Joyce’s fortieth birthday, February 2, 1922. The novel’s publication made Joyce a celebrity and encouraged him to launch a new, even more outrageously experimental work whose title, kept secret for many years, would be Finnegans Wake. Since Ulysses remained banned for obscenity in much of the English-speaking world during these years, Joyce earned few royalties, and depended for support on bequests and endowments from a generous patron named Harriet Shaw Weaver. The 1920s in Paris proved to be a heady, troubled time for Joyce. Bouts of eye inflammation, first experienced in Trieste, required a series of painful eye surgeries. They were largely unsuccessful and Joyce began losing his sight. The avant garde extravagance of “Work in Progress,” as Finnegans Wake was called before its publication, aroused deep skepticism and defection among some of Joyce’s most ardent supporters, including Ezra Pound. But new circles of friends and disciples replaced the doubters, including the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, and Eugene and Maria Jolas who eventually published segments of “Work in Progress” in their journal transition. To further strengthen support for the work they joined Beckett in assembling a collection of essays published in 1929 under the title of Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. The American poet William Carlos Williams also contributed to the volume. Joyce’s family life was troubled by the increasing instability of his daughter Lucia, whose schizophrenic symptoms were unsuccessfully treated by a series of psychiatrists. But there were happy events as well. Joyce’s son Giorgio married, and a grandson, Stephen, was born. And Joyce and Nora were themselves finally married in London in 1931, an action that legally secured inheritances for their progeny. In 1933 a favorable court decision by Judge John M. Woolsey of the United States District Court of New York cleared Ulysses of charges of obscenity and allowed for its publication by Random House Press. But the political storm clouds gathering in Europe in the 1930s proved threatening to Joyce and the extended Jewish family, by
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marriage, of his son. Finnegans Wake was completed and its publication celebrated at a lavish party for Joyce’s forty-seventh birthday on February 2, 1939. But before the end of the following year, the Joyces had left Paris for Zurich, desperately worried about the safety of their institutionalized daughter. They arrived in Zurich in December 1940 and less than a month later, Joyce was dead, from peritonitis following surgery for a perforated ulcer. Joyce’s works reflected his life, his times, and his varied cultures both in their themes and in their aesthetic aims and development. Late Victorian and turn-of-the century Ireland placed him in a country whose quasi-colonial status gave it representation in the British parliament but little control over its own affairs. As a result Ireland suffered economic stagnation, rural and urban poverty, and a sense of oppression that led to a Home Rule movement ultimately frustrated by the Catholic Church’s role in the downfall of Charles Stewart Parnell, the country’s best hope for independence through parliamentary negotiation. Joyce’s Dubliners stories reflect the national despondency following this failure as a condition of paralysis that called less for political agitation against England than an unflinching self-examination. In this respect Joyce departed from the aims of Irish cultural nationalism – the movement known as the Celtic Revival whose recovery of the Gaelic language and of Irish myth and folklore he regarded as parochial and backward-looking. Inspired by the realism of Ibsen’s drama, Dubliners offers stories of schoolboy yearning, of entrapment by duty and responsibility, oppressive working conditions, the degradation of patriotism, the ravage of families by alcoholism. The last story in the collection, “The Dead,” thematizes the ambiguous clash between Irish revival insularity and the protagonist’s look toward the Continent for cultural sustenance. Joyce characterized his prose in these stories as a style of “scrupulous meanness.” Influenced, like Pound, by the style of Gustave Flaubert, Joyce adopted a mode of writing in clean, dry, hard prose that exemplified the modernists’ repudiation of the opulent emotional language they attributed to romanticism. Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man also resorts to another tenet of modernism – classicism – to frame its K€unstlersroman, its semiautobiographical
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account of a sensitive boy growing up in Dublin with aesthetic aspirations. By naming its protagonist Stephen Dedalus, the novel evokes the myth of Icarus, the son of the artist Dedalus whose winged escape from ancient Crete was aborted by flying too close to the sun, melting the wax that held his wings together. The classical superstructure endows the story of young Dedalus’s struggles to free himself from the squalor of poverty, and from the oppressive constraints of the Catholic Church, with universal significance. A Portrait also offers moments of enlightenment and self-recognition, termed “epiphany” by Joyce, as antidotes to the paralysis of Dublin life. Stylistically, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man exhibits an imitative form of writing that expresses the stages of Stephen Dedalus’s artistic development in a changing play of language reflective of his evolving consciousness. Childhood is narrated in simple prose, the romantic longings of early adolescence in lyrical language, the rigorous scholasticism of the university phase in erudite expression. A final series of diary entries ending the novel make it clear that the shifting narrative styles represented aesthetic simulations rather than actual representations of Stephen’s consciousness. A Portrait ends with Stephen Dedalus, like Icarus, attempting to escape his island home for the Continent. Joyce’s next novel, Ulysses, begins with Stephen Dedalus returned to Dublin, living in desolate aimlessness following the death of his mother. In Ulysses both the thematic enactment of classical mythology and the experiments with stylistic imitation undergo a dramatic enlargement and expansion. Set in 1904 Dublin, Ulysses is structured in correspondence with Homer’s classic epic, the Odyssey, although the precise relation of each chapter to an Odyssean adventure became apparent only thanks to a schema Joyce sent to his Italian translator, Carlo Linati. The story of Homer’s voyager, who must overcome tremendous obstacles with wit and courage, is invested in the unlikely figure of a 38-year-old Jewish advertising canvasser named Leopold Bloom. Joyce’s early love of drama recrudesces in the novel’s classical unity of time, place, and action. Set on a single specific day, June 16, 1904 in Dublin, the action consists of the movements and interactions not only of the protagonists – Bloom, his wife Marion (Molly), and Stephen Dedalus – but also
of a considerable portion of the city’s colorful population. The variations from the Odyssey are as intriguing as the correspondences. Bloom’s obstacles and crises are as much psychological as they are social. He must come to terms with grief over the loss of his infant son, the suicide of his father, and the infidelity of his wife who, unlike the faithful Penelope of the classic, initiates an adulterous affair with her impresario on this day. Bloom also encounters prejudice and anti-Semitism, while Stephen Dedalus, still trying to realize a vocation as an artist, finds himself excluded from the Irish literary and intellectual milieu. The city of Dublin is represented with what has been called “documentary” realism not only for its historically verifiable addresses, buildings, and institutions, but also for the historical personages mixed in with its fictional figures. This creates an effect of tremendous vitality, as its citizens, on the move, visit shops, school, post office, public bath, church, cemetery, newspaper office, library, museum, pubs and eateries, beach, hospital, and house of prostitution. Ulysses owed its notoriety not only to features of its content but also to the conspicuous experiments in style that produced a dizzying variety of narrative voices. The style of narration, changing virtually chapter by chapter, confronts the reader with considerable difficulty. The early episodes are told by an impersonal voice that nonetheless moves in and out of the minds of protagonists whose thoughts are reported in the process of shaping and expressing. In addition to this “stream of consciousness,” Joyce also produces a variant of the imitative style introduced in A Portrait by having the narration reflect themes, settings, and Homeric correspondences. The episode reporting Bloom’s visit to the newspaper office is divided into sections introduced by captions or “headlines,” for example, as well as windy rhetoric befitting Aeolus, the keeper of the winds. The episode corresponding to the lure of the siren song tempting Odysseus and his men highlights the musical qualities of the narrative prose, beginning with an “overture” that gives each character a musical leitmotif. The episode set in the Holles Street Maternity Hospital recapitulates the evolving styles of English literary history in mimicry of the embryonic development of a fetus. The final episode is produced by the irrepressible and lively thoughts of Molly Bloom in bed, as she
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revisits her day and her past. The novel ends with her memory of the moment of love on Howth Hill when she offered an affirmative “yes I said yes I will Yes” to her husband’s proposal and to life itself. The difficulty of reading Ulysses is eclipsed by the challenges posed by Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s last work. Its title, inspired by an Irish ballad of a dead hod carrier who is revived by a splash of whiskey during his wake, points to death and resurrection as overall themes of the work. But the phantasmagoric character of the writing – reminiscent of the hallucinatory brothel episode in Ulysses – departs dramatically from the realism of Joyce’s earlier texts. The book is without stable characters, setting, or actions. Everything is so fluid and multiple that everything is indeterminate. Although there appears to be a family at the heart of the work – possibly named Earwicker and consisting of mother, father, twin sons, and daughter – nothing is certain about them including their names, numbers, or species. The mother – Anna Livia Plurabelle, as she is designated – may be old or young, or a hen, or the river Liffey. Her husband may be a pub-keeper, or a mythic giant, or the landscape of Dublin itself. The children, twin sons who are enemies and a daughter who is also sometimes doubled, variously take form as tree, stone, cloud, or rainbow. There are transgressions and sins at issue, including aggression and possible incest, but trials and inquests fail to clarify them. Like Ulysses, the work has mythic resonances although these too are multiple. Genesis, the Stations of the Cross, the Oedipus myth, Irish mythology, all play structural roles. Joyce talked of the Wake as a “night” work, and the analogue of dream – particularly Freudian dream – offers arguably the best analytical tool for making sense of its seeming nonsense. This nonsense also permeates the language, whose words are multiple, interlaced with other words and meanings reminiscent of the “portmanteau words” in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. The Wake’s language layers its English with words from many other languages, creating a universalizing effect. Joyce’s influence on later twentieth-century literature and culture has been enormous, as has been his appeal to common readers. He has had an impact not only on such Irish writers as Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien, but also on a much wider international field. Vladimir Nabokov and
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Umberto Eco reflect Joyce’s influence in their word play, puns and puzzles, and historical and arcane trivia. The Latin American writers strongly influenced by Joyce include Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina, Pablo Neruda of Chile, and Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz of Mexico. Anthony Burgess, Salman Rushdie, and J. M. Coetzee gloss Joyce significantly in their work. The British playwright Tom Stoppard’s 1974 play Travesties features Joyce’s conflict with an English consular official during a staging of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in Zurich. Joyce’s writing also provided instructive study for such influential late twentieth-century critical theorists as Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. In 1979, the American composer John Cage produced an avant garde piece of music titled Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on “Finnegans Wake.” Film adaptations of Joyce’s work include an early cinematic version of Finnegans Wake by the film animator Mary Ellen Bute, as well as ambitious adaptations of Ulysses by Joseph Strick (1967) and Sean Walsh (2003). The Strick film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1967. The famous American director John Huston filmed the Dubliners story “The Dead” in 1987. A film titled Nora, produced by Pat Murphy in 2000, is based on the biography of Joyce’s wife by Brenda Maddox. The International James Joyce Foundation, established in 1967, sponsors an international symposium on Joyce’s work every two years, generally in a European city. In alternating years a North American Joyce conference is held in the US or Canada. In addition, Joyce study groups formed by common nonacademic readers meet regularly all over the world. SEE ALSO: Beckett, Samuel (BIF); Censorship and the Novel (BIF); Critical Theory and the Novel (BIF); Irish Fiction (BIF); Little Magazines (AF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); O’Brien, Flann (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Atherton, J. S. (1959). The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake.” Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Attridge, D. (2000). Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory, and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Beck, W. (1969). Joyce’s “Dubliners”: Substance, Vision, and Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Beja, M. (1992). James Joyce: A Literary Life. Columbus: Ohio University Press. Bishop, J. (1986). Joyce’s Book of the Dark: “Finnegans Wake.” Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Brivic, S. (1985). Joyce the Creator. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Brown, R. (1988). James Joyce and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Budgen, F. (1973). James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses.” Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Campbell, J., & Robinson, H. M. (1969). A Skeleton Key to “Finnegans Wake.” New York: Viking. Cheng, V. (1995). Joyce, Race, and Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Devlin, K. J. (1991). Wandering and Return in “Finnegans Wake.” Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ellmann, R. (1983). James Joyce, rev. edn. New York: Oxford University Press. Gifford, D. (1982). Notes for “Dubliners” and “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” 2nd edn. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gifford, D. (with Seidman, R. J.) (1989). “Ulysses” Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” rev. and expanded edn. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gilbert, S. (1952). James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” New York: Vintage. Gillespie, M. P. (1989). Reading the Book of Himself. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Groden, M. (1977). Ulysses in Progress. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Henke, S. A. (1990). James Joyce and the Politics of Desire. New York: Routledge. Joyce, J. (1963). Stephen Hero [1944]. New York: New Directions. Joyce, J. (1986). Ulysses [1922] (ed. H. W. Gabler with W. Steppe & C. Melchior). New York: Vintage. Joyce, J. (1999). Finnegans Wake [1939]. New York: Penguin. Joyce, J. (2006a). Dubliners [1914] (ed. M. Norris). New York: Norton.
Joyce, J. (2006b). Exiles [1918]. London: Nick Hern. Joyce, J. (2007). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1916] (ed. J. P. Riquelme). New York: Norton. Joyce, S. (1958). My Brother’s Keeper. New York: Viking. Kenner, H. (1979). Joyce’s Voices. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kenner, H. (1987). Ulysses, rev. edn. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kershner, R. B. (1989). Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Killeen, T. (2004). “Ulysses” Unbound. Bray: Wordwell. Lawrence. (1981). The Odyssey of Style in “Ulysses.” Princeton: Princeton University Press. Leonard, G. (1993). Reading “Dubliners” Again: A Lacanian Perspective. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Maddox, B. (1988). Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Mahaffey, V. (1995). Reauthorizing Joyce. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. McCarthy, P. A. (1980). The Riddles of “Finnegans Wake.” Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses. McHugh, R. (1991). Annotations to “Finnegans Wake,” rev. edn. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Norris, M. (1992). Joyce’s Web. Austin: University of Texas Press. Norris, M. (2003). Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s “Dubliners.” Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Riquelme, J. P. (1983). Teller and Tale in Joyce’s Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Scott, B. K. (1984). Joyce and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Senn, Fritz. (1984). Joyce’s Dislocutions (ed. J. P. Riquelme). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Shechner, M. (1974). Joyce in Nighttown. Berkeley: University of California Press. Valente, J. (1995). James Joyce and the Problem of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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K Kelman, James STEPHEN BERNSTEIN
A central figure in contemporary Scottish literature, James Kelman is the author of plays, polemics, and essays, but his most important work is found in his short stories and novels. Since his earliest work, Kelman has focused his fiction on the characters, dialogue, and events of everyday working-class life. In the process he has created a version of literary realism that makes revolutionary use of point of view and free indirect speech to limn the psyches of its narrators and protagonists, a group whose central condition is alienation. Kelman’s approach to plot is spare, with the small, yet personally meaningful, events of daily experience standing in for larger, potentially melodramatic, drama. Along with downplaying major events, he shuns traditional strategies of closure and resolution, so that his narratives typically break off rather than end. Taken together, these tactics govern a body of work that refuses to engage in the practices by which the great majority of stories and novels are written. Yet Kelman’s fiction is composed in a pioneering mode replete with interest, conviction, and feeling. Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, and Ernest Hemingway are all important influences on his work, but his achievement is uniquely his own, and has in turn become an important touchstone for a generation of younger Scottish writers such as Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, and Duncan McLean. Kelman was born in Glasgow in 1946 to a father with a picture-framing business and a mother who stayed home with the family’s five boys. With
a distaste for the academic classic, he left school at 16 and concentrated on reading the literature that appealed to him, taking whatever work he could find. In 1969 he married Marie Connors, a social worker, and at about this time he became involved in a writing group at Glasgow University. The group’s organizer and mentor, Philip Hobsbaum, helped Kelman make the connection that led to his first book, the short story collection An Old Pub Near the Angel (1973). Kelman’s first five books and pamphlets, from the early 1970s to the early 1980s, are collections of short stories, a literary form that has had continuing appeal for him even as he has concentrated on novel-writing since the mid-1980s. His stories are typically brief, focusing on only a few moments or hours in the life of a protagonist (frequently also the narrator). From his earliest stories Kelman employs his characteristic point of view, shifting suddenly (often within a single paragraph or even sentence) from third to first person or, occasionally, between first and second person. The effect of these shifts is to intensify the reader’s sense of a character’s experience, as the language and perspective particular to a single consciousness underline broader observations. Glaswegian working-class dialect is also a staple in Kelman’s work, depending more on phoneticized spellings than the inclusion of dialect words. After his first book Kelman dispensed with quotation marks in dialogue, furthering the seamlessness of integration among his narrative elements. With The Busconductor Hines (1984) Kelman began to publish novels, and the 15 years from
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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1984 through 2008 saw him publish seven novels to only four short story collections. While the novel obviously affords him a broader temporal and geographic canvas on which to work, it also allows him to deepen his exploration of the individual within a complex cultural and economic milieu. In his first three novels, The Busconductor Hines, A Chancer (1985), and A Disaffection (1989), Kelman examines the lives of a trio of young male protagonists caught up in the difficulty of living a satisfying life within the limited opportunities available to them. Rab Hines, the protagonist of the first novel, and Patrick Doyle, the protagonist of A Disaffection, are particularly philosphical about their plights, establishing a strong existentialist undertow in their narratives. Critical attention to Kelman’s work increased during this period, with A Disaffection shortlisted for Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize, and winning Scotland’s James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 1994 Kelman published How Late It Was, How Late, recounting a week in the life of Sammy Samuels, a Glaswegian existing on the fringes of the economy who goes blind after a police beating and spends the novel negotiating the terms of his new condition. Tremendous controversy erupted when the novel was awarded the Booker Prize, with one judge disparaging its use of dialect and expletives. Kelman’s acceptance speech was a blistering riposte to those who would equate polite language and literary quality. Since How Late Kelman’s novels have become more varied in approach and voice, while continuing his long-term project of examining the varieties of modern social, political, and economic alienation. Translated Accounts (2001) is a radically experimental attempt to render texts supposed to have originated from interrogations in a territory under martial law. The resulting documents, rife with omissions and lines of junk characters, recount atrocities in a form even more open-ended than usual in Kelman’s work. You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free (2004) is the lengthy internal monologue of Jeremiah Brown as he spends an evening in a pair of American bars, thinking over his 12 years in the US prior to a planned return to Scotland the following morning. With mixed humor and pathos, Brown reflects on the numerous misunderstandings, humiliations, and small victories
of being other on American soil. Kieron Smith, Boy (2008) is a masterful first-person account of the world of its eponymous protagonist as he encounters increasingly complicated networks of children, adults, and social institutions in the changing Glasgow of the 1950s. The novel’s monologue represents a new direction for Kelman as he modulates its qualities in correspondence with Kieron’s age during the lengthy narrative. The result is arguably Kelman’s most touching and tender work. SEE ALSO: Politics and the Novel (BIF); Scottish Fiction (BIF); Working-Class Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bernstein, S. (2000). James Kelman. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 20(3), 42–79. Jackson, E., & Maley, W. (eds.) (2001). Kelman and Commitment. Edinburgh Review, 108, 21–122. Kelman, J. (1973). An Old Pub Near the Angel and Other Stories. Orono, ME: Puckerbush. Kelman, J. (1983). Not Not While the Giro and Other Stories. Edinburgh: Polygon. Kelman, J. (1984). The Busconductor Hines. Edinburgh: Polygon. Kelman, J. (1985). A Chancer. Edinburgh: Polygon. Kelman, J. (1987). Greyhound for Breakfast. London: Secker and Warburg. Kelman, J. (1989). A Disaffection. London: Secker and Warburg. Kelman, J. (1991). The Burn: Stories. London: Secker and Warburg. Kelman, J. (1992). Some Recent Attacks: Essays Cultural and Political. Stirling: AK Press. Kelman, J. (1994). How Late It Was, How Late. London: Secker and Warburg. Kelman, J. (1999). The Good Times. London: Secker and Warburg. Kelman, J. (2001). Translated Accounts: A Novel. London: Secker and Warburg. Kelman, J. (2002). “And The Judges Said . . .”: Essays. London: Secker and Warburg. Kelman, J. (2004). You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free. London: Hamish Hamilton. Kelman, J. (2008). Kieron Smith, Boy. London: Hamish Hamilton. Kelman, J., Owens, A., & Gray, A. (1985). Lean Tales. London: Jonathan Cape. K€ ovesi, S. (2007). James Kelman. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
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KENNEDY, A. L.
Kennedy, A. L. KAYE MITCHELL
Alison Kennedy was born in Dundee on October 22, 1965. While doing a BA in theater studies at Warwick University (1983–6), she began writing dramatic monologues and scripts, and she has since produced a diverse array of work to great critical acclaim and increasing commercial success. In addition to her novels and short stories, Kennedy has written two non-fiction books (on bullfighting and the Powell and Pressburger film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp); a play (The Audition) for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and scripts for live performances (both theater/devised pieces and dance) and for film (Stella Does Tricks, 1998); and innumerable journalistic pieces on the arts and on politics. As well as receiving numerous prizes for her own work and being listed twice (1993 and 2003) as one of Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists,” she has served as a judge of the Booker Prize, the Guardian First Book Prize, and the Orange Prize. Recently, she has collaborated with Scottish musicians for the Ballads of the Book album (2007) and has turned her hand to stand-up comedy, doing onewoman shows in comedy clubs in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Critical writings on Kennedy tend to position her as one of a number of Scottish authors – including James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, Janice Galloway, and others – who have formed part of the “renaissance” of Scottish literature since the publication of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark in 1981. Yet Kennedy herself presents her identity and nationality in a decidedly ambivalent way, claiming that: “My nationality is beaten together from a mongrel mix of Scots, Welsh, Scots-Irish and Midland English. Because I love Scotland I will always seek to write about it as enough of an outsider to see it clearly” (Bell 102). The explanation is a telling one, because Kennedy’s work evinces a notable fascination with outsiders: the marginalized, lonely, and dispossessed within society. This is perhaps most in evidence in her first collection of short stories, Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains (1990), which brought her immediate critical attention and was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Saltire Society Book of the Year Award. These are stories of
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ostensibly “small lives” and relationships, of the minor epiphanies of everyday life; yet what Kennedy seeks to reveal is the vastness of the inner lives of her characters, the richness of emotion behind the facade of banality, the uncanny strangeness of the apparently familiar. In the title story, a woman discovers her husband’s infidelity by chance, returning home after her train to work fails to appear; all the trains go to Garscadden. She takes a knife from the kitchen, means to kill him, but doesn’t. These are seismic changes for her, but invisible to the outside world. The perilous potential of the domestic sphere and the fraught nature of intimacy are recurrent themes here; both “Translations’ and “The Moving House” treat of sexual abuse, sensitively representing the confusion and trauma of the victims. Kennedy’s documenting of such lives is always humane, stressing their largeness, however they might appear. The narrator of “The role of notable silences in Scottish history” notes “the huge, invisible, silent roar of all the people who are too small to record,” (1990, 64), while the wronged wife of “Night Geometry” opines: “We have small lives, easily lost in foreign droughts, or famines . . . This is not enough” (34). Keenly alert to the ways in which official histories neglect or pass over the lives of ordinary people, Kennedy’s own stories are compensatory, bringing such lives to light, while also frequently reveling in their oddness. Now That You’re Back (1994) reprises some of the themes of Night Geometry, but is more obviously adventurous in its use of disparate styles, genres, and narrative voices. Alongside the familiarly bleak yet empathetic stories of a sexual abuse victim forced into prostitution (“Friday Payday”), religious fundamentalist parents attempting to “purify” their son (“A Perfect Possession”), and two brothers nurturing a third after some kind of breakdown (“Now That You’re Back”), we find a humorous take on discipleship in “On Having More Sense,” as a wise man preaches on the greater wisdom of penguins, and a macabre parody of Southern Gothic in “Mixing with the Folks Back Home” as a mother writes to her daughter explaining that her father is not her real father, but in fact a serial killer. In between these two collections, Kennedy produced her first novel, Looking for the Possible Dance (1993), a simple but lyrical portrait of a Scottish girl, Margaret, who struggles to deal with
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her grief for her beloved father, recently dead, and her difficult relationship with her boyfriend Colin – and with Scotland. The novel is structured around her train journey from Scotland to London, as she reflects on her life, relationships, and aspirations, and its ending evinces a quiet but inconclusive optimism. Kennedy writes vividly and unsettlingly about love, sex (often of the dark and perverse variety), and the bliss (romantic, sexual, or religious) that threatens to undo identity. Thus Jennifer in So I Am Glad (1995) becomes embroiled in a romantic relationship with a man who may be a reincarnated Cyrano de Bergerac – or merely a homeless junkie; Helen Brindle in “Original Bliss” (a novella, in Original Bliss, 1997) flees an abusive marriage to be with a famous self-help guru with a pornography addiction – all of this underscored by a turbulent religious faith of the most orgasmic kind. The stories of Indelible Acts (2002) document sundry intimacies and infidelities, with the narrator of the title story expressing her desire for “something to stay with me . . ., for marks, for brands in the memory, indelible acts,” to remind her of her encounters with her married lover (115); the violence of this sexual imagery is not unusual in Kennedy’s work. Everything You Need (1999), arguably Kennedy’s most ambitious novel, but the one that has most divided reviewers, tackles the subject of the writing life itself. It centers on a group of writers on a remote island, wrestling with questions of faith, love, and suicide, and on the relationship between Mary, an aspirant writer, and Nathan, an established writer and (unbeknownst to her) her father. The eroticizing of the father–daughter relationship and of Nathan’s two suicide attempts showcases Kennedy’s attraction to difficult subject matter, where sex and death are intriguingly inextricable. This point is borne out in Paradise (2004), the confessional first-person narrative of Hannah Luckcraft, an alcoholic whose life is spiraling out of control as she drinks to ward off the awareness that “reality – there’s nothing but horror in that” (309). The increasingly surreal, fragmentary nature of the narrative mimics Hannah’s blackouts and hallucinations, her growing paranoia. It is Kennedy’s most recent novel, Day (2007), that has brought her to the attention of a wider readership. This atypical historical novel (using
an unconventional combination of third- and second-person narration) about a World War II RAF serviceman and ex-prisoner of war, is a subtle investigation of questions of history, class, and memory and a tacit expression of Kennedy’s own pacifism. It won her the Costa Book Award in 2008, and suggests that her reputation and appeal continue to grow. SEE ALSO: Postmodernist Fiction (BIF); Scottish Fiction (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bell, I. A. (ed.) (1995). Peripheral Visions: Images of Nationhood in Contemporary British Fiction. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Kennedy, A. L. (1990). Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains. Edinburgh: Polygon. Kennedy, A. L. (1993). Looking for the Possible Dance. London: Secker and Warburg. Kennedy, A. L. (1994). Now That You’re Back. London: Vintage. Kennedy. A. L. (1995). So I Am Glad. London: Vintage. Kennedy, A. L. (1997). Original Bliss. London: Vintage. Kennedy, A. L. (1999). Everything You Need. London: Vintage. Kennedy, A. L. (2002). Indelible Acts. London: Vintage. Kennedy, A. L. (2004). Paradise. London: Vintage. Kennedy, A. L. (2007). Day. London: Vintage. March, C. L. (2002). Rewriting Scotland. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mitchell, K. (2007). A. L. Kennedy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Norquay, G. (2005). Partial to Intensity: The Novels of A. L. Kennedy. In J. Acheson & S. Ross (eds.), The Contemporary British Novel Since 1980. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 142–153. Stoddart, H. (2005). Tongues of Bone: A. L. Kennedy and the Problems of Articulation. In N. Bentley (ed.), British Fiction in the 1990s. London: Routledge, pp. 135–149.
Kiely, Benedict THOMAS O’GRADY
Benedict Kiely wrote prolifically from the mid1940s almost until his death in 2007. His reputation may ultimately rest on his short stories and
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his one novella, but he also wrote nine novels between 1946 and 1985 that established him during his lifetime as a substantial Irish man of letters. His other books include an analysis of the sectarian divide that defined life in his native Northern Ireland during his formative years, a critical study of nineteenth-century Irish novelist and short story writer William Carleton, a critical study of the Irish novel in the first half of the twentieth century, two volumes of memoirs, and a selection of miscellaneous essays written throughout his six-decade career. He also wrote an account of his rambling travels around Ireland, and he compiled and edited several books centered on the importance of specific place in Irish experience and in the Irish imagination. Born on August 15, 1919 in a townland of the County Tyrone village of Dromore, Kiely grew up in the nearby town of Omagh. Graduating in 1936 from the Christian Brothers School in Omagh, he left Northern Ireland in 1937 for the Irish Free State (later the Republic of Ireland) with the intention of studying for the priesthood at the Jesuit novitiate in County Laois; forced by a back ailment to abandon his clerical studies, he spent 18 months in a sanatorium in Dublin. His religious calling aborted, Kiely matriculated at University College Dublin, where he received a bachelor’s degree in history, Latin, and English in 1943. Parlaying his degree and his earlier freelance writing into a series of newspaper positions in Dublin, he settled in the city that would be his permanent home and also the vantage point from which he would take his literary measure of Ireland. The common denominator among Kiely’s novels is their depiction of darker aspects of Irish life and the Irish psyche. Set in and around Omagh, his first two novels, Land without Stars (1946) and In a Harbour Green (1949), expose and explore the bleakness of provincial life in a British barracks town around the time of World War II. Kiely would return to Omagh and environs in his fiction throughout his career, especially in his short stories, but his next six novels are mostly set elsewhere in Ireland. Reflecting his solid establishment in Dublin, Kiely set his third novel, Call for a Miracle (1950a), in the Irish capital, a tangled world of broken bodies and damaged souls (devout believers, jaded journalists, jejune college students, displaced rural innocents). He
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followed this with Honey Seems Bitter (1952), a combined murder mystery, love story, and psychological exploration (tellingly, it was republished in New York in 1954 under the title The Evil Men Do). Banned by the Censorship of Publications Board, this novel gained Kiely desirable notoriety in conservative mid-century Ireland, elevating his stature among serious readers and his fellow writers alike. In The Cards of the Gambler (1953), Kiely employs a Donegal folk tale with Faustian overtones to frame a tour de force elaboration on the universal themes of literature (and of life) – good vs. evil, faith vs. doubt, mortality vs. eternity – featuring along the way cardsharping, soul-selling, lashings of drink, adultery, and death-defying acts of bravery. He followed this entertaining novel with There was an Ancient House (1955), which builds on the author’s personal experience in the Jesuit novitiate to explore the conflict between the needs of the spirit and the temptations of the flesh. In The Captain with the Whiskers (1960), set among recognizable landmarks but in a composite landscape of his native County Tyrone and neighboring County Derry, Kiely engages with the troubling issue of dysfunction in a family suffering both emotional and physical abuse inflicted by a domineering patriarch. In Dogs Enjoy the Morning (1968), Kiely turns to the heart of the country, a lusterless Midlands village called Cosmona, to explode the myth of Ireland’s sexual prudery. Despite its name deriving from the Irish cos mhona (bank of turf), Cosmona is no mere land of canal-side bogtrotters, but a vital “cosmos” unto itself which retains more than a trace of its earlier monastic name: Insula Viventium, the Island of the Living. In 1977, Kiely published Proxopera: A Tale of Modern Ireland, arguably his most enduring work. Dramatizing the dilemma of a retired schoolteacher whose family is held hostage by nationalist terrorists to his completing a “proxy operation” – the delivery to a nearby town of a bomb hidden in a milk can – this novella is infused from start to finish with righteous anger. Clearly, Kiely believes that the aggression of paramilitary groups from either side of the sectarian divide in Northern Ireland constitutes not just a broadly moral transgression but also a personal transgression against the decent individuals and families who make up the general populace of the politically troubled province. His final novel, Nothing
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Happens in Carmincross (1985b), presents a variation on that theme. Reworking a real-life incident he recounted in his travelogue All the Way to Bantry Bay (1978a), Kiely centers his narrative on an Irishman returning to Northern Ireland from America for his niece’s wedding: the ceremony never takes place as, posting the last of her invitations, the bride gets blown to pieces by a bomb planted in a mailbox. Kiely also published four collections of short stories: A Journey to the Seven Streams (1963), A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly (1973), A Cow in the House (1978b), and A Letter to Peachtree (1987). Drawing heavily on the author’s boyhood years in Omagh and environs, the stories reflect his debt to the oral tradition of Irish storytelling in their presentation of the bold antics of aging rakes, the comic misadventures of curious adolescents, and the humorous dynamics of swarming families. But almost invariably, a more ominous tone or note resonates beneath or behind their intoxicating hilarity, and frequently the line between gaiety and grief, laughter and lament becomes blurred in Kiely’s literary vision. In 2001, the stories were gathered, along with Proxopera, into a single volume, The Collected Stories of Benedict Kiely. Throughout Kiely’s long career, his reputation was shaped in part by the benign neglect that trends and tendencies in the literary marketplace and in academia can effect. It was also shaped in part by his public profile – by his being best known in Ireland as a “personality” in both print and broadcast media, by his being thought of more as a diverting raconteur than as a serious litterateur. His stature in the Irish literary pantheon remains uncertain. Benedict Kiely died on February 9, 2007. SEE ALSO: Censorship and the Novel (BIF); Irish Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Cahill, C. (ed.) (1994). A Tribute to Benedict Kiely [special issue]. Recorder: The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society, 7(1). Casey, D. (1974). Benedict Kiely. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.
Eckley, G. (1972). Benedict Kiely. New York: Twayne. Fogarty, A., & Hand, D. (eds.) (2008). Benedict Kiely [special issue]. Irish University Review, 38(1). Kiely, B. (1945). Counties of Contention. Cork: Mercier. Kiely, B. (1946). Land without Stars. London: Christopher Johnson. Kiely, B. (1947). Poor Scholar: A Study of the Works and Days of William Carleton, 1794–1869. London: Sheed and Ward. Kiely, B. (1949). In a Harbour Green. London: Jonathan Cape. Kiely, B. (1950a). Call for a Miracle. London: Jonathan Cape. Kiely, B. (1950b). Modern Irish Fiction: A Critique. Dublin: Golden Eagle. Kiely, B. (1952). Honey Seems Bitter. New York: E. P. Dutton. (Published in US as The Evil Men Do. New York: Dell, 1952.) Kiely, B. (1953). The Cards of the Gambler. London: Methuen. Kiely, B. (1955). There Was an Ancient House. London: Methuen. Kiely, B. (1960). The Captain with the Whiskers. London: Methuen. Kiely, B. (1963). A Journey to the Seven Streams: Seventeen Stories. London: Methuen. Kiely, B. (1968). Dogs Enjoy the Morning. London: Gollancz. Kiely, B. (1973). A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly: A Dozen Stories. London: Gollancz. Kiely, B. (1977). Proxopera: A Tale of Modern Ireland. London: Gollancz. Kiely, B. (1978a). All the Way to Bantry Bay - and Other Irish Journeys. London: Gollancz. Kiely, B. (1978b). A Cow in the House and Nine Other Stories. London: Gollancz. Kiely, B. (1980). The State of Ireland: A Novella and Seventeen Stories. Boston: D. R. Godine. Kiely, B. (1985a). The Aerofilms Book of Ireland from the Air. London: Artus. Kiely, B. (1985b). Nothing Happens in Carmincross. London: Gollancz. Kiely, B. (1987). A Letter to Peachtree and Nine Other Stories. London: Gollancz. Kiely, B. (1989). Yeats’ Ireland: An Illustrated Anthology. London: Aurum. Kiely, B. (1991). Drink to the Bird: A Memoir. London: Methuen. Kiely, B. (1996). And as I Rode by Granard Moat. Dublin: Lilliput. Kiely, B. (1999a). A Raid Into Dark Corners and Other Essays. Cork: Cork University Press.
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KUREISHI, HANIF
Kiely, B. (1999b). The Waves Behind Us: A Memoir. London: Methuen. Kiely, B. (2001). The Collected Stories of Benedict Kiely (intro. C. McCann). London: Methuen.
Kureishi, Hanif BRADLEY W. BUCHANAN
Hanif Kureishi occupies an ambiguous and controversial place in both twentieth-century British fiction and in postcolonial literature. Much of his most popular fiction deals primarily with the position of Pakistani and Indian immigrants in England and their children, but he refuses to glamorize or indeed dwell upon non-Western culture as something distinct from English life. Instead, he concentrates on the effect of immigration and other social changes on London, his fiction’s dominant setting. His often autobiographical work also deals with the moral aftermath of the permissive culture that dominated the lives of young people in the 1960s and 1970s: it examines infidelity, drug abuse, family break-up, political pettiness, economic inequality, selfishness, and men’s anger against feminism with unflinching and sometimes disturbing directness. Born in Bromley, England, on December 5, 1954, Kureishi first attained prominence in 1986 when his screenplay for the film My Beautiful Laundrette was nominated for an Oscar. The story, which features a gay love affair between a young man of Pakistani origin and an English ex-skinhead, as well as an expose of the links between illegal drugs and the more respectable business ventures of Thatcher-era capitalism (which, the films suggests, offered both opportunities and grave dangers for immigrants), earned widespread praise as well as condemnation from some Pakistani groups. Its themes of sexual transgression and racial tension, as well as its satirical portrait of social and economic ambition, laid the groundwork for many of Kureishi’s later fictional preoccupations. Kureishi’s first and most successful novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), extended his satire to a broader set of political concerns including feminism, religious mysticism, political correctness, left-wing theater, and the influence of American racial politics. Though it too provoked complaints from Muslims (as well as from con-
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servative English critics) it also earned the Whitbread First Novel Award and remains the most solid basis for Kureishi’s reputation as a novelist. His subsequent fiction has been less successful, in terms of both critical and popular responses, and its detractors have remained vocal. The Black Album (1995) attacked the leftist excesses of academia as well as the crassness of consumer culture, while also using the controversy surrounding Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses (1988) – though the novel is never named – as an opportunity to portray a group of Muslim students as a mixture of extremists and hypocritical fools. After this perhaps all too topical novel was poorly received, Kureishi’s fiction moved away from an engagement with racial themes and religion to an autobiographical examination of middle-aged men and their various discontents, as evinced in Intimacy (2000), a short novel apparently dealing with his own real-life decision to leave Tracey Scoffield, his wife and the mother of two of his children. Two books of short stories, Love in a Blue Time (1997) and Midnight All Day (2001b), also elaborate the theme of male dissatisfaction, whose causes appear to be many: the stultifying effect of family life, women’s excessive demands, the unrealistic myth of romantic fulfillment, a culture that encourages self-indulgence, men’s own emotional and creative sterility, and simple boredom. Despite the varied sources of Kureishi’s apparent ennui, many critics have found fault with the monotony of his preoccupations and with the drab humorlessness of his more mature prose style. The third phase of Kureishi’s career as a writer of fiction was perhaps a reaction against such criticisms: it features a turn away from the hard-edged, satirical realism of his earlier work toward a mild form of the fantastic, an engagement with alternate realities somewhat akin to magical realism (as in Gabriel’s Gift) or science fiction (The Body). Gabriel’s Gift (2001a) is a lighthearted, lightweight tale about a boy who discovers a “gift” for turning his art into real objects; it presents a much less politically charged world than is usual in Kureishi’s writing, and few traces of his former preoccupations with race, sexuality, or religion are visible. The Body (2002) offers a darker, more challenging vision of a future in which older people can temporarily live inside
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(i.e., “rent”) the dead bodies of young beautiful people, and thus enjoy a second or third crack at fulfillment (especially of the sexual sort). This prospect proves enjoyable for a while, but something is clearly missing in this promise of eternal youth, and the tale ends with the protagonist trapped and unable to return to his family. Kureishi’s most recent (and longest) novel, Something to Tell You (2008), has earned both plaudits and dispraise for revisiting some of the themes and motifs of his early work. Its narrator, a psychotherapist named Jamal, views pleasureloving London life with the same easy-going indulgence of Karim Amir of The Buddha of Suburbia, and he even encounters Omar Ali (the homosexual hero of My Beautiful Laundrette). Unlike these hedonists, however, Jamal has a sinister secret to share with the reader, though his growing torment is to some extent overshadowed by the unlikely love affair that blossoms between Miriam, his rebellious sister, and Henry, his neurotic and arty friend. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (WF); London in Fiction (BIF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Pakistani Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Buchanan, B. W. (2007). Hanif Kureishi. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kaleta, K. C. (1998). Hanif Kureishi: Postcolonial Storyteller. Austin: University of Texas Press. Kureishi, H. (1990). The Buddha of Suburbia. London: Faber and Faber. Kureishi, H. (1995). The Black Album. New York: Simon and Schuster. Kureishi, H. (1997). Love in a Blue Time. New York: Scribner’s. Kureishi, H. (2000). Intimacy. London: Faber and Faber. Kureishi, H. (2001a). Gabriel’s Gift. New York: Scribner’s. Kureishi, H. (2001b). Midnight All Day. New York: Scribner’s. Kureishi, H. (2002). The Body and Seven Stories. London: Faber and Faber. Kureishi, H. (2008). Something to Tell You. London: Faber and Faber. Moore-Gilbert, B. (2001). Hanif Kureishi. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ranasinha, R. (2002). Hanif Kureishi. Tavistock: Northcote House. Thomas, S. (ed.) (2005). Hanif Kureishi. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Yousef, N. (2002). Hanif Kureishi’s “The Buddha of Suburbia”: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum.
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L Lawrence, D. H. FIONA BECKET
D. H. Lawrence wrote some of the most popular, challenging, and controversial fiction of the modernist period. He was also a celebrated poet, a skillful dramatist and translator, an essayist of rare insight on diverse subjects, and a phenomenal letter writer. His fiction maintains his position at the heart of twentieth-century British literature with its combination of social and domestic realism and poetic intensity in works that bear witness to a deeply felt belief that the conditions and repercussions of political modernity required a new kind of writing, a new relation to language. Lawrence was able to live by writing. Highly conscious of his readership, particularly in Britain and the United States, he was yet no slave to his audience. Lawrence’s publishers were sensitive to the fact of prosecution – a state of affairs that often resulted in the taking of editorial liberties – and Lawrence’s most significant works were either suppressed by court order or threatened under the censorship laws. The critical reception of the earlier work tended toward the positive. The major writing polarized opinion, often in response to the poetic style and to the presentation of sexual relations. A gifted linguist and an itinerant figure, Lawrence was extremely well traveled. His early reputation rested on his poetry – Lawrence benefited from the support of Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford) and Ezra Pound – in particular his inclusion in the first anthologies of Imagism (although Lawrence was
rather doubtful about his Imagist credentials, characteristically fighting shy of cliques, groups, or movements). However, it was the novel that ensured his status as an internationally recognized writer, and it was the novel form that Lawrence believed held the greatest potential for radical thought in the modern age. His definition of the novel, which included the Gospels and Plato’s Dialogues, demonstrates the importance of a dynamic congruence of language and form. The products of a highly individual voice and an idiosyncratic personal philosophy or “metaphysic,” Lawrence’s novels, characterized by intensely poetic and highly metaphorical prose, are yet stylistically distinct from each other. The plots often represent familiar or conventional modes – the family saga, the twocouples structure, the picaresque, even modes of popular romance – yet the revision and reworking of these produce a new kind of metaphysical fiction the significance of which, as cultural critique, many of Lawrence’s contemporaries found difficult to comprehend. The early novels deconstruct romantic and sexual love. Famously, one of Lawrence’s earliest reviewers assumed “D. H.” to be a woman. The reception of his third, autobiographical, novel, Sons and Lovers (1913), was almost wholly positive. It was taken to epitomize a Freudian and confessional mode – a critical response that vexed Lawrence and which he repudiated. While he shared with Freud an interest in the instinctive life (he wrote two books on the unconscious), Lawrence nevertheless rejected what he knew of Freudian psychology which he viewed as
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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symptomatic of a modernity that pathologized sex. Thematically, the mature novels constitute a sustained critique of cultural and individual violence and advocate, albeit indirectly, an end of the degraded institutions and relations of modernity, and a new, untested notion of selfhood. Lawrence’s principal characters frequently undergo metaphysical journeys in which the birth of the self is the unforeseen and unexamined goal. However, in the later novels the impersonal aesthetic of the mature writing tends to give way to an overconscious messianic version of individualism before resorting to the solutions of a highly personal primitivist vision. An earlier sensitivity to community similarly tends toward a more brutal sense of race and nation in the later novels, although Lawrence returns to the theme of England and what he idiosyncratically calls “passional” awareness in his final novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1993 [1928], 101). Born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, on September 11, 1885, Lawrence’s origins in the industrial English Midlands inevitably inform his writing. He was educated at Nottingham High School and University College, Nottingham, and worked as a schoolteacher in Croydon before illness prompted his resignation. His early life and work were characterized by some strong ties, particularly to women, although his letters bear witness to some enduring male friendships. Lawrence was proud of a practical resourcefulness and thrift which he learned at home but, as he matured as a writer, he found provincial values, and England more generally, stultifying and oppressive. During the years of the Great War (1914–18) Lawrence was pronounced unfit for military service. He and his wife Frieda (Weekley, nee von Richthofen) spent most of the war years in Cornwall, where, perhaps due to his wife’s nationality – Frieda Lawrence was German by birth – they were vulnerable to (unfounded) accusations of spying. This was a time of volatile relations both with Frieda and their sometime close friends, the writer Katherine Mansfield and critic John Middleton Murry. Frieda was Lawrence’s lifelong companion but the marriage – and marriage was a relationship Lawrence felt to be of fundamental importance – was notoriously explosive. Several years his senior, Frieda had been married when they first met and had then left her children and
agreed to a divorce in order to be with Lawrence. During their time in Cornwall Lawrence made plans, and quarreled, with the philosopher Bertrand Russell; stronger friendships included those with Aldous Huxley, E. M. Forster, Richard Aldington, and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.). Lawrence drew on his friends and acquaintances for many of his characters – a tendency that often attracted their displeasure and caused resentment – although he was not interested in literary portraiture. He left England after the war and began the itinerant lifestyle that is often undertaken by the principal characters in his novels. Lawrence traveled partly for his health, partly in response to invitations, and often simply because he could. He sojourned in Italy, producing insightful travel writing which expanded the genre into more critical directions than hitherto (Twilight in Italy, 1916; Sea and Sardinia, 1921; Mornings in Mexico, 1927; Sketches of Etruscan Places, 1932). In 1922, often referred to in literary criticism as the year of “high” modernism, he visited Ceylon (later Sri Lanka), Australia, New Zealand, the South Seas, and America. He settled for a while in the American southwest (Taos), and made lengthy visits to Mexico. Lawrence’s ability to travel to, and to inhabit, a variety of places and cultures produced extraordinary novels, novellas, poems, short stories, discursive essays, even literary criticism – material that examines and engages with themes of difference and otherness often framed by a preoccupation with sex and the unconscious, race and nation. To say that he remained, at heart, an English writer is not a jingoistic statement but an indication of the source of what Lawrence called his “vision.” The rejection of England embodied by his travels and expressed in, for instance, The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), The Lost Girl (1920), and Aaron’s Rod (1922), is a repudiation of the degraded conditions of overconscious modernity marked by industrial “progress,” impersonal, directionless warfare, and the alienated individual. Lawrence never “settled” in the conventional sense of the word, and died aged 45 in Vence, France, of tuberculosis. As one of the twentieth century’s most skillful short story writers it is fitting that Lawrence won a Nottinghamshire Guardian short story competition in 1907 with “A Prelude.” More significant, however, was the publication of poetry and short
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LAWRENCE, D. H.
stories in the influential English Review. The following five years saw into print three novels including Sons and Lovers (1913), a volume of poetry, a play, and a collection of short stories that included “The Prussian Officer” (1914). In its treatment of complex family and sexual relationships, and the efforts of a son-lover to retain a sense of singular self-integrity in his relations with women, Sons and Lovers broke new ground and was strikingly modern; and Lawrence recognized the poetic power of his language in this new book in contrast to the styles of the previous two novels. Lawrence is recognizably a dualistic thinker and the sexual discord between male and female that underpinned these early novels remained central to those that followed as he attempted to resolve oppositionality into unity. The year 1915 saw the publication and suppression of The Rainbow, the first of two novels to explore modernity, and to give full expression to Lawrence’s personal philosophy, with reference to members of three generations of the Brangwen family and their relationships. The publisher, Methuen, was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. Women in Love is the “sister” novel to The Rainbow and an altogether more pessimistic book. Lawrence considered calling it “Dies Irae” (Day of Wrath) and, with reference to its implications as a critique of modernity, called it “a terrible and horrible and wonderful novel” (Letters 2: 669). In fact, not a year passed in which Lawrence did not produce a significant work, whether fiction, poetry, essay, or travel writing. The Lost Girl, a novel published in the same year as Women in Love, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Movements in European History, intended as a book for schools, was published the following year. Studies in Classic American Literature, a psychoanalytic critique of writing by Franklin, Hawthorne, and Whitman among others, published in 1923, still has acknowledged critical value. Through the 1920s short stories and novellas drew on Lawrence’s memories of England as well as his experience of other continents, taking in radical, and sometimes critically unpalatable, directions his thought on human self-sufficiency, sex, and the vitalist philosophy which many associate with Lawrence. The travel writing combines autobiography, documentary, philosophy, and photographs; it embodies an unparalleled attention to particulars
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and provides vivid, personal dissertations on place. Landmark volumes of poetry included Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), with Pansies seized by the police in 1929, along with 13 paintings by Lawrence exhibited at the Warren Gallery, London. His last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), was published privately for subscription in Florence. For years, an expurgated version was available. The complete text, however, was published 30 years after Lawrence’s death by Penguin Books in an action that triggered the much publicized and much discussed prosecution in 1960 of Penguin Books under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959. The publishing house was acquitted, sold a great many books, and there ensued an overdue public debate about censorship, one of several cases that stimulated social change not least in England. Each of the 10 novels published in Lawrence’s lifetime challenges orthodoxies, particularly conventional social and sexual mores. Specific dualities identify the contours of Lawrence’s thought as he returns to the challenges they pose: male/ female; speech/silence; primitive/modern; self/ other. More than that the novels at their best examine the future of the novel form, and provide fascinating insights into the ambition and scale of Lawrence’s artistic vision. They explore the relation of individual to community, race, nation, and place, and do so in ways that maintain a creative pressure on the capacity of the English language to be modeled into new expressive and poetic forms. At the core of Lawrence’s poetic analysis into what it is to be human and modern is a preoccupation with the instinctive and non-verbal life. His personal philosophy, or “metaphysic,” which is a word he uses in his “Study of Thomas Hardy” (1985 [1914], 91), did not remain fixed, although the essay explores the creative potential of conflict, strife, and oppositionality that informs much of Lawrence’s mature writing. The White Peacock (1911), The Trespasser (1912) and, in particular, Sons and Lovers had approached this direction but the language, structure, and scale – the vision – of The Rainbow was different. The language of The Rainbow constitutes an impersonal aesthetic written, according to Lawrence’s description, “in a foreign language I don’t know very well” (Letters 1: 544). The novel’s narrative language is characterized by a forceful,
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concentrated mode of repetition in which familiar and often simple words are required to take on new meanings as the language tests the extent and limits of Western individualism and Western psychology. It was Lawrence’s first properly modernist novel and it builds its vision around the lives and feelings of a yeoman farmer called Tom Brangwen, his daughter, Anna, and her daughter, Ursula. Both the beginning and the end of The Rainbow offer visions of community that seem either to embody or to promise that community’s capacity for self-preservation and cultural renewal, even on the back of apparently catastrophic social, cultural, and personal breakdown. The novel’s symbolic logic is consistent, and supports a highly idiosyncratic philosophy of change and rebirth. The “sequel,” Women in Love, differs from The Rainbow in its modes of thought and language. In the Foreword to Women in Love Lawrence wrote that “the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters” (1987b [1920], 485), principally Ursula Brangwen, her sister Gudrun, and their lovers Rupert Birkin, an educationalist and radical, and Gerald Crich, an industrialist and proprietor of a coal mine. The narrative trajectory in The Rainbow is generational, and it exploits a sense of mythic, impersonal time, in which biblical narrative models – the Creation, the Flood – undergo modification as a means of engaging with modernity and alienated modern selfhood. Women in Love is apparently more personal, and focuses on the two couples whose friendships and love affairs identify the central preoccupations of the book in its relentless critique of modern culture and modern relationships. It is a novel underpinned by violence; not gratuitous displays of multiple violent acts but the subliminal violence, often sadistic, that in part defines modern subjectivity in the context of a disintegrating and dying culture. Some of the narrative’s key words are “corruption,” “dissolution,” and “reduction.” Rupert Birkin (the book’s Lawrence-figure) is assaulted by his lover, Hermione Roddice, denigrated as a “Kulturtr€ager” capable of deriving sensations (emotional and intellectual) only from others. His next relationship, with Ursula Brangwen (who has undergone the experiences of The Rainbow), provides the context for his critique of romantic love in the face of her fidelity to a
conventional union of man and woman. She, in turn, is mystified by Birkin’s love for the powerful, blond Gerald Crich which Birkin insists can complement, if not balance, his love for Ursula. One chapter in particular, called “Gladiatorial,” which describes a friendly bout of ju-jitsu between Birkin and Gerald, employs homoerotic language but not sex: the book’s underlying logic denies this possibility (as in the “Shame” chapter of The Rainbow which describes Ursula’s short-lived infatuation with her school-mistress, a freethinking feminist). Gerald’s lover, Gudrun, ultimately finds his conventional values, with which she has flirted, and his powerful physical presence stifling. With the sadistic, stateless artist, Loerke (whose name, like hers, has a mythic suggestiveness) at her side, she defeats Gerald in a psychodrama staged in the blank, white, crystalline landscape of the Tyrolean Alps, away from the overdeveloped townscapes of England. This novel which, in contrast to the impersonal sweep of The Rainbow, has been founded on talk, conversation, verbal disputes, and, often, verbal confusion, ends in mid-conversation with Birkin and Ursula disagreeing (as usual) about the details of Birkin’s personal philosophy. Never before had the conventions of the English novel been so critically overturned, revised, and re-presented in contexts that so uncompromisingly explore the life of feeling. The subsequent novels failed to achieve the intensity and critical acuity of The Rainbow and Women in Love, but that is not to belittle their achievement. In The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod the main characters, Alvina Houghton and Aaron Sisson respectively, tire of the confinements of English provincial life and the predictable responsibilities of family. Both follow a trajectory to Italy, Alvina through her marriage to Ciccio, a peasant from the Abruzzi mountains. Aaron’s travels are punctuated by his encounters principally with a maverick intellectual called Rawdon Lilly who articulates a messianic philosophy about political and social authority. Aaron, a flautist, loses his instrument to an anarchist’s bomb but is promised that creative energy will continue to flourish, even – or perhaps especially – in oppositional times. This novel explores a reversal of Lawrence’s faith in marriage – Aaron abandons his family in England – and shows strong male figures (not for
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LAWRENCE, D. H.
the first time) shedding their ties to overbearing (female) figures. The theme of male friendship resonates in the novels to come. Kangaroo (1923) and The Boy in the Bush (1924; with M. L. Skinner) developed out of Lawrence’s journey to Australia in 1922. The latter is underpinned by Lawrence’s preoccupation with the creation of an alternative community in which a new social project could be developed. This remained an unrealized aspiration for Lawrence. Kangaroo is a more significant novel and examines themes of charismatic leadership, power, democracy, and revolution. Characteristic in Lawrence is the tension between the attractions of organized social and political change and the necessity of singular detachment, principally in the man (usually these figures are male) of feeling. The socialist leader, Willie Struthers, preaches to Richard Lovatt Somers (the Lawrence-figure who has written essays on democracy) about brotherhood, but Somers has fears for the integrity of individuality. “Kangaroo” is the nickname of the charismatic leader of a right-wing group of disaffected war veterans (the Diggers) who is similarly interested in engaging Somers as a lieutenant. In the chapter called “Bits” Lawrence deliberates on the theme of the fragmented self and ultimately rejects the politics of the “hive.” Discursive, satirical, and digressive, Kangaroo is a good novel of Australia with some poetically powerful descriptions of place. The Plumed Serpent (1926) stays with the theme of political and social revolution, and cultural regeneration, this time in Mexico. The novel describes an imagined revival of pre-Columbian religious consciousness by means of a new cult of the Men of Quetzalcoatl, the serpent god of MesoAmerican myth. A much stronger novel than its critical reception suggests, it continues Lawrence’s examination of male friendship and charismatic leadership. The trinity at the heart of the novel is constituted in the relationship of the two revolutionaries, Don Ramon Carrasco and Don Cipriano Viedma, and Kate Leslie, a middle-aged Irish woman (who marries Cipriano) in whom the death of the modern self and subsequent transformation to an older mode of consciousness must be achieved. Most problematic in this novel, arguably, is the distortion of Lawrence’s previous concentration on “blood-consciousness”
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(Fantasia of the Unconscious, 2004 [1922], 173) – a highly idiosyncratic metaphor in which the linking of the elements “blood and “consciousness” is an attempt to embody and describe subterranean levels of human feeling in contrast to the Freudian model. In The Plumed Serpent the emphasis shifts problematically from a concentration on the universal “life-blood” to unpalatable theorizations of race difference. The Plumed Serpent proves to be a somewhat utopian work for Lawrence inasmuch as it attempts to resolve many of the problems posed by the previous novels and this is best and most eloquently expressed by Marianna Torgovnick who argues that “The Plumed Serpent frees Lawrence because it allows him to integrate the dualities that plagued him” (168). He did so by resorting to a willed primitivism in which overconscious Western individualism undergoes a series of small but significant deaths. The aspiration that underpins Lawrence’s writing, prior to and including The Plumed Serpent, is for the rebirth of the self in a context of cultural regeneration where the shackles of Western individualism are lost. However, as Torgovnick and others have pointed out, Lawrence is bound by the vocabulary and the values, the constraints and assumptions, of Western thought. Lawrence’s final novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, develops the acquiescence of Kate Leslie in the figure of Connie Chatterley, the titled lady for whom sexual fulfillment is possible only in contexts in which phallic power is seen as transformative. Her lover, the gamekeeper Mellors, cannot, however, benefit from the fantasy context of a new world or a religious revival of the kind that sweeps away modern social and political institutions and expectations in The Plumed Serpent. The taboo of sex and marriage across the class divide cannot be properly challenged in postwar England where social difference and deference are seen to retain their power. While the lovers, separated at the end of the novel, wait to take up their lives again in a new place, Lawrence situates Mellors in epistolary (and monologic) mode to propose that only a revolution in sexual attitudes can make cultural regeneration possible. This is also a novel that digresses in order to draw attention to the importance and potential of the novel form, and which in places chooses to
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announce Lawrence’s distance from novelistic tradition. Had Lawrence never written novels or poetry, the novellas and short fiction would, nevertheless, constitute a significant body of work in its own right. The themes and preoccupations of the novels persist, of course, in the short fiction. The oppositionality of male and female underpins the serious and innovative novellas, The Captain’s Doll, The Ladybird, The Fox (all 1923), and St. Mawr (1925). The Fox shows Lawrence making reference to, but also revising, Freudian psychology and, like St. Mawr develops its own powerfully symbolic mode. Personal rebirth prefigures cultural rebirth in St. Mawr and The Escaped Cock (1929; later republished as The Man Who Died), which takes, like The Plumed Serpent and “The Woman who Rode Away,” a hinterland away from the overused spaces of Europe and America as the location for regeneration and rebirth. A malevolent primitivism recurs in “The Princess” and “The Woman who Rode Away” in texts that have provoked, not without justification, the condemnation of feminists. The three major collections of short stories are identified respectively by their inclusion of “The Prussian Officer” (1914), “England, My England” (1915/1922) and “The Woman who Rode Away” (1925/1928). “The Prussian Officer” is a brilliant exploration of individuals deadened by their cultural moment and also announces the centrality to Lawrence of the barely conscious commerce of pleasure and pain. Much of the language of “The Prussian Officer,” the futurist imagery and the emphasis on mechanical obedience of inner drives anticipates aspects of Women in Love. It is in complete contrast to, for example “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” an exceptionally well-crafted story located in the English Midlands in which a woman, washing clean the body of her man after a fatal incident at the pit, comes to understand the nature of their marital and personal conflict. Many of the short stories identify subliminal levels of strife between men and women; many deal, by concentration on individuals, with war and the death of feeling. Several of the later stories, like “Jimmy and the Desperate Woman,” had a distinct satirical edginess in which Lawrence attempted to settle a few scores. Phenomenally productive and often controversial, Lawrence compulsively took issue with the unexamined assumptions of his time and culture.
A major and central figure of British modernism, he remains a writer whose work inspires a range of often conflicting critical responses – viewed by some as a reactionary and by others as a flawed but radical thinker. The reception of his work and the attempts to suppress it – in which the Chatterley trial plays its part – is part of recent British social history. Lawrence’s work has contributed to the shaping of attitudes in the twentieth century, and to public debates about sex, censorship, and freedom of expression. Crucially, Lawrence took risks in his writing, and believed that the novel form was a highly significant medium for cultural critique: in “Why the Novel Matters” he famously wrote “The novel is the one bright book of life” (1985 [1936], 195). As a novelist he had a profound influence on the development in the twentieth century of metaphysical fiction with a concentration on the life and language of the feelings – “We have no language for the feelings” (1985 [1936], 203) – and his work has had an effect on writers as diverse as John Cowper Powys and Doris Lessing. Lawrence’s writing, extensively translated, continues to challenge and provoke critical debate across cultures. SEE ALSO: Censorship and the Novel (BIF); Ford, Ford Madox (BIF); Mansfield, Katherine (WF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Queer/ Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF); WorkingClass Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS References to Lawrence’s works are to The Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence (gen. eds. J. T. Boulton & W. Roberts). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alldritt, K. (1971). The Visual Imagination of D. H. Lawrence. London: Arnold. Becket, F. (1997). D. H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Bell, M. (1992). D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Black, M. (1986). D. H. Lawrence: The Early Fiction. London: Macmillan. Cavitch, D. (1969). D. H. Lawrence and the New World. New York: Oxford University Press. Clarke, C. (1969). River of Dissolution: D. H. Lawrence and English Romanticism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
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LEHMANN, ROSAMOND
Ellis, D. (1998). The Cambridge Biography of D. H. Lawrence 1885–1930, vol. 3: D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922–1930. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fernihough, A. (1993). D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology. Oxford: Clarendon. Kinkead-Weekes, M. (1996). The Cambridge Biography of D. H. Lawrence 1885–1930, vol. 2: D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile: 1912–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, D. H. (1979, 1982). The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 1: September 1901–May 1913 (ed. J. T. Boulton); vol. 2: June 1913–October 1916 (eds. G. J. Zytaruk & J. T. Boulton). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, D. H. (1985). Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays [1936] (ed. B. Steele). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, D. H. (1987a). The Plumed Serpent [1926] (ed. L. D. Clark). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, D. H. (1987b). Women in Love [1920] (eds. D. Farmer, L. Vasey, & J. Worthen). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, D. H. (1989). The Rainbow [1915] (ed. M. Kinkead-Weekes). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, D. H. (1992). Sons and Lovers [1913] (eds. H. Baron & C. Baron). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, D. H. (1993). Lady Chatterley’s Lover; and, A Propos of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” [1928] (ed. M. Squires). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, D. H. (1994). Kangaroo [1923] (ed. B. Steele). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, D. H. (2004). Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious [1921, 1922] (ed. B. Steele). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leavis, F. R. (1955). D. H. Lawrence: Novelist. London: Chatto and Windus. Millett, K. (1985). Sexual Politics [1977]. London: Virago. Sagar, K. (1985). D. H. Lawrence: Life into Art. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Torgovnick, M. (1990). Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Williams, R. (1970). The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence. London: Hogarth. Worthen, J. (1991). The Cambridge Biography of D. H. Lawrence 1885–1930, vol. 1: D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885–1912. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Lehmann, Rosamond JUDY SIMONS
Rosamond Lehmann writes fiction that chronicles a shifting society fractured by war, loss, political change, and class antagonism. Predominantly she tells the story of early twentieth-century womanhood, reworking the traditional subjects of “the woman’s novel” – romance, marriage, family, and the fabric of domestic existence – to invest them with new meaning. Lehmann’s love stories expose the bitterness of passion, her families are minefields of jealousy and resentment, her domestic scenes contain unspoken danger zones, and her well-brought-up young women are framed against a background of social upheaval that mirrors their own internal traumas. No writer has more painfully exposed the subterfuges or the selfabasement of the female psyche and none matches Lehmann’s delicacy and lyricism in expressing the rapturous intensity of apparently inconsequential experience. The New York Times called her prose “a continual harmony of glancing, glowing colors” (Chamberlain 3), and the author Anita Brookner, in many respects her literary successor, commented that “she succeeds in giving a unique account of the world seen through feminine eyes, and this she manages better than Virginia Woolf, whom she knew, ever did” (Brookner 20). Born in Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, on February 3, 1901, the day of Queen Victoria’s funeral, Lehmann enjoyed a privileged upbringing, infused by the inheritance of the past. Many of her books deal directly with the transition from Victorian to modern and depict the reluctance of one generation to let go its stranglehold on the mores and behaviors of the next. Her first, highly autobiographical, novel, Dusty Answer (1927), takes its introspective heroine, Judith Earle, from childhood to young adulthood, through university and first loves. Its singularity lies not so much in taking a young girl’s consciousness as subject but how that consciousness registers a distinctive modernity. The Cambridge episodes, flirting with lesbianism and premarital sex, prefigure campus novels of mid-century, while the youthful cast reflects the daring and spontaneity of life in the aftermath of war. The work was an immediate bestseller – it had freshness, originality, and shock value – and
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Lehmann was acclaimed as a definitive, if controversial, contemporary voice. She produced six more novels, each as stylistically innovative as Dusty Answer, and on both sides of the Atlantic she was rated one of the most important novelists of the age. During World War II she wrote masterly short stories for the literary journal, New Writing, edited by her brother, John Lehmann, and she was in constant demand as a broadcaster and reviewer. Her work was translated into several languages; in France especially her reputation remained high, where, following their first publication, her books have never been out of print. Dusty Answer was followed by the bleak A Note in Music (1930), a thinly veiled account of the misery of Lehmann’s short-lived marriage to Leslie Runciman, and her attraction to the painter, Wogan Phillips, who in 1928 became her second husband. The themes of dislocation and the isolated consciousness continued to haunt her next two books, Invitation to the Waltz (1932) and The Weather in the Streets (1936), which follow the fortunes of Olivia Curtis, another self-portrait, over a decade. Taken together, with their ironic subversion of nostalgia, they embody the ambivalence of tone that became Lehmann’s trademark. The aristocratic Spencer family, romanticized in Invitation to the Waltz, is exposed in the sequel as oppressive and hidebound, paralyzed by its own introversion. Yet Lehmann’s barbed satire is directed equally at the pretentiousness of artistic bohemianism – she was on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group – as at the selfprotective strategies of the upper class. An emancipated woman, Olivia is simultaneously liberated and victimized by her independence; with tragic irony, the realization of her adolescent fantasies serves only to destroy her. The tension between family and romantic desire, and the corrosive nature of thwarted love, are most vividly captured in the two novels of Lehmann’s late maturity, The Ballad and the Source (1944) and The Echoing Grove (1953). Both are technically challenging in their use of multiple narrators, and, in The Ballad and the Source, of a Jamesian juvenile perspective on innocence and adult intrigue. Lehmann’s own passionate life found expression in successive fictions, culminating in The Echoing Grove’s depiction of tortured sisters and their love for the same man. Bound by a shared past from whose memories they can
never escape, Madeleine and Dinah reflect something of the strain that dominated Lehmann’s relationships with her own siblings as well as the fallout from her tempestuous affairs with the poet Cecil Day Lewis and the writer Goronwy Rees. The intensity of feeling is for many readers the central theme of Lehmann’s writing. “Oh, the torment of loving,” cries Judith in Dusty Answer (80): that sense of torment is at the heart of Lehmann’s fiction as her heroines continue to pursue romance knowing that it will be their downfall. Yet Lehmann is also an acute social commentator. In particular her books, either implicitly or explicitly, take war as a major subject, delineating its impact on civilian life and its silent legacy in the form of a lost or maimed generation whose attitude to existence is unalterably impaired. Surprisingly, given her contemporary prestige and the duration of her literary career, Lehmann’s published output is modest, and there were long silences between her major novels. After the publication of The Echoing Grove she stopped writing fiction seriously and although she produced a memoir, The Swan in the Evening (1967) and another novel, A Sea-Grape Tree (1976), neither measures up to the achievement of her mature writing. Her work fell into critical neglect, and she remained virtually forgotten until republication by the feminist press, Virago, in the 1980s, when interest in the author underwent a remarkable renaissance. Following Virago’s lead, Penguin reissued Dusty Answer and The Echoing Grove as Modern Classics and, as sales figures rose, so Lehmann’s reputation was revitalized. Her work was adapted for television and film, and she was sought out for interviews. She died in 1990, shortly before her ninetieth birthday. SEE ALSO: Brookner, Anita (BIF); Edwardian Fiction (BIF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF); Woolf, Virginia (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bort, F., & Cachin, M.-F. (eds.) (2003). Rosamond Lehmann et le metier d’ecrivain. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Marne-la-Vallee. Brookner, A. (1990). Rosamond Lehmann. Spectator, p. 20 (Mar. 17). Chamberlain, J. (1927) [Review of Dusty Answer.] New York Times Book Review, p. 3 (Dec. 4).
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LEWIS, WYNDHAM
Dorosz, W. (1975) Subjective Vision and Human Relationships in the Novels of Rosamond Lehmann. Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Guppy, S. (1985). The Art of Fiction No. 88: Rosamond Lehmann. Paris Review, 96, 162–85. At www. theparisreview.org/media/2894_LEHMANN2.pdf accessed Mar. 4, 2010. Hastings, S. (2002). Rosamond Lehmann: A Life. London: Chatto and Windus. Lehmann, R. (1927). Dusty Answer. London: Chatto and Windus. Lehmann, R. (1930). A Note in Music. London: Chatto and Windus. Lehmann, R. (1931). A Letter to a Sister. London: Hogarth. Lehmann, R. (1932). Invitation to the Waltz. London: Chatto and Windus. Lehmann, R. (1936). The Weather in the Streets. London: Collins. Lehmann, R. (1938). No More Music. Duke of York’s Theatre, London. Lehmann, R. (1944). The Ballad and the Source. London: Collins. Lehmann, R. (1946). The Gypsy’s Baby and Other Stories. London: Collins. Lehmann, R. (1948). Genevieve (trans. J. Lemarchand). London: John Lehmann. Lehmann, R. (1953). The Echoing Grove. London: Collins. Lehmann, R. (1955). Children of the Game (trans. J. Cocteau). London: Harvill. (Republished as The Holy Terrors in 1957.) Lehmann, R. (1956). A Hut, a Sea-Grape Tree. In Winter’s Tales, vol. 2. London: Macmillan. Lehmann, R. (1967). The Swan in the Evening: Fragments of an Inner Life. London: Collins. Lehmann, R. (1976). A Sea-Grape Tree. London: Collins. Lehmann, R. (1985). Rosamond Lehmann’s Album. London: Chatto and Windus. Lehmann, R., & Beaton, C. (1941). Air of Glory: A Wartime Scrapbook. London: Ministry of Information. Lehmann, R., & Pole, W. T. (1965). A Man Seen Afar. London: Neville Spearman. Lehmann, R., & Sandys, C. (1970). Letters from Our Daughters. London: College of Psychic Studies. Lehmann, R., & Sandys, C. (eds.) (1978). The Awakening Letters. Jersey: Neville Spearman. Lehmann, R., Day Lewis, C., & Roberts, D. K. (1945). Orion, vol. 2. London: Nicholson and Watson. LeStourgeon, D. E. (1965). Rosamond Lehmann. New York: Twayne. Millar, G. (dir.) (1983). The Weather in the Streets. Rediffusion Films.
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O’Sullivan, T. (dir.) (2003). The Heart of Me. BBC Films/Martin Pope. Pollard, W. (2004). Rosamond Lehmann and Her Critics: The Vagaries of Literary Reception. Aldershot: Ashgate. Siegel, R. (1990). Rosamond Lehmann: A Thirties Writer. New York: Peter Lang. Simons, J. (1992). Rosamond Lehmann. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Tindall, G. (1984). Rosamond Lehmann: An Appreciation. London: Chatto and Windus. Wallace, D. (2000). Sisters and Rivals in British Women’s Fiction, 1914–39. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Lewis, Wyndham PAUL EDWARDS
Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) wrote over 40 books including 14 fictional works. Others are concerned with literature, art and aesthetics, and cultural, political, and philosophical analysis. As a painter he pioneered the form of geometrical abstraction that characterized Vorticism and edited Blast (two issues, 1914 and 1915), publishing Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, and Rebecca West. Lewis was a major figure in British art until blindness overtook him in 1951. His portraits of James Joyce, Pound, and Eliot are memorable and definitive. These fellow “Men of 1914” regarded Lewis as their equal (sometimes as a worthy antagonist), but the critical industry around his work remains small. Lewis is a rebarbative, muscular, and vivid writer. His style is not transparent, but is itself the material from which a grotesque fictional world is created. This world recalls reality but is an obvious simulacrum, which makes his work an anticipation of postmodernism. Lewis dogmatically opposed modernist fiction’s concern with the unconscious, with fleeting impressions and deep psychology. It should concern itself rather with the outside of things (and people), not their interior (Lewis 1934). The redemptive epiphanies of Joyce and Woolf were also too cheaply bought, he thought. Add to this a “masculine” scorn for sentimentality that sometimes seems to extend to emotion itself, and the ingredients for a fatally confined fiction seem complete. For some, that Lewis wrote in favor of Hitler in 1931 (and is reputed to be a racist,
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misogynist, and homophobe) confirms that the humanistic nourishment that fiction supplies is best sought elsewhere. For others, these factors make Lewis worth studying as a representative of “fascist modernism.” Neither reaction does justice to the values embedded in his fiction. Lewis, whose tragic, absurdist philosophy anticipated Albert Camus, believed that the capacity to understand and represent our condition is a “gift” through which we may “humanize” ourselves (though equally we might use it to “dehumanize ourselves . . . still further”: Lewis 1934, 289). Like other modernists he believed that such humanization could – and must be – continued though artistic creation. Lewis’s relentless, sometimes withering, skepticism about “the most plausible and pretentious of affirmatives, either as man or as thing” (Lewis 1999 [1937], 247) masks a passionate attempt to construct a reality that reflects our potential as free human beings. The problem was to strike a balance between the destructive and creative aspects of his vision. Trained at the Slade School of Art, Lewis began his real education in Paris, where he moved in 1904. The decisive influences on his future fiction were the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists, especially Dostoevsky. “Since I was not interested in problems of good or evil, I did not read these books so much as sinister homilies as monstrous character patterns, often of miraculous insight” (Lewis 1950, 146). It was to the exposition of such “monstrous character patterns” in the activities of the peasants, fishermen, and innkeepers of Brittany (where he had followed the Pont Aven painters in search of authentic life) that Lewis devoted his first short stories and literary sketches, published by Ford in the English Review in 1909. Characters are governed by fetishized mechanical routines – “inferior religions” (Lewis 1982, 147). The narrator – elevated into a gloating connoisseur of discomfiture in the revisions issued as The Wild Body in 1927 – registers and sometimes provokes the upsetting of such routines. But he is himself governed by an urge to fetishize normality into grotesque, comic patterns. The sardonic extravagance of his prose seems motivated by the fear of meaninglessness that it seeks to keep at bay. Lewis’s first novel, Tarr (1990 [1918] ), was conceived as an extended exploration of similar character patterns among an international cast of
art students in Paris. They believe they are living authentically yet actually follow a script supplied to them by nineteenth-century bohemianism. But this was Lewis’s life too, and real blood flows through the characters’ veins, and is spilt, with real pain, however much the semi-autobiographical Tarr would wish to deny it. The novel expanded and changed focus during six years of composition (O’Keeffe, in Lewis 1990), becoming something of a testing ground for Lewis’s Vorticist theories about art and life, internationalism and the role of German romanticism in that country’s military aggression in 1914. Otto Kreisler, a talentless German artist, is the character most trapped in a routine – his allowance suddenly terminated by his father – but his struggles to escape only confirm the romantic cliches that confine him: a “passionate” affair (culminating in rape), a duel, and eventual suicide. Tarr, Kreisler’s more talented English counterpart, is equally enmeshed in a tortuous love affair, but escapes, partly by exalting “Life into a Comedy,” as Lewis put it in a prologue. How this is to be interpreted or evaluated remains one of the issues still open in critical debate. In the 1920s Lewis produced his large works of cultural, political, and philosophical analysis, diagnosing the ideological weaknesses that had led to war and thwarted revolutionary change (1926, 1927). Two major works of fiction transposed and reflected on these critiques: The Childermass: Section 1 (1928a) and The Apes of God (1930). The Childermass is Lewis’s most obscure and difficult work, a fantastic novel set in an encampment in the Afterworld, where the dead await judgment and entry into the “Magnetic City.” Pullman and Satters, respectively an intellectual and a na€ıf (embodying covert satirical commentaries on Joyce and Gertrude Stein) undergo transformations in this unstable no man’s land, then witness the proceedings at the court of the “Bailiff” (an amalgam of music hall entertainer and Mussolini) as he selects those appellants with identities sufficiently stable for admission to the city. The Bailiff is opposed by a rebellious faction led by Hyperides, who deploy philosophical and political arguments similar to Lewis’s own. Innocents are killed, but the narrative breaks off before any resolution or real action and was not resumed until the 1950s, when Lewis was commissioned by the BBC to complete the work for radio dramatization.
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The Apes of God is Lewis’s most devastating and unalloyed satire, set in London during the weeks leading up to the 1926 General Strike, and caricaturing many of Lewis’s associates and patrons, most notably the Sitwell family. The “apes” are wealthy amateur artists, imitators of the godlike true artist (none appears in the novel). Lewis takes his elaborate verbal masquerade to its most extreme point of threatening emptiness in this book, which accordingly has an ambiguous reputation as his most important or most unreadable. From the 1930s on, Lewis wrote for the common reader. Snooty Baronet (1932) is a comically heartless tale of a publicity stunt in Persia, intended to boost the sales of the narrator’s behaviorist books. Sir Michael Kell-Imrie, the maimed war-veteran narrator, is, it becomes clear, a psychopath. He casually shoots his agent as Persian “bandits” approach to perform the arranged kidnap. This apparently empty novel is one of Lewis’s best, a subtle reflection on the effects of war. The Revenge for Love (1937) is an unsparing exposure of the “nothing” in wait beneath the surface of life, threatening to engulf his characters. Margot and Victor are ordinary people caught up in communist and criminal machinations in the run-up to the Spanish Civil War. The novel has, as Lewis claimed, a “metaphysical kernel,” but it is the actions of careless people that are responsible for the tragic deaths of Margot and Victor. Margot’s love is the realest thing in the world the novel depicts – an unprecedented revelation of the humanism that lay concealed behind the harsh surfaces of Lewis’s fiction. In 1939, his political reputation under a cloud despite his retraction of sympathy for fascism, Lewis went with his wife to North America, where they spent the war years in some hardship. The Vulgar Streak (1941) reads as an underpowered predecessor of Self Condemned (1954), since both depict “masculine” men who effectively destroy themselves through undervaluing women who love them. Self Condemned tells a story of tragic hubris modeled on Lewis’s own; the academic historian Rene Harding resigns and emigrates to Canada and hotel-bound poverty. The sheer accumulation of detail of everyday life and companionship with the wife he had taken for granted gives this novel a new power. The hotel burns down, becoming an empty cave of ice, and
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Harding also becomes a hollow shell after his wife, appalled at his increasing compromises, throws herself under a truck. Lewis was by now blind, his optic nerve and brain under attack from a pituitary tumor. Self Condemned transposes his fading of consciousness to the whole project of Enlightenment in wartime, under threat of nuclear annihilation. His last major work continued The Childermass in Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta as the retitled The Human Age (1955). Pullman now has as much of Lewis himself in him as of Joyce. Lewis was now definitely “interested in the problem of good and evil,” and the books follow Pullman’s progress, first under the protection of the Bailiff in “Third City” (Purgatory) and then in Hell, where he advises Sammael (Satan) himself. Pullman acts throughout in accordance with what seem to him to be expedient but enlightened attitudes in difficult times: God’s representative, an ineffectual angel known as the Padishah, seems simply not interested enough in imperfect man to bother over what happens to Pullman as the great cosmic power blocs clash. Sammael on the other hand has an apparently idealistic plan to democratize the divine, and Pullman is able to outdo him in ingenious methods of persuading the rebel angels to surrender divinity and enter a Human Age. The main point is clear. The political and intellectual compromises of intellectuals and artists in the twentieth century – whether with the left or the right – have led them to betray what should be their deepest commitment, to truth and to the divine. A final volume (“The Trial of Man”), in which Pullman (no doubt still accompanied by the childish Satters) would be judged, forgiven by God, and assimilated to Heaven, remained unfinished, and perhaps unfinishable, at Lewis’s death. SEE ALSO: Censorship and the Novel (BIF); Ford, Ford Madox (BIF); The Little Magazines (AF); London in Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); West, Rebecca (BIF); World War I in Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Beasley, R. (2007). Wyndham Lewis and Modernist Satire. In M. Shiach (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 126–36.
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Edwards, P. (2000). Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gasiorek, A. (2004). Wyndham Lewis and Modernism. Tavistock: Northcote House. Humphreys, R. (2004). Wyndham Lewis. London: Tate. Jaime, C. C. (ed.) (2007). Wyndham Lewis the Radical: Essays on Literature and Modernity. Berne: Peter Lang. Jameson, F. (1979). Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kenner, H. (1954). Wyndham Lewis. London: Methuen. Klein, S. (1994). The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis: Monsters of Nature and Design. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, W. (1926). The Art of Being Ruled. London: Chatto and Windus. Lewis, W. (1927). Time and Western Man. London: Chatto and Windus. Lewis, W. (1928a). The Childermass: Section 1. London: Chatto and Windus. Lewis, W. (1928b). Tarr, rev. edn. London: Chatto and Windus. Lewis, W. (1930). The Apes of God. London: Arthur Press. Lewis, W. (1932). Snooty Baronet. London: Cassell. Lewis, W. (1934). Men without Art. London: Cassell. Lewis, W. (1991). The Revenge for Love [1937] (ed. R. W. Dasenbrock). Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow. Lewis, W. (1941). The Vulgar Streak. London: Robert Hale. Lewis, W. (1950). Rude Assignment: A Narrative of My Career Up to Date. London: Hutchinson. Lewis, W. (1954). Self Condemned. London: Methuen. Lewis, W. (1955). The Human Age, book 2: Monstre Gai; book 3: Malign Fiesta. London: Methuen. Lewis, W. (1982). The Complete Wild Body (ed. B. Lafourcade). Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow. (Original contents published 1909–35.) Lewis, W. (1990). Tarr: The 1918 version [1918] (ed. P. O’Keeffe). Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow. Perrino, M. (1995). The Poetics of Mockery: Wyndham Lewis’s “The Apes of God” and “The Popularization of Modernism.” London: Modern Humanities Research Association.
Lively, Penelope ALISTAIR DAVIES
In a long and prolific literary career (she has written over more than 40 works for adults and
children), Penelope Lively has excelled in a number of genres: the ghost story, the romance, the historical novel, even science fiction. Her work for adults has been marked by a consistent spirit of experiment subtle enough to win the admiration of critics while never alienating a wider readership. Absorbing modernist and postmodernist modes, she is predominantly a realist writer whose work, both for children and for adults, questions our experience of time, memory, and history and challenges the codes and expectations of the “real.” From the publication of her first novel for children, Astercote (1970), Lively has enjoyed considerable recognition and success. Her fifth novel for children, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (1973), won the Carnegie Medal while her ninth, A Stitch in Time (1976c), won the Whitbread Prize. Her first collection of short stories, Nothing Missing but the Samovar (1978a), won the Southern Arts Literature Prize. Her first novel for adults, The Road to Lichfield (1977), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, as was According to Mark (1984a). She won the Booker Prize in 1987 for Moon Tiger, the deathbed reflections on her own life and on the life of the twentieth century of an English writer, for whom history is a shifting kaleidoscope, without one defining perspective. The novel focuses on a consistent theme of Lively’s work: the individual’s drive for narrative order and the need to accept the inherent dangers and limitations of this drive. Lively is a child of the British Empire and an adult of its decline. Born in Egypt in 1933 (her father worked for a bank), she enjoyed, as she recounts in the first volume of her vivid, selfreflective memoirs, Oleander, Jacaranda (1994), the privileged life of a colonial family. What she retains from that period (the subtitle of her memoir is A Childhood Perceived) is the child’s sense of the strangeness of things when they were unfettered by the codes of English culture and of English class. The most memorable characters in her fiction for children and for adults are those who exemplify or retain the primordial strangeness of childhood perception and who resist containing experience and events within the neat structures of narrative or explanation. The world of colonial privilege ended with the divorce of her parents in 1945 and with her repatriation to England, even if the world of
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privilege did not. Educated at a private school and at Oxford (where she studied modern history), she found security in the upper-class world of her maternal grandmother and her large house in Somerset, powerfully evoked in the second volume of her memoirs, A House Unlocked (2001). Prewar Egypt and postwar Somerset are recurrent places in her writing, the one representing a vanished world, the other a vanishing one. Given the impact of World War II on her own life and on the confident imperial world in which she grew up, it is not surprising that World War II haunts her work as the decisive event in the lives of many of her characters and of their culture; but it is the lives of middle- and upper-middle-class women, as these changed in the wake of the political, social, and sexual transformations of the postwar period, that always take center stage. From the beginning (in her fiction for children and for adults), her work has focused on the displacement felt by her characters not just in time but in space, reflecting a modern world where older structures have disappeared or are disappearing, where change and transformation are constant but where the present is always haunted by a profound awareness of the past. More recently, as in her novels The Photograph (2003) and Consequences (2007) and her antimemoir Making It Up (2005), she has explored the question of choices made and of imagined alternative lives, but these works continue a preoccupation at the heart of her work: the dual roles of circumstances and of chance in shaping lives. SEE ALSO: Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (BIF); Colonial Fiction (BIF); Historical Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Jolly, M. (2000). After Feminism: Pat Barker, Penelope Lively and the Contemporary Novel. In A. Davies & A. Sinfield (eds.), British Culture of the Postwar. London: Routledge, pp. 58–82. Lively, P. (1970). Astercote. London: Heinemann. Lively, P. (1971a). The Whispering Knights. London: Heinemann. Lively, P. (1971b). The Wild Hunt of Hagworth. London: Heinemann.
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Lively, P. (1972). The Driftway. London: Heinemann. Lively, P. (1973). The Ghost of Thomas Kempe. London: Heinemann. Lively, P. (1974). The House in Norham Gardens. London: Heinemann. Lively, P. (1975a). Boy without a Name. London: Heinemann. Lively, P. (1975b). Going Back. London: Heinemann. Lively, P. (1976a). Fanny’s Sister. London: Heinemann. Lively, P. (1976b). The Presence of the Past: An Introduction to Landscape History. London: Collins. Lively, P. (1976c). A Stitch in Time. London: Heinemann. Lively, P. (1977). The Road to Lichfield. London: Heinemann. Lively, P. (1978a). Nothing Missing but the Samovar. London: Heinemann. Lively, P. (1978b). The Voyage of QV 66. London: Heinemann. Lively, P. (1979). Treasures of Time. London: Heinemann. Lively, P. (1981). The Revenge of Samuel Stokes. London: Heinemann. Lively, P. (1982). Next to Nature, Art. London: Heinemann. Lively, P. (1983). Perfect Happiness. London: Heinemann. Lively, P. (1984a). According to Mark. London: Heinemann. Lively, P. (1984b). Dragon Trouble. London: Heinemann. Lively, P. (1986). Pack of Cards: Collected Short Stories 1978–1986. London: Heinemann. Lively, P. (1987a). Debbie and the Little Devil. London: Heinemann. Lively, P. (1987b). A House Inside Out. London: Deutsch. Lively, P. (1987c). Moon Tiger. London: Deutsch. Lively, P. (1989). Passing On. London: Deutsch. Lively, P. (1991). City of the Mind. London: Deutsch. Lively, P. (1993). Cleopatra’s Sister. New York: Viking. Lively, P. (1994). Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived. New York: Viking. Lively, P. (1996). Heat Wave. New York: Viking. Lively, P. (1998). Spiderweb. New York: Viking. Lively, P. (2001). A House Unlocked. New York: Viking. Lively, P. (2003). The Photograph. New York: Viking. Lively, P. (2005). Making It Up. New York: Viking. Lively, P. (2007). Consequences. New York: Viking. Moran, M. H. (1997). The Novels of Penelope Lively: A Case for the Continuity of the Experimental Impulse in Postwar British Fiction. South Atlantic Review, 62(1), 101–120.
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London in Fiction WINNIE CHAN
Its fabled landmarks might be easily located in the familiar A–Z atlas, but London as portrayed in twentieth-century fiction is a place of myth. Historic yet constantly changing, cosmopolitan yet stolidly English, the city is incomprehensible, a universal microcosm that has seized the imagination of just about every novelist in Britain, not to mention its far-flung former colonies. These writers have made London the setting, if not the subject, of their diverse fictions, which depict so many Londons that they defy description. Yet in them the city is somehow always instantly recognizable. At the turn of the twentieth century, writers in the world’s most populous city inherited a grim, grimy London popularized in fiction by Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, home to not only Dr. Jekyll, but also Mr. Hyde. This London endures, for example, in “the dirt, the discouragement, the discomfort” of H. G. Wells’s TonoBungay (1909, 81) and the “hell of noise and dust and dirt” of Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman Steps (1923, 8). Well into the twentieth century, the picaresque adventures of tramps in George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) could have made themselves at home in Henry Mayhew’s quintessentially Victorian expose of London Labour and the London Poor (1985 [1851] ). Even as its landmarks were being razed to make way for new ones, such as Underground “Tube” stations, an essentially Victorian London persisted in fiction and, apparently, fact. This stubbornly Victorian character – associated with industrial progress, imperial confidence, middleclass solidity, and English parochialism – seems to have resisted the advancement of modernism into London. Modernism was a largely urban sensibility, since polyglot cities attract artists and intellectuals, and London had been a polyglot city since it was known as Londinium in the Roman Empire, if not earlier. During the nineteenth century, London’s population sextupled to over six million, primarily through migration from the countryside and the northern cities, as well as the rest of the world. Yet if Paris was modernism’s capital, then London was often regarded as its anti-capital, at least until “human character changed,”
according to Virginia Woolf’s celebrated recollection, “on or about December 1910” (1924, 4). On or about that date, the London of modernist fiction began to resemble the fragmentary, illogical “Unreal City” of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1971 [1922] ), the poem that would become the anthem of its generation. Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) exemplifies this sensibility. A violent mashup of Victorian content in modernist form, the novel fictionalizes a historically factual non-event – a botched anarchist bomb plot on the Greenwich Royal Observatory in 1894 – and peoples the familiar detective plot with grotesquely Dickensian caricatures; however, the narration’s caustically detached irony erodes any coherence that might have survived the chapters’ non-linear plotting. As the anarchists plot to explode a landmark that dictates time, the novel’s plotting explodes conventions of time, while its apprehension of London as a maddening profusion of circles, triangles, and squares transforms the urban space into the unreadable text it always was. The subtler distortions of London in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) manipulate the city’s familiar geography to map not only space and time, but also, above all, its characters’ subjectivities. Throughout a single day, characters’ paths intersect as they travel about the city by foot and tram, their journeys taking them from Dean’s Yard to Oxford Street, from Whitehall to Regent’s Park, from the present into the past and back. As the novel’s eponym prepares for a dinner party, she contemplates her marriage and a former suitor, while the patient of one of her guests, a shell-shocked veteran of the Great War whose vividly tormenting perceptions are merely echoed by hers, is so overwhelmed by the past that he kills himself before dinner-time. Moreover, as numerous commentators have remarked, the journeys traced by Mrs. Dalloway are impossible to complete in the time given. For all its remarkable innovation, Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness technique was pioneered a decade earlier, in the 13 book-length “chapters” of Dorothy Richardson’s semiautobiographical Pilgrimage (1915–69). Richardson disliked the term “stream of consciousness,” but The Tunnel (1919), the novel’s fourth “chapter,” depicts in conspicuously minute and unmediated detail the protagonist’s first impressions of the
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city in the 1890s, thus suggesting modern London as a site of unprecedented possibility for narrating streams of consciousness. If modernist experimentation in fiction reoriented time and space, then London was an irresistible subject of and stimulus to such innovation. The epicenter of Anglophone modernism shifted to New York and Chicago as World War II advanced onto British shores. The Blitz, intended to bomb Britain into submission, would destroy towns large and small; it began on September 7, 1940 with 57 consecutive nights of air raids on London, and resumed with unmanned V1 bombs and V2 rockets in the “Little Blitz” of 1944–5. Windows were blacked out, streetlights extinguished. Half of the over 60,000 civilians killed were Londoners. Long since revised in public memory as the finest hour of a heroic people resisting evil, this time of darkness and silence, punctuated by bombs and anti-aircraft fire, produced morally ambivalent fictions set in a city driven literally underground. Written as they were on a diet of rations, against a backdrop of bomb-pocked ruins, under nightly threat of devastation, these anxious fictions depict a London – and by extension, a nation – in decline. While wartime propaganda celebrated the Underground as a symbol of Londoners’ steadfast, good-humored resistance against Hitler, wartime fiction preserved a much more ambivalent portrait of this subterranean landscape, a site of doubt and dread far removed from the moral certainty of a righteous war. (Resurrecting Blitzera Tube stations, novels by writers born after the war, including Graham Swift’s Shuttlecock, 1981, and Ian McEwan’s Atonement, 2001, have more recently challenged the heroic legend.) As both a propagandist for Britain’s Ministry of Information and an air-raid warden in London, Elizabeth Bowen observed the ravages of the Blitz firsthand. Yet in The Heat of the Day, written and set during the war, the Blitz is obliquely depicted, though intensely perceived, by the protagonist through “the non-existence of her window” (1948, 93), among other absences that renew the city daily. Likewise, Bowen’s oft-anthologized story, “The Demon Lover” (1945), suggests the trauma induced by the Blitz through its protagonist’s confusion of World War II with World War I. By contrast, the Blitz propels the convoluted plot of Graham Greene’s thriller, The Ministry of
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Fear (1943), whose protagonist eludes a would-be assassin by navigating tube stations and bomb shelters beneath the city and its maze of constantly changing ruins above. Both this novel and Bowen’s ironically contrast London with the countryside, which, though physically untouched by the Blitz, manifests corruption by it in illusory pastoral. As the Blitz distorts space, so does it distort time: despite their significant differences, neither Greene’s “entertainment” nor Bowen’s impressionist narrative proceeds chronologically, their fragmentary flashbacks emphasizing the impossibility of return to a prewar past. Also, both protagonists become entangled in love triangles that involve spies and thus transcend romantic infidelity. Since London figures among the more heavily traveled regions of “Greeneland,” Greene unsurprisingly revisits the theme of wartime infidelity in London with The End of the Affair (1951). Critics tend to dismiss wartime fiction as artistically uninteresting, but these snapshots of Blitz London innovatively appropriate modernist techniques to map a dynamically unfamiliar terrain that the modernists could perhaps not have imagined, prompting moral reflection through devastations of time and place, reflecting anxieties that continued to reverberate decades after the war. The Girls of Slender Means (1963), drawn from Muriel Spark’s own wartime experiences in a women’s shelter, typifies her compact black humor. Set between VE Day and VJ Day from May to August 1945, the plot climaxes as a V1 bomb explodes in the garden, trapping the “girls” within. The plump, pious Joanna perishes after the slender, mean Selina escapes through a window, returning to rescue not one of her housemates, but a designer frock that wartime rationing had compelled her to share for candy coupons and soap. Yet the fate of good and evil does not affirm worldly injustice so much as it stimulates moral reflection, effecting the religious conversion of the novel’s anarchic protagonist. As the Cold War deepened, such reflections turned to fantasy in the dystopic Londons of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962). Where Orwell’s London is under constant surveillance by Big Brother, Burgess’s London is lawless and impersonal, breeding the extravagant violence that befits a society in decline. Set in the
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near future, both novels depict societies whose decline is vividly implied through violence to the language. In Orwell’s novel, Newspeak, “the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year” (55), officially extinguishes Oldspeak, which readers would recognize as English. By contrast, the sociopathic teenage “droogs” of Burgess’s novel communicate in “nadsat,” which grafts onto English Cockney and American slang, in addition to Russian, the language of the dominant culture. Likewise, the Britain of Nineteen Eighty-Four has been reduced to “Airstrip One,” a province of Oceania, which consolidates Britain’s disintegrating Empire with the ascendant Americas. Closer to this dystopic future, Burgess’s 1985 (1978) confirms Orwell’s conclusions, but trade unions and militant Muslims, rather than totalitarianism, threaten to crush freedom and individuality. After World War II, the Empire on which the sun had once never set disintegrated, beginning in 1947 with the independence and partition of India and ending, thus far, in 1997 with the cession of Hong Kong to China. In that 50-year span, migrants from the Empire’s far-flung possessions – principally the Caribbean, which was nearest, and South Asia – established a presence for “black British” writing before long. Like migrants from the countryside and the North in earlier fictions, these conspicuously foreign immigrants arrive in the imperial capital seeking their fortunes, only to suffer disillusionment when the colonial myths of civilized behavior and fair play elude them. These fictions also tend to depict crises of identity and processes of selfcreation as these new Londoners transform and are transformed by the city. The most ethnically diverse city in Europe, London had long attracted migrants from around the world, but the British Nationality Act of 1948 extended citizenship to those born in the colonies, prompting mass migration that visibly changed the city’s complexion, to the great alarm of nativists who feared what the Jamaican performance poet Louise Bennett has memorably satirized as “colonizin Englan in reverse” (1983, 106–7). Most of these rights were revoked by the British Nationality Act of 1981, but colonization in reverse could not be reversed. According to the 2001 census, 30 percent of the minority population in England and Wales called London home: while
only about 2 percent of Britons claimed African ancestry, for example, over 10 percent of Londoners did. As a familiar sign of protest declared, “We are here, because you were there.” Fiction abundantly documents this transformation of London. Among the earliest examples, Colin MacInnes’s “London Novels” explore the city’s emerging subcultures and racist reactions to them: an African student narrates half of City of Spades (1957), but Absolute Beginners (1959) more notably dramatizes, almost in real time, the racially charged Notting Hill riots that exploded in September 1958. MacInnes was an Australian writing about London, where Caribbean writers had already begun to establish a voice, not least through novels that depict migrant experience. The most influential of these is Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956), a slim novel narrated in a pan-Caribbean, “broken” English spoken nowhere in the Caribbean, but constructed specifically to seem Caribbean to English readers. Just as Selvon reinvents the English language, so his characters remap the unreal city: Bayswater, Notting Hill Gate, and Marble Arch become “the Water,” “the Gate,” and “the Arch.” However, the novel’s title makes a foregone conclusion of the migrants’ failure to integrate. Later migrant novels focus on self-creation, a process often achieved through writing. V. S. Naipaul, like Selvon a native of Trinidad, set in London two novels about writers. The Enigma of Arrival (1987) is more straightforwardly autobiographical than The Mimic Men (1967), a novel notable for the claustrophobic descriptions of its unreliable narrator, an exiled politician who struggles to begin his memoir in a “multi-mirrored, book-shaped room with a coffin-like wardrobe” (5) in Kensington High Street, a description that emphasizes the relationship of the setting to the migrant’s subjectivity. In Buchi Emecheta’s considerably less astringent SecondClass Citizen (1974), a perennially pregnant Ibuza woman travels from Nigeria to join her husband, an incompetent law student in London. Amid gritty north London settings, she overcomes the obstacles of gender (imposed by her philandering husband), race (imposed by the majority English), and ethnicity (imposed by the West Indian immigrants who had preceded her) in order to create her “brainchild,” a novel that portrays African experiences in English because “She could
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not write in any African language, so it must be English although English was not her mother tongue” (166). By the time her husband discovers and burns her manuscript, she is ready to leave him, having written her way to selfhood, at once disillusioned and empowered by what the demystified imperial metropolis nonetheless makes possible. Despite these radical changes to London’s population, its numbers stagnated between six and seven million from 1900 to 2000. In the same time, Greater London doubled in area, absorbing its suburbs. Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) participated in a tradition satirizing the anxieties of coarse but socially aspirant suburban dwellers. In The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), Hanif Kureishi revises this tradition in the adventures of “a funny kind of Englishman” (3), the adolescent son of a Pakistani immigrant and a lower-middleclass Englishwoman, who confronts his identity through sex, drugs, and theater in London. As the Jamaican-born cultural theorist Stuart Hall observes, race is the modality in which class is lived in Britain (Hall et al. 1978). Reflecting the changing face of Cool Britannia, these post-imperial migrants and their descendants have also been revitalizing Anglophone fiction. However, these exotic recent fixtures of the Queen’s Honours List and shortlists for Britain’s glitziest literary prizes warn that, even in London, Britain is no “Happy Multicultural Land,” in the mocking phrase of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000, 384). As satirized in that novel and Kureishi’s The Black Album (1995), The Satanic Verses became notorious for blasphemy against Islam and the bounty on its author’s head, but Salman Rushdie’s “love-song to our mongrel selves” (1991, 394) exposed the rifts among Britain’s marginalized communities. One of its protagonists gives up the dream of “Ellowen Deeowen” he had cherished as a child half a world away when he discovers in L-O-N-D-O-N that immigrants constitute “a city visible but unseen.” He remembers, however, that William the Conqueror was an immigrant too. Lacking the illusory cohesion of Victorian London, much late twentieth-century fiction about the city is haunted by its fictional past. For good reason does the climactic scene of The Satanic Verses occur on the set of a movie adapted from a musical adapted from Dickens’s Our
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Mutual Friend. Alan Moore’s graphic novels resurrect the sordid fascination of late Victorian London. The From Hell series (1991–6) revisits the adventures of Jack the Ripper, while The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999– ) assembles legendary late Victorian Londoners from Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man, and The Picture of Dorian Gray to face off against Fu Manchu, the Yellow Peril that emanated from Limehouse in Sax Rohmer’s fabulously pulpy novels (1913–73). Less speculatively, the city is a historical palimpsest in Edward Rutherfurd’s sprawling London (1998), whose two families impose linear, chronological order on the city from pre-Roman times to the eve of the twenty-first century. Enacting its own versions of Masterpiece Theater, fiction about contemporary London narrates its present by reckoning with Londons past. As the epigraph to White Teeth, Zadie Smith’s millennial blockbuster, puts it, paraphrasing Shakespeare while cryptically crediting the National Archives as merely a “Washington, DC, museum”: “The past is prologue.” As the millennium approached, notable novels set in the city looked elegiacally to its past. The pastoral title of London Fields (1989), regarded as the masterpiece of Martin Amis, whose satirical novels inevitably find their way back to London, evokes elegy despite its multiple endings and apocalyptic setting in 1999. Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989) is set in a magic realist London that warps in and out of the seventeenthcentury English Revolution, while the novel’s jacket avers that Winterson herself “does not live in London.” Amid this abundance of self-reflexive, formally adventurous fiction, London’s most devoted chroniclers have been Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair. Biographer of Shakespeare, Blake, Eliot, and London itself – his cultural history, London: The Biography (2000), figures the city as a person and traces its life from the earliest records to the shiny millennial developments at Canary Wharf and the Millennium Dome – Ackroyd writes about a “blue plaque” London of great men and grand themes. Of Hawksmoor (1985), generally regarded as his finest work, a novel involving a real-life student of the legendary architect Christopher Wren, Ackroyd confessed to the New York Times: “I’m not sure whether it’s a historical novel
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set in the present or a contemporary novel set in the past” (Kolbert 1996). As Ackroyd’s biographies of Londoners and novels about Londons past blend fact and fiction, so the work of Iain Sinclair resists generic classification. But Sinclair focuses on minutiae about East London rather than the city at large. His earliest experimental fictions, such as White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987) and Downriver (1991), resuscitate the area’s “drowned voices” (Atkins & Sinclair 1999, 128). While Ackroyd credits Sinclair’s Lud Heat (1975) with inspiring Hawksmoor, Sinclair declares Ackroyd to be one of the monuments of London in his volume of illustrated essays, Liquid City (1999). Perhaps appropriately, these complementary writers’ fictions about London destabilize the idea of fiction. Yet they do not destabilize the idea of London. Since Chaucer’s pilgrims left for Canterbury from a Southwark inn, London has supplied the impetus for storytelling. With the city’s rich history continually enriched by newcomers, the storytelling shows no sign of abating. SEE ALSO: Black British Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of the African Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/ Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ackroyd, P. (1985). Hawskmoor. London: Hamish Hamilton. Ackroyd, P. (2000). London: The Biography. London: Chatto and Windus. Amis, M. (1989). London Fields. London: Jonathan Cape. Atkins, M., & Sinclair, I. (1999). Liquid City. London: Reaktion. Bennett, A. (1923). Riceyman Steps. London: Cassell. Bennett, L. (1983). Colonization in Reverse. In Selected Poems. Kingston, Jamaica: Sangster’s. Bowen, E. (1945). The Demon Lover. In The Demon Lover and Other Stories. London: Jonathan Cape. Bowen, E. (1948). The Heat of the Day. London: Jonathan Cape.
Bradbury, M. (1991). London 1890–1920 [1976]. In Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930. London: Penguin. Burgess, A. (1962). A Clockwork Orange. London: Heinemann. Burgess, A. (1989). 1985. London: Arrow. Conrad, J. (1907). The Secret Agent. London: Methuen. Eliot, T. S. (1971). The Waste Land [1922]. In T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land: A Facsmile and Transcript of the Original Drafts including the Annotations of Ezra Pound (ed. V. Eliot). Orlando, FL: Harcourt. Emecheta, B. (1974). Second-Class Citizen. London: Allison and Busby. Greene, G. (1943). The Ministry of Fear. London: Heinemann. Greene, G. (1951). The End of the Affair. London: Heinemann. Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., & Roberts, B. (1978). Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. London: Macmillan. Kolbert, E. (1996). Wandering through History. New York Times, p. 3 (Jan. 19). Kureishi, H. (1990). The Buddha of Suburbia. London: Faber and Faber. Kureishi, H. (1995). The Black Album. London: Faber and Faber. MacInnes, C. (1957). City of Spades. London: MacGibbon and Kee. MacInnes, C. (1959). Absolute Beginners. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Mayhew, H. (1985). London Labour and the London Poor [1851]. London: Penguin. McEwan, I. (2001). Atonement. London: Jonathan Cape. McLeod, J. (2004). Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis. London: Routledge. Moore, A., & Campbell, E. (1991–6). From Hell. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink. Moore, A., & O’Neill, K. (1999–2008). The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. La Jolla, CA: America’s Best Comics. Murray, A. (2007). Recalling London: Literature and History in the Work of Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair. London: Continuum. Naipaul, V. S. (1967). The Mimic Men. London: Deutsch. Naipaul, V. S. (1987). The Enigma of Arrival. London: Viking. Office of National Statistics. Census;1; 2001 – Commentaries – Ethnicity and Religion. At www. statistics.gov.uk/census2001/profiles/commentaries/ ethnicity.asp, accessed May 24, 2008. Orwell, G. (1933). Down and Out in Paris and London. London: Gollancz. Orwell, G. (1936). Keep the Aspidistra Flying. London: Gollancz.
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Orwell, G. (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker and Warburg. Phillips, L. (2006). London Narratives: Post-War Fiction and the City. London: Continuum. Richardson, D. (1919). The Tunnel. London: Duckworth. Rohmer, S. (1913). The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu. London: Methuen. Rushdie, S. (1988). The Satanic Verses. London: Viking. Rushdie, S. (1991). In Good Faith. In Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991. London: Granta. Rutherfurd, E. [Wintle, F.] (1998). London: The Novel. London: Crown. Selvon, S. (1956). The Lonely Londoners. London: Allan Wingate. Sinclair, I. (1987). White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. London: Goldmark. Smith, Z. (2000). White Teeth. London: Hamish Hamilton. Spark, M. (1963). The Girls of Slender Means. London: Macmillan. Swift, G. (1981). Shuttlecock. London: Picador. Wells, H. G. (1909). Tono-Bungay. London: Macmillan. Winterson, J. (1989). Sexing the Cherry. London: Bloomsbury. Woolf, V. (1924). Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. London: Hogarth. Woolf, V. (1925). Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Lowry, Malcolm PATRICK A. McCARTHY
Malcolm Lowry (born July 28, 1909) was the youngest son of Arthur O. Lowry, a cotton broker, and his pious wife Evelyn. Raised in the Wirral town of Caldy, he was then sent to the Caldicott School and the Leys School, where he wrote stories under the pseudonym CAMEL, for Clarence Malcolm Lowry (he despised the name Clarence and soon abandoned it). In 1927, aged 17, he secured his father’s permission to sail to the Far East and back as a deckhand on a freighter, the SS Pyrrhus, before entering Cambridge. The experience proved far less romantic than he expected, but he nonetheless mined it for the first of his many autobiographical fictions, Ultramarine (1933), whose protagonist Eugene Dana Hilliott is resented by much of the ship’s crew but eventually earns their respect by joining the firemen who stoke the ship’s furnaces. Ultramarine draws not
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only on Lowry’s own experience but also on two other sea voyage novels that he read while at Cambridge: Conrad Aiken’s Blue Voyage, which influenced his handling of dialogue and perspective, and Nordahl Grieg’s The Ship Sails On, with whose protagonist and author Lowry identified himself. He also met both writers, arranging for Aiken to serve as his tutor (and father figure) during summer 1929 and later traveling to Oslo to meet Grieg. In 1933, on vacation in Spain, Lowry met Janine Vanderheim, a young American woman who had adopted the name Jan Gabrial. They married in Paris in January 1934, soon separated, and reunited in New York that August. Meanwhile, Lowry worked on another autobiographical novel, In Ballast to the White Sea, about a young man (Lowry) who tries to write a novel (Ultramarine) but becomes obsessed with the influence on his work of another novel (The Ship Sails On) by a Norwegian novelist, Erikson (Grieg). Lowry’s subject was the dilemma of a writer who has trouble establishing an identity of his own, but In Ballast apparently ended happily, its protagonist having worked out his relationship to his literary precursor. But in 1935, when Lowry’s American agent Harold Matson sent In Ballast to Burton Rascoe, an editor at Doubleday, and enclosed a copy of Ultramarine to show that Lowry was already a published writer, Rascoe claimed (falsely) that Ultramarine was almost entirely plagiarized from a story he had published and that In Ballast was lifted from other sources. Facing precisely the charge that he was attempting to explore and overcome in his new novel, that he was entirely a derivative writer, Lowry considered suicide. A year later, depressed and unable to control his drinking, he checked himself into the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital, not only because he needed help but also, he said, to do research for a story. Rescued by Jan, he wrote a rather powerful novella, based on his Bellevue experience, entitled The Last Address, later revising it as Swinging the Maelstrom. Neither was ever published, but after his death an amalgam of the two appeared under the title Lunar Caustic (1968b). In October 1936 the Lowrys again changed locale, traveling to Mexico for an extended stay. There he began Under the Volcano (1947), a novel set in Mexico that he spent the next decade writing
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and rewriting. The germ of the book, Lowry said, was a bus ride like the one in chapter 8 that is interrupted by the discovery, by the side of the road, of a dying Indian whom no one can help without risking liability for his death. At its center is the figure of Geoffrey Firmin – “the Consul” – an alcoholic whose life is simultaneously tragic and comic and who writes a beautiful, heartrending letter, pleading with his ex-wife Yvonne to return to him, yet is fully aware, even as he writes, that he cannot post it. Strangely appealing, utterly absurd, yet at times quite noble, the Consul is one of the great protagonists of modern fiction. As he began writing the story of the Consul’s doomed reunion with Yvonne, however, Lowry’s own marriage fell apart. Jan left him in December 1937 and moved to Los Angeles; he stayed in Mexico until July 1938, then followed her, but despite attempts at reconciliation the bond was broken. After nearly a year in California he met Margerie Bonner, a former film actress, and fell in love with her; he soon moved to Vancouver, where he was joined by Margerie. In December 1940, a month after his divorce from Jan became final, he and Margerie were married. Well before then, however, she had become the sustaining force in his life: a woman who believed in his genius and was willing to devote herself to him and his writing. When it was finally published in 1947, Under the Volcano seemed to confirm Margerie’s faith. It is a major literary achievement, a densely textured, symbolic epic that, Lowry claimed in a letter of January 1946 to Jonathan Cape, “was so designed, counterdesigned and interwelded that it could be read an indefinite number of times and still not have yielded all its meanings or its drama or its poetry” (1995, 527). The manuscript that Harold Matson sent to one publisher after another in 1940, however, was only a poor cousin of the published book. The plots of the 1940 and 1947 versions are not substantially different, although Yvonne is the Consul’s daughter rather than his ex-wife in 1940 (the estranged wife, Priscilla, never appears in person) and Hugh is Yvonne’s American boyfriend rather than the Consul’s younger brother. But the dialogue of the 1940 text is painfully clumsy, the characters poorly drawn, and its details not fully interwoven. The many rejection notices the book received in 1940 were a serious blow, but the result was a vastly
better book, after Lowry spent years rethinking and reworking page after page. Anyone who doubts that he knew exactly what he was doing when he submitted the revised manuscript should read the letter to Cape cited above, which covers 30 pages in Lowry’s collected letters and, despite exaggerated claims for esoteric levels of meaning, is still the best introduction to the novel’s design and themes. On June 7, 1944 a fire broke out in the squatter’s shack where the Lowrys lived on the Burrard Inlet across from Vancouver. Among the papers lost was virtually the entire manuscript of In Ballast (although a carbon copy, unknown to scholars for decades after Lowry’s death, had been left with Jan’s mother). The loss of this important manuscript was devastating, and Lowry realized that the same could have happened to Under the Volcano, which Margerie had rescued from the fire; even so, he spent yet another full year on revisions before mailing the Volcano manuscript to his agents in June 1945. In November, still waiting for a decision, he and Margerie set out to spend the winter in Mexico. The trip was important in crucial respects: for example, he learned that he had miscopied and mistranslated the apparently threatening sign that appears in the garden in chapter 5, but he recognized that his mistake could be passed along to the Consul and the misinterpretation attributed to the character’s paranoid vision of the world. It was during this trip, too, that he received news that Under the Volcano had been accepted by Cape in England and all but accepted by Reynal and Hitchcock in the US, the letters being delivered on the same day by the cartero on whom Lowry had modeled the one who delivers Yvonne’s long-lost picture postcard in chapter 6. In other respects, however, the trip was a catastrophe. For one thing, Lowry discovered that his friend Juan Fernando Marquez had been killed in a manner eerily reminiscent of the Consul’s death; for another, Lowry himself was arrested, jailed briefly, and harassed for weeks over an unpaid fine from his 1936–8 stay in Mexico. It seemed as if his past were haunting him. Even before Under the Volcano appeared, Lowry planned two more novels, based on his return trip to Mexico. In Dark as the Grave wherein My Friend is Laid (1968a) – the title comes from “On the Death of Mr. William Hervey,”
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an elegy by Abraham Cowley – Sigbjørn Wilderness (Lowry), accompanied by his wife Primrose (Margerie), returns to Mexico, the setting of his unpublished novel The Valley of the Shadow of Death (Under the Volcano). He is haunted by a fire that burned down his shack on June 6, 1944 (the date is changed slightly to coincide with D-Day), worried that the novel and film Drunkard’s Rigadoon (The Lost Weekend) will undercut his novel, and stunned to learn that his friend Juan Fernando Martinez (Marquez) was killed much as the character in his book was. In Dark as the Grave and its sequel, La Mordida, where he is arrested for the unpaid fine, Sigbjørn imagines that he is living within his own book, or a version of that book now being written by his daemon. Nowhere near completion and often unsatisfactory as fiction, these novels are fascinating in other ways, particularly as extended meditations on metafiction. In later years Lowry plunged into several projects. There was a filmscript of Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1990) in collaboration with Margerie, brilliant, but impossibly long for a film; a collection of short stories, Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (1961), in which the various protagonists move from a state of harmony, simplicity, and love (in “The Bravest Boat”) into increasing self-involvement (beginning with “Through the Panama”), and finally (in “The Forest Path to the Spring”) back to the happiness that opened the collection; and a novel, October Ferry to Gabriola (1970), about Ethan Llewelyn, whose Lowryan obsessions include a fear that his evil spirits have started a series of fires that follow him around. Lowry also planned an elaborate series of novels (including revisions of Ultramarine and Under the Volcano) to be called “The Voyage that Never Ends,” framed by a narrative in which Sigbjørn Wilderness, hospitalized and under anaesthesia, dreams the other works. None of these late projects came to fruition, although it is hard to understand why Hear Us O Lord, at least, could not have been published. In 1954, evicted from their beloved shack, the Lowrys moved to Europe, staying first in various parts of Italy and then in England. Lowry’s drinking was increasingly out of control, and on June 27, 1957, in the East Sussex village of Ripe, he died of an overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol. The promise of Under the Volcano had faded when
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Lowry published almost nothing during the last decade of his life, and he died a virtual unknown. Yet Margerie devoted herself to getting other works published, and during the next 13 years editions of Hear Us O Lord, Lunar Caustic, Dark as the Grave, and October Ferry appeared, along with the badly edited Selected Poems (1962) and Selected Letters (1965), both of which have been supplanted by superior collected editions. These and other posthumous publications, along with Douglas Day’s (1973) compelling biography and a more thorough and reliable biography by Gordon Bowker (1993) two decades later, have brought Lowry a degree of recognition that he enjoyed only briefly during his lifetime. While his other fiction, his film project, and his poems have their interest, Lowry will always be known primarily as the author of Under the Volcano; but that is no small achievement, for Under the Volcano is one of the most endlessly fascinating novels of the twentieth century. SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ackerley, C., & Clipper, L. J. (1984). A Companion to “Under the Volcano.” Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Asals, F. (1997). The Making of Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano.” Athens: University of Georgia Press. Asals, F., & Tiessen, P. (eds.) (2000). A Darkness that Murmured: Essays on Malcolm Lowry and the Twentieth Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Binns, R. (1984). Malcolm Lowry. London: Methuen. Bowker, G. (1993). Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry. New York: St. Martin’s. Bradbrook, M. C. (1974). Malcolm Lowry: His Art and Early Life: A Study in Transformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brittain, D., & Kramer, J. (dirs.) (1976). Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry. National Film Board of Canada. Cross, R. K. (1980). Malcolm Lowry: A Preface to His Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Day, D. (1973). Malcolm Lowry: A Biography. New York: Oxford University Press. Gabrial, J. (2000). Inside the Volcano: My Life with Malcolm Lowry. New York: St. Martin’s.
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Grace, S. E. (1982). The Voyage that Never Ends: Malcolm Lowry’s Fiction. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Grace, S. E. (ed.) (1992). Swinging the Maelstrom: New Perspectives on Malcolm Lowry. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. Huston, J. (dir.) (1984). Under the Volcano. Universal. Lowry, M. (1933). Ultramarine. London: Jonathan Cape. (Rev. edn. published Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962.) Lowry, M. (1947). Under the Volcano. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock. Lowry, M. (1961). Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Lowry, M. (1968a). Dark as the Grave wherein My Friend is Laid (ed. D. Day & M. B. Lowry). New York: New American Library. Lowry, M. (1968b). Lunar Caustic (ed. E. Birney & M. B. Lowry). London: Jonathan Cape. Lowry, M. (1970). October Ferry to Gabriola (ed. M. B. Lowry). New York: World. Lowry, M. (1975). Psalms and Songs (ed. M. B. Lowry). New York: New American Library. Lowry, M. (1990). The Cinema of Malcolm Lowry: A Scholarly Edition of Lowry’s “Tender is the Night”
(ed. M. Mota & P. Tiessen). Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Lowry, M. (1992). The Collected Poetry of Malcolm Lowry (ed. K. Scherf). Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Lowry, M. (1994). The 1940 “Under the Volcano” (ed. P. Tiessen & M. Mota). Waterloo, ON: MLR Editions. Lowry, M. (1995, 1996). Sursum Corda! The Collected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, vols. 1 and 2 (ed. S. Grace). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Lowry, M. (1999). Satan in a Barrel and Other Early Stories (ed. S. Grace). Edmonton: Juvenilia. McCarthy, P. A. (1994). Forests of Symbols: World, Text, and Self in Malcolm Lowry’s Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press. McCarthy, P. A. (ed.) (1996). Malcolm Lowry’s “La Mordida”: A Scholarly Edition. Athens: University of Georgia Press. McCarthy, P. A., & Tiessen, P. (eds.) (1997). Joyce/ Lowry: Critical Perspectives. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Salloum, S. (1987). Malcolm Lowry: Vancouver days. Madeira Park, BC: Harbour.
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M Macaulay, Rose ALICE CRAWFORD
Rose Macaulay (1881–1958) is best known for her last novel The Towers of Trebizond (1956), with its famous opening line, “ ‘Take my camel, dear,’ said myAuntDot,assheclimbeddownfromthisanimal on her return from High Mass.” The full extent of her oeuvre is frequently not recognized. Author of 23 novels between 1906 and 1956, she was also a prolific journalist, BBC broadcaster, and writer of travel and history books, as well as of literary criticism, poems, and plays. Themes of quest and the pursuit of wholeness preoccupy her, and her writing interrogates constantly the idea of the soul’s search for fulfillment. Struggles of the female quester concern her consistently, and images of androgyny characterize much of her work. The second of the seven children of George Campbell Macaulay (1852–1915) and Grace Mary Conybeare (1855–1925), Macaulay came from a strongly literary and academic background. Her father lectured in English at Cambridge University; historian Thomas Babington Macaulay was her grandfather’s cousin. After spending much of an idyllic childhood at the Italian fishing village of Varazze, near Genoa, she returned to England to attend first Oxford High School for Girls, then Somerville College, Oxford, which she entered in 1900 to read modern history. Leaving Oxford in 1903 with an aegrotat, she published her first novel Abbots Verney in 1906. She was introduced gradually to London literary life, chaperoned initially by poet Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), a family friend, and became
a recognized figure on the edges of the Bloomsbury Group. By 1914 she had written seven novels, of which The Lee Shore (1912) won first prize in a competition run by Hodder and Stoughton. These early fictions, The Furnace (1907), The Secret River (1909), The Valley Captives (1911), Views and Vagabonds (1912), and The Making of a Bigot (1914) are, like her first poems (The Two Blind Countries, 1914), studded with the complex iconography of mystic quests. All rather clumsily trace a protagonist’s development from innocence to maturity, revealing ideas with which she engages again in later, more sophisticated novels. During World War I, Macaulay served in the Ministry of Information where she met Gerald O’Donovan (1871–1942), the married ex-priest who became her “beloved companion” for over 20 years. Her novels of this period, Non-Combatants and Others (1916), What Not (1918), and Potterism (1920), seem to reflect her personal happiness, confidently introducing humor and satire into her writing. New maturity and the war itself have allowed her freedom to fantasize and to give rein to the fun, anger, and wit that accompany the satirical mode. Macaulay’s best novels date from the 1920s, exploring with humor, verve, and satirical acuity new possibilities available to women as they attempt to construct the female self. The independent women protagonists of Dangerous Ages (1921, winner of the Prix Femina (Vie heureuse)) and Told by an Idiot (1923) seek a combination of personal and career fulfillment. Mystery at Geneva (1922) and Orphan Island (1924) are lighter novels interrogating the wider theme of
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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civilization’s limits, a preoccupation that also informs Crewe Train (1926), whose heroine contends with the conflict between the civilized and the barbaric in her own personality. In Keeping Up Appearances (1928), these separate drives are portrayed as distinct individuals, while in Staying with Relations (1930), the central female character struggles to define a coherent self against a background of civilization on the verge of collapse. There is a decline in the quality of Rose Macaulay’s fiction in the 1930s. Between 1940 and 1950 she wrote no fiction at all, a situation surely reflecting personal cataclysms she experienced during World War II. A serious car accident, the destruction of her home in the Blitz, and Gerald O’Donovan’s death darkened the years 1939–41. They were Defeated (1932), Going Abroad (1934), I Would Be Private (1937), and And No Man’s Wit (1940) are unhappy novels whose questing characters slide into hopelessness, the goals of their quests increasingly tentative and unconvincing. Macaulay seems to turn with relief at this stage to the certainties of non-fiction, producing Life among the English in 1942, They went to Portugal in 1946, and Fabled Shore in 1949. Her fiction re-emerges in 1950 with The World My Wilderness, a distraught evocation of personal and social disintegration left by the war, and culminates in 1956 with the mature synthesis of styles and preoccupations of The Towers of Trebizond, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Macaulay’s return to the Anglican Church in 1951 is the most striking feature of the last eight years of her life; her final novel is the fictional outpouring of her personal “church or adultery” dilemma. Rose Macaulay’s writing career spans 50 years. Born a Victorian, she lived through the reigns of six monarchs. Her novels offer a barometer of the changing times, showing the emergence not only of the modern woman but of the modern person. Friendships with Virginia Woolf, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen, E. M. Forster, and Ivy Compton-Burnett were important to her intellectual life; it is possible to see her distinctive writing style informed and enriched by conversations with these other prominent authors. Her writing is sharp, clear, funny, wise, perceptive, zestful. She writes in all possible genres – fiction, poetry, drama, literary criticism, travel prose, journalism – and packs into her climactic last novel her multifarious perceptions about how life
should be lived. Cool and detached on the sidelines of modernism, a quiet but insistent champion of female strengths, she deserves recognition as more than a footnote to the development of the twentieth-century canon. She is an important player. SEE ALSO: Edwardian Fiction (BIF); World War I in Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Babington Smith, C. (1972). Rose Macaulay. London: Collins. Bensen, A. (1969). Rose Macaulay. New York: Twayne. Crawford, A. (1995). Paradise Pursued: The Novels of Rose Macaulay. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Emery, J. (1991). Rose Macaulay: A Writer’s Life. London: John Murray. LeFanu, S. (2003). Rose Macaulay. London: Virago. Macaulay, R. (1920). Potterism. London: Collins. Macaulay, R. (1921). Dangerous Ages. London: Collins. Macaulay, R. (1923). Told by an Idiot. London: Collins. Macaulay, R. (1926). Crewe Train. London: Collins. Macaulay, R. (1928). Keeping Up Appearances. London: Collins. Macaulay, R. (1930). Staying with Relations. London: Collins. Macaulay, R. (1932). They were Defeated. London: Collins. Macaulay, R. (1950). The World My Wilderness. London: Collins. Macaulay, R. (1956). The Towers of Trebizond. London: Collins. Macaulay, R. (1961). Letters to a Friend. London: Collins. Macaulay, R. (1962). Last Letters to a Friend. London: Collins. Macaulay, R. (1964). Letters to a Sister. London: Collins. Passty, J. N. (1988). Eros and Androgyny: The Legacy of Rose Macaulay. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Manning, Olivia THEODORE L. STEINBERG
Olivia Manning, born in 1908 (sometimes listed as 1911), while not the most important novelist of the twentieth century, produced fine work, which has been largely overlooked by critics and general
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readers, probably for two reasons: she was not personally popular with her peers and therefore was treated as an outsider, and she handles narrative in traditional ways, with none of the modernist innovations favored by her contemporaries. Another factor that cannot be discounted is her gender, although many of Manning’s novels focus on men’s lives rather than women’s. Her earlier novels contain few memorable scenes, but they leave strong overall impressions and provide valuable perspectives on mid-twentieth-century British life. Manning’s novels reflect the places she lived in: she was born in Portsmouth, on the south coast of England, but lived as a child in Ireland and then with her husband in Bucharest, Egypt, and Jerusalem. She died in London in 1980. Manning’s protagonists, whether male or female, share a similar malaise. They are loners who feel cut off from their society and from their families. They often feel abandoned by their parents, who ignored them or died (occasionally through suicide). Their marriages are seldom happy. Her characters, therefore, tend to be isolated and keenly aware of their inability to establish meaningful human contacts. Her earliest work, The Wind Changes (1937), combines the personal and the political in describing Dublin during the 1920s, contrasting the views of Elizabeth Dearborn with those of men who are politically engaged. Artist among the Missing (1949) foreshadows The Levant Trilogy by being set in the Middle East during World War II. Geoffrey Lynd undergoes a psychological crisis as a result of his feelings of isolation, whereas his wife Vi has no trouble dealing with her unpleasant surroundings. For the first time in Manning’s work, we see a reversal of the usual gender roles in a marriage, but even if the roles were more stereotypical, the basic inequality would condemn the marriage. The inability of Geoffrey and Vi to make meaningful human contact, with each other or with anyone else, presents a frightening picture. So, too, does A Different Face (1953), in which Hugo Fletcher returns to his childhood home, whose name describes its character: Coldmouth. Instead of comfort, he finds that he has neither relatives nor friends there. The ruins that dot the city, evidence of the Blitz, symbolize the society of Coldmouth and his own bleak psychological
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state. The Doves of Venus (1955) focuses on a woman, Ellie Parsons, who is incapable of escaping the sterile, lonely world of her mother. The Play Room (1969; published the same year in America as The Camperlea Girls) presents a similar picture: Laura Fletcher uses her father’s failures to wield power over her whole family. The Rain Forest (1974) describes the sterility of British life in the context of the decline of the British Empire. Manning’s major work, her masterpiece, far transcends these novels. That work is actually a series of six connected novels, organized into two trilogies: The Balkan Trilogy (1981), comprising The Great Fortune (1960), The Spoilt City (1962), and Friends and Heroes (1965); and The Levant Trilogy (1982), comprising The Danger Tree (1977), The Battle Lost and Won (1978), and The Sum of Things (1980). To add to the confusion, the two trilogies are often considered as a single work known as The Fortunes of War. (The Fortunes of War is also the title of the BBC dramatization of 1987.) On the surface, The Fortunes of War tells the story of Guy and Harriet Pringle, a newly married couple who live in Bucharest at the beginning of World War II and who, in the second trilogy, are evacuated to Egypt. As Tolstoy did in War and Peace, Manning combines and contrasts private, domestic affairs and public, political concerns, allowing the domestic and the political spheres to comment on and to clarify each other. Because Guy teaches English in Bucharest, he is perfectly positioned to observe the attitudes of his Romanian students and his British colleagues toward the coming war and toward each other. Unhappily, Guy is not only naive, but also simultaneously self-absorbed and entirely unselfreflective (as are most of his colleagues), which means that his observations, while perhaps well intentioned, tend to be irrelevant and often quite mistaken. Much the same can be said about his attitude toward domestic life. While he laments German incursions into Romania, he has no hesitation about trying to take over every aspect of Harriet’s life. Harriet, on the other hand, is a sharp observer of the political scene and gradually comes to understand the relationship between the political and domestic spheres. Ultimately, Harriet and Guy establish a fair and meaningful union based not only on greater
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self-awareness but also on greater awareness of each other. Manning’s great achievement in The Fortunes of War lies in her ability to show how national and domestic issues intersect. Her writing is not innovative, but she shows considerable skill in her adaptation of the Tolstoyan model to mid-twentieth-century life. Also, like Tolstoy, she employs a huge cast of characters, each of whom she imbues with a distinct personality. One of the best is the half-Russian, half-Irish Yakimov, who is both amusing and disturbing. Manning also presents a fine sense of place. Her depictions of Romania and Egypt during the war are striking. Manning thought that her work should be better known. She was right. SEE ALSO: Colonial Fiction (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Burgess, A. (1967). The Novel Now: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction. New York: Norton. Manning, O. (1937). The Wind Changes. London: Jonathan Cape. Manning, O. (1949). Artist among the Missing. London: Heinemann. Manning, O. (1953). A Different Face. London: Heinemann. Manning, O. (1955). The Doves of Venus. London: Heinemann. Manning, O. (1969). The Play Room. London: Heinemann. (Published in US as The Camperlea Girls.) Manning, O. (1974). The Rain Forest. London: Heinemann. Manning, O. (1981). The Balkan Trilogy. New York: Penguin. Manning, O. (1982). The Levant Trilogy. New York: Penguin. Morris, R. K. (1972). Continuance and Change: The Contemporary British Novel Sequence. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Morris, R. K. (1987). Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War: Breakdown in the Balkans, Love and Death in the Levant. In J. I. Biles (ed.), British Novelists Since 1900. New York: AMS. Steinberg, T. L. (2005). Twentieth-Century Epic Novels. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press.
Mantel, Hilary SUE ZLOSNIK
British journalist and fiction writer Hilary Mantel is the author of nine novels, a range of short stories, and an autobiography as well as numerous essays and articles. Her fiction is characterized by a combination of acute social observation, mordant wit, and intimations of another reality just beyond the range of normal perception. Born in 1952 near Manchester, Mantel draws upon various phases of her life to provide settings for her fiction: domestic disruption and relocation, a Catholic education, the London School of Economics, a brief residency in Saudi Arabia, social work, living in East Anglia, and suburban life in Greater London, where she now lives and works. Her fiction constantly returns to familiar gothic motifs: monstrosity, female identity, family secrets, religion and repression, paranoia, liminality, metamorphosis, and the haunting of the past by the present. In her autobiography, Giving up the Ghost (2003), she describes an encounter with a nameless terror at the age of 7, “something intangible . . . some formless, borderless evil” (107); this presence lurks in the pages of her novels. Mantel’s first novel, Every Day is Mother’s Day (1985), draws upon her experiences as a hospital social worker and may be read on one level as an indictment of an inadequate care system in 1970s Britain. Such a literal reading, however, does not do it justice. In its protagonist, Muriel Axon, Mantel creates an ambiguous figure of both pathos and monstrosity whose dislocation from the “normal” world makes her capable of matricide and infanticide. Vacant Possession (published the following year but set 10 years later than its predecessor) explores the implications of the Thatcher government’s “care in the community” policy as Muriel is released from a mental hospital; however, the novel is more comic in tone, and the identity-shifting Muriel looms large as a female gothic monster. In Eight Months on Gazzah Street (1988), Mantel creates a different kind of “female gothic.” Its heroine becomes a virtual prisoner in a characterless apartment in Jeddah, in the midst of an alien and misogynistic environment (where nothing is quite as it seems on the surface and people die in
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unexplained ways), and finds her methodical mind of no help in deciphering the oppressive mysteries around her. Fludd (1989) is more consistently comic in tone than any of its precursors. Mantel’s self-confessed mind for detail provides acute observations that root this fantastical tale in time and place: the Catholic community in a fictional 1950s Derbyshire village is visited by the enigmatic Fludd whose effects are alchemical and liberatory, especially for the young nun whom he frees from the confines of convent life. Mantel’s concern with the effects on individuals of trauma on a grand scale was to find powerful expression in her next two novels. A Place of Greater Safety (1992) is a massive novel about the French Revolution. The historical figures of Desmoulins, Danton, and Robespierre are given highly individuated lives in a novel that fuses the personal and the political and in which Mantel’s characteristic black humor is never abandoned, even in the final tumbril. History makes its presence felt too in A Change of Climate (1994), set in present-day Norfolk, where the tragic personal history of Ralph and Anna Eldred, rooted in African politics, gradually unfolds. In 1998 Mantel was to turn to a more remote history – the Age of Enlightenment – in The Giant O’Brien, which tells the story of the exploitation of freakery but also celebrates the power of the imagination. In An Experiment in Love (1995) Mantel returns to a reworking of her own youthful experiences. In doing so, she creates a powerfully Gothic female Bildungsroman. The novel focuses on female embodiment. In a gothic doubling, its central character Carmel is followed by the enigmatic and malevolent “Karina” through their northern Catholic childhood to residence in the same London university hall. As Karina waxes (and is shown at the end to be pregnant), Carmel wanes, collapsing from near starvation brought on by poverty and distress. As in Fludd, Mantel vividly evokes the quotidian details of a world now gone, yet the intimations of another reality beyond are disturbingly represented. In Karina, she creates a figure of amoral female monstrosity who, like Muriel Axon, is apparently capable of anything; even, it would seem, locking in her room-mate as the hall burns down. Beyond Black (2005), is located both around the M25 motorway and in a liminal area between the living and the dead. In the drab material
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world of outer London in the 1990s, professional psychic Alison Hart is constantly harassed by entities that are described (using the language of Heathrow) as “airside.” Although physically large, she is not, however, a monstrous figure but a persecuted heroine. In her daily life the boundary between ordinary experience and a timeless but banal “beyond” is constantly destabilized. There is nothing ethereal about Alison’s fiends; her spirit guide is one of several nasty individuals from her past. Although there is a good deal of comic effect in the novel, the narrative voice never distances itself from Alison’s perceptions of the spirit world. Its denizens are given the same substantial representation as the live characters. Only when Alison is able to give shape to an incident of major violent trauma in her childhood is she able to exorcize her demons, her link with the spirit world remaining in a more benevolent form. The recipient of a number of prizes Mantel maintains a dedicated readership; the recent appearance of her work on university curricula and in conference papers indicates growing academic recognition of her significance as a contemporary writer. Her latest novel, Wolf Hall (2009), has been widely acclaimed and won the Man Booker Prize: telling the story of the early life and rise to power of the Tudor politician Thomas Cromwell, it represents a return to the detailed and vividly imagined historical fiction of A Place of Greater Safety. Its portrayal of Cromwell reveals an inner life, engaging the reader in sympathetic identification with a figure perhaps best known to posterity through the enigmatic representation of his Holbein portrait. SEE ALSO: Feminist Fiction (BIF); Historical Fiction (BIF); London in Fiction (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Horner, A., & Zlosnik, S. (2005). Gothic and the Comic Turn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mantel, H. (1985). Every Day is Mother’s Day. London: Chatto and Windus. Mantel, H. (1986). Vacant Possession. London: Chatto and Windus. Mantel, H. (1988). Eight Months on Gazzah Street. London: Viking. Mantel, H. (1989). Fludd. London: Viking.
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Mantel, H. (1992). A Place of Greater Safety. London: Viking. Mantel, H. (1994). A Change of Climate. London: Viking. Mantel, H. (1995). An Experiment in Love. London: Viking. Mantel, H. (1998). The Giant O’Brien. London: Fourth Estate. Mantel, H. (2003). Giving up the Ghost. London: Fourth Estate. Mantel, H. (2005). Beyond Black. London: Fourth Estate. Mantel, H. (2009). Wolf Hall. London: Fourth Estate. Molino, M. R. (2003). Hilary Mantel. In M. Moseley (ed.), British and Irish Novelists Since 1960. Detroit: CengageGale,pp.230–43.
Maugham, W. Somerset PHILIP HOLDEN
W. Somerset Maugham is perhaps best known as an accomplished writer of short stories in which craft outweighs formal innovation, yet, in one of the longest literary careers of any British writer, he was most notable for his endless capacity for selfreinvention. Commencing as a late Victorian writer of realist fiction concerning class and gender, Maugham also dabbled in the gothic and adventure romance. As an Edwardian he became one of the most popular playwrights of his generation. Growing weary of the limits imposed by conventional dramatic forms, he returned to fiction, publishing his greatest novel, Of Human Bondage (1915). His experiences during World War I and after took his writing in two further directions. Through his Ashenden short stories, relying on personal experience as an intelligence agent, he pioneered espionage fiction. Travels in the South Pacific and later East and Southeast Asia resulted in the exotic fiction for which he is best known. Yet we should also not forget that much of Maugham’s fictional production in his later career is concerned with domestic issues, reflecting particularly on the world of Anglophone literary production and authorial celebrity in the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, Maugham’s greatest fictional work is surely himself. Through thin fictionalization, autobiographical self-representation, destruction of documents, and outright disinformation, Maugham created himself as perhaps the quintessential cosmopolitan English man of letters, an image that has slowly been picked apart by scholars and biographers after his death in 1965.
Maugham’s early childhood was unhappy. He was born in France of British parents in 1874, and orphaned at the age of 10. Sent to England to be cared for by an emotionally remote vicar uncle, Maugham found himself initially ridiculed by schoolmates because of his French accent. As a young man, he left England, audited classes at the University of Heidelberg, and then returned to study medicine in London. His most successful early fiction draws on autobiographical experience. Maugham’s first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), is set in the slums of south London near St. Thomas’ Hospital, the institution where he trained. Following the generic conventions of contemporary working-class fiction, the novel describes a young woman’s affair with a married man, her pregnancy, miscarriage, and ultimate death through resultant septicemia. Mrs. Craddock, published in 1902, is set in rural Kent where Maugham spent his teenage years: in contrast to the misogyny of some of his later fiction, the novel is a sympathetic portrayal of a young middle-class woman, Bertha Leys, trapped in a marriage to a man who is not her intellectual equal. Maugham’s habit of drawing on autobiographical sources is apparent even in non-realist works. The Magician (1908) is a novel in which a young woman is enslaved and killed by an occultist in diabolic attempts to create new forms of life. The novel draws on elements of gothic and science fiction in contemporary works by Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, and Bram Stoker. Its early scenes, however, are set in the bohemian milieu in early twentieth-century Paris, where Maugham resided from 1905 onward: the characters meet at a restaurant called the Chien Noir (Black Dog), which in reality was a meeting place on the Rue d’Odessa called the Chat Blanc (White Cat). Maugham’s success as a playwright in the early years of the twentieth century meant that his interest in fiction diminished. It revived in 1915 with the publication of Of Human Bondage, an autobiographical Bildungsroman based on a manuscript written some 15 years previously. The novel’s protagonist, Philip Carey, resembles Maugham in many ways: he is an orphan raised by a clergyman uncle, who attends school at Tercanbury (a Hardyesque reversal of Canterbury, where Maugham attended the King’s School), resides in Heidelberg and Paris, and studies medicine. Yet Maugham’s attempt to re-script his own
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life to fit the narrative mode of the Bildungsroman is unconvincing. Philip gives up dreams of adventure and an exploitative and ultimately humiliating relationship with the working-class Mildred Rogers for middle-class domesticity, a career as a doctor, and marriage to the wholesome Sally Altheny. The novel’s rushed comedic ending, however, cannot undo the fact that its disturbing power centers on Philip’s relationship with Mildred. Mildred’s androgyny, like that of Proust’s Albertine Simonet, enables a coded representation of a homosexual relationship. Maugham married and had a daughter, but most of his emotional and sexual life was invested in relationships with men. In 1914, he met the American Gerald Haxton, and their turbulent relationship was to persist for three decades until Gerald’s death in 1944. It was with Gerald, indeed, that Maugham first traveled to the South Pacific in 1916, and Tahiti became the setting of part of the author’s next novel, The Moon and Sixpence (1919). The novel adapts the story of the French artist Paul Gauguin into that of Charles Strickland, an English stockbroker who rejects bourgeois respectability to become a painter in Paris and then departs to achieve artistic apotheosis and death in Tahiti, Maugham substituting the French painter’s syphilis with Strickland’s more socially acceptable leprosy. Its conclusion reverses that in Of Human Bondage, substituting Strickland’s ultimate sacrifice in the name of artistic truth for Philip’s choice of social conformity. Yet Maugham introduced a key element in The Moon and Sixpence: a complex, ironizing narrational strategy. The novel is not told by or focalized through Strickland; rather, it is recounted to its readers by a naive narrator whom we are encouraged to identify with Maugham himself. The narrator pursues Strickland, interrogating him, reconstructing his life retrospectively like “a biologist who from a single bone must reconstruct not only the appearance of an extinct animal, but its habits” (1919 : 40). Such narrative strategies, involving a complex series of identifications and disavowals between protagonist, narrator, and author, are central to much of Maugham’s later writing. From the beginning of the 1920s until the middle of the 1930s, Maugham wrote a series of short stories, novels, and travelogues set in the South Pacific and Southeast and East Asia, which constitute his most important work. The South
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Pacific short story collection The Trembling of a Leaf (1921) was followed by two volumes on China: the travelogue On a Chinese Screen (1922), and the Hong Kong-centered novel The Painted Veil (1925). Maugham would also complete a further travelogue about a trip across mainland Southeast Asia, The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930b). His reputation as a writer about Asia, however, is ultimately founded on his writings on the Malayan Archipelago (present-day Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore) in the short story collections The Casuarina Tree (1926) and Ah King (1933), and the novel The Narrow Corner (1932). Popular reception in Britain now views Maugham nostalgically as the chronicler of a vanished colonial order, yet this misunderstands the context of what he called his “exotic fiction.” Unlike Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, or E. M. Forster, Maugham did not engage in public debate concerning the merits of imperialism: his narratives do not exhibit Kipling’s jingoism, Conrad’s tortured simultaneous attraction to colonial adventure and horror at the realities of colonial governance, or Forster’s acerbic critique of colonial inequalities. Maugham knew little of the countries he visited, and his accounts of them often rely on Orientalist literary traditions, attributing little agency to non-European characters who are stereotypically presented. Yet in presenting a domestic colonialism with its attendant hypocrisies, Maugham did not so much celebrate empire as document its internal contradictions. In a manner similar to contemporaries working in psychology and ethnography, Maugham uses non-European societies as a foil to show the artificiality of what passed for colonial civilization: some of the force of this critique no doubt comes from the fact that his own sexuality was disavowed by discourses of respectable sexuality that underpinned the European civilizing mission. Like The Moon and Sixpence, Maugham’s Malayan fiction often exhibits complex narrational strategies. On one level, the texts often strive to contain transgression. Maugham makes much use of the framed narrative common to much colonial fiction. In a short story such as “Footprints in the Jungle,” one man listens to another give an account of a social scandal now sealed in the past: it is dug up, analyzed dispassionately, and, at the conclusion of the narrative, safely reinterred. At times, the fiction is also overmoralized. The ending of The
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Painted Veil, for example, in which the vagrant Kitty Fane learns the meaning of self-sacrifice in devotion to charitable work in plague-stricken China, is trite. Even in his more successful stories, indeed, Maugham follows colonial stereotypes in making European women the scapegoats for the hypocrisies of colonialism: a prime example of this is “The Letter.” Yet at times, as with The Moon and Sixpence, a series of filiations and identifications between framing and embedded narratives result in a play of meaning that the text strives to but cannot quite contain. At its most successful Maugham’s short fiction and non-fiction moves toward modernism, leaving a reader with a disturbing sense of incompleteness through uncertain denouements. The Malayan stories, indeed, were to prove influential on contemporaries whose politics or cultural contexts were very different from Maugham’s: the socialist and anti-imperialist George Orwell, or the exemplar of Shanghai modernist cosmopolitanism, Eileen Chang. Maugham’s other fiction written from the 1920s to the late 1940s exhibits considerable variety in subject matter. Cakes and Ale (1930a) is set in London and the Kent of Maugham’s youth. While critics and biographers have often seen the novel as a partial roman-a-clef containing fictionalized representations of novelists Hugh Walpole and Thomas Hardy, its central concerns are the manufacture of artistic celebrity and also the invention of biographical narratives that conceal as much as they reveal: both topics were dear to Maugham’s heart. The Razor’s Edge (1944), Maugham’s most popular novel, returns to the theme of the decadence of Western civilization through the experiences of the young American Larry Darrell, who finds enlightenment in India. Both texts continue Maugham’s habit of using complex narrative strategies, and elements of autobiography: the narrator of The Razor’s Edge, for instance, is explicitly identified as Maugham himself. Maugham was to continue writing until the 1960s, and his death in 1965 prompted a flurry of biographical studies and critical attention. His status as a popular writer who, in his own words, had a manufactured rather than natural talent, “incapable of those great, sustained flights that carry the author on broad pinions into a celestial sphere” (Maugham, 1938 : 81), has led in the last few decades to relative critical neglect. Nevertheless, biographies and film adaptations of
Maugham’s works have proliferated, and his sales remain strong. Much scholarly work on Maugham has, however, been formalist in nature, and few major book-length critical studies have been published since 1990. Maugham’s elaborate performative identity, and the openness of his texts to queer and postcolonial reading strategies, however, suggest that re-evaluation may not be far away. SEE ALSO: Colonial Fiction (BIF); Edwardian Fiction (BIF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF); Working-Class Fiction (BIF); World War I in Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Calder, R. (1989). Willie: The Life of W. Somerset Maugham. New York: St. Martin’s. Curtis, A., & Whitehead, J. (eds.) (1987). W. Somerset Maugham: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge. Hastings, S. (2009). The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham. London: John Murray. Holden, P. (1996). Orienting Masculinity, Orienting Nation: W. Somerset Maugham’s Exotic Fiction. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Meyers, J. (2004). Somerset Maugham: A Life. New York: Knopf. Maugham, W. S. (1897). Liza of Lambeth. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Maugham, W. S. (1902). Mrs. Craddock. London: Heinemann. Maugham, W. S. (1908). The Magician. London: Heinemann. Maugham, W. S. (1915). Of Human Bondage. London: Heinemann. Maugham, W. S. (1919). The Moon and Sixpence. London: Heinemann. Maugham, W. S. (1921). The Trembling of a Leaf. London: Heinemann. Maugham, W. S. (1922). On a Chinese Screen. London: Heinemann. Maugham, W. S. (1925). The Painted Veil. London: Heinemann. Maugham, W. S. (1926). The Casuarina Tree. London: Heinemann. Maugham, W. S. (1928). Ashenden; or, The British Agent. New York: Doubleday. Maugham, W. S. (1930a). Cakes and Ale; or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard. London: Heinemann. Maugham, W. S. (1930b). The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong. London: Heinemann. Maugham, W. S. (1931). Collected Plays. 3 vols. London: Heinemann.
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Maugham, W. S. (1932). The Narrow Corner. London: Heinemann. Maugham, W. S. (1933). Ah King. London: Heinemann. Maugham, W. S. (1938). The Summing Up. London: Heinemann. Maugham, W. S. (1944). The Razor’s Edge. London: Heinemann. Maugham, W. S. (1949). A Writer’s Notebook. London: Heinemann. Morgan, T. (1980). Maugham. New York: Simon and Schuster.
McCabe, Patrick MICHAEL L. STOREY
Patrick McCabe, popular and award-winning Irish writer, is best known for his dark and gruesome, yet humorous novels about the dysfunctional state of Irish life. Like the plays of his contemporary, Martin McDonagh, McCabe’s works unrelentingly demythologize small-town Irish life, portraying it in such a way as to disabuse readers of any sentimental notions they might have about Ireland and its people. His novels depict domestic and sectarian violence, alcoholism, childhood trauma, psychopathic behavior, various kinds of abuse including sex abuse by clergy, madness, and suicide. Born in Clones, County Monaghan in 1955 and educated at St. Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, McCabe pursued a career in teaching, first in County Longford and then in London, while at the same time writing fiction. The success of his third novel, The Butcher Boy (1992), enabled him to pursue a career in writing. He is the author of nine novels; a book for children, The Adventures of Shay Mouse (1985; illustrated by his wife, Margot); a play version of The Butcher Boy entitled Frank Pig Says Hello; a collection of linked stories, Mondo Desperado (1999); and several radio plays. He has won impressive awards, including the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Fiction for The Butcher Boy. That novel and Breakfast on Pluto (1998) were shortlisted for the prestigious Booker prize, and both have been made into films directed by Neil Jordan. McCabe’s distinctive style, referred to as “bog gothic,” is characterized by mentally disturbed narrators, horrific events, gruesome description, and black humor. His
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works reveal the influence of his childhood and youthful obsessions: American culture, including comic books, cowboy movies, and television programs; drugs; music (he played in a band); and hippie culture. An early story, “The Call” (1979), won the Irish Press Hennessy Award, but his first novel, Music on Clinton Street (1985), attracted little attention. His second novel, Carn (1989), set in a fictional border town and treating the subjects of abuse, madness, and IRA violence, garnered more praise. The Butcher Boy, set in the 1960s, is arguably both his most popular novel and his best. The narrator, Francie Brady, relates the story of his childhood trauma from the perspective of a psychiatric hospital, where he has been confined for many years since murdering Mrs. Nugent, the mother of his friend Philip. Francie’s story includes abuse by his alcoholic father; mental instability and the eventual suicide of his mother; and sexual abuse by a priest. More devasting, however, is Francie’s psychological abuse by Mrs. Nugent, whose characterization of the Brady family as “pigs” (an allusion to the English stereotype of the Irish) destroys Francie’s fragile sense of pride in his family and their Irish heritage. The Nugents have pretensions to English culture and civility that contrast sharply with the “wild Irish” traits of Francie’s family – his father’s volatility and drunkenness, his mother’s manic behavior, and the permanent disorder of the family home. Francie is thus caught between an unconscious desire to become a member of the Nugent family (he fantasizes about suckling Mrs. Nugent’s breast) and a self-destructive intent to fulfill Mrs. Nugent’s characterization of the family by behaving like a pig, including one scene in which he fantasizes about teaching Philip and Mrs. Nugent how to defecate like a pig. When Mrs. Nugent entices his best friend, Joe Purcell, to give up Francie for Philip, it sends Francie over the edge: he kills her by firing a slaughterhouse bolt pistol into her head. The brilliance of The Butcher Boy lies not only in its major theme of the anxiety of Irish identity, but also in its postmodernist style. Perfectly conceived to reflect the mind of the traumatized Francie Brady, it is characterized by run-on and fragmented sentences; a disjointed, shifting narrative; a blend of fantasy and reality that are often difficult to distinguish from one another; and allusions to American comics and
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John Wayne movies, as well as to Irish songs, including “The Butcher Boy,” a ballad about romantic betrayal and suicide, which Francie’s mother ominously sings. With The Dead School (1995) and Breakfast on Pluto (1998), McCabe continued his success, and his fascination with the darker aspects of Irish life. Breakfast on Pluto, set against the backdrop of the Irish Troubles in the 1970s, is related by Patrick “Pussy” Braden, a transvestite prostitute who, 20 years earlier, had become entangled in IRA terrorist activities and who yearns to discover his/ her real mother. Emerald Germs of Ireland (2001) and Call Me the Breeze (2003), despite containing many of McCabe’s trademarks – lurid violence, dark humor, mentally disturbed characters, and the like – received mixed reviews. But his most recent novels, Winterwood (2006) and The Holy City (2008), both novels of dark humor, violence, and insanity, have been more favorably received. The former won the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year. There are no book-length studies of McCabe’s fiction, though there are certain to be some in the near future as he continues to gather both popular and critical acclaim. McCabe lives in County Sligo, Ireland. SEE ALSO: Irish Fiction (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Jordon, N. (1997). Butcher Boy. (film). McCabe, P. (1985). Music on Clinton Street. Dublin: Raven Arts. McCabe, P. (1989). Carn. Salcombe: Aidan Ellis. McCabe, P. (1992). The Butcher Boy. London: Picador. McCabe, P. (1995). The Dead School. London: Picador. McCabe, P. (1998). Frank Pig Says Hello. In John Fairleigh (ed.), Far From the Land: Contemporary Irish Plays. London: Methuen. McCabe, P. (1999). Mondo Desperado. London: Picador. McCabe, P. (2001). Emerald Germs of Ireland. London: Picador. McCabe, P. (2003). Call Me the Breeze. London: Faber and Faber. McCabe, P. (2006). Winterwood. London: Bloomsbury. McCabe, P. (2008). The Holy City. London: Bloomsbury. Potts, D. (1999). From Tir na nOg to Tir na Muck: Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy. New Hibernia Review, 3(3), 83–95.
Scaggs, J. (2000). Who is Francie Pig? Self-Identity and Narrative Reliability in The Butcher Boy. Irish University Review, 30(1), 51–8. Sweeney, E. (2004). “Pigs!”: Polluting Bodies and Knowledge in Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy. In K. Rockett & J. Hill (eds.), National Cinema and Beyond. Dublin: Four Courts.
McEwan, Ian LYNN WELLS
Rising above his early reputation as an author fixated on the grotesque and perverse, Ian McEwan has established himself as one of the world’s most celebrated prose fiction writers in English, enjoying both critical approbation and commercial success. While he frequently employs the self-conscious and experimental techniques associated with the postmodern period, he also prides himself on his work’s compellingly readable quality and strong moral sensibility, characteristics familiar to his readership from the tradition of the great English novels of the nineteenth century. His writing has won many awards, and several of his texts have been adapted for the screen, the most famous being the Oscar-winning film of Atonement. McEwan was born in 1948 in Aldershot, England, spending part of his youth living on army bases in Singapore and Libya. He studied at the University of Sussex before pursuing a master’s degree at the University of East Anglia, where he was mentored by the English authors Angus Wilson and Malcolm Bradbury, and was influenced by the work of contemporary writers such as Iris Murdoch, Saul Bellow, and Norman Mailer. At the age of 24, he began a career as a professional writer, quickly becoming, along with his friend Martin Amis, one of the enfants terribles of the British literary scene. As a young writer, he became active in various political causes, including the feminist and anti-nuclear movements, and he has continued his activism in more recent years by speaking publicly on issues of environmentalism and religious extremism. He lives in London with his second wife, Annalena McAfee, and has two grown sons from his first marriage. In his first two books of short stories, First Love, Last Rites (1975), and In Between the Sheets (1978b), McEwan created characters on the
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margins of everyday society: orphaned and neglected children and adolescents, sexual deviants, misfits, and murderers. This early work, which earned him critical recognition along with the nickname “Ian Macabre,” has elements of sexual violence and is set in dreary, often claustrophobic, urban environments with little or no hope of social reform or individual compassion. His first two novels, The Cement Garden (1978a) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981), contained lurid characters, themes, and settings similar to those in the stories, with an increasing emphasis on the importance of gender roles, particularly on male domination over women. During the early 1980s, McEwan took a hiatus from writing novels to work in other forms, including screenplays and an oratorio. Throughout this period, he became more engaged with political realities, partly in response to what he saw as the oppressive influence of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s right-wing policies. As a result, he executed what Claudia Schemberg calls an “ethical turn” in his work, returning to the novel with a new commitment to “openly engaging in complex ethical, social and historical issues” (2004, 28). Hailed as a turning point in McEwan’s career, The Child in Time (1987) marked his first engagement with political satire. Set in a vaguely futuristic London under a heartless Thatcherite government, the novel combines gritty realism with elements of fantasy, drawn from McEwan’s fascination with post-Einsteinian physics. The main character, Stephen Lewis, who is searching for his abducted daughter, has a number of unusual temporal experiences that help him to see beyond his obsessive desire to recover his child and to act more compassionately toward others. The Innocent (1990) and Black Dogs (1992) deal with historical issues but also self-consciously foreground the difficulties of representing the past, which qualifies both texts as examples of the subgenre of postmodern literature that Linda Hutcheon (1988) calls “historiographic metafiction.” The Innocent, a blackly comic spy thriller, is set in Berlin after World War II, where the main character, Leonard Marnham, an English radio technician, gets caught up in the secretive world of espionage while becoming embroiled in a love triangle with a German woman and her abusive ex-husband. Their relationship
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serves as an allegory of the persistent effects of past violence and the negative consequences of personal and cultural domination. Black Dogs, set around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, also has passages related to the aftermath of World War II. Jeremy, the narrator, presents the text as his memoir of the lives of his in-laws, Bernard and June Tremaine, whose diametrically opposed views create discrepancies in their memories of shared events. This conflict becomes focused around June’s experience of being attacked as a young woman by black dogs, which have associations with the horrors of Nazi Germany. With Enduring Love (1997), McEwan moved away from political and historical themes to concentrate on the relationship between two men brought together by a freak accident in which a young boy is trapped in a hot air balloon. Each of the five men who come to the boy’s rescue, including the narrator Joe, faces the dilemma of saving himself or risking death in order to save another. Joe’s guilt over his choice of self-preservation is mirrored in the egotistical behavior of Jed, a delusional erotomaniac who pursues Joe against his wishes. Joe’s desperate efforts to get others, especially his wife, to believe his tale of persecution at Jed’s hands become the basis of the text’s openly self-conscious reflection on the difficulties of conveying the truth in narrative form. Amsterdam, for which McEwan won the Man Booker Prize in 1998, returned to political satire and the critique of Thatcherism. The world of the text is characterized by greed, corruption, and self-interest, embodied by two friends, the composer Clive Linley and the tabloid editor Vernon Halliday. Both men represent a kind of masculine egotism that is in direct contrast to the principles of compassion and generosity associated with the novel’s few female characters. In this tour de force, McEwan draws on the tradition of English comic writers such as Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis to create a moral parable in which the villains are properly punished through acts of poetic justice. McEwan’s best-known novel, Atonement (2001), has been lauded for its richly detailed portrayal of events during World War II, including the retreat to Dunkirk and the service of medical personnel in London hospitals. Despite its verisimilitude, however, Atonement is a deeply literary text, with allusions to Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Bowen, and many other
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authors. The central character, Briony Tallis, is herself a writer, and her inflated belief in her own imaginative gifts leads to the novel’s central event, in which she falsely accuses a family friend and her sister’s lover, Robbie Turner, of raping her young cousin. Briony’s act of atonement for this crime takes the form of writing various narratives, which in turn provide the novel’s multilayered structure. The text’s intricate movements between different levels of representation challenge the reader to sort out truth from fiction, and to judge the ultimate sincerity of Briony’s act of repentance. Saturday (2005) deals with issues of multiculturalism and global terrorism in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. Set on the day of the massive protest in London against the imminent invasion of Iraq in 2003, the text contains many references to 9/11, including a burning plane streaking across the city sky behind a glass-paned tower. The central conflict in the novel takes place between a surgeon, Henry Perowne, and the mentally ill street-thug Baxter, suffering from Huntington’s disease. The altercations between the doctor and the thug, which begin with a minor traffic accident, escalate into a clear parody of the 9/11 attacks, with Baxter’s assault on Perowne’s family and home paralleling the invasion of the domestic United States. McEwan’s careful focalization of the novel’s events through Henry’s eyes creates a subtly ironic critique of the doctor’s ultimate triumph over his assailant as a symbol of lasting security for contemporary Britain. On Chesil Beach (2007) is set in the early 1960s at the dawn of the sexual revolution. The tightly constructed plot centers on newlyweds Florence Ponting and Edward Mayhew, who are unable to articulate their secret desires and anxieties on their wedding night in a seaside hotel room. As is common in McEwan’s work, there are selfreflexive elements in On Chesil Beach, with the couple’s dilemma paralleling the difficulties of “reading” the other, and of communicating adequately with language. McEwan’s most recent novel, Solar (2010), tackles the topical issues of climate change and environmental stewardship using an allegorical framework reminiscent of Saturday. The lifestyle of the main character, Nobel prize-winning scientist Michael Beard, clearly symbolizes a world
given to unsustainable excess: he eats and drinks too much, cheats on his lovers, and steals ideas from his colleagues. Even his research on alternative energy sources such as solar is the product of exploitation. The novel’s various settings – the Arctic, London, New Mexico – map a state of steady global degradation, which Beard’s ultimate defeat at the hands of his vindicated victims can do nothing to stop. The novel’s final image, of Beard’s young child seeking her father’s loving embrace, holds out the hope for moral redemption seen in many of McEwan’s works. In all his fiction, McEwan combines a contemporary sensibility about the power and limitations of narrative with a keen sense of his characters’ inner lives and their struggles to deal morally with one another. His work demonstrates an impressive variety of generic styles and a wide historical range while consistently providing his readers with points of identification and reflection about their own lives. SEE ALSO: Amis, Martin (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Childs, P. (ed.) (2006). The Fiction of Ian McEwan: A Reader’s Guide to the Essential Criticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Childs, P. (2007). Ian McEwan’s “Enduring Love.” London: Routledge. Gauthier, T. S. (2006). Narrative Desire and Historical Reparations: A. S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie. New York: Routledge. Groes, S. (2009). Ian McEwan: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London: Continuum. Head, D. (2007). Ian McEwan. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hutcheon, L. (1988). A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge. Malcolm, D. (2002). Understanding Ian McEwan. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. McEwan, I. (1975). First Love, Last Rites. London: Jonathan Cape. McEwan, I. (1978a). The Cement Garden. London: Jonathan Cape. McEwan, I. (1978b). In Between the Sheets. London: Jonathan Cape. McEwan, I. (1981). The Comfort of Strangers. London: Jonathan Cape.
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McEwan, I. (1987). The Child in Time. London: Jonathan Cape. McEwan, I. (1990). The Innocent. London: Jonathan Cape. McEwan, I. (1992). Black Dogs. London: Jonathan Cape. McEwan, I. (1997). Enduring Love. London: Jonathan Cape. McEwan, I. (1998). Amsterdam. London: Jonathan Cape. McEwan, I. (2001). Atonement. London: Jonathan Cape McEwan, I. (2005). Saturday. London: Jonathan Cape. McEwan, I. (2007). On Chesil Beach. London: Jonathan Cape. McEwan, I. (2010). Solar. London: Jonathan Cape. Noakes, J., & Reynolds, M. (eds.) (2002). Ian McEwan. London: Vintage. Roger, A. (1996). Ian McEwan’s Portrayal of Women. Forum for Modern Language Studies, 32(1), 11–26. Ryan, K. (1994). Ian McEwan. Plymouth: Northcote House. Schemberg, C. (2004). Achieving “At-one-ment”: Storytelling and the Concept of the Self in Ian McEwan’s “The Child in Time,” “Black Dogs,” “Enduring Love,” and “Atonement.” Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Slay, J., Jr. (1996). Ian McEwan. New York: Twayne. Wells, L. (2010). Ian McEwan. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wright, J. (dir.) (2007). Atonement. Studio Canal/ Relativity Media/Working Title Films.
McGahern, John MICHAEL L. STOREY
The fiction of John McGahern, the often acclaimed (and once banned) Irish author, appears to be written in an understated, realistic style. But his realism – like that of James Joyce, perhaps McGahern’s strongest literary influence – is subtly enhanced by poetic imagery and symbolism that bring a romantic and metaphysical quality to his writing. His fiction is almost always set in the rural Irish midlands where McGahern grew up, and his themes of oppressed, impoverished country life, circumscribed by conservative Catholic doctrine and ritual, are drawn from life in that part of Ireland. While his fiction has been read as a social critique of mid-twentieth-century Ireland, it is renowned more for its timeless, existential themes of family (including Oedipal) relationships, growing up, the search for meaning, and the confrontation with death. McGahern is best
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known for his six novels and four collections of stories (including The Collected Stories (1992)), but he also wrote a memoir, a play, and several radio and television adaptations of his fiction, as well as numerous reviews and essays. Internationally recognized, he is especially admired in France. McGahern was born in 1934 to Catholic parents. His father, a police sergeant, lived in the police barracks a short distance from the family home. His mother, a schoolteacher to whom he was greatly attached, died of cancer when John was 10 years old. He and his six siblings then moved into the barracks with their father. After completing his education at University College Dublin, McGahern took a teaching position in a national school near Dublin. He was dismissed from his teaching position, however, when his second novel, The Dark (1965), caused a scandal (it was banned in Ireland) and it became known that he had married a divorcee, a Finnish woman. He then left Ireland for England, later traveling to Spain and the US, where he held various jobs, including some teaching positions. After divorcing his first wife, he remarried and eventually returned to Ireland, where he lived until his death in 2006. McGahern’s first novel, The Barracks (1963), is an existential examination of the human condition. Elizabeth, the protagonist and second wife of Reegan, an embittered and violent police sergeant, searches for meaning in her life as she dies slowly of cancer. The novel treats the themes of belief and unbelief, hope and despair, and life’s meaning and its absurdity within the context of rural, conservative Catholicism. His second novel, The Dark, banned because of its frank portrayal of masturbation and sexual abuse, has been compared to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Like Joyce’s novel, The Dark is a semiautobiographical Bildungsroman. It follows the motherless protagonist, young Mahoney, up through his school years to his departure from his father’s home. The novel’s central conflict, the son’s struggle with his violent, abusive father, finds resolution in a final scene of reconciliation. The Leavetaking (1974) and The Pornographer (1979) also treat the theme of a young man’s growth into adulthood. Amongst Women (1990) presents Michael Moran, a veteran of the Irish War of Independence, an embittered, aging farmer and a tyrannical
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husband and father, surrounded by his three daughters and second wife, Rose. Generally acclaimed as McGahern’s finest work, the novel is a portrait of family dynamics and the decline of patriarchal dominance in Ireland. In his final novel,ThatTheyMayFacetheRisingSun(2002),the protagonist Joe Ruttledge has returned from England to live with his wife, Kate, in the Irish midlands. It is a beautiful, yet unsparing portrait of rural Irish life – its people, seasons, rituals, and rhythms. Like the novels, MaGahern’s short stories are often semi-autobiographical. The protagonist is usually a young, educated Irishman from a rural background, most often a teacher, disaffected and searching for meaning in his life. Most often he seeks it through a love affair or through reconciliation with his father. The love stories – “My Love, My Umbrella,” “Doorways,” and “Sierra Leone,” to name a few – almost always end unsatisfactorily. The affairs often begin by happenstance, quickly become intense, but end abruptly on a bitter or ironic note. The father–son stories, such as “Wheels,” “Korea,” and “Gold Watch,” are also bleak and depict the father, usually a police sergeant or a small farmer, as meanspirited, brutal, and unreceptive to the son’s attempts at reconciliation. McGahern’s Memoir (2005; titled All Will Be Well in the US), published the year before his death, confirmed what many readers had long suspected. Not only were the novels and stories based on events and relationships in his life, but the tyrannical, abusive father figure that dominates the fiction is modeled closely on the author’s own father. The memoir is a fitting final work – one that simultaneously sheds light on the novels and stories and brings a sense of culmination to them. SEE ALSO: Censorship and the Novel (BIF); Irish Fiction (BIF); Joyce, James (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Maher, E. (2003). John McGahern: From the Local to the Universal. Dublin: Liffey. McGahern, J. (1963). The Barracks. London: Faber and Faber. McGahern, J. (1965). The Dark. London: Faber and Faber.
McGahern, J. (1970). Nightlines. London: Faber and Faber. McGahern, J. (1974). The Leavetaking. London: Faber and Faber. McGahern, J. (1978). Getting Through. London: Faber and Faber. McGahern, J. (1979). The Pornographer. London: Faber and Faber. (Rev. edn. published 1984.) McGahern, J. (1985). High Ground. London: Faber and Faber. McGahern, J. (1990). Amongst Women. London: Faber and Faber. McGahern, J. (1992). The Collected Stories. London: Faber and Faber. McGahern, J. (2002). That They May Face the Rising Sun. London: Faber and Faber. (Published in US as By the Lake.) McGahern, J. (2005). Memoir. London: Faber and Faber. (Published in US as All Will Be Well: A Memoir.) Sampson, D. (1993). Outstaring Nature’s Eye: The Fiction of John McGahern. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press.
McLiam Wilson, Robert MATTHEW McGUIRE
Robert McLiam Wilson was born in 1964 in Belfast. He attended Cambridge University for a period before dropping out and temporarily becoming homeless, an incident that had a significant impact on his subsequent artistic development. Alongside fellow novelist Glen Paterson, McLiam Wilson is generally regarded as heralding a new generation of Northern Irish writers, which grew up amid the Troubles, and offers a different perspective to that of older figures like Seamus Heaney. McLiam Wilson has published three novels, a non-fiction book about poverty in Britain and Ireland entitled The Dispossessed (1992), and made a number of television documentaries for the BBC. In 2003 he was declared one of Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists” despite not having published anything since 1996. While his second novel Manfred’s Pain (1992) details the life of an elderly Jewish man living London, McLiam Wilson is most highly regarded for his Northern Irish fiction. Ripley Bogle (1989) and Eureka Street (1996) address a number of themes including the supersaturation of identity politics in the North, the problematic nature of
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traditional Nationalist and Unionist ideologies, and the dubious nature of aesthetic representations of the Troubles. The author’s interest in muddling the conventional thinking about Northern Irish loyalties is evinced through his own pseudonym, playfully constructed from the Irish (“McLiam”) and English (“Wilson”) versions of the same name. Ripley Bogle is an ironic Bildungsroman, set in the 1980s. Its eponymous hero is a homeless vagrant who wanders the streets of Thatcher’s London recollecting his childhood spent growing up amid the unfolding chaos of the Northern Irish Troubles. As well as evoking the work of both Charles Dickens and George Orwell, the book is overtly Joycean in is playful mix of the highly ludic and the highly literary. Seen through the eyes of a child, Ripley Bogle presents an estranged and defamiliarized version of this most well-documented period of Northern Irish history. The novel renders the conflict as devoid of the ideologies upon which historical and political narratives rely. The author’s own pseudonym finds its mirror in the main character who comically rechristens himself “Ripley Irish-British Bogle” in an attempt to reconcile his ancestry, having both an Irish mother and a Welsh father. Ripley Bogle marked something of a watershed in Northern Irish fiction which for the first time was presented with a highly self-aware, postmodern representation of the post-1969 conflict. The novel satirized the two most popular modes of Northern Irish fiction, the “Troubles trash” thriller and the “across the barricades” romance. McLiam Wilson accuses these generic fictions of complicity in the kind of ideological deadlock and theoretical slippage upon which the Troubles are predicated. The novel’s dramatic denouement reveals that all narratives are suspect, that accessing an objective truth is the goal of only the most naive reader. Eureka Street is also concerned with a familiar Northern Irish cliche. It depicts the lives of two friends from opposite sides of the political divide and their attempts to reconcile themselves to the changing nature of Northern Ireland at the time of the paramilitary ceasefires during the 1990s. Again, it seeks to deliberately destabilize the received categories of Northern Irish culture. Jake Jackson is a disgruntled Catholic with a positive loathing for anything Irish. His friend Chuckie Lurgan is an entrepreneurial Protestant, more
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interested in his wallet or his women than anything faintly political. Echoing the author’s work in The Dispossessed, the novel explores the underlying economics of the Troubles, reminding us that the sectarian violence of Northern Ireland was mainly restricted to the poorer parts of society. Eureka Street contains one of the most famous depictions of violence in recent Northern Irish writing; the scene is a bomb blast in the Fountain Lane area of Belfast city center. The novel marks a significant departure in Northern Irish fiction in that it focuses upon the city, and not the country, as a source of artistic inspiration and a symbol of potential redemption. The novel offers a contrast to the iconography of Northern Irish poetry and its tendency toward an organic symbolism and a rural mythology as a source of cultural consolation and relief. Whereas Ripley Bogle took on the mass market fiction of the North, Eureka Street satirizes the high art of Northern Irish poetry and its attempts to elevate itself above the ideological compromises of Northern Irish life. The character Shague Ghinthoss, a pun on “shag and toss,” parodies the image of the Northern Irish poet, a criticism McLiam Wilson makes explicit in some of his non-fictional writing. SEE ALSO: Irish Fiction (BIF); Joyce, James (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Kennedy-Andrews, E. (2003). Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles Since 1969: (De)constructing the North. Dublin: Four Courts. Kirkland, R. (2000). Bourgeois Redemptions: The Fictions of Glen Patterson and Robert McLiam Wilson. In L. Harte & M. Parker (eds.), Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories. Basingstoke: Macmillan. McLiam Wilson, R. (1989). Ripley Bogle. London: Vintage. McLiam Wilson, R. (1992). Manfred’s Pain. London: Picador. McLiam Wilson, R. (1993). 1989. In Twenty-One Picador Authors Celebrate 21 Years of International Writing. London: Picador. McLiam Wilson, R. (1995). The Glittering Prize. Fortnight, pp. 344–5 (Nov.). McLiam Wilson, R. (1996). Eureka Street. London: Secker and Warburg.
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McLiam Wilson, R., & Wylie, D. (1992). The Dispossessed. London: Pan. Patten, E. (1995). Northern Ireland’s Prodigal Novelists. In I. A. Bell (ed.), Peripheral Visions: Images of Nationhood in Contemporary British Fiction. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Pelaschiar, L. (2000). Transforming Belfast: The Evolving Role of the City in Northern Irish Fiction. Irish University Review, 30(1), 117–26.
Mo, Timothy ELAINE YEE LIN HO
Born in 1950, Timothy Mo read History at St. John’s College, Oxford, and worked as a reporter for Boxing News before becoming a full-time writer. His Chinese father and English mother divorced when he was 18 months old. The first nine years of his life were spent in Hong Kong where he was educated first in a Chinese convent school and then in a school for the children of English expatriates. This formative experience is related in a little-known but important essay (Mo 1996) published long after he had achieved recognition as a novelist. The essay offers an explanatory narrative for the way his career and identity as a writer unfolded over two decades. In hindsight, Mo sees himself as a child “endowed through genes and upbringing with a precocious conceptual intelligence, adrift within an ideographic literary culture” (305), stifled by teachers who compelled him to read and write Chinese characters. In the English school, which he found liberating, he learnt boxing and developed a preference for Anglo-Western culture and stories of action and adventure. The essay also addresses the issues that framed the critical reception of Mo from his first two novels, The Monkey King (1978) and Sour Sweet (1982): his cultural identity and unique propensities as a fictionist. Set in mid-twentieth-century Hong Kong, The Monkey King narrates the fortunes of the Poon family and the battle of wits between the patriarch Mr. Poon and his son-in-law, Wallace Nolasco. Wallace, a Macanese of Portuguese descent, is the outsider who eventually triumphs to replace Mr. Poon as head of the family. In Sour Sweet, the setting is Chinatown, London where the immigrant Lily Chen struggles for survival in an environment she bare-
ly comprehends, with little on her side but wit, willfulness, and an inalienable sense of herself as authentically Chinese. Both Wallace and Lily are marginal to the social milieu in which they find themselves, and Mo constitutes their marginality as a variety of perspectives from which to satirize the Chinese family and cultural traditions. The subjects of these novels and Mo’s ancestry focus attention on the issue of Chinese identity at a time when ethnicity of any stripe was almost invisible in British fiction. This focus runs counter to Mo’s professed antipathy to Chinese culture, and tends to distract from more perceptive appraisal of his talents as a writer: his ability to draw complex and sympathetic main characters, a stringent eye for detail in scene-setting, and the capacity to make descriptions of physical action and combat deliver their impact. These strengths are on full display in the ambitious epical narrative of his third novel, An Insular Possession (1986), which explores the so-called First Opium War fought between Britain and China in the nineteenth century, which led to the colonization of Hong Kong. In the two protagonists, Gideon Chase and Walter Eastman, American journalists caught between the two empires, Mo refocuses his abiding interest in marginal subjects and viewpoints but away from Chinese ethnicity and culture. This is a move he continues in The Redundancy of Courage (1991), considered by some to be his finest work to date. The novel, set in the fictional island of Danu, which closely resembles East Timor, relates the islanders’ war of independence, first against a European colonizer and then against an imperial neighbor. The fighters are observed by Adolph Ng, the first-person narrator, a Danuese whose Chinese ancestry is important only insofar as it separates him from his native and mestizo comrades-in-arms. Of much greater significance is the novel’s critique of hegemonic power and its sympathetic but also dispassionate portrayal of characters who take up roles of resistance. Mo’s own mimetic prowess is such that the novel garnered praise from no less than Jose Ramos-Hortas himself, the Timorese leader and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, who found its realism remarkable especially considering that Mo had not been to East Timor (www. timothymo.co.uk/insulared.html, accessed Aug. 15, 2008). The novel was published before East Timor’s struggle exploded onto the world stage
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and demonstrated Mo’s prescience as a global observer and commentator. In his fifth novel, Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard (1995), Mo migrates to another Asian location, the Philippines. By this time, he was spending more and more of his year in Asia, not only in the Philippines but also in Thailand and on family visits to Hong Kong. He had also turned his back on mainstream commercial publishers to set up his own Paddleless Press, a high-risk venture for an established author that bears more than a passing resemblance to the intriguing mix of courage and bravado found in his characters. Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard is populated by ordinary men and women who, like their counterparts elsewhere in Mo’s fictional worlds, inhabit a society over which they have little control and who have to negotiate daily with powerful structures that rule and ruin their lives. Their actions are both admirable and nugatory, the outcomes alternately tragic and comic. In describing the foibles and antics on both sides, Mo is characteristically humorous. But he also bares his satire’s lacerating edge. The novel attracted controversy for its perceived attack on Philippine and other nationalities as much as for its venue of publication. In his latest novel, Renegade or Halo2 (1999), the protagonist Rey Castro is a migrant laborer traveling out of the Philippines to Asia and the Anglo-American West, a contemporary Ulysses, antiheroic in the modernist vein but made visible in a late modern globalizing world where the cross-cultural encounters of an entire underclass of working migrants rarely merit public and fictional concern. The novel contains descriptions of rape, torture, and cruelty but also sensitively probes Rey’s psychology. His acerbic comments present a host of cultures and cultural characteristics in unflattering light. Mo’s apparent readiness to rank cultural differences and levy value judgments is highly unusual at a historical juncture in which cultural relativism appears to be the order of the day. Due to recent interest in diasporic literatures, Sour Sweet remains Mo’s most popularly read and widely taught novel to date. While it is a pioneering work that remains the best novel on Chinatown Britain, it does not show Mo’s full range as an artist. Mining the groove of his undoubted realist talent, Mo consistently sets his fiction
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against forces that impose boundaries on human action and expression wherever in the world he perceives them. The perceptions can be partial and provocative, but they are always uniquely and astutely those of a cosmopolitan writer for whom questions of value, justice, and social action do not afford much room for gentility and compromise. SEE ALSO: Colonial Fiction (BIF); East Asian Fiction (WF); Globalization and the Novel (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ho, E. Y. L. (2000). Timothy Mo. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kerr, D. (2001). Timothy Mo’s Man Sundae and Other Overseas Workers. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 36(2), 15–28. McLeod, J. (1999). On the Chase for Gideon Nye: History and Representation in Timothy Mo’s An Insular Possession. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 34(2), 61–73. Mo, T. (1978). The Monkey King. London: Deutsch. Mo, T. (1982). Sour Sweet. London: Deutsch. Mo, T. (1986). An Insular Possession. London: Chatto and Windus. Mo, T. (1991). The Redundancy of Courage. London: Chatto and Windus. Mo, T. (1995). Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard. London: Paddleless. Mo, T. (1996). Fighting Their Writing: The Unholy Lingo of RLS and Kung Fu Tse. In C. Hope & P. Porter (eds.), New Writing 5. London: Vintage, pp. 299–318. (An earlier version published as “One of Billy’s Boys,” Eastern Express Weekend (Hong Kong), Feb. 5, 1994.) Mo, T. (1999). Renegade or Halo2. London: Paddleless. Timothy Mo website: www.timothymo.co.uk.
Modernist Fiction BRYONY RANDALL
While the parameters of the terms “modernist” and “modernism” are constantly under debate, there is a broad critical consensus that “modernist fiction,” in the Western Anglophone world, usually denotes experimental narrative works
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produced between 1890 and 1940, and the major figures in British and Irish modernist fiction would include Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Prose fiction falling within this category is identified by its breaking with literary norms; being “modern,” in the sense of new, different, unprecedented. And while experimentation in terms of form is most widely seen as identifying modernist literature – breaking up linear narrative, using non-normative syntax, inventing new forms of narrator, and so on – modernist texts are also characterized by their willingness to address new and sometimes controversial subject matter. Modernist fiction has often been caricatured as holding “real life” at a distance, interested only in its own formal and stylistic innovations. But much modernist fiction is characterized by a direct, often antagonistic, engagement with the lived realities of its rapidly changed, and changing, social and political world, influencing and influenced by the contemporaneous developments in other art forms, as well as presenting complex responses to intellectual developments in every field, from politics and philosophy to physics and biology. The use of the word “modernist” as a literary critical term is a relatively recent development. “Modernism” was by no means a conscious movement but evolved in various ways out of the literature of earlier periods – often reacting against it, but also adopting and modifying its forms. The writers we now refer to as “modernist” would not have used the term to describe themselves, and indeed may have been surprised to find themselves grouped with other writers with whom they may not have found much in common. The different kinds of innovation now designated “modernist” range from Ford Madox Ford’s profoundly unreliable narrator in The Good Soldier (1915) to the multivocal “tunnelling” narrative method of Mrs. Dalloway (1925), where the narrative is smoothly passed from one character to another; from D. H. Lawrence’s insistent, poetic prose, dealing with previously taboo issues of sexuality and family dynamics in novels such as Sons and Lovers (1913), to May Sinclair’s treatment of similar themes in The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922) through sparse prose, tightly focused through an individual consciousness. Thus any attempt to pin down the qualities that will be
displayed by every modernist text will inevitably fail. However, what these texts share is an unusual form or mode of narration: one that might break with the traditional linear chronology of the novel, representing an alternative temporality or temporalities; or allow access to the consciousness (or indeed unconscious) of its characters and, in doing so, propose different ways of conceiving the relationships between people; or include language and diction not previously considered novelistic, whether by working with “lowbrow” forms of speech, or including “poetic” language, dense with imagery and allusion. Another classic modernist characteristic is the breaking down of boundaries between genres (in, for example, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), subtitled A Biography, or Mary Butts’s Armed with Madness of the same year, modeled along the lines of a medieval Grail epic). While, broadly speaking, the Victorian novel seeks to convince the reader of the contiguity of the world it creates with the real world in which the reader lives, modernist fiction draws attention to its own fictionality – to the fact that it is formed in language – and, in doing so, provokes the reader to probe the relationships between him- or herself, language, and the real world. The innovations of British and Irish modernist writers are rooted in responses to a world whose beliefs had been radically disrupted during the last decades of the nineteenth century. This period saw a reorientation in scientific, philosophical, and political thought toward the fundamental questions of both God’s and man’s place in the universe. Mid-century, Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution had implied a challenge to belief in a creator-god, but also as a consequence undermined the picture of an anthropocentric universe. Karl Marx (with his collaborator Friedrich Engels) emphasized the extent to which individuals were in thrall to the economic mechanisms of an industrialized society. Sigmund Freud proposed that, rather than being rational beings in control of our thoughts and actions, we are constantly influenced by the unconscious, full of desires, drives, and fears originating in childhood. And Friedrich Nietzsche, famously pronouncing that “God is dead,” suggested that humanity can look only to itself to generate its values, hence individuals should make their choices based on
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what will enable them to succeed. In the early twentieth century, the work of Albert Einstein in physics and Ferdinand de Saussure in linguistics emphasized the relative instability of the physical world and of language, respectively. It is in the context of these developments in other disciplines that we must see the experimentations of the writers of modernist fiction. Alongside these developments, dramatic changes in the political, social, and cultural landscape of Britain and Ireland in this period form both the backdrop to, and the material of, modernist fiction. The feminist movement gained momentum throughout the 1880s, 1890s, and into the twentieth century; campaigns on the specific issue of votes for women ran alongside broader debates about women’s role and rights in society. The fight for Irish independence from British rule was one of many global movements asserting the right to self-determination of nations colonized by European powers; the end of the nineteenth century saw the beginnings of the decline of empire globally. Alongside the loss of this means of anchoring Britain’s sense of itself, the so-called “death of liberalism” in British politics posed a further challenge to assumptions about progress and stability. The development of extremist political movements across Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century shook the belief in the dominance of liberal politics. And, of course, politics and economics eventually played themselves out in the most apocalyptic of events, World War I. Unprecedented in scale, the Great War not only affected the lives of every individual British and Irish citizen, but demanded a profound reassessment of assumptions about what, collectively and individually, humans could apparently do to each other – indeed, to themselves. This period also saw a dramatic acceleration in technological innovation: electric light; the telegraph and later telephone; the bicycle, car, and airplane. Photography became an aspect of everyday life that began to be taken for granted; the cinema developed as a new mode of entertainment. Public transport proliferated and became part of the daily routine for many. These developments not only radically changed, within the course of a generation, the day-to-day experiences of individuals and communities, but challenged traditional concepts of time and space. A person
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on the other side of an ocean could be heard as if they were in the same room; people could, individually in a car or in a carriage full of strangers, traverse distances in an afternoon that previously might have taken days. The night-time streets of the city could become as bright as day; sitting still in a darkened room, one could witness vast panoramas, dramatic movement, projected onto a screen. Finally, it is crucial to place modernist fiction in the context of contemporary developments in other art forms. Not only did the invention of the new art form of cinema influence experimental forms of representing time in narrative (in, for example, Dorothy Richardson or Virginia Woolf), but this was also a period of radical innovation in the other visual arts, particularly painting and sculpture. When post-impressionist and cubist painters such as Paul Cezanne, Vincent Van Gogh, and Pablo Picasso were first exhibited in London in the 1910s their works caused outrage in their challenge to received notions of visual art and their desire to transform assumptions about how and indeed what we see, and how it might be represented. Presenting multiple perspectives simultaneously, disrupting the hierarchical relationship between subject and context, drawing attention to the materiality of the artistic medium – the impact of these gestures in the art world can easily be read across to innovations in narrative, which in turn would feed back into other artistic forms. No historical period is without its changes, but modernist fiction was produced in a period marked by a particularly intense concentration of disruptions to long-held beliefs, assumptions, and modes of experience. Individual writers might be particularly engaged with certain aspects of their environment above others. But seen collectively, the capacity of British and Irish modernist fiction writers to engage with, even welcome, the fragmentary and inconclusive – in the form of their work as well as its content – reflects the newly fragmentary and inconclusive nature of the world around them. As befits so slippery a category, many of the key early contributors to British and Irish modernist fiction were neither British nor Irish; conversely, much writing by British and Irish writers took place outside of Britain or Ireland. Among the key figures who exemplify this crossing of national
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boundaries are Henry James (who was born in America, but lived most of his adult life in England, becoming a British citizen just before his death) and Joseph Conrad (a Pole who settled in England and learned English only in his twenties). James’s novels resist categorical conclusions and neat endings; this is perhaps the most “modernist” of their characteristics. He is credited with refining and popularizing so-called “free indirect discourse,” where the thoughts and feelings of a particular character are rendered in third-person narrative, placing the narrative voice in an ambiguous position between narrator and character. He also plays with the potential of the first-person narrative to disrupt, rather than confirm, narrative authenticity; in The Turn of the Screw (1898) a mysterious story is told through an unnamed narrator, himself reporting what he has been told by a friend who has read the firsthand account of events, placing layers of uncertainty and possible slippage between the story and the reader. Conrad, a great admirer of James, also used this so-called “frame” narrative in his most famous novel Heart of Darkness (1902) to render the journey on which it takes the reader – into the African interior, and into the damaged mind of the elusive Kurtz – even more unsettling; his Secret Agent (1907) is a disturbing story of terrorism and manipulation that resonates with twentyfirst-century preoccupations. Disrupting the expected firm relationship between fiction and reality, between language and the things we use language to describe, these works exemplify modernist fiction’s attempt to respond adequately to a world where assumptions about the foundations of human experience had been radically undermined. Another key figure in this early modernist scene is Ford Madox Ford. A novelist and short story writer, and sometime collaborator with Conrad, Ford made an equally important contribution to the development of modernist fiction in his role as editor and publisher, publishing Conrad, James, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce, among others, in his English Review and Transatlantic Review. (Indeed, periodicals such as these, and The Egoist and The Athenaeum, were crucial outlets for modernist fiction.) Ford’s most celebrated work is The Good Soldier, a finely drawn exploration of deceit and loyalty through one of the most famously unreliable narrators in
British fiction. But he is also recognized for the World War I tetralogy Parade’s End (1982 [1924–8]), a panoramic evocation of the realities of life in the trenches as well as the emotional and psychological struggles of those left behind. Other writers known for their war fiction are Rebecca West, whose Return of the Soldier (1918) was the first war novel by a woman, and Richard Aldington, also a poet, who drew on his own experiences on the front line in Death of a Hero (1929). The impact of the war resonates throughout the modernist fiction of the 1920s and into the 1930s, directly and obliquely. Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922) and To the Lighthouse (1928) have war as their, almost absent, center, reflecting its unspeakability. Similarly, her Between the Acts, posthumously published in 1941, is a novel whose festive subject matter (a village pageant) works in productive tension with the dark shadow of World War II. Although Woolf is often associated with particular innovations in narrative fiction (free indirect discourse, poetic prose) each of her 10 novels unfolds a different mode of narrative, from the more traditionally realist The Voyage Out (1915) to the lyrical evocation of a single London day in Mrs. Dalloway to the “prose poem” of The Waves (1931). The once familiar depiction of Woolf as the token woman among a male high modernist cabal has in the last couple of decades been displaced by a much more gender-balanced picture of modernist innovation, Bonnie Kime Scott’s anthology The Gender of Modernism (1990) being a landmark text in this critical trajectory. From the fervently feminist, proto-modernist short stories of George Egerton (the pen name of the Irish writer Mary Chavelita Dunne) in the 1890s, to Dorothy Richardson’s monumental 13-volume Pilgrimage (1979 [1915–67]; the first work of fiction to be described as “stream of consciousness”) to the mysterious novels of Mary Butts in the 1920s and 1930s, whose infusion with myth and preoccupation with sexuality compare interestingly with the better-known work of D. H. Lawrence, the centrality of British and Irish women writers to the modernist literary landscape is now firmly established. Ongoing work toward the (re)discovery and republication of female writers, such as the Welsh short story writer Dorothy Edwards, keeps this project alive in modernist studies.
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MODERNIST FICTION
While modernism is frequently described as a hybrid, expatriate phenomenon, the republication of writers such as Edwards is indicative of current critical interest in the idea of “national modernisms.” In Ireland, other major figures include Flann O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett (via proto-modernists like Oscar Wilde and John Millington Synge); indeed, Beckett’s mid-century work in prose and drama represents some of the most extreme forms that modernist writing might take, presenting a radical challenge to notions of human subjectivity, time, and experience with a dark humor. But James Joyce remains the most celebrated Irish modernist; his immense novel Ulysses (1922), using the Greek epic as its model, is often cited as the crowning achievement in modernist fiction, not least because of its deployment of many radically different styles within a single volume. Famously, the final chapter has no punctuation, evoking the fluid interior world of the character Molly Bloom. Earlier in the century, Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners (1914) had caused controversy in its attention to taboo subjects and refusal to provide comfortable conclusions. Even more controversial is his Finnegans Wake (1939), written in an entirely synthetic language, based on English but where almost every word is a portmanteau made up of words from any number of different languages. The fiction of Scottish writers such as Lewis Grassic Gibbon (best known for his immense A Scots Quair, 1946 [1932–4]) and Neil M. Gunn is firmly located in a Scottish context, as well as participating in a transnational modernist literature. In Wales, Caradoc Evans, Saunders Lewis, and the prose work of Dylan Thomas all display qualities we might now consider “modernist.” And this interest in the range of modernisms draws attention to the idea of a specifically English modernism, in writers such as Woolf, Lawrence, Butts, and E. M. Forster. Later in the century, numerous prose fiction writers turned to less overtly experimental styles; nevertheless, there is increasing critical interest in exploring modernist traces in the work of Christopher Isherwood, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Henry Green, Rosamond Lehmann, and Rose Macaulay. (E. M. Forster is a similar liminal figure from early in the century, claimed as modernist by some, as Georgian by others.) But other writers such as
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B. S. Johnson and Malcolm Lowry display their modernist heritage much more overtly. So while, by the 1960s, the cultural phenomenon of “postmodernism” had apparently marked the end of modernist fiction, its impact resonates through the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. SEE ALSO: The Avant Garde Novel (AF); Feminist Fiction (BIF); Irish Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Scottish Fiction (BIF); World War I in Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Aldington, R. (1929). Death of a Hero. London: Chatto and Windus. Beckett, S. (1986). The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber. Bradbury, M., & McFarlane, J. (eds.) (1976). Modernism 1890–1930. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bradshaw, D. (ed.) (2003). A Concise Companion to Modernism. Oxford: Blackwell. Butts, M. F. (1928). Armed with Madness. London: Wishart. Conrad, J. (1907). The Secret Agent. London: Methuen. Conrad, J. (2007). Heart of Darkness [1902]. London: Penguin. Dettmar, K., & Bradshaw, D. (eds.) (2006). A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Edwards, D. (1927). Rhapsody. London: Wishart. Ford, F. M. (1915). The Good Soldier. London: John Lane. Ford, F. M. (1982). Parade’s End [1924–8]. London: Penguin. Gibbon, L. G. (1946). A Scots Quair [1932–4]. London: Jarrolds. Goldman, J. (2004). Modernism 1910–1945: Image to Apocalypse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. James, H. (1881). The Portrait of a Lady. London: Macmillan. James, H. (1898). The Turn of the Screw. London: Heinemann. Joyce, J. (1914). Dubliners. London: Grant Richards. Joyce, J. (1922). Ulysses. Paris: Shakespeare and Co. Joyce, J. (1939). Finnegans Wake. London: Faber and Faber. Kolocotroni, V., Goldman, J., & Taxidou, O. (1998). Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lawrence, D. H. (1913). Sons and Lovers. London: Duckworth.
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Levenson, M. (ed.) (1999). The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nicholls, P. (1995). Modernisms: A Literary Guide. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Rainey, L. (2005). Modernism: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell. Richardson, D. (1979). Pilgrimage [1915–67]. London: Virago. Scott, B. K. (1990). The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sinclair, M. (1922). The Life and Death of Harriett Frean. London: Collins. West, R. (1918). The Return of the Soldier. London: Nisbet. Whitworth, M. (ed.) (2007). Modernism: A Guide to Criticism. Oxford: Blackwell. Woolf, V. (1915). The Voyage Out. London: Hogarth. Woolf, V. (1922). Jacob’s Room. London: Hogarth. Woolf, V. (1925). Mrs Dalloway. London: Hogarth. Woolf, V. (1927). To the Lighthouse. London: Hogarth. Woolf, V. (1928). Orlando. London: Hogarth. Woolf, V. (1931). The Waves. London: Hogarth.
Moore, Brian EAMON MAHER
Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1921, Brian Moore spent the majority of his life in Canada and the US. The author of some 20 novels, he is characterized as a talented storyteller as well as someone with a keen understanding of the female psyche (O’Donoghue, 1991). By the time of his death in January 1999, Moore’s standing was extremely high: a lucrative book contract signed with Bloomsbury in 1988 made him financially secure and many of his novels were successfully adapted for the screen (most notably Catholics, Black Robe, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, and Lies of Silence). While many of the earlier novels have a distinctively Irish flavor, others are situated in France, the US, Canada, and South America. The family of Moore’s upbringing was staunchly Catholic and nationalistic, yet Moore found the religious atmosphere of Belfast stifling. Lacking what he described as a religious sense, and being uninspired by the thought of following his father and brothers into a career in medicine, he fled Belfast to work in the British Ministry of War Transport in 1942. Much of what he experienced
traveling around Europe and North Africa at the end of World War II was filed away and used in subsequent novels such as The Colour of Blood (1987), The Statement (1995), and The Magician’s Wife (1997). Although a confirmed agnostic from an early age, Moore was fascinated by those who had faith. His education at St. Malachy’s, the Catholic diocesan school in Belfast, filled him with disdain for religious bigotry. His first novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955), traces the tragic plight of an alcoholic spinster who desperately seeks comfort in a relationship with a returned emigrant, James Madden, who mistakenly believes that she is a woman of means. On discovering that she is even more impoverished than he, Madden puts an end to the relationship. This leads to a bout of drinking and a fatal questioning of her faith by Judith. She ends up railing against religion during a visit to her friend, Mrs. O’Neill: “ ‘God! What does He care? Is there a God at all, I’ve been asking myself, because if there is, why does he never answer our prayers?’ ”(229). Moore’s first novel presents a gloomy picture of Belfast, where people live in a religious ghetto with little hope of escape or diversion. The Feast of Lupercal (1958) and the autobiographical The Emperor of Ice Cream (1966) consolidate the image of a sectarian, repressive city. The former has at its main protagonist Diarmuid Devine, a teacher in Ardath College, a thinly disguised representation of St. Malachy’s, who is momentarily dazzled by the arrival of a young woman from Dublin. In the same way as for Judith Hearne, “Catholicism and the colonial bigotry of Belfast frustrate his ability to reach a sense of independent maturity” (Hicks 25). He is unable to consummate his passion for Una and the liaison endangers his career in Ardath. The Emperor of Ice Cream does offer the promise of liberation, which is supplied, strangely enough, by the bombing of Belfast during World War II. Gavin Burke joins the ARP (civil defense) unit (as Moore did) and finds himself enmeshed in the unfolding of history. He is unexpectedly cast in a heroic role as he courageously pulls bodies from collapsed buildings and discovers qualities he never knew he possessed. At the end of the novel, in a symbolic gesture, Burke and his fellow ARP member, Freddy Hargreaves, choose not to
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kneel as the “Our Father” is recited in the hospital. This is the first example of a triumphant break from the shackles of religion by one of Moore’s characters. The range of topics covered in the novels is vast. Political issues are broached in The Colour of Blood, describing the travails of a cardinal in communist Poland, No Other Life (1993), which treats of the effects of liberation theology on a Caribbean island, and Lies of Silence (1990), set in Belfast during the Troubles. The Statement deals with a Vichy collaborator in Nazi-occupied France during World War II, whereas The Magician’s Wife broaches colonial activities in Algeria under the Emperor Napoleon III. Sexuality and issues of identity are central elements in I am Mary Dunne (1968), The Doctor’s Wife (1976), and The Temptation of Eileen Hughes (1981). Two notable, and very different, approaches to Catholicism are evident in Catholics (1972a) and Cold Heaven (1983). The former is set on a remote island monastery off the southwestern coast of Ireland in the period after Vatican IV. The monks of the monastic community are anxious to say the Mass in Latin, which contravenes the ecumenical thrust of Vatican IV. A progressive priest, James Kinsella, is sent by Rome to bring the monks to order. The abbot, Tomas Kinsella, a man who lost his faith during a visit to Lourdes, attempts to steer a path between the two factions and ends up rediscovering the ability to pray. “Prayer is the only miracle” (91), he tells the monks, thus revealing the key that unlocks his unbelief. Cold Heaven is a fascinating exposition of how a Marian apparition transforms the life of an entrenched agnostic, Marie, who successfully faces down the patriarchal Catholic Church which she associates with “its priests and indulgences and denials of the imperfection of this world for an illusionary hereafter” (1983, 88–9). Marie steers a path away from religion and ends up leaving her husband to live with a man with whom she is deeply in love. In an interview, Moore stated: “Belief is an obsession of mine. I think everybody wants to believe in something – politics, religion, something that makes life worthwhile for them. And with most people there’s a certain point in their lives when these beliefs are shattered. And it’s that point I seize on as a writer” (Craig 253).
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Graham Greene referred to Brian Moore as his favorite living author and his work is certainly worthy of close scrutiny and will continue to attract scholarly attention in the future. SEE ALSO: Irish Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Craig, P. (2002). Brian Moore: A Biography. London: Bloomsbury. Hicks, P. (2007). Brian Moore and the Meaning of the Past. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen. Moore, B. (1955). The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. London: Flamingo. Moore, B. (1958). The Feast of Lupercal. London: Flamingo. Moore, B. (1960). The Luck of Ginger Coffey. London: Flamingo. Moore, B. (1963). An Answer from Limbo. London: Flamingo. Moore, B. (1966). The Emperor of Ice Cream. London: Flamingo. Moore, B. (1968). I am Mary Dunne. London: Flamingo. Moore, B. (1971). Fergus. London: Flamingo. Moore, B. (1972a). Catholics. London: Triad/Panther. Moore, B. (1972b). The Revolution Script. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Moore, B. (1975). The Great Victorian Collection. London: Flamingo. Moore, B. (1976). The Doctor’s Wife. London: Flamingo. Moore, B. (1979). The Mangan Inheritance. London: Flamingo. Moore, B. (1981). The Temptation of Eileen Hughes. London: Flamingo. Moore, B. (1983). Cold Heaven. London: Triad/ Panther. Moore, B. (1985). Black Robe. London: Flamingo. Moore, B. (1987). The Colour of Blood. London: Flamingo. Moore, B. (1990). Lies of Silence. London: Flamingo. Moore, B. (1993). No Other Life. London: Flamingo. Moore, B. (1995). The Statement. London: Flamingo. Moore, B. (1997). The Magician’s Wife. London: Flamingo. Murray, C. (ed.) (1988). Brian Moore Special Issue. Irish University Review, 18(1). O’Donoghue, J. (1991). Brian Moore: A Critical Study. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Sampson, D. (1998). Brian Moore: The Chameleon Novelist. Dublin: Merino.
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Murdoch, Iris BRAN NICOL
Iris Jean Murdoch was a singular figure in twentieth-century literature. In addition to being one of the most distinctive postwar British novelists, producing 26 novels (as well as five plays, a book of poems, a libretto, and a recently rediscovered short story), she was also an esteemed moral philosopher, publishing numerous philosophical books and essays. Murdoch’s fiction is an interesting combination of the “classic realist” emphasis on character and detailed description and the conventions of prose romance. Her plots are gripping and full of bizarre twists and coincidences that disrupt the apparent stability of the lives of her characters. Nevertheless her character’s experiences, and the way they respond, mean that her novels are serious explorations of profound philosophical questions such as the nature of goodness, love, spirituality, power, and death. Murdoch was born on July 15, 1919 in Dublin, though her family moved to England when she was only a year old. She always regarded herself as an Irish writer, despite spending most of her life in England, and being educated at some of the most quintessentially English institutions (the Froebel Institute, Badminton School, and Cambridge and Oxford universities). Rather than pointing to peculiarly “Irish” qualities in Murdoch’s writing, the significance of her insistence is that it indicates her willingness to style herself as something of an outsider to the English literary tradition. Indeed, in her formative years as a writer and philosopher she looked to Continental literary and philosophical traditions for inspiration, admiring in particular the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Queneau, Elias Canetti, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. She met Sartre, Queneau, and other European intellectuals during a period, in 1944–6, when she worked with displaced people on the Continent for the Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. When she studied philosophy at Cambridge after the war she did so “under the shadow” of Wittgenstein. Her book on Sartre, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), was one of the first serious analyses by a British philosopher of the prominent Continental tradition of existentialism.
Murdoch was a Fellow at St. Anne’s College and university lecturer in philosophy at Oxford University between 1948 and 1963, following which, between 1963 and 1967, she lectured at the Royal College of Art, London. Having married fellow don John Bayley in 1956, she lived all her life in Oxford. She has been called the very personification of “the Oxonian intellectual” (New York Times, Dec. 26, 2001), and was known to be fiercely intelligent, kind, and eccentric (known for the untidiness of her home, her love of pubs, and oddities of behavior such as delivering completed manuscripts to publishers in plastic bags). Her fiction, peopled with middle- and upper-class academics and civil servants, reflects her own rarefied social environment. The outward impression of stability and sedentariness in her life was contradicted, however, by a string of biographical studies that followed her death in 1999, including three memoirs published by Bayley. It emerged that Murdoch had led a complicated emotional life and had had a multitude of affairs. Her reticence to speak about her private life – and perhaps the emphasis on goodness in her philosophy – had given her a “saintly” public persona, and the systematic couplings and power games that typify social relations in her novels were assumed by readers to be purely the product of her imagination. The increased knowledge of her life, however, makes them seem more autobiographical. Murdoch’s first novel, Under the Net, a picaresque tale of bohemian London in the 1950s, was published in 1954. It saw her briefly classified as part of a new social- realist movement in fiction, whose members also included contemporaries such as Kingsley Amis and Angus Wilson, which rejected the introspective, experimental strains of modernism. Her next few novels, however, including The Flight from the Enchanter (1956), The Bell (1958), and A Severed Head (1961), made it clear that Murdoch’s brand of realism was far from a reflection of everyday life of the period. This is underlined by the arguments in notable polemical essays such as “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited” (1958), “Against Dryness” (1961), and “Existentialists and Mystics” (1970), which demonstrate how different Murdoch’s understanding of “realism” was to the kind of documentary clarity favored by social realism. There she argued that contemporary
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fiction and philosophy proved that contemporary culture was suffering from an inability to think or speak about morality and politics with sufficient depth, and was beset by an impoverished understanding of the human personality. She felt contemporary fiction had a duty to engage with this problem, and her solution was that writers look to the achievements of nineteenth-century realist novelists such as Tolstoy and George Eliot, who were able to create complex characters that seemed – unlike those of the majority of Murdoch’s contemporaries – to exist “independently” of their author and the demands of the plot. This “independence” of character was the counterpart of the activity at the very heart of Murdoch’s own ethics, which she developed through works of philosophy such as The Sovereignty of Good (1970b) and The Fire and the Sun (1977): the necessity of “attending to” the world outside the self and the other people who inhabit it without misperceiving it through the prism of personal fantasy. Murdoch’s moral philosophy was essentially a form of Platonism, one which turns on the value of moving from “low Eros” to “high Eros,” that is, avoiding selfish worldly gratification by looking objectively at the external world. The motivation behind this can be summed up by the title of her last work of philosophy, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992). Everyday morality was once shaped by the “metaphysical conceptual framework” provided by religion. But in a post-Christian world, where the ready “protective symbolism” of religion was in decline, she felt an alternative was required. Art could perform this function, as it “shows us the world, our world and not another one, with a clarity which startles and delights us simply because we are not used to looking at the real world at all” (Murdoch 1997b, 352). Murdoch’s philosophical background made her an agile and formidably intelligent theorist of contemporary fiction, and an important counter-voice to prominent “anti-realist” novelists of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Alain RobbeGrillet, B. S. Johnson, or John Barth. But it also meant that reviewers tended to measure her own work against the exacting standards of the great realist novelists she championed and find it wanting. In fact, the comparison between Murdoch’s own writing and nineteenth-century realism is rather misleading. Murdoch always had more in
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common with contemporaries who were preoccupied by myth and psychodrama, and whose work was more self-consciously aesthetic, such as William Golding or Muriel Spark. Nevertheless, her fiction does live up to the high expectations set up by her philosophy and literary theory in an important sense: it is a serious attempt to explore the nature of existence in a world without God. This dilemma explains why so many of her plots involve accidental events. Novels such as The Bell (1958), A Word Child (1975), and The Good Apprentice (1985) revolve around accidental deaths for which the central character is responsible. Thus they implicitly ask how a guilty man can achieve redemption in the face of the absence of God, or how we derive any meaning at all from our lives. If meaning is not determined by God, can we legitimately – as existentialists such as Sartre argued we must – determine meanings in our own lives? Murdoch’s characters try to aestheticize their experience by drawing its disparate elements into a consoling narrative. The reader realizes that what they are unable to accept is the fact that existence is really made up of accidental, contingent elements that must be understood as such. Goodness is not a matter of shaping one’s life artistically, but of trying to respect the otherness of the world outside us and the people in it. Critics tend to agree that Iris Murdoch’s best fiction was produced in the 1970s and early 1980s. This period is marked by an increasing confidence in combining an expansive canvas of characters, reminiscent of the nineteenth-century novel, with a tightly woven plot and symbolic structure typical of twentieth-century fiction. Most notable are her novels A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970a), The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), The Black Prince (1973), A Word Child (1975), and The Sea, the Sea (1978) (for which she won the Booker Prize). These novels, in different ways, each place at the heart of the narrative a powerful, self-obsessed man who is able to dominate those around him. In three remarkable novels, The Black Prince, A Word Child, and The Sea, the Sea, this man is presented convincingly from “the inside” as a result of Murdoch’s remarkable “literary tranvestism,” her ability to narrate convincingly from a first-person male perspective. Such tyrannous characters point, at one level, to the importance in Murdoch’s life of charismatic men such as Canetti or Wittgenstein, but, at another, demonstrate her lifelong interest in
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the nature of power and myth. In particular, they suggest that what enables some people to maintain power over others is the willingness of people to be subjected. The powerful figure somehow embodies what they desire. While each of these fictions, typical of Murdoch’s writing, confines itself, romance-like, to its own mysterious self-contained world rather than attempting to reflect wider and clearly identifiable social and political realities, a concern with power and delusion undoubtedly has clear relevance to an age shaped by the media, ideology, and the specter of totalitarian regimes. In the last two decades of Murdoch’s writing career, her fiction became closer still to the realist works of the nineteenth century that she so admired. Novels such as The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), The Good Apprentice (1985), The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), and The Green Knight (1993) resemble, more than the work of any other late twentieth-century writer, the Jamesian “loose, baggy monster” of a novel, packed with different characters wrapped up in a complex plot. By contrast, Murdoch’s last novel was Jackson’s Dilemma (1995), one of the shortest she had produced since the 1960s. Its brevity has much to do with her suffering from the effects of Alzheimer’s disease while writing it, the illness that would soon cause her death. Murdoch published nothing after Jackson’s Dilemma and slowly withdrew from public life, to be cared for by Bayley and close friends. She died on February 8, 1999. Shortly afterwards Bayley, a prominent literary critic in his own right, published a bestselling memoir, Iris: A Memoir (published as Elegy for Iris in the United States), which was turned into a successful Oscar-nominated movie, Iris, in 2001. While part of the fascination was undoubtedly Hollywood’s interest in “tragic genius,” the film nevertheless underlines the poignancy of a writer known for her vitality and intelligence beingdeprived by illness ofher memory and identity. SEE ALSO: Amis, Kingsley (BIF); Golding, William (BIF); Spark, Muriel (BIF); Wilson, Angus (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Antonaccio, M. (2000). Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bayley, J. (1999). Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch. London: Abacus. Byatt, A. S. (1994). Degrees of Freedom: Early Novels of Iris Murdoch, rev. edn. London: Vintage. Conradi, P. J. (2001a). Iris Murdoch: A Life. London: HarperCollins. Conradi, P. J. (2001b). Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist, 3rd edn. London: HarperCollins. Dooley, G. (ed.) (2003). From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Murdoch, I. (1953). Sartre: Romantic Rationalist. Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes. Murdoch, I. (1954). Under the Net. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1956). The Flight from the Enchanter. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1957). The Sandcastle. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1958). The Bell. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1961). A Severed Head. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1962). An Unofficial Rose. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1963). The Unicorn. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1964). The Italian Girl. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1965). The Red and the Green. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1966). The Time of the Angels. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1968). The Nice and the Good. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1969). Bruno’s Dream. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1970a). A Fairly Honourable Defeat. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1970b). The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge. Murdoch, I. (1972). An Accidental Man. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1973). The Black Prince. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1974). The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1975). A Word Child. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1976). Henry and Cato. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1977). The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murdoch, I. (1978). The Sea, the Sea. London: Chatto and Windus.
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Murdoch, I. (1980). Nuns and Soldiers. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1983). The Philosopher’s Pupil. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1985). The Good Apprentice. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1986). Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Murdoch, I. (1987). The Book and the Brotherhood. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1989a). The Black Prince: A Play. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1989b). The Message to the Planet. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1992). Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1993). The Green Knight. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1995). Jackson’s Dilemma. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1997a). Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1997b). On “God” and “Good. In P. Conradi (ed.), Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. London: Chatto and Windus, pp. 337–62. Murdoch, I., & Priestley, J. B. (1964). A. Severed Head: A Play. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I., & Saunders, J. (1968). The Italian Girl: A Play. London: Samuel French. Nicol, B. (2002). Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction, 2nd edn. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Rowe, A. (ed.) (2007). Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mystery/Detective/Crime Fiction ROSEMARY ERICKSON JOHNSEN
Crime fiction in the twentieth century underwent dramatic shifts in generic structure, thematic foci, and critical reception. In many ways a young genre as the century began, it matured into a form capable of exploring significant social issues; what has sometimes been critiqued as crime fiction’s unreflective replication of dominant social groups and cultural norms altered almost beyond recognition by the century’s end to a genre that privileges minority groups of all kinds and critical, even subversive, ideologies.
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The genre has been remarkably fluid, yet it has also retained some of the key elements that appeal to readers. Early twentieth-century crime writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers remain popular with twentyfirst-century readers and have achieved a new life through television and film adaptations. Critical approaches to the genre have kept pace with developments within crime fiction but, unsurprisingly, also reflect scholarly trends; theoretical approaches of particular prominence in the last quarter century have been structuralist (especially narrative theory), psychoanalytic, and feminist. During the twentieth century, there was considerable interplay between English writers and those from other national traditions, especially writers of American crime fiction, but it is possible to delineate the main developments in British crime fiction over the course of the century. Early twentieth-century examples of the genre carry over themes and structures from the late Victorian period. The Sherlock Holmes stories typify several of the main traits of this period: atmospheric settings, dramatic action sequences, and an emphasis on the brilliance of the detective. Holmes assumes disguises, pursues villains, and is presented as the triumph of ratiocination: he solves the mystery because he observes more clearly and thinks more logically than do others. Another major writer of this early period is G. K. Chesterton. Although Chesterton’s Father Brown stories focus on the detective’s intuition rather than on his logic, and their emphasis on spirituality (specifically Roman Catholic) is at odds with the secular framework of the Holmes stories, both series share key elements. They appear primarily in the short story genre, both make the detective character central to both plot and theme, and the stories in both often conclude with the detective enlightening the confused people around them. Chesterton’s stories are surprisingly athletic; Holmes is known for his physical exploits, but Chesterton’s little priest is equally intrepid in his approach to dangerous villains. These two significant series reflect the popularity of short stories during the early twentieth century, with stories appearing in periodicals initially, followed by book publication as collections. The interwar period saw the rise of a style of detective fiction that is often referred to as the
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“golden age” mystery. The term has been contested by recent scholars, and there exists no universally accepted term, partly because most of the descriptions imply a judgment even as they identify/describe the style: terms currently in use include “golden age,” “classic,” “traditional,” “cozy,” and “clue-puzzle.” Major authors of the period include Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Margery Allingham. Key markers of popular crime fiction of this period include a restricted setting (often upper class, such as a country house or an island retreat), a strongly patterned plot leading to a denouement that restores order, and characters who are individualized but not developed in much depth. The reader of these books expects the author to “play fair” in constructing the plot and distributing clues; Stephen Knight’s term “clue-puzzle” draws attention to the role of the reader in trying to figure out “whodunit” (2004, 88). Writers of this period worked within a clear framework, but also stretched the genre by constructing startling departures from the expected; one of the most well-known examples is Christie’s Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in which the seemingly guileless narrator turns out to be the killer. Taken to an extreme, as in the crime novels of Freeman Wills Croft, this subgenre can seem superficial, more focused on factual trivia like rail timetables than on characters and social context. Although they are sometimes belittled by later practitioners of the genre, these writers contributed enormously to the genre, not only through their published crime novels, but also through the theories they promulgated through “clubs” and reviews and, in some cases, through the academic cachet they offered. For example, W. H. Auden and Cecil Day-Lewis, important poets of the era, lent their highbrow credentials to the genre. Day-Lewis published 20 crime novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake, and Auden’s still significant essay on the genre, “The Guilty Vicarage” (1928), offered prestige to a genre moving into the mainstream. The golden age writers, in the “tension between consoling uniformity and energizing revision” (Horsley 38), established the genre in important ways while opening up possibilities for later writers to develop further. After World War II, crime fiction writers turned toward more “realistic” plots and characters. One significant development was a turn
toward the police detective as sleuth; in earlier versions, the gifted individual, whether Holmes or Poirot, tended to sweep past the bumbling police in solving the mystery. Two major writers who began publishing series featuring police detectives were P. D. James, whose Dalgliesh series began in 1962 with Cover Her Face, and Ruth Rendell, whose first Inspector Wexford book, From Doon with Death, was published in 1964. Dalgliesh is a bridge figure, combining some of the sensitivity of earlier aristocratic amateurs such as Sayers’s Peter Wimsey and Allingham’s Albert Campion with the officially sanctioned duties of a Scotland Yard detective. Dalgliesh writes poetry, has tortured romantic relationships with women, relies on psychology to assist in solving crimes, yet he is a police officer; the series pushes the boundaries when, for example, Dalgliesh decides not to bring the perpetrator to official justice. Wexford is a more traditional policeman, but Rendell enlarges the conventions to include development of a family life that changes realistically over time, and from its inception the series offered plots that asked readers to think about social issues and current events; the first novel’s resolution confronts assumptions of heterosexuality, and later books take up issues such as motorway expansion and the place of African immigrants in a rural English district. Another significant postwar development was the re-emergence of the spy/thriller/adventure novel. The Cold War and accompanying fear of nuclear warfare lent impetus to two very different series: the James Bond thrillers written by Ian Fleming (14 titles from 1953 to 1966) and the spy fiction of John Le Carre (21 titles since 1961). Elements of earlier instances of the subgenre are given a new emphasis by Fleming and Le Carre. The Bond series reveals traces of the empire/ adventure fiction of writers such as Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling alongside the flamboyance of Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel. Fleming’s books feature the glamorous Agent 007 and his intelligence-agency staff; replete with exotic femmes fatale, evil villains with plans for world domination, travelog-worthy settings, and hightech gadgets, the series transferred successfully to film beginning with Dr. No in 1962. Le Carre’s spy novels are often seen as the antithesis of the Bond books; many of them feature George Smiley, a mild middle-aged agent. Like W. Somerset
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Maugham in his Ashenden stories, Le Carre draws on his own experience in government-sponsored espionage. Le Carre’s first novel, Call for the Dead (1961), introduced Smiley, whose task is to identify an East German spy. Over the years, Le Carre has adapted his espionage novels to changing circumstances: his most recent publication, A Most Wanted Man (2008) explores the “war on terror” through the actions of a young male Muslim facing deportation from Germany and the female civil rights lawyer who represents him. Le Carre’s books downplay the potential glamour of espionage work to suggest instead the complicated moral codes of people and nations in a time of increasing globalization. Since the 1980s, the genre has developed in many directions. While some crime writers continued to publish work written in the clue-puzzle mode, sustaining and enlarging the boundaries of that subgenre, other writers turned to deliberately subversive modes and/or perspectives. Two postwar trends attained genre-altering status in the late decades of the twentieth century. First, the postwar move toward greater psychological exploration of characters – murderer, victim, and those affected by the crime – led to late twentieth-century crime fiction that emphasized psychological development and psycho-social interrelations over traditional mystery plotting. Many of these books also draw on the postwar trend toward more social critique, and the genre exploded into an unprecedented diversity of sleuths, plot structures, and subgenres. Rendell’s career suggests some of the changes characteristic of the final 20 years of the century; she has written one-offs alongside the Wexford series since 1965, but in 1986 she began publishing crime novels under the pen name Barbara Vine. The Vine books are darker than the Wexford series titles: they are more focused on the psychological causes of, and reactions to, crime, and they openly critique society; often they are sympathetic to the characters who commit the crimes. Reginald Hill, whose Dalziel and Pascoe series began in 1970, has also reflected the changing emphases of the genre; not only have the Dalziel and Pascoe books become more issueoriented, but in 1993 Hill introduced a new series character, Joe Sixsmith, who is a Luton-based, black, out-of-work machinist turned private investigator.
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The work of Val McDermid offers an informative example of many key developments in the genre; she has reflected trends, but has also shaped them through the example of her work, her reviews and patronage, and a non-fiction study of the female private investigator, A Suitable Job for a Woman (1994). McDermid has three series, and has written a number of one-offs. Her first published crime novel, Report for Murder (1987), introduced Lindsay Gordon. The first five Gordon titles, perhaps unsurprisingly for a series featuring a lesbian sleuth in the 1980s, were published by the feminist Women’s Press; by the sixth title, in 2003, the lesbian sleuth had become sufficiently mainstream for HarperCollins to publish Hostage to Murder. The Kate Brannigan series began in 1992 with Gollancz; with its regionalism and (heterosexual) feminist sleuth, it represents an intensification of other trends in the genre. Her one-off novels, along with the Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series (first title published in 1995), take readers deep into dysfunctional psychology (including the graphically portrayed serial killer) and social issues such as child abuse, pornography, and incest. One of the characteristic contemporary markers of the Hill/Jordan books is that the characters themselves are presented as psychologically scarred, and their issues become part of the plot; Tony Hill’s sexual dysfunction is presented as giving him special insight as a profiler, and both Hill and Jordan suffer imprisonment and assault at different times during the series’ development. More traditional mysteries continued to develop alongside the more obviously status-quo-challenging work, however, and some new subgenres enjoyed increasing popularity. Sherlock Holmes pastiches have appeared practically since the original stories were published, and they continue to emerge. In the latter decades of the century, series proliferated featuring real-life and fictional characters as sleuths; Jane Austen and several of her characters have put been to use in this way, as have Beatrix Potter, Sigmund Freud, and Robert Peel. The starting point for the historical subgenre is widely considered to be Ellis Peters’s Brother Cadfael series (pseudonym of Edith Pargeter; first title published in 1977), and the subgenre achieved remarkable popularity in the following decades. Anne Perry is one of the bestselling writers in this subgenre, and she has published
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prolifically in multiple series: her first two series have Victorian settings (Thomas Pitt series, 25 books, beginning in 1979; William Monk series, 16 books, beginning in 1990), and in the twentyfirst century, she added a series set during World War I while continuing to produce Pitt and Monk titles. Perry’s books are heavy on period atmosphere and melodramatic plots. She adds her own twist to the traditional detective sidekick role by providing both of her sleuths with female companions whom they ultimately marry; these characters allow the books to explore social restrictions on women in a non-threatening way. Monk’s partner, Hester Latterly, served as a nurse under Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War, which provides opportunities for significant secondary plots, particularly in the early books of the Monk series. In the 1990s, the historical mystery subgenre took on particular resonance for women writers, who saw the genre as an opportunity to revisit women’s history through a popular genre form. Writers such as Gillian Linscott (with her suffragette sleuth, Nell Bray) produced awardwinning fiction that was openly feminist in orientation. One indication of the significance achieved by the subgenre was the creation of a Crime Writers’ Association “dagger” award specifically for the historical subgenre in 1999 (named after Ellis Peters); its winners include such writers as C. J. Sansom, Andrew Taylor, Lindsey David, and Linscott. The crime fiction genre has proven its staying power over the course of the twentieth century. Dominant forms become subgenres (e.g., the clue-puzzle mystery), new subgenres emerge (the historical, the serial killer), and older subgenres blend into dominant modes. As a literary mode, crime fiction has always rested unevenly between popular forms and literary fiction. Some of its most popular writers, such as P. D. James, have extended their reach well beyond the audience for crime fiction and receive accolades normally reserved for literary writers. At the same time, CWA awards have been given to writers whose works have never been marketed as crime fiction, such as Sarah Waters. When a book is shortlisted for the Booker Prize and also wins a CWA “dagger,” it is clear that the genre has joined the mainstream literary culture. The power of a series, the crime plot’s potential for interrogating social conditions and exploring the
psychology of the individual, an expanding place in the bookstores (even as other genres, such as the once venerable Western, shrink), a lively scholarly conversation – all of these factors suggest that crime fiction will only gain in prominence in the twenty-first century, as new writers continue to respect, yet also to challenge, the genre’s traditional boundaries. SEE ALSO: Campus Novel (BIF); Detective/ Crime Fiction (WF); Feminist Fiction (BIF); Historical Fiction (BIF); Noir Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Auden, W. H. (1948). The Guilty Vicarage. In The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. London: Faber and Faber. Christie, A. (1920). The Mysterious Affair at Styles. London: John Lane. Christie, A. (1926). The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. London: Collins. Coward, R., & Semple, L. (1989). Tracking Down the Past: Women and Detective Fiction. In. H. Carr (ed.), From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women’s Writing in the Postmodern World. London: Pandora. Haycraft, H. (ed.) (1974). The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays [1946], rev. edn. New York: Carroll and Graf. Haycraft, H. (1984). Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story [1942], rev. edn. New York: Carroll and Graf. Herbert, R. (ed.) (1999). The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery. New York: Oxford University Press. Horsley, L. (2005). Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Irons, G. (ed.) (1995). Feminism in Women’s Detective Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. James, P. D. (1962). Cover Her Face. London: Faber and Faber. Johnsen, R. (2006). Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Klein, K. (1988). The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Knight, S. (1980). Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. London: Macmillan. Knight, S. (2004). Crime Fiction 1800–2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Le Carre, J. (1961). Call for the Dead. London: Gollancz. Le Carre, J. (2008). A Most Wanted Man. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
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Light, A. (1991). Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars. London: Routledge. Linscott, G. (1999). Absent Friends. London: Virago. Makinen, M. (2001). Feminist Popular Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Malmgren, C. (2001). Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction. Bowling Green, OH Popular Press. McDermid, V. (1987). Report for Murder. London: Women’s Press. McDermid, V. (1994). A Suitable Job for a Woman: Inside the World of Women Private Eyes. London: HarperCollins. Munt, S. (1994). Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel. London: Routledge. Peters, E. (1977). A Morbid Taste for Bones. London: Macmillan. Plain, G. (2001). Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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Porter, D. (1981). The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Crime Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press. Priestman, M. (1990). Detective Fiction and Literature: The Figure on the Carpet. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Priestman, M. (ed.) (2003). The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rendell, R. (1964). From Doon with Death. London: John Long. Rowland, S. (2001). From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective Crime Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Shaw, M., & Vanacker, S. (1991). Reflecting on Miss Marple. London: Routledge. Todorov, T. (1977). The Typology of Detective Fiction. In The Poetics of Prose, trans. R. Howard. Oxford: Blackwell. Vine, B. (1986). A Dark-Adapted Eye. London: Viking. Walton, P., & Jones, M. (1999). Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hardboiled Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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O O’Brien, Edna ELKE D’HOKER
As the author of 16 novels, six collections of short stories, a dozen plays, and several works of nonfiction, Edna O’Brien is one of the most prolific Irish writers. Yet, in spite of this steady flow of writing and her wide readership on both sides of the Atlantic, critical recognition has been slow in coming. Until the mid-1990s critics relegated her work to the realm of “women’s fiction” and analyzed it for what it revealed of the author’s own life and love affairs. More recently, however, critical reinterpretation of her work has led to its recognition as an important testimony to sociopolitical realities in twentieth-century Ireland and as a powerful representation of universal human desires and obsessions. Edna O’Brien was born on December 15, 1930 in a small rural village in the west of Ireland. Being raised on a farm in this closed Catholic community left an indelible mark on the author, as did her experience of the unhappy marriage of her parents. O’Brien was educated at a convent school and later attended the Pharmaceutical College in Dublin. In 1952 she eloped with Czech Irish author Ernest Gebler. The couple settled in Wicklow before moving to London, where O’Brien still lives. The marriage ended in 1964 and O’Brien raised their two sons alone. In 1960 Edna O’Brien came to fame with The Country Girls, a remarkable first novel that chronicles the development of two Irish girls, Kate and Baba, from childhood in a rural village, through religious indoctrination in a convent school, to the
brink of adulthood and independence in Dublin. Critics in England and America praised the novel for its originality and appeal. Yet in Ireland the novel was banned by the Censorship Board for its profanity and its outspoken treatment of women’s bodies and sexuality. The novel was followed by The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964) and reissued with a new epilogue in 1987 as The Country Girls Trilogy. In the trilogy, a gradual darkening from novel to novel can be noticed as the girls’ hopes and expectations turn to disillusionment and despair. The most remarkable feature of the trilogy is the opposition and interplay of the romantic, submissive, and naive Kate and the irreverent, opportunistic, and funny Baba. While Kate is struggling with the impossible ideals of Irish femininity, Baba radically rejects these ideals but is equally unable to realize a fulfilling sense of self. The trilogy thus offers a powerful critique of the limiting roles prescribed for women in literature and in life (Byron). Kate’s romantic quest for wholeness and identity through love would become a familiar theme in O’Brien’s fiction. In August is a Wicked Month (1965) and Casualties of Peace (1966) O’Brien also depicts young women with failed marriages who are having affairs in a doomed quest for emotional fulfillment and a stable sense of self. This quest can be traced to the original, prelapsarian unity with the mother, which the protagonists seek to regain through sexual union (Pelan). Yet, as Anita Brookner observed in The Spectator (Oct. 15, 1988), “no compensation for the loss of the mother is possible . . . all men in the world could not replace the original closeness.”
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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The sexual explicitness of these two novels further reinforced O’Brien’s reputation as “the Irish Colette,” a reputation that O’Brien to a certain extent consciously marketed in readings and interviews. Yet, with the formal and narrative experimentation of her next three novels, O’Brien also sought to prove that this image did not preclude a serious engagement with literature. Thus, the second-person narration of A Pagan Place (1970) has the unsettling effect of making the reader “a second player,” standing simultaneously inside and outside the fictional world (Herman 1994). Night (1972) is constructed as the interior monologue of Mary Hoolihan and abounds with intertextual references to the tradition of Irish femininity from Cathleen Ni Houlihan to Molly Bloom. Mary is also a descendant of Baba in The Country Girls in her rebellious rejection of what is “properly” feminine. Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977), finally, is narrated by an unreliable narrator: a middle-aged woman who has murdered her younger lover. Love and loss, obsession and disappointment are again the main themes here, but they intersect with reflections on female power and control (D’hoker). In general, however, critics were not enthusiastic about O’Brien’s narrative experiments which did not seem to square with the received opinion of her as a spontaneous confessional writer. By contrast, O’Brien’s short story collections of the 1960s and 1970s received far greater praise. The Love Object (1968) is a significant first collection in which O’Brien demonstrates her skill in penetrating the female psyche. Although set in different European countries, the collection is remarkably unified: all female characters are obsessed with a “love object” – a rug, a new sofa, an (older) lover – which promises a transformation of their lonely existence. While their inevitable disappointment can in part be blamed on the insensitiveness of the males these women pin their hopes on, it is also, as Schrank & Farquharson (21–2) have pointed out, the “working out of the emotional dialectic of the romantic in the absence of any social awareness or political consciousness.” O’Brien’s next collection sports the nicely ironic title A Scandalous Woman: Stories (1974). For while the women in this collection may be called scandalous by their judgmental neighbors – or by the reader – the men are truly to blame. Backed up by a rigorously patriarchal system, they either
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turn women into sacrificial victims or cause their descent into madness, as in the title story of the collection. The tales in Mrs. Reinhardt and Other Stories (1978), Returning (1982), and Lantern Slides (1990) provide variations on these themes. All of these stories tend to be one or another of two types: urban stories in which an exiled, middle-aged Irishwoman is trying to cope with love and loss in a hostile environment, or rural stories of Irish childhood and adolescence. Recurrent themes in both types of stories are alienation and loneliness, the restrictions of patriarchal society and the love–hate relationship with the mother and the mother country – a theme that O’Brien also explored in her famous non-fiction work Mother Ireland (1976). Several of the stories also reveal the influence of Joyce in their depiction of individual and national paralysis and in their intertextual references to his work. After the publication of Johnny I Hardly Knew You, O’Brien told the Paris Review that she felt she had “written all [she] wanted to say about love and loss and loneliness and being a victim and all that” and that she was now hoping to “develop, to enlarge” (Guppy 24, 26). The attempt to chart new territory proved difficult; the usually prolific author did not publish a new novel for 11 years. Nor did The High Road (1988) or Time and Tide (1992) really fulfill expectations, since these novels stage rather typical O’Brien heroines trying to come to terms with failed relationships. A relatively new element in The High Road is the lesbian relationship between the protagonist and her Spanish lover. While this affair initially promises a more fulfilling kind of love, it is brutally terminated by the conservative, patriarchal powers of the Spanish village where the novel is set. Time and Tide is a moving exploration of motherhood, both in terms of the strong but debilitating mother–daughter bond and in terms of the daughter-as-mother who tries to cope with the loss of her grown-up sons. A truly new departure in O’Brien’s oeuvre was announced with House of Splendid Isolation (1994), the first novel of her so-called trilogy of contemporary Ireland. This novel takes up the difficult topic of Irish nationalism as an IRA gunman from the North seeks shelter in the big house of a dying woman in the South. O’Brien treats both characters with remarkable compassion and insight and offers a nuanced view of the
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conflict. Down by the River (1996) deals with another issue dividing contemporary Ireland: abortion laws and the rights of women. It is based on the famous “X case” in which a young girl, pregnant as a result of rape, is barred from traveling to Britain for an abortion. Wild Decembers (1999) tackles the Irish obsession with the land as it traces the increasingly violent battle between Brennan and Bugler, two neighboring farmers. Although this novel, like so many in O’Brien’s oeuvre, ends in death, the ending is not entirely negative. In fact, all three novels of the trilogy end on a tentative note of hope, as if O’Brien foresees a positive future for the island if only it can transcend its violent past (King 2000). In the Forest (2002) continues in the line of the trilogy with O’Brien’s reworking of a recent, traumatic event: the murder of a young woman, her son, and a priest by a madman. To the dismay of some critics and readers, O’Brien offers insight into the psychology of victim and murderer alike, suggesting that the latter is as much a victim of hypocrisy and neglect as the former in rural Ireland. In The Light of Evening (2006), finally, O’Brien returns to one of the familiar themes of her fiction, the ambivalent relationship between mother and daughter. And she treats the theme with greater objectivity and understanding than ever before. If in earlier stories and novels, the narrative perspective – and the reader’s sympathy – lay squarely with the daughter (Weekes 2006), The Light of Evening offers for the first time a fulldrawn and convincing portrait of the mother. The lives of both mother and daughter in The Light of Evening are clearly autobiographical and O’Brien has even drawn on the loving and admonishing letters her own mother wrote to her every week. This sensitive and moving account of two unhappy marriages makes one realize, in retrospect, how mistaken critics have been in calling O’Brien’s earlier fiction, from The Country Girls to Time and Tide, “confessional.” Still, even if this initial reception may have hampered the serious critical study of O’Brien’s fiction, it also stands as an ironic testimony to the emotional honesty and lasting power of her work. SEE ALSO: Censorship and the Novel (BIF); Feminist Fiction (BIF); Irish Fiction (BIF); Joyce, James (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Byron, K. (2002). “In the Name of the Mother . . .”: The Epilogue of O’Brien’s Country Girls Trilogy. Women’s Studies, 31(4), 447–65. D’hoker, E. (2006). Powerful Voices: Female Narrators and Unreliability in Three Irish Novels. Etudes Irlandaises, 32(1), 21–31. Guppy, S. (1984). The Art of Fiction No. 82: Edna O’Brien. Paris Review, 26, 22–50. Herman, D. (1994). Textual You and Double Deixis in Edna O’Brien’s A Pagan Place. Style, 28(3), 378–410. Ingman, H. (2002). Edna O’Brien: Stretching the Nation’s Boundaries. Irish Studies Review, 10(3), 253–65. King, S. H. (2000). On the Side of Life: Edna O’Brien’s Trilogy of Contemporary Ireland. New Hibernia Review, 4(2), 49–66. Laing, K., Mooney, S., & O’Connor, M. (eds.) (2006). Edna O’Brien: New Critical Perspectives. Dublin: Carysfort. O’Brien, E. (1960). The Country Girls. London: Hutchinson. O’Brien, E. (1962). The Lonely Girl. London: Jonathan Cape. O’Brien, E. (1964). Girls in Their Married Bliss. London: Jonathan Cape. O’Brien, E. (1965). August is a Wicked Month. London: Jonathan Cape. O’Brien, E. (1966). Casualties of Peace. London: Jonathan Cape. O’Brien, E. (1968). The Love Object. London: Jonathan Cape. O’Brien, E. (1970). A Pagan Place: A Novel. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. O’Brien, E. (1972). Night. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. O’Brien, E. (1974). A Scandalous Woman: Stories. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. O’Brien, E. (1976). Mother Ireland. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. O’Brien, E. (1977). Johnny I Hardly Knew You: A Novel. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. O’Brien, E. (1978). Mrs. Reinhardt and Other Stories. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. O’Brien, E. (1982). Returning: Tales. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. O’Brien, E. (1985). A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories of Edna O’Brien. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. O’Brien, E. (1987). The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue. London: Jonathan Cape. O’Brien, E. (1988). The High Road. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. O’Brien, E. (1990). Lantern Slides: Short Stories. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. O’Brien, E. (1992). Time and Tide. London: Viking.
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O’Brien, E. (1994). House of Splendid Isolation. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. O’Brien, E. (1996). Down by the River. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. O’Brien, E. (1999). Wild Decembers. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. O’Brien, E. (2002). In the Forest. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. O’Brien, E. (2006). The Light of Evening. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. O’Hara, K. (1993). Love Objects: Love and Obsession in the Stories of Edna O’Brien. Studies in Short Fiction, 30(3), 317–25. Pelan, R. (2006). Edna O’Brien’s “Love Objects”. In L. Colletta & M. O’Connor (eds.), Wild Colonial Girl: Essays on Edna O’Brien. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 58–77. Schrank, B., & Farquharson, D. (1996). Object of Love, Subject to Despair: Edna O’Brien’s The Love Object and the Emotional Logic of Late Romanticism. Canadian Journal of Irish Studies [Edna O’Brien special issue], 22(2), 21–36. Weekes, A. O. (2006). Martyrs to Mistresses? The Mother Figure in Edna O’Brien’s Fiction. In P. A. Lynch, J. Fischer, & B. Coates (eds.), Back to the Present Forward to the Past: Irish Writing and History Since 1798, vol. 1. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 309–24.
O’Brien, Flann JOSEPH NUGENT
´ Flann O’Brien, born Brian O’Nolan (Irish Brian O Nuallain), aka Myles na gCopaleen (or na Gopaleen), is as dazzling a writer as Ireland has produced. Whether we take him as an accomplished modernist or prescient postmodernist, his critical significance is now confirmed, his reputation and popularity assured. O’Brien’s best novels are intricately plotted, brilliantly executed, often morbidly funny experiments that entice the reader into an alternative universe of dark absurdity. During his lifetime he was celebrated mainly as a newspaper columnist, his journalistic pyrotechnics transcending the squalid Ireland of the 1940s and 1950s to strike, Swift-like, at our pretensions and pomposities even today. Born in Strabane in the north of Ireland on October 5, 1911, O’Brien was the third boy in a Roman Catholic family of 12 children. His father Michael, although a civil servant of the Crown, was a Gaelic enthusiast who brooked no English in
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the home. Not until the family settled in Dublin in 1923 did O’Brien enter school and become fully exposed to his peers and their vernacular English. The rhythms of the Dublinese he encountered there resound through his subsequent writings. In 1929, O’Brien entered University College Dublin, then in thrall to the spirit of James Joyce, who only a generation earlier had studied there. At UCD, O’Brien pursued with little enthusiasm though final success his BA and MA while becoming, like many of his creations, a habitue of the Dublin public house. Over the intervening five years, his boisterous oratory and seditious humor drew throngs to the Literary and Historical Debating Society. Comhthrom Feinne, the college’s student magazine, provided a vehicle for his nascent absurdism. There he adopted the guise of Brother Barnabas, the first in a parade of literary personae engaged in a lifelong struggle to transcend the confines of conventional English. To extend the platform for his satire he co-founded the journal Blather, “a publication of the Gutter”; commercial ineptness, however, saw the enterprise collapse and his persona du jour, Count O’Blather, silenced (Cronin 72). Despite O’Brien’s studied projection of disinterest in the lecture hall and the library, UCD awarded him an MA for his thesis on “Nature in Irish Poetry” in 1935. He sat the entrance exams for the Irish Civil Service that same year. With the death of his father, O’Brien at 26 years of age became responsible for the welfare of his many siblings. Almost immediately he turned with vigor to a project that had its origins in the writings of Brother Barnabas. Within a year, a manuscript entitled At Swim-Two-Birds was sent to Longmans, Green and Company in London. There an exuberant reader, one Graham Greene, reported that “We have had books within books before now, but O’Nolan takes Pirandello and Gide a long way further” (Cronin 89). “The screw is turned,” he explained, “until you have (a) a book about a man called Trellis who is (b) writing a book about certain characters who (c) are turning the tables on Trellis by writing about him” (Cronin 89). While critical reviews from the English literary journals were generally poor, consolation came from Paris. Samuel Beckett was excited by it and an intrigued James Joyce seemingly adopted its publication as another of his late-life causes.
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Published in 1939, At Swim-Two-Birds authored by “Flann O’Brien,” revealed an array of techniques that would later be termed “postmodern.” At the time, its complexities, evasions, contortions, and seeming determination to confound the audience attracted the label “antinovel.” In this metafictional “twisted Celtic knot” an array of preposterous characters from legend and popular fiction casually intermingle with the working-class inhabitants of modern Dublin (O’Brien 2007, p. xii). Plucked from their arcane origins, Finn MacCool and Mad Sweeny (later resurrected by Seamus Heaney in Sweeney Astray, 1983) conform to the literary theories of the novel’s primary narrator, a louche young man studying at University College Dublin. A modern novel’s characters, he insists, “should be interchangeable as between one book and another”; indeed, “Each should be allowed a private life, self-determination and a decent standard of living” (O’Brien 1960, 33). An author too lazy to invent his own characters, however, risks the ire of those he has corralled between book covers. His own imported figures may turn against the plagiarist-creator of the novel-within-the novel to haul him before the courts on trumped-up charges – as in At Swim. The perplexed reader who negotiates the work’s three beginnings must always expect the kind of bamboozling aphorisms that O’Brien reveled in: “Evil is even,” he tells us, “truth is an odd number and death is a full stop” (314). Abysmal sales at home and his failure in 1939 to secure an American publisher were compounded by the Luftwaffe’s bombs which destroyed the remaining copies of At Swim-Two-Birds soon after World War II began. The novel all but vanished until its republication to acclaim in 1960. In 1940, however, O’Brien had another daring work in progress. Less experimental in form but more intricately detailed, The Third Policeman is altogether darker in tone than At Swim. The novel’s recognizably Irish if startlingly surreal landscape is patrolled by assorted policemen overly concerned with “the Atomic Theory.” A transfer of molecules between the locals and their bicycles (caused by the bad roads of the district) has caused many of the inhabitants to become suffused with bicycle-ness and many bikes to become half-human. Into this world is
cast the understandably bewildered narrator, in flight from the murder he committed in the novel’s opening line. In time it becomes clear that the unnamed protagonist is dead and that he and the novel are traversing the circular landscape of hell itself, enduring “the beginning of the unfinished, the rediscovery of the familiar, the re-experience of the already suffered, the freshforgetting of the unremembered” (O’Brien 2007, 406). Nothing in the main text, however, caps the absurdity of the copious footnotes, in which O’Brien’s lingering distaste for the pretensions of academic discourse takes flight. The footnotes methodically document an earnest learned disputation over the lunatic ramblings of deSelby, a scientist engaged in investigating the nature of hammering, the possibility of diluting water, and the cleansing of those “air-balls” that are the actual cause of darkness. To O’Brien’s lasting embarrassment, the work was rejected by Longman in the summer of 1940, thus lost to the public until its posthumous appearance in 1967. Back in 1941, O’Brien was compiling an angry work of public protest. The short novel An Beal Bocht, later translated into English by Patrick C. Power as The Poor Mouth (1973), seethes with indignation. Taking a furious swipe at the insincerity of a tawdry Ireland with which O’Brien was becoming increasingly disenchanted, it targeted those who paid mere lip-service to the Irish language he so loved. A scathing riposte to the smug earnestness of the Celtic Twilight and the Gaelic Revival, the work was originally written in O’Brien’s rich and colorful Irish. While a little of the novel’s chief delight – its upending of the pieties in which the Gaelic biographies of the period had been encased – may be lost in translation, O’Brien’s lament over the loss of a Gaelic past is at once hilarious and deeply affecting. The 1996 Dalkey Archive edition is made even more glorious by Ralph Steadman’s inspired illustrations. O’Brien sought fame, and expected success. In 1939 he had engaged under a series of noms de guerre in a lightly scurrilous attack on the writer Frank O’Connor through the letters page of the Irish Times. The ensuing shenanigans won him the offer of a daily column, “Cruiskeen Lawn” (The Little Full Jug), by the newspaper’s editor, R. M. Smiley. Despite O’Brien’s sporadic forays into writing for the Dublin theater, “Cruiskeen Lawn” was to remain the chief platform for his
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manic and often alcohol-fuelled creativity and the source of his celebrity from 1940 almost until his death. Times readers were treated to Myles’s radical expansion via puns, neologisms, portmanteau words, and malapropisms of the “tiny fund of noises” the English language had provided him with; in his native Gaelic, of course, there were those who “know so many million words that it is a matter of pride to them never to use the same word twice in a lifetime” (O’Brien 1968, 207). The dyspeptic Myles’s many pet hates – politicians, bureaucrats, experts of all sorts – were subjected to daily abuse in columns headed “Bores,” or “The Myles na Gopaleen Catechism of Cliche.” In response, the drinking classes of Dublin embraced Myles’s characters, “The Brother” and “The Plain People of Ireland,” and gathered his linguistic inventions into their own patois. As a result Myles became, Keith Hopper insists, “O’Brien’s most holistically conceived dramatic persona” (1995, 35). The surprising acclaim that accompanied the republication of At Swim-Two-Birds in 1960 enticed O’Brien back to the path he had left. In many ways, it was too late. Too many creative energies had been dissipated by drink, ill health, and general disillusionment. The Hard Life (1961), with its blustering attack on the Catholic Church symbolized by the Jesuit Father Fahrt and a Mr. Collopy who disgraces himself in front of the pope, has a whiff of opportunism about it. Although enlivened by O’Brien’s still pitch-perfect ear for the vagaries of Dublin dialogue, the rendition is more conventional, the storyline more predictable than before. O’Brien’s last completed novel, The Dalkey Archive (1964) was, conceptually, altogether more ambitious. But this meandering treatise on life, death, the existence of God and the human condition seldom excites. To people it O’Brien plundered much, including “the Mollycule Theory” from the typescript of The Third Policeman: sadly, the sparkle of these 25-year-old inserts only accentuates the dullness that surrounds them. True to the literary theories of At Swim-Two-Birds, the paratextual deSelby, St. Augustine, and James Joyce are lassoed, now with the aid of a time machine, and put to work. But the Joyce depicted here is a degraded edition of the one whose alma mater O’Brien had entered 30 years before. Now ashamed of the novels he produced, the great
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author has become a harmless idiot, required by the Jesuits only as a part-time mender of their tattered underwear. That the shade of Joyce loomed over O’Brien from the start is a commonplace. But the consensus that “Flann O’Brien was a failure, and Myles na Gopaleen was to blame” is increasingly questioned by critics such as Joseph Brooker (2005) who celebrate the fantastic fictions of both Flann the novelist and Myles the journalist. Under whatever guise, O’Brien still thrills with his startlingly innovative experiments in language and his devastating social satire written at a time, as he might have said, “when it was neither popular nor profitable.” Flann O’Brien died on April Fool’s day, 1966. SEE ALSO: Beckett, Samuel (BIF); Irish Fiction (BIF); Joyce, James (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); O’Connor, Frank (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Asbee, S. (1991). Flann O’Brien. Boston: G. K. Hall. Brooker, J. (2005). Flann O’Brien. Tavistock: Northcote House. Clissmann, A. (1975). Flann O’Brien: A Critical Introduction to His Writing. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Cronin, A. (1998). No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien. New York: Fromm. Hopper, K. (1995). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernist. Cork: Cork University Press. Imhof, R. (ed.) (1985). Alive, Alive O! Flann O’Brien’s “At Swim-Two-Birds.” Dublin: Wolfhound. Kiberd, D. (2001). Gaelic Absurdism: At Swim-TwoBirds. In Irish Classics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. O’Brien, F. (1941). An Beal Bocht. Dublin: An Preas Naisiu´nta. (Trans. by P. C. Power as The Poor Mouth. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1973.) O’Brien, F. (1943). Faustus Kelly: A Play in Three Acts. Dublin: Cahill. O’Brien, F. (1960). At Swim-Two-Birds. London: Longman. O’Brien, F. (1961). The Hard Life: An Exegesis of Squalor. London: MacGibbon and Kee. O’Brien, F. (1964). The Dalkey Archive. London: MacGibbon and Kee. O’Brien, F. (1967). The Third Policeman. London: MacGibbon and Kee.
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O’Brien, F. (1968). The Best of Myles: A Selection from “Cruiskeen Lawn” (ed. K. O’Nolan). London: MacGibbon and Kee. O’Brien, F. (2007). The Complete Novels (intro. K. Donohue). New York: Knopf. ´ Conaire, B. (1986). Myles na Gaeilge. Dublin: An O Clo´chomhar. Taaffe, C. (2008). Ireland through the Looking Glass. Cork: Cork University Press.
O’Connor, Frank MICHAEL L. STOREY
Frank O’Connor is acclaimed as one of Ireland’s greatest short story writers and an international master of the genre. Influenced by nineteenthcentury Russian and French realists, especially Turgenev and Maupassant, O’Connor worked exclusively within the realistic mode, restricting his fictional world to that of working- and middle-class Irish Catholics. Out of that world he created masterpieces of the short story. Born Michael Francis O’Donovan in 1903 in the city of Cork to impoverished working-class parents – an alcoholic father and a doting mother – the author adopted the pseudonym Frank O’Connor in the mid-1920s at the beginning of his writing career. As a student at St. Patrick’s National School, O’Connor met Daniel Corkery – teacher, writer, and ardent nationalist – who encouraged him to embrace Irish culture and to learn the Gaelic language. In 1918 O’Connor joined the Irish Republican Army (IRA) but did not participate in the War of Independence against England (1919–21). In the Irish Civil War (1922–3) between the Free State army and the diehard Republicans, O’Connor joined the latter and worked on their publicity staff, until he was captured and imprisoned by Free State soldiers. After the conflict ended in a Free State victory, he was released and found work as a librarian. He also taught Gaelic and co-founded the Cork Drama League. In 1935 he joined the board of directors of the famous Abbey Theatre and was appointed managing director in 1937. He later worked for the BBC in London, then in 1951 moved to the United States, where he taught at various universities and published stories in the New Yorker magazine. In 1961, after suffering a stroke, he returned to Ireland, where he died in 1966.
O’Connor is renowned for his stories, of which he wrote over 200, but he also wrote poetry, two novels, two volumes of autobiography, six books of literary criticism, a biography (The Big Fellow: A Life of Michael Collins, 1937), several travel books, and numerous essays. He also collaborated on four plays and wrote a fifth himself, and he translated numerous Gaelic poems into English, publishing several collections. Despite confining himself to realistic portrayals of provincial Catholic Ireland and relying mostly on a small set of character types – idealists, romantics, dreamers, and the like – O’Connor produced an impressive range of stories. They encompass nearly every conceivable topic affecting working- and middle-class Ireland in the twentieth century: childhood and parent–child relationships, courtship, sexual morality and marriage, emigration, the “Troubles,” the role of the church, and the law. The breadth of his literary tone is also impressive, ranging from the comic, farcical, and satiric to the poignant, ironic, and tragic. In The Lonely Voice (1962), his study of the short story, O’Connor argues that the short story captures “an intense awareness of human loneliness” (19). While this quality does not characterize every O’Connor story, it is certainly the dominant quality in such stories as “Guests of the Nation,” “In the Train,” “The Majesty of the Law,” “Michael’s Wife,” “The Long Road to Ummera,” “Uprooted,” “The Frying Pan,” and “Bridal Night” – eight of his finest stories. In “Guests of the Nation,” the title story of his first collection, which contains stories about the “Troubles” (the War of Independence and the Civil War) an Irish rebel named Bonaparte is left feeling “very lost and lonely” (1931, 19) after carrying out – in great anguish – an order to execute two English prisoners with whom he has grown close. Stories of humor and satire balance those with darker themes. His stories of childhood – “First Confession,” “My Oedipus Complex,” and “The Drunkard,” to name just three – are both comic and poignant in their portrayal of the travails of childhood, such as making one’s first confession or dealing with the arrival of a new sibling. O’Connor also brought this serio-comic perspective to stories of mother–son relationships (e.g., “Judas”), romance (“The Mad Lomasneys”), and the Catholic clergy (“The Holy Door”). He could also be hilariously scathing of the Irish nationalist,
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as in “Eternal Triangle,” which satirizes revolutionary sentimentalism and patriotic blather. One of O’Connor’s trademarks is his distinctive narrative voice. He greatly admired the oral tradition of the seanchaı´, the Gaelic storyteller who recited stories from memory to gatherings of people. In The Lonely Voice O’Connor lamented that the short story “no longer rang with the tone of a man’s voice speaking” (1962, 29). Given the great differences between oral and written narratives, it would have been impossible for O’Connor to fully restore the voice of the seanchaı´ to the modern Irish story. But in the warmth, immediacy, rhythm, and tone of his narrative voice, he was able to connect the modern Irish story to its ancient source, thereby contributing significantly to the great legacy of Irish storytelling. SEE ALSO: Irish Fiction (BIF); Working Class Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Lennon, H. (ed.) (2007). Frank O’Connor: Critical Essays. Dublin: Four Courts. Matthews, J. (1983). Voices: A Life of Frank O’Connor. New York: Atheneum. O’Connor, F. (1931). Guests of the Nation. London: Macmillan. O’Connor, F. (1932a). The Saint and Mary Kate. London: Macmillan. O’Connor, F. (1932b). The Wild Bird’s Nest: Poems from the Irish. Dublin: Cuala. O’Connor, F. (1936). Bones of Contention. London: Macmillan. O’Connor, F. (1944). Crab Apple Jelly. London: Macmillan. O’Connor, F. (1947). The Common Chord. London: Macmillan. O’Connor, F. (1951). Traveller’s Samples. London: Macmillan. O’Connor, F. (1952). The Stories of Frank O’Connor. New York: Knopf. O’Connor, F. (1954). More Stories by Frank O’Connor. New York: Knopf. O’Connor, F. (1957). Domestic Relations. New York: Knopf. O’Connor, F. (1961). An Only Child. London: Macmillan. O’Connor, F. (1962). The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. Cleveland: World. O’Connor, F. (1981). Collected Stories. New York: Knopf. Sheehy, M. (ed.) (1969). Michael/Frank: Studies on Frank O’Connor. New York: Knopf.
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Steinman, M. (1990). Frank O’Connor at Work. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Tomory, W. (1980). Frank O’Connor. Boston: Twayne. Wohlgelernter, M. (1977). Frank O’Connor. New York: Columbia University Press.
O’Flaherty, Liam HEDDA FRIBERG-HARNESK
Among Irish writers, Liam O’Flaherty is one of the major analysts of “post-revolutionary disillusion in the mid-1920s” and one of the leaders, with Sean O’Casey and James Joyce, of “a counter-Revival realism in art” (Kiberd 491, 498). Sean O’Faolain, for one, placed O’Flaherty “at the head of the realistic school of his day” (173). Not only the realist, O’Flaherty is also master of the lyrical mode, “a poet in prose, who chose the short story as a medium” (Kennelly 1994, 198). As a short story writer, O’Flaherty belongs with such other giants of his generation as Mary Lavin, Frank O’Connor, and O’Faolain.Somecriticshaveseenhim“accordingto the Irish measure – as a naturalist, a realist, a social critic or historian, or a voice of things Irish, an acquaintance of Yeats, George Russell, and Sean O’Casey” – others as a European writer, belonging to the tradition of “Dostoevsky, Sartre, Camus, or the film-maker Ingmar Bergman” (Zneimer, p. vii), as well as to an Irish one. Born on August 28, 1896, in Gort na gCappal, a windswept village on rocky Inis Mo´r, the largest of the Aran Islands, O’Flaherty’s life journey took him from “medieval” Aran rurality to twentiethcentury urban modernity. In 1908, O’Flaherty left Aran to train as a postulant for the Holy Ghost Order at Rockwell College. He attended other schools, among them University College Dublin, where he read Marx, Engels, Connolly, and Bentham. To his nationalism – following in the footsteps of his father, “the first Sinn Feiner on their island” (O’Brien 16), Liam had joined the Republican Volunteers – he now added a socialist strand. While at University College Dublin, he also decided to leave the road to priesthood. This, and his enlistment in the British Army in 1915, caused him – as he recalls in Shame the Devil (1934) – to be held as “a pariah and a fool and a renegade,” and was a “far greater blow to my relatives than my refusal to become a priest” (21). His nightmarish experiences on the Western Front
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ended in September 1917, when he was wounded and shell-shocked at Langemarck. Treated in a Dublin hospital for melancholia acuta, he was later invalided out of the war. O’Flaherty recalls his postwar seafaring years – traveling to London, South America, Turkey, and North America – in the autobiographies Two Years (1930), I Went to Russia (1931), and Shame the Devil. Returning to Dublin, he turned to revolutionary groups and, on January 18, 1922, he and some unemployed dock workers occupied the Rotunda. Raising a red flag from its roof, he declared an Irish soviet republic. The incident forced him to leave Ireland for London. From there, he launched his literary career, publishing his first short story, “The Sniper,” and his first novel, Thy Neighbour’s Wife, in 1923. The short story collection, Spring Sowing, appeared in 1924 as did his second novel, The Black Soul (1924a), with its brooding protagonist Fergus O’Connor. Like the first novel, this one is set in Inverara, a mythologized Aran. Intensely productive years followed, and by 1930 O’Flaherty had produced eight of his prose books, innumerable short stories, newspaper articles, and a biography. He had also met and married Margaret Barrington, and their daughter, Pegeen, was born in 1926. O’Flaherty’s reputation rests on his short stories, which are deceptively simple slices of rural life. The appeal of the stories lies not solely in their literary qualities, but also in the issues of biculturality they raise. Scholars have noted that the effects of O’Flaherty’s bilingualism, and his habit of writing Irish and English versions of the same stories – apparently reinventing them rather than self-translating them – have not been fully explored (Cahalan 18). Among O’Flaherty’s “Dublin thrillers”– to which Mr. Gilhooley (1926), The Puritan (1931), and The Assassin (1928) belong – The Informer (1925), magnificently propelled by the lumbering, slow-witted Gypo Nolan, is by far the greatest success. Between 1929 and 1992 it has been turned into four films and “at least three stage versions in English” (Sheeran 2000). In Skerrett (1932), O’Flaherty is, as Kennelly (1998) has put it, “at his gripping best,” and the novel stands out as uniquely powerful. Skerrett illustrates the writer’s tendency to, as Kiberd puts it, see land as “the only enduring hero” (495).
Thus, teacher David Skerrett (based on David O’Callaghan, O’Flaherty’s Inis Mo´r schoolmaster) devotes his life to the people of the island of Nara, but finds in the end that there is “nothing beyond this unconquerable earth but the phantasies born of man’s fear and man’s vanity . . . this grinning, unsympathetic earth, to which all beings were the same, the bones of the wicked as the bones of the just” (262). In his “historic trilogy,” O’Flaherty explores three momentous events of Irish history: the great famine of the 1840s in Famine (1937), the land war of 1879–82 in Land (1946), and the 1916 Easter Rising in Insurrection (1950). In the masterly Famine, O’Flaherty moves away from his early preoccupation with an individual, tortured psyche to focus on the collective fate of the poverty-stricken tenantry of the Galway region. Here he faces squarely “the larger, socio-political framework and the historical context within which his imagination has been formed. If his greatest passion explodes in Skerrett, his compassion surges to the fore in Famine” (Friberg 204). Having arrived, in Shame the Devil, at a stance of artistic detachment, he here fuses detachment with compassion, achieving his greatest scope and artistic cohesion yet. ´ il (1953) and The Pedlar’s Revenge After Du (1976), O’Flaherty ceased publishing. Agonized by an inability to write, he struggled, until his death on September 7, 1984, to complete a new novel, “The Gamblers.” SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF); Irish Fiction (BIF); Joyce, James (BIF); O’Connor, Frank (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Cahalan, J. M. (1991). Liam O’Flaherty: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne. Costello, P. (1997). Liam O’Flaherty’s Ireland. Dublin: Wolfhound. Friberg, H. (1996). An Old Order and a New: The Split World of Liam O’Flaherty’s Novels. Uppsala: Uppsala University. Kennelly, B. (1988). O’Flaherty His Mark. Irish Times, “Weekend,” p. 7 (Sept. 3). Kennelly, B. (1994). Liam O’Flaherty: The Unchained Storm. In Journey into Joy: Selected Prose (ed. A. Persson). Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe.
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Kiberd, D. (2001). After the Revolution: O’Casey and O’Flaherty. In Irish Classics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. O’Brien, J. (1973). Liam O’Flaherty. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press. O’Faolain, S. (1937). Don Quixote O’Flaherty. London Mercury, 37 (Dec.), 170–5. O’Flaherty, L. (1923). Thy Neighbour’s Wife. London: Jonathan Cape. O’Flaherty, L. (1924a). The Black Soul. London: Jonathan Cape. O’Flaherty, L. (1924b). Spring Sowing. London: Jonathan Cape. O’Flaherty, L. (1925). The Informer. London: Jonathan Cape. O’Flaherty, L. (1928). The Assassin. London: Jonathan Cape. O’Flaherty, L. (1930). Two Years. London: Jonathan Cape. O’Flaherty, L. (1931). I Went to Russia. London: Jonathan Cape. O’Flaherty, L. (1932). Skerrett. London: Gollancz. O’Flaherty, L. (1933). The Martyr. London: Gollancz. O’Flaherty, L. (1934). Shame the Devil. London: Grayson and Grayson. O’Flaherty, L. (1937). Famine. London: Gollancz. O’Flaherty, L. (1946). Land. London: Gollancz. O’Flaherty, L. (1950). Insurrection. London: Gollancz. ´ il. Dublin: Sairseal and Dill. O’Flaherty, L. (1953). Du O’Flaherty, L. (1976). The Pedlar’s Revenge and Other Stories (ed. A. A. Kelly). Dublin: Wolfhound. O’Flaherty, L. (1996). The Letters of Liam O’Flaherty (ed. A. A. Kelly). Dublin: Wolfhound. Sheeran, P. F. (1976). The Novels of Liam O’Flaherty. Dublin: Wolfhound. Sheeran, P. F. (2000). The Informer. Cork: Cork University Press. Zneimer, J. (1970). The Literary Vision of Liam O’Flaherty. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Orwell, George DAPHNE PATAI
George Orwell, considered by many to be one of the great political writers in the English language, was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903, in Motihari, Bengal, India, at the time a British colony. His father, Richard Blair, was a subdeputy opium agent in the Indian Civil Service who, in 1897, married Ida Mabel Limouzin, daughter of a Frenchman living in Burma. In 1904, when Eric was a year old, Ida Blair moved
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back to England with him and his elder sister. Another sister was born a few years later. For the next eight years, Eric rarely saw his father. In his 1946 essay “Why I Write,” Orwell stated that he knew from the age of 5 or 6 that he would become a writer (18: 316). In 1911, at the age of 8, Eric Blair was enrolled as a scholarship student at St. Cyprian’s, a well-regarded preparatory school in Sussex. Always something of a misfit, and aware of his own “shabby-genteel” background (5: 115), the boy hated his five years there, and especially the headmaster’s snobbish wife. Orwell the writer took his revenge decades later in a scathing essay, “Such, Such Were the Joys,” written in the 1940s (19: 356–87). Orwell himself considered the essay libelous and it was therefore published only posthumously (in 1952 in the Partisan Review). Many critics have noted the relationship between this essay and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), both of which denounce institutionalized authoritarianism and the sadistic drive for power. After St. Cyprian’s and brief enrollment at Wellington, Eric Blair attended prestigious Eton College as a King’s Scholar, graduating in 1921. There, at the age of 16, he “suddenly discovered the joy of mere words” (18: 317). Not academically inclined and lacking the money to attend university, Eric joined the Indian Imperial Police, choosing to be posted in Burma (where his grandmother still lived). He served from 1922 to 1927, ever more critical of imperialism and the roles in which it trapped both its subjects and its administrators. The experience provided the setting for two of his best-known essays, “A Hanging” (1931) and “Shooting an Elephant” (1936), as well as for his first novel, Burmese Days (1934), which, though presenting a caustic portrait of British imperialism in Burma, is hardly more sympathetic to the Burmese themselves. The novel’s protagonist, Flory, detests imperialism but hates himself even more and ultimately commits suicide. Constrained by his work in the Indian Imperial Police, Eric Blair despised his role as “part of the actual machinery of despotism,” as he later wrote (5: 136). He returned to England in August 1927 and resigned his position within a few months. Wanting to break with the class of oppressors, and attracted to ways of life unlike his own, he engaged in “social exploration” (in Peter Keating’s phrase). He went to Paris to become a writer but,
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when his money ran out, lived a working-class life and then returned to England where he tried out the life of a tramp and vagabond, following the example of Jack London, a writer he much admired. This conscious social descent lasted intermittently between 1928 and 1932 and provided material to which Orwell returned again and again in the 1930s. These adventures are recounted in his first book, the memoir/reportage Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), published under the pen name George Orwell. They also provided him with material for his second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), his only novel with a female protagonist. Orwell’s third novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), like the preceding two, focused on the frustrated aspirations of the protagonist. Later in life Orwell declined to have A Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying reprinted, writing to his agent that they were both “thoroughly bad books” (16: 232). After the fame he gained with Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four, however, these early novels acquired significance and have been reprinted constantly since his death – less for their intrinsic value than for their status in the corpus of Orwell’s work, though A Clergyman’s Daughter does contain one episode written in an experimental Joycean style. At the suggestion of Victor Gollancz, his publisher, Orwell embarked on another social descent. In early 1936, he went to the economically depressed northern part of England to experience and write about the lives of the working class and unemployed. His seven-week investigation resulted in his second book of reportage, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), published by Gollancz’s Left Book Club and offered as the club’s selection for March 1937. As Orwell wrote in Wigan Pier, he wanted to “submerge” himself, “to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants” (5: 138). Wigan Pier is a powerful social commentary, and a revealing one, for Orwell expresses considerable ambivalence toward the working class among whom he lived. But there was no ambivalence in his contemptuous caricatures, in the book’s second half, of leftists: “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force
every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England” (5: 161). Such comments moved Gollancz to add an introduction of his own, perhaps to make the book more palatable to his leftist readership. Orwell considered himself part of the generation that had “missed” World War I and thus felt untested in battle (12: 270). With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he went to Spain to report and stayed on to fight against fascism, joining the Independent Labour Party’s “sister party” in Spain, the Trotskyist POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificacio´n Marxista). In Catalonia, where he arrived in late December 1936, Orwell observed the beginnings of what he considered to be a true socialist revolution, only to see it put down by the Soviet-backed Spanish Communist Party, to whom the POUM and the anarchists were as much an enemy as Franco’s Falangists. Orwell had served for only four months with the POUM militia on the Aragon front when, on May 20, he was shot in the throat. He recovered from his wound but had to flee Spain or face arrest for his involvement with the outlawed POUM. Thereafter, “wounded in Spain” became a constant epithet whenever he was mentioned. Homage to Catalonia, which Victor Gollancz declined to publish, was brought out by Fredric Warburg in April 1938. Unsparing in its criticisms of the Communist Party’s attacks on anarchists and Trotskyists in Spain, the book consolidated Orwell’s reputation as a non-communist socialist who spoke his mind. Lies, manipulation, assaults on the notions of truth and objective reality, destruction of the past by rewriting history, journalists who become propagandists, betrayals by friends, pointless cruelty and death – all these themes, later so important to Orwell, appeared first in Homage to Catalonia. Spain had a profound impact on Orwell’s work, as he stated plainly in his famous essay “Why I Write”: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it” (18: 319; emphasis original). But Orwell’s political judgments were not always as keen as his political passions. In his essay “Why I Join the I.L.P. [Independent Labour Party]” (1938), he wrote: “The only regime which, in the long run, will dare
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to permit freedom of speech is a Socialist regime” (11: 168). Diagnosed with tuberculosis in April 1938, Orwell spent nearly six months in a sanatorium. In early September, he went with his wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy, whom he had married in 1935, to Morocco to convalesce. There he wrote Coming Up for Air (1939) and a number of important essays, among them “Marrakech” (1939). He left Morocco at the end of March 1939, taking the manuscript of his new novel to Victor Gollancz – “that Stalinist publisher,” Orwell would later call him (Bowker 250) – with whom he was still under contract. After his own baptism by fire in Spain, Orwell for a time rejected war as a solution to political conflict, even in the face of the growing menace of Nazi Germany. For two years, between 1937 and 1939, he supported the Independent Labour Party’s anti-militarist stance. Opposing the Popular Front endorsed by the communists, Orwell expressed his relief when Chamberlain returned from Munich on September 30, 1938, having signed an agreement with Hitler allowing Germany to annex the Sudetenland. But, on the night before the Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact (signed on August 23, 1939), Orwell rediscovered via a dream both his patriotism and his true feelings about military action. He welcomed war against Germany and lamented that his health made it impossible for him to fight. In his essay “My Country Right or Left” (1940), he stated that there could be no substitute “for patriotism and the military virtues . . . however little the boiled rabbits of the Left may like them” (12: 271–2). “Ours,” he wrote, “was the one-eyed pacifism that is peculiar to sheltered countries with strong navies” (12: 270). And in the essay “Inside the Whale” (1940), he took Henry Miller to task for his passivity and detachment from the problems of his time (12: 107–8). Given his change of heart, Orwell broke with the ILP for its continued “pacifism,” which, he argued repeatedly, was “objectively pro-Fascist.” As he explained in his 1942 essay “Pacifism and the War”: “If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other” (13: 396). Many of his essays of this period defend patriotism. In “Notes on Nationalism” (1945), for example, Orwell distinguishes between patriotism, the legitimate love of and preference for one’s native land, and
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nationalism, which he saw as inevitably driven by a desire for power over other nations. Patriotism is defensive, he argued, while nationalism is offensive (17: 142). Unable to fight, Orwell became a BBC broadcaster to India and in that capacity was subjected to the censorship imposed by Britain’s Ministry of Information. It has long been known that Orwell’s hatred of hypocrisy and bureaucratic jargon was intensified by his experience at the BBC during World War II. A cache of his unknown writings, however, discovered in the BBC archives in 1984, has allowed this connection to be more fully documented. Upon leaving the BBC in 1943, Orwell (now officially introduced everywhere as “George Orwell”) became literary editor of the leftist paper Tribune. In addition to a weekly column, aptly titled “As I Please,” he contributed book reviews to Tribune, as well as to The Observer and the Manchester Evening News. Meanwhile, his “London Letter” continued to appear in Partisan Review. Although Orwell had first conceived the idea of using an animal allegory to expose the Soviet myth upon returning from Spain, he began to work on Animal Farm only in 1943. As he would later state in “Why I Write,” “Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole” (18: 320). The manuscript was turned down by Gollancz and several other British publishers who wished to avoid offending the Soviet Union, at the time England’s ally. Orwell’s agent tried to sell the book to the Dial Press in New York; it was rejected on the grounds that it was impossible to sell animal stories in the USA. Finally, Fredric Warburg expressed interest in the book and published it in August 1945; it was published in the US in 1946 and was also translated into numerous languages. Warburg remained Orwell’s publisher for the rest of his life – and beyond. Animal Farm made Orwell instantly famous. A little-recognized inspiration for Animal Farm was Philip Guedalla’s “A Russian Fairy Tale” (1930), with a similar political message. It was Guedalla who described, in that story, a Good Fairy “who believed that all fairies were equal, but held strongly that some fairies were more equal than others” (206). Orwell’s adaptation of the line
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would become the single most famous sentence to be associated with his name, taking its place alongside key terms and phrases that he would later introduce in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Animal Farm, an easily decipherable romana-clef, also tackled many of the themes Orwell would explore more deeply in Nineteen EightyFour: the rewriting of history, the manipulation of language to make genuine thought impossible, the dominance of leaders over their followers, the assault on objective truth. In short, the unrelenting pursuit of power and the terror unleashed in order to consolidate and retain it. The Russian Revolution was bound to fail, Orwell wrote in a 1945 essay on Arthur Koestler’s book The Yogi and the Commissar, because it had carried within it “the seeds of evil” that would eventually destroy it – and this would have been the case even had Lenin lived (17: 343). Accounts of Orwell’s 10-year marriage to Eileen O’Shaughnessy vary, not least because Orwell was something of a philanderer. Still, he was eager to have a child and, in June 1944, the couple adopted a boy, Richard. Eileen died in March 1945 in the course of a hysterectomy (an operation of which Orwell disapproved). In early 1946 Orwell’s volume of Critical Essays appeared, earning him the respect of critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Seeking a quiet life close to nature, in 1946 an exhausted Orwell moved, with his son Richard and a housekeeper, to Barnhill, a remote croft house on the Scottish island of Jura. The climate only exacerbated his tuberculosis. Richard Blair, who still considers Jura his “spiritual home,” has said (Brown 2008) that although his father is commonly seen as dour and sour, he also harbored a strong romantic streak and a restless penchant for adventure. Jura thus joined colonial Burma, the doss-houses of England and the kitchens of Paris, civil war Spain, and the coal mines of Wigan as locales in which Orwell could test his mettle and sharpen his powers of observation. It was on Jura that Orwell began Nineteen Eighty-Four in earnest, but he was interrupted by illness and hospitalization. Returning to Jura in July 1948, he finished the manuscript. Then, in January 1949, he once again entered a sanatorium. Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in June 1949 to immediate acclaim. Orwell had considered calling the book “The Last Man in Europe” –
for he conceived it as a tale of resistance and ultimate capitulation to a totalitarian regime in which nothing is left of the private self. The novel was much influenced by James Burnham’s book The Managerial Revolution (1941), which predicted a postwar future characterized by an oligarchy of “managers” imposing absolute bureaucratic rule on a world divided into three superstates. These states, centered on Europe, Asia, and America, would be in perpetual conflict but without the possibility of actually defeating one another. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, this vision turns into the three totalitarian powers engaged in constant ersatz conflict and suddenly shifting alliances, the point of which is to stimulate production without ever raising the standard of living. Big Brother is a symbolic creation who governs the population of Oceania according to the principles of IngSoc (Orwell’s satirical version of English socialism), which places all power in the hands of the Party. Telescreens keep the population under constant surveillance; thought control is institutionalized, sexual pleasure prohibited (in order to better focus repressed desire on the Party’s official enemies), and no private self allowed to exist. Children inform on their parents; low-grade literature is mechanically produced for consumption by the Proles – the dirty masses who alone are somewhat free of surveillance merely because they are considered too dim-witted to be a danger. Orwell’s most memorable – perhaps only memorable – female character is Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Described as a “rebel from the waist down” by the novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, she becomes Winston’s lover as a conscious blow against the Party. Winston’s ultimate betrayal of Julia, under torture, is the emblem of his capitulation to O’Brien, his tormentor and hero. Although Nineteen Eighty-Four belongs comfortably within the tradition of twentieth-century dystopian novels, what sets Orwell’s novel apart from comparable works is the absence of the usual rationale for pursuing power. In the dystopian tradition, there is typically a “Grand Inquisitor” scene (deriving from a famous episode in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov), in which the leader justifies his exercise of power by referring to the weakness of the masses, eager to be delivered from the burden of freedom. This rationale is
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rejected in Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the Party pursues power for its own sake. Nineteen Eighty-Four is also memorable for its book-within-the-book – Goldstein’s Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, and for its Appendix on Newspeak, in which Orwell sets out an explanation of how manipulation of language can ultimately make free thought impossible. In September 1949, Orwell was admitted to University College Hospital in London. Ever since Eileen’s death in 1945, he had sought another wife, unsuccessfully inviting a number of his female acquaintances to become the widow of a well-known writer. In October, still in the hospital, he married Sonia Brownell (an assistant editor at Cyril Connolly’s magazine Horizon). Orwell died of tuberculosis on January 21, 1950, at the age of 46. He was buried at the Church of All Saints, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire. Sonia’s control of his literary estate for decades thwarted scholars and would-be biographers. Though Orwell had wanted no biography written of him, Sonia did eventually commission one (by Bernard Crick) and then, shortly before her death in 1980, tried to prevent its publication. In 1998, after 17 years of research, Peter Davison published the nearly exhaustive Complete Works of George Orwell, in 20 volumes and more than 8,500 pages. Orwell’s status as a moral exemplar, famous for his “honesty” and “decency,” has been such that people on all sides politically have tried to claim him as their own. His writing is ambivalent enough that appropriate quotations can be found to support many contradictory positions. As Orwell’s politics changed, however, his rhetoric did not. Thus, for example, he first charged the “pansy left” with trying to stir up war fever, and, once he himself had abandoned his anti-war position, charged the same “pansy left” with cowardice for opposing war with Germany. Orwell’s fertile mind and varied interests make him hard to classify: a romantic, an old-fashioned liberal but also an anti-capitalist, a lifelong selfproclaimed socialist who was fiercely anti-communist, a poseur who criticized in particular the hypocrisy of middle-class leftists, an exposer of power and its corrupting effects who was nonetheless attracted to it. Orwell’s subjects were far ranging: from his continuing criticism of Stalinism and totalitarianism and other contemporary
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political issues, to his pioneering work on popular culture: boys’ weeklies, detective fiction, cartoon art, “good bad books,” as well as countless essays on literature. He also contributed numerous words and phrases to the English language: Newspeak, double think, memory hole, Hate Week, Ministry of Truth, etc. He had an excellent ear for catchwords and slogans, such as “Big Brother is Watching You” (borrowed from an advertisement he had seen in London). His 1945 essay “You and the Atom Bomb” is credited with introducing the term “cold war” (17: 321), and in perhaps his most famous essay, “Politics and the English Language” (1946), he advised, “let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about” (17: 429). “Good prose is like a windowpane,” he stated in “Why I Write” (18: 320). Orwell’s belief in the referential power of language and its importance for a democratic politics is an antidote avant la lettre to today’s postmodernism, which has famous intellectuals expressing skepticism about the existence of an external reality and language’s potential to tell the truth about the world. Because Orwell attempted to think clearly and write without veils of mystification, it is all the more striking that he nonetheless shared the conventional antipathy of his culture toward homosexuals, women, and Jews; he also believed that abortion and birth control were examples of moral degeneration. These aspects of his thinking, however, have often been ignored, in favor of an idealized view of him. V. S. Pritchett, for example, famously called Orwell “the wintry conscience of a generation” and “a kind of saint” (1950, 96). Successive biographies (in particular those by Crick, Shelden, Meyers, Taylor, and Bowker) have provided different perspectives on Orwell’s life and work, and have tempered some of the earlier adulation. Orwell’s reputation for integrity, however, was seriously compromised by documents released in July 1996, revealing that, in April 1949, he had offered to provide the British Foreign Office’s covert propaganda unit, the Information Research Department, with an annotated list he had compiled of 86 names of “crypto-communists,” “fellow-travellers,” and others he considered unreliable (1997–8, 20: 240–59). Orwell observed that all art is propaganda; but, importantly, he also recognized that all propaganda is not art. In the end, he was perhaps his own best interpreter. In “Why I Write” he
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explained his objectives: “What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. . . . But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. . . . So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information” (18: 319–20). Perhaps it is Orwell’s passionate commitment to both goals, and not only the state of our contemporary world, that have made his work as relevant today as when it was written. SEE ALSO: London, Jack (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS All references to Orwell’s writings are to The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. P. Davison (1997–8), by volume and page number. Bowker, G. (2003). Inside George Orwell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Brown, A. (2008). Big Brother’s living legacy. Sunday Times (Nov. 23). At http://entertainment. timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/ books/article5212649.ece accessed Feb. 15, 2010. Burnham, J. (1941). The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World. New York: John Day. Collini, S. (2003). The Grocer’s Children: The Lives and Afterlives of George Orwell. Times Literary Supplement, pp. 3, 6 (June 20). Crick, B. (1981). George Orwell: A Life, rev. edn. London: Secker and Warburg. Davison, P. (1996). George Orwell: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin’s. Fowler, H. W., & Fowler, F. G. (1906). The King’s English. Oxford: Clarendon. Gottlieb, E. (1992). The Orwell Conundrum: A Cry of Despair or Faith in the Spirit of Man? Don Mills, ON: Carleton University Press. Guedalla, P. (1930). A Russian Fairy Tale. In The Missing Muse. New York: Harper.
Hitchens, C. (2002). Why Orwell Matters. New York: Basic Books. Keating, P. (ed.) (1976). Into Unknown England, 1866–1913: Selections from the Social Explorers. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Koestler, A. (1945). The Yogi and the Commissar and Other Essays. London: Jonathan Cape. Meyers, J. (2000). Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation. New York: Norton. Orwell, G. (1970). Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (ed. S. Orwell & I. Angus). 4 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Orwell, G. (1997–8). The Complete Works of George Orwell (ed. P. Davison). 20 vols. London: Secker and Warburg. Patai, D. (1984). The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Pritchett, V. S. (1950). George Orwell. New Statesman and Nation, p. 96 (Jan. 28). Rodden, J. (1989). The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of “St. George” Orwell. New York: Oxford University Press. Rodden, J. (ed.) (2007). The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rodden, J., & Cushman, T. (eds.) (2004). George Orwell into the Twenty-First Century. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Runciman, D. (2008). Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stansky, P., & Abrahams, W. (1972). The Unknown Orwell. London: Constable. Stansky, P., & Abrahams, W. (1979). Orwell: The Transformation. London: Constable. Steinhoff, W. (1975). George Orwell and the Origins of 1984. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Taylor, D. J. (2003). Orwell: The Life. New York: Henry Holt. Watson, G. (1998). The Lost Literature of Socialism. Cambridge: Lutterworth. Williams, R. (1971). Orwell. Glasgow: Collins. Woodcock, G. (1967). The Crystal Spirit. London: Jonathan Cape. Zwerdling, A. (1974). Orwell and the Left. New Haven: Yale University Press.
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P Phillips, Caryl DAVE GUNNING
Caryl Phillips has established himself as one of the foremost chroniclers of what he calls the “new world order”: the late twentieth- and early twentyfirst-century global relationships that colonial and postcolonial frameworks seem increasingly unable fully to explain. His drama, fiction and travel writing engage consistently with people searching for ways to belong to societies that are often hostile to their presence, and his work is throughout marked by his refusal to accept simple answers to the complicated question of where, and how, home might be found. He has been the recipient of such prestigious literary awards as the James Tait Black and Commonwealth Writers’ prizes, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the PEN/ Faulkner Award. In 1993 he featured as one of Granta’s 20 “Best of Young British Novelists.” Born on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts on March 13, 1958, Phillips was still an infant when his parents migrated to the United Kingdom. Raised in white working-class areas of Leeds and Birmingham, he attended the Queen’s College, University of Oxford (where he is now an honorary fellow). He lives in New York City, and is professor of English at Yale University. While studying for his English degree, Phillips traveled to the United States in 1978, where he came across the writings of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin and realized that he wanted to write himself. Baldwin (who became a friend of Phillips until his death in 1987) can be seen as a particular influence on the younger writer’s attempts to capture the subtleties of human
experience in difficult times. Phillips’s first writing success was in the field of drama; his play Strange Fruit opened at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield on October 30, 1980. This play, and his first novels The Final Passage (1985) and A State of Independence (1986), introduce many of the themes concerning migration and belonging that would continue to be crucial throughout his career. In 1987 Phillips published an account of his journey around Europe, The European Tribe. This book, which was scathing in its attack on the deep-rooted and persistent racism he found across the continent, develops his earlier explorations of homelessness and offers his first full examination of many of the concerns that would shape his later writing. In Amsterdam he visited Anne Frank’s house and revealed how, as a child, he had looked to the Jewish experience to understand his own exclusion. This, and the reflections he offered on Shakespeare’s Othello and Shylock while in Venice, foreshadowed the interrelations between histories of suffering that would come to dominate his writing. Higher Ground (1989) was the first of Phillips’s novels to offer three separate narratives. No explicit links are drawn between the stories of a late eighteenth-century African working as an interpreter for slavers, a 1960s African American radical serving time for robbery, and a Jewish refugee in postwar London, but the connections between the sense of displacement felt by each resonate throughout. His next two novels, Cambridge (1991) and the Booker Prize-shortlisted Crossing the River (1993), concentrated more squarely on the histories of the African diaspora. In the former, Phillips closely echoes eighteenth- and nine-
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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teenth-century texts that record aspects of slavery by such authors as M. G. (“Monk”) Lewis, Lady Mary Nugent, and Olaudah Equiano, to present the contrasting first-person accounts of the circumstances that bring the white Emily Cartwright and black slave Cambridge into contact on a Caribbean plantation. Phillips’s belief in the key importance of form in understanding character and situation comes through in these carefully rendered voices, each blinkered to the full realities of his or her situation. The Nature of Blood (1997) is Phillips’s most complex and ambitious novel to date. It continually shifts between the story of a Holocaust survivor, Eva Stern, an account of the 1480 persecution of the Jews of Portobuffole, near Venice, and a first-person narrative of a African general who, although not named, seems to be Othello. It ends by detailing an encounter in modern-day Israel between Eva’s Uncle Stephan, now a disillusioned Zionist, and a black Falasha Jew from Ethiopia. While it was criticized in some quarters for its “appropriation” of Jewish suffering, the novel stands as Phillips’s clearest portrayal of the need to understand the connections between experiences of alienation and brutality. In 2000 Phillips published his second travelogue, The Atlantic Sound, which continued his explorations of the global legacies of the slave trade; but his Commonwealth Writers’ Prize-winning A Distant Shore (2003) was set in present-day Britain, and maps the relationship between a middle-aged white woman and an African asylum seeker. It can seem in some ways a major departure from the focus on history that had shaped his work for the previous 15 years, yet its attention to the complexities that make people different, and the possibility for communication between them, reveals it as in many ways typical of his work. Dancing in the Dark (2005), the story of the real-life entertainer Bert Williams, was Phillips’s first novel set wholly in the United States, but Foreigners (2007a) marked a return to Britain and further developments in Phillips’s blending of history, fiction, and reportage. The year 2007 also saw Phillips’s return to writing for the stage with his adaptation of Simon Schama’s Rough Crossings which revealed his continuing interest in the history of slavery. Phillips remains a major figure in articulating the complicated ways in which brutal past events play out in the complex present.
SEE ALSO: Baldwin, James (AF); Black British Fiction (WF); Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/ Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ledent, B. (2002). Caryl Phillips. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ledent, B. (ed.) (2007). Familial and Other Conversations: Special Issue on Caryl Phillips. Moving Worlds, 7(1). Phillips, C. (1981). Strange Fruit. Ambergate: Amber Lane. Phillips, C. (1985). The Final Passage. London: Faber and Faber. Phillips, C. (1986). A State of Independence. London: Faber and Faber. Phillips, C. (1987). The European Tribe. London: Faber and Faber. Phillips, C. (1989). Higher Ground. London: Viking. Phillips, C. (1991). Cambridge. London: Bloomsbury. Phillips, C. (1993). Crossing the River. London: Bloomsbury. Phillips, C. (1997). The Nature of Blood. London: Faber and Faber. Phillips, C. (2000). The Atlantic Sound. London: Faber and Faber. Phillips, C. (2001). A New World Order: Selected Essays. London: Secker and Warburg. Phillips, C. (2003). A Distant Shore. London: Secker and Warburg. Phillips, C. (2005). Dancing in the Dark. London: Secker and Warburg. Phillips, C. (2007a). Foreigners: Three English Lives. London: Harvill Secker. Phillips, C. (2007b). Rough Crossings. London: Oberon. Thomas, H. (2006). Caryl Phillips. London: Northcote House.
Politics and the Novel ALEX HOUEN
British and Irish political novels in the twentieth century are incredibly varied in form, voice, and content. This is hardly surprising given the numerous political upheavals in this period, along
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with the changes in approach to the novel as a genre. The best political novels are notable for exploring (1) the limits of what “the novel,” “Britain” and/or “Ireland,” and “politics” are, and (2) how those entities relate to each other. For several critics, the realist forms that predominated in the nineteenth century were inextricably linked to bourgeois liberalism in emphasizing the views and voice of an individual. Such novels could also present wider purviews: nineteenth-century naturalism, in particular, examined ways in which “character” might be socially and biologically determined. Usually, though, the nineteenth-century investment in individualism was evidenced by the use of an omniscient narrator and by a linear narrative as development of a main character. In the twentieth century, novelists fashioned alternative forms of characterization and narrative voice so as to engage with changes in the political landscape. Plotting affairs of state thus frequently meant plotting new states of mind and body. In the first decade of the twentieth century, many writers rejected nineteenth-century novelistic conventions to address the effects of modernization. Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (1903) and H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909) both examine mechanization and modernization, in the face of which Wells’s narrator, George Ponderevo, announces: “I fail to see how I can be other than a lax, undisciplined storyteller” (Wells 1946 [1909], 107). Joseph Conrad experiments with non-linear omniscient narration in The Secret Agent (1907), which focuses on the impact of international anarchism in London. In showing how characters’ domestic lives becomes entangled in affairs of state, the novel’s plot adduces the political complexity of the anarchists’ plots. Conrad also collaborated with Ford Madox Hueffer (who changed his name to Ford in 1919) in developing non-linear forms of narration as a novelistic “impressionism” that would give a better sense of the simultaneity of “places, persons, and emotions” (Ford 1998, 325) taking place in the writer. Such experiments usher in a modernist approach to the novel that was well established by 1910. Indeed, Virginia Woolf went so far as to claim that “human character changed” around “December 1910” (Woolf 1998 [1924], 396); the novelist’s job was thus to change the character of
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the novel. For Woolf, this partly entailed producing novels more adequate to women’s experience. Just as women were not represented adequately in politics (female suffrage was not granted in Britain until 1918), so Woolf felt that female subjectivity had not been adequately represented in fiction. Along with writers such as Dorothy Richardson (in her Pilgrimage novels, 1915–38), Woolf experimented in mixing free indirect discourse, interior monologue, and collaged narrative structure to present new explorations of subjectivity and personal relationships. By 1913 Britain was gripped by a range of political activism – from strikes to suffragette militancy – all of which was derailed by mobilization for the Great War (1914–18). With British citizens being conscripted to suffer the horrors of trench warfare, relations between the state, subjectivity, and the war’s traumas were much explored in novels. Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) is set before the war and employs the impressionist narration he developed with Conrad to present the unreliable view of his narrator, John Dowell, on the sexual and social intrigues by which he is confounded. After fighting at the front, Ford drew on his experiences for his Parade’s End tetralogy (2002 [1924–8]), which follows the life of Christopher Tietjens and uses an impressionist approach in part to merge Tietjens’s experience of warfare with his fraught domestic life. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) includes an examination of shell-shock and the inability of society to aid those suffering from it. She followed this up with To the Lighthouse (1927), which features the war as an event that ruthlessly strips her narrative of its plot and characters. If, as Woolf upheld, “human character” had changed in 1910, then the Great War clearly presented a more severe and sustained period of upheaval. Other notable novels that link the war’s political and psychological effects include Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (1928), Wyndham Lewis’s Childermass (1928), and Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero (1929). Ireland faced another war during this period – its War of Independence. The Republican struggle to end Britain’s rule over Ireland came to a head in the Easter Rising of 1916 when the British army in Dublin crushed the Republican forces and then executed Padraic Pearse and other rebel leaders. In the wake of this event, Republicans waged a
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relentless guerrilla war against the British forces, which was the main factor in bringing about the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921) as a compromise. The treaty established Ireland as an independent free state with the exception of six Ulster counties in Northern Ireland, which were retained as part of the United Kingdom. The Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen examines the years before the treaty in The Last September (1929), which portrays an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family torn between its allegiances to Britain and Ireland. In contrast, James Joyce’s Ulysses (2008 [1922]) might seem apolitical given the time at which it was published. Set in Dublin on a single day, June 16, 1904, the novel charts a convergence of meanderings between Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. British rule is questioned (e.g., in the “Telemachus episode”) no less than Irish nationalism (e.g., in “Cyclops”), but the political stance of the novel is more a matter of using different narrative styles and voices while excavating a variety of tongues from within the English language. Insularities of subjectivity and nationality thus give way to a wider linguistic community. In the second half of the 1920s labor unrest peaked with the General Strike of 1926. By the early 1930s, Britain, like America, was suffering from serious economic depression and high unemployment. Critics such as George Orwell and Philip Henderson criticized 1920s modernism for having lost sight of political reality by focusing on subjectivity. Numerous novelists concurred and resuscitated a realist approach, which is particularly in evidence in 1930s working-class fiction. Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933) is a notable example, depicting unemployment in northern England and presenting dialogue in a northern working-class vernacular. Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s trilogy A Scots Quair (1946 [1932–4]) is a landmark Scottish novel that follows heroine Chris Guthrie and builds an anti-capitalist vision that encompasses the effects of World War I and disappointment over the failed General Strike of 1926. Other important novels addressing issues of class and labor include James Hanley’s Boy (1931) and Lewis Jones’s Cymardy (1978 [1937]). The 1930s was a period in which various political ideologies clashed to gain ascendancy. Stalin instigated purges to consolidate the power of his Communist Party in the USSR. Germany was
turning toward National Socialism. Fascism took root in Italy under Mussolini and then in Spain when General Franco’s forces deposed the popularly elected Republican government in 1936, thereby precipitating the Spanish Civil War (1936–8). In Britain and Ireland the left-wing ideologies of communism, socialism, and anarchism won more adherents than national socialism and fascism, particularly among writers. Fears over the spread of right-wing politics led over 2,700 British volunteers to help the struggle against Franco’s Fascists during Spain’s Civil War. Among the volunteers were a number of writers, including George Orwell whose Homage to Catalonia (1938) is an autobiographical account of the experience. Wyndham Lewis’s Revenge for Love (1937) presents a cynical novelistic view of British motives for fighting against Franco’s forces (Lewis had decidedly right-wing sympathies). Published in the wake of Franco’s victory, Graham Greene’s The Confidential Agent (1939) is pessimistic in suggesting that Spain’s political conflict would spread. A number of other novels envisaged conflict in Europe, including Rex Warner’s The Professor (1938) and Orwell’s Coming Up for Air (1939). World War II (1939–45) proved the forecasts of war to be right and had devastating effects on Britain and her allies (Ireland remained neutral). As with World War I, novelists struggled to produce novels adequate for engaging with horrors like the London Blitz (1940–1). James Hanley’s No Directions (1943) portrays a single night of the Blitz and tries to capture myriad experiences of it by detailing the effects on a single tenement. Henry Green, who served in the Auxiliary Fire Service, gives an excellent impression of the devastation in Caught (1943). Like Hanley, Green focuses on the impressions of his characters, eschewing intervention from an omniscient narrator. Elizabeth Bowen’s Heat of the Day (1949) is also set in wartime London and mixes metaphysical romance with a spy plot to show how politics and private life could become entangled. In contrast, Evelyn Waugh builds a more epic survey of the war years in his Sword of Honour trilogy which, like Ford’s earlier Parade’s End tetralogy, examines how traumas of war become compounded with treacheries of domestic life in the mind of his main character, Guy Crouchback.
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Britain emerged a victor from the war, but took many years to recover from it. With the economy in a parlous condition, Clement Attlee’s new Labour government maintained food rationing and upheld a range of Welfare State policies, establishing the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948 and nationalizing major industries and public utilities. Continuing fears over totalitarian politics found a voice in Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), an anti-Stalinist allegory set in a farmyard, which he followed up with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), perhaps the best-known British political novel of the century. Set in a dystopian 1984, the latter depicts a world divided into three political blocs and shows Winston Smith, the main character, in his struggle to reject the totalitarian rule of “Big Brother” in Oceania, the bloc that absorbed Britain and Ireland. In showing Big Brother’s power to be largely dependent on the control of language, the novel is a landmark work in examining links between politics and linguistic expression. Orwell’s forecast of a world divided into political blocs was arguably confirmed by the ensuing Cold War stand-off between the countries – including Britain (Ireland remained neutral) – allied under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the countries allied under the Warsaw Pact. Resultant fears over the possibility of nuclear war were addressed in a number of novels, notably Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence (1948), Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957), and John Bowen’s After the Rain (1958). The Cold War spy novel was another form of fiction that developed realist insights into links between international espionage and British political institutions – salient examples include Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File (1962) and John Le Carre’s Tinker, Sailor, Soldier, Spy (1974). The 1950s in Britain were known as the “Angry Decade” largely because the Welfare State ideals of Attlee’s Labour government were felt by many not to have lived up to expectations. With the country still suffering from the economic burdens of the war, realist working-class fiction enjoyed a resurgence from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s. More than that of the 1930s, much of this fiction portrayed vicissitudes of social mobility. Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) portrays its workingclass character Jim Dixon struggling to fit in as a lecturer with his predominantly middle-class
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colleagues in a provincial university. In a cynical conclusion, Jim rejects academic life to take up a better-paid position as an assistant to his lover’s rich uncle. John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957), Raymond Williams’s Border Country (1960), and David Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960) also address difficulties of social mobility through working-class characters. For many reviewers, the best “proletariat” novel since the 1930s was Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), which uses northern English vernacular to give voice to its main character, Arthur Seaton, in his uncompromising stance toward amatory relationships and factory life. Many commentators have claimed that since the 1950s working-class solidarity has weakened apace with the diminishing faith in consensus politics. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government (1979–90) overturned many welfare state aims, privatizing industries, undermining trade union power, and championing individual entrepreneurs. Socialist idealism was thus forced to give way to burgeoning middle-class liberalism. Since the 1960s, the growth of “identity politics” (advancing the rights of a group marginalized on grounds such as ethnicity, gender, or religion) has also increasingly meant that political constituencies and solidarities cannot be thought of simply along lines of class, political party, or locality. The women’s liberation movement that grew in the 1960s and 1970s was particularly successful in advancing a range of political rights for women, and there have been numerous novels by authors such as Angela Carter, Fay Weldon, and Jeanette Winterson that have experimented in figuring women’s voices aesthetically in order to examine strictures of women’s socio-political status. Since the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1967, queer fiction has also grown apace with political organizations advancing “queer” sexuality (ranging from gay and lesbian to bisexual and transgendered). Queer novels by writers such as Alan Hollinghurst, Jeanette Winterson, and Colm To´ibın have been important in relating a fluidity of sexual identity to other social hybridities. Since the 1950s a major factor contributing to social hybridity has been immigration. The British Nationality Act, 1948 granted rights of UK residence to virtually all citizens of British Commonwealth countries. Intended to draw an influx
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of cheap labor, the Act was certainly successful on that score. A range of novels from Caribbean immigrants portrayed difficulties in resettling, including George Lamming’s The Emigrants (1954) and Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956), whose narrator speaks a mix of Trinidadian vernacular and standard English. More recent novels showing generational differences within families who migrated include Caryl Philips’s The Final Passage (1985), Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia (1990), and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000). Migration to Britain continued even though many nations that Britain had colonized achieved independence (including India and several Caribbean and African countries). A range of postcolonial novels have examined transitions to independence by developing new forms of historical fiction. Important examples include Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day (1980), Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991), and Giles Foden’s The Last King of Scotland (1999). Rushdie also ignited furious debates on the politics of postcolonialism, postmodernism, and fiction with the publication of his Satanic Verses (1988). Iran, which deemed it as portraying the prophet Mohammed in a blasphemous light, pronounced a death sentence on Rushdie and the book was banned in several countries. The demise of the British Empire has been followed by several shifts in the political unity between England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. For both Ireland and Northern Ireland the partition since 1921 has been a particularly fraught issue. Militant disagreements about it in Northern Ireland were particularly fierce from 1968 to 1998, between Unionists (who were almost exclusively Protestant and favored union with Britain) and Nationalists (who were almost exclusively Catholic and sought a unified, independent Ireland). This period of conflict, known as the “Troubles,” saw more than 3,200 people shot and 40,000 wounded. The Belfast Agreement of 1998 was designed to be a compromise arrangement for all sides and granted political devolution to Northern Ireland. Because of continuing political strife, however, devolution was suspended until 2007. Novels on the Troubles are plentiful, with many of them refracting their realism through a lens of tragic romance (doomed
love between a Catholic and a Protestant). Notable alternatives include Robert McLiam Wilson’s Ripley Bogle (1989), Deirdre Madden’s One by One in the Darkness (1996), and Patrick McCabe’s Breakfast on Pluto (1998). Proposals for devolution in Scotland and Wales were defeated in referendums in 1979 but were successful in referendums in 1997. The Scottish Parliament and the Welsh National Assembly were subsequently established in 1999. After the 1979 referendum numerous Scottish novelists explored the condition of Scotland. Alasdair Gray’s Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) is a major example; set partly in contemporary Glasgow and partly in the dystopian realm of “Unthank,” the examination of Scotland also involves pitting realism and fantasy against each other. James Kelman has been influential in using narrators who speak in Scottish vernacular, and in novels such as How Late it Was, How Late (1994) he explores how individuals are affected by various government institutions. Other important novels examining the state of Scotland include Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) and Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (1995). There have been fewer novels in English examining Welsh life and politics partly because many Welsh novelists have preferred to write in Welsh. Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley (1939) has remained popular and documents life in Welsh coalmining communities. More recently, Mary Jones’s Resistance (1985) has examined militant Welsh nationalism, and Trezza Azzopardi’s The Hiding Place (2000) has considered multiculturalism in Wales in relation to the Maltese community in Cardiff in the 1960s. Since the 1980s factors such as Thatcherism and the weakening of class solidarity have prompted a number of novelists to cast a critical eye on the political state of Britain more generally. Martin Amis’s Money: A Suicide Note (1984) portrays the consumer greed of its time through its disagreeable main character, John Self. Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time (1987) imagines a future Conservative government seeking to mold ideal citizens from birth. And Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! (1994) looks in part at the replacement of Thatcher by fellow Conservative John Major, along with Britain’s preparations for participation in the First Gulf War in Iraq.
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POLITICS AND THE NOVEL
SEE ALSO: Angry Young Man Fiction (BIF); Censorship and the Novel (BIF); Colonial Fiction (BIF); Feminist Fiction (BIF); Historical Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Politics/ Activism and Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (BIF); Working-Class Fiction (BIF); World War I in Fiction (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Aldington, R. (1929). Death of a Hero. London: Chatto and Windus. Amis, K. (1954). Lucky Jim. London: Gollancz. Amis, M. (1984). Money: A Suicide Note. London: Jonathan Cape. Azzopardi, T. (2000). The Hiding Place. London: Picador. Bergonzi, B. (1970). The Situation of the Novel. London: Macmillan. Blunden, E. (1928). Undertones of War. London: Cobden-Sanderson. Bowen, E. (1929). The Last September. London: Constable. Bowen, E. (1949). The Heat of the Day. London: Jonathan Cape. Bowen, J. (1958). After the Rain. London: Faber and Faber. Braine, J. (1957). Room at the Top. London: Methuen. Butler, S. (1903). The Way of All Flesh. London: Grant Richards. Coe, J. (1994). What a Carve Up! New York: Viking. Conrad, J. (1907). The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale. London: Methuen. Deighton, L. (1962). The Ipcress File. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Desai, A. (1980). Clear Light of Day. London: Heinemann. English, J. F. (ed.) (2006). A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell. Foden, G. (1999). The Last King of Scotland. London: Faber and Faber. Ford, F. M. (1915). The Good Soldier. London: John Lane. Ford, F. M. (1998). On Impressionism [1914]. In V. Kolocotroni, J. Goldman, & O. Taxidou (eds.), Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 325–30. Ford, F. M. (2002). Parade’s End [1924–8]. London: Penguin.
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Foster, J. W. (ed.) (2006). The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gibbon, L. G. (1946). A Scots Quair [1932–4]. London: Jarrolds. Gray, A. (2007). Lanark: A Life in Four Books. Edinburgh: Canongate. Green, H. (1943). Caught. London: Hogarth. Greene, G. (1939). The Confidential Agent: An Entertainment. London: Heinemann. Greenwood, W. (1933). Love on the Dole. London: Jonathan Cape. Hanley, J. (1943). No Directions. London: Faber and Faber. Head, D. (2002). The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huxley, A. (1948). Ape and Essence. London: Chatto and Windus. Jones, L. (1978). Cymardy [1937]. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Jones, M. (1985). Resistance. Belfast: Blackstaff. Joyce, J. (2008). Ulysses [1922]. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kelman, J. (1994). How Late It Was, How Late. London: Secker and Warburg. Kureishi, H. (1990). The Buddha of Suburbia. London: Faber and Faber. Lamming, G. (1954). The Emigrants. London: Michael Joseph. Le Carre, J. (1974). Tinker, Sailor, Soldier, Spy. London: Random House. Lewis, W. (1928). The Childermass. London: Chatto and Windus. Llewellyn, R. (1939). How Green Was My Valley. London: Michael Joseph. Madden, D. (1996). One by One in the Darkness. London: Faber and Faber. McCabe, P. (1998). Breakfast on Pluto. London: Picador. McEwan, I. (1987). The Child in Time. London: Jonathan Cape. Okri, B. (1991). The Famished Road. London: Jonathan Cape. Orwell, G. (1945). Animal Farm. London: Secker and Warburg. Orwell, G. (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker and Warburg. Philips, C. (1985). The Final Passage. London: Faber and Faber. Richardson, D. (1938). Pilgrimage [1915–38]. 4 vols. London: J. M. Dent/Cresset. Rushdie, S. (1981). Midnight’s Children. London: Picador. Rushdie, S. (1988). The Satanic Verses. London: Penguin.
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Schwarz, D. R. (1989). The Transformation of the English Novel 1890–1930. London: Macmillan. Selvon, S. (1956). The Lonely Londoners. London: Allan Wingate. Shute, N. (1957). On the Beach. London: Heinemann. Sillitoe, A. (1958). Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. London: W. H. Allen. Smith, Z. (2000). White Teeth. London: Hamish Hamilton. Stevenson, R. W. (1986). The British Novel Since the Thirties: An Introduction. London: Batsford. Storey, D. (1960). This Sporting Life. London: Longman. Warner, A. (1995). Morvern Callar. London: Jonathan Cape. Warner, R. (1938). The Professor. New York: Knopf. Waugh, E. (2001). The Sword of Honour Trilogy [1952–61]. London: Penguin. Wells, H. G. (1946). Tono-Bungay [1909]. London: Penguin. Welsh, I. (1993). Trainspotting. London: Vintage. Williams, R. (1960). Border Country. London: Chatto and Windus. Wilson, R. M. (1989). Ripley Bogle. London: Deutsch. Woolf, V. (1925). Mrs. Dalloway. London: L. and W. Woolf. Woolf, V. (1998). Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown [1924]. In V. Kolocotroni, J. Goldman, & O. Taxidou (eds.), Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 395–7.
Postcolonial Fiction of the African Diaspora JOHN J. SU
The phrase “postcolonial fiction of the African diaspora” typically refers to those works written since the 1950s by African immigrants and their descendants. The era of decolonization on the African continent began in 1957 with the independence of Ghana, and the political turmoil across Africa during the next two decades, combined with the need in Great Britain for cheap labor in the aftermath of World War II, led to significant waves of migration through the 1960s. Writing by so-called “black Britons” has gained increasing prominence and prestige since the 1960s, and has played a crucial role in a rethinking of what constitutes Britishness in a post-imperial context.
A variety of factors make generalizations about African diaspora writing very difficult. The immense cultural, religious, and ethnic diversity of Africa means that the life experiences of a West African immigrant such as Buchi Emecheta differ considerably from those of an East African such as Abdulrazak Gurnah. The identity categories used in Great Britain can cause further confusion. Well into the 1990s, it was common to use the term “black Briton” indiscriminately to refer to immigrants from Africa, the British West Indies/ Caribbean, and South Asia. Salman Rushdie, the most famous contemporary author of South Asian descent, identified himself with this term in his non-fictional essays during the 1980s. The complex biographies of many expatriate authors also make classification difficult and often idiosyncratic. G. V. Desani and Doris Lessing, for example, have not been characterized as belonging to the African diaspora, although the former was born in Africa and the latter spent a significant portion of her childhood there. Many of the authors from the British West Indies were descended from African slaves, including Sam Selvon, George Lamming, David Dabydeen, and Caryl Phillips. Yet West Indian or Caribbean literature has been seen as a separate phenomenon. In part, this is because Caribbean migration was more concentrated in the aftermath of World War II, and the arrival in 1948 of the SS Empire Windrush with 492 passengers from the West Indies provides a very convenient marker for the beginning of contemporary West Indian literature in Great Britain. The cohesiveness of West Indian or Caribbean authors was further cemented in the 1950s by the BBC production of Caribbean Voices, a radio show that highlighted the works of authors including Selvon, Lamming, and V. S. Naipaul. No equivalent landmark date exists for immigrant writers from Africa, though 1555 is often listed as the year in which Africans first were brought to Britain. Evidence suggests that Africans were in Britain centuries earlier, as soldiers in Caesar’s army, but in 1555 five Africans were brought to Britain to learn English in order to serve as translators for the rapidly expanding slave trade. The emphasis on this date is important because it links the presence of Africans in Britain to the emergence of capitalism and imperialism. Prior to the twentieth century, literature written
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POSTCOLONIAL FICTION OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA
in Britain by Africans was dominated by the issue of slavery. While slavery was abolished in Great Britain in 1807, the presence of abolitionist speakers from the United States kept the issue in the forefront of Britain through the 1860s and beyond. The two “fathers” of African literature in Britain, Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano, both produced autobiographical works, Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (1998 [1782]) and The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, Written by Himself (2001 [1789]) respectively. The two have often been characterized as polar opposites, Sancho as an assimilationist and Equiano as a militant on behalf of African cultures. C. L. Innes (2002) suggests that the opposition is overstated, but it has provided the basic paradigm for understanding African diaspora literature prior to the twentieth century. The publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in 1958 is often seen as a crucial moment in the development of postcolonial literature generally and African literature specifically. While Achebe himself spent only limited time in Great Britain, the thematic concerns of his first novel shaped the writings of subsequent expatriate Africans. Perhaps the most significant development in his work was the focus on questions of nationhood for the former colonies of the British Empire: would such nations attempt to restore precolonial societies, model themselves on Western democracies, or create some kind of hybrid system of governance? The conspicuous critique of Christianity is apparent throughout Achebe’s writings, and many of the authors who followed him. Whereas Equiano and other African writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century consistently invoked the rhetoric and authority of Christianity on behalf of the cause of abolition, the tendency among twentieth-century postcolonial authors is to highlight the ways in which Christianity promoted British imperialism and denigrated not simply the religious beliefs among the colonized populations but also their cultural traditions and practices. Achebe understood the novel as crucial not only to the conceptualization of Englishness but also to imperial portraits of Africa. The novels of Rudyard Kipling, Joyce Cary, and Joseph Conrad helped to promote among the English middle classes the perception that Africa was a land without
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history, peopled only by violent and promiscuous savages. Achebe’s project of rewriting colonial history from the perspective of the colonized is signaled from the very first word of Things Fall Apart, which is the name Okonkwo. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), not a single African is named, denying the inhabitants of the continent not only cultural histories but personal histories. Writers who would follow Achebe – including his countrymen Buchi Emecheta and Ben Okri, and Abdulrazak Gurnah of Zanzibar/Tanzania – tended to differ from the Windrush generation of Caribbean authors including Selvon, Lamming, and Vic Reid in their interest in portraying postcolonial violence and civil war (V. S. Naipaul is an exception, portraying civil wars in works such as A Bend in the River, 1979, and Half a Life, 2001), though these conflicts are depicted as occurring in Africa. Achebe, Emecheta, and Okri all portrayed the horrors of the Biafran War (1967–70), the Nigerian civil war that shook the entire continent. As the most populous nation in Africa and possessing significant oil reserves, Nigeria was long seen as the Great Exemplar for the continent. Works such as Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1988 [1987]), Emecheta’s Destination Biafra (1982), and Okri’s Booker Prize-winning The Famished Road (1991) all focused on the civil war as a moment of profound disillusionment as anti-colonial liberation struggles were replaced by ethnic conflicts. Achebe’s and Okri’s novels both demonstrate profound anxiety that the civil war demonstrated the failure of Africans to move beyond the colonial era and to develop national identities that would transcend narrower ethnic and tribal affiliations. Rather than making a radical break with the colonial past, postcolonial nations seemed doomed to relive ethnic and tribal conflicts that were cultivated by the British in order to prevent a united resistance. “What must a people do to appease an embittered history,” asks one of the protagonists of Anthills of the Savannah at the end of the novel, mourning the unending cycle of violence in her country (204). Gurnah’s work also portrays postcolonial violence in his native Tanzania, where the black majority overthrew an Arab elite that had been in the country for centuries. Gurnah differs from Achebe in focusing less on the conflicts themselves than on the exiles such conflicts produce,
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and this difference might be taken to be emblematic of African diaspora writers. From his first novel, Memory of Departure (1987), onward, Gurnah explores the experiences of Africans who feel at home neither in Africa nor in Great Britain. In a world seemingly consumed by violence, Gurnah’s protagonists find themselves on an endless pilgrimage, whether it is Hassan Omar working on a cargo ship at the end of Memory of Departure or Yusef running away to join German troops in Paradise (1994). Gurnah seems unwilling to portray a moment of final reconciliation between his protagonists and their families; between warring ethnic and religious groups; between a colonial past and a postcolonial present. Readers never discover the ultimate fate of either Omar or Yusef. In a later novel, such as Admiring Silence (1996), the unnamed narrator finds himself with an uncertain future after being left by his English partner Emma and their teenage daughter Amelia. The letter he receives from his family in Zanzibar ends with the words “Come home,” which the narrator cannot read as anything other than cruel irony: for 20 years, he never told them about Emma and he grossly fabricated his descriptions of them to her. Buchi Emecheta added a new dimension to the portrayals of life in Britain by male writers in the 1950s and 1960s: the experiences of African women and their struggles with sexism in both Britain and Africa. In a trilogy comprised of In the Ditch (1972), Second-Class Citizen (1974), and The Bride Price (1976), Emecheta depicts the struggles of Adah to acquire an education and to support her children. The sexism of Ibo culture is described from the very first paragraphs of SecondClass Citizen: her parents were so disappointed that their first child was not a boy that they did not even bother to record her birth date. Her mother tries to prevent her child from getting an education; her family forces her to marry as a teenager; her husband Francis exploits her for her income. Emigrating to Britain in hopes of finding a better life, Adah confronts the increasing cruelty of her husband as well as discrimination in her new homeland for being black and female. Emecheta emphasizes the connections between racism and sexism: after discovering that in the eyes of the English she is a “second-class citizen,” Adah slowly discovers that in the eyes of Francis, “a woman was a second-class human.” Francis’s own
frustration with the demeaning treatment he receives in Great Britain is taken out on Adah, and he becomes progressively more abusive. Jealous of her job, her growing independence, and her literary aspirations, he burns the novel she has been writing (entitled The Bride Price) as well as her passport, their marriage certificate, and their children’s birth certificates. The end of the novel leaves Adah forced to care for five children, unable to get the English legal system to protect her from Francis or to compel him to support his family, yet looking forward to the possibility of building a better future for herself and her children. Emecheta, like most of the other African and Afro-Caribbean expatriate authors of her generation, employs conventions of Western literary realism in her writing. This is significant because, by the 1970s, many white English authors including John Fowles and Angela Carter were engaging in experiments with style, language, and narrative voice that would eventually be referred to as postmodern. The preference for realism among expatriate writers in Great Britain from former colonies is due to several factors. First, the conventions of realism correspond well with the expectations of a reading public that saw the fiction of postcolonial authors as a kind of sociological testimony. Much as Equiano was expected to testify to the dehumanizing effects of slavery, Gurnah, Emecheta, and other postwar authors were expected to testify to the dehumanizing effects of colonialism. The often playful experiments with language and convention that were characteristic of so-called postmodern literature were typically seen as incompatible with a responsibility to portray the horrors of colonial and postcolonial violence. Second, the conventions of realism enabled postcolonial authors to infuse the British novel with language and idioms taken from their home countries. Sam Selvon has been celebrated for “creolizing” the British novel, drawing on the everyday language of West Indian immigrants; similar efforts can be found among authors of the African diaspora. Since the nineteenth century, self-proclaimed realists such Stendhal insisted that the novel should present the language and experiences of everyday life. In Stendhal’s words, “a novel is a mirror, taking a walk down a big road” (342), not some romantic portrait of aristocracy filled with complex imagery and artifice. Authors such as Emecheta
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and Gurnah capture this spirit a century later, portraying the squalor in which many immigrants lived. Ben Okri’s most celebrated novel, The Famished Road, indicates that expatriate authors have become increasingly innovative formally. The Famished Road has been celebrated as a work of magic realism or postmodernism, though Okri himself has downplayed such characterizations. Okri has suggested that his writing represents a form of realism, one informed by cultural and spiritual beliefs that would be foreign to many British readers: “So what seems like surrealism or fantastic writing actually is not fantastic writing, it’s simply writing about the place in the spirit of the place. I’m not trying in the slightest to produce strange effects” (quoted in Arana & Ramey 147). The stated intent is not incompatible with postmodernism, which like modernism before it drew heavily from the cultures of colonial territories. The novel follows the adventures of Azaro, an abiku child. Abiku in Yoruba, or ogbanje in Ibo, refers to a spirit-child that dies shortly after birth, and continually returns to its mother’s womb in a cycle of birth and death. The abiku/ ogbanje has been portrayed in the work of Nigerian authors including Achebe, Okri, and Wole Soyinka. For Okri, the abiku functions as a kind of metaphor for Nigeria itself, a postcolonial nation that “dies” with the Biafran War shortly after its “birth” as a nation in 1960. Okri explores the same question that haunted Achebe in Anthills of the Savannah: what might be necessary to end an apparently seemingly endless cycle of violence? There is significant evidence that the term “postcolonial” may be beginning to outlive its usefulness as a term to describe the writings of expatriate Africans and their descendants. “Postcolonial” emphasizes the ways in which authors continue to be defined by the dynamics of a colonial center and periphery. Without denying that forms of imperialism continue to exist, many younger authors (particularly those who were born in Britain) are more interested in moving beyond the binaries of white/black, colonizer/colonized, civilized/savage that have been integral to the defense of British colonialism and its critique by postcolonial literature. Victoria Arana and Lauri Ramey (2004), for example, use the term “neo-millennial avant-garde artists” to
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describe authors such as Andrea Levy, Bernardine Evaristo, and Diran Adebayo. Adebayo’s Some Kind of Black (1996) and My Once upon a Time (2000) portray a multicultural London that looks radically different from the city portrayed half a century earlier in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956). Since the 1990s, the British reading public as a whole has demonstrated an increasing appetite for such multicultural fictions. Such an appetite is, no doubt, not completely different from the Orientalist fantasies that led Britons to consume the writings of Kipling and Conrad. However, it increasingly appears to be the case that Britons have accepted if not embraced the idea that Britishness is being reinvented in ways that incorporate the cultural attitudes and norms of its African, Afro-Caribbean, and South Asian populations. SEE ALSO: Black British Fiction (WF); Colonial Fiction (BIF); East African Fiction (WF); Globalization and the Novel (BIF); London in Fiction (BIF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Southern African Fiction (WF); West African Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Achebe, C. (1958). Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann. Achebe, C. (1988). Anthills of the Savannah [1987]. New York: Anchor. Acheson, J., & Ross, S. C. E. (eds.) (2005). The Contemporary British Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Adebayo, D. (1996). Some Kind of Black. London: Virago. Adebayo, D. (2000). My Once upon a Time. London: Abacus. Arana, R. V., & Ramey, L. (eds.) (2004). Black British Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H. (eds.) (1989). The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in PostColonial Literatures. London: Routledge. Baucom, I. (1999). Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Emecheta, B. (1972). In the Ditch. London: Barrie and Jenkins. (Rev. edn. published 1979.) Emecheta, B. (1974). Second-Class Citizen. London: Allison and Busby. Emecheta, B. (1976). The Bride Price. New York: Braziller. Emecheta, B. (1982). Destination Biafra. London: Allison and Busby. Equiano, O. (2001). The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, Written by Himself [1789] (ed. W. Sollors). New York: Norton. Fishburn, K. (1995). Reading Buchi Emecheta: CrossCultural Conversations. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Gikandi, S. (1996). Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia University Press. Gilroy, P. (1987). “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London: Hutchinson. Gurnah, A. (1987). Memory of Departure. London: Jonathan Cape. Gurnah, A. (1994). Paradise. London: Hamish Hamilton. Gurnah, A. (1996). Admiring Silence. London: Hamish Hamilton. Head, D. (2002). The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Innes, C. L. (2002). A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain, 1700–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Innes, C. L. (2007). The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, A. R. (ed.) (1995). Other Britain, Other British: Contemporary Multicultural Fiction. London: Pluto. Naipaul, V. S. (1979). A Bend in the River. London: Deutsch. Naipaul, V. S. (2001). Half a Life. London: Picador. Okri, B. (1991). The Famished Road. London: Jonathan Cape. Rushdie, S. (1991). Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Granta. Sancho, I. (1998). Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African [1782] (ed. V. Carretta). New York: Penguin. Selvon, S. (1956). The Lonely Londoners. London: Allan Wingate. Stendhal. (2003). The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of 1830 [1830] (trans. B. Raffel). New York: Modern Library. Tew, P. (2004). The Contemporary British Novel. London: Continuum.
Postcolonial Fiction of the British South Asian Diaspora J. EDWARD MALLOT
Multicultural fiction writers have been highly visible in the United Kingdom for several years, but no group has received more popular success and critical attention than the South Asian diaspora. Following the 1981 publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, author after author has garnered mass acclaim, record-breaking advances, and prestigious awards – so much so that an alleged “Booker backlash” emerged by the late 1990s, even as some claimed that “the future of English Literature is Indian” (Ranasinha 63). Ruvani Ranasinha notes that these Anglophone writers “become highly visible as mediators, cultural translators, and spokespersons” (10) – despite their sometimes dubious, tenuous claims on “authenticity,” or their often professed reluctance to represent entire ethnic communities. The term “British Asian,” like so many markers of collective identity, has a complicated and manufactured history. Rushdie and others had long self-identified as “black British,” an umbrella term denoting minority communities and ethnic literatures. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, however, theorists, authors, and audiences questioned both its political efficacy and its aesthetic implications, following Stuart Hall’s assertion that the “black British” label created a problematic hegemony incapable of representing the ethnic diversity of contemporary culture (1996b [1987], 166). Likewise, Susheila Nasta cautions against the subsequent, more specific label “South Asian,” which “inevitably flattens a diverse range of backgrounds,” effectively allowing the white majority to once again “divide and rule” (6). Further, the term “British Asian,” or “British South Asian,” literature fails to specify which individuals are referenced, or by which criteria. Does the term include Sam Selvon and V. S. Naipaul, immigrants of South Asian descent but usually associated with the West Indian diaspora? Does it represent Mulk Raj Anand and G. V. Desani, both important early examples of “British Asian” writing, who came to prominence in the UK but then returned to India? Does the term
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POSTCOLONIAL FICTION OF THE BRITISH SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA
necessarily imply fiction about South Asia or about Britain? Does it suggest political agenda or aesthetic sensibility, the author’s citizenship or residence, the text’s readership or subject matter? If the term “British Asian fiction” seems relatively recent, so does its practice. The West Indian and African diasporas, led by figures such as Selvon, Naipaul, and Buchi Emecheta, found audiences in the UK well before any substantial, sustained emergence of Indian English literature. South Asians had, of course, been living in Britain at least as far back as 1700 and, after the postwar/ decolonization era, eventually formed the nation’s largest minority ethnic group. But with few exceptions the English reading public did not embrace subcontinental novelists. Ranasinha notes that South Asians found British audiences as social historians, not as creative writers; even by the 1950s, Indian fiction was understood as a “commercial liability in metropolitan publishing houses,” with the result that would-be novelists either failed to win contracts or tempered politicized representations of difference (12). Some individuals did attain genuine UK readerships. Anand maintained associations with the Bloomsbury group; his Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936) illuminate the conditions of the poor in colonial India. Desani produced an unexpected hit with All about H. Hatterr (1948), a curious picaresque novel charting the title character’s comic quest for Enlightenment. The initial “H,” Hatterr claims, stands for “Hindustaniwalla,” one of many surprising linguistic subversions he terms “rigamarole English” (2007 [1948], 37). As Nasta observes, Desani’s fiction immediately announces itself as subversive, challenging contemporary conventions of language, genre, and style; All about H. Hatterr prefigures the postmodern sensibilities of Rushdie, who has acknowledged some stylistic indebtedness to the work. A handful of novelists, such as Attia Hosain and Kamala Markandaya, produced multiple works during the mid-century period, and are today recognized as key figures of early British Asian writing. But despite individual successes – such as Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) and Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve (1954) – British Asian fiction still lacked the consistent readership of Selvon and Naipaul. Perhaps surprisingly, in the 1970s three India-themed novels won the prestigious Booker Prize – all written by Eur-
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opeans (J. G. Farrell, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Paul Scott). This lack of direct “Indian” representation changed swiftly and dramatically in 1981, with Midnight’s Children. The magical odyssey of Saleem Sinai – born at the stroke of India’s independence – wowed audiences and critics alike, quickly assuming canonical status. In 1993, the novel won the “Booker of Bookers” award; in 2008, British readers named Midnight’s Children the best winner of the competition’s 40-year history. According to Ranasinha, the work “propelled South Asian Anglophone writing into the mainstream” (59), and British minority writers have often claimed that Rushdie’s success not only inspired their own efforts, but helped make a broader audience possible for multicultural artists. For white audiences, the author became the de facto representative of South Asia, with increasingly complicated implications by the end of the 1980s. Rushdie has always proven a controversial novelist, seemingly inviting criticism with his depictions of Indira Gandhi in Midnight’s Children and various Pakistani historical figures in Shame (1983). But few could have anticipated the international furor surrounding his 1988 work The Satanic Verses. The author argued that this was a story about immigration and exile, hybridized identities and metamorphoses – “a lovesong,” he would explain later, “to our mongrel selves” (1991, 394). The novel’s twinned protagonists, arriving in England and quickly transforming into an angel and a devilish goat, find that their new physical attributes reflect English stereotyping. The white majority controls the immigrants because they “describe us . . . They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct” (1997 [1988], 174). Saladin Chamcha learns that he must reject all such attempts to define him, and instead embrace each part of his “mongrel self.” Rushdie’s work also includes dream sequences about the prophet Muhammad’s life and the early development of Islam, including the infamous and long-contested “satanic verses.” The author’s radical reimagining of Muslim history angered communities throughout the world, ultimately resulting in assassinations, riots, disruptions in diplomatic relations and international trade, and the death decree from Ayatollah Khomeini. The world was reminded of the sheer power of literature to provoke and to endanger; Rushdie himself went
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into hiding for several years. If Midnight’s Children increased the visibility of British Asian writing at the beginning of the 1980s, The Satanic Verses exposed its political potential at the decade’s end. The crisis transformed multicultural British writing altogether, raising the visibility of “black British” authors to unprecedented heights while shattering the imagined coherence of the “black British” community. Rushdie’s themes of immigration and exile, assimilation, and intolerance have frequently featured in other British Asian fiction. The protagonist of Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man (1972) mistakenly believes that he’s assimilated so successfully that he’s “more English than the English” (1973 [1972], 72). Only after injustices and attacks from increasingly hostile neighbors does he realize that “I have been transformed into a stranger” (241) – not the magical transmutation of Rushdie’s immigrants, but similar in spirit and effect. In contrast, Hari Kunzru’s debut The Impressionist (2002) features Pran Nath, so gifted at assimilation that he becomes a sort of “everywhere man,” adopting a series of identities ranging from upper-class Indian brat to crossdressed sex worker, Victorian schoolboy, missionary orphan, English university student, imperial anthropologist’s assistant, and African desert nomad. In Britain, his light skin and carefully modulated accent allow him to pass as “Jonathan Bridgeman”; at every turn the young man searches for signs of Englishness to adopt, so that it “sinks a little deeper into his skin” (247). His performance as Jonathan Bridgeman is so convincing that the beautiful and mysterious Astarte Chapel rejects him for being too typical, breaking his heart by telling him that “You’re the most English person I know” (332). In starkly different fashion, Rushdie, Markandaya, and Kunzru each explore the value of assimilation, the construct of an alleged “essential Englishness,” the limits and pitfalls of colonial mimicry. Monica Ali’s hugely successful Brick Lane (2003) perhaps surprisingly touches on similar themes, its protagonist Nazneen exposed to conflicting strategies of adapting to life in east London. An arranged marriage brings the young woman from Bangladesh to Brick Lane. Her husband, Chanu, is often well meaning, but significantly older, generally hapless, and a poor match for her romantic aspirations; Nazneen later finds herself
drawn to the young, handsome, politically active Karim. But Ali’s protagonist observes and adapts, negotiating a London life increasingly on her own terms. Surrounded by characters either determined to preserve Bangladeshi collective identity or determined to assimilate completely, she learns to establish her own rules and expectations. Ultimately she rejects both husband and lover, deciding to stay in Britain with her children. In the novel’s oft-cited closing scene, Nazneen takes the girls ice skating. While one daughter protests that “you can’t skate in a sari,” Nazneen sees potential for her own appropriations of Englishness and Asianness. “This is England,” she replies. “You can do whatever you like” (369). Multicultural British fiction boasts several high-profile female authors – Zadie Smith and Andrea Levy among the most famous – and Brick Lane places Ali at the forefront of women novelists. But while Ali may be the most recognizable name, several others received significant critical attention during the post-Midnight’s Children period. Ravinder Randhawa’s A Wicked Old Woman (1987) has been considered an important early example of feminist British Asian fiction. Its central character, Kulwant, disguises herself as the “wicked old woman” of the title, a masquerade that invites her to explore the unstable nature of identities more broadly. But Kulwant’s wanderings in “old woman” disguise allow Randhawa to introduce a variety of other women, each struggling to come to terms with hybridity, prejudice, and intergenerational conflict. The complicated, interweaving narrative strands include Maya, conducting research on madness in the Asian community for a television documentary, and Rani, who barely survives a brutal attack. Shellshocked and hospitalized, Rani recovers only when the other women “heal” her through collective storytelling. Farhana Sheikh’s unorthodox narrative The Red Box (1991) features Raisa, whose interviews with young female students illuminate prejudice and violence plaguing ethnic minorities in secondary schools. In Atima Srivastava’s Transmission (1992), the female protagonist struggles with the complexities of “second-generation” life, as she prepares a television program about the HIV/AIDS crisis. In a principal plotline of Meera Syal’s Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999), Tania prepares a documentary about contemporary British Asians, starring
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POSTCOLONIAL FICTION OF THE BRITISH SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA
close friends Chila and Sunita. But Tania’s project exposes them in such stark, unflattering light that the film threatens to tear the friendships apart. Writers and audiences have long been acutely aware of the politics of representation, even more so following the scandal of the Satanic Verses affair. Cultural critics have written extensively and forcefully about the lack of representation for minorities in mainstream British media, and the complicated political ramifications of what representations do exist; repeatedly, novelists have explored these issues in their fiction. This concern with self-definition and mainstream access connects Syal to the works of Hanif Kureishi, already famous for 1980s screenplays such as My Beautiful Laundrette. Kureishi’s stature in British ethnic literary criticism nearly rivals Rushdie’s own; Sukhdev Sandhu considers him the most important figure “responsible for dragging Asians in England into the spotlight” (230). Without question, he provides critical insight and exposure to the status and concerns of the Britishborn children of Asian immigrants; in particular, his work illuminates often unexpected distinctions between first- and second-generation experience. “My name is Karim Amir,” the protagonist of The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) begins, “and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories” (1991 [1990], 3). “Not proud” of his Englishness, Karim is hardly “Pakistani” either, mirroring Kureishi’s own insistence that he identifies, first and foremost, as a Londoner. Ranasinha argues that Kureishi’s work “parodies the idea of homogeneous, distinct, racially defined communities” (222). The determined mess of identity in The Buddha of Suburbia – neither expressing nor exploiting nor rejecting ethnicity entirely – places Karim in what Mark Stein has called not simply “post-ethnicity,” but “posedethnicity” (115), employing expected markers of difference on occasion, but undercutting any notion that identity can be confined to race alone. Hence Karim’s acting career, beginning with a disastrously comic turn as Mowgli and ending as token minority soap opera character, parallels his tendency to view ethnicity itself as performance. Like Kureishi, a host of second-generation writers have come to literary prominence; many investigate the oft-called “in-between” or “caught
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between” cultural positions of British-born Asians. Syal’s comic Bildungsroman, Anita and Me (1996), introduces a girl growing up in an intolerant rural England in the 1960s. Nadeem Aslam’s bleak, violent novel Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) explores tensions within British Asian families. As the community in the “Desert of Loneliness” struggles to understand the disappearance of unmarried lovers Jugnu and Chanda, family matriarch Kaukab attempts to come to terms with a country still foreign and hostile, and children even stranger and more hateful. Her efforts to maintain Muslim piety may reflect the stereotype of Asian immigrants, but in this work the younger generation sometimes embraces a still stronger fundamentalism. In this sense, Aslam’s novel echoes a group of texts exploring the rise of radical Islam in British Asian youth. Kureishi’s 1997 story “My Son the Fanatic,” in which a wholly secular Pakistani immigrant becomes horrified at his son’s turn to fundamentalism, now seems hauntingly prescient of the September 11 and July 7 terrorist acts. His second novel, The Black Album (1995), explores similar terrain, its plot largely concerned with youth anger against white Britain generally, and Rushdie’s Satanic Verses specifically. Ali’s Brick Lane community fails to cohere in the wake of September 11 and its own political infighting; in a seemingly life-reflecting-art moment, production of the novel’s film adaptation was suspended in 2006 when some residents protested alleged antiMuslim, anti-Bangladeshi plotlines. In Moshin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), the title character responds to post-9/11 intolerance by joining an activist Islamic organization in Pakistan. Assimilation has proven a consistent key issue for British Asian texts, but its principal terms have changed in the wake of recent global violence; these authors explore the reasons behind the rise of youth-based political activism, and its potential consequences for the body politic. Memory – of home and homeland, of precolonial and pre-independence conditions, of life before England, of the basic tenets of non-Western tradition, religion, and culture – provides fertile territory for British multicultural fiction. In British Asian writing, texts of and about memory tend to take two forms. In one vein, authors look back to particular political periods in subcontinental history. A. Sivanandan’s When
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Memory Dies (1997) charts waves of communal violence inflicted against Tamil minorities in both pre- and post-independence Sri Lanka. Rushdie’s Shame and Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008) reflect on the political power players of post-independence Pakistan, in distinctly postmodern and often damningly satiric fashion. In another vein, exiled characters cast a nostalgic eye back to subcontinental homelands, such as in Sunetra Gupta’s Memories of Rain (1992). In Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef 1994 and The Sandglass (1998), characters’ longing for Sri Lanka remains compromised both by ongoing communal violence and by the gaps, errors, and inventions of memory itself. For Nasta, Gunesekera’s prose suggests “a poetics of diaspora in which return is no longer possible, and the filters of fragmented memory no longer provide an untroubled or celebratory route to an ‘imaginary homeland’ ” (213). As various literary characters and cultural theorists attest, returning home – in memory or in reality – is no longer a simple, viable option. Stuart Hall argues that “Migration is a oneway trip. There is no ‘home’ to go back to. There never was” (1996a [1987], 115). Nor is return necessarily desirable for descendants of immigrants, or those who have fought to immigrate to and to stay in the UK. Markandaya’s protagonist may have found himself “a nowhere man,” but the second and third generations, headed by Kureishi, more frequently position themselves as British, challenging and expanding the very notion of Britishness in their lives and works. Indeed, Kureishi and Kunzru now typically place their fictions outside ethnic communities or questions of difference; far from being “nowhere novelists,” they now seek to explore contemporary Britain more broadly. Thus it may soon be the case that “British Asian fiction” no longer denotes literature about ethnic/cultural identity, or even necessarily about the United Kingdom; as writer after writer achieves prominence, the relatively new field promises even wider audiences and areas of inquiry in the decades ahead. This does not mean, however, that narratives of arrival are a thing of the past; many authors explore the still significant numbers of newcomers, and their determination to remain and prosper. Manzu Islam’s Burrow (2004) concerns an illegal immigrant in contemporary London. Even as authorities close in around him,
he maintains that England “is not as difficult as it used to be. At least we have learnt how to defend ourselves and shout for what is due to us . . . We had to do it because England is all we have by way of a home . . . We will do anything to survive; we’re going to survive” (291). SEE ALSO: Black British Fiction (WF); Colonial Fiction (BIF); Indian Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Pakistani Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the African Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Sri Lankan Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ali, M. (2003). Brick Lane. New York: Scribner’s. Anand, M. R. (1935). Untouchable. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Anand, M. R. (1936). Coolie. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Aslam, N. (2004). Maps for Lost Lovers. New York: Knopf. Desani, G. V. (2007). All about H. Hatterr [1948]. New York: New York Review of Books. Gunesekera, R. (1994). Reef. New York: New Press. Gunesekera, R. (1998). The Sandglass. London: Granta. Gupta, S. (1992). Memories of Rain. New York: Grove. Hall, S. (1996a). Minimal Selves [1987]. In H. A. Baker, Jr., M. Diawara, & R. H. Lindeborg (eds.), Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 114–19. Hall, S. (1996b). New Ethnicities [1987]. In H. A. Baker, Jr., M. Diawara, & R. H. Lindeborg (eds.), Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 163–72. Hamid, M. (2007). The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Orlando, FL: Harcourt. Hanif, M. (2008). A Case of Exploding Mangoes. New York: Knopf. Hosain, A. (1961). Sunlight on a Broken Column. New Delhi: Penguin. Islam, M. (2004). Burrow. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Kunzru, H. (2002). The Impressionist. New York: Dutton. Kureishi, H. (1991). The Buddha of Suburbia [1990]. New York: Penguin. Kureishi, H. (1995). The Black Album. London: Faber and Faber. Kureishi, H. (1996). My Beautiful Laundrette and Other Writings. London: Faber and Faber. (Play originally published 1986.)
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POSTCOLONIAL FICTION OF THE WEST INDIAN/CARIBBEAN DIASPORA
Kureishi, H. (2005). My Son the Fanatic [1997]. In The Word and the Bomb. London: Faber and Faber, pp. 61–74. Markandaya, K. (1954). Nectar in a Sieve. London: Putnam’s. Markandaya, K. (1973). The Nowhere Man [1972]. London: Allen Lane. Nasta, S. (2002). Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ranasinha, R. (2007). South Asian Writers in TwentiethCentury Britain: Culture in Translation. Oxford: Clarendon. Randhawa, R. (1987). A Wicked Old Woman. London: Women’s Press. Rushdie, S. (1981). Midnight’s Children. London: Jonathan Cape. Rushdie, S. (1991). Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Granta. Rushdie, S. (1997). The Satanic Verses [1988]. New York: Picador. Sandhu, S. (2003). London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City. London: HarperCollins. Sheikh, F. (1991). The Red Box. London: Women’s Press. Sivanandan, A. (1997). When Memory Dies. London: Arcadia. Srivastava, A. (1992). Transmission. London: Serpent’s Tail. Stein, M. (2004). Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Syal, M. (1996). Anita and Me. New York: New Press. Syal, M. (1999). Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee. London: Doubleday.
Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/Caribbean Diaspora TIMOTHY WEISS
In the Caribbean, one emigre writer recollects, “you grow up knowing that you’re going to leave” (Philip 230). That seems to be a given for writersto-be of the West Indies/Caribbean basin, whose diaspora includes the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. For the Anglophone Caribbean, London has long served as a de facto cultural capital, and with the post-World War II surge of migration, its West Indian population grew significantly. By 1961 an estimated 172,000 West
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Indians had immigrated to the UK, and by 1981 500,000 people of West Indian background lived there. Diasporic literature begins as a literature of immigration, later becoming a migrating literature constantly reformulating its sense of place and identity. “Migration creates the desire for home, which in turn produces the rewriting of home” (Conde & Lonsdale 1999). In its beginnings, diasporic literature exists on the margins of national literatures, whether British, American, or Canadian; as it evolves from one generation of writers to the next it redefines national spaces and imagines transnational ones. West Indian diasporic literature began with C. L. R. James, who went to England in 1931 to write and publish books. His Minty Alley (1936) is the first West Indian novel published in England focusing on West Indian subject matter and incorporating West Indian dialects. Minty Alley portrays a Port of Spain barrack-yard through the eyes of a middle-class young man, Haynes, who temporarily lodges there. Knowing the world through books and content at first to observe his neighbors from the privacy of his room, he gradually becomes more involved in their lives, sheds his innocence, and enters the fray of color-conscious, sexually charged lower-class Trinidadian society. James was a pioneer – as was E. R. Braithwaite who also emigrated to England in the 1930s and whose To Sir, With Love (1959), both the book and the film (1967), later became an important popular landmark – for it was not until the late 1940s and the arrival of Empire Windrush emigrants that West Indian disaporic literature in Great Britain entered its first, definitive phase. The rubric “Windrush generation” – derived from the troopship/passenger vessel the SS Empire Windrush which began carrying West Indians and other emigrants to England in June 1948, an event that came to symbolize the beginnings of contemporary, multiracial Britain and the reshaping of national identity – designates this postwar migration from the Caribbean (and other former colonies). George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, V. S. Naipaul, and Wilson Harris, as well as lesserknown writers such as Edgar Mittelholzer, Andrew Salkey, Roger Mais, Roy Heath, and Michael Anthony, all immigrated to England in the late 1940s and 1950s. The challenges they faced were daunting given that there existed neither
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publishers nor readers, nor even an established subject matter, for this new literature, but they arrived at a time of literary transition, when their work could be encouraged and supported by institutions such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and publishing houses such as Andre Deutsch, Heinemann, Longman, and Faber and Faber. The radio program Caribbean Voices transmitted sparks from this new literary flame to metropolitan and overseas audiences and became “the single most important literary catalyst for Caribbean creative writing in English” (Wambu 2000). George Lamming, whose novels include In the Castle of My Skin (1953) and The Emigrants (1954), was one important writer whose career the program helped launch. Returning to the rural landscape of his childhood in Barbados in the 1930s and 1940s, In the Castle of My Skin recounts a boy’s growing up in a village where people have little or no knowledge of their history; the novel relates the coming to awareness of the individual and the community in a colony where feudal relations between white landlords and black workers are coming to an end. The Emigrants picks up where In the Castle of My Skin leaves off, tracing the voyage of the young man who has left his native island, traveling with other West Indians to England. The “better break” that each seeks is circumscribed by the barriers they encounter such as difficulty in finding lodging and employment, harassment by police, and their own ignorance of life in Britain. Sam Selvon traveled on the same passenger ship as Lamming from the West Indies to London and composed parts of his first novel, A Brighter Sun (1952), during the transatlantic crossing. His bestknown work, The Lonely Londoners (1956), takes the form of a series of vignettes recounted from the third-person point of view of Moses Aloetta, a Trinidadian immigrant who has lived in London for 10 years and has gotten into the habit of helping new arrivals from the West Indies and Africa get settled there. Its comic elements counterpoint a harsh reality of segregation and racism. During the 1970s and 1980s Selvon continued to reflect on the immigrant experience, tracing his protagonist’s (mis)fortunes and peregrinations in Moses Ascending (1975) and Moses Migrating (1983). V. S. Naipaul and Wilson Harris stand out as the most prolific novelists of the first generation
of West Indian/Caribbean emigres. Naipaul’s novels combine, in a transformative manner, autobiographical and historical elements, and respond to contemporary predicaments and issues – not only in the Caribbean and Great Britain, but in the developing world. Miguel Street (1959), his first written but third published work, portrays an inner-city neighborhood of Port of Spain through the eyes of a boy growing up there, rendering it indirectly through the ironic process of the adolescent’s discoveries, questionings, disillusionment, and eventual departure from the island. The Mystic Masseur (1957) writes a sympathetic yet satiric (fictional) biography of a healer, Ganesh, who rises from his east Indian village origins to become author and intellectual, politician and decorated statesman. The Suffrage of Elvira (1958) looks at politics in rural Trinidad, where narrow ethnic loyalties, jealousies, and philistinism trump processes of democratization. A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) treats the colonial Trinidad of the author’s grandparents and parents, recording a colony’s transition from a rural to an urban, modern society. Although its protagonist is modeled on the author’s father, Biswas’s sense of not belonging is also Naipaul’s. Expatriates, immigrants, and exiles figure in several later novels: in The Mimic Men (1967) Ralph Singh, a middle-aged businessman and self-exiled West Indian politician, writes his memoirs and simmers in his alienation from both Caribbean and London societies. The Booker Prize-winning In a Free State (1971) recounts a journey into disorder in an African country, as does another important novel, A Bend in the River (1979), whose narrator, an immigrant shop owner of Indian Muslim origin, depicts a postcolonial Africa caught in cycles of half-development, deterioration, and destruction. The Enigma of Arrival (1987) has been read as a novel that reconciles an immigrant’s colonial heritage with the socio-cultural changes of post-imperial England, reinterpreting what it means to be British today; it can also be read as an expression of a new transnational identity, explored further in A Way in the World (1994). Wilson Harris is a visionary novelist and theorist whose works draw from Caribbean and South American sources (e.g., Amerindian mythology) as well as the whole Western literary tradition; not only his fiction but also non-fictional works such
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POSTCOLONIAL FICTION OF THE WEST INDIAN/CARIBBEAN DIASPORA
as The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination (1983) have influenced second-generation Anglo-Caribbean writers. Mythopoeic and marvelously real in style and genre, Harris’s fiction engages in a play of opposites – conqueror and conquered, Old and New World, the living and the dead – where all oppositions are shown to be interrelated. A mixture of dream and parable, Palace of the Peacock (1960), part of The Guyana Quartet (1960–3), reimagines a version of the El Dorado myth/legend, with the principal character of Donne and his crew embodying the conquistadores of an earlier epoch. The crew’s journey to the interior of a rain forest recalls Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), yet unlike the latter, the narrative ends not in disillusionment but in celebration and illumination, more like The Divine Comedy, a major influence on Harris who repeatedly makes a point of drawing on literary traditions from around the world as well as on native Caribbean materials. Novels such as The Eye of the Scarecrow (1965), Ascent to Omai (1970), Companions of the Day and Night (1975), The Tree of the Sun (1978), The Carnival Trilogy (1993), and Jonestown (1996) continue Harris’s reimagining of late twentieth-century human identity. Conjuring up the ghosts of tormented Old World–New World history, employing folklore and myth as translational vehicles, Harris’s fiction is above all an art of cross-cultural passages, transformation of consciousness, historical quest, and redemption. During the first half of the twentieth century, Dominican-born Jean Rhys was the only Caribbean woman writer to achieve an international reputation, beginning with The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927) and especially with Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which tells the story of Antoinette Cosway, first wife of Edward Rochester of Charlotte Bront€e’s Jane Eyre (1847), and establishes a model of literary rewriting that later authors would adopt and develop further. The way having been paved by Lamming, Selvon, Naipaul, Harris, and Rhys, from the 1970s through the 1990s a second generation of writers of West Indian/Caribbean background emerged in the UK, and these writers can be discussed from at least three perspectives: women writers, who give us their own accounts of the experience of displacement and their particular shaping of themes introduced by first-generation
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male writers; the predominance of Guyanese writers; and further development of the project of revisioning Caribbean history and exploring contemporary identity, especially with a multicultural, transnational emphasis. Diasporic fiction by women of Caribbean background developed sooner in North America than in the UK, with Brooklyn-born Paula Marshall publishing Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), which recounts the lives of Barbadian immigrants in New York. In the UK, on the other hand, fiction by women writers was absent from the literary boom of the 1950s; it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that novels by women about women’s experiences began to be published. Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey (1970) tells the story of a girl’s growing up in Trinidad, her movement from village to city and the resulting conflicts of moral sensibility that this brings, and her eventual departure for England. Hodge’s novel expands the range of accounts of West Indian childhood, told from male perspectives in Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin, Naipaul’s Miguel Street, and Anthony’s The Year in San Fernando (1965), for example. Guyanese-born Beryl Gilroy emigrated to England in 1952 and belongs to an earlier generation than does Hodge; she published the autobiographical Black Teacher (1976), which chronicles her experience as a black headmistress in a London borough, and after that, novels such as Frangipani House (1986), which portrays an aging woman in a Caribbean retirement home and thus treats indirectly an aspect of emigration that remains in the background: the fate of family and friends the emigrant leaves behind. Jamaican-born Joan Riley’s novel, Unbelonging (1985), examines the plight of black immigrant girls in England, recounting the story of 11-yearold Hyacinth who is bullied at school and beaten and sexually abused at home. The coedited collection Leave to Stay: Stories of Exile and Belonging (Riley & Wood 1996) takes a larger, more varied view of the immigrant experience, demonstrating its multiplicity and richness. Grace Nichols, Janice Shinebourne, and Pauline Melville are three other Guyanese writers who immigrated to or sojourned in the UK. Nichols’s Whole of a Morning Sky (1986) and Shinebourne’s Timepiece (1986) take a female slant in their narratives, each treating a girl’s or family’s movement from
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village to city in Guyana during the struggle for independence in the 1960s. Author and actor Pauline Melville has published short story collections, Shape-Shifter (1990) and The Migration of Ghosts (1999), and a novel, The Ventriloquist’s Tale (1997), combining Amerindian legends with postcolonial, magically real explorations of identity and place. Stylishness and the theme of metamorphosis link the three works: from the space-shifter, who conjures up different manifestations, to the ventriloquist and migrating ghosts, such as a president who returns to a village whose Amerindian inhabitants laugh at a video of his funeral. Melville enjoys turning the tables, poking fun and satirizing; she is at once irreverent and lighthearted. Trinidadian Shiva Naipaul and Guyanan Roy A. K. Heath chart individuals’ desperation and failures in West Indian/Caribbean communities. The deceased, younger brother of V. S. Naipaul, Shiva also attended Oxford where he studied Chinese; equally known as a travel writer, his fiction can be even more caustic and grimmer than his brother’s. Fireflies (1970) and The ChipChip Gatherers (1973) take place in Trinidad; A Hot Country (1983; published in the US as Love and Death in a Hot Country) is set in a fictionalized Georgetown, Guyana, where a million people find themselves “trapped in the sun-stunned vacuum separating ocean from jungle” (5). The realist-naturalist mode likewise distinguishes novels of Heath, who immigrated to England in 1951 and then embarked on a career as a teacher and an attorney, not publishing his first book until 1974. His best-known novels remain The Armstrong Trilogy, comprising From the Heat of the Day (1979), One Generation (1981), and Genetha (1981). Their protagonist, a rough-tempered man with neither backbone nor background, finds himself always somewhat out of control in situations beyond his mastery. Recounting the lives of two generations of a Georgetown family, Heath’s novels chronicle the interplay of caste, class, manners, morals, and passions in twentiethcentury Guyana. In the 1950s and 1960s first-generation West Indian emigre writers in Britain initiated the narratives and themes and carved out creative identities that the second-generation would expand; by the 1980s and 1990s to be writers of mixed or multicultural background from former
colonies had become an advantage. We see the influence of Naipaul, who traveled often and wrote about an array of contemporary issues, and Harris, who was always a bridge builder between continents and traditions and who constantly interrogates the past, on West Indian writers who came into prominence during that period. Like Naipaul, Caryl Phillips has written travel books, essays, and novels – as well as plays and scripts for radio, television, and film. The works of Fred D’Aguiar, poet, playwright and fiction writer, show the imprint of Harris, with their aspects of the marvelously real and their thematic interest in time, memory, and the relationship between the living and the dead. D’Aguiar explores the traumas of history that continue to haunt us and the complexity of the human spirit. The Longest Memory (1994), set in early nineteenth-century America, recounts the story of a slave who is captured after being denounced by his foster father and then whipped to death. “The future is just more of the past waiting to happen,” The Longest Memory begins, and D’Aguiar’s second fictional work, Dear Future (1996), continues an investigation of time, drawing on such disparate sources as Harris and H. G. Wells. Feeding the Ghosts (1997) combines history with the marvelous, turning to the infamous Middle Passage and one recorded incident in 1832–3 of a ship’s captain who jettisoned 130 slaves en route to the West Indies. In D’Aguiar’s imaginative account, one slave thrown overboard, Mintah, manages to cling to the ship, climb back on board, and conceal herself. She gets paper and quills from the captain’s chest – she has been educated in a Dutch mission – and keeps a journal, which is brought as evidence to the trial against the captain later in Britain. Mintah (and D’Aguiar) write to “feed the ghosts,” a moral responsibility to acknowledge that the dead are part of the living and that history is often untold and always unfinished. Another Guyanese-born author David Dabydeen, a scholar, poet, and novelist, writes crafted fiction about diasporic identity. In Disappearance (1993) an immigrant and Afro-Guyanese engineer goes to England to work on a large-scale project to shore up a sea wall in the town of Dunsmere; there he lodges with a middle-aged woman, Mrs. Rutherford, who lived a number of years with her husband in colonial Africa and who introduces her lodger to a bygone England. The novel
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POSTCOLONIAL FICTION OF THE WEST INDIAN/CARIBBEAN DIASPORA
evokes Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival as well as Harris’s The Secret Ladder (1963), although in both cases with a shift of attitude and tone, as if postcolonial themes can no longer be treated in the manner of first-generation writers. The skillfully narrated A Harlot’s Progress (1999) plays against William Hogarth’s series of eighteenthcentury paintings and engravings, imagining the life story of a West Indian slave who appears in Plate 2; the narrative moves in flashbacks from Mungo’s birthplace in Africa to the Americas and England, where he serves, in turn, Lord Montague, a Jew, and a prostitute (i.e., Moll Hackabout, the central figure of Hogarth’s engravings). As an elderly man Mungo dictates his story to a Mr. Pringle of the Committee for the Abolition of Slavery. It may be that postcolonial fiction of the West Indian/Caribbean diaspora, which came about as a result not only of political change but also of post-World War II immigration to the UK and America, has run its course. The extravagances and touches of parody in Melville, D’Aguiar, and Dabydeen suggest an evolving dynamic and a search for new directions. The themes of the first generation, such as coming to awareness in the colony, emigration, and new identity in the metropolis, have transformed into other themes that focus on untold histories and revisionings of history, on multicultural identities, and on human inequalities and injustice, though certainly not limited to the diaspora. Second- and third-generation West Indian/Caribbean diasporic writers will continue to blend into the whole range of fiction written in English as well as present new perspectives on a multicultural United Kingdom and world where the drama of displacement, cultural differences, and transcultural allegiances and identities carries on.
SEE ALSO: Black British Fiction (WF); Colonial Fiction (BIF); Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Globalization and the Novel (BIF); London in Fiction (BIF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the African Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Arnold, A. J. (ed.) (2001). A History of Literature in the Caribbean, vol. 2: English-and-Dutch Speaking Regions. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Braithwaite, E. R. (1959). To Sir, with Love. Bath: Chivers. Conde, M., & Lonsdale, T. (eds.) (1999). Caribbean Women Writers: Fiction in English. New York: St. Martin’s. Cudjoe, S. R. (ed.) (1990). Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Dabydeen, D. (1993). Disappearance. London: Secker and Warburg. Dabydeen, D. (1999). A Harlot’s Progress. London: Vintage. D’Aguiar, F. (1994). The Longest Memory. London: Vintage. D’Aguiar, F. (1996). Dear Future. New York: Pantheon. Gilroy, B. (1976). Black Teacher. London: Cassell. Gilroy, B. (1986). Frangipani House. London: Heinemann. Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Glissant, E´. (1997). Poetics of Relation (trans. B. Wing). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Harris, W. (1960). Palace of the Peacock. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (1963). The Secret Ladder. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (1983). The Womb of Space: The CrossCultural Imagination. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Harris, W., & Bundy, A. J. M. (eds.) (1999). Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination. London: Routledge. Heath, R. A. K. (1979–81). The Armstrong Trilogy, comprising From the Heat of the Day, One Generation, Genetha. New York: Persea. Hodge, M. (1970). Crick Crack, Monkey. Oxford: Heinemann. James, C. L. R. (1936). Minty Alley. London: Secker and Warburg. King, B. (2004). The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 13: 1948–2000: The Internationalization of English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lamming, G. (1953). In the Castle of My Skin. London: Michael Joseph. Lamming, G. (1954). The Emigrants. London: Michael Joseph. Maes-Jelinek, H. (2006). The Labyrinth of Universality: Wilson Harris’s Visionary Art of Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Melville, P. (1990). Shape-Shifter. London: Women’s Press.
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Melville, P. (1997). The Ventriloquist’s Tale. London: Bloomsbury. Melville, P. (1999). The Migration of Ghosts. London: Bloomsbury. Naipaul, S. (1970). Fireflies. Harlow: Longman. Naipaul, S. (1973). The Chip-Chip Gatherers. Harlow: Longman. Naipaul, S. (1983). A Hot Country. London: Hamish Hamilton. (Published in US as Love and Death in a Hot Country. New York: Penguin, 1985.) Naipaul, V. S. (1961). A House for Mr. Biswas. New York: Penguin. Naipaul, V. S. (1967). The Mimic Men. New York: Vintage. Naipaul, V. S. (1971). In a Free State. New York: Vintage. Naipaul, V. S. (1979). A Bend in the River. New York: Vintage. Naipaul, V. S. (1987). The Enigma of Arrival. New York: Knopf. Naipaul, V. S. (1994). A Way in the World. New York: Knopf. Nair, S. (1996). Caliban’s Curse: George Lamming and the Revisioning of History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Nasta, S. (2002). Home Truths: Fiction of South Asian Diaspora in England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nichols, G. (1986). Whole of a Morning Sky. London: Virago. Philip, M. N. (1993). Writing a Memory of That Place [interview]. In J. Williamson, Sounding Differences: Conversations with Seventeen Canadian Women. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Riley, J. (1985). The Unbelonging. London: Women’s Press. Riley, J., & Wood, B. (eds.) (1996). Leave to Stay: Stories of Exile and Belonging. London: Virago. Selvon, S. (1956). The Lonely Londoners. New York: Longman. Selvon, S. (1975). Moses Ascending. New York: Heinemann. Selvon, S. (1983). Moses Migrating. New York: Three Continents. Shinebourne, J. (1986). Timepiece. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Wambu, O. (ed.) (2000). Hurricane Hits England: An Anthology of Writing about Black Britain. New York: Continuum. (Originally published as Empire Windrush: Fifty Years of Writing about Black Britain. London: Gollancz, 1998.) Webb, B. J. (1992). Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction: Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris, and Edouard Glissant. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Weiss, T. F. (1992). On the Margins: The Art of Exile in V. S. Naipaul. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Postmodernist Fiction PAUL CROSTHWAITE
“Postmodernism” is a term commonly associated with fiction published since the 1960s that revives, contests, or reformulates the legacy of formal and stylistic innovation inherited from the “modernist” writers of the early twentieth century. Postmodernism has been perhaps the most significant concept in critical discussions of the novel over the last three decades. As the term makes clear, postmodernism stands in relation to modernism, but the one movement did not simply follow upon the other in consecutive succession. It would be impossible to say when, or even if, modernism “ended,” but it was clear by the end of World War II that the wave of radical experimentation that we now think of as the modernist movement was waning in energy and influence. Lawrence, Ford, Joyce, and Woolf were all dead, while Forster had long since abandoned the novel. Important modernists such as Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, Wyndham Lewis, Flann O’Brien, and Dorothy Richardson continued to work in the postwar period, but all remained, in different ways, marginal to literary culture in the British Isles. Crucially, the network of wealthy patrons, small presses, and avant gardist “little magazines” that had forged the notion of a distinctively “modern” movement in literature, and had positioned this movement as the defining sensibility of the age, had been fragmented and dispersed by the economic and political turmoil of the 1930s and 1940s. The decline of modernism left a vacuum at the forefront of English fiction that would be filled, at least initially, by writers who sought to guide the novel in an aesthetically conservative direction. The foremost novelists of the 1950s and early 1960s – figures such as C. P. Snow, Anthony Powell, Kingsley Amis, Angus Wilson, and William Cooper – actively repudiated the introversion and experimentation of modernism, advocating, instead, realist conventions that harked back to the Victorian and Edwardian periods: an orientation toward the broad panorama of social life; recognizable, authentically rendered settings; neatly drawn characters; chronologically linear narratives; and measured, “transparent” prose, untroubled by syntactical or typographical deviations.
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POSTMODERNIST FICTION
Given the challenges to austerity, authority, and convention that marked Britain and Ireland in the 1960s – the explosion of mass consumerism, the rise of youth culture, the counterculture and anti-Vietnam War movements, the Irish Catholic civil rights struggle, the emergence of second-wave feminism, and the “sexual revolution” – it was inevitable that as the decade unfolded the restored preeminence of realist fiction would come to appear increasingly reactionary and anachronistic. A model for a form of fiction that might adequately channel the disruptive energies of the period came from France in the form of the nouveau roman or “new novel.” Associated with the likes of Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, and, most notably, Alain Robbe-Grillet, the nouveau roman displaced the novel’s traditional concern with character, plot, and theme in favor of a systematic working through of the various permutations of a set of textual units, a strategy that tended to emphasize what Robbe-Grillet called the “the movement of the writing itself.” Such texts would be highly influential for a new generation of British novelists. The novels of this new generation are often categorized as “metafictions,” a term coined in 1970 by one of the form’s chief American exponents, William Gass (1970). Metafiction is not an exclusively postmodernist mode, nor is postmodernist fiction necessarily metafictional, but the self-conscious, self-scrutinizing impulse that characterizes metafiction is a particularly prevalent feature of the postmodernist novel. Metafiction, as the term suggests, denotes fiction that is concerned with its own fictional status or fictionality. Metafictions aim to expose, interrogate, and subvert the established conventions according to which fictional narratives are constructed and construed. The most famous British metafiction, John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), is a pastiche of the Victorian realist novel that openly declares its allegiance with RobbeGrillet and the nouveau roman. In typical metafictional style, Fowles forces his readers to confront the artificial, contrived, and conventionalized status of the traditional novel, reminding them that his characters are pure figments of “imagination,” who have no existence “outside my own mind,” and requiring them to choose between two alternative endings. All the devices
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and mechanisms that realist novelists meticulously conceal in order to construct a believable, consistent fictional world, metafictional writers like Fowles willfully make visible. Fowles’s novel was only the most high-profile manifestation of a renewed experimentalism in British fiction in the mid- to late 1960s and early 1970s; a similarly subversive approach to traditional fiction was evident in the work of Christine Brooke-Rose, John Berger, Brigid Brophy, David Caute, Gabriel Josipovici, and Muriel Spark. The radical, iconoclastic sensibility that animated the work of these writers was taken to a logical extreme by B. S. Johnson, whose texts of the 1960s not only self-consciously signaled the constructedness of their own narratives, but also further resisted the reader’s immersion in the fictional world by directing attention to the book itself as a material artifact: Alberto Angelo (1964) included several pages with holes cut through them, while The Unfortunates (1969) consisted of unbound sections, presented in a box, which could be shuffled and reassembled at random. The work of this group of novelists illustrates particularly clearly the most important difference between modernist and postmodernist fiction. Characteristic features of modernist novels, such as unpunctuated “streams of consciousness” or narratives that present events out of chronological order, draw attention to the style and form of the text, thereby threatening the “transparency” so prized by realism. But they do so, typically, in the pursuit of a more realistic mode of representation than realism itself; realistic, that is, not so much in their delineation of the external realm of objects and social relations, but in their fidelity to the internal, psychological flux of thought, perception, memory, and desire. Postmodernist novels, in contrast, tend to determinedly reject any aspiration toward realism, authenticity, or believability. Instead of attempting to render human experience in a manner that is as “lifelike” and convincing as possible, they overtly remind readers that their characters consist of nothing more than words on a page. These strategies left the postmodernists open to accusations of having intensified modernist fiction’s air of historical disengagement, austere formalism, and solipsistic self-absorption (now focused not so much on the inner worlds of the characters as on the internal functioning of the
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text itself). Younger writers, in particular, began to suggest that the emphasis of the metafictionalists on a formal registration of the upheavals of the period was an inadequate response to contemporary events and the long histories from which they emerged. At the same time as endorsing a more explicit engagement with questions of history and politics, this emerging generation also advocated fiction that, while exploring the parameters of the form, offered readers the pleasures permitted by established techniques of plotting and characterization. Beginning in the late 1970s, this reordering of priorities gave rise to a vibrant seam of hybrid fiction – part innovative, part traditional – which led critics to speak of British “postmodern realism” and postmodern “historiographic metafiction.” The latter term, coined by the Canadian critic Linda Hutcheon (1988; 2002) and developed in the British context by Alison Lee (1990), has proved particularly influential. It describes fiction that concertedly probes the expanses of the historical past – its epic movements, iconic figures, and obscure incidents – while, in a manner consistent with the “postmodern” historiography of scholars such as Hayden White, self-reflexively indicating the impossibility of objectively establishing the facts of the past. Novels such as Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton (1987), John Banville’s Doctor Copernicus (1976), Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990), and Fowles’s own A Maggot (1985) foreground the challenge of reconstructing historical events from contesting narratives, testimonies, and documents that leave the reality of the past “as it was” perpetually obscure. This fascination with the shadowy contours of the historical event has orbited remarkably often around the catastrophes of World War II. In such texts as Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs (1992) and Atonement (2001), Lawrence Norfolk’s In the Shape of a Boar (2000), Graham Swift’s Shuttlecock (1981) and Waterland (1983), and D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981) the devastating upheavals of the 1940s present unique challenges to historical knowledge, prompting characters to pursue the truth of events whose traumatic force ultimately exceeds the claims of representation and understanding. If the actuality of the past was understood to be impenetrable and unknowable in the fiction of the
period, it followed that the author was licensed to envision history as he or she wished. Inspired by the Latin American “magical realist” writers – Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, and Gabriel Garcıa Marquez – who rose to global prominence in the 1960s and 1970s, British and Irish novelists began to blend historically consistent, broadly verisimilar narratives with extravagant, fantastical incidents that transgressed any notion of realism. The uses to which these strategies could be put were various: to reimagine the history of the nation along alternative – liberatory or even utopian – lines; to disturb the instrumental rationality of the imperialist project through the irruption of indigenous traditions of magic and folklore; to signal the spectral, ghostly continuance of the past into the present; or to conceive of wildly subversive constellations of gender, sexuality, and desire. These implications of magical realism operated in different ways and to varying extents in such texts as Banville’s Birchwood (1973), Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984), Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981), Desmond Hogan’s A Curious Street (1984), Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) and The Satanic Verses (1988), and Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion (1987). The broad interest in the past evident in the innovative fiction of this period encompassed a more specific interest in the milestones of literary history itself. A range of important texts, which Peter Widdowson (2006) has dubbed “re-visionary fictions,” appropriated and “rewrote” canonical works of earlier eras: Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) in Sue Roe’s Estella: Her Expectations (1982); Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) in Will Self’s Dorian (2002); Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) in Emma Tennant’s Two Women of London (1989) and Tess (1993); and Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) in Marina Warner’s Indigo (1992). The implications of these texts were ambiguous. On the one hand, they suggested a depersonalization of the act of writing that resonated with the work of French theorists such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva. In an assault on the great author-genius figure of high modernist myth – the author whose destiny it was to bring forth the
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POSTMODERNIST FICTION
radically new work in a heroic act of poiesis – these thinkers argued for the never original – always citational and “intertextual” – status of the literary artifact, which was viewed, in Barthes’s (1977) words, as no more than a “tissue of quotations.” On the other hand, however, these novels could be seen as staging active, engaged interventions in the grand tradition of English Literature, excavating the politically and sexually troubling material submerged by their progenitor texts. For women writers, in particular, this genre of postmodernist fiction offered a means of decentering the masculine and patriarchal perspective inscribed in so many canonical texts. The obtrusive presence in the text of the traces of earlier works – a self-conscious emphasis on its “intertextual” condition – extended far beyond such “re-visionary fictions,” however, emerging as a pervasive feature of the postmodernist novel. The willingness of postmodernist writers from the 1970s onward to utilize many of the tried and tested techniques of fictional realism – while continuing to unsettle the aesthetic, philosophical, and political assumptions embedded in realist novels – was paralleled by a new receptiveness to the forms of “popular,” “genre,” or “mass” fiction (themselves typically realist in style if not content). This tendency is, indeed, often identified as one of the key distinguishing features of postmodernism. Though critics have recently demonstrated the myriad ways in which the activities of modernist writers, critics, and publishers were entangled with the market, it is nonetheless evident that modernists perceived the formally difficult, philosophically sophisticated work over which they labored to exist at a decisive remove from the realm of newspapers, glossy magazines, Hollywood movies, and “potboiler” novels consumed by the vast majority of society. Recent decades, however, have seen an increasing interfusion of the “literary” and the “popular.” This shift toward more accessible forms could be viewed as a mere capitulation to the demands of the mass market, a cynical attempt to shift more copies by adopting commercially proven forms. More generally, it could be interpreted as an expression of what the American Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson (1991) terms “the cultural logic of late capitalism.” As Jameson theorizes it, postmodernism arises from the tendency of contemporary global capitalism to “commodify” all cul-
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tural forms, to reduce them to mere units of commercial exchange. For the likes of Andreas Huyssen (1986), however, the collapse of the distinction between “high” and “low” culture in postmodernism could equally be read as a strategic and progressive move, a challenge to the elitist, often politically reactionary – if not outright fascist – orientation of modernism in the name of a more democratic, inclusive, and pluralistic vision of culture. It is certainly true that the new coupling of literary and popular conventions in this period by no means resulted in a straightforward process of artistic decline or “dumbing down.” On the contrary, the vitality of many mass culture forms opened up productive new possibilities that had not previously been available to the “high art” novel. Texts that staged an intersection with science fiction – such as J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) and Crash (1973), Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977), McEwan’s The Child in Time (1987), and Ian Watson’s Chekhov’s Journey (1983) – offered radically new configurations of subjectivity, gender, sexuality, technology, and temporality. Similarly, postmodernist reinventions of the detective, crime, and “whodunit” genres – as undertaken by the likes of Ackroyd in Hawksmoor (1985) and Martin Amis in Other People: A Mystery Story (1981) and London Fields (1989) – succeeded in foregrounding the inherently philosophical character of such texts: their fixation on questions of knowledge, meaning, truth, and interpretation. Postmodernist novels of the 1980s and 1990s did not merely incorporate the narrative forms and conventions of popular, genre texts. The innovative fiction of the period was also suffused, at the level of content, with the products of mass culture. Not only genre novels, but popular music, film, and television titles, mainstream magazines and newspapers, shopping, consumerism, and advertising, and the styles of club and dance culture circulate through the work of Amis, Jonathan Coe, Toby Litt, Will Self, Alan Warner, and Irvine Welsh. The tendency of such texts to hover indeterminably between complicity and critique in their treatment of the allegedly “degraded,” “vacuous” landscape of mass culture troubled some readers, but the lurid vibrancy of this world undoubtedly helped to invigorate the novel.
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As the first decade of the twenty-first century draws to a close, the condition of “postmodernist fiction” in Britain and Ireland is a paradoxical one. On the one hand, the debates about postmodernism have lost much of the urgency they displayed in preceding decades, new writers are less likely to be discussed in terms of their affiliation, or otherwise, with postmodernist aesthetics, and other problematics, such as postcolonialism and globalization, suggest different ways of thinking about the contemporary novel. On the other hand, however, the influence of postmodernism has been so pervasive that few major novelists to have emerged in recent years do not utilize the repertoire of techniques developed by earlier generations of postmodernists. This influence is particularly clearly visible in the work of A. L. Kennedy, David Mitchell, Toby Litt, Zadie Smith, and Sarah Waters. If, as Jameson, suggests, postmodernism is the “cultural dominant” of late capitalist consumer society, then its fictional manifestations have a long, and perhaps interminable, future. SEE ALSO: The Avant-Garde Novel (AF); Critical Theory and the Novel (BIF); Feminist Fiction (BIF); Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Globalization and the Novel (BIF); Historical Fiction (BIF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ackroyd, P. (1985) Hawksmoor. London: Hamish Hamilton. Amis, M. (1989) London Fields. London: Jonathan Cape. Baker, S. (2000) The Fiction of Postmodernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ballard, J. G. (1970) The Atrocity Exhibition. London: Jonathan Cape. Barthes, R. (1977) The Death of the Author. In Image, Music, Text (trans. S. Heath). London: Fontana, pp. 142–8. Bukatman, S. (1993) Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Byatt, A. S. (1990) Possession. London: Chatto and Windus.
Carter, A. (1984) Nights at the Circus. London: Chatto and Windus. Connor, S. (1997) Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Crosthwaite, P. (2009) Trauma, Postmodernism, and the Aftermath of World War II. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Currie, M. (ed.) (1995) Metafiction. London: Longman. D’haen, T., & Bertens, H. (eds.) (1993) British Postmodern Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Eaglestone, R. (2004) The Holocaust and the Postmodern. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elias, A. J. (2001) Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fowles, J. (1969) The French Lieutenant’s Woman. London: Jonathan Cape. Gass, W. H. (1970) Philosophy and the Form of Fiction. In Fiction and the Figures of Life. New York: Knopf, pp. 3–26. Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell. Heise, U. K. (1997) Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutcheon, L. (1988) A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge. Hutcheon, L. (2002) The Politics of Postmodernism, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Huyssen, A. (1986) After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Johnson, B. S. (1969) The Unfortunates. London: Panther. Lee, A. (1990) Realism and Power: Postmodern British Fiction. London: Routledge. Lyotard, J. F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (trans. G. Bennington & B. Massumi). Manchester: Manchester University Press. McHale, B. (1987) Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen. McHale, B. (1992) Constructing Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Nicol, B. (ed.) (2002) Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Robbe-Grillet, A. (1965) Snapshots and Towards a New Novel (trans. B. Wright). London: Calder and Boyars. Rushdie, S. (1988) The Satanic Verses. London: Penguin.
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POWELL, ANTHONY
Smyth, E. J. (ed.). (1991) Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction. London: Batsford. Stevenson, R. (2004) The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 12: The Last of England? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Swift, G. (1983) Waterland. London: Heinemann. Warner, M. (1992) Indigo; or, Mapping the Waters. London: Chatto and Windus. Waugh, P. (1984) Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London: Routledge. Waugh, P. (1992) Practising Postmodernism/Reading Modernism. London: Arnold. Widdowson, P. (2006) “Writing Back”: Contemporary Re-Visionary Fiction. Textual Practice, 20(3), 491–507.
Powell, Anthony NICHOLAS BIRNS
Anthony Dymoke Powell was born December 21, 1905 in London. His father was a military officer of Welsh and English ancestry, his mother a descendant of Lincolnshire landowners. Powell attended the New Beacon School, a preparatory school in Sussex, and then Eton and Oxford. Though his family had enough money to send him to institutions associated with the upper class, he was not himself of the aristocracy. Powell went to London to work at the Duckworth publishing firm, which produced his first novel, Afternoon Men (1931), a chronicle of jaded, disaffected young Londoners which served as a drily inconclusive generational manifesto for a cohort born in the twentieth century and inured to its disillusionments. Venusberg (1932), his second novel, is set in an unnamed Baltic country, while From a View to a Death (1933), his third, is set among the English landowning class and concerns hunting, transvestism, and social aspiration. Powell’s next novel, Agents and Patients (1936), set in Berlin and England, involves a pair of swindlers and the innocent young man who becomes involved with them. It achieved a new level of perceptive, philosophical comedy. What’s Become of Waring? (1939) is the first novel in which Powell used a first-person narrator. This mystery story about literary forgery set the tone for his mature idiom. But this idiom was not to flower until after World War II, during which Powell served in a
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variety of administrative and military intelligence positions. Powell resumed producing fiction in 1951 with A Question of Upbringing. Whereas his five prewar novels had been short, standalone works heavily reliant on dialogue and without long, meditative passages, this novel announced itself as part of an extended Music of Time sequence (1951–75), later amended to A Dance to the Music of Time. This sequence followed the fortunes of the narrator character Nicholas Jenkins, a man much like Powell himself, through school, university, work, love, and the army. Yet, unlike C. P. Snow’s contemporaneous sequence Strangers and Brothers and Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, after which Powell’s novel sequence is in some ways patterned, Jenkins does not take a major role in the action and is far more intent on observing the behavior of others. Jenkins’s story nonetheless coalesces into one continuous narrative, with a huge array of characters major and minor who pass through the chronicle, often reappearing in situations and places where we least expect them. Three of the figures who reappear most often are Jenkins’s principal acquaintances at school: the sensitive, vulnerable Charles Stringham, the hearty, selfconfident Peter Templer, and the ambitious, opportunistic Widmerpool. Widmerpool is the antihero of the series, who pops up incongruously in various circumstances (in France, at debutante balls, as the fiance of a much older woman), and who represents the values despised in the novels. Widmerpool, who begins as a social outsider, has a need to be on the winning side socially and politically. This leads him to make opportunistic, short-term calculations that often hurt him in the long run. However, Widmerpool is more than an unattractive go-getter; he emerges as a moral monster who will not relinquish his sense for vengeance on Stringham for condescending to him at school. He carries his vengeance even to the point of marrying Stringham’s tempestuous and promiscuous niece, Pamela Flitton, partly to get back at Stringham. Stringham succumbs to alcoholism (although he revives to die heroically in the Japanese camp at Singapore) and Templer goes to his death, perhaps arranged by Widmerpool, on an anti-Nazi military mission in the Balkans. Though Jenkins is personally happy – after an exciting affair with Templer’s sister Jean, he marries Lady Isobel
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Tolland – Widmerpool, who advances rapidly in the army and, later, politics, seems to be presiding over a society where his values increasingly hold sway. Jenkins, though, finds new sustenance in the charming composer Hugh Moreland and the painter Ralph Barnby, whose aphorisms about women pepper the text. Although Moreland and Barnby also die prematurely, the values they represent – a passive, non-assertive trust in art and good character – finally prevail over Widmerpool’s. A Dance to the Music of Time, which ended with Hearing Secret Harmonies in 1975, is notable for the vast reach of its literary and cultural allusions, including not only literature but history, politics, and the visual and performing arts. It has been attacked for covering only one, upper-class, and/ or bohemian stratum of society, although the seventh book, The Valley of Bones (1964), is set largely among middle-class bank clerks who join a Welsh regiment during the war. The accusation of class bias was often a cover for attacks on Powell’s anti-communist viewpoint, which is evident in his work. Even now, some decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Powell’s reputation remains too embroiled in left–right clashes to be impartially judged. Powell’s Journals, written in his seventies and eighties, further consolidate his reputation as having perhaps the most complete career of any British novelist in the twentieth century, having written novels, criticism (he was a respected regular reviewer for the Daily Telegraph), and memoir. Powell died on March 28, 2000 at his home, The Chantry, in Somerset. SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Barber, M. (2004). Anthony Powell: A Life. Woodstock, NY: Duckworth Overlook. Berberich, C. (2007). The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature: Englishness and Nostalgia. Aldershot: Ashgate. Birns, N. (2004). Understanding Anthony Powell. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Joyau, I. (1994). Investigating Anthony Powell’s “A Dance to the Music of Time.” New York: St. Martin’s.
Powell, A. (1931). Afternoon Men. London: Duckworth. Powell, A. (1932). Venusberg. London: Duckworth. Powell, A. (1933). From a View to a Death. London: Duckworth. Powell, A. (1936). Agents and Patients. London: Duckworth. Powell, A. (1939). What’s Become of Waring. London: Cassell. Powell, A. (1951–75). A Dance to the Music of Time. 12 vols. London: Heinemann. Powell, A. (1984). To Keep the Ball Rolling. London: Heinemann. Powell, A. (1990). Miscellaneous Verdicts. London: Heinemann. Powell, A. (1992). Under Review. London: Heinemann. Powell, A. (1995). Journals 1982–1986. London: Heinemann. Powell, A. (2005). Some Poets, Artists, and a Reference for Mellors. London: Timewell. Spurling, H. (1977). Invitation to the Dance. London: Heinemann.
Priestley, J. B. ALISON CULLINGFORD
Essayist, playwright, and broadcaster, J. B. (John Boynton) Priestley was one of the most popular English authors of the mid twentieth century, publishing 29 novels and novellas between 1927 and 1976. Priestley did not consider himself to be a born novelist, finding essays and plays far easier to write: he compared the mental effort of writing a long novel to lifting an elephant off his desk every morning. Nevertheless fiction was the ideal expression for many of his ideas. Enjoying a technical challenge, Priestley experimented with many kinds of fiction: thrillers, medieval whimsy, science fiction, and horror. However, his style remained recognizable. He saw his writing in the comic tradition, admiring authors such as Fielding, Dickens, and Bennett, and embraced what he called “extroversion and breadth and vitality,” as opposed to what he considered to be the critical fashion for “introversion and strangeness and intensity” (1962, 157). Priestley’s settings are mostly contemporary, his casts of characters large, his time scales short. Priestley’s best novels, as he was aware, offered more than just a wellcrafted enjoyable story, deriving emotional resonance by skillfully evoking the prewar
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Bradford so important to him while acknowledging the end of that era. However, Priestley could enrich even the slightest of his fictions with his enthusiasm for magic and the arts, especially the transforming power of music, dreams, and the mystery of time. Born in 1894 in Bradford, a cosmopolitan wool town in the West Riding of Yorkshire, “Jack” Priestley was the son of a socialist schoolmaster. On leaving school, Priestley became a clerk in a wool office, but was keen to be a writer, publishing articles in newspapers, especially the Bradford Pioneer. Priestley served in the British Army in World War I from 1914 to 1919, then studied at Cambridge. Rejecting academia, he moved to London to write for his living, initially as an accomplished essayist and reviewer. His first novel, Adam in Moonshine (1927a), was a light romance of mistaken identity, set in the Yorkshire Dales, his second, Benighted (1927b), a psychological horror tale of stranded travelers taking shelter in a crazy household. Collaborating on an epistolary novel Farthing Hall (1929) with novelist Hugh Walpole freed Priestley financially to write a large-scale picaresque novel, The Good Companions (1929), in which three diverse travelers revive a concert troupe. This heart-warming, lively book delighted readers and made Priestley a household name. It was followed by Angel Pavement (1930), bleaker in tone, which shows the effect on the staff of a furniture firm of a takeover by the dubious Golspies, in a vividly described London. In the 1930s, Priestley’s fiction took second place to his new interest in drama, yet he continued to write novels, bringing his growing social concern, into, for example, Wonder Hero (1933), which depicts the poverty of declining northern town Slakeby. World War II provided new fictional themes, such as the intriguing slice of working life, Daylight on Saturday (1943), about an aircraft factory. Priestley hoped that the war would bring an opportunity to build a better, more equitable society, and his wartime writing, like his inspiring Postscripts radio broadcasts, shines with optimism. Postwar, Priestley wrote one of his finest novels, Bright Day (1946), in which a screenwriter looks back from a meretricious gray present to the golden age of pre-World War I Bradford. Like almost all Priestley’s finest works, it recreates the musical, classless, friendly,
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and comfortable world of his boyhood, in this case going beyond nostalgia to explore disillusionment, through the way in which the enchantment of the Alington family is destroyed. In the 1950s and 1960s, Priestley’s disillusionment with politics and concern about the growth of mass media, which he dubbed Admass, were reflected in satirical fiction, for example, Festival at Farbridge (1951), on the Festival of Britain, and Sir Michael and Sir George (1964), about warring arts administrators. His own favorite novel was The Image Men (1968), in which two disreputable academics set up a public relations institute. He also wrote unsettling short stories and thrillers and revisited 1913 Bradford for another remarkable novel, Lost Empires (1965), in which a young painter joins his magician uncle’s theater troupe. Priestley continued to write fiction until the late 1970s. He died in 1984. After a dip in critical and popular attention to Priestley’s works, with the exception of the best-known plays, the 2000s have seen a great revival of interest, particularly in his discussion of Englishness, his views of social and political conflict, and his complicated attachment to the lost city of prewar Bradford. SEE ALSO: Mystery/Detective/Crime Fiction (BIF); Working-Class Fiction (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Atkins, J. (1981). J. B. Priestley: Last of the Sages. London: John Calder. Braine, J. (1978). J. B. Priestley. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Brome, V. (1988). J. B. Priestley. London: Hamish Hamilton. Cooper, S. (1970). J. B. Priestley: Portrait of an Author. London: Heinemann. Day, A. E. (2001). J. B. Priestley: An Annotated Bibliography with a Supplement. Slad: Ian Hodgkins. Hughes, D. (1958). J. B. Priestley: An Informal Study of His Work. London: Hart-Davis. Klein, H. (2002). J. B. Priestley’s Fiction. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Nelson, M. (1999). The Novels of J. B. Priestley: A Short Guide. Bradford: J. B. Priestley Society. Priestley, J. B. (1927a). Adam in Moonshine. London: Heinemann. Priestley, J. B. (1927b). Benighted. London: Heinemann.
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Priestley, J. B. (1929). The Good Companions. London: Heinemann. Priestley, J. B. (1930). Angel Pavement. London: Heinemann. Priestley, J. B. (1933). Wonder Hero. London: Heinemann. Priestley, J. B. (1937). Midnight on the Desert. London: Heinemann. Priestley, J. B. (1943). Daylight on Saturday: A Novel about an Aircraft Factory. London: Heinemann. Priestley, J. B. (1946). Bright Day. London: Heinemann. Priestley, J. B. (1951). Festival at Farbridge. London: Heinemann. Priestley, J. B. (1960). Literature and Western Man. London: Heinemann. Priestley, J. B. (1962). Margin Released: A Writer’s Reminiscences and Reflections. London: Heinemann. Priestley, J. B. (1964). Sir Michael and Sir George. London: Heinemann. Priestley, J. B. (1965). Lost Empires. London: Heinemann. Priestley, J. B. (1968). The Image Men. London: Heinemann. Walpole, H., & Priestley, J. B. (1929). Farthing Hall. London: Macmillan.
The Publishing Industry: The Rise of the Paperback CLAIRE SQUIRES
The paperback book is an intrinsically twentiethcentury literary and publishing phenomenon, and the story of its rise is central to the modern publishing industry. Portable, disposable, and contemporary, the paperback is more than simply a book published within paper or card covers. It is a mass-market commodity: cheap, accessible, and rendered iconic by the British company Penguin. The paperback is also associated with pulp publishing of sometimes dubious quality, but has been at the vanguard of bringing education and entertainment to a mass readership, overturning censorship and promoting bestseller culture. By the mid-1960s, the Beatles would aspire to be a “Paperback Writer,” in the words of their number one song. The history of paperback publishing begins before the twentieth century, and Penguin’s innovations followed in the path of several earlier publishing companies, both British and Continental. One forerunner of paperback lists was the
cheap reprint series of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The development of the railways and the British educational system brought about new markets composed of commuters and the educated working classes, who were catered for by series such as Routledge’s Railway Library and Hodder and Stoughton’s “yellow jackets.” Such series were hardback in format, but were similar to the later paperback imprint in terms of their content and their approach to new markets. The physical format of the paperback also predated Penguin by centuries. Books with paper covers existed from the early years of printing in the late fifteenth century, and in subsequent centuries books were sometimes produced in the format, allowing individual buyers to have their books bound in matching covers for their libraries. During the mid nineteenth century, the Leipzig-based publisher Tauchnitz started the Collection of British Authors series, which was a close precursor of the modern paperback. Although based in Germany, the paperback series was an English-language list, which continued into the first half of the twentieth century. In 1932, Tauchnitz was joined by another German paperback publisher, Albatross. The physical format, design, and avian colophon (the publisher’s logo), bear close similarity to that of Penguin, which would start up only a few years later. Other British companies also established new cheap reprint publishing in the same period as Penguin, with both Collins and Hutchinson starting lists in 1934 (cloth-bound but priced very modestly at seven pence). Hutchinson in particular encountered strong resistance from booksellers, who were concerned at the much smaller margins and the potential undercutting of the more profitable hardback market. In the 1930s, sixpenny paperback lists were set up by Pearson (genre novels), Newnes (phrasebooks), and Martyn (children’s books). The founder of Penguin Books, Allen Lane, began his publishing career at the Bodley Head in 1919. He was 16 years old, and joined his uncle’s family firm to learn the trade. While there, he most notably published the first British edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1936. Lane’s fame, however, derived from his foundation of Penguin Books in the previous year. The motivations – and inspiration – for the establishment of this new paperback imprint were
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numerous, and historians of publishing dispute the relative importance of the “myths of creation” of Penguin Books (Hare 3). One story is often told of Lane’s journey home to London after a weekend staying with the crime writer Agatha Christie and her husband. The selection of books for sale from the train station was poor and, finding no cheap but good-quality reading material, Lane set about to remedy the situation. Lane discussed his intentions for Penguin in an article in the trade journal The Bookseller a few months before the launch of the first 10 titles in August 1935. The aim of Penguin, he wrote, was to “convert . . . book-borrowers into book-buyers” (Hare 3). Penguin was thus catering to the new reading population of the early twentieth century brought about by successive Education Acts. This population was educated, literate, but not wealthy. In the 1930s, a Penguin paperback was priced at six pence, making it as consumable as a packet of cigarettes, as Lane would often note. The Penguin paperback was therefore conceived as a commodity. This mercantile motivation partly stemmed from the financial difficulties in which the Bodley Head found itself. As well as the more altruistic motivation to provide good reading matter for the new reading public, Penguin was also created to make money for the failing publisher, and the first few books were published as an imprint of the Bodley Head. Lane was concerned, though, that this paperback commodity should have cultural, educational, and informational value. The first 10 titles published in 1935 gave an indication of the mixed approach Lane took. The initial batch included Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Andre Maurois’s Ariel (a life of Shelley), and detective novels by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Lane had acquired the rights for the initial list from several hardback publishing houses (including the Bodley Head, Jonathan Cape, and Chatto), sometimes in the face of skepticism about his aims. Despite this skepticism – and the high targets that Penguin needed in order to make its low-cost model work – the initial list took off. Another founding myth of Penguin is that the buyer’s wife from the general retailer Woolworth’s influenced the chain’s decision to place a high order of the books, when the buyer himself was unconvinced, thinking the books too upmarket for
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his customers. Whatever the truth behind this story, Woolworth’s stocked the books in great quantity, the titles achieved heavy sales through conventional bookshops, and Penguin also initiated a series of innovative sales channels including the “Penguincubator,” a purpose-built slot machine. Penguin was not an innovator of the paperback format, but what was innovatory was its combination of the format, its sales, distribution, and marketing strategies, its design principles, and its choice of content. From the beginning, Penguin presented to its readers a consistent, color-coded design that encouraged recognition and brand awareness – orange for general fiction, green for crime, dark blue for biographies. The developing lists included a wide selection of texts: new writers, middlebrow crime, travel, biography, and then later the Penguin Classics, the Specials (pamphlet-type books on current political issues, particularly attuned to the circumstances of the 1930s and 1940s), and Puffin children’s books. Penguin’s paperbacks were books of quality, but with a distinctly mass-market approach and appeal. During World War II, Penguin benefited from its comparatively generous paper ration; and it is during this time that it became “a cherished institution” (MacKenzie 251), publishing not only the Penguin Specials, but also working with the government to produce the Forces Book Club and books for prisoners of war, as well as more generally providing information and light relief for a nation at war. Some years after the war came Penguin’s most iconic moment, and one that was intrinsically bound up in the history of the paperback book. Lane decided to publish an unexpurgated edition of D. H. Lawrence’s sexually explicit Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) as a Penguin paperback. Lane delivered copies of the books to the police, and it became in 1960 the first test case of the new Obscene Publications Act. Penguin amassed a range of witnesses in defense of the book, including writers, academics, and religious figures. In the opening address by the prosecution, it was clear that the provocation was in its format and availability. The question posed by the prosecution to the jury of whether they would wish their children, wife, or servants to be able to read the book demonstrated that this was not an issue of
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content per se, but of access to content. This access was facilitated by the cheap and readily available format of the paperback book. Penguin won the trial unanimously, and went on to sell millions of copies of the book. When Penguin floated on the stock market in 1961, shares in the company were popularly called “Chatterleys,” and Philip Larkin later immortalized the trial in poetry, as a moment which heralded the new world of the 1960s. The paperback book, particularly in the shape of the Penguin, thus entered the public consciousness as thoroughly modern and accessible. Following the early success of Penguin, other companies in both the UK and the US followed its model. In America, Pocket Books was established in 1939, closely followed by Avon Books in 1941. Pocket Books brought a law suit against Avon for “plagiarism of format,” but lost (Flower 17). The paperback format was already well established by both Penguin and its forebears, and the ensuing years would see further companies take it up. In Britain, Pan Books was founded in 1944, and Corgi in 1951. By the late 1950s, in a speech on the topic of the past, present, and future of paperback books, Desmond Flower identified that over 30 companies were operating paperback lists in Britain, and that in 1958 three paperback publishers alone had produced between them 22 million books (Flower 20–1). Common elements in paperback publishing emerged. Apart from Penguin, which – following a substantially enlarged edition of George Bernard Shaw’s An Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism and Sovietism – published original titles as well as books previously offered as hardbacks elsewhere, most paperback lists operated by buying reprint rights from other companies, or by republishing its existing hardback books in paperback format. This pattern is still to a large extent retained, though “paperback originals” of the 1970s moved away from this convention. Publishers in the late twentieth century continued to publish initially in hardback to fulfill market expectations and the practices of literary journalists, who traditionally prioritized reviews of new hardback publications. By the beginning of 2007, however, the literary imprint Picador – which had initially been set up as a paperback list before turning to hardback publication as well – announced that it would publish most of its titles
simultaneously in both hardback and paperback, with a minimal hardback print run. This announcement occasioned much debate in the trade media, demonstrating the controversy that the paperback format, and challenges to conventional publishing practices, still causes. In the early years, Penguin’s covers consisted only of the color bands, typography, and the Penguin colophon. In America, Pocket Books and Avon used illustrations, and in order to compete in the 1940s, Penguin USA followed suit long before its British parent company turned to illustrated covers in the 1960s. In Britain, Pan and Corgi also used pictorial and then photographic covers. The reluctance of the British Penguin to turn to the pictorial derived from different motivations: a strong sense of the overall Penguin brand, on the one hand, but also Allen Lane’s distaste for what he referred to as “bosoms and bottoms” – paperback books whose covers made their appeal, he felt, through titillation (MacKenzie 253). Penguin’s insistence on somberly designed covers, and content of a certain quality, set it apart from and above the mass of other developing companies, and a more downmarket idea of what the paperback could be. The paperback was the medium for postwar pulp – or “mushroom” – publishing. Beginning in the postwar decade, this publishing trend boomed in the 1950s when paper rationing eventually ended after wartime restrictions. The US market heavily influenced content, which was dominated by gangster novels, science fiction, westerns, crime and “racy” novels whose covers often promised more than they actually delivered. In Britain, publishers included Federation Press, Gramol Publications, Phoenix Press, R. and L. Locker, Modern Fiction Ltd., and Scion Ltd. In terms of their swift production processes and lack of reprints these companies were more closely allied to the magazine and comic publishing industries than traditional book publishing, although what they produced were short paperback novels. The length of the books was tightly controlled, typically at 36,000–40,000 words. Authors were paid on a 1,000-word fee basis, and frequently wrote under pseudonyms with several writers producing material for one “author.” The gangster novels of “Hank Janson” – who also is a character in some of his own books – sold
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over 20 million copies between 1946 and 1971. The enormous success of such publications, and their occasionally risque nature, did not evade the notice of the law. In 1954, Janson’s publishers were taken to court for obscene libel over the seven titles Accused, Auctioned, Persian Pride, Pursuit, Amok, Killer, and Vengeance. The prosecution resulted in a fine and six months’ imprisonment for the publishers, and book destruction orders, and bookshops were also prosecuted for stocking some of the output of the mushroom publishers. Paradoxically, however, the British government bought copies of Hank Janson books for distribution to the Forces. In the 1950s, further pulp publishers were repeatedly taken to court because of their publications, leading to subsequent bankruptcies and the slowing of the pulp market. The broader paperback market went from strength to strength. Mainstream paperback publishers incorporated genre fiction into their lists in the postwar decades – a third of Penguin’s titles in the 1960s were crime – and established genre specialists such as the romance publisher Mills & Boon moved from hardback into paperback publication in the same period. The paperback could be said to have evolved in the 1930s, but its modern, truly mass-market identity arrived in the 1960s. In the postwar period, developments in graphic design and photography, and the paperback’s ability to reflect a broad range of reading tastes and multimedia synergies, including television and film tie-in editions, firmly established its modern credentials. Title output statistics alone demonstrate the growing dominance of the paperback market: at the beginning of the 1960s, under 6,000 titles were published in the format, whereas a decade later production had risen to 37,000 titles per year. By the end of the century, approximately 60 percent of title output was in the paperback format, rising from 30 percent in 1975. In the 1960s, Penguin and Pan were both selling around 20 million copies a year (Stevenson 137–8). Such high figures emphasize the economic, social, and cultural force of the paperback book. The paperback is, arguably, a democratic publishing medium. It has a low price point, is typically produced in large print runs, is distributed via diverse sales channels (from traditional bookshops to newsagents and supermarkets), and
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thus enables readers to access easily a wide range of subject matter both fiction and factual – including, as the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial demonstrated, controversial content. The idea of paperback democracy thus extends beyond the mechanisms of pricing and distribution strategies to encompass a broader sense in which growing access to book consumption lowers “conventional barriers around reading” (Stevenson 141). More than ever before, book readers were also book owners, echoing Lane’s formulation on the foundation of Penguin. People had the intellectual and economic means to own and consume books, radically democratizing the marketplace. The price, production values, and relative availability of books also meant that books became more portable, more readily damaged, and more liable to be disposed of. The “airport novel” and the “beach read” are products bought for temporary entertainment, stuffed in suitcases, covered in sand and suntan cream, and liable to be left behind in hotels, or given away at the end of a journey to a charity shop. The aura of the book might thus have been diminished, but its cultural reach was extended. Alongside the rise of the paperback book, particularly from the 1960s onward, there has also been a development of a culture of marketing which reached an apogee at the end of the century. The large print runs of the paperback novel are directly linked to a publishing industry structured around a promotional culture and bestseller lists. Release times of paperbacks are carefully calculated to tie in with literary prizes, seasonal sales spikes, and film or TV adaptations, and to optimize media opportunities. After the abandonment of the price-regulating Net Book Agreement in 1995, discounting became common practice in chain and online retailers, with the highest-selling paperbacks primarily marketed through front-ofstore promotions in three-for-two and other price offers. For some cultural critics, this was a step too far, with the paperback leading literary culture from a democratic into a highly commercialized marketplace. For many others, it is the logical conclusion of Allen Lane’s idea. For in the twentyfirst century, despite numerous competing media, the paperback novel still sells in the millions, confirming Lane’s “hope – and hunch” that paperback publishing on the Penguin model “is
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capable of great expansion, and will increasingly make knowledge more accessible” (Flower 6). SEE ALSO: Censorship and the Novel (BIF); The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Eliot, S., & Rose, J. (eds.) (2007). A Companion to the History of the Book. Oxford: Blackwell. Feather, J. (2006). A History of British Publishing, 2nd edn. Abingdon: Routledge. Flower, D. (1959). The Paper-Back: Its Past, Present and Future. London: Arborfield. Hare, S. (ed.) (1995). Penguin Portrait: Allen Lane and the Penguin Editors 1935–1970. London: Penguin. Holland, S. (1993). The Mushroom Jungle: A History of Postwar Paperback Publishing. Westbury: Zeon. Lewis, J. (2005). Penguin Special: The Life and Times of Allen Lane. London: Viking. MacKenzie, R. (1991). Penguin Books. In J. Rose & P. Anderson (eds.), British Literary Publishing Houses, 1881–1965. Detroit: Gale, pp. 251–61. McAleer, J. (1999). Passion’s Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCleery, A. (2007). The Paperback Evolution: Tauchnitz, Albatross and Penguin. In N. Matthews & N. Moody (eds.), Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 3–17. Morpurgo, J. (1979). Allen Lane: King Penguin. London: Hutchinson. Princep, B. (1991). Pan Books Limited. In J. Rose & P. Anderson (eds.), British Literary Publishing Houses, 1881–1965. Detroit: Gale, pp. 244–5. Rolph, C. (ed.) (1961). The Trial of Lady Chatterley. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Schmoller, H. (1974). The Paperback Revolution. In A. Briggs (ed.), Essays in the History of Publishing. London: Longman, pp. 283–318. Squires, C. (2005). Novelistic Production and the Publishing Industry in Britain and Ireland. In B. Shaffer (ed.), A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945–2000. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 177–93. Squires, C. (2007). Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Stevenson, R. (2004). The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 12: 1960–2000: The Last of England? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sutherland, J. (1978). Fiction and the Fiction Industry. London: Athlone.
Sutherland, J. (2002). Reading the Decades: Fifty Years of the Nation’s Bestselling Books. London: BBC. Williams, W. (1973). Allen Lane: A Personal Portrait. London: Bodley Head.
Pym, Barbara MICHAEL COTSELL
The English novelist Barbara Pym was born in 1913 and was brought up in Oswestry, a small town in Shropshire. Her childhood was happy. The family was church-going and the Church of England, both in its inhibitions and absurdities, is a presence in all her work. She attended a girls’ boarding school and then went on to study English at Oxford. Her love of English poetry is evident in her work, which is rich in literary allusion. Her fiction is often concerned with women who are “educated, upper middle class, mildly scholarly” (Rossen 21), people on the fringes of academia. At Oxford she fell in love but was rejected. Though she continued to enjoy a busy romantic life, Pym at this time appears to have chosen the life of a single woman and author over marriage. In the late 1930s and early 1940s she wrote a number of early unpublished works, some of which were published after her success was assured (Crampton Hodnet, 1985; Civil to Strangers and Other Writings, 1987). During World War II she was a Wren (member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service). In 1946 she took employment at the International African Institute where she worked until her retirement in 1974. Jane and Prudence (1953) is set in a village but suburban London is more typically the setting of her novels. Anthropology increasingly interested her and from Less than Angels (1955) on the world of anthropology became almost as important to her fiction as the church. Some Tame Gazelle (1950), a novel centered on a pair of comic spinsters based on herself and her sister, Hilary, was her first success and led to a succession of remarkable works in the 1950s. Excellent Women (1952), now a Penguin Classic – in which Mildred, the self-effacing spinster who is the narrator, declares, “I suppose an unmarried woman just over thirty, who lives alone, and has no apparent ties, must expect to find herself
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PYM, BARBARA
involved or interested in other people’s business, and if she is also a clergyman’s daughter then one might really say there is no hope for her” (5) – is widely regarded as her most successful work. It was followed by Jane and Prudence, a tale of two women, one married, the other not; Less than Angels; and A Glass of Blessings (1958), her Emma, in which the heroine is gently humbled after she falls for an obvious homosexual. Her heroines are enormously likable even when they become, as she intends, frustrating to others or themselves. Love in her work is an elusive necessity, yet women are often hesitant or subtly selfish, and men are overbearing and egotistical, but also weak. Her women are often in love but satisfactory resolutions for romance are hard to come by. What emerges in her work is a presentation of frequent deprivations, lack of appreciation, unsatisfied longings, triviality, unexpected rewards, hopefulness, poetry, and rich humor. Her dialogue is deft and her character’s voices subtly differentiated. Her ability to evoke the unspoken between characters is particularly adept. There is an uncomfortable conversation about shared bathrooms between a male and female tenant in Excellent Women, which may stand for her subtle evocation of the body as much as does her sexual humor (male characters in her works have such names as Rockingham or “Rocky,” Fabian Driver, Piers Longridge, and Everard Bone). Though she continued writing, Pym failed to find a publisher between 1963 and 1977. She was then identified by Lord David Cecil and the poet Philip Larkin as the most underrated writer of the century. She went on to enjoy a revival and a correspondence and friendship with Larkin, whose influence on her later work is clear. She could now publish Quartet in Autumn (1977), a touching and compassionate study of four retirees adrift in London, and The Sweet Dove Died (1978), a harsher depiction of contemporary sexual life. Her last novel, A Few Green Leaves (1980), set in the village where she lived in her retirement, is a gentle, saddened work which has been said to be about “the passing of the gentry as an influence on local lives” (Shulz 116). She died from cancer in 1980.
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Pym’s legacy lies in her achievement in proving that the novel of the comedy of manners – the novel in the tradition of Jane Austen and Trollope’s Barchester novels – was relevant to modern English life. Her sensitivity to domestic life and particularly to the lives of women has been echoed in the fiction of a number of her contemporaries. What Larkin called her “plangent qualities” and her fine comedy are likely to ensure a future for her work. REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Cotsell, M. (1989). Barbara Pym. London: Macmillan. Holt, H. (1990). A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym. London: Macmillan. Lenckos, F. E., & Miller, E. J. (eds.) (2003). “All This Reading”: The Literary World of Barbara Pym. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Liddell, R. (1989). A Mind at Ease: Barbara Pym and Her Novels. London: Peter Owen. Pym, B. (1950). Some Tame Gazelle. London: Jonathan Cape. Pym, B. (1952). Excellent Women. London: Jonathan Cape. Pym, B. (1953). Jane and Prudence. London: Jonathan Cape. Pym, B. (1955). Less than Angels. London: Jonathan Cape. Pym, B. (1958). A Glass of Blessings. London: Jonathan Cape. Pym, B. (1961). No Fond Return of Love. London: Jonathan Cape. Pym, B. (1977). Quartet in Autumn. London: Macmillan. Pym, B. (1978). The Sweet Dove Died. London: Macmillan. Pym, B. (1980). A Few Green Leaves. London: Macmillan. Pym, B. (1982). An Unsuitable Attachment. London: Macmillan. Pym, B. (1984). A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters (ed. H. Holt & H. Pym). London: Macmillan. Pym, B. (1985). Crampton Hodnet. London: Macmillan. Rossen, J. (1987). The World of Barbara Pym. London: Macmillan. Salwak, D. (ed.) (1987). The Life and Work of Barbara Pym. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Schulz, M. (1987). The Novelist as Anthropologist. In Salwak (1987), pp. 101–19.
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Q Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction HOWARD J. BOOTH
The twentieth century in Britain and Ireland saw dramatic changes for homosexuals and those who did not identify with traditional gender roles. Initially the law, medicine, and culture defined such people in predominantly negative ways. In time more positive views of sexual and gender difference began to circulate, and reform campaigns gathered force. The closing decades of the century saw male homosexual behavior largely decriminalized and non-normative gender and sexual identities gaining new legal rights. Further, the framework that had come into being in the second half of the Victorian period began to be dismantled. Fiction reflected the changes through this whole period, with many authors seeking to use their writing to influence debates on sexuality and gender identity. The trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895, and his imprisonment, had linked homosexuality and the figure of the artist in the public mind. In the following years the environment for male “homosexuals” – the medical term and the identity associated with it were of late Victorian provenance – was harshly repressive. Lesbianism was not illegal, but was held in place by many of the same forces as male homosexuality. Writing fiction about homosexual experience was always going to be a challenge. Literary forms and a language would need to be developed to represent it. Authors who wanted to change attitudes had to find ways of expressing themselves without
arousing a negative response from the newspapers and the authorities. Publishers, bookshops, and libraries had to be located that were willing to produce and distribute such fiction. The texts that appeared were sometimes expurgated or available only to the few able to pay a high price. Even then some were withdrawn from sale or banned. As Gregory Woods noted, what fiction there was after the Wilde trials addressing non-normative sexuality usually ended tragically, either in death or in capitulation to social norms that offered nothing (Woods 217). In many of these texts the language of degeneration was used. Conditions of modern living, it was held, meant that those who would not have lived to have children in the past were now breeding. A range of “abnormalities” was said to result, where sexual “deviance” was one form they could take. While Howard Overing Sturgis had, in his novel Tim (1891), addressed youthful romantic friendships, his 1904 novel Belchamber centers on Sainty, Lord Belchamber, who is weak and permanently lamed after a riding accident. Though well intentioned, others bend him to their will. As Noel Annan remarked, in Belchamber “Sturgis described a world in which love cannot exist” (Annan, p. viii). When E. M. Forster came to draft his novel about homosexual maturation, Maurice (1971), between 1913 and 1914, he resolved to reject a tragic trajectory. Urged on by his then mentor, the socialist and homosexual rights campaigner Edward Carpenter, Forster resolved on a happy ending. The novel sees a failed relationship with Clive Durham that involves male–male intimacy and is conducted under the influence of Clive’s
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reading of Plato. This is followed by a sexual relationship across class boundaries with the gamekeeper on Clive’s estate, Alec Scudder. Forster differs from the Ulster writer Forrest Reid who sought to align idealized, age-asymmetrical relationships and nature. The successful relationship not only offers fulfillment for Maurice, but it also shows how a divided England can be made whole. A traditional marriage plot novel is recast for a homosexual relationship, though this poses challenges for the writer given the initial loneliness and isolation of the main character; the novel’s symbolism has to carry much of the meaning. Forster returned to Maurice a number of times in later years to make revisions. The text could not have been published before the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 allowed a defense of artistic merit. It could perhaps have appeared in the 1960s, but the elderly Forster gave permission for the novel to be published only after his death. His achievement can be fully understood only when the context in which Maurice was first written is kept in mind. Frederick Rolfe, the self-styled Baron Corvo, also wrote a text with a happy ending, albeit by recourse to an improbable plot twist. An outsider, he has fascinated many down the years, including A. J. A. Symons, whose Quest for Corvo (1934) is a classic of experimental biography. Rolfe’s novel The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole (1993; finished in 1910, but first published in a heavily expurgated form in 1934) takes its title from Plato’s Symposium to suggest an intense, complementary union between the main character Nicholas Crabbe and a young boy, Zildo. In the closing pages it is acknowledged that the boy is in fact a girl. Crabbe and Gilda can marry and the relationship can become sexual. Though the plot creaks and groans, it allows Rolfe to address sexual and gender ambiguity. Maurice refuses to engage with the two main models of the time for explaining homosexuality. One, as already mentioned, was degeneration. The other was that one had, in order to desire someone of the same sex, really to be a member of the other sex at some underlying psychological or physical level. This model was dominant in the representation of women who desired women in the modernist period. The major lesbian novel was Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, which appeared – and was promptly banned after an
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obscenity trial – in 1928. That the view taken of homosexuality was crucial to how texts were regarded by the legal authorities can be shown by what happened to Compton Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Women, which was published in a limited edition that same year. It addressed expatriate lesbians on the island of Capri and suggested that a lesbian relationship would never last; its subtitle is “Theme and Variations.” Mackenzie’s novel of the year before about the male homosexual colony on Capri, Vestal Fire (1927), linked homosexuality to degeneration. His texts, though, were not banned; it seems that the view taken of homosexuality was important to whether proceedings were initiated. In Ireland, Molly Keane also depicted homosexuality while denying it a positive outcome in Devoted Ladies. The Well of Loneliness follows the early life of Stephen, addressing her sense of being different. Instead of accepting the norms of feminine behavior she wants to do things that are normally seen as male. She is an “invert” attracted to feminine women. As a piece of writing it has often been criticized, and its bleak ending suggests that Stephen can never experience lasting, reciprocated love. However, the novel has been important to generations of lesbians, and in the last decade has received renewed attention from queer historians and theorists of gender. They have pointed to its complex investigation of individual response to models of twentieth-century gender and sexual identity. Such attributes can also be found in Hall’s other fiction, for example in her short story “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself.” The discourses that connected gender and sexuality were taken into the new, modernist forms of writing. In Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), the main character at the center of the day’s events in Dublin is the deeply human Leopold Bloom. He is described at one point as a “new womanly man.” While he is heterosexual he is depicted as being between the sexes, and being the better for it. Woolf’s novel Orlando (1928), in the popular 1920s form of the fantasy novel, has a span of three and a half centuries. It was written for Vita Sackville-West, and was described by her son Nigel Nicolson as “the longest and most charming love-letter in history” (Nicolson 201). Orlando is a young man at the court of Elizabeth I, and ends the text as a woman aged 36 in the year of the
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novel’s publication. Orlando seeks to detach gendered identity and selfhood from physical characteristics. Woolf explored issues of lesbian desire and bisexuality as a sub-theme in other novels. For example, in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Clarissa remembers her youthful, intense relationship with Sally Seton, before both of them got married. She sees the same pattern being repeated for her daughter, Elizabeth, who is involved with Miss Kilman. A concern with gender roles, desire, and the pressure to conform is found in an intense form in the writing of D. H. Lawrence. He both represented male–male intimacy – for example in the “A Poem of Friendship” chapter of his first novel The White Peacock (1911) – and subscribed to the prevailing view that what sexuality and relationships had to offer was reserved for sex with members of the opposite sex. Over time, Lawrence became increasingly vigilant in his treatment of non-normative forms of sexuality. The “Shame” chapter of The Rainbow (1915) moves from depicting the attraction of a relationship between two women to sharply condemning their relationship, as the chapter title suggests. There was also, as Lawrence’s short novel The Fox shows, a tendency to see as threatening women who took on masculine roles. Other writers of the period, outside the traditional modernist canon, made significant interventions on “other” sexualities. Ronald Firbank has long had his champions for his heady combination of modernist play and extreme aestheticism, in texts such as Valmouth (1919) and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926). In Dawn’s Left Hand (1931), the tenth part of Dorothy Richardson’s multipart modernist text Pilgrimage, a triangular relationship emerges as Miriam starts a relationship with a married man but is also aware of her intense feelings for another woman, Amabel. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s first and most popular novel, Lolly Willowes (1926), is, like Orlando, in the genre of the fantasy novel. Its main character is at once a young woman of the 1920s and a witch able to move beyond conventional social constraints. Warner’s 1927 novel Mr. Fortune’s Maggot, set on a Pacific island, brilliantly explores the relationship between colonialism and masculinity. The novel depicts the relationship between the missionary Timothy and a young boy, Lueli. At the end, Timothy realizes
that true love would best be expressed by his leaving and that what he brings to the remote island as a Western man only does harm in the long run. Warner had written incisively as a critic on Jane Austen, and her final novel, The Flint Anchor (1954), tells the story of John Barnard, who lives from 1790 to 1863. It explores the tensions and pressures around aging, gender roles, and sexuality that Austen’s texts often elide. In the 1930s and 1940s a return in the English novel to realism coincided with a shift toward recording the emerging urban subcultures. There was a stress on social interaction involving homosexual characters rather than on maturation and early relationships. The Berlin novels of Christopher Isherwood set out to observe 1930s bohemian life in the capital of the Weimar Republic. The effort to create a detached, camera-like observer insulated the writer from his novels’ references to homosexuality, which are anyway few and cautious. The Thirties Generation of writers retreated from direct involvement in homosexual politics; political writing was held to be bad art. Isherwood’s writing in his later, American phase was more direct, and he returned to his Berlin years in his moving Christopher and His Kind (1976). Though a memoir, it draws on the techniques of fiction; for example, the author depicts his earlier self as a character called “Christopher.” World War II brought together people from different backgrounds. Many lived for the present, no longer held by old moral codes because they feared that there might not be much in the way of a future. The Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen’s short stories “Mysterious Koˆr” and “The Happy Autumn Fields” explored the possibilities the war opened up for female intimacy. The characters in the fiction of the short-lived Denton Welch (1915–48) make a period of uncertainty into one of male–male erotic possibility. Mary Renault’s Charioteers, published in 1959, is a sensitive and acute study of a small group of men during World War II. Renault’s historical novels set in classical times, beginning with The Last of the Wine (1956), both constructed worlds where attitudes to human relationships and sexuality were radically different and invited powerful feelings of identification from their readers. Ireland entered the twentieth century with the same legal and medical context as Britain with respect to homosexuality; what was different was
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the stronger, more proscriptive role of religion in the form of the Roman Catholic Church and – mainly in the North – Presbyterian Protestantism. A nationalist line of writing, initiated by Oscar Wilde, sought to unsettle the interconnections in British discourse between masculinity, morality, and the power of the nation. This was developed by writers of the Celtic Revival. After partition and independence, attitudes to gender and sexuality in Ireland became more proscriptive. This is common in postcolonial contexts, and writers adopted a range of responses. For example, Edith Somerville and Martin Ross (whose real name was Violet Martin), the authors of the “Irish RM” novels, excluded the erotic from their texts, displacing it onto the depictions of the Irish countryside and the chase of the hunt. Kate O’Brien was the most outspoken and brave of Irish lesbian writers, though she was marginalized. O’Brien set novels such as Mary Lavelle (1936) and That Lady (1946) in Spain; her readers were encouraged to draw parallels with modern Ireland. In Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, homosexuality was represented more and more in fiction. It was explored in relation to other issues of the day, such as the limits of liberalism (in the novels of Angus Wilson) or decolonization (in, for example, Simon Raven’s The Feathers of Death, 1959). The agenda was set by the gathering campaign for decriminalization. Compton Mackenzie’s Thin Ice (1956) argued for law reform on the basis that the existing law encouraged blackmail; discourses of degeneration were, however, still to the fore in his fiction. The Wolfenden Committee’s report of 1957 into homosexuality and prostitution advocated partial decriminalization, which came for England and Wales only in 1967, though prosecutions went up in the years that followed as the police felt they had a law they could enforce more effectively. The Stonewall uprising in New York in 1969, when gays subjected to a police raid turned round and fought back, became the symbolic event when an open, unapologetic homosexual identity started to be asserted worldwide. Male homosexuality was not decriminalized in Scotland until 1980, and in Northern Ireland until 1982. The Republic of Ireland legislated in 1983. In 1980s Britain, the initial gains of the 1970s came under severe threat. The negative attitudes of the Conservative government and the popular press were seen in particular in the response to the
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AIDS crisis. The short stories of Adam Mars-Jones, in Monopolies of Loss (1992) and The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis (with Edmund White, 1987), probed its impact on lives, social networks, and the gay community. New literary and theoretical approaches were also emerging in these years. Lesbian and gay studies began to focus on how sexual identities were made and constructed – not born: homosexuality was not something that had been discovered in the late nineteenth century but had always existed; rather it was a medical and legal category produced in a specific Western historical moment. The realization that terms like “homosexual,” “lesbian,” and “gay” were perhaps limited by that specific context led to the advent of the queer movement, which can be said to have begun around 1990. For long a term of abuse, the word “queer” was reappropriated as a term for what lay outside or troubled the definitions of sexology and discourses of power. It came at a time when the conventions of the short, limited postwar realist British novel were giving way. The new possibilities found in narrative in postmodernist fiction made for a new wave of British and Irish lesbian and gay writing. Queer fiction has perhaps taken two main forms. One has been to “queer” the past, including the recent past, to re-examine earlier experience and writing through new eyes. Sarah Waters’s novels have been very popular, reaching a further audience through television adaptations. They have sought to reinsert lesbian desire into history and ways of telling stories, drawing on the gothic and the Victorian sensation novel. Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library (1988) explores what happens when the world of wealth, casual sex, and consumption associated with the main character, Will, is interrupted when he discovers his grandfather’s role in persecuting an older generation of homosexuals. The relationship between homosexuality and art is important to Hollinghurst, as it also is to the contemporary Irish writer Colm To´ibın. The other main line of writing drew on queer theory. Jeanette Winterson has sought to align changing ways of thinking with innovation in form. Her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), intersperses an account of a queer childhood in an extremely religious working-class Lancashire upbringing with fairytale-like narratives. Later texts, including The Passion (1987) and Written on the Body
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(1992), have probed traditional constructions of sexuality and gender, and the way in which the body is represented, using the writing strategies of postmodernist fiction. Writing that addresses the concerns of everyday lesbian and gay lives continued to appear, however; examples include the early novels of the Irish writer Emma Donoghue, Stir Fry (1994) and Hood (1995). Carrying forward a major conclusion of the queer movement, that we should not simply accept the definitions we inherit from nineteenth-century sexology such as “heterosexual” or “homosexual,” or indeed the notion of having a single “sexuality” or an essential gender identity at all, Jackie Kay’s 1998 novel Trumpet sympathetically examines the responses of a family and friends who discover, on his death, that a jazz musician had been “passing” as a man when he was in fact biologically a woman. “Queer” had, at the end of the century, begun to open a space for fiction on transgender issues. Much of the full range of experience of gender and sexuality, though, especially outside large Western cities, still remained to be explored by queer writers. SEE ALSO: Censorship and the Novel (BIF); Critical Theory and the Novel (BIF); Fantasy Fiction (BIF); Feminist Fiction (BIF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Historical Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Annan, N. (1986). Introduction. In H. O. Sturgis, Belchamber. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bowen, E. (1945). “Mysterious Koˆr” and “The Happy Autumn Fields.” In The Demon Lover and Other Stories. London: Jonathan Cape. Doan, L. (2006). Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women and English Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Donoghue, E. (1994). Stir Fry. London: Hamish Hamilton. Donoghue, E. (1995). Hood. London: Hamish Hamilton. Firbank, R. (1919). Valmouth. London: Grant Richards. Firbank, R. (1926). Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli. London: Grant Richards. Forster, E. M. (1971). Maurice. London: Arnold.
Hall, R. (1928). The Well of Loneliness. London: Jonathan Cape. Hall, R. (1934). Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself. London: Heinemann. Hollinghurst, A. (1988). The Swimming Pool Library. London: Chatto and Windus. Isherwood, C. (1976). Christopher and His Kind. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Isherwood, C. (1992). The Berlin Novels, comprising Mr. Norris Changes Trains [1935], Goodbye to Berlin [1939]. London: Minerva. Jagose, A. (1996). Queer Theory. Carlton South, Vic.: Melbourne University Press. Kay, J. (1998). Trumpet. London: Picador. Keane, M. (as Farrell, M. J.) (1934). Devoted Ladies. London: Collins. Keane, M. (1981). Good Behaviour. London: Deutsch. Lawrence, D. H. (1911). The White Peacock. London: Heinemann. Lawrence, D. H. (1915). The Rainbow. London: Methuen. Mackenzie, C. (1956). Thin Ice. London: Chatto and Windus. Mars-Jones, A. (1992). Monopolies of Loss. London: Faber and Faber. Mars-Jones, A., & White, E. (1987). The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis. London: Faber and Faber. Nicolson, N. (1973). Portrait of a Marriage. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. O’Brien, K. (1936). Mary Lavelle. London: Heinemann. O’Brien, K. (1946). That Lady. London: Heinemann. Raven, S. (1959). The Feathers of Death. London: Anthony Blond. Reid, F. (1905). The Garden God: A Tale of Two Boys. London: David Nutt. Reid, F. (1955). Tom Barber, comprising Young Tom [1944], The Retreat [1936], Uncle Stephen [1931]. New York: Pantheon. Renault, M. (1956). The Last of the Wine. London: Longmans, Green. Renault, M. (1959). The Charioteer. New York: Random House. Richardson, D. (1931). Dawn’s Left Hand. London: Duckworth. Rolfe, F. (1993). The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole (ed. A. Eburne). London: Quartet. Sturgis, H. O. (1891). Tim. London: Macmillan. Sturgis, H. O. (1904). Belchamber. London: Constable. Symons, A. J. A. (1934). The Quest for Corvo. London: Cassell. To´ibın, C. (1999). The Blackwater Lightship. London: Picador. Walshe, E. (ed.) (1997). Sex, Nation and Dissent in Irish Writing. Cork: Cork University Press. Warner, S. T. (1926). Lolly Willowes; or, The Loving Huntsman. London: Chatto and Windus.
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Warner, S. T. (1927). Mr. Fortune’s Maggot. London: Chatto and Windus. Waters, S. (1998). Tipping the Velvet. London: Virago. Waters, S. (2002). Fingersmith. London: Virago. Weeks, J. (1990). Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present. London: Quartet. Welch, D. (1943). Maiden Voyage. London: Routledge. Welch, D. (1944). In Youth is Pleasure. London: Routledge.
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Winterson, J. (1985). Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. London: Pandora. Winterson, J. (1987). The Passion. London: Jonathan Cape. Winterson, J. (1992). Written on the Body. London: Bloomsbury. Woods, G. (1998). A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press. Woolf, V. (1925). Mrs. Dalloway. London: Hogarth. Woolf, V. (1928). Orlando. London: Hogarth.
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R Richardson, Dorothy SCOTT McCRACKEN
Dorothy Richardson was born into a middle-class family in the small town of Abingdon, just south of Oxford. Her father lost most of his money when she was a teenager and the family moved to London, where she attended a progressive school influenced by the ideas of John Ruskin. At 17, when the family’s financial situation deteriorated further, she went to work as a teacher in Germany, then as a governess and teacher in England, and eventually as a receptionist in a dental surgery in Harley Street. While working in London in the 1890s and early 1900s, Richardson lived in lodgings in Bloomsbury and associated with writers, political radicals, and European exiles. Several of the men and women she had relationships with at this time figure in her long prose work, Pilgrimage, for example, Benjamin Grad (Michael Shatov in Pilgrimage), Veronica Leslie Jones (Amabel), and H. G. Wells (Hypo Wilson). Her affair with Wells resulted in a miscarriage and this seems to have precipitated her decision to become a writer. Her writing career began with reviews, essays, and journalism in small periodicals. She published a series of short pieces in the Saturday Review between 1908 and 1914 before beginning Pilgrimage, the first part of which, Pointed Roofs, was published in 1915. She married the artist Alan Odle in 1917, who was largely unrecognized in his own lifetime, but whose pen and ink drawings are now collectors’ items. Odle was an important influence on her work and, although few letters
between Richardson and Odle survive, it is clear from his surviving correspondence that he and Richardson shared many ideas about literature and art. From 1917 until 1939, they spent their winters in Cornwall and their summers in London. In the 1930s, Richardson was active in support of refugee writers from Germany. They stayed permanently in Cornwall from 1939 until Odle’s death in 1948. She did not leave Cornwall until she was moved unwillingly to a nursing home in Kent in 1954. She died in 1957. Richardson was one of a select group of writers who changed the rules of prose fiction at the beginning of the twentieth century. With James Joyce in Ireland, Marcel Proust in France, William Faulkner in the United States and, in England, Virginia Woolf, Richardson invented a new form of writing. She can claim, with Proust and Joyce, to have been at the forefront of a revolution in literature. The first “chapter” of her long work Pilgrimage was begun in 1913 and published in 1915, two years after the publication of the first volume of A la recherche du temps perdu, a year after the first appearance of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and seven years before Woolf’s first experimental novel Jacob’s Room. The first 10 “chapters” of Pilgrimage were published by Duckworth at lengthening intervals between 1915 and 1931: Pointed Roofs (1915), Backwater (1916), Honeycomb (1917), The Tunnel (1919), Interim (1919), Deadlock (1921), Revolving Lights (1923), The Trap (1925), Oberland (1927), and Dawn’s Left Hand (1931). Extracts from Interim were published in Little Review 1919–20. The eleventh chapter, Clear Horizon, was published by Dent in
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RICHARDSON, DOROTHY
1935. In 1938, Dent published a four-volume edition that included a new “chapter,” Dimple Hill. In 1967, Dent and Knopf published a new edition simultaneously in Britain and the United States that included the unfinished “chapter” Richardson had been working on until 1953, March Moonlight. In 1979 Pilgrimage was recognized as a feminist classic with the publication of a Virago paperback edition. Although a number of critical terms have been used to describe Pilgrimage, Richardson was unhappy with May Sinclair’s description (borrowed from William James) of her work as “stream of consciousness.” In fact, she denied that she was writing a novel at all. Novels, in Richardson’s opinion, always suffered from being “conducted tours.” Pilgrimage in contrast gradually develops its own aesthetic, always deferring either an ending or narrative resolution. Richardson also published short stories in a variety of periodicals (a collection was published by Virago in 1989) and a handful of poems. She was the author of numerous articles in periodicals such as Adelphi and Vanity Fair. She began her literary career reviewing for the vegetarian journal Crank. Between 1912 and 1921, she wrote a regular column, “Comments by a Layman,” for the Dental Record. She translated eight books into English from French and German. Between 1927 and 1933 she published 23 articles on film in the avant garde little magazine Close Up. A selection was republished in 1999 by Princeton University Press as part of an anthology of articles from the periodical. Richardson showed as much interest in cinema audiences as in the films themselves. As in all her work, she was acutely aware of the dynamics of gender, seeing the cinema, just as she saw the boarding houses, cafes, and shops represented in Pilgrimage, as a counter-public sphere for women. Richardson’s aesthetic was influenced by diverse currents of thought. She was part of the alternative, bohemian culture at the turn of the century that embraced vegetarianism, feminism, and socialism. Olive Schreiner and Charlotte Perkins Gilman made an early impact on her work and one of her first reviews was of a book by the advocate for homosexual rights, utopian socialist, and Whitmanite poet, Edward Carpenter. Her first book was about the Quakers: The Quakers: Past and Present (1914b).
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The philosophical influences on Pilgrimage included the American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Cambridge philosopher John Ellis McTaggert, Henri Bergson, and, in the 1930s, the Russian existentialist philosopher Nikolai Berdaeyev. Yet Pilgrimage was not just a novel of ideas. Richardson was deeply marked by her experience of working for £1 a week in London at the turn of the century. Her literary aesthetic was always concerned with the relationship between women’s work and art. A semi-autobiographical work, Pilgrimage covers the life of its protagonist, Miriam Henderson, from early childhood to the moment she becomes a writer. In its succeeding episodes, London is an “elastic” material space that facilitates Miriam’s public life. London’s streets, cafes, restaurants, and clubs figure largely in her explorations, which extend her knowledge of both the city and herself. Uncomfortable with, even hostile to, the nineteenth-century conventions of femininity, Miriam seeks a third space between masculinity and femininity, developing a new and evolving form of gendered identity that is enabled by the possibilities the city offers. Richardson’s work was the subject of intense critical discussion in the 1920s, given its centrality to the emergence of modernist prose fiction. After a brief dip in the 1930s, there was renewed critical interest after World War II and her work started to receive due recognition with the critical revisions that followed second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. In the last 10 years, Richardson has been fully restored to the modernist canon and is now included as a matter of course in introductory texts. Yet Richardson was always, and has remained, a controversial figure. She was well known in avant garde circles in London in the 1920s, paying a visit to Paris in 1924 where she met Ernest Hemingway and Mary Butts. Her work was discussed by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Edith Sitwell, John Rodker, William Carlos Williams, and Katherine Mansfield among others. She knew Lawrence and was the object, with Joyce and Proust, of his famous attack, “Surgery for the Novel – or a Bomb?” (1925). Alfred Knopf, her American publisher, described her novels as “more or less notorious” (Fromm 119). Toward the end of her life, she had started to become the subject of doctoral theses. In the postwar period,
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she was written about by those critics, such as Leon Edel and Thomas Staley, who pioneered the institutionalization of modernist literature as part of university literature courses. However, it was with the emergence of secondwave feminism that her importance to twentiethcentury literature came to be recognized. Richardson was “rediscovered” in pioneering critical works such as Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1982 [1977] ) and in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s No Man’s Land (1988–94). Two critics in particular, Gloria Fromm and Gillian Hanscombe, were instrumental in establishing her importance. Fromm’s biography came out in 1977, with a second edition in 1994. Hanscombe published a paperback edition of Pilgrimage with Virago in 1979 and her monograph, The Art of Life, came out in 1982. A number of Richardson’s key critical writings were published in Bonnie Kime Scott’s anthology of women modernists, The Gender of Modernism (1990). The 1990s saw the publication of the critical apparatus for a scholarly approach to Pilgrimage in George H. Thomson’s A Reader’s Guide (1996) and his Notes on “Pilgrimage”: Dorothy Richardson Annotated (1999). The 1990s also saw monographs by Jean Radford, Carol Watts, Kristin Bluemel, and Elisabeth Bronfen. Critical work on Richardson has continued to develop, with monographs by Joanne Winning and Jane Garrity making important contributions. Both critics highlight Richardson’s significance for lesbian literary history. Critical work has also appeared in Japanese, French, Italian, and German. SEE ALSO: Feminist Fiction (BIF); Joyce, James (BIF); London in Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF); Woolf, Virginia (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bluemel, K. (1997). Experimenting on the Borders of Modernism: Dorothy Richardson’s “Pilgrimage.” Athens: University of Georgia Press. Donald, J., Friedberg, A., & Marcus, L. (eds.) (1999). Close-Up, 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dorothy Richardson Website. At www.keele.ac.uk/ depts/en/richardson/richardsonmain.html, accessed Mar. 9, 2010.
Edel, L. (1964). Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage. In The Modern Psychological Novel 1900–1950 [1955], rev. edn. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, pp. 154–61. Fromm, G. G. (1994). Dorothy Richardson: A Biography [1977] 2nd edn. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Garrity, J. (2003). “Neither English nor Civilized”: Dorothy Richardson’s Spectatrix and the Feminine Crusade for Global Intervention. In Step-Daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 85–139. Hanscombe, G. E. (1982). The Art of Life: Dorothy Richardson and the Development of Feminist Consciousness. London: Owen. McCracken, S. (1997). Masculinities, Modernist Fiction, and the Urban Public Sphere. Manchester: Manchester University Press. McCracken, S.(ed.) (2008– ). Pilgrimages: The Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies. At www.keele.ac.uk/ depts/en/richardson/pilgrimages/index.html, accessed Feb. 11, 2010. Parsons, D. (2007). Theorists of the Modernist Novel: James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf. Abingdon: Routledge. Radford, J. (1991). Dorothy Richardson. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Richardson, D. (1914a). Gleanings from the Works of George Fox. London: Headley. Richardson, D. (1914b). The Quakers: Past and Present. London: Constable. Richardson, D. (1915). Pointed Roofs. London: Duckworth. Richardson, D. (1916). Backwater. London: Duckworth. Richardson, D. (1917). Honeycomb. London: Duckworth. Richardson, D. (1919a). Interim. London: Duckworth. Richardson, D. (1919b). The Tunnel. London: Duckworth. Richardson, D. (1921). Deadlock. London: Duckworth. Richardson, D. (1923). Revolving Lights. London: Duckworth. Richardson, D. (1925). The Trap. London: Duckworth. Richardson, D. (1927). Oberland. London: Duckworth. Richardson, D. (1930). John Austen and the Inseparables. London: William Jackson. Richardson, D. (1931). Dawn’s Left Hand. London: Duckworth. Richardson, D. (1935). Clear Horizon. London: J. M. Dent/Cresset. Richardson, D. (1938). Pilgrimage. 4 vols. London: J. M. Dent/Cresset. (Includes author’s foreword and Dimple Hill for the first time.) Richardson, D. (1967). Pilgrimage. 4 vols. London: J. M. Dent. (Includes March Moonlight for the first time.)
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Richardson, D. (1989). Journey to Paradise: Short Stories and Autobiographical Sketches (ed. T. Tate). London: Virago. Showalter, E. (1982). A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bront€e to Lessing [1977], rev. edn. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sinclair, M. (1918). The Novels of Dorothy Richardson. Little Review, 4, 3–11. Staley, T. F. (1976). Dorothy Richardson. Boston: Twayne.
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Thomson, G. (1996). A Reader’s Guide to Dorothy Richardson’s “Pilgrimage. Greensboro, NC: ELT. Thomson, G. H. (1999). Notes on “Pilgrimage”: Dorothy Richardson Annotated. Greensboro, NC: ELT. Watts, C. (1995). Dorothy Richardson. Plymouth: Northcote House/British Council. Winning, J. (2000). The Pilgrimage of Dorothy Richardson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
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S Science Fiction NICHOLAS RUDDICK
Science fiction of the literary kind was invented in Britain and there has been a lot of British science fiction. More than 3,000 significant science fiction novels and story collections by authors born or long resident in the UK were published in Britain in the twentieth century. Yet science fiction in general and British science fiction in particular are problematic concepts. “Science fiction” was not used as a genre label until the 1930s in the USA, long after works now considered to be science fiction first appeared in Britain. There is still no generally accepted academic definition of science fiction, and there remains an academic reluctance to take seriously what is thought to be a popular literature for the immature. Those who do take British literary science fiction seriously are often anxious to disassociate it from “sci-fi” Hollywood blockbusters and their spin-offs. British science fiction originates in late nineteenth-century fiction by H. G. Wells. The young Wells was of the first generation of British students to receive a thorough scientific education. His intellectual hero was Thomas Henry Huxley, the leading figure in the campaign to persuade educated Britons to accept the new evolutionary theory. The agnostic Huxley argued that Darwinism called for a thorough re-envisioning of man’s place in nature, and named the shift from the scriptural to the scientific explanation of life’s origins a “new reformation.” Science fiction could not have come into being without this reformation; more than any other kind of fiction, science
fiction explores what it is to be a member of the human species in a scientifically conceived universe. Wells’s late Victorian contemporaries were progressionists: they believed that human beings advanced inevitably toward perfection. Wells, by contrast, knew that humanity was a biological species engaged in a struggle for existence against competing organisms and changing environmental conditions. Progress was never assured, while the certain consequence of failure to adapt was extinction. Seeking to persuade his contemporaries that progressionism was delusional, Wells wrote “scientific romances” that explored the consequences of the new worldview for the future of humanity. Wells’s main science fiction invention was a machine to accelerate evolutionary change artificially so that, instead of occurring slowly over millions of years, it could be observed by an individual in historical time. In Wells’s first great scientific romance The Time Machine (1895), the seeming utopia of the far future hides a dystopian nightmare of post-human regression. Wells demonstrates that by Darwinian logic any static utopia goes to the bad: if a species doesn’t need to struggle to survive, it degenerates mentally and physically. The Time Machine transformed utopian and dystopian fiction and was the seminal work of modern literary science fiction. In his other major early scientific romances Wells applied evolutionary thought to existing fictional themes. The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) is about a mad scientist who, unlike Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, is aware of human
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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evolutionary history. The Invisible Man (1897) is a psychological portrait of the scientific genius as dangerous lunatic. In The War of the Worlds (1898), Wells updated the alarmist invasion narrative and elaborated on post-Darwinian anxieties about being supplanted by a superior species. Wells’s interest in character and his anti-progressionism continue to mark British science fiction, while American science fiction tends to be more idea-driven and optimistic. Wells’s scientific romances include exciting adventure, Swiftian satire, and horrific elements worthy of Poe. They are also cognitively rich: they force readers to confront metaphysical questions that the traditional realistic novel has no means of dealing with. Hugo Gernsback, the US father of science fiction as pop-cultural entertainment, reprinted all Wells’s major scientific romances in his pioneering pulp magazine Amazing Stories (1926–9). Though Wells himself showed no interest in this transatlantic development, his work more than any other helped Gernsback formulate science fiction as a popular genre. After 1900, Wells promoted a technocratic, socialist world state as a means of avoiding human self-extinction. Mainstream writers wrote scientific romances to disagree with his politics: Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford in The Inheritors (1901); Rudyard Kipling in “With the Night Mail” (1909 [1905] ) and “As Easy as ABC” (1917 [1912] ); and E. M. Forster in “The Machine Stops” (1909). In The War in the Air (1908) and The World Set Free (1914) Wells suggested that civilization needed to be torn down before it could be reconstructed on sounder principles. His contemporaries George Griffith, William Le Queux, and Louis Tracy simply relished staging near-future wars with advanced weaponry. Disasters, both man-made and natural, became a frequent subject of twentieth-century British science fiction, reflecting the pessimism that comes naturally to disillusioned idealists in a bellicose, spiritually uncertain age. In M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901) everyone is quickly killed off with volcanic gas so as to track the mental degeneration of the lone survivor. A striking interwar counterpart is S. Fowler Wright’s Deluge (1927), in which a devastating flood allows society to be reorganized on libertarian principles. Many notable early scientific romances were variations on Wellsian visions of superhumanity
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or subhumanity: J. D. Beresford’s The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911), G. B. Shaw’s Back to Methuselah (1921), E. V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man (1923), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), John Gloag’s Tomorrow’s Yesterday (1932), and W. Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John (1935). Stapledon, a visionary on whom the science fiction label sits awkwardly, traced in Star Maker (1937) humanity’s ultimate evolution into a disembodied godlike entity. A few early science fiction writers turned to prehistory, as Wells’s focus on the future left ripe for exploitation the terrain that had been opened up by the post-Darwinian discovery of human antiquity. Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) remains the most popular work of prehistoric science fiction: an exciting adventure yarn combining those staples of pop prehistory, apemen and dinosaurs. Fowler Wright’s Dream (1931) and James Leslie Mitchell’s Three Go Back (1932) are more earnest: their nostalgia for the primitive is a protest against the horrors of modern civilization. Between the late 1930s and early 1960s, scientific romance was slowly superseded by American-style science fiction as “Yank magazines” filtered into Britain. Stirrings of British science fiction fandom were evident by 1937, by which time John Wyndham, who later traded on the quintessential Englishness of his fiction, had already begun publishing in the US pulps. C. S. Lewis in his Cosmic Trilogy (1990 [1938–45] ) used science fiction motifs to allegorize Christian themes, but the genre’s agnostic roots made the result awkward. Lewis’s friend J. R. R. Tolkien instead developed fantasy fiction, first with The Hobbit (1937) and after World War II with The Lord of the Rings (1954–5). A counter-genre to Wellsian science fiction, Tolkienian heroic fantasy offers a consoling escape from the ugly, godless scientific world. Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937), Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome (1941), and The Sound of His Horn (1952) by Sarban constitute a neglected trilogy of British science fiction responses to the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s. So do three famous postwar works: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the bestknown dystopian novel in world literature; and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) and The Inheritors (1955), poetic novels that
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recapitulate the “fall” of humanity in an attempt to understand the persistence of evil in a secular, naturalistic universe. The 1950s saw the rise of the “cosy catastrophe” exemplified by Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), in which the English people, faced with alien menaces, pulled together as they had done during the Blitz. More disconcerting ecological disaster scenarios by John Christopher such as The Death of Grass (1956) were not quite so popular, perhaps because they dealt with more plausible dangers. While Wyndham’s fiction was marketed without science fiction trappings, Arthur C. Clarke’s seemed indistinguishable from American science fiction of the “Golden Age.” Yet Clarke owed more to Stapledon’s evolutionary transcendentalism than to US models. His early masterpiece Childhood’s End (1953) suggests the cost, as well as the benefit, of becoming superhuman. This decade also saw the debut of Brian Aldiss, who throughout his long, distinguished career has built bridges between science fiction and the mainstream and between British scientific romance and American science fiction. His first important novel was Non-Stop (1958), a striking variation on the science fiction theme of conceptual breakthrough. During the New Wave (1962–79), British writers under the influence of J. G. Ballard rejected the technophilia of American science fiction and imported more sophisticated narrative techniques from the literary avant garde. In Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962), the disaster is neither a dreadful warning nor an excuse to remodel society, but a manifestation of a Freudian death drive; the characters embody humanity’s unconscious desire to return to the inorganic realm. Further insights into the roots of violence were offered by the British-based US film director Stanley Kubrick in his black comedy Dr. Strangelove (1964), and by Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange (1962), filmed powerfully by Kubrick in 1971. Ballard was the twentieth-century British writer who, after Wells, did most to make science fiction a literature worth reading. While Wells’s estranged perspective came from his lowly background and scientific training, Ballard’s came from his upbringing in Shanghai and his wartime internment in a Japanese camp. His science fiction masterpieces are his Urban Disaster Trilogy,
Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974), and HighRise (1975). No other British writer has so ambitiously attempted to decode the demented dreams of Western civilization from the bland, concrete reality of the contemporary urban environment. British New Wave science fiction is typified by the contents and design of New Worlds magazine under Michael Moorcock’s editorship (1964–71), and by story anthologies such as Judith Merril’s England Swings SF (1968) and Langdon Jones’s The New SF (1969). Longer experimental fictions such as Aldiss’s Report on Probability A (1968) and Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) retain sociological interest. More durable achievements will likely include Moorcock’s Behold the Man (1969), John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968) and The Sheep Look Up (1972), Keith Roberts’s Pavane (1968), Ian Watson’s The Embedding (1973), and Christopher Priest’s Inverted World (1974). Perhaps the greatest science fiction achievement in the 1960s was the collaboration between New Wave Kubrick and Golden Age Clarke that resulted in the film and novel both called 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Kubrick’s enigmatic movie, in which a computer is the most interesting character, the background music has more emotional impact than the dialogue, and each frame is a compositional masterpiece, remains the most highly regarded science fiction film ever made. But Kubrick owed much to Clarke’s conception of humanity’s continuing need for selftranscendence if our extinction is to be averted. British science fiction seemed to fall into a decade-long trough after the New Wave, when “sci-fi” values dominated the publishing industry in the wake of George Lucas’s film Star Wars (1977). Ballard in Hello America (1981) turned his satiric gaze on US popular culture, while Christopher Priest abandoned science fiction entirely. The 1980s was a golden decade of science fiction parody and pastiche: Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) and its sequels; Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, beginning with The Colour of Magic (1983); Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil (1985); and the TV series Red Dwarf (1988–99). Playing little part in the US cyberpunk renaissance, British science fiction writers seemed drained: stasis or decadence were the keynotes of M. John Harrison’s In Viriconium (1982) and Aldiss’s monumental Helliconia
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Trilogy (1982–5). But respected mainstream novelists now incorporated science fiction elements without condescension: Russell Hoban in Riddley Walker (1980), Alasdair Gray in Lanark (1981), D. M. Thomas in The White Hotel (1981), and John Fowles in A Maggot (1985). A “boom” revitalized British science fiction after 1990, though the most prominent contemporary writers are too different to form a school, and slip easily between science fiction and adjacent genres, even within the same work. Gwyneth Jones in Bold as Love (2001) writes near-future science fiction/fantasy/horror fiction from a feminist perspective. China Mieville in Perdido Street Station (2000) writes weird fiction colored by Marxism and contemporary literary theory. Stephen Baxter’s Evolution (2002) is a Darwinian epic in the tradition of Wells, Stapledon, and Clarke. Kim Newman writes recursive dark fantasy; Jeff Noon composes playful, hallucinatory experimental fiction; and Neil Gaiman operates in every conceivable fantastic medium and genre. Though few literary historians would disagree that Wells is a major figure in the history of science fiction, Americans tend to emphasize the foundational role played by the pulp magazine editors Gernsback and John W. Campbell. In other words, they believe that Americans should earn most of the credit for the existence of a genre whose protocols were formulated in the USA. Meanwhile, Aldiss, who has long argued for Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) as science fiction’s originating work, has shown little interest in identifying the specificity of British science fiction. There are three main critical approaches to the problematic existence of British science fiction. The editors of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (Clute & Nicholls, 1993), the best-regarded reference work in the field, feel that it would have been redundant to give separate entries for the USA and UK, since science fiction from these areas dominates the Encyclopedia. This approach emphasizes the idea of science fiction as an Anglo-American collaboration and makes the huge science fiction field a little more manageable. Yet because this approach ignores differences between British and American science fiction, it feeds suspicions that British science fiction is an impersonation of the genuine American article. The science fiction novelist and critic Brian Stableford argues in Scientific Romance in Britain
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(1985) that Wellsian scientific romance was an integral part of British literary culture until 1950, barely interacting with American science fiction. Deriving from the post-Darwinian scientific essay, scientific romance is speculative, futuristic, elegant, delicately ironic, and evolutionary in theme. After World War II changes in British publishing practices made it more profitable to ape American models and scientific romance died out. Stableford threw a brilliant new light on a forgotten chapter in British literary history – but implied that, after 1950, British science fiction was a pale shadow of American science fiction. In Ultimate Island (1993), critic Nicholas Ruddick delineates a continuing British science fiction tradition that links Wells to the present. It expresses itself via the recurrent motif of the Island as a metaphor both for Great Britain and for the insular self. This Island functions as an arena on which a catastrophic evolutionary struggle is staged. Ruddick promotes a science fiction canon of important works marked by this specifically British feature, but excludes many notable oeuvres. Clarke’s work does not display the required Britishness, while the unquestionably British works of Aldiss lack the characteristic motif. The academic study of science fiction in Britain is now firmly established, with the Science Fiction Foundation at the University of Liverpool serving as its natural focus. What British science fiction now needs is a comprehensive literary history that synthesizes the critical approaches summarized above. The goal of such a project would be to show how British science fiction, far from being an impersonation of American models, is an indigenous cultural product with deep roots and with a long series of literary achievements to its credit. SEE ALSO: Fantasy Fiction (BIF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Speculative Fiction (AF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (BIF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Adams, D. (1979). The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. London: Pan. Aldiss, B. W. (1958). Non-Stop. London: Faber and Faber.
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Aldiss, B. W., & Wingrove, D. (1986). Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction. London: Gollancz. Ballard, J. G. (1962). The Drowned World. London: Gollancz. Ballard, J. G. (1970). The Atrocity Exhibition. London: Jonathan Cape. Ballard, J. G. (1973). Crash. London: Jonathan Cape. Baxter, S. (2002). Evolution. London: Orion. Beresford, J. D. (1911). The Hampdenshire Wonder. London: Sidgwick and Jackson. Bergonzi, B. (1961). The Early Scientific Romances of H. G. Wells. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Brunner, J. (1968). Stand on Zanzibar. New York: Doubleday. Brunner, J. (1972). The Sheep Look Up. New York: Harper and Row. Burdekin, K.(as Constantine, M.) (1937). Swastika Night. London: Gollancz. Burgess, A. (1962). A Clockwork Orange. London: Heinemann. Christopher, J. (1956). The Death of Grass. London: Michael Joseph. Clarke, A. C. (1953). Childhood’s End. New York: Ballantine. Clarke, A. C. (1968). 2001: A Space Odyssey. New York: New American Library. Clute, J., & Nicholls, P. (eds.) (1993). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction 2nd edn. London: Orbit. Conrad, J., & Ford, F. M. (1901). The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story. London: Heinemann. Doyle, A. C. (1912). The Lost World. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Forster, E. M. (1928). The Machine Stops [1909]. In The Eternal Moment and Other Stories. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, pp. 1–61. Foundation (1984). British Science Fiction as Seen from Abroad [special issue], 30 (Mar.). Fowles, J. (1985). A Maggot. London: Jonathan Cape. Gerber, R. (1959). The English Island Myth: Remarks on the Englishness of Utopian Fiction. Critical Quarterly, 1(1), 36–43. Gilliam, T. (dir.) (1985). Brazil. 20th Century Fox. Gloag, J. (1932). Tomorrow’s Yesterday. London: Allen and Unwin. Golding, W. (1954). Lord of the Flies. London: Faber and Faber. Golding, W. (1955). The Inheritors. London: Faber and Faber. Gray, A. (1981). Lanark: A Life in Four Books. Edinburgh: Canongate. Greenland, C. (1983). The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the British “New Wave” in Science Fiction. London: Routledge.
Harrison, M. J. (1982). In Viriconium. London: Gollancz. Hoban, R. (1980). Riddley Walker. London: Jonathan Cape. Huxley, A. (1932). Brave New World. London: Chatto and Windus. Jones, G. (2001). Bold as Love. London: Gollancz. Jones, L. (ed.) (1969). The New SF. London: Hutchinson. Kincaid, P. (1995). A Very British Genre: A Short History of British Fantasy and Science Fiction. Folkestone: British Science Fiction Association. Kipling, R. (1909). With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D. [1905]. In Actions and Reactions. London: Macmillan, pp. 109–67. Kipling, R. (1917). As Easy as ABC [1912]. In A Diversity of Creatures. London: Macmillan, pp. 1–44. Kubrick, S. (dir.) (1964). Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Columbia. Kubrick, S.(dir.) (1968). 2001: A Space Odyssey. MGM. Lewis, C. S. (1990). The Cosmic Trilogy, comprising Out of the Silent Planet [1938], Perelandra [1943], That Hideous Strength [1945]. New York: Tor. Merril, J. (ed.) (1968). England Swings SF. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Mieville, C. (2000). Perdido Street Station. London: Macmillan. Mitchell, J. L. (1932). Three Go Back. London: Jarrolds. Moorcock, M. (1969). Behold the Man. London: Allison and Busby. Nicholls, P. (1973). An ABC of British Science Fiction: Apocalypse, Bleakness, Catastrophe. In C. Carrell (ed.), Beyond This Horizon. Sunderland: Ceolfrith, pp. 18–25. Odle, E. V. (1923). The Clockwork Man. London: Heinemann. Orwell, G. (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker and Warburg. Pratchett, T. (1983). The Colour of Magic. Gerrards Cross: Smythe. Priest, C. (1974). Inverted World. London: Faber and Faber. Priest, C. (1979). British Science Fiction. In P. Parrinder (ed.), Science Fiction: A Critical Guide. London: Longman, pp. 187–202. Roberts, K. (1968). Pavane. London: Hart-Davis. Ruddick, N. (1992). British Science Fiction: A Chronology, 1478–1990. New York: Greenwood. Ruddick, N. (1993). Ultimate Island: On the Nature of British Science Fiction. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Sarban (Wall, J. W.) (1952). The Sound of His Horn. London: Peter Davies. Science Fiction Studies (2003). The British SF Boom [special issue], 30(3).
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SCOTT, PAUL
Shaw, G. B. (1921). Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch. London: Constable. Shiel, M. P. (1901). The Purple Cloud. London: Chatto and Windus. Stableford, B. (1985). Scientific Romance in Britain 1890–1950. New York: St. Martin’s. Stapledon, W. O. (1937). Star Maker. London: Methuen. Thomas, D. M. (1981). The White Hotel. London: Gollancz. Tolkien, J. R. R. (1937). The Hobbit; or, There and Back Again. London: Allen and Unwin. Tolkien, J. R. R. (1965). The Lord of the Rings [1954–5]. New York: Ballantine. Warner, R. (1941). The Aerodrome: A Love Story. London: John Lane. Watson, I. (1973). The Embedding. London: Gollancz. Wells, H. G. (1895). The Time Machine: An Invention. London: Heinemann. Wells, H. G. (1896). The Island of Doctor Moreau. London: Heinemann. Wells, H. G. (1897). The Invisible Man. London: C. A. Pearson. Wells, H. G. (1898). The War of the Worlds. London: Heinemann. Wright, S. F. (1927). Deluge: A Romance. London: Fowler Wright. Wyndham, J. (1951). The Day of the Triffids. London: Michael Joseph.
Scott, Paul JANIS HASWELL
Two decades before the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), Paul Mark Scott examined in 13 successive novels the colonial relationship between England and India. Scott is best known for the Raj Quartet, produced as a drama series by Granada Television in 1984 and aired on PBS under the title The Jewel in the Crown. His contribution to the postcolonial assessment of the imperial experience is nothing less than groundbreaking. Scott was born on March 25, 1920, in London, to a family of painters and commercial artists. When his father’s business failed, Scott left public school to work as an accountant. At the beginning of the war, he enlisted in British Intelligence and was deployed to India in March 1943, where he commanded an air supply unit. After repatriation in 1946, Scott worked as an accountant in a literary agency, then joined David Higham As-
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sociates as an agent, and was later a director until 1960, when he left to write full-time. He was married to novelist Nancy Edith Avery on October 23, 1941 and had two daughters, Carol (b. 1947) and Sally (b. 1948). Originally a poet and then a playwright, Scott reached his full potential as a novelist only gradually, publishing his first novel, Johnny Sahib, in 1952, and seven subsequent novels in the next 12 years. They are varied in quality, and later he would counsel readers to avoid them except for The Mark of the Warrior (1958). But this advice is misleading since Scott’s most important themes – the importance and dignity of work, and the historical ties between England and India – emerge consistently. By the early 1960s Scott had built a reputation as a novelist on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1964 his publisher sent him to India to rejuvenate his creative juices. While visiting the village of his former havildar, Scott found himself reacting to the primitive conditions by assuming a “sahib face” – the facade ruling whites turn toward the foreign and frightening other. He would revisit India again in 1969 and 1971. The resulting four novels are collectively titled the “Raj Quartet.” The dominant image of The Jewel in the Crown is a girl running in the dark: Daphne Manners, who paid the price for loving Hari Kumar (an England-educated black man returned to India). This is Scott’s trademark technique, weaving his themes around a primary image deepened by a counterpoint image – the missionary Edwina Crane, who has qualities, according to Scott, “different from but perhaps complementary to those of the girl . . . It is a technique of reverse exploration” (1986, 64). The Day of the Scorpion (1968) widens the story line, infusing the lives of the Layton family in Pankot with the Kumar–Manners tragedy. Sarah Layton emerges as the iconoclast who resists the Raj’s collective pressure to use her white skin as the basis of her value and identity. The Towers of Silence (1971) is a “quiet” book that pushes Scott’s themes even deeper through the perspective of retired missionary Barbie Batchelor, a devotee of Ralph Waldo Emerson. A Division of the Spoils (1975) is a book of action, centered on historian Guy Perron, who witnesses the moment of Indian independence and what Scott believed was the moral failure of England: the partition of India
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and Pakistan. Scott regarded Sarah as the center of Division and Perron as a positive, sympathetic critic. But the character who unites the Quartet is Ronald Merrick – the complex, lower-class Englishman who defended at all costs (to the point of tragic self-delusion) the racial superiority of whites. He was, more than any other character, caught in the colonial mentality of what Scott called “perpetual Edwardian sunlight” (1986, 126). Although he admitted only to T. S. Eliot as an influence, Scott is often compared to E. M. Forster, an unfortunate reference that has prompted some critics to pronounce the Quartet as seriously limited in its critique of imperial power. Scott himself, however, characterized his novels as a “literature of dissent,” though he adamantly refused to privilege “realities of power” as his focus; heavy-handed politicized fiction would generate a network of images incapable of capturing the fundamentals of human experience (1986, 83). He avoided didacticism for another reason: he sought a particular relationship with his readers, a “moral dialogue between the writer and the reader,” and thereby invited “a creative and critical response” to his novels (114). Readers who enter into that dialogue find that the Quartet offers an anti-essentialist account of national identity, prompting Schwarz to call Scott “white England’s first novelist of decolonization” (1992, 99). During his lifetime, Scott’s novels never achieved the status of commercial blockbusters, primarily because he attempted to put India back on England’s map of awareness, and India was not a saleable topic in the 1950s and 1960s. Scott believed that silence about the demise of empire would only engender historical ignorance, a dangerous thing. His return to India marks his refusal to keep quiet, to do nothing in the face of insular indifference and belligerence. His message, in its broadest formulation, is that “Englishness” has been inexorably altered because England has cohabited with India. This insight has the potential to break down cultural insularity. In Scott’s view, England would never know itself apart from its colonial relationship with India because India is the place where “the British came to the end of themselves as they were” (1998, 3). In 1977 Staying On was awarded the Booker Prize. Scott’s final published work, a retelling of
the Cinderella story titled After the Funeral (1978), featured pen and ink illustrations by his daughter Sally. While teaching as a writer-inresidence at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma in the fall of 1977, Scott was diagnosed with cancer and underwent surgery. He returned to London in December, and died there on March 1, 1978. SEE ALSO: Colonial Fiction (BIF); Forster, E. M. (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Childs, P. (1998). Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet: History and Division. Victoria, BC: University of Victoria. Haswell, J. (2002). Paul Scott’s Philosophy of Place(s): The Fiction of Relationality. New York: Peter Lang. Schwarz, B. (1992). An Englishman Abroad . . . and at Home: The Case of Paul Scott. New Formations, 17, 95–105. Scott, P. (1952). Johnny Sahib. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Scott, P. (1953). The Alien Sky. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Scott, P. (1956). A Male Child. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Scott, P. (1958). The Mark of the Warrior. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Scott, P. (1960). The Chinese Love Pavilion. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Scott, P. (1962). The Birds of Paradise. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Scott, P. (1963). The Bender. London: Secker and Warburg. Scott, P. (1964). The Corrida at San Feliu. London: Secker and Warburg. Scott, P. (1966). The Jewel in the Crown. London: Heinemann. Scott, P. (1968). The Day of the Scorpion. London: Heinemann. Scott, P. (1971). The Towers of Silence. London: Heinemann. Scott, P. (1975). A Division of the Spoils. London: Heinemann. Scott, P. (1977). Staying On. London: Heinemann. Scott, P. (1978). After the Funeral. London: Whittington. Scott, P. (1998). The Day of the Scorpion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scott, P. (1986). My Appointment with the Muse. London: Heinemann. Spurling, H. (1990). Paul Scott: A Life of the Author of the Raj Quartet. New York: Norton.
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Tedesco (Haswell), J., & Popham, J. (1985). Introduction to the Raj Quartet. Washington, DC: University Press of America. Weinbaum, F. S. (1992). Paul Scott: A Critical Study. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Scottish Fiction DAVID GOLDIE
In an essay of 1896 the quixotic Scottish writer R. B. Cunninghame Graham railed against contemporary trends in Scottish fiction, arguing that, because of their pernicious influence, “to-day a Scotchman stands confessed a sentimental fool . . . oppressed with the tremendous difficulties of the jargon he is bound to speak, and above all weighted down with the responsibility of being Scotch” (Nash 45). Many of the Scottish writers who followed him in the next century were very conscious of this “responsibility of being Scotch” and the need to answer to its particular demands. For some it was a source of pride, and a duty of care they took on willingly; for others it was an unwelcome historical burden that impeded the free travel of their minds. But whether they liked it or not, they shared in Scotland an often problematic common ground. At the beginning of the twentieth century Scotland was a small nation on the periphery of Europe; a nation without statehood, locked as it was into a political union dominated by a partner, England, that was almost 10 times its size. It was weak as a political entity but strong economically, having gained enormously from the British imperial project for which it had provided much of the heavy engineering as well as merchants, administrators, and soldiers. Added to this, it was a country that had difficulty in coming to a settled view of itself: a country of three languages (English, Scots, and Gaelic) and two distinct cultures (Lowland and Highland); a nation renowned for its beautiful landscapes that had some of the most heavily industrialized and squalid cities on the planet; a place that set a high value on education, with more ancient universities than England, but which lost many of its best minds to London. Given these contexts, it is perhaps no surprise that the most influential book on Scottish literature to emerge in the early century, G. Gregory
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Smith’s Scottish Literature: Character and Influence (1919), characterized the nation’s literature as fundamentally divided against itself. In Gregory Smith’s view, Scottish literature was rarely capable of achieving a unified vision but was rather perennially involved in a delicate balancing act between extremes of fantasy and realism, escape and engagement. The term he coined for this, the “Caledonian antisyzgy” (from “syzygy,” meaning unity or alignment), was picked up and used (perhaps overused) by practitioners and critics, and became the paradoxical sign, the token of a deep self-contradiction and insecure sense of identity, under which Scottish literature marched for much of the twentieth century. At the turn of the century, Scottish fiction seemed to be stuck firmly on the escapist side of Gregory Smith’s dichotomy, tending to evade the difficult issues of contemporary Scotland by dwelling in the nation’s past. The novels and stories of Fiona MacLeod (William Sharp), among them Pharais: A Romance of the Isles (1894) and The Sin-Eater (1895), for example, depict a myth-laden rural Scotland, heavy with the world-weariness and cultural pessimism of the French Symbolists and the Celtic Twilight. Less enervated, but perhaps similarly evasive and pessimistic, was the still popular tradition of Scottish historical fiction. Largely established by Sir Walter Scott and lately reinvigorated by Robert Louis Stevenson, this tradition was not without its moral ambiguities and psychological depths, but its emphasis on romantic adventure and stirring landscape distanced it from the everyday concerns of its readers. It was a tradition that would continue: John Buchan’s John Burnet of Barns (1898) and Witch Wood (1927), Violet Jacob’s Flemington (1911), and Neil Munro’s The New Road (1914) were worthy successors, the last in particular blending Stevenson’s psychological acuteness with Scott’s ambiguity about the relative merits of Highland and Lowland cultures in a very readable story of the moral decline and economic destruction of Jacobitism in eighteenth-century Scotland. The popular novels of Nigel Tranter and Dorothy Dunnett would continue this tradition in the second half of the twentieth century, ensuring a wide international readership for Scottish historical fiction. A different past was evoked in the so-called Kailyard fiction, which dominated Scottish
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literature at the turn of the century, and which was the main cause of Cunninghame Graham’s ire. This fiction, as typified by J. M. Barrie’s Auld Licht Idylls (1888), S. R. Crockett’s The Stickit Minister (1893), and Ian McLaren’s Beside the Bonny Brier Bush (1894), constructs a timeless small-town Scotland of pawky, perceptive farmers and their gossipy sharp-witted wives, of ministers who learn to love the earnest eccentricities of their flocks, and of the soft-centered tragedies of bright young men dying on the verge of success in the wider world. It is a fiction that is often derided for its sentimentalism, but there is perhaps more to it than its detractors allow. It offered a reassuring notion of rootedness and community to its many readers, and was, as several contemporary critics have argued, often more ironic and self-reflexive than it might appear at first glance. But what is unanswerable is that it signally failed to address the issues of the contemporary nation: like the fictions of the Celtic Twilight and of historical romance, it provided worthwhile and often thoughtful entertainment but ultimately ducked the issues facing a modern, largely urban society. The need to redress the balance, to stop taking refuge in the past and to make a literature that squarely faced the facts of industrialization (and later deindustrialization) was one that would be felt strongly throughout Scottish fiction for the rest of the century. The first steps toward this were taken in two early century novels that challenged the Kailyard directly and exposed its cozy assumptions to the cold blasts of European realism and classical fatalism. The first is George Douglas Brown’s The House with the Green Shutters (1901), a novel that brings a whiff of Balzac and Zola to small-town Scotland, showing a bourgeois family cracking under commercial pressures and the strain of keeping up appearances. As is often the case in Scottish fiction, the plot focuses on the contention between a father and son: the domineering John Gourlay senior, an imaginatively limited and brutal merchant of high ambitions, and the morbidly oversensitive, fushionless John Gourlay junior. As the story builds toward the younger Gourlay’s murder of his father, the reader hears strong echoes of classical tragedy, but above all feels the rural pieties of the Kailyard being violently, almost melodramatically, desecrated. Gillespie (1914) by John MacDougall Hay
– a kind of Dostoevsky to Douglas Brown’s Balzac – similarly takes strands of Kailyard fiction, naturalism, and classical drama and knits them with a malevolent Presbyterianism into a grim familial tragedy, precipitated by the hubris of a tyrannical merchant father, Gillespie Strang. Both novels challenge the assumptions of the Kailyard, showing the corrosive moral effects of commercialization, but continue to inhabit its small-town environment. The city, the locus of much English and European realism and the environment in which most Scots lived, rarely featured in Scottish fiction until the 1930s. With the exception of Frederick Niven’s The Justice of the Peace (1914), another father and son novel with a largely benign view of Glasgow, and Patrick MacGill’s Children of the Dead End (1914) and The Rat-Pit (1915), which offer much harsher takes on the Irish immigrant experience in Glasgow and western Scotland, Scottish cities went largely unexplored in fiction. This absence would be remedied by sensitive treatments of urban poverty in novels such as Dot Allan’s Makeshift (1928), Edwin Muir’s Poor Tom (1932), and George Blake’s The Shipbuilders (1935), and would be exploited for sensational effect in Alexander McArthur and Kingsley Long’s No Mean City (1935). The most interesting comparative examinations of the urban experience in this period, however, come in two works that trace the movement of families from rural to urban Scotland. The first is Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair trilogy of 1932–4, which follows Chris Guthrie, from her youth in the rich farming country of the Mearns before World War I, through successive failing marriages and life in a declining small town, to her (and her son’s) engagements with radical politics in the fictional city of Duncairn in the 1930s. The novels, beginning with Sunset Song (1932), move from an elegiac portrayal of a rural community destroyed by World War I to a strident account of contemporary urban poverty and political struggle. Chris’s journey is a personal one, an attempt at self-realization in the face of a hostile and patriarchal political economy, but it is also a national one. Her husband half-joking refers to her in the second novel in the sequence, Cloud Howe (1933), as “Chris Caledonia”: a reminder that these are Scotland’s struggles as much as those of an isolated individual adrift in modernity. Equally
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radical in its politics, and almost as wide in its epic sweep, is James Barke’s The Land of the Leal (1939). A more overtly populist book than A Scots Quair, and less dominated by a lyrical attention to landscape, The Land of the Leal follows a family on their long journey from a declining countryside in the nineteenth century to 1930s Glasgow. The novel’s strong central character, Jean Ramsay, shares some of the traits of Chris Guthrie but also owes something to the resolute, independent women, Joanna Bannerman and Martha Ironside, who manage to escape the narrowing confines of conventional femininity in Catherine Carswell’s Open the Door! (1920) and Nan Shepherd’s The Quarry Wood (1928). This mid-century urban fiction was complemented by a reinvigorated rural fiction which bore some traces of its Kailyard and Celtic antecedents but was less sentimental and idealized, which acknowledged the economic poverty of the Scottish countryside but still attempted to see it in mythic or archetypal terms as a source of spiritual regeneration. Elements of this are present in Gibbon’s Scots Quair, particularly in Chris Guthrie’s sense of connection to an ancient landscape symbolized in the standing stones to which she habitually retreats; but it is in the novels of Neil M. Gunn that this sense of a regenerative natural landscape finds its fullest expression. His Highland River (1937) offers an interesting contrast with Gibbon for the way its protagonist Kenn is, unlike Chris Guthrie, able to rediscover a sense of natural vitality and hope in his native countryside following the devastation of World War I: tracing the stream of his life back to its spiritual wellsprings in childhood. Gunn’s other major novels, Sun Circle (1933), Butcher’s Broom (1934), and The Silver Darlings (1941), take him further back into Scotland’s past – in the case of Sun Circle to its far distant past – but this is not the melancholy escapism of the Celtic Twilight. Gunn is aware of the land as a changing economic environment, a real geography of habitation and commerce, but he is also alive to its profound meliorative effects. Working by the accumulation of closely observed natural detail rather than generalizing rhetoric, he attempts in these novels to persuade the reader to look again and look deeper at the redemptive patterns of communal life that have shaped the historic Scottish landscape.
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Gibbon and Gunn are often associated with the Scottish Renaissance, a movement centered on the poet Hugh MacDiarmid that attempted to instill a new confidence in the Scottish voice and a new sense of independence in its literature. The success of this movement between the wars, however, was not matched by success after. Scottish fiction, by most accounts, lost its way in the 30 years after World War II. Robin Jenkins’s The Cone-Gatherers (1955), James Kennaway’s Tunes of Glory (1956), and Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) are examples of fine individual novels by writers who maintained a steady and high-quality output, but who seemed to be working in isolation from the main streams of Scottish thought. Novels that dealt more directly with contemporary conditions, such as Edward Gaitens’s Dance of the Apprentices (1949) and Gordon M. Williams’s From Scenes Like These (1968), conjured a people and a culture that seemed exhausted by two World Wwars and the passing of Scotland’s industrial greatness. What humor they contained was largely the humor of the gallows. This sense of terminal decline was added to by novels like William McIlvanney’s Docherty (1975), which elegized the masculine certainties of Scotland’s industrial past while implicitly acknowledging their redundancy in the present. A surprising number of novels in this period, notable among them J. F. Hendry’s Fernie Brae (1947), Archie Hind’s The Dear Green Place (1966), and George Friel’s Mr. Alfred MA (1972), portrayed sensitive, educated individuals being beaten down by the urban culture that surrounded them. Modeling themselves on James Joyce’s Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man they conveyed a depressing message: that there was no place in a hostile contemporary Scotland for the artist and the intellectual. It is widely agreed that this mood altered in the early 1980s, and that the last 20 years of the century saw a significant upswing in the confidence and the range of Scottish fiction. This, it is sometimes argued, is a consequence of the revived Scottish political and cultural nationalism that led, eventually, to the creation in 1999 of a devolved Scottish parliament in Edinburgh. But its literary impetus can be said to come principally from two writers whose work appeared in that decade, Alasdair Gray and James Kelman. Gray’s Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) brought a new
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intellectual assurance and inventiveness into play, in a narrative that juxtaposed the depressingly familiar story of a failed Scottish artist against an imaginatively rich phantasmagoria set in a parallel Scotland. Gray takes a recognizable Scottish tale of the youthful formation and defeat of its central character and turns it playfully, with the aid of techniques culled from a range of conventional, postmodern, and science fictions, into an intriguing, sometimes mind-bending, aesthetic adventure. His postmodern playfulness and his confronting of traditional Scottish masculine attitudes, seen also to advantage in the textual, moral, and typographic experiments of 1982 Janine (1984) and Poor Things (1992), helped create a writing environment free from many of the constraints of conventional realism. The novels of Iain Banks, for example, in a prolific output following his debut, The Wasp Factory (1984), blend the real and fantastic in sometimes startling ways. Often, as in The Bridge (1986), they employ bold time shifts, narrative trickery, and an allusive wit to uncover historical trauma and explore difficult issues of personal (and, by implication, national) identity. A range of other works, among them Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989), the stories of A. L. Kennedy’s Now That You’re Back (1994), and Irvine Welsh’s Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995), similarly use the kinds of bold experimental technique found in Gray to delve into the darker, less tractable and attractive places of the Scottish psyche. If Gray qualified the Scottish urban realist tradition and helped it develop a new kit of sophisticated narrative tools, James Kelman might be said to have worked the other way, stripping it back down to its raw essentials. From his first substantial collection of short stories, Not Not While the Giro (1983), and his debut novel The Busconductor Hines (1984) Kelman developed a distinctive expletive-laden dialect voice marked by its desire to write not from somewhere above the urban working class but from deep within it. The issue of dialect was fundamental here, with Kelman being the first writer to challenge directly the problems of representing Scotland’s diverse languages and accents in English that earlier writers had skated uneasily around. Novelists like Munro and Gunn had, in the absence of a Gaelic prose fiction tradition
(in contrast to its strong poetic tradition), often used Gaelic syntax to defamiliarize their English and offer a sense of linguistic difference without compromising readability. Similarly with Scots: many writers choosing to follow Stevenson in employing “a strong Scotch accent of the mind” (Stevenson 23) rather than attempting to mimic spoken Scots in phonetic forms. The dominant mode remained English. Where Scots accents appeared at all it was as direct speech, their orthographical awkwardnesses being safely corralled in the enclosures of a Standard English narration. For Kelman this was not so much a technical nicety as a fundamental political problem, a thoughtless but systematic subjection of the Scots (and particularly the working-class Scots) voice to a dominating English one. As a consequence, he introduced a voice that had not been heard before in Scottish fiction, a narrating consciousness with an often crude, confused force that refuses to privilege itself in register and vocabulary over its characters. The result is seen in novels such as A Chancer (1985) and the Booker Prize-winning How Late It Was, How Late (1994), which fuse third-person narration, characters’ thoughts, and direct speech in a raw, free indirect vernacular voice that brings the experiences of those marginalized by modern society – characters like the feckless gambler Tammas and the blinded small-time criminal Sammy Samuels – powerfully and often sympathetically back to the center of our attention. This apparently simple step, of valorizing the demotic and privileging it as narrative speech, had a surprisingly powerful effect in freeing Kelman’s successors from the restrictions of polite form. Enthused by his combativeness and his linguistic radicalism, younger writers such as Irvine Welsh, Duncan McLean, Alan Warner, and Des Dillon produced a number of bold, confrontational novels that use the vernacular with a new confidence – McLean and Warner taking that voice out of its industrial heartlands and, in novels such as McLean’s Bunker Man (1995) and Warner’s Morvern Callar (1995) and These Demented Lands (1997), bringing a hard, hip urban sensibility to the small towns of the Kailyard and the romantic countryside of the Celtic Twilight. Probably the most widely known Scottish book of the late twentieth century, Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993; filmed by Danny Boyle in 1995) perhaps best sums
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up this new confidence. In parts a degrading, vicious account of deprivation and addiction, in others a boisterous, inventive testimony to the qualities of humor and intelligence that can weather such devastation, it is never less than assured in its emotional tone and its range of dialect voices: compelling the reader’s attention despite the potential difficulties of its dense Leith dialect and unrelenting obscenity. The complaints of Cunninghame Grahame about perceived Scottish sentimentalism and the difficulties of the Scots language seemed, 100 years later, to be no longer such an issue for Scottish fiction. The “burden of being Scotch” may not have been lifted entirely, but it was now being explored with directness and a confident vigor. SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Allan, D. (1928). Makeshift. London: Melrose. Banks, I. (1984). The Wasp Factory. London: Macmillan. Banks, I. (1986). The Bridge. London: Macmillan. Barke, J. (1939). The Land of the Leal. London: Collins. Blake, G. (1935). The Shipbuilders. London: Faber and Faber. Brown, G. D. (1901). The House with the Green Shutters. London: John Macqueen. Brown, I., Clancy, T. O., Manning, S., & Pittock, M. (eds.) (2007). The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, vol. 3: Modern Transformations: New Identities (from 1918). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Buchan, J. (1898). John Burnet of Barns. London: John Lane. Buchan, J. (1927). Witch Wood. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Carswell, C. (1920). Open the Door! London: Andrew Melrose. Christianson, A., & Lumsden, A. (eds.) (2000). Contemporary Scottish Women Writers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Craig, C. (ed.) (1987). The History of Scottish Literature, vol. 4: Twentieth Century. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Craig, C. (1999). The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Crawford, R. (2007). Scotland’s Books: The Penguin History of Scottish Literature. London: Penguin.
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Dunn, D. (ed.) (1995). The Oxford Book of Scottish Short Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Friel, G. (1972). Mr. Alfred MA. London: Calder and Boyars. Gaitens, E. (1949). Dance of the Apprentices. Glasgow: William McLellan. Galloway, J. (1989). The Trick is to Keep Breathing. Edinburgh: Polygon. Gibbon, L. G. (1932). Sunset Song. London: Jarrolds. Gibbon, L. G. (1933). Cloud Howe. London: Jarrolds. Gibbon, L. G. (1934). Grey Granite. London: Jarrolds. Gifford, D., & McMillan, D. (1997). A History of Scottish Women’s Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gifford, D., Dunnigan, S., & MacGillivray, A. (eds.) (2002). Scottish Literature: In English and Scots. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gray, A. (1981). Lanark: A Life in Four Books. Edinburgh: Canongate. Gray, A. (1984). 1982 Janine. London: Jonathan Cape. Gray, A. (1992). Poor Things. London: Bloomsbury. Gunn, N. M. (1933). Sun Circle. Edinburgh: Porpoise. Gunn, N. M. (1934). Butcher’s Broom. Edinburgh: Porpoise. Gunn, N. M. (1937). Highland River. Edinburgh: Porpoise. Gunn, N. M. (1941). The Silver Darlings. London: Faber and Faber. Hart, F. R. (1978). The Scottish Novel: A Critical Survey. London: John Murray. Hay, J. M. (1914). Gillespie. London: Constable. Hendry, J. F. (1947). Fernie Brae. Glasgow: William McLellan. Hind, A. (1966). The Dear Green Place. London: New Authors. Jacob, V. (1911). Flemington. London: John Murray. Jenkins, R. (1955). The Cone-Gatherers. London: Macdonald. Kelman, J. (1983). Not Not While the Giro and Other Stories. Edinburgh: Polygon. Kelman, J. (1984). The Busconductor Hines. Edinburgh: Polygon. Kelman, J. (1985). A Chancer. Edinburgh: Polygon. Kelman, J. (1994). How Late It Was, How Late. London: Secker and Warburg. Kennaway, J. (1956). Tunes of Glory. London: Putnam’s. Kennedy, A. L. (1994). Now That You’re Back. London: Jonathan Cape. MacGill, P. (1914). Children of the Dead End. London: Herbert Jenkins. MacGill, P. (1915). The Rat-Pit. London: Herbert Jenkins. MacLeod, F. (1894). Pharais: A Romance of the Isles. Derby: Harpur and Murray.
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MacLeod, F. (1895) The Sin-Eater and Other Tales. Edinburgh: Patrick Geddes. March, C. L. (2002). Rewriting Scotland: Welsh, McLean, Warner, Banks, Galloway, and Kennedy. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. McArthur, A., & Long, K. (1935). No Mean City: A Story of the Glasgow Slums. London: Longmans, Green. McCordick, D. (ed.) (2002). Scottish Literature in the Twentieth Century: An Anthology. Dalkeith: Scottish Cultural Press. McIlvanney, W. (1975). Docherty. London: Allen and Unwin. McLean, D. (1995). Bunker Man. London: Jonathan Cape. Muir, E. (1932). Poor Tom. London: J. M. Dent. Muir, E. (1936). Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer. London: Routledge. Munro, N. (1914). The New Road. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Murray, I., & Tait, B. (1984). Ten Modern Scottish Novels. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Nash, A. (2007). Kailyard and Scottish Literature. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Niven, F. (1914). The Justice of the Peace. London: Eveleigh Nash. Petrie, D. (2004). Contemporary Scottish Fictions: Film, Television and the Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Shepherd, N. (1928). The Quarry Wood. London: Constable. Smith, G. G. (1919). Scottish Literature: Character and Influence. London: Macmillan. Spark, M. (1961). The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. London: Macmillan. Stevenson, R. L. (1888). Memories and Portraits. London: Chatto and Windus. Wallace, G., & Stevenson, R. (eds.) (1993). The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies: New Visions, Old Dreams. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Warner, A. (1995). Morvern Callar. London: Jonathan Cape. Warner, A. (1997). These Demented Lands. London: Jonathan Cape. Watson, R. (2007). The Literature of Scotland: The Twentieth Century, 2nd edn. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Welsh, I. (1993). Trainspotting. London: Secker and Warburg. Welsh, I. (1995). Marabou Stork Nightmares. London: Jonathan Cape. Williams, G. M. (1968). From Scenes Like These. London: Secker and Warburg. Wittig, K. (1958). The Scottish Tradition in Literature. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd.
Self, Will M. HUNTER HAYES
The author of 18 books and recipient of praise from novelists such as J. G. Ballard and Martin Amis, Will Self has earned a reputation as one of England’s more provocative writers. A caustic satirist and deconstructionist of political and popular cultures, Self has developed a distinctive prose style that combines lyrical precision with verbal agility while offering unique perceptions on contemporary life, a style he terms “dirty magical realism.” Born William Woodard Self in London on September 26, 1961, the son of Peter and Elaine Rosenbloom Self, a political science professor and publisher’s assistant respectively, Self spent his childhood and teenage years in the north London suburbs that feature prominently in his early short stories and novels. Self’s mother, an expatriate American from a working-class Jewish background that contrasts sharply with the more privileged Anglican background of Self’s paternal lineage, encouraged his love of reading. Despite possessing a deep familiarity with British, Continental, and American literature, when Self entered Exeter College, Oxford University in 1979 he read politics, philosophy, and economics instead of English. This early training in philosophy, coupled with Self’s linguistic dexterity, provides a key component of Self’s fiction. His second book, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991), a collection of short stories – published six years after Slump (1985), a collection of Self’s trenchant cartoons that appeared in the New Statesman – introduces readers to notable characters and motifs that continue to populate Self’s fictive world. One prominent recurring character, Dr. Zachary Busner, a self-styled renegade pop psychiatrist reminiscent of R. D. Laing, appears in “Ward 9,” which presents a psychiatric hospital as a nightmarish environment. Additional details concerning Busner’s background and career emerge piecemeal through Self’s successive works of fiction, including his 1997 novel, Great Apes. The collection’s best-known story, “The North London Book of the Dead,” features details taken closely from Self’s reactions to his mother’s death from cancer in 1988. Additionally, this story
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posits a situation – London inhabited by the deceased as well as the living – that Self explores more fully and even more personally in his third novel, How the Dead Live (2000a). The Quantity Theory of Insanity generated wide press coverage in England as well as critical acclaim; it was shortlisted for the 1992 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize the following year. Self followed The Quantity Theory of Insanity with a pair of novellas in Cock and Bull (1992) that satirized social conventions of sex and gender identity. In “Cock” a woman acquires a penis and begins to assume masculine behavior traits that include rape and murder. Its counterpart, “Bull,” describes the fate of a rugby player and journalist, John Bull, who grows a vagina behind one knee and is subsequently seduced and impregnated by his doctor. These novellas combine Kafkaesque transformations and a postmodern self-awareness typical of much of Self’s later work. In 1993, the year that the influential literary magazine Granta included Self in its second “Best of Young British Novelists” installment, he published his first novel, My Idea of Fun. A Faustian novel subtitled “a cautionary tale,” My Idea of Fun is a highly allusive work that displays the influence of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Personal Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and Mikhail Bulgakov’s classic political and cultural satire, The Master and Margarita (1966), while also referring at times to children’s stories and jokes. Although many critics responded harshly to the novel’s grotesque violence, other critics responded enthusiastically to the novel. Such sharp critical division has become commonplace with the reception of Self’s work. A multilayered novel that ridicules consumerist culture while also providing a critical look at the author’s well-publicized history of drug addiction, My Idea of Fun explores the links between personal will and moral action. Throughout the 1990s Self contributed to many general interest and literary magazines while also working at one time or other for each of London’s leading newspapers, and he continues to write weekly columns and various articles. Many of these articles appear in his collections of journalism and essays, Junk Mail (1995), Sore Sites (2000c), Feeding Frenzy (2001),
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and Psychogeography (2007). His 1996 novella, The Sweet Smell of Psychosis, takes a fiercely satirical look at London’s media and celebrity milieu. He has also been a frequent commentator on the radio and television, appearing frequently on BBC Radio 4 and on television programs including Have I Got News for You, Shooting Stars, and Grumpy Old Men. Through these appearances and his newspaper columns, Self has become well known to many people unfamiliar with his fiction. His second full-length novel, Great Apes (1997), adopts a satiric method akin to eighteenth-century satirists through its depiction of chimpanzees as the dominant evolutionary species. In this novel, chimpanzees and humans exchange places in the evolutionary order, compelling Self not only to reimagine quotidian behaviors but also to present the modern city drawn to a smaller physical scale. Such considerations of scale, whether spatial, physical, temporal, or psychological, have long been a figurative device that Self employs effectively to relate the reader to the fictive environment. In Great Apes he does so in order to challenge conventional notions of humans’ supposed superiority to other species. Whereas Great Apes undercuts many humanist arguments, his next novel, How the Dead Live, raises metaphysical questions in its depiction of a “necropolitan” London by closely reinterpreting The Tibetan Book of the Dead. This novel also includes Self’s harshest depiction of his years as a heroin addict. Self’s following novels have become increasingly political. Dorian: An Imitation (2003), his retelling of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which Self moved forward a century, deals with the socio-politics of sexual identity and AIDS. In 2006 he published The Book of Dave (2006), a novel with a bifurcated narrative structure set several centuries in the future and the recent past in order to portray the misogynistic anger that Dave Rudman, a London cab driver, suffers due to his loss of parental rights and a futuristic dystopian society in which a repressive religion is founded on a sacred text that is in fact Rudman’s mad rant to his son. With The Butt (2008a), Self allegorically depicts a society – combining Australia, where he lived briefly and continues to visit, with Iraq – that provides the setting for his satiric look at the military and social
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politics of Tony Blair and George W. Bush. After his start as a promising enfant terrible, Self has proven to be a prolific and influential writer whose work acquires significance beyond the United Kingdom. SEE ALSO: Critical Theory and the Novel (BIF); London in Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Alderson, D. (2005). “Not Everyone Knows Fuck All about Foucault”: Will Self’s Dorian and Post-Gay Culture. Textual Practice, 19(3), 309–29. Golomb, L. A. (2003). In R. J. Lane, R. Mengham, & P. Tew (eds.), Contemporary British Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, pp. 74–86. Hayes, M. H. (2007). Understanding Will Self. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Self, J. (2001). Self Abuse: Love, Loss and Fatherhood. London: John Murray. Self, W. (1985). Slump. London: Virgin. Self, W. (1991). The Quantity Theory of Insanity. London: Bloomsbury. Self, W. (1992). Cock and Bull. London: Bloomsbury. Self, W. (1993). My Idea of Fun: A Cautionary Tale. London: Bloomsbury. Self, W. (1994). Grey Area and Other Stories. London: Bloomsbury. Self, W. (1995). Junk Mail. London: Bloomsbury. Self, W. (1996). The Sweet Smell of Psychosis. London: Bloomsbury. Self, W. (1997). Great Apes. London: Bloomsbury. Self, W. (1998). Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys. London: Bloomsbury. Self, W. (2000a). How the Dead Live. London: Bloomsbury. Self, W. (2000b). Perfidious Man. London: Viking. Self, W. (2000c). Sore Sites. London: Ellipsis. Self, W. (2001). Feeding Frenzy. London: Viking. Self, W. (2003). Dorian: An Imitation. London: Viking/ Penguin. Self, W. (2004). Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe. London: Bloomsbury. Self, W. (2006). The Book of Dave. London: Viking/ Penguin. Self, W. (2007). Psychogeography. London: Bloomsbury. Self, W. (2008a). The Butt: An Exit Strategy. London: Bloomsbury. Self, W. (2008b). Liver. London: Viking. Self, W. (2009). Psycho Too. London: Bloomsbury.
Sinclair, Iain ALEX MURRAY
Iain Sinclair is one of the most challenging and innovative contemporary British novelists, with his Beat-inspired explorations of London, both past and present, having changed the face of “city writing” in the twentieth century. Born in Wales in 1943, Sinclair moved to London in 1961 to undertake a brief course at the London School of Film Technique in Brixton, before moving to Trinity College Dublin, where he undertook an English and fine arts degree. He then returned to London a few years later and taught film studies briefly in the North East London Polytechnic. Following this Sinclair made a documentary about Allen Ginsberg’s appearance at the Dialectics of Liberation conference in 1967. In the 1970s Sinclair set up his own publishing house, Albion Village Press, while also working as a council gardener, cigar packer, brewery worker, and book dealer. This eclectic background helps explain Sinclair’s unusual approach to literature. While many of his contemporaries, such as Peter Ackroyd and Will Self, studied at Oxford or Cambridge and moved into journalism, Sinclair was to immerse himself in a visual medium (he has made a number of films), while taking influence from American postwar literature, rather than systematically following a traditional literary education. Sinclair was also involved in various London “avant garde” literary circles as well, attempting to publish and champion writing that would otherwise struggle to find an audience. These differences mark themselves very clearly in his writing. Beginning in the 1970s he was to publish a series of small-circulation poetry collections which drew heavily on the Beat and Black Mountain poets, including Lud Heat (1975) and Suicide Bridge (1978). Lud Heat attempted to plot an “occult” map of London by suggesting that the churches of the seventeenth-century architect Nicholas Hawksmoor were infused with a power that was to influence these spaces in the present. Following these early “poems,” Sinclair published his first novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, through the tiny Goldmark press in 1987. The novel is a dense and sophisticated simultaneous explora-
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tion of contemporary London and the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888. It contains, roughly speaking, three narratives. The first follows a group of book dealers in the present as they make their way around the UK, and then around the East End of London, as they attempt to find the rare first publication of Conan Doyle’s Studies in Scarlet and ruminate on the identity of Jack the Ripper. The second narrative is set in 1888 and largely follows the activities of James Hinton and his friend Sir William Withey Gull, who, in Sinclair’s novel, is Jack the Ripper. The third narrative is a vignette of Gull’s childhood that explores the religious influences on Gull’s later acts. Yet this summary does little to provide an image of the density of Sinclair’s prose, and the confusion that his anti-narrative style creates. The boundaries between the three narratives are continually blurred as Sinclair allows the past and the future to cast a light upon each other. White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings achieved a degree of critical success, yet it was soon overshadowed by Sinclair’s second novel, Downriver (1991), which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. The novel is a long and sprawling exploration of the lower reaches of the Thames, or more particularly of the transformation of the Docklands under Thatcherism. It is part of a project that Sinclair has referred to as “exorcising” Thatcherism, in which the struggle against abstract government policy is framed as an apocalyptic, absurdist battle for the city’s soul. Again the narrative style is dense, the prose rife with allusions, both cultural and historic, that require an active and engaged reader with a knowledge of London’s past. The critical acclaim that followed brought Sinclair a rise in readership and increased his public profile, and he became a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and other such publications. He followed up Downriver with the almost impenetrable Radon Daughters (1994), a novel – loosely tied around a set of key energy fields that radiate out from the London General Hospital in Whitechapel – that again explored psychic scars on the London landscape. The novel is also notable for its savage Sinclairian satire of Oxbridge academia. The late 1990s brought Sinclair further recognition with his series of documentary London walks, Lights Out for the Territory (1997a), an alternative guidebook to London for literati. The
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book is actually composed of nine “excursions” around London, examining separate elements of the city’s past and present through the act of walking. Only one of these pieces had not been previously published; the book is more a collection of essays than a unified volume. In it Sinclair constructs something like an alternative myth of the city, one that stands in opposition to the city’s broader governmentality, crass capitalism, and heritage industry. This work was celebrated by a number of famous Londoners including Peter Ackroyd and Ken Livingstone, the once and future mayor of London. Two years later, with Rachel Lichenstein, Sinclair published Rodinsky’s Room (1999), an account of the disappearance of the Spitalfields synagogue caretaker David Rodinsky in the 1960s. Sinclair posited his book in opposition to the “blue plaque” history of the city; his was an attempt to account for those silenced by the relentless development of the city. Following the success of Lights Out for the Territory, Sinclair, in an almost self-conscious fashion, attempted to move his writing out of London. In Landor’s Tower (2001) he moved his mythographic project to the Welsh valleys; in London Orbital (2002) he explored the boundaries of the city on the M25; in Dining on Stones (2004) he examined the area around the A13, leading from London to the coast; and in Edge of The Orison (2005), he followed the walk of John Clare from Epping Forest to a village near Peterborough. In all of these prose works London is a place to be escaped, with its zones of decay and detritus increasingly disappearing within its inner city, swallowed up by the relentless process of gentrification that has transformed London since the 1970s. In 2006 Sinclair edited a collection of essays entitled London: City of Disappearances, in which appear contributions from such contemporary figures as Michael Moorcock, Will Self, and J. G. Ballard and such historical figures as Thomas De Quincey. The collection suggests that London’s condition is one of continual disappearance with its history in a constant process of erasure, and that the task of its writers is to record the city as it disappears from view. Sinclair, the London mythographer par excellence, is fittingly publishing a documentary fiction entitled Hackney: That Rose-Red Empire, which concerns the London suburb that has been the author’s home for the past 30 years and which is
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currently being transformed forever by its redevelopment for the 2012 Olympic Games. SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF); London in Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Atkins, M., & Sinclair, I. (1999a). Liquid City. London: Reaktion. Baker, B. (2007). Iain Sinclair. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bond, R. (2005). Iain Sinclair. Cambridge: Salt. Lichtenstein, R., & Sinclair, I. (1999). Rodinsky’s Room. London: Granta. Murray, A. (2007). Recalling London: Literature and History in the Work of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd. London: Continuum. Sheppard, R. (2007). Iain Sinclair. London: Northcote House. Sinclair, I. (1988). White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings [1987]. London: Palladin. Sinclair, I. (1991). Downriver. London: Vintage. Sinclair, I. (1994). Radon Daughters. London: Jonathan Cape. Sinclair, I. (1995). Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge [1975, 1978]. London: Vintage. Sinclair, I. (1997a). Lights Out for the Territory. London: Granta. Sinclair, I. (1997b). Slow Chocolate Autopsy (illus. D. McKean). London: Phoenix. Sinclair, I. (2001). Introduction. In A. C. Doyle, A Study in Scarlet. London: Penguin. Sinclair, I. (2002). London Orbital: A Walk around the M25. London: Granta. Sinclair, I. (2003). The Verbals: Iain Sinclair in Conversation with Kevin Jackson. London: Worple. Sinclair, I. (2005). Edge of the Orison. London: Hamish Hamilton. Sinclair, I. (ed.) (2006). London: City of Disappearances. London: Hamish Hamilton. Wolfreys, J. (2004). Writing London: Materiality, Memory, Spectrality. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sinclair, May ALLISON PEASE
May Sinclair was one of the most respected, intellectually connected, and widely read English
novelists and critics of the early twentieth century. Comprising 21 novels, a novel in verse, numerous short stories, two books on idealist philosophy, a book on the Br€ onte sisters, a journal about assisting an ambulance during World War I, and dozens of literary reviews, Sinclair’s vast oeuvre encompasses realist and experimental styles as well as thematic concerns with philosophical idealism, the loss of faith, the literary marketplace, new women, psychology, patriarchy, and the restraints of social convention that reflect her unique longevity as late Victorian, Edwardian, and modernist female writer. Sinclair’s fiction engages the literary innovations of her time, beginning with novels that were socially rebellious in a realist mode and moving toward novels that experimented with narrative point of view and stream of consciousness, a phrase she famously used to describe Dorothy Richardson’s style in Pilgrimage (1915–38), thus creating a new critical vocabulary for understanding modernism. Most consistently, her fiction explores the social conditions and psychological conflicts that impede individual self-realization. Born Mary Amelia St. Clair Sinclair in 1863 in Rock Ferry, near Liverpool, to a middle-class Scottish family, May, the name she adopted in the 1890s, was the youngest and only girl of six children. Her father was an alcoholic ship owner whose business failed when May was 7, causing her parents to separate and the boys to be sent to numerous relatives. Thereafter May lived with her religious, strong-willed mother in reduced circumstances, moving from place to place. Despite this, May taught herself German, Greek, and French and read widely. She received one year of formal schooling at the Cheltenham Ladies’ College where she gained the admiration of Dorothea Beale, one of the most respected educators in England. She published a lyrical and philosophical book of poems under the name Julian Sinclair in 1886, and her first novel, Audrey Craven, in 1897, and continued to live with and care for her mother until her death in 1901. Sinclair never had any public romantic attachments and lived alone through the publication of her final novel in 1927. She developed Parkinson’s disease and remained out of public view until she died in 1946. May Sinclair’s first commercial and critical success arrived after the death of her mother with
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the publication of her third novel, The Divine Fire, in 1904. Often compared to George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), The Divine Fire centers around the vulnerability of impoverished authors and the commercialization of book publishing. Like much of Sinclair’s work, it is heavily imbued with the idealist philosophy of T. H. Green (1836–82). Sinclair’s novels focus on the spiritual and psychological self-realization of their characters, chronicling their struggles with frustrating human institutions and conventions. In an early article on idealism Sinclair argued: “We regard the individual as under a positive obligation to develop to his utmost all the powers and latent capabilities of his nature” (1893, 703). Her Edwardian novels, such as The Helpmate (1907), Kitty Tailleur (1908), and The Creators (1910) reflect Edwardian feminism’s concern with women’s sexual and social roles, and question the mind/body dualities imposed on women. In these earlier novels impediments to self-realization come from external, social sources, conventions that in the later novels have been internalized into internal psychological conflict. By the early 1920s critics had claimed Sinclair as the foremost English woman novelist of her time as well as the best known in England and America. Although Sinclair’s psychological theories are imbricated with her idealist philosophy, and are considered by today’s standards simplistic, her contemporaries respected her psychological acumen, one publisher introducing her to a PEN conference in 1924 as “the great novelist, the greatest psychological analyst in fiction” (Boll 142). Sinclair was an avid reader of psychology and in 1913 was a benefactor and member of the board of the first clinic in Britain to offer psychoanalytic treatment, the Medico-Psychological Clinic. The three novels generally regarded as her best, The Three Sisters (1914c), Mary Olivier: A Life (1919), and The Life and Death of Harriet Frean (1922), are psychological studies of women who are victimized by their family’s demands that they conform to the Victorian ideal of the selfsacrificing woman. These novels, each set in rural England, detail the workings of repression, whether of sexual feelings or the drive for independence. Largely through the work of feminist scholars, modernist criticism has come to reassess and
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value Sinclair, whose reputation waned for many decades in the twentieth century. Critical attention has focused on her admittedly autobiographical novel, Mary Olivier: A Life, which brings together Sinclair’s most pronounced formal innovations with her ongoing concerns with women’s struggles for independence and selfrealization, the harms of repression, and sublimation as an almost mystical force by which to escape and simultaneously realize oneself. Influenced by the early volumes of Richardson’s Pilgrimage, the novel is written in stream-of-consciousness, impressionist, or poetic imagist style and fluctuates between second- and third-person narration. The narrative brings the reader into intimate contact with the psychological processes of the narrator, Mary, foregrounding her internal conflicts as she struggles early in life to earn her mother’s recognition on a par with her brothers and later in life to escape the psychological confines of her mother’s repressive expectations so she can, at age 40, develop into a writer. The novel is lyrical and dense, and is similar in style and content to the better-known modernist novels, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). Sinclair was at the center of literary modernism, but not of it. She befriended and supported the work of struggling and well-known authors, among them Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, H.D., Richard Aldington, Rebecca West, and Katherine Mansfield. Almost a generation older than these figures, however, she is as much influenced by the nineteenth century as the twentieth. SEE ALSO: Edwardian Fiction (BIF); Feminist Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Richardson, Dorothy (BIF); World War I in Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Boll, T. E. M. (1973). Miss May Sinclair: Novelist. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Kunka, A. J., & Troy, M. K. (eds.) (2006). May Sinclair: Moving towards the Modern. Aldershot: Ashgate. Raitt, S. (2000). May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Oxford: Clarendon.
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Sinclair, M. (1893). The Ethical and Religious Import of Idealism. New World, 2, 694–708 (Dec.). Sinclair, M. (1897). Audrey Craven. London: Blackwood. Sinclair, M. (1898). Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson. London: Blackwood. Sinclair, M. (1901). Two Sides of a Question. London: Constable. Sinclair, M. (1904). The Divine Fire. London: Constable. Sinclair, M. (1906). Superseded. New York: Henry Holt. Sinclair, M. (1907). The Helpmate. London: Constable. Sinclair, M. (1908). Kitty Tailleur. London: Constable. Sinclair, M. (1910). The Creators: A Comedy. London: Constable. Sinclair, M. (1912a). Feminism. London: Women’s Suffrage League. Sinclair, M. (1912b). The Three Bront€es. London: Hutchinson. Sinclair, M. (1913). The Combined Maze. London: Hutchinson. Sinclair, M. (1914a). The Judgement of Eve and Other Stories. London: Hutchinson. Sinclair, M. (1914b). The Return of the Prodigal. New York: Macmillan. Sinclair, M. (1914c). The Three Sisters. London: Hutchinson. Sinclair, M. (1916). Tasker Jevons: The Real Story. London: Hutchinson. Sinclair, M. (1917a). A Defence of Idealism: Some Questions and Conclusions. London: Macmillan. Sinclair, M. (1917b). The Tree of Heaven. London: Cassell. Sinclair, M. (1919). Mary Olivier: A Life. London: Cassell. Sinclair, M. (1920). The Romantic. London: Collins. Sinclair, M. (1921). Mr. Waddington of Wyck. London: Collins. Sinclair, M. (1922a). Anne Severn and the Fieldings. London: Hutchinson. Sinclair, M. (1922b). Life and Death of Harriett Frean. London: Collins. Sinclair, M. (1922c). The New Idealism. London: Macmillan. Sinclair, M. (1923). Uncanny Stories. London: Hutchinson. Sinclair, M. (1924a). Arnold Waterlow: A Life. London: Hutchinson. Sinclair, M. (1924b). A Cure of Souls. London: Hutchinson. Sinclair, M. (1925). The Rector of Wyck. London: Hutchinson. Sinclair, M. (1926). Far End. London: Hutchinson. Sinclair, M. (1927a). The Allinghams. London: Hutchinson.
Sinclair, M. (1927b). History of Anthony Waring. London: Hutchinson. Sinclair, M. (1930). Tales Told by Simpson. London: Hutchinson. Sinclair, M. (1931). The Intercessor and Other Stories. London: Hutchinson. Zegger, H. (1976). May Sinclair. Boston: Twayne.
Smith, Zadie DENNIS A. FOSTER
Zadie Smith emerged as one of the most important young novelists in Britain in 2000 with the publication of White Teeth. Her three novels to date explore the crossings and conflicts of race, religion, class, and culture in contemporary family, politics, and business. She is at the forefront of multicultural writers and was listed by Granta in its “Best of Young British Novelists 3” (2003). Smith was born in north London on October 27, 1975, to a Jamaican mother and an English father. Her blended family includes a brother, Ben Smith, known as the rap musician Doc Brown. The working-class London she grew up in embodies the postcolonial mixing of peoples and cultures that now characterizes many larger Western cities. Educated in public schools, she graduated from King’s College, Cambridge (1998) in English. While at Cambridge, she wrote much of White Teeth. An early chapter of that book, published by Granta as “The Waiter’s Wife,” brought the book pre-publication attention and a substantial advance. The book was enthusiastically received and won a number of prizes, including the Guardian First Book Award (2000) and the Whitbread First Novel Award (2000). The intellectual and linguistic verve of the book drew comparisons to the work of Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis. Her next book, The Autograph Man (2002), although not as well received, continued to develop the voice that had sustained the explosive playfulness of her first novel, but with a more restrained delivery. On Beauty, her third novel, brought her the Orange Prize for Fiction (2006) and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction (2005). Smith’s writing approaches the intermixing of world cultures not through the language of identity politics or the privileged perspective of the
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marginal, subaltern figure. Rather, she allows identity to emerge from the intimate encounters of people compelled, often hilariously, to live together. In White Teeth, working-class Londoner Archie Jones is best friends with Samad Iqbal, whom he fought beside in World War II. He has married Clara, a beautiful 19-year-old Jamaican. The interactions of these characters and their families displays less a set of precise cultural differentiations than an emerging set of new features. Samad’s twins, for example, develop in opposing directions, drawing from a grab bag of English, Indian, Muslim, scholarly, and terrorist qualities. The appearance (and escape) of a genetically engineered mouse designed for research exemplifies the inevitable gap between origin and outcome. Although with not quite the comic touch, Autograph Man picks up the exploration of identity in the fatherless Jewish Chinese character of Alex-Li Tandem. Alex is writing a book dividing the world up into Jewish and Goyish things that cuts across all lines – “Jewish office items (the stapler, the pen holder), Goyish office items (the paper clip, the mouse pad)” (77) –and neither race nor religion matter. At the same time, his Holy Grail-like pursuit of an authentic Kitty Alexander autograph suggests the deep interplay of celebrity, market value, and symbol in fabricating a meaningful world. The play of Smith’s language works against any equation of identity with being and permanence. Rather, it shows that character is constantly evolving and in flux. From an epigraph in White Teeth to the explicit homage in On Beauty (2005), Smith has drawn from E. M. Forster, emulating his investigation of the multitude of personal interactions that constitute literary as well as social being. Placing On Beauty in an American academic setting, she expands the postcolonial dimensions of her writing to America while reducing her focus to the small town. Still, the fractures that constitute race, gender, family, and beauty remain implicit in all relations. Throughout the novel, she examines the problems that fantasy – the notion that some simple wholeness is possible – brings to social relations. This idea occurs as well in a short essay Smith wrote prior to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 (6), which focuses its critique on the American failure to think complexly about the consequences of war. Smith seems always to look
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at the next development in each relationship, to “connect” in Forster’s sense. The pressures of being a famous author rather than a writer writing have appeared in numerous of her interviews over the years. One response for Smith has been to turn to something like the literary criticism she once anticipated writing. In “Fail Better: The Morality of the Novel” (2007), written for an unfinished book of essays on writing and fiction, Smith takes apart the fantasy of producing the perfect book. In the title’s allusion to Samuel Beckett, she reveals something of the ethic of writing and, by extension, of reading. The ongoing failure that constitutes valuable writing requires that readers also give themselves to the difficult work of reading. And asked to speak on “craft,” Smith sounds like Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own or Three Guineas: “I’ve been asked to speak about ‘some aspect of craft.’ I dithered over this lecture. I always dither over lectures, never more than when they’re about ‘craft’ ” (2008, 5). In her dithering, her approach and refusal, her ultimately not identifying with the book (“The book was genuinely strange to me,” 12), she, like Woolf, distances herself from the forces of identity politics, economics, and criticism that have marked so much of the literary movement to which she has contributed. SEE ALSO: Forster, E. M. (BIF); London in Fiction (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bentley, N. (2007). Re-Writing Englishness: Imagining the Nation in Julian Barnes’s England, England and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Textual Practice, 21(3), 483–504. McEwan, I. (2005). Zadie Smith. Believer 3(6), 47–64. Smith, Z. (1999). The Waiter’s Wife. Granta, 67 (Autumn), 127–43. Smith, Z. (2000). White Teeth. London: Hamish Hamilton. Smith, Z. (2002). The Autograph Man. London: Hamish Hamilton. Smith, Z. (2003). We Proceed in Iraq as Hypocrites and Cowards – and the World Knows It. Guardian, G2, p. 7 (Feb. 27). At www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2003/ feb/27/iraq.world1, accessed Mar. 1, 2010.
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Smith, Z. (2005). On Beauty. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Smith, Z. (2007). Fail Better. Guardian (Jan. 13). At http://zadiesmithnews.wordpress.com/2007/01/ 13/fail-better/#more-20, accessed Mar. 1, 2010. Smith, Z. (2008). That Crafty Feeling. Believer, 6(5), 5–12.
Spark, Muriel GERARD CARRUTHERS
Muriel Spark is one of the most important Catholic novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. An elegant stylist and a sophisticated manipulator of the novel form, she is a writer of clinical, often cruel, comedy while diagnosing a deeply deficient materialism in the contemporary human condition. Spark has enjoyed both a wide readership as well as great critical acclaim. Muriel Sarah Camberg was born in Edinburgh on February 1, 1918 to a Scottish Jewish father and an English mother. She was educated at James Gillespie’s School in the Scottish capital, where she encountered the teacher Christina Kay, who became the model for Spark’s most famous character, Jean Brodie. Marrying Sydney O. Spark in 1937, she immigrated with him to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and had a son, Robin (b. 1938). In 1944 she divorced the mentally unstable Spark, left her son in a convent school, and returned to Britain where she worked for the Political Intelligence Office. From 1947 to 1949 Muriel Spark was editor of the Poetry Review, had her first literary success when “The Seraph and the Zambesi” won The Observer newspaper’s Christmas short story competition in 1951, but was most intent on becoming a poet. The Fanfarlo and Other Verse appeared in 1952. During the early 1950s Spark also gained recognition as a critic and editor by publishing a coedited collection of essays on William Wordsworth (1950), a book on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1951), a coedited selection of letters by the Bront€es (1953), and a study of John Masefield (1953). Having been brought up in a nominally Presbyterian background (principally through the medium of James Gillespie’s), Spark became an Anglican in 1953, heavily influenced as she was by the life and work of T. S. Eliot. In 1954, however, increasingly immersed in the work of John Henry Newman,
whose letters she coedited in 1957, she changed denomination yet again, becoming a Roman Catholic. Her first novel, The Comforters (1957), was much admired by critics, including Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, and was the result not only of Spark’s interest in the numinous but of her recent experience of breakdown and hallucination (in part due to overindulgence in a slimming drug). As her reputation for being one of the most innovative novelists in the Englishspeaking world burgeoned, she moved to New York in 1962, where she wrote for the New Yorker, which serialized much of her emerging fiction. In 1966 Spark moved to Italy, where she was to live for the rest of her life. She was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Mandelbaum Gate in 1965 and the Order of the British Empire in 1967. She became an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1978, a Dame of the British Empire in 1993, and a Commandeur in the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1996. She was awarded a lifetime’s achievement honor, the David Cohen Prize for Literature, in 1997. Her twenty-second novel, The Finishing School, was published in 2004, and she died on April 13, 2006. The Comforters is the first of many semiautobiographical novels by Spark. In it Caroline Rose, a half-Jewish convert to Catholicism, struggles to square the idea of free will with the omniscient Godhead. Influenced by the French nouveau roman, then little known in the English-speaking world, this self-reflexive novel involves a central character who becomes aware of the story being typed out and of the shocking possibility that “reality” in the novel is all a fabrication. Spark’s version of the playful, even postmodern, novel is fascinating since it is part of her attempts, ongoing throughout her career, to marry such experimental, metafictional technique to anagogic, or religious, purposes. The Comforters considers the idea, using the metaphor of the novel, that the world is a difficult place for the individual morally to discern, and that the only person entitled to judge, or to promulgate any absolute narrative, is God (a curious tension for a creative writer to set up within her work). Spark’s novels all deal with characters struggling to make sense of who is in control of a complicated, theocentric destiny. Her third, Memento Mori (1959), established Spark as a
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consummate black humorist as Death assumes the modern technology of the telephone to “threaten,” seemingly, a group of elderly Londoners, many of whom have led self-obsessed lives. In fact Death’s reminder to these people that they “must die” is, in effect, God giving them the chance for moral self-reckoning as the end of their lives approach. Blithely ignorant of the afterlife and puffed up with their own importance, most of the characters carry on toward oblivion in a kind of modern danse macabre, where the reader is invited to laugh at the veniality of most of what passes for human activity in the secular world and to consider the possibility for themselves that there might be a bigger “story” beyond what we apprehend as normality. The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) continued what was fast becoming Spark’s hallmark mode of traumatizing the modern world with unlikely supernatural visitation. In this novel Dougal Douglas, in the first instance a stereotypical, disliked Scotsman “on the make” come to live high on the hog in London, enters the lives of a group of suburban characters obsessed with material progress, respectability, pursuing blackmail, and adulterous relations. Claiming to be a demon, Dougal accomplishes such feats as shape-changing by holding down two jobs at once through the simple expedient of reversing his name for his second employer and becoming Douglas Dougal. He also meddles in the lives of others, for instance turning an extramarital affair into a menage a trois by becoming a second boyfriend to a secretary having relations with her boss. Here we see Dougal acting as an orthodox diabolic force, where he exacerbates already freely chosen moral evil and does not introduce it where it does not already preexist (since in the divine economy God is the ultimate power who will not allow the Devil to enforce sin on human existence). In these and other ways, Dougal ruins some characters and potentially allows all to consider that the rationalist, materialist, sensualist, consumerist view of life that predominates in the late twentieth century is in fact morally threadbare. In Spark’s most famous novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), the eponymous “schoolmarm,” like Dougal Douglas, is one of Spark’s many storytellers who create a fog of multiplying fictions that beguile and blinker.
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Spark’s most “Scottish” novel, one of only a few set even partly in her native country, it depicts Brodie as a combination of Mary, Queen of Scots and John Knox, Catholic and Protestant, testimony to a heterogeneous national identity, a theme that persistently interests Spark at the level of the individual (one of her finest short stories, “The Gentile Jewesses,” has particular fun with oxymoronic identity as Spark makes the point that cultural labels that are generally descriptive are always inadequate, indeed unimaginative). Jean Brodie highlights Spark’s lack of recognition among her fellow contemporaries in Scottish writing (in spite of being the Scottish writer, in heady combination of both popular and critical acclaim, with the greatest worldwide status since Robert Louis Stevenson). As a woman of mixed identity and as a successful cosmopolitan writer, little concerned in her work with the “condition of Scotland,” Spark has been regarded somewhat coldly by others in the Scottish literary pantheon (Robin Jenkins, her closest Scottish contemporary in stature, has claimed categorically that she is not a Scottish writer). Jean Brodie is an essay in uncertain identity and the fact that human beings are always less in control of events than they think. Brodie, a woman of marginalized location, allowed even the limited role of a spinsterhood teaching career at a girls’ school only because of the decimation of the male population following World War II, fabricates fantasies of her life story for the consumption of her pupils and herself. Liberating and pathetic, Brodie’s stories are licentious and an index of her strictly limited freedom in society. She also attempts to dictate the life stories of her chosen students, her “creme de la creme,” in a way that is routinely defeated in each case. We know this through Spark’s “flash forward” technique that gives “endings” away, so that the reader, enlightened, is less interested in the outcome of the plot and has attention drawn instead to the work’s moral parameters. Exuberant, silly, and the inadvertent occasion for grace in the lives of her chosen set, Brodie is one of the most extravagant fictional creations of the later twentieth century (a fine film version was made in 1969 starring Maggie Smith, for which she won an Oscar, and numerous versions for the stage also have been produced). The Girls of Slender Means (1963) consolidated Spark’s technique of casting and satirizing the
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moral dynamics among an intimate set of people against a large-scale historical backdrop (this time the residents of a female hostel during World War II). Moving briefly away from her previous miniaturism, where many characters interlock in the course of what had been, in the case of Brodie and Slender Means, essentially novellas, The Mandelbaum Gate (1965) is another historical fiction (set against Palestinian tensions in the 1960s) which, in its extended foray into the mind of one largely admirable central character, essays a depth of psychological realism that Spark had not previously attempted, nor to which she was to return. She returned to a series of short novels of devastating surface satire, where the characters are largely inscrutable in their inner lives but where the morality of their situation becomes shockingly clear. The Driver’s Seat (1970) features a kind of hyper-version of Jean Brodie, where a woman, having given up on a world in which she is desperately unhappy, sets out to engineer the drama of her own demise though God, in sinister form, does not allow her absolute control of events. Arguably Spark’s finest technical performance (something, in any case, that she believed), this book is certainly the most chilling of all of Spark’s works in its cold-hearted presentation of the characters. An excellent film version starring Elizabeth Taylor was made in 1975. Similarly notable Sparkian performances from the same period are Not to Disturb (1971), in which brilliantly managed formal cliche, where all happens according to a most predictable gothic horror plot, mimics the way in which the immorality of the characters has brought a hellish certainty to their lives (and deaths); and The Abbess of Crewe (1974), a stunning satire of the Watergate scandal, set in a convent, where neurotic surveillance and control become the obsessive focus of the protagonist’s motivation. In the 1970s Spark satirized, not always convincingly, the larger than life pretensions of life in both New York and Italy, before returning to her best form in the late novels, Loitering with Intent (1981) and A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), both of which satirize the literary London she had known in the 1950s. These novels show Spark with her hugely amused and scathing eye, lampooning nefarious schemers and culture vultures. A mocker of the arrogance of overblown human designs in its earthbound forms, Spark is
one of the most important religious novelists of the twentieth century. SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF); Jenkins, Robin (BIF); Jewish Fiction (BIF); Scottish Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bold, A. (ed.) (1984). Muriel Spark: An Odd Capacity for Vision. London: Vision/Barnes and Noble. Bold, A. (1986). Muriel Spark. London: Methuen. Carruthers, G. (1997). The Remarkable Fictions of Muriel Spark. In D. Gifford & D. McMillan (eds.), A History of Scottish Women’s Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press pp. 514–25. Carruthers, G. (2008). “Fully to Savour Her Position”: Muriel Spark and Scottish Identity. Modern Fiction Studies, 54(3), 487–04. Cheyette, B. (2000). Muriel Spark. Tavistock: Northcote House. Hynes, J. (1988). The Art of the Real: Muriel Spark’s Novels. London: Associated University Press. Hynes, J. (ed.) (1992). Critical Essays on Muriel Spark. London: Macmillan. Kemp, P. (1974). Muriel Spark. London: Paul Elek. Lodge, D. (1971). The Uses and Abuses of Omniscience: Method and Meaning in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. In The Novelist at the Crossroads. London: Routledge. Malkoff, K. (1968). Muriel Spark. New York: Columbia University Press. McQuillan, M. (ed.) (2001). Theorising Muriel Spark: Gender, Race, Deconstruction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Randisi, J. (1991). On Her Way Rejoicing: The Fiction of Muriel Spark. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Rankin, I. (1985). Surface and Structure: Reading Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat. Journal of Narrative Technique, 29, 146–55. Richmond, V. B. (1984). Muriel Spark. New York: Ungar. Spark, M. (1957). The Comforters. London: Macmillan. Spark, M. (1959). Memento Mori. London: Macmillan. Spark, M. (1960). The Ballad of Peckham Rye. London: Macmillan. Spark, M. (1961). The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. London: Macmillan. Spark, M. (1963). The Girls of Slender Means. London: Macmillan. Spark, M. (1965). The Mandelbaum Gate. London: Macmillan. Spark, M. (1970). The Driver’s Seat. London: Macmillan.
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Spark, M. (1971). Not to Disturb. London: Macmillan. Spark, M. (1974). The Abbess of Crewe. London: Macmillan. Spark, M. (1981). Loitering with Intent. London: Bodley Head. Spark, M. (1988). A Far Cry from Kensington. London: Constable. Spark, M. (1994). The Collected Short Stories. London: Penguin. Stanford, D. (1963). Muriel Spark: A Biographical and Critical Study. Edinburgh: Centaur. Whittaker, R. (1982). The Faith and Fiction of Muriel Spark. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Storey, David WILLIAM HUTCHINGS
Uniquely among working-class writers of his generation, David Storey has been acclaimed in England and America as both a novelist and a playwright. Born in 1933 in Yorkshire, the son of a coalminer, Storey draws quite specifically on his varied life experience as a professional athlete, an artist (educated at London’s prestigious Slade School of Fine Art), a teacher, a construction worker, a writer, and a son whose education, talents, and parental ambitions elevated him – however uneasily – from the working class to the middle class. Like other novelists of the so-called “angry young men” generation (Sillitoe, Wain, Braine, Kingsley Amis), Storey remains best known for his first book. This Sporting Life (1960b) is narrated by Arthur Machin, a professional rugby player whose on-field life and in-game values he finds difficult to reconcile with his increasingly intimate domestic relationship with his widowed landlady. The novel insightfully depicts the psychological values inherent in this roughest of male contact sports – competitiveness, toughness, camaraderie, pain, rituals, teamwork, dedication, rowdiness, and (not least) violence. Outside the fields of grown-up play, these characteristics prove insufficient, even dangerous. There, quite different, often difficult, bafflingly complex emotions prevail. The novel’s much acclaimed film adaptation was directed by Lindsay Anderson (1963) from Storey’s screenplay. Storey’s subsequent two novels, in quick succession, broke numerous social and literary
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taboos of their day. Flight into Camden (1960a) is a “breakaway” novel whose female first-person narrator defies social conventions and familial expectations, establishing a new autonomy through an adulterous relationship. Radcliffe (1963b), Storey’s earliest third-person narrative, depicts unabashedly homoerotic desire with a virtually unprecedented frankness and forthrightness for English fiction. At the time, such relationships were unlawful, discussed only obliquely if at all. Radcliffe, however, culminates in a protracted, passionate male–male kiss inside a chapel – a quasi-sacramental scene that scandalized many readers. Though the characters’ physiotypes and class backgrounds now seem stereotypical (wealthy, effete Leonard Radcliffe lusts after muscular, working-class Vic Tolson), and though the violent denouement seems lurid and/or melodramatic, Radcliffe remains a milestone in the depiction of homosexuality in English fiction. Storey’s portrayal is far more explicit and forthright than that of D. H. Lawrence, to whom he has often been compared – a linkage that Storey disdains (Sage 64). Storey’s next two novels were hewn from a long, unfinished work. Pasmore’s (1972) subject is psychological breakdown – a theme Storey introduced in The Restoration of Arnold Middleton (1967), his first play. In the novel, Colin Pasmore undergoes an existential crisis involving both emotional collapse and marital separation. Yet, unlike countless novels and plays about domestic dissolution and strife-laden homes, Pasmore probes psychological self-exile and the anxieties of forced exclusions – the pain accompanying the loss of the familiar and mundane, of home, security, and countless rituals formerly taken for granted that no longer reassure. Storey’s focus is the central character’s reactions rather than actions, depicted with extraordinary nuance and psychological insight; his later play The March on Russia (1989) takes place in Pasmore’s parents’ home. With A Temporary Life (1973), Storey explored for the first time the life and psychology of an artist, a former athlete now a teacher, whose wife is hospitalized with mental illness. Saville, winner of the Booker Prize in 1976, is a Bildungsroman whose protagonist comes of age in Yorkshire during and after World War II. Acclaimed for its detailed evocation of time, place, and the working-class community against
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which Colin Saville defines himself, it is also an insightful psychological portrait of ambition, alienation, and the costs and rewards of achievement. Similarly, in A Prodigal Child (1982), Bryan Morley grows up distanced from his farm-working parents; he is attracted to and welcomed by the family of the farm’s owner, the Spencers. Again, issues of class, mores, love, and social mobility are thoughtfully explored. Present Times marked Storey’s turn from his childhood’s era to strife-torn, early Thatcherite England. Postcolonial immigration, feminist agitation, financial duress, and unemployment bewilder and beleaguer middle-aged Frank Attercliffe, a sportswriter and former professional footballer, the father of five children, abandoned by his wife for a richer man. Fourteen years later, A Serious Man (1998) offered an even more devastating critique of New Labour’s Britain, narrated by Richard Fenchurch (a character also in Storey’s play Stages 1992), whose near-complete emotional breakdown resulted in a five-year confinement in a mental institution. Disconcertingly, many details of Fenchurch’s life – as a formerly acclaimed novelist, playwright, and painter – are markedly similar to Storey’s own, radically problematizing where the book’s fictionality begins and ends, even as the narrator’s mental instability makes his self-presentation unreliable. Yet, clearly, Fenchurch would be incapable of writing a novel as complex and sophisticated as A Serious Man. Matthew Maddox, the protagonist of As It Happened, is an emeritus professor at a school of fine art. Having failed an attempted suicide, now absent his remarried wife and departed children, he seeks rehabilitation and a sense of purpose amid the cultural and social malaise that Fenchurch also deplored. Divided within himself, as Storey’s characters often are, he too seeks “restoration” beyond mere resignation and dismay. Thin-Ice Skater (2004) marks another abrupt transition in Storey’s fiction. Its narrator is a withdrawn, self-absorbed 17-year-old whose strange, obsessive memos comprise the book’s first 45 pages and its final chapter; his erotic involvement with his middle-aged aunt yields disastrous familial consequences. Renowned for seemingly straightforward realism and sharply observed period details of
postwar England, Storey’s novels are equally remarkable for their psychological nuances and deft insights into social class – particularly the plight of those educated out of the working class they were born into but finding at best uneasy acceptance into professional or artistic circles. Despite the later novels’ increasingly dour or disaffected socio-political themes, their psychological incisiveness and their eloquence are undiminished. SEE ALSO: Angry Young Man Fiction (BIF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF); Working-Class Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Anderson, L. (dir.) (1963). This Sporting Life. Rank/ Independent Artists. Eyre, R. (dir.) (1980). Pasmore. Play for Today. BBC Television. Jackson, D., & Perkins, W. (1993). David Storey. In M. Moseley (ed.), British Novelists Since 1960. 3rd series. Detroit: Gale, pp. 253–77. Pittock, M. (1990). Revaluing the Sixties: This Sporting Life Revisited. Forum for Modern Language Studies, 26(2), 96–108. Pittock, M. (1991). Storey’s Radcliffe. Durham University Journal, 52(2), 235–48. Pittock, M. (2000). A Serious Novel. Forum for Modern Language Studies, 35(3), 261–77. Randall, P. R. (1986). The Tie that Binds: Family in the Novels of David Storey. In A. Wertheim (ed.), Essays on the Contemporary British Novel. Munich: Max Hueber, pp. 227–44. Reinelt, J. (1972). Storey’s Novels and Plays: Fragile Fictions. In W. Hutchings (ed.), David Storey: A Casebook. New York: Garland, pp. 53–72. Sage, V. (1976). Conversation with David Storey. New Review, pp. 63–5 (Oct.). Storey, D. (1960a). Flight into Camden. London: Longman. Storey, D. (1960b). This Sporting Life. London: Longman. Storey, D. (1963a). Journey through a Tunnel. Listener, pp. 159–61 (Aug. 1). Storey, D. (1963b). Radcliffe. London: Longman. Storey, D. (1967). The Restoration of Arnold Middleton. London: Jonathan Cape. Storey, D. (1972). Pasmore. London: Longman. Storey, D. (1973). A Temporary Life. London: Allen Lane. Storey, D. (1976). Saville. London: Jonathan Cape. Storey, D. (1982). A Prodigal Child. London: Jonathan Cape.
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Storey, D. (1984). Present Times. London: Jonathan Cape. Storey, D. (1989). The March on Russia. New York: Samuel French. Storey, D. (1992). Stages. In Storey: Plays, vol. 1: The Contractor, Home, Stages, and Caring. London: Methuen. Storey, D. (1998). A Serious Man. London: Jonathan Cape. Storey, D. (2002). As It Happened. London: Jonathan Cape. Storey, D. (2004). Thin-Ice Skater. London: Jonathan Cape. Tredell, N. (2006). Saville, by David Storey. In M. Moseley (ed.), Booker Prize Novels, 1969–2005. Detroit:CengageGale,pp.80–8.
Swift, Graham DAVID MALCOLM
Graham Swift is one of the most highly regarded contemporary British novelists. Since the publication of his first novel, The Sweet-Shop Owner, in 1980, he has won numerous literary prizes (Last Orders took the Booker Prize in 1996) and widespread critical acclaim. His fictions have been translated into many languages, and films have been made of three of his novels. His work receives long and usually positive reviews in major journals. Above all, critics and scholars pay attention to his 1983 novel Waterland, which can be seen as one of the central British novels of the last two decades of the twentieth century. Although its success has overshadowed Swift’s seven other novels, they, too, have won serious critical consideration. In a review of Tomorrow (2007), Alvarez writes: “Waterland is an extraordinary work, and there was even better to come” (36). Despite some negative commentary, especially with regard to The Light of Day (2003) and Tomorrow, Swift’s fictions, especially Last Orders (1996), are seen as important and powerful novels. In 1996, the eminent Irish novelist John Banville wrote that “Book for book, Swift is surely one of England’s finest living novelists” (8). Swift was born in south London in 1949. He was educated at a private secondary school and at Queen’s College, Cambridge, and York University. He has been a full-time writer for most of his
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career, concentrating almost entirely on fiction. He is a very private figure in the British literary world, and one whose biography shows little direct connection with his work. Swift’s novels are part of a substantial change that takes place in British fiction in the 1980s. Along with his contemporaries, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Rose Tremain, and others, Swift is seen as bringing new thematic depth and technical innovation to a parochial and unambitious British novel. While this argument is not wholly true, it does bear examination, and was certainly perceived as accurate in the 1980s. Swift’s fiction is homogeneous, although it is neither repetitious nor boring. He works with a small number of kinds of narrator, a limited variety of characters and settings, and a restricted set of themes. His narrators are usually middleaged (predominately male) and reflective, scrutinizing their pasts, trying to make sense of them, in monologues delivered to no one or to characters who cannot hear them. The past itself, in various forms – individual history, the history of a locality, national and international history – is the narrators’ and the novelist’s concern. Most narrators are aware of how difficult it is to reconstruct the past. Memory is selective; causes are hard to know; versions of the past are frequently best guesses or inventions. The narrators’ organization of their memories embodies these difficulties: they are non-linear and associative; often words fail the speakers. The status of these accounts as constructs is emphasized constantly. Swift’s settings and characters are also variations on some basic motifs. He favors London suburbs, middle class and working class, although Waterland is mostly set in a fictionalized, but verisimilar, East Anglia. There are, however, excursions beyond south London; for example, sections of Out of This World (1988) take place in Greece and postwar Germany. All novels have roughly contemporary settings, although there are extensive passages set in the past, either recent or distant. The family – that embodiment of the individual’s link with the past – is at the center of Swift’s writing. His narrators usually brood over relations – always complex, frequently soured – between fathers and their children and between spouses. The characters themselves are drawn
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from a variety of social backgrounds: the Beeches in Out of This World are wealthy arms manufacturers; the protagonists in Last Orders are from the south London working class and lower middle class. Critics usually point to the unglamorous and quotidian nature of these figures, an observation that is only partly true. Certainly their emotional lives are very rich, and their experiences (incest, abortion, adultery, murder) intense. Indeed, the action of Swift’s novels is often quite violent. Warfare, which for Swift embodies the destructive power of history, plays an important part in many of his novels. In terms of genre, Swift’s fiction is rooted in the nineteenth-century British traditions of the social-psychological and the historical novel. It remains within the conventions of realist fiction, apart from his use of dead narrators in Out of This World and Last Orders. However, the technical complexity of Swift’s work – multiple points of view and narrators, an intricate and non-chronological organization of events, the admixture of many texts generically different from the dominant genre in a novel (for example, fairy tale, encyclopedia entry, and scientific account in Waterland), a language that frequently draws attention to itself – gives the novels a self-referential and metafictional focus that goes beyond the norms of realist prose. Two of his novels, Shuttlecock (1981) and The Light of Day, have elements of spy fiction and detective fiction, but these are both subordinate to the novels’ psychological interests. Swift published a collection of short stories, Learning to Swim and Other Stories, in 1982. Although these stories have received negative commentary from many English-language reviewers, scholars in Continental Europe have been kinder to them. Certainly, two of them, “Seraglio” and “Hoffmeier’s Antelope,” are powerfully ambiguous pieces of work.
In almost 30 years, Swift has published eight novels. His most recent fiction, Tomorrow, is, unusually for Swift, narrated entirely by a female character. It is, like his other novels, an exploration of a family’s past and the relation of that past to the present and future. It has received hostile reviews. However, no matter how Swift’s career develops, his position in late twentiethcentury British fiction, centered on the achievements of Waterland and Last Orders, is surely secure. SEE ALSO: Historiographic Metafiction (AF); London in Fiction (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Alvarez, A. (2007). The Trouble with Happiness [review of Tomorrow]. New York Review of Books, pp. 36–7 (Nov. 22). Banville, J. (1996). That’s Life [review of Last Orders]. New York Review of Books, pp. 8–9 (Apr. 4). Craps, S. (2005). Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. Lea, D. (2005). Graham Swift. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Malcolm, D. (2003). Understanding Graham Swift. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Swift, G. (1980). The Sweet-Shop Owner. London: Allen Lane. Swift, G. (1981). Shuttlecock. London: Allen Lane. Swift, G. (1982). Learning to Swim and Other Stories. London: London Magazine Editions. Swift, G. (1983). Waterland. London: Heinemann. Swift, G. (1988). Out of This World. London: Viking. Swift, G. (1992). Ever After. London: Picador. Swift, G. (1996). Last Orders. London: Picador. Swift, G. (2003). The Light of Day. London: Hamish Hamilton. Swift, G. (2007). Tomorrow. London: Picador. Widdowson, P. (2006). Graham Swift. Tavistock: Northcote House.
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T Thomas, D. M. BRAN NICOL
The novelist, poet, and translator Donald Michael Thomas is the author of nearly 20 collections of poetry, translations of the Russian poets Pushkin, Akhmatova, and Yevtushenko, a biography of Solzhenitsyn, and 13 novels, of which the most famous is The White Hotel (1981). His fiction has been considered a significant example of postmodernist writing in that it is anti-realist or experimental in form and frequently uses the techniques of pastiche and what Linda Hutcheon has termed “historiographic metafiction” (5). Thomas was born in 1935 in Redruth in Cornwall. After what he has described as a rather sheltered early life in west Cornwall, his emigration to Melbourne in Australia at the age of 14 had considerable impact, especially the long journey by boat itself, during which he went through puberty. Many of his poems and stories revolve around the idea of a literal and symbolic journey, usually by boat or by train, while perhaps his most important collection of poetry, The Puberty Tree (1992), continually returns to depict the young Thomas’s formative experiences in Australia. Australian culture and education (he attended University High School in Melbourne) also made a lasting impression on him, not least in cementing his views about the narrow-mindedness of English society and culture. On his return from Australia in 1951, Thomas began his National Service, most of which involved learning Russian. While he was graded “suitable for low level interrogation of prisoners”
(Thomas, 1987), more important than this skill was the feeling for Russian culture he picked up as a result. In particular, Thomas discovered the poetry of Alexander Pushkin (1789–1837) and Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966), probably Russia’s two most important poets. After completing National Service, Thomas studied English at New College Oxford, graduating with first class honors in 1959 and taking his MA. At Oxford Thomas entered into the first of three marriages and published a short story called “The Opportunist” in the university magazine Isis – the only publication using his full name. Another Donald Thomas at Oxford had already published a volume of poems, and so Thomas subsequently opted for his trademark initials. Thomas began writing poetry while taking his diploma in education at Oxford in 1958 and continued to do so while teaching English at Hereford College of Education from 1963 to 1977. He became established as a poet when he was included in Penguin Modern Poets 11 (Black et al. 1968) along with D. M. Black and his friend Peter Redgrove. When Hereford College closed down in 1977, Thomas, at a loose end, returned to Oxford to embark on a BLitt on “Problems in Translating Pushkin” under the supervision of renowned critic and writer, John Bayley. Although he never completed his thesis, his immersion in Russian writing, and his admiration for Russian writers such as Pushkin, Pasternak, and especially Mikhail Bulgakov in The Master and Margarita (1966–7) led him to try writing a novel that would follow “the creative laws of poetry, based very largely on symbol and image” without sacrificing the drive of realist narrative. He wrote two novels,
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Birthstone (1980), originally begun in collaboration with the poet Elizabeth Ashworth, and The Flute-Player (1979), a phantasmagoric history of twentieth-century totalitarian society. Thomas had intended these novels to be only a temporary break from writing poetry. Yet at the end of the 1970s he felt compelled to write another, having been driven to compose a number of “intuitive” poems (such as “Woman to Sigmund Freud”), as well as experiencing predictive dreams and astounding coincidences. His third novel, The White Hotel (1981), is the story of a woman who is analyzed by Sigmund Freud and is later murdered by the Nazis at the massacre of Babi Yar in the Ukraine in 1941. The novel is notable for its intertextual juxtaposition of different genres, such as erotic fantasy, poetry, letters, psychoanalytic case study, and a documentary account of the Holocaust, and its incorporation of passages of writing from other authors (mainly Freud and Anatoly Kuznetsov’s realist novel about the Babi Yar massacre). It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1981. As is the case with other examples of postmodern bricolage, by the likes of William Burroughs or Kathy Acker, Thomas was accused of plagiarizing elements of the novel, even though his debt to Freud and Kuznetsov is clear from the copyright page and allusions in the text. The accusations are perhaps better understood within the context of the postmodern fondness for incorporating other texts in a supposedly self-contained work of fiction, a practice that challenges the conventional understanding of originality and authorship. Similar effects are created by Thomas’s Russian Nights quintet, which followed The White Hotel: Ararat (1983), Swallow (1984), Sphinx (1986), Summit (1987), and Lying Together (1990). These novels are linked not just by their concern with Russia and the tension between artistic freedom and a suppressive totalitarian society, but also by their stylistic promiscuity and Thomas’s impersonation of the voices of other writers, such as Pushkin, H. Rider Haggard, and the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. In the 1990s Thomas published three novels which probe the impact of the momentous, traumatic elements of twentieth-century history on the conscious and unconscious minds of those who live through them. Flying in to Love (1992a) is a fictionalization of the Kennedy assassination
and its aftermath, while Pictures at an Exhibition (1993) is another controversial yoking together of the Holocaust and psychoanalysis. Eating Pavlova (1994) masquerades as the personal diary of Freud, resulting in the creation of an even more libertarian and subversive – though still plausible – Viennese doctor than we know, and allowing Thomas’s distinctive “Freudian” style of richly symbolic writing to flourish. In the last decade, Thomas has published only low-key works: two novels and a second memoir, Bleak Hotel (2008), which revolves around the frustrations of The White Hotel being optioned by film companies for 27 years without ever being made into a film. But his poetic yet highly readable fiction, especially The White Hotel, continues to be admired by readers, and his work regarded by academics as symptomatic of the techniques and values of postmodern writing generally, and the genre of “Holocaust fiction” particularly. He lives in Truro, Cornwall. SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Akhmatova, A. (1988). Selected Poems (trans. D. M. Thomas). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Berman, J. (1987). The Talking Cure: Literary Representations of Psychoanalysis. New York: New York University Press, pp. 270–94. Black, D. M., Thomas, D. M., & Redgrove, P. (1968). Penguin Modern Poets 11: D. M. Black, Peter Redgrove, D. M. Thomas. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foster, J. B. (1995). Magical Realism, Compensatory Vision, and Felt History: Classical Realism Transformed in The White Hotel. In L. P. Zamora & Wendy B. Faris (eds.), Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 267–83. Hutcheon, L. (1988). A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, pp. 158–77. Nicol, B. (2002). D. M. Thomas. Plymouth: Northcote House/British Council. Punter, D. (1985). The Politics of Fear. In The Hidden Script: Writing and the Unconscious. London: Routledge, pp. 113–28. Pushkin, A. (1982). The Bronze Horseman and Other Poems (trans. D. M. Thomas). London: Secker and Warburg.
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Thomas, D. M. (1979). The Flute-Player. London: Gollancz. Thomas, D. M. (1980). Birthstone. London: Gollancz. Thomas, D. M. (1981). The White Hotel. London: Gollancz. Thomas, D. M. (1983). Ararat. London: Gollancz. Thomas, D. M. (1984). Swallow. London: Gollancz. Thomas, D. M. (1986). Sphinx. London: Gollancz. Thomas, D. M. (1987). Summit. London: Gollancz. Thomas, D. M. (1988a). Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life. London: Little, Brown. Thomas, D. M. (1988b). Memories and Hallucinations. London: Gollancz. Thomas, D.M. (1990). Lying Together. London: Gollancz. Thomas, D. M. (1992a). Flying in to Love. London: Bloomsbury. Thomas, D. M. (1992b). The Puberty Tree: New and Selected Poems. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe. Thomas, D. M. (1993). Pictures at an Exhibition. London: Bloomsbury. Thomas, D. M. (1994). Eating Pavlova. London: Bloomsbury. Thomas, D. M. (1998). Lady with a Laptop. New York: Carroll and Graf. Thomas, D. M. (2000). Charlotte. London: Duckworth. Thomas, D. M. (2008). Bleak Hotel. London: Quartet. Vice, S. (2000). Documentary Fiction: D. M. Thomas, The White Hotel. In Holocaust Fiction. London: Routledge, pp. 38–66.
To´ibın, Colm WILLIAM A. JOHNSEN
Colm To´ibın is one of the most recognized and influential writers in Ireland in that he serves a public role as a commentator on current events, as a reviewer and editor, and as a presence at conferences and festivals, yet he preserves against this publicity a prose true to his characters rather than his own biography. To´ibın has admitted to an early admiration for Hemingway, although his prose is unclouded by Hemingway’s plainerthan-thou bravado. There are of course Irish influences on the author as well (he has edited a magisterial anthology of Irish fiction from Jonathan Swift to Emma Donoghue (1999c) for Penguin), yet his tone is markedly different from the ironic deadpan of Joyce’s Dubliners or the deadbeat of Beckett’s prose. Born in 1955 in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, To´ibın was educated at the Christian Brothers
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School (where his father taught) and then at St. Peter’s College, Wexford. He took a BA in history and English at University College Dublin in 1975. He lived in Barcelona for three years, teaching English and learning Catalan, in the midst of Spain’s political turbulence. When he returned to Ireland he began writing for In Dublin, Hibernia, and the Sunday Tribune; he served three years (1982–5) as editor of Magill, at the time Ireland’s most influential current affairs magazine. During this time he worked on an MA in modern English and American literature but never submitted his thesis (on Anthony Hecht). In 1985 he left Ireland again, writing journalism while traveling in South America (especially Argentina during the time of the trial of the generals) and Africa. He published his first book in 1987 (Walking Along the Border, with photographs by Tony O’Shea) and, in 1990, he published The Trial of the Generals (1990c), Homage to Barcelona (1990a), and his first novel (completed in 1986), The South (1990b). To´ibın lives and works mainly in Dublin, but spends a summer month each year in Spain. In 1959 Iris Murdoch advised contemporary novelists to avoid the self-regarding neurosis of high modernism by creating characters unlike themselves (1959, 271). To´ibın is such a novelist, even when he borrows from his own past: his first novel is a portrait of a Protestant woman’s artistic emergence. Katherine Proctor, the main character of The South, leaves husband, son, and ancestral big house behind to begin painting and a new life in Barcelona with another painter who was jailed and tortured for his revolutionary activities during the Spanish Civil War. They live in an isolated mountain village with their daughter, but flashbacks force her lover Miguel (who does not drive) to flee with their daughter in the jeep, killing them both in an accident. Katherine’s past pursues her as well through an Irish painter, Michael Graves (also from Enniscorthy), whose continued friendship preserves her Irish identity in Spain. They return to Ireland together, and Katherine makes an elaborate peace with her son, now married. She resumes her painting and keeps quiet company with Graves, not pretending that these arrangements are equal to what she has lost. The Heather Blazing (1992), To´ibın’s next novel, follows Eamon Redmond, a high court judge who is driving to his holiday cottage with his wife, Carmen. He has just decided a suit in favor of a
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hospital discharging financial responsibility for a handicapped child to her impoverished parents. The novel reviews the childhood that brought him to such emotional distance from the pain of others, and from his wife and children. Chapters alternate between Eamon’s present and his past, during his childhood in Enniscorthy where his father (a schoolteacher) raised him alone after his mother died. He profits from his father’s political affiliation to Fianna Fail, and meets his future wife while canvassing. His rise in the courts is not hampered by his politics. Carmen tries to make him keep less to himself. Unexpectedly, she has a stroke and dies. Through his grief he gradually comes closer to his children and their families. In a beautifully understated final episode, he becomes a companion to his grandson by making him a basin of seawater to play in. At the end, the two go to the shore to play in the sea, repeating a custom that Eamon shared with his father. Already it is clear that To´ibın’s journalistic career of calling Ireland’s politics to account has transformed into the project of imaginatively re-envisioning Ireland. The Story of the Night (1996), the author’s third novel, is set in Argentina during the military dictatorship of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Richard Garay’s adamantly British mother taught him English and associated herself with the British enclave in Buenos Aires. Richard feels distant from his family, his schoolfellows, and his fellow English teachers at the school, but he is in love with Jorge Canetto, a fellow university student who asked him to teach him English. Richard and Jorge go for a holiday in Spain together, but Jorge is emphatically heterosexual in his company. Richard’s bilingualism proves invaluable to the CIA, and he is woven into the profiteering of denationalizing the Argentinian oil industry as a consultant. As Richard’s world widens beyond his parents’ flat and their furniture, which he has kept, he meets Pablo, Jorge’s brother returned from San Francisco. Eventually Pablo agrees to move into a modern house Richard sublets. Although To´ibın’s fictional characters speak as sparely as he writes, it is only The Story of the Night that is told in the first person. Perhaps only the full power of To´ibın’s understated prose can carry what one expects or fears for Richard and Pablo. Although dates are never given, Richard’s description of San Francisco recounts the initial appear-
ance of HIV/AIDS. When Pablo inexplicably leaves him, Richard in despair goes to New York with an acquaintance from the oil industry who gives him sex and cocaine without complications. But Richard’s apparently allergic reaction to the drugs shows how well this narrator keeps from himself the fact that he has AIDS. The full weight of To´ibın’s investment in a stylistic spareness across several novels pays for the dignity of Richard’s suffering at the end of the novel. The modesty of his narrating prose educates the reader to respect Richard’s physical and emotional pain, especially his own modesty in facing it. Hemingway’s spareness and the French tradition of l’ecriture blanche pale in comparison with what To´ibın is able to achieve. To´ibın has described in several interviews the history of his increasing identification with gay writing, which began at this time. Such identification for To´ibın is less about tagging himself as a homosexual and more about leading the way in modeling respect for it. The Blackwater Lightship (1999a), shortlisted for the Booker Prize, quietly returns to Enniscorthy, but consciously reinvokes properties and families described in The Heather Blazing. The pattern of alternating between Irish and international settings in his novels has now become apparent. To´ibın’s fourth novel offers a new, more energetic narrating and listening to several characters who are good at telling their own stories to each other. It is as if To´ibın lets his laconic prose style temporarily rest in peace in Richard Garay’s terminal narrative. Dora Devereux, Lily, and Dora’s granddaughter Helen are the three main characters. Helen’s father died when she was a child. Living separate from her mother while she attended to her father in the hospital educated her in separation, and she keeps her mother separate from her own life as a principal of a comprehensive school, mother of two boys, and wife. The separation is broken by her brother Declan (who is near death from AIDS), who wants to leave the hospital to go to his grandmother’s house in Cush (another locale detailed in The Heather Blazing). The grandmother Dora, her daughter Lily, and her granddaughter Helen must deal with Declan’s friends and his life in the close area of a cliffside cottage and the unrelenting last stages of Declan’s illness. The Master (2004b), also shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is perhaps To´ibın’s major work to
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date, profiting from his 10-year commitment to gay writing begun with The Story of the Night and the series of essays on gay writers for the London Review of Books (1994–2000), published as Love in a Dark Time (2002b); but also from conducting archival biographical research for Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush (2002a). It is rare for biographers to successfully create novelistic attachments to the characters their books treat. To´ibın’s study of Henry James is as moving as Richard Ellmann on James Joyce and Hermione Lee on Virginia Woolf. He enables the reader to sense that James’s reluctance to give himself away to passion with either men or women is at one with his unparalleled artistic achievements in prose. To´ibın creatively restores an antecedent master for contemporary writing who can amend the crude divisions of gay and straight fiction. Mothers and Sons (2006) collects some of To´ibın’s recent short stories, a form he has sponsored previously by editing an audiocassette of Irish short stories in 1997 as well as the fiction anthology for Penguin in 1999. The first story, “The Use of Reason,” appeared nine years earlier in the composite novel by seven Irish writers (Dermot Bolger, Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, Hugo Hamilton, Jennifer Johnston, Joseph O’Connor, and To´ibın) edited and conceived by Dermot Bolger as Finbar’s Hotel (1997). Perhaps the finest story in Mothers and Sons is “The Name of the Game,” which concerns a woman who overcomes the debts left by her husband by opening a chip shop, and then sells it successfully to finance a new life despite the pressure from her son to leave him in charge of it. To´ibın has announced a second planned collection of stories on exile and return, and has begun to describe himself in interviews and public appearances as a story-catcher. Yet To´ibın has also said that he has returned to writing fiction by pen and ink, as if to keep the pace of this new commitment to more stories in hand. Brooklyn (2009), his latest novel (starting again in Enniscorthy), tells Eilis Lacey’s all too common Irish story of emigrating to Brooklyn, establishing a self-sufficient life impossible at home, yet pulled back by Irish duties and affections impossible to escape. Her story modifies the defeated return told in George Moore’s famous story “Homesickness” (which To´ibın anthologized in The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction) and uncannily
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evokes Joyce’s “Eveline.” Before returning to Ireland to comfort her mother grieving for the sudden death of Eilis’s older sister Rose, she marries her Brooklyn Italian boyfriend at his urging in a civil ceremony. He feels that she might not return otherwise. He is right. Eilis is now more attractive to the young men of Enniscorthy, who had ignored her earlier, and they are more attractive to her. She schedules her return to Brooklyn only when the network of transatlantic Irish family gossip blows the cover on her double life. This novel continues To´ibın’s ongoing project across essay, drama, and fiction: to repossess and renew Irish literature by crafting more complex representations of gay lives and Irish identity. SEE ALSO: Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Irish Fiction (BIF); James, Henry (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bolger, D., Doyle, R., Enright, A., Hamilton, H., Johnston, J., O’Connor, J., & To´ibın, C. (1997). Finbar’s Hotel. London: Picador. Bøss, M. (2005). Belonging without Belonging: Colm To´ibın’s Dialogue with the Past. Estudios Irlandeses, 0, 22–9. ´ ibın. Dublin: Delaney, P. (ed.) (2008). Reading Colm To Liffey. Eagleton, T. (1999). Mothering: Review of The Blackwater Lightship. London Review of Books, p. 8 (Oct.14). Foster, R. F. (2007). Luck and the Irish. Harmondsworth: Penguin. McCourt, J. (2005). Colm To´ibın. In A. Roche (ed.), The UCD Aesthetic: Celebrating 150 Years of UCD Writers. Dublin: New Island pp. 229–38. Murdoch, I. (1954). Under the Net. London Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. (1959). The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited. Yale Review, 49, 247–71. To´ibın, C. (1985). Inside the Supreme Court. Magill, 8(7), 8–35. To´ibın, C. (1987). Walking Along the Border. London: Macdonald. To´ibın, C. (1990a). Homage to Barcelona. London: Simon and Schuster. To´ibın, C. (1990b). The South. London: Serpent’s Tail. To´ibın, C. (1990c). The Trial of the Generals: Selected Journalism 1980–1990. Dublin: Raven Arts.
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To´ibın, C. (1991). Fecking off to England. In M. Rowe (ed.),SoVeryEnglish.London:Serpent’sTail,pp.13–15. To´ibın, C. (1992). The Heather Blazing. London: Picador. To´ibın, C. (1994). The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe. London: Jonathan Cape. To´ibın, C. (1996a). The Kilfenora Teaboy. A Study of Paul Durcan. Dublin: New Island. To´ibın, C. (1996b). Playboys of the GPO. London Review of Books, 18(8), 14–16 (Apr. 18). To´ibın, C. (1996c). The Story of the Night. London: Macmillan. To´ibın, C. (1999a). The Blackwater Lightship. London: Picador. To´ibın, C. (1999b). The Irish Famine. London: Profile. To´ibın, C. (ed.) (1999c). The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction. Harmondsworth: Penguin. To´ibın, C. (2002a). Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush. Dublin: Lilliput. To´ibın, C. (2002b). Love in a Dark Time. London: Picador. To´ibın, C. (2004a). Beauty in a Broken Place. Dublin: Lilliput. To´ibın, C. (2004b). The Master. London: Picador. To´ibın, C. (2005). Barcelona, 1975. Dublin Review, 18, 79–89. To´ibın, C. (2006). Mothers and Sons. London: Picador. To´ibın, C. (2007). A Brush with the Law. Dublin Review, 28, 11–33. To´ibın, C. (2009). Brooklyn. London: Viking.
Trevor, William MICHAEL L. STOREY
William Trevor’s numerous, highly acclaimed novels and stories are distinguished by their moral vision, psychological complexity, comic and tragic insights, and detached, ironic perspectives. Having lived in Ireland and England, Trevor is adept at setting his fiction in both countries, writing insightfully about English and Irish life and – in his Irish fiction – about both Anglo-Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics. Best known for his novels and stories, Trevor has also written plays, children’s fiction, essays, and reviews, and he has both adapted his fiction and created original dramas for radio and television. Two of his novels, Fools of Fortune and Felicia’s Journey, have been made into major films. He has been the recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the prestigious Whitbread Award, which he has won three times.
Trevor was born William Trevor Cox in Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland, in 1928 to Protestant parents. His father was a bank official whose routine transfers resulted in the family living in numerous small towns, in both the Irish Free State (which in 1949 became the Republic of Ireland) and British-controlled Northern Ireland. As a result of these frequent family relocations, Trevor was educated in about a dozen schools, some of which were Catholic. After graduating from Trinity College Dublin, he taught for a few years in Ireland. In 1952 he married, and the following year he and his wife moved to England, where Trevor again taught but also worked as a sculptor and then for an advertising agency. He took the pseudonym William Trevor for his first novel, A Standard of Behaviour (1958), and upon winning the Hawthornden Prize for his second novel, The Old Boys (1964), he left the advertising agency and took up writing full-time. He and his wife settled in Devon, England, where they still live. Trevor’s novels fit within the English tradition of the serious moral novelists, particularly Dickens, Hardy, E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene. His short fiction resembles – in both style and subject – that of the best modern Irish short story writers, especially Joyce, Frank O’Connor, and Sean O’Faolain, with Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) perhaps being his single greatest literary influence. Trevor’s most recurrent themes are dark ones of loneliness, alienation, marital unhappiness, betrayal, calamity, madness, evil, guilt, and the like, though he often tempers his treatment of these bleak themes with irony and humor. One of his signature techniques is the use of multiple perspectives in relating a narrative – a technique that often results in the reader’s uncertainty about the truth of events. Characters in his novels, such as the title characters of Mrs. Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel (1969) and Elizabeth Alone (1973) and Julia in Other People’s Worlds (1980), often come to painful realizations about their lives, while his short stories are often structured, like Joyce’s Dubliners, on what Joyce called “epiphany,” that is, an illumination or recognition. In the story “Mr. McNamara,” for example, a boy attempts to learn more about his father after his father’s death in hope of understanding himself better. His search takes him to Dublin’s Fleming Hotel where his father often visited the title character and brought back his
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friend’s gifts and stories to the family. What the boy discovers is that Mr. McNamara is really Nora McNamara. Angry over his father’s betrayal and hypocrisy, the boy wants to reveal the truth to his mother, but cannot. Instead, he is burdened by the awful secret, a burden that will embitter him for life. Frequently a novel or story will trace a character’s unhappiness or perverseness back to a childhood incident. In “The Death of Peggy Meehan,” the 46-year-old narrator recalls how in a childhood fantasy he “killed” Peggy Meehan. When she died of an illness a short time later, he was struck with guilt and began to “see” her. As the story ends, she continues to appear to him – ironically as an object of desire – in his terribly lonely life. Many of Trevor’s works treat the disappointments, betrayals, and failures of love and marriage. An early novel, The Love Department (1966), explores with both comic effect and moral insight the middle-class marriages of London suburbanites. “Teresa’s Wedding,” an early story, and “Honeymoon in Tramore,” a late one, have the same theme: the wedding couple’s recognition that their marriage falls considerably short of their romantic ideals. In some stories, such as the renowned “Ballroom of Romance,” characters resign themselves to loveless marriages, while in others, such as “Office Romances” and “A Bit on the Side,” they act out the emptiness, betrayals, and loneliness of failed relationships. Trevor’s fascination with evil in human nature has resulted in his depiction of psychopaths, con men, sexual deviants, murderers, and the like. Quite often the malevolent or perverse behavior of these characters is a result of their being neglected or abused as children. In The Children of Dynmouth (1976), set on the Dorset coast of England, the 15-year-old protagonist, Timothy Gedge, neglected by his family, goes about maliciously exploiting for his own gain the secret sins and failings of people of Dynmouth village – their sexual proclivities, infidelities, and pathologies. The most sinister of Trevor’s characters is Mr. Hildritch of Felicia’s Journey (1994), an Englishman who ensnares the title character. Sexually abused as a child by his mother and rejected by a series of women, Hildritch is a psychopath who – despite living a seemingly ordinary life – kills women but then blocks out his horrendous acts from his conscious mind.
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Typically, Trevor’s plots place innocent characters in situations in which they are threatened – psychologically, sexually, physically – by the malicious characters. Julia of Other People’s Worlds (1980), for instance, is brought under the malevolent influence of a younger man, Francis Tyte, who bigamously marries her while indirectly participating in the murder of his first wife. In Felicia’s Journey, Felicia is a pregnant Irish girl who has been thrown out of her home by her puritanical father; she goes to England in search of the young man who seduced her. There she meets by chance Hildritch, who draws her into his psychopathic world. A recurrent theme in Trevor’s Irish fiction is the tragic legacy of Ireland’s politically violent past, specifically the Anglo-Irish War of 1919–21 (part of the so-called “Troubles”) in which Irish rebels fought for independence against the British army. Trevor’s treatment of this theme is distinguished by his compassionate and non-political perspective which allows him to shed light on the great human cost of the “Troubles.” In Fools of Fortune (1983), The Silence in the Garden (1988), and The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), as well as in several short stories, Trevor shows how personal tragedy results from the larger political tragedy. In Fools of Fortune, which spans the years 1918 to 1982, the protagonist Willie Quinton experienced as a child the burning of the family home, Kilneagh; the murder of his father, two sisters, and family servants by the Black and Tans, a brutal British paramilitary force; and the suicide of his mother distraught over the family misfortunes. This chain of tragic events was set in motion because Willie’s Anglo-Irish parents, despite being allied by religion and heritage to the British, were supportive of Irish nationalists in their bid for independence in the Anglo-Irish War. It continues when, out of revenge, Willie kills the man who murdered his father and sisters and is forced to flee, leaving behind his lover and English cousin, Marianne. Pregnant with his child, Marianne waits at Kilneagh for decades with the child, Imelda, who eventually becomes mentally disturbed. In the end, the family achieves a measure of happiness as Willie, now an old man, returns to Kilneagh. Trevor takes up this theme of the tragic past in several short stories and links it to the sectarian violence and terrorism of the Northern “Troubles” – the decades-long conflict between
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Catholic nationalists and Protestant unionists in Northern Ireland. In “The Distant Past,” a story set in the late 1960s at the onset of the Northern Troubles, Trevor shows how, despite decades of relative peace in Ireland, the bitter legacy of the distant past (specifically the Anglo-Irish War) really lies just below the surface and easily rises to embitter relationships between Catholics and Protestants once more. “Attracta,” arguably the most powerful story by any contemporary writer about the devastating effects of terrorism in Northern Ireland, records the attempts of the title character, an elderly Catholic schoolteacher in the North, to convey to her young Protestant pupils the horror and senselessness of sectarian violence. She attempts to do so by reading to them a shocking newspaper account about the wife of a British army officer stationed in Northern Ireland. The report graphically reports the murder and decapitation of the husband and the rape and suicide of the wife. Attracta links these horrific events to her own victimization in the Anglo-Irish War when her parents were accidentally killed in an IRA ambush of British forces. But the children have become immune to violence, and when they tell their parents about their teacher’s efforts, Attracta is forced into retirement. In over 50 years of writing Trevor’s fiction has remained, in style and technique, firmly within the mode of realism with occasional use of the gothic to enhance psychological themes of guilt and madness. He has not been lured by the postmodernist techniques embraced by many of his contemporaries. But among writers of realist fiction, Trevor is undoubtedly one of the world’s best. SEE ALSO: Irish Fiction (BIF); Joyce, James (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS MacKenna, D. (1999). William Trevor: The Writer and His Work. Dublin: New Island. Morrison, K. (1993). William Trevor. New York: Twayne. Paulson, S. (1993). William Trevor: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne. Schirmer, G. (1990). William Trevor: A Study of His Fiction. New York: Routledge.
Trevor, W. (1958). A Standard of Behaviour. London: Hutchinson. Trevor, W. (1964). The Old Boys. London: Bodley Head. Trevor, W. (1965). The Boarding House. London: Bodley Head. Trevor, W. (1966). The Love Department. London: Bodley Head. Trevor, W. (1967). The Day We Got Drunk on Cake and Other Stories. London: Bodley Head. Trevor, W. (1969). Mrs. Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel. London: Bodley Head Trevor, W. (1971). Miss Gomez and the Brethren. London: Bodley Head. Trevor, W. (1972). The Ballroom of Romance and Other Stories. London: Bodley Head. Trevor, W. (1973). Elizabeth Alone. London: Bodley Head. Trevor, W. (1975). Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories. London: Bodley Head. Trevor, W. (1976). The Children of Dynmouth. London: Bodley Head. Trevor, W. (1978). Lovers of their Time and Other Stories. London: Bodley Head. Trevor, W. (1979). The Distant Past and Other Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Trevor, W. (1980). Other People’s Worlds. London: Bodley Head. Trevor, W. (1981). Beyond the Pale and Other Stories. London: Bodley Head. Trevor, W. (1983). Fools of Fortune. London: Bodley Head. Trevor, W. (1986). The News from Ireland and Other Stories. London: Bodley Head. Trevor, W. (1988). The Silence in the Garden. London: Bodley Head. Trevor, W. (1990) Family Sins and Other Stories. London: Bodley Head. Trevor, W. (1991). Two Lives: Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria. New York: Viking. Trevor, W. (1992). The Collected Stories of William Trevor. New York: Viking. Trevor, W. (1994). Felicia’s Journey. London: Viking. Trevor, W. (1996). After Rain. London: Viking. Trevor, W. (1998). Death in Summer. London: Viking. Trevor, W. (2000). The Hill Bachelors. London: Viking. Trevor, W. (2002). The Story of Lucy Gault. London: Viking. Trevor, W. (2004). A Bit on the Side. London: Viking. Trevor, W. (2005). The Dressmaker’s Child. London: Viking. Trevor, W. (2007). Cheating at Canasta. London: Viking. Trevor, W. (2009). Love and Summer. London: Viking.
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U Upward, Edward CHRIS HOPKINS
Edward Upward was closely associated with W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Christopher Isherwood in the 1930s. However, his literary reputation has sometimes been seen as minor in comparison to those of such contemporaries. Certainly he lived much less in the public eye, and his writing career features a large hiatus between 1939 and 1962. However, his fiction is often distinctive and innovative, driven by its exploration of politics and aesthetics. Upward was born on September 9, 1903 in Romford, Essex. His father, a doctor, supported his son’s literary ambitions. He went to Repton School and then Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, as did Isherwood. Upward gained more from the official curriculum than did Isherwood (who left without a degree). Nevertheless, for both the imaginative focus of university life was their parallel fictional universe of “Mortmere.” Through these stories they developed a broadly oppositional stance toward what they termed the “poshocracy,” the existing social order. After graduation, Upward taught as a private tutor and in preparatory schools, before being appointed English master at Alleyn’s Boys’ School, Dulwich, in 1932. In the same year, he visited the USSR and on his return attended meetings of the Communist Party of Great Britain, becoming a member by 1934. In the party he met Hilda Percival, also a teacher, and they married in 1936. His position as a Communist Party activist and a public schoolmaster was an odd one.
Upward said that “They must have known . . . I carried on my political work in the evenings selling the Daily Worker, and politics was my salvation. I was miserable and couldn’t have borne the life of a teacher without it” (Wroe 2003). Nevertheless, Upward remained a respected teacher at the school until his retirement from teaching in 1961. Unlike others in Britain who were disillusioned by the Hitler–Stalin pact of 1940, Upward remained a party member. He finally left the Communist Party in 1948 because he felt that, in supporting the postwar Labour government (affiliation was sought in 1946), it had abandoned its revolutionary identity and become “utterly uncommunist” (Wroe 2003). His commitment to the party had marked consequences for his writing after 1938: some accounts say he suffered a breakdown after completing Journey to the Border (1938), while others say he felt that party work was more urgent than writing. In either case, there began a period of writer’s block lasting for some 16 years. After 1954, he was able to write again and he produced substantial works between 1962 and 1977. Upward’s writing began with the coimagined Mortmere stories. Mortmere was a subversive, gothic world, based in parodies of favorite authors and genres, including Conan Doyle, Poe, and the detective story in general. The stories were not published at the time, but a number have been published subsequently. “The Railway Accident,” chiefly written by Upward and published in 1949, is the best known. The fantastic world of Mortmere and the narration and style appropriate to it
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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are a vital prehistory to his main publication of 1930s, the novella Journey to the Border. Overall, the stories produced a kind of surrealist effect, which Isherwood said was homegrown: “I use the term ‘surrealism’ . . . we had, of course, no idea that such a movement already existed on the continent” (Lodge 203). By 1938, Upward knew a good deal about surrealism, and a surrealist mode is used in Journey to the Border in sophisticated and politically resonant ways. The story concerns a nameless private tutor who coaches the son of the Parkin family and lives in their home. He, like Upward, finds his position “miserable,” living in a situation in which mind and body are subservient to wealth and crassly ideological bourgeois beliefs. At the opening of the story the tutor is suffering from acute anguish caused by his lack of control over any aspect of his life. He falls into a neurotic state of hallucination (though in many ways this in fact reveals his oppressors as they really are) in which his lack of grip on any sure reality leads him into a perpetual circle of self-questioning and self-accusation. The surreal visions of this ungrounded mental life are linked by the story to what is seen as the inevitable alienation of bourgeois life as capitalism enters a period of terminal crisis. At the close of the novella the tutor sees that there is a way out of this mental prison, that Marxist social thought provides a ground that can distinguish illusion and reality. Though this sounds schematic in summary, the accomplished narrative technique makes the journey to the border (first of madness and then toward sanity) one in which the reader is fully engaged. The logic of the novella was carried over into Upward’s own writing life: the emphasis in his postwar work was on the representation of reality from a Marxist perspective. His major postwar work was the trilogy The Spiral Ascent, made up of In the Thirties (1962), The Rotten Elements (1969), and No Home but the Struggle (1977). In some ways the trilogy tackles similar material to his novella of 1938, although the surreal mode is no longer used: it explores the life of a communist teacher, Alan Sebrill, from the 1930s to the 1970s, and his quest to integrate all aspects of his life – artistic, political, and everyday – into something whole and unalienated. The trilogy had a mixed reception, and critical views remain polarized: some see the work as the product of an arid and
unengaging socialist-realist doctrine, while others see it as a serious, impressive, and individual narration of the experience of political commitment. Since his hundredth year, Upward has brought out previously unpublished work, a number of new stories, and new editions of other works with Enitharmon Press. He died in February 2009. SEE ALSO: Isherwood, Christopher (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Cunningham, V. (1989). British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Finney, B. (1976). Laily, Mortmere and All That. Twentieth Century Literature, 22(3), 286–302. Hopkins, C. (1994). Neglected Texts, Forgotten Contexts: Four Political Novels of the Nineteen Thirties. Sheffield: Sheffield Hallam University. Hynes, S. (1979). The Auden Generation. London: Faber and Faber. Lodge, D. (1977). The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy and the Typology of Modern Literature. London: Arnold. Upward, E. (1938). Journey to the Border. London: Hogarth. Upward, E. (1962). In the Thirties. London: Heinemann. Upward, E. (1969). The Rotten Elements. London: Heinemann. Upward, E. (1972). The Railway Accident and Other Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Upward, E. (1977). No Home but the Struggle. London: Heinemann. Upward, E., & Isherwood, C. (1994). The Mortmere Stories. London: Enitharmon. Walker, A. (2000). Edward Upward: A Bibliography 1920–2000. London: Enitharmon. Wroe, N. (2003). A Lifetime Renegade. Guardian, p. 16 (Aug. 23).
Utopian and Dystopian Fiction CHRIS FERNS
The title of Thomas More’s Utopia (2002 [1516] ) involves a play on words, deriving from both the Greek eu-topos – “good place” and ou-topos – “no place.” Utopia may be defined as both a good place, an ideal (or at least significantly improved) society, and at the same time one that does not
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exist, an ambiguity that is reflected in the term’s usage. To describe something as “utopian” may be to applaud it as a desirable goal or to denounce it as hopelessly impractical. More was not the first writer to imagine a model state: Utopia draws on a tradition of political thought going back to Plato’s Republic and beyond. What renders Utopia distinctive, however, is that More’s vision is presented in the guise of a contemporary discovery narrative, recounted by a traveler who supposedly accompanied Amerigo Vespucci on one of his voyages, and then proceeded to engage in further exploration. As a result the narrative takes on a tantalizing air of plausibility, raising the possibility that such a society just might exist in the real world – particularly given that the account provided by More’s traveler is hardly less credible than some contemporary discovery narratives purporting to be authentic. Utopia describes an island whose society is rationally organized to provide stability, security, and freedom from hunger, endless toil, and war. Money and private property have been abolished, and while everyone must work, the limitation of the working day to six hours would have represented an enormous liberation to most people in More’s day. Yet while there is little to indicate that More intended Utopia as a practical recipe for political reform, in the work of his successors a didactic intent is clearly apparent – to the extent that in some cases works of utopian literature have influenced developments in the world to which they propose an alternative. The House of Salomon, the scientific research institute described in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1974 [1627] ), is often cited as one of the inspirations for the foundation of the Royal Society; James Harrington’s Oceana (1992 [1656] ) was taken as a model for constitutional reform during both the American and French revolutions; while Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1967 [1888] ) inspired the foundation of Bellamy societies worldwide, leading the philosopher John Dewey to cite it as second in importance only to Das Kapital among works written in the previous 50 years. A distinguishing feature of utopian literature, then, is that it sets out not only to describe alternatives to the world that exists, but to do so in the hope of transforming it. In the twentieth century, the most important writer of utopian fiction was H. G. Wells. In a
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series of novels including A Modern Utopia (1905), In the Days of the Comet (1906), The World Set Free (1914), Men Like Gods (1923), and The Shape of Things to Come (1933) – as well as a range of non-fictional works – Wells sets out his vision of a utopian World State organized on rational principles. He described his ideal as “a scientifically organized classless society” where the middle class would have expanded to absorb both upper and lower classes, but he clearly did not see democracy as necessary to achieving this goal. A Modern Utopia proposes that power would rest in the hands of a ruling elite called the samurai – explicitly compared to Plato’s guardians – a “voluntary nobility” under whose guidance a combination of sound education and eugenics (only those with the ability to reach a specified income level are permitted to have children) might ultimately produce a “cleaned and perfected humanity” such as that portrayed in Men Like Gods. By then, the necessity for most laws and regulations would have been eliminated, since universal education would lead to a rational consensus on all matters of importance: as one character in Men Like Gods declares, “our education is our government.” Many aspects of Wells’s ideal now seem either repugnant or hopelessly optimistic, yet his importance as a writer of utopias rests not merely on their content, but on the attention he paid to the problems inherent in utopian narrative. While the narrative model provided by More, and followed by his many successors – a traveler discovers a utopian society in some remote part of the world, receives a guided tour, and returns to describe its wonders – had proved serviceable enough in the Renaissance, by the nineteenth century, with the ending of the age of discovery, it was clearly becoming outdated. Furthermore, Wells recognized that the static character of most earlier utopias – their tendency to represent utopia as having achieved a state of perfection that rendered any further alteration superfluous – was out of keeping with the realities of social change which were now impossible to ignore. Strongly influenced by the evolutionary theories of Darwin and T. H. Huxley, and keenly aware of the likely impact of continuing technological innovation on society, Wells emphasized the need for utopia to be “not static but kinetic.” In an effort to present utopia as a work in progress, rather than
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a finalized ideal, Wells increasingly utilized the narrative conventions of science fiction, a genre in which he was also a pioneer. Instead of an undiscovered island, A Modern Utopia and Men Like Gods are set in parallel universes, while The World Set Free and The Shape of Things to Come describe future utopian societies that emerge from cataclysmic war. How far his narrative experiments succeed is open to debate: some commentators have complained that his utopian novels lack the imaginative vigor of his earlier scientific romances. Nevertheless, Wells was among the first writers of utopian fiction to recognize that not merely its content, but its form, needed to change with the times. Wells also had a major influence on the composition of some of the most significant dystopias of the twentieth century. These include Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), while E. M. Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops” (1976 [1909] ), depicting a humanity rendered helpless by its reliance on the technology of which Wells was so enthusiastic an advocate, was also written as a direct response to Wells’s utopian dreams. Satiric attacks on utopian writing were nothing new. Aristophanes parodied Plato; Swift ridiculed the Baconian scientific dream in Book III of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), while his depiction of the land of the Houyhnhnms in Book IV provides a grimmer reflection on the ideal of utopian perfection; and Bellamy’s Looking Backward prompted a rash of parodic responses, designed to show where its proposals would “really” lead. Yet in the twentieth century attacks on the utopian ideal take on a new urgency, reflecting a growing concern about the possibility of its realization, and the fear that it would prove anything but the unmixed blessing writers such as Wells had imagined. Would the strong, centralized authority envisaged in so many utopias, supported by scientific and technological resources of which early writers had only dreamed, really be used in the best interests of the citizen? All the experience of the totalitarian regimes of the first half of the twentieth century tended to suggest otherwise. And even if the authority’s intentions were benign, would not the solution of humanity’s problems deprive it of the challenges necessary to sustain progress, and
lead to the degeneration of the race? Wells himself had explored that possibility in The Time Machine (1895), and in Brave New World, set in the year AD 2540, Huxley offers a vision of the utopian future where humans have become anything but the superior beings imagined in Men Like Gods. Wells is only one of Huxley’s satiric targets. From the names of the characters (Benito Hoover, Lenina Crowne, Helmholz Watson among others) it is apparent that Huxley sees the various conflicting ideologies of the period – fascism, capitalism, communism – as all being utopian in tendency, and operating hand in hand with the discoveries of modern science to further the creation of a world of mindless conformity. As presiding deity of his future World State, Huxley chooses Henry Ford, pioneer of the production line which now produces human beings instead of motor cars, as well as being instrumental in the creation of the consumer society whose excesses the novel satirizes. Nevertheless, the parallels with Wells’s utopian vision are impossible to ignore. In particular, Huxley takes aim at two of its central features: education and eugenics. In Brave New World new educational methods do indeed lead to consensus on virtually all issues – but do so by means of brainwashing, sleep-teaching, and behavioral conditioning which inculcates an ideal of infantile dependence on authority. And, rather than eliminating the lower orders by selective breeding, Huxley’s World State reinforces the class system by rendering the classes still more distinct through a process of prenatal conditioning. As is the case with the lunar inhabitants in Wells’s The First Men in the Moon (1901), workers are bred to be physically adapted to the tasks they will grow up to perform, while the problem of alienated labor is addressed by breeding an underclass of “Epsilons” who are too stupid to object to it. Huxley recognizes that some dissidence is to be expected, especially among the Alpha elite, from whom the World Controllers are drawn, but even this can be easily handled by exiling troublemakers to convenient islands (a solution also proposed in A Modern Utopia). In this regard, Brave New World differs markedly from We and Nineteen Eighty-Four, where repression is heavily relied on to ensure conformity. Indeed, a distinguishing feature of Huxley’s dystopia is how
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much it resembles a utopia. It too offers peace, security, prosperity. Work is not unduly burdensome, crime is unknown, and happiness almost universal – and if much of the happiness is provided by mindless distractions, sexual promiscuity, and stupefying drugs, this is as much a satire of Western consumer society as of utopia. Nor do the rebels Huxley portrays offer much by way of an alternative. The excessively brainy Helmholz Watson is discontented only because he lacks the opportunity to be truly creative, and he embraces the prospect of exile with enthusiasm. His fellow rebel, the unpopular Bernard Marx, resents society mainly because he feels he does not fit in; when he achieves social success temporarily his discontent evaporates. Only John the Savage, who comes from a Mexican reservation where old customs persist, genuinely loathes the society of the World State – but his views are represented as no less the result of conditioning (albeit a different one) than those of the Brave New Worlders. In particular, his romantic idealization of the vacuous Lenina Crowne, followed by his puritanical revulsion when she proves only too eager to sleep with him, suggest that his more traditional sexual mores are little better than Brave New World’s state-endorsed promiscuity. The novel concludes with John’s suicide, leaving the order of the World State undisturbed. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four provides a very different vision of a possible future – and one much closer at hand. Where Huxley’s dystopia is primarily an extrapolation of tendencies in Western consumer society, Orwell’s, like Zamyatin’s We (a work by which it is heavily influenced) depicts a totalitarian state clearly inspired by Soviet-style communism. Big Brother, whose mustachioed face stares down from innumerable posters in Oceania, one of the three power blocs that dominate the world of the future, is as clearly modeled on Stalin as Zamyatin’s Benefactor is on Lenin. State control is maintained by a combination of omnipresent surveillance and brutal repression. The actions of its citizens are continually monitored by “telescreens” – a kind of two-way television, while the Thought Police endeavor to ensure that not only subversive actions, but even subversive thoughts, receive the punishment they deserve. Ultimately, the goal is to reform the language to the point where, in “Newspeak,” it will no longer be possible even to think subver-
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sively. In the meantime, Oceania’s propaganda machine ensures that the state’s version of reality is almost universally accepted – even where it is completely at variance with what actually happens. As in Brave New World (and also We) resistance to the state is associated with defiance of its sexual morality. Where Helmholz, Bernard, and John the Savage prefer monogamy or abstinence to state-endorsed promiscuity, Nineteen-Eighty Four’s hero, Winston Smith rebels against the sexual puritanism of Oceania by having an affair with a co-worker, Julia. Yet while Huxley represents traditional sexual morality as no less socially constructed than that of the utopian future, Orwell (like Zamyatin) portrays sexual dissidence as a positive force – but only at the cost of effectively reinscribing the sexual stereotypes of his own period. A key scene in both Nineteen Eighty-Four and We involves a female character abandoning the androgynous uniform approved by the state in favor of a more traditionally feminine appearance. Julia yearns for a “real woman’s frock” and silk stockings, and enhances her allure for Winston by wearing make-up – which he finds renders her “far more feminine.” Old-fashioned artifice is represented, paradoxically, as more “natural” than, and hence preferable to, the norms of the dystopian state. In common with both Zamyatin and Huxley, Orwell also provides a reworking of the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” scene in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. But while Zamyatin and Huxley follow Dostoevsky in having the representative of authority justify its actions, however regrettable, as being in the best interests of a humanity incapable of taking charge of its own destiny, in Orwell’s version O’Brien, who interrogates and tortures Winston, declares that the only motivation of those in charge is the pursuit of power for its own sake. Whether this adds to or detracts from the force of his critique of utopia remains debatable. If Stalinism is one of his main satiric targets, it was surely the presence of precisely the utopian agenda that O’Brien disclaims that rendered Stalin’s monstrous crimes possible – the belief that what was done was ultimately in the service of a greater good. Since Nineteen Eighty-Four no British utopias or dystopias have had an impact comparable to
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those of Wells, Huxley, or Orwell – although Huxley continued to explore utopian possibilities in his work. In his Foreword to the 1946 edition of Brave New World he discussed possible alternatives to the nightmare it depicts, a theme to which he later returned in his non-fictional Brave New World Revisited (1958), and toward the end of his life he produced a full-blown utopia, Island (1962). Island portrays a society that combines the best elements of Western scientific knowledge and Eastern spiritual awareness, which, together with its portrayal of the use of psychedelic drugs as an educational tool, gained it a certain vogue in the 1960s and 1970s. Nevertheless, while Huxley’s utopian vision is in many respects more appealing than Wells’s, the work as a whole suffers from its narrative limitations. Disregarding Wells’s experiments with narrative form, Island returns to the traditional model of the Renaissance, the only real distinction being that his utopian island is reached, not in the course of a voyage of discovery, but when a recreational boating trip goes disastrously awry. The result is a decidedly predictable narrative, lacking any of the innovative quality that rendered Brave New World so distinctive. Also worthy of note is Anthony Burgess’s dystopian Clockwork Orange (1962) where the mindless violence of the protagonist Alex and his comrades is represented as the lesser of two evils in comparison to the utopian project of eliminating violence by means of psychological conditioning. Doris Lessing also explores a range of scenarios, both utopian and dystopian, in her Canopus in Argos: Archives novel sequence (1979–83), although in recent interviews she has declared she does not believe in utopia any more. Yet while in recent years there has been a considerable expansion in the academic study of utopias and utopian literature, there has been no real parallel in Britain to the resurgence of utopian writing that has occurred elsewhere. The major utopias and dystopias of the later twentieth century produced by writers such as Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Samuel Delany, Marge Piercy, and Margaret Atwood have been an almost exclusively North American phenomenon. SEE ALSO: Fantasy Fiction (BIF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF);
Science Fiction (BIF); Speculative Fiction (AF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bacon, F. (1974). The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis. Oxford: Clarendon. Bellamy, E. (1967). Looking Backward [1888]. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Burgess, A. (1962). A Clockwork Orange. London: Heinemann. Ferns, C. (1999). Narrating Utopia. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Forster, E. M. (1976). The Machine Stops [1909]. In Collected Short Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Harrington, J. (1992). “The Commonwealth of Oceana” and “A System of Politics.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huxley, A. (1932). Brave New World. London: Chatto and Windus. Huxley, A. (1958). Brave New World Revisited. New York: Harper and Row. Jameson, F. (2005). Archaeologies of the Future. London: Verso. Kubrick, S. (dir.) (1971). A Clockwork Orange. Warner Brothers. Kumar, K. (1987). Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times. Oxford: Blackwell. Lessing, D. (1992). Canopus in Argos: Archives, comprising Re: Colonized Planet 5, Shikasta [1979]; The Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five [1980]; The Sirian Experiments [1980]; The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 [1982]; Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire [1983]. London: Vintage. Levitas, R. (1990). The Concept of Utopia. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Linfield, S. (2001). Against Utopia: An Interview with Doris Lessing. Salmagundi, 130–1, 59–74. Menzies, W. C. (dir.) (1936). Things to Come. United Artists. More, T. (2002). Utopia [1516]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Orwell, G. (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker and Warburg. Orwell, G. (1951). Wells, Hitler and the World State. Critical Essays. London: Secker and Warburg, pp. 92–8. Radford, M. (dir.) (1984). Nineteen Eighty-Four. Virgin Films. Wells, H. G. (1895). The Time Machine. London: Heinemann. Wells, H. G. (1898). The War of the Worlds. London: Heinemann.
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Wells, H. G. (1905). A Modern Utopia. London: Chapman and Hall. Wells, H. G. (1906). In the Days of the Comet. London: Macmillan. Wells, H. G. (1914). The World Set Free. London: Macmillan.
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Wells, H. G. (1923). Men Like Gods. London: Cassell. Wells, H. G. (1933). The Shape of Things to Come. London: Hutchinson. Zamyatin, Y. (1924). We (trans. G. Zilboorg). New York: E. P. Dutton.
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W Warner, Alan SCOTT HAMES
Alan Warner won overnight fame with his debut novel in 1995, and was immediately linked to a fashionable grouping of young male Scottish writers including Irvine Welsh and Duncan McLean. Though he was involved in the small literary counterculture from which Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) sensationally emerged, situating Warner within this urban Scottish “school” can be misleading. While these writers took confidence from 1980s Scottish fiction by James Kelman and Alasdair Gray, and shared an enthusiasm for hedonistic youth culture, Warner’s fiction has little in common with the urban realism of Trainspotting and its imitators. Distinct from that novel’s stark naturalism, masculine bravado, and punk ethic, Warner’s highly lyrical fiction typically centers on the lives and voices of laconic young people, particularly women, in remote Highland settings. Landscape and the atmosphere of small-town legend are central to his work, in which every place name and nickname evokes an outlandish anecdote, whose retelling becomes a vital ceremony of belonging. While each of his novels achieve a highly specific sense of place and community, Warner’s style is a heightened realism, often edging into the surreal and dreamlike. It is never the direct, “straight” verisimilitude usually associated with dialect fiction. Nor is it “dialect fiction” per se: Warner’s vernacular writing is experimental and highly stylized, and capturing authentic local speech is not his aim. The idiosyncratic, vividly concrete language of his protagonists helps to
characterize them as individuals rather than bearers of a communal voice. Locality is nonetheless crucial to Warner’s art, in which claustrophobic patterns of provincial life gradually reveal their own potential for visionary transcendence. Warner’s sensuous, visually arresting prose transforms the quotidian – the “as per usual,” as his characters always call it – into a bewitching otherworld suffused with erotic possibility and religious mystery. Two subjects have dominated Warner’s critical reception: the topical prominence of “place,” popular culture, and Scottishness in his work, and his rendering of “bafflingly credible girlhood femininities” – highly original, wholly convincing portraits of young women’s inner lives (Schoene 255). Warner was born in 1964 in the remote coastal town of Oban, the model for “The Port” which appears in each of his first four novels. He was raised in a small hotel owned by his parents in a neighboring village, and worked on the local railway before attending university in London. Railways, hotels, and the milieu of seasonal tourist towns recur throughout his fiction, often in tension with the exciting but ephemeral culture of the metropolis. Warner took a second degree at the University of Glasgow and then worked in a supermarket before publishing Morvern Callar in 1995. Described by Warner as “an old existential novel recast in today’s colours,” the story begins with the titular central character discovering the corpse of her boyfriend, who has committed suicide (Weissman 1997). Morvern undertakes a journey of self-exploration after publishing his novel under her own name, but her absent (or withheld) emotional reaction to her partner’s
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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WARNER, ALAN
death provides the novel’s sustaining tension. Morvern’s predicament, isolation, and seemingly numb reticence evoke a Scottish teenage Meursault, the protagonist of Albert Camus’s The Outsider. Warner’s debut received a Somerset Maugham Award and was adapted for the screen in 2002. The hypnotic film version was well received by critics (especially the largely silent performance of Samantha Morton), though director Lynne Ramsay was only partly successful in translating Morvern’s distinctive linguistic grip on the world into a consistent visual style. These Demented Lands (1997), the hallucinatory sequel to Morvern Callar, contains Warner’s most daring and inventive writing to date. The novel’s opening scenario – in which Morvern’s ferry out of The Port sinks, casting its passengers into a subaquatic “landscape of colours . . . glissanding on the lunar seabeds way below” – mixes biblical allusion, Greek myth, and apocryphal local history to intoxicating effect (5). The novel’s psychedelic landscapes, improbable characters, and unstable narrative world show the influence of writers includingAndre Gide, Michael Ondaatje, and Juan Carlos Onetti. Warner insists, “internationalism is so important – you can’t arrive at your own style just through the local” (Dale 124). The Sopranos (1998) is the story of five Catholic schoolgirls from The Port and their riotous adventures during a visit to the “Capital” (a thinly disguised Edinburgh). The individual voices, outlooks, and vulnerabilities of the five senior pupils are vividly realized in Warner’s most conventional novel (the sequel to which, The Stars in the Bright Sky, will appear in 2010). When the writer Janice Galloway observed that Warner’s women are “never done fiddling with their stockings,” she likely had The Sopranos in mind (March 1999, 94). The novel contains an unmistakable note of male voyeurism, though this erotic distancing is tempered by the third-person narrative voice joining the ensemble as a “sixth soprano,” sharing the idioms and exuberance of the teenage characters: “Fionnula stepped quick to the toilets, swayed a good bit an biffed the door, she checked the mirror an saw the nose shine but she’d left make-up in her bag so’s lifted a sleeve to it an her lips were jibberin, jibberin, Jesussussusus” (Warner 1998, 191). Warner was chosen as one of Granta magazine’s 20 “Best of Young British Novelists”
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the year after publishing The Man Who Walks (2002), a picaresque journey across a Highland landscape encrusted with Celtic myth, kitsch Scottish history, and profane local legend. The novel’s conclusion takes aim at the “overwhelming, colonizing superiority” of Hollywood versions of Highland history, “determined to force a vision on the mundane and curse the consequences” – but this charge fits Warner’s own, audacious attempt to remythologize Scottish landscape and culture (277). The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven (2006) seems to mark a shift in Warner’s career, moving beyond The Port to a Spanish provincial resort, and the erotic confession of the prosperous middle-aged designer Manolo Follana, who believes he is HIV-positive. Warner’s brilliant feeling for locality marks the unnamed provincial city of this novel, with its familiar tourist economy and gossipy lore. Inverting several of Warner’s previous trademarks, the novel shifts from a youthful relish of sexual adventure to plaintive, fastidious, death-haunted reflections on the past. Portraying language as a barrier to, rather than as the basis of, human connectedness, this novel abandons the vernacular voice but contains Warner’s most ambitious and elaborate symbolic patterning. The slightly artificial English “translatorese” of The Worms contains its own lyric and comic strengths, and showcases Warner’s gift for sustained stylization. All his work, according to Warner, endeavors “to give the impermanent the quality of myth” (Dale 127). His vital and inventive fiction feels very much of its time and place, and yet destined to last. SEE ALSO: Ondaatje, Michael (WF); Scottish Fiction (BIF); Welsh, Irvine (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Dale, S. (2000). An Interview with Alan Warner. Edinburgh Review, 103, 121–33. March, C. L. (1999). Interview with Janice Galloway. Edinburgh Review, 101, 85–98. March, C. L. (2002). Rewriting Scotland: Welsh, McLean, Warner, Banks, Galloway and Kennedy. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ramsay, L. (dir.) (2002). Morvern Callar. Company Pictures.
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Redhead, S. (2000). Repetitive Beat Generation. Edinburgh: Rebel. Schoene, B. (2007). Alan Warner, Post-Feminism and the Emasculated Nation. In B. Schoene (ed.), Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 255–63. Warner, A. (1995). Morvern Callar. London: Jonathan Cape. Warner, A. (1997). These Demented Lands. London: Jonathan Cape. Warner, A. (1998). The Sopranos. London: Jonathan Cape. Warner, A. (2002). The Man Who Walks. London: Jonathan Cape. Warner, A. (2006). The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven. London: Jonathan Cape. Weissman, L. (1997). A Drink or Two with Alan Warner. At www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0497/ warner/interview.html, accessed Sept. 1, 2008.
Waugh, Evelyn BERNARD SCHWEIZER
Born in 1903, in London, Evelyn Waugh grew up in an upper-middle-class home, in which literature formed a integral part of daily life. His father, Arthur Waugh, was head of the publishing house Chapman and Hall and also an amateur literary critic. His only sibling, Alec Waugh, was a successful novelist at the age of 18, and Waugh doubtlessly learned some tricks of the trade from him, although he went on to eclipse his elder brother’s reputation. After attending an Anglican boys school, Evelyn Waugh studied history at Hertford College, Oxford. But being more interested in socializing and drinking than in academic pursuits, he left the university prematurely in 1924, with only a third-class degree, after which he had two unsuccessful teaching stints. He was dismissed from his second post as a teacher for alleged sexual misconduct, but he had accumulated enough experience by then to write his fictional account of a failed student turned novice teacher, Decline and Fall (1928). This comic novel is widely admired for its hilarious rendering of the naive protagonist’s education at the hands of an unscrupulous society. Expelled from Oxford for a prank others had played on him, the luckless Paul Pennyfeather embarks on a teaching career that only enmeshes him further in conflict and
scandal, as his naivety acts as a foil to point up the ruthlessly selfish nature of a pleasure-driven, decadent society composed equally of ill-behaved pupils and their shameless parents. At the time of its publication, the book’s indecorous treatment of social anarchy and sex caused a stir. Waugh married his namesake, Evelyn Gardner, in 1928, but their marriage broke down shortly afterward when his wife began an affair with another man. The latent misogyny in Waugh’s portrayal of female characters may well stem from that betrayal. Even while undergoing the mortification of his wife’s infidelity, he wrote his second, enormously successful, novel, Vile Bodies (1930b). It is a mordant reflection on the vapidity of London’s fashionable youth, mired in campy frivolity and addicted to sex, alcohol, speed, and gossip. The antics of these “Bright Young Things” are tellingly pointless and repetitive, as captured in their verbal ticks (“how blind-making,” “isn’t that rather sad-making?” (184, 185) and their inclination to find everything more or less “bogus.” The novel’s running joke, the on-andoff-again engagement of Adam and Nina, symbolizes the unprincipled nature of this set. Ironically, Waugh himself belonged to the circle of Bright Young Things; hence, relying for his comic effects on the very anarchy and frivolity that he outwardly decried shows that on a basic level he was attracted to it. Indeed, he made a fine career out of cultural pessimism. But turning absurdity into comedy was not Waugh’s only way of dealing with his discontent. Waugh sought relief from a malaise composed of depression, spousal betrayal, and ennui by converting to Catholicism in 1930. It would take more than a decade for specific Catholic motifs to appear in his fiction, notably in Brideshead Revisited (1945), where he sought to dramatize the operation of divine grace on a reluctant believer. In the meantime, he drew literary inspiration from an eclectic range of non-Catholic writers, including the satirists Hector Hugh Munro (“Saki”), the comic writer P. G. Wodehouse, the parodist and caricaturist Max Beerbohm, as well as the more ponderous aristocrat Sir Osbert Sitwell, whom he styled “The Grand Old Man of English Letters” (Waugh 1977, 95) By contrast, he rejected the modernism of Bloomsbury and stayed clear of the leftist Auden coterie. Still, he shared the restlessness of most British writers of the
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WAUGH, EVELYN
1930s and traveled extensively. Part of it had to do with the need to distance himself from his failed marriage; the same impulse is enacted in several of his novels, in which a cuckolded protagonist seeks solace by traveling to distant, exotic lands. Waugh’s first travel book, Labels (1930a), already hints at marital problems, chronicling an aborted honeymoon cruise in the Mediterranean. The book’s tone is one of deflated expectation and weariness. After this debut travelogue, Waugh’s travel writing became increasingly politicized. In his second travel book, Remote People (1931), Waugh acknowledged “the importance which politics assume the moment one begins to travel” (137). He lampoons the coronation of Ethiopia’s native emperor Haile Selassie, then the only black ruler of an African nation besides Liberia. While Waugh found everything surrounding the emperor’s coronation to be laughable, he praised the efficiency and taste of the British colonizers in Kenya, thereby revealing his colonial mindset. Although Waugh also skewered the British, notably members of the aristocracy and the urban youth culture, he stopped short of belittling British monarchs. Like D. H. Lawrence and Graham Greene, Waugh based several novels on his voyages abroad. In the novel that came out of his Ethiopian journey, Black Mischief (1932), the fictional screen is thin enough to let the reader recognize a crass version of Ethiopia behind the country of “Azania” and its naively progressive ruler, Seth. Black Mischief, arguably Waugh’s most farcical novel, pokes merciless fun at modernization and progress, as the emperor’s schemes to bring Azania into the twentieth century fail one after the other. The end of the novel enacts two secret wishfulfillment scenarios: Waugh’s protagonist Basil Seal ends up ingesting his own lover who, unbeknownst to him, had been captured and stewed by cannibals (this gruesome twist may well signify a cathartic swipe at his first wife); and Azania’s political chaos leads to the declaration of a joint French–British protectorate, which suggests a benevolent view of imperialism. Waugh’s next travel book, Ninety-Two Days (1934b), is a version of the modern quest for El Dorado gone wrong. Waugh’s disillusioning experience in South America provided him with inspiration for one of his best novels, A Handful of
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Dust (1934a), which is also partly set in Guyana. Like the three novels that came before, this one is again startlingly original in its plot, although the underlying themes of polite amorality, the juxtaposition of innocence and experience, and the sense of a gradual descent into chaos, are staples of Waugh’s imagination. Tony Last, a well-meaning but ultimately bumbling member of a declining aristocratic house, abandons his ancestral home after learning of his wife’s infidelity (her affair was merely an attempt to dispel boredom). He looks for a better world by going on a vague quest for El Dorado in South America. Instead of stumbling on the golden city, he is entrapped by a lunatic settler in the Amazon hinterland and forced by him to read Dickens aloud for the rest of his life. Waugh’s next travel book, Waugh in Abyssinia (1936), is based on his second and third trips to Ethiopia, one before and one after the Italian invasion of 1935. At the time of its publication, Waugh’s statement that Ethiopians are “by any possible standard an inferior race” drew less criticism than his open support of Mussolini’s politics. Even today, the book’s glossing over of Italian war crimes and its naive presentation of benevolent fascists is embarrassing. The novel to come out of these trips, Scoop (1938), is another wish-fulfillment fantasy, with Waugh posturing as a wannabe reporter, William Boot. In contrast to Waugh, who had been a rather unsuccessful foreign correspondent, Boot literally makes history during his stay in Ishmaelia (alias Ethiopia). Waugh’s last travel book of the 1930s, Robbery under Law (1939), was commissioned by a British oil magnate. Not surprisingly, the book attacks Mexico’s socialist regime and its expropriation of foreign petroleum concerns in 1938. By the time Waugh went to Mexico, he had obtained a divorce and married the devoutly Catholic Laura Herbert, with whom he had six children. He now lived in a respectable country house in the west of England, trying to lose his bourgeois moorings and model himself on a country squire. Thus, his social trajectory was just the opposite of the decline that haunts his aristocratic protagonists, especially the Marchmains of Brideshead Revisited. Although many readers consider Brideshead Revisited to be his best work of fiction, some critics are disappointed because the novel lacks his trademark hilarity. Indeed, the sincerity with which Waugh chronicles the disintegration of the
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Marchmain family and their estate, Brideshead, reveals a different side of him. Nevertheless, his perennial concerns are all at work here: the waste of youth, epitomized in the degeneration of the flamboyant alcoholic Sebastian Flyte; the flight of the male protagonist, Charles Ryder, to Latin America to escape a failed marriage; the disappearance of country houses as a symptom of the nobility’s decline; and the way in which faith holds out hope for redemption in a drab, materialistic world. The ending of the novel, in which the lapsed Catholic, Lord Marchmain, makes peace with God on his deathbed comes close to propagating Catholic dogma. Despite the novel’s contrived focus on religious conversion, Waugh’s invocation of an angst-ridden, dissipated, disillusioned set of characters desperately trying to wrest meaning from any source whatever – be it the past, drink, art, or faith – is a lasting document to Waugh’s power of social observation, psychological realism, and spiritual yearning. The most important work of Waugh’s later phase is doubtlessly the Sword of Honour trilogy, a series of novels dramatizing the military misadventures of yet another Waugh alter ego, Guy Crouchback, a bumbling antihero who is spurned by women, unsuccessful in the army, and beset by ethical and spiritual doubts. The trilogy, which was adapted as a television drama in 2001 (Anderson 2001), illustrates Waugh’s deep disillusionment with the West during World War II. He was appalled by the Allied decision to collaborate with the Soviet Union and let it claim eastern Europe as its sphere of influence. At that point, Waugh felt that the West had lost its moral moorings. Thus, the eponymous sword on display in Westminster Abbey, designed as a gift from King George IV to Stalin, should really be called “sword of dis-honour,” a symbol of the Allies’ betrayal of eastern Europe and its Catholic population. This is a serious enough theme, but it jars with Waugh’s desire to deliver slapstick comedy and farce. The contrary impulses set up a tension that threatens to undermine the work’s formal coherence and to dislodge its moral center. Still, the trilogy compellingly exposes the dullness of army life and highlights the disillusioning savagery of war. The great British historian A. J. P. Taylor is reported to have recommended the novel to anybody who wanted to know what World War II was really like.
For those who balk at the prospect of plodding through Waugh’s slow-paced trilogy, there is the delightful collection The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh (1998). Readers new to Waugh will appreciate his perfect ear for dialogue, his skill at farce, his deflation of hypocrisy, and his keen eye for snobbery and social class distinction. Since there is less room in these stories to paint a broad canvas of cultural pessimism or build elaborate ethnocentric fantasies, many of these stories succeed as true satires of social mores and personal foibles. Moreover, aficionados of Waugh will appreciate in the collection an outtake from Black Mischief, an alternative ending to A Handful of Dust, a “prequel” to Brideshead Revisited, as well as chapters of an unfinished novel. Waugh died suddenly, in April 1966, of a heart attack, after having completed only one volume of his autobiography, covering his early years (A Little Learning, 1964). What he could not accomplish himself, biographers have more than compensated for since his death. There are now a half-dozen full-length biographies of Waugh. Waugh’s ongoing popularity is not a result of his politics, which were reactionary to the point of embarrassment. His conservative opinions published in the right-wing press could be so wrongheaded as to call his entire judgment into question. His support for Mussolini’s war of aggression against Ethiopia in 1935 is notorious. And his warnings that Britain was headed for a classless society did not inspire confidence in his prophetic abilities. Part of this was genuine conviction, as Waugh identified himself as an arch-conservative who had no problem being called a snob. However, part of it was also posturing, as he could conveniently raise his authorial profile through the notoriety gained by writing controversial journalism. Today, Waugh is often invoked as a masterful satirist, but he himself rejected the label, and with good reason. Satire is essentially a didactic and ameliorative project. It pokes fun at the vices and follies of specific people or systems through exaggeration in order to bring about progress and improvement. Waugh held no belief in positive change and ridiculed the idea of progress, which sets him apart from other Tory satirists such as Jonathan Swift or Alexander Pope. His overarching worldview was dominated by an obsession
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with decline. He saw change and decay wherever he looked and ached for the restoration of a bygone world of feudal loyalties, aristocratic traditions, and monarchic rule. Although capable of valor in battle and courage under pressure, he might quake at the mere mention of “the common man.” The idea of the welfare state, of multiculturalism, and even of democratic government were quite unnerving to him. This reactionary sensibility accounts for a good deal of the situation comedy of his novels, as he lampoons anything from humanitarianism, to sexual liberation, to respect for non-whites, to modernization, to republicanism. But his satire is so indiscriminate and unconstructive as to defy the usual didactic impulse of satire. Having said this, it would be churlish to deny Waugh’s ongoing relevance. Besides his inflammatory journalism, Waugh also penned articles on such subjects as education, youth, and literature that have enduring value. Moreover, his fiction has aged well. Not only was he a master prose stylist and an expert at crafting intricate plots, his fiction also resonates with larger cultural concerns that still speak to us. This man, who refused to install a telephone in his home, who relied on an ear trumpet to hear better, and who railed against modern gadgets of all sorts might find admirers among today’s critics of globalization, universal commodification, and unchecked modernization. Indeed, his lament against standardization (“all buildings will look the same, all shops sell the same produce, all people say the same things”: 1977, 47]) appears particularly prescient. Moreover, his attack on gossip writing and sensationalist journalism in Vile Bodies and Scoop anticipates today’s paparazzi-fueled infatuation with the lives of media stars and the antics of TV personalities. Finally, his disdain for the telephone may sound consolatory to those who are appalled by today’s addiction to cell phones and the cheapening of meaningful communication in the digital age. That major films of his novels keep being made can be seen as further evidence that Waugh has a strong contemporary following.
SEE ALSO: Colonial Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Anderson, B. (dir.) (2001). Sword of Honour. TalkBack. Beaty, F. L. (1992). The Ironic World of Evelyn Waugh: A Study of Eight Novels. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Blayac, A. (ed.) (1992). Evelyn Waugh: New Directions. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Carens, J. F. (1966). The Satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Carens, J. F. (1987). Critical Essays on Evelyn Waugh. Boston: G. K. Hall. Davis, R. M. (1989). Evelyn Waugh and the Forms of His Time. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Fry, S. (dir.) (2003). Bright Young Things [film of Vile Bodies]. Revolution Films/Doubting Hall. Hastings, S. (1994). Evelyn Waugh: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Jarrold, J. (dir.) (2008). Brideshead Revisited. Ecosse Films. Lodge, D. (1971). Evelyn Waugh. New York: Columbia University Press. Patey, D. L. (1998). The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell. Stannard, M. (1987). Evelyn Waugh. New York: Norton. Waugh, E. (1928). Decline and Fall. London: Chapman and Hall. Waugh, E. (1930a). Labels. London: Duckworth. Waugh, E. (1930b). Vile Bodies. London: Chapman and Hall. Waugh, E. (1931). Remote People. London: Duckworth. Waugh, E. (1932). Black Mischief. London: Chapman and Hall. Waugh, E. (1934a). A Handful of Dust. London: Chapman and Hall. Waugh, E. (1934b). Ninety-Two Days. London: Duckworth. Waugh, E. (1936). Waugh in Abyssinia. London: Longman. Waugh, E. (1938). Scoop. London: Chapman and Hall. Waugh, E. (1939). Robbery under Law. London: Chapman and Hall. Waugh, E. (1945). Brideshead Revisited. London: Chapman and Hall. Waugh, E. (1952). Men at Arms. London: Chapman and Hall. Waugh, E. (1955). Officers and Gentlemen. London: Chapman and Hall. Waugh, E. (1961). Unconditional Surrender. London: Chapman and Hall. Waugh, E. (1964). A Little Learning. London: Chapman and Hall. Waugh, E. (1977). A Little Order: A Selection from His Journalism (ed. D. Gallagher). Boston: Little, Brown.
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Waugh, E. (1998). The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh. Boston: Little, Brown. Waugh, A. (2004). Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family. London: Headline.
Weldon, Fay LORENA RUSSELL
Fay Weldon, CBE, is a prolific British writer of novels, screenplays, and short stories. Since her premier as a novelist with The Fat Woman’s Joke in 1967, she has penned some 28 novels, seven short story collections, seven works of nonfiction, and 16 screenplays (including Upstairs, Downstairs and a 1985 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice). Her memoir, Auto da Fay, was written in 2002. Her writings exhibit a persistent interest in sexual politics, which she explores with a sardonic sensibility, punchy prose, and dry wit. Her satire is marked by a dark, ironic tone that questions social inequalities and their often irrational and unexpected consequences. Weldon was born Franklin Birkinshaw on September 22, 1931 in Worcestershire, England. She lived in New Zealand until she was 14, when she returned to England with her mother and sister. In interviews and her memoir, she recalls her early days in a household of women, and her newfound freedom upon entering St. Andrews University in 1949, where she studied economics and psychology. She married at 22, but the marriage did not last. Weldon found herself struggling as a single mother with her son Nicolas before landing a position in advertising, a job that she held with some success for about eight years. Two of her more memorable lines from this period include “Go to work on an egg” (Hancock & Blodgett 300) and “Vodka gets you drunker quicker” (Jeffries 2006). The former slogan garnered her fame while the latter was never published. In 1962 she married Ron Weldon and had three more sons. She has since divorced, and is currently married to poet Nick Fox. It was in the 1960s that Weldon took up writing. Along with her many published works of fiction and non-fiction, she remains a major part of the literary scene. In 1983 she served as chair of the judges for the Man Booker Prize. Her 1978 Praxis was shortlisted for the award,
The Heart of the Country (1987a) won the 1989 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, while her 1997 collection of short stories Wicked Women won the 1996 PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award. In 1990 Weldon received an honorary doctorate from the University of St. Andrews, and she was awarded the CBE in 2001. Fay Weldon is a frequent contributor to the Guardian, and has taught creative writing at Brunel University in London since 2006. Many of her best-known novels, including Remember Me (1976), The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), Splitting (1995b), and Worst Fears (1996), follow the trials of a betrayed wife. Weldon’s stories frequently concern the hardships of women, tracing the material and psychological effects of failed relationships and economic challenge. Despite the comic tone, her novels consider how these hardships play out through various degrees of suffering, alienation, and revenge. Gender difference remains a persistent concern in her writings, as the difficulties facing Weldon’s earlier characters arise largely from women’s social status as second-class citizens. The Life and Loves of a She-Devil succeeds in its radical imaginings of what might happen if a wronged woman were to take control (an element sadly absent from the 1991 American film adaptation). The plot is classic Weldon, as it follows the elaborate revenge of the wronged wife Ruth Pradgett against her philandering husband Bobbo and his lover, the romance novelist Mary Fisher. Accepting the role of a female Lucifer, Ruth systematically embarks on a path of revenge bent on ruining Bobbo’s claims on happiness. In the chapters that follow, Ruth lays waste to Bobbo and Mary’s fairy-tale affair. In episodic style, she cleverly infiltrates an entire range of social systems – medical, judiciary, religious – to bring ruin and misery on the couple. In the end Ruth endures a radical series of operations that ultimately transform her into the very image of Mary Fisher. The conclusion of the novel finds Ruth living out her days having taken over Mary Fisher’s body, seaside tower, and servants, in firm control of the much reduced Bobbo. While Ruth Pradgett is an uneasy hero by any standard, the text effectively challenges the predominant image of woman as victim, and remains a classic example of one significant strand of feminist thought from the 1980s.
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WELDON, FAY
Down among the Women (1971), Praxis, and The Cloning of Joanna May (1989a) deal with cycles of economic hardship, abuse, and oppression. Many of Weldon’s characters, like the aged titular character Praxis, recognize their implication in the cycle, but are helpless to change it. Weldon’s writing typically challenges readers to face their darker sides, demanding a certain reckoning with elements of sadism, anger, eroticism, and other “unwomanly” traits that stand outside traditional concepts of femininity. Like Ruth Pradgett, and Praxis, Mabs in Puffball (1980) is certainly not a character with whom most readers would readily identify. She viciously persecutes her neighbor and ruthlessly beats her children. Yet, there is an element in her character that also serves to place her outside the seemingly natural order of patriarchal norms. Mabs’s behavior inverts this order, and her acts again invite readers to consider her against the circumstances of oppression, and thereby to reconsider the seeming stability of the “natural” order between the sexes. Weldon’s 2001 novel, The Bulgari Connection, received a flurry of criticism for its participation in what was considered crude product placement. Weldon had received payment from the jewelrymaker for the story, which was elaborated from a commissioned shorter piece. The novel itself ironically condemns materialism, and is centered on the dysfunctional relationships arising out of our perverse investments in class, money, sex, and jewelry. Weldon’s feminism has modified through the years in response to changing social norms, and her more recent writings such as What Makes Women Happy (2006) and The Spa Decameron (2007) are often less concerned with women’s oppression and more with their abuses of power. The Spa, a frame-narrative told by a group of women isolated at a remote Scottish spa during a storm, offers a series of meditations on class, age, and love. In the conclusion of her non-fictional What Makes Women Happy, Weldon offers moral advice: “‘Be good and you’ll be happy. Be happy and you’ll be good” (Jeffries 2006). These are the words that set the prisoner free. While the emphasis on ethics may seem odd from a writer best known for crafting a series of delightfully wicked characters, it is nevertheless fitting that the answer comes in such a simple yet profound
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notion. As Regina Barreca observes, “it is obvious that Fay Weldon is not wicked, not really. True, her fiction and her nonfiction alike are filled with images of transgression, subversion, heresy, and hysteria, but her writings are, in the end, humane, compassionate, sympathetic, and merciful” (4). In a career spanning some 40-odd years and still going strong, Fay Weldon’s fast-moving style and comedic stories never fail to surprise with their wisdom and ethical insights. SEE ALSO: Feminist Fiction (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Barreca, R. (ed.) (1994). Fay Weldon’s Wicked Fictions. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Dowling, F. (1998). Fay Weldon’s Fiction. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Faulks, L. (1998). Fay Weldon. New York: Twayne. Hancock, A., & Blodgett, H. (1998). Fay Weldon. In M. Moseley (ed.), British Novelists Since 1960. 2nd series. Detroit: Gale, pp. 297–316. Jeffries, S. (2006). Lie Back and Think of Jesus (Sept. 5). At www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/sep/05/gender. religion, accessed July 22, 2009. Knutsen, K. P. (2001). War Crimes and the Crime Novel: Fay Weldon’s “The Shrapnel Academy.” English Studies, 82(5), 437–49. Krouse, A. N. (1978). Feminism and Art in Fay Weldon’s Novels. Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, 20(2), 5–20. Smith, P. J. (2000). “Women Like Us Must Learn to Stick Together”: Lesbians in the Novels of Fay Weldon. In A. H. P. Werlock (ed.), British Women Writing Fiction. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, pp. 125–47. Weldon, F. (1967). The Fat Woman’s Joke. London: MacGibbon and Kee. (Published in US as And the Wife Ran Away. New York: David MacKay, 1968.). Weldon, F. (1971). Down among the Women. London: Heinemann. Weldon, F. (1971 –3). Upstairs Downstairs. London Weekend Television. Weldon, F. (1975). Female Friends. London: Heinemann. Weldon, F. (1976). Remember Me. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Weldon, F. (1978). Praxis. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
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Weldon, F. (1980). Puffball. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Weldon, F. (1983). The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Weldon, F. (1984). Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen. London: Michael Joseph. Weldon, F. (1985a). Polaris and Other Stories. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Weldon, F. (1985b). Pride and Prejudice (dir. C. Coke). BBC. Weldon, F. (1986). The Shrapnel Academy. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Weldon, F. (1987a). The Heart of the Country. London: Hutchinson. Weldon, F. (1987b). The Hearts and Lives of Men. London: Heinemann. Weldon,F.(1987c).TheRulesofLife.London:Hutchinson. Weldon, F. (1988). Leader of the Band. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Weldon, F. (1989a). The Cloning of Joanna May. London: Collins. Weldon, F. (1989b). Sacred Cows. London: Chatto and Windus. Weldon, F. (1990). Darcy’s Utopia. London: Collins. Weldon, F. (1992). Life Force. London: HarperCollins. Weldon, F. (1993). Affliction. London: HarperCollins. (Published in US as Trouble. New York: Viking.) Weldon, F. (1995a). The Hole in the Top of the World (dir. S. McLoughlin). LA Theatre Works/BBC. Weldon, F. (1995b). Splitting. London: Flamingo. Weldon, F. (1996). Worst Fears. London: Flamingo. Weldon, F. (1997a). Big Women. London: Flamingo. (Published in US as Big Girls Don’t Cry.) Weldon, F. (1997b). Wicked Women. London: Atlantic Monthly Press. Weldon, F. (1999). Godless in Eden. London: Flamingo. Weldon, F. (2000). Rhode Island Blues. London: Flamingo. Weldon, F. (2001). The Bulgari Connection. London: Flamingo. Weldon, F. (2002). Auto da Fay: A Memoir. London: Flamingo. Weldon, F. (2003). Breakfast with Emma (dir. P. Teal). Shared Experience, London Weldon, F. (2004). Mantrapped. London: HarperCollins. Weldon, F. (2005). She May Not Leave. London: Fourth Estate. Weldon, F. (2006). What Makes Women Happy. London: Fourth Estate. Weldon, F. (2007). The Spa Decameron. London: Quercus. Weldon, F. (2008). The Stepmother’s Diary. London: Quercus. Weldon, F. (2009). Chalcot Crescent. London: Corvus.
Wells, H. G SIMON J. JAMES
H. G. Wells was born in Bromley, Kent in 1866, the son of a servant and a shopkeeper and cricketer. He escaped from apprenticeship as a draper to become a pupil-teacher in Midhurst, and then a student at the Normal School of Science (now Imperial College) in London; his first books were biology textbooks. The importance of education and of scientific method were to become significant themes in Wells’s subsequent career as a writer of fiction. Wells made an immediate impact with the scientific romance The Time Machine (1895), which imaginatively extended new developments in research into mathematics, geology, and biology, especially the theory of evolution. The Time Traveller journeys into the year 802701 expecting to find a highly developed future civilization. Instead, he discovers that humanity has degenerated into two separate species: the beautiful but mentally feeble Eloi, and the technically proficient but apelike Morlocks, who literally prey on the Eloi. He escapes back to the present, but his narrative is left unresolved, as he fails to return from his second journey. The Time Machine was followed by a series of fantastic romances which warn against a misguided and complacent faith in mankind’s evolutionary and cultural security. Prendick in The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) is horrified to discover that the island where he has been shipwrecked is home to an exiled vivisectionist, who is creating hybrid human beings from other animals. The animals revert to their original nature and Moreau is killed; Prendick is eventually rescued from the island but cannot bear to live among society again, seeing humans as animals. Griffin, the eponymous protagonist of The Invisible Man (1896), also attempts to employ a scientific invention, the secret of invisibility, for his own advancement; but, eventually hungry, cold, and bleeding, he is beaten to death by a mob. In The War of the Worlds (1898), the Martians’ technologically advanced space-traveling cylinders, tripods and Heat Ray, and super-adapted physiology seem to make them superior when they attempt to colonize the Earth, but in the end the invaders are defeated by Earth’s humblest species, its bacteria.
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WELLS, H. G
Later romances such as When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), The First Men in the Moon (1901b), The Food of the Gods (1904), In the Days of the Comet (1906), The War in the Air (1908), and Men Like Gods (1923) are fantasies of power. Here, Wells imagines models of social organization different from the modern democratic nation state. This would become an increasingly important theme in Wells’s work once he began to add to his fictional output political and utopian books such as Anticipations (1901a), Mankind in the Making (1903), A Modern Utopia (1905b), and New Worlds for Old (1908), which imagine futures for the human race more perfected than the present day portrayed in the fiction. Wells’s early realism satirizes the status quo in depicting lower-middleclass protagonists whose aspirations for a better kind of life are restricted by social class and poor education. The student hero of Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900, the first of his books that Wells described as a “novel”) dreams of distinction in science and politics, but has to surrender his sense of his own importance when he falls in love, marries, and becomes a father. Kipps (1905a) developed from what was planned as a much larger novel, The Wealth of Mr. Waddy (whose remnants were eventually published in 1969). Kipps escapes from the draper’s shop thanks to an unexpected inheritance discovered by his actor friend Chitterlow, but is unable to escape from the effects of his inadequate schooling and from the many interdictions of the Edwardian class system. His dreams of becoming a gentleman finally ruined by a disastrous stay in a London hotel, Kipps breaks off his engagement to the pretentious Helen Walshingham and marries instead his childhood sweetheart, the servant Ethel Pornick. Helen’s brother proves to have swindled most of Kipps’s fortune away, but an investment in a bookshop and in Chitterlow’s play eventually provides the Kippses with security and a happy ending. The draper Polly, in The History of Mr. Polly (1910) is prone to romantic dreaming and, lacking the vocabulary to express himself, to inventing new words. Trapped in an unhappy marriage and a failing business, Polly burns down his shop and runs away, finding happiness first as a tramp and then as the odd-job man in a country inn. Wells always argued for the freedom of novelists to choose whatever form expressed
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their subject matter freely, especially since he saw his own work as constituting not merely a reflection of the real world, but an intervention in it. Here, he differed from his friend Henry James: The important point which I tried to argue . . . was that the novel of completely consistent characterization arranged beautifully in a story and painted deep and round and solid, no more exhausts the possibilities of the novel, than the art of Velazquez exhausts the possibilities of the painted picture. . . . Throughout the broad smooth flow of nineteenth-century life in Great Britain, the art of fiction floated on this same assumption of social fixity. The Novel in English was produced in an atmosphere of security for the entertainment of secure people who liked to feel established and safe for good. Its standards were established within that apparently permanent frame and the criticism of it began to be irritated and perplexed when, through a new instability, the splintering frame began to get into the picture. I suppose for a time I was the outstanding instance among writers of fiction in English of the frame getting into the picture. (Wells, 1934, 493–5)
Wells’s magnificent “condition of England” novel Tono-Bungay (1909b) is disordered, fragmented, self-conscious, and amoral in its narrative mode. George Ponderevo grows up as the child of a servant at the country house Bladesover, which comes to symbolize for him everything subservient, backward-looking, and decaying about contemporary society. George’s Uncle Edward makes a swift, spectacular fortune from the patent medicine Tono-Bungay, which confers no actual benefit but is brilliantly advertised – Tono-Bungay’s success is proof that the body politic is sick beyond cure. Edward’s empire eventually collapses and, following a disastrous expedition to steal a valuable mineral from an African country, and his rejection by his aristocratic lover, George uses his scientific talents to manufacture a deadly battleship for a foreign power. Tono-Bungay marks the turning point in Wells’s career as a novelist. His twentieth-century fiction throws off Victorian models to take increasing formal liberties in sprawling, discur-
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sive novels that mirror the increasing disorder of modern life. “Since the passing of Victoria the Great,” he wrote in The Soul of a Bishop (1917), “there had been an accumulating uneasiness in the national life. It was as if some compact and dignified paper-weight had been lifted from people’s ideas, and as if at once they had begun to blow about anyhow” (24). The novels that follow Tono-Bungay interleave plot with dialogue or interior monologue on such subjects as sexual morality, education, and the establishment of a utopian world government. Ann Veronica (1909a) scandalized the Edwardian establishment with its depiction of a young woman who chooses her scientific instructor Capes as her lover even though he is married. (Subsequently, Capes’s wife dies, Capes earns success as a playwright, and Ann Veronica is reconciled with her father.) Remington, in the roman-a-clef The New Machiavelli (1911), abandons his wife and a promising political career for another woman and exile in Italy. Trafford and Marjorie in Marriage (1912) shake off the insubstantial trappings of civilization and in Labrador establish a more real basis for living. Wells’s fiction, which predicted tanks, aerial bombardment, and the atomic bomb, had always been excited by the subject of warfare. While armed conflict provides evidence that humanity is not governed efficiently, the destruction of the status quo by military technology might offer the possibility of rebuilding a better civilization in the future. Wells’s later work includes future histories such as The World Set Free (1914b) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933), which predict society’s destruction by modern technology, then its subsequent utopian rebuilding. This strain took on greater urgency in Wells’s work once he foresaw, and then reported on, the Great War. Wells’s home front novel, Mr. Britling Sees it Through (1916), the best selling of Wells’s works of fiction in his own lifetime, shows a writer musing on the war and its likely aftermath. Joan and Peter (1918) dramatizes its protagonists’ upbringing, and concludes that school history teaching should stress humanity’s common origin over the artificial categories of national identity. He followed this novel with a textbook that sought to do just that, The Outline of History (1919), which sold millions of copies across the world. Wells continued to write dream visions (such as Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole
Island, 1928) and sprawling semiautobiographical novels about world and sexual politics (notably The World of William Clissold, 1926) through to 1941’s You Can’t Be Too Careful. Wells lived in a house that he had designed with the architect C. A. Voysey, Spade House, in Sandgate, Kent; at Easton Glebe, Essex; at Lou Pidou in France; and in London. When asked to provide his own epitaph, he suggested, “God damn you, you fools, I told you so.” He lived long enough to see, and write about, World War II, dying in August 1946. Wells was a highly versatile and prolific writer, who also produced short stories, newspaper articles, popular science, and screenplays. In a writing career that spanned over 50 years, Wells established friendships with Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, George Gissing, Joseph Conrad, and Arnold Bennett, and romantic relationships with novelists such as Elizabeth von Arnim, Dorothy Richardson, and Rebecca West. He became president of International PEN and campaigned against censorship. Wells was a significant public figure, running twice for Parliament, and meeting world leaders including Winston Churchill, Lenin, Stalin, and both Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was instrumental in the formation of both the League of Nations in 1922 and the Sankey Declaration of Human Rights which was published after his death. Wells’s greatest imaginative preoccupation was escape. In the little discussed The Sea Lady (1902) Chatteris chooses the “better dreams” (160), of the heroine over a life of bourgeois respectability escaped by returning with her to the sea. Wells’s work not only consistently imagines different ways of escaping the petty limitations and unhappiness of everyday life, but actively seeks to make everyday life better for its readers. In his essay “The Contemporary Novel” (1914), he claimed: I consider the novel an important and necessary thing indeed in . . . modern civilisation. . . . In many directions I do not think we can get along without it. . . . The novel has inseparable moral consequences. . . . And I do not mean merely that the novel is unavoidably charged with the representation of this wide and wonderful conflict. It is a necessary part of the conflict. . . . You see now the scope of the claim I am making for the novel; it is to be the social mediator, the vehicle of
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WELSH FICTION IN ENGLISH
understanding, the instrument of self-examination, the parade of morals and the exchange of manners, the factory of customs, the criticism of laws and institutions and of social dogmas and ideas. It is to be the home confessional, the initiator of knowledge, the seed of fruitful selfquestioning. (1914a, 148–68)
Wells was a major influence as preacher and pedagogue in his own time, and continues to be so, especially in science fiction and cinema. SEE ALSO: Censorship and the Novel (BIF); Fantasy Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Science Fiction (BIF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Batchelor, J. (1985). H. G. Wells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bloom, R. (1977). Anatomies of Egotism: A Reading of the Last Novels of H. G. Wells. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Scheick, W. (1984). The Splintering Frame: The Later Novels of H. G. Wells. Victoria, BC: University of Victoria. Smith, D. C. (1986). H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography. New Haven: Yale University Press. Wells, H. G. (1895). The Time Machine: An Invention. London: Heinemann. Wells, H. G. (1896). The Island of Doctor Moreau. London: Heinemann. Wells, H. G. (1897). The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance. London: Pearson. Wells, H. G. (1898). The War of the Worlds. London: Heinemann. Wells, H. G. (1899). When the Sleeper Wakes: A Story of the Years to Come. London: Harper. Wells, H. G. (1900). Love and Mr. Lewisham. London: Harper. Wells, H. G. (1901a). Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought. London: Chapman and Hall. Wells, H. G. (1901b). The First Men in the Moon. London: Newnes. Wells, H. G. (1902). The Sea Lady: A Tissue of Moonshine. London: Methuen. Wells, H. G. (1903). Mankind in the Making. London: Chapman and Hall. Wells, H. G. (1904). The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth. London: Macmillan. Wells, H. G. (1905a). Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul. London: Macmillan.
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Wells, H. G. (1905b). A Modern Utopia. London: Chapman and Hall. Wells, H. G. (1906). In the Days of the Comet. London: Macmillan. Wells, H. G. (1908). The War in the Air, and Particularly How Mr. Bert Smallways Fared While It Lasted. London: Bell. Wells, H. G. (1909a). Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Wells, H. G. (1909b). Tono-Bungay. London: Macmillan. Wells, H. G. (1910). The History of Mr. Polly. London: Nelson. Wells, H. G. (1911). The New Machiavelli. London: Lane. Wells, H. G. (1912). Marriage. London: Macmillan. Wells, H. G. (1914a). An Englishman Looks at the World, Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary Matters. London: Cassell. Wells, H. G. (1914b). The World Set Free. London: Macmillan. Wells, H. G. (1915). Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil and The Last Trump: Being a First Selection from the Literary Remains of George Boon, Appropriate to the Times. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Wells, H. G. (1916). Mr. Britling Sees It Through. London: Cassell. Wells, H. G. (1917). The Soul of a Bishop: A Novel (with Just a Little Love in It) about Conscience and Religion and the Real Troubles of Life. London: Cassell. Wells, H. G. (1918). Joan and Peter: The Story of an Education. London: Cassell. Wells, H. G. (1920). The Outline of History, Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind. London: Newnes. Wells, H. G. (1923). Men Like Gods. London: Cassell. Wells, H. G. (1926). The World of William Clissold: A Novel at a New Angle. London: Benn. Wells, H. G. (1933). The Shape of Things to Come: The Ultimate Revolution. London: Hutchinson. Wells, H. G. (1934). Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain. London: Gollancz. Wells, H. G. (1941). You Can’t be Too Careful: A Sample of Life 1901–1951. London: Secker and Warburg. Wells, H. G. (1969). The Wealth of Mr. Waddy: A Novel. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Welsh Fiction in English STEPHEN KNIGHT
Medieval Wales, like Ireland, had a rich prose fiction in Celtic, but there is no direct link to
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modern English-language fiction. Welsh fiction in English began in the nineteenth century and flourished in the twentieth. The first phase explored Wales from an English viewpoint but after that south Wales writers more honestly realized their turbulent industrial world. The third phase, after World War II, involved an increasing emphasis on the independence of this small but complex country and integration between Welsh-language and English-language cultures. Recently, in the major centers, urban literature has come into its own, focusing on the personal and social tensions evident at the start of the twenty-first century. At first, English publishers, starting around 1800, produced what postcolonialists call firstcontact material in travel tales, romances, and historical novels. Often by Welsh men and women, these works focused on touristic topics emphasizing the nature, beauty, and implicit exploitability of the country. Some writers were more assertively Welsh: in The Rebecca Rioter (1880) Amy Dillwyn described sympathetically the southwestern 1840s resistance to rapacious landowners. A Maid of Cymru (1901) by the sisters Mallt and Gwenffreda Williams (writing as “The Dau Wynne,” the two Wynnes) was firmly nationalist. “Allen Raine” (Anne Adaliza Evans) wrote internationally successful romances, but her viewpoint was always Welsh and she focused on contemporary conflicts – like the seductions of London in A Welsh Singer (1897) and in The Queen of the Rushes (1906) the dramatic nonconformist revival of 1904. Intensifying romance with ethnography, Raine first realizes a distinctly Welsh voice in English-language fiction. Caradoc Evans, like “Raine” from southwest Wales, published My People (1915) and Capel Sion (1916) while working as a London journalist. His brief, pungent stories pillory greed, hypocrisy, and ignorance in his former rural community. Deeply resented in Wales to this day, the stories were popular in London: as in dark tales of “Red Indian” or “Aboriginal” savagery, the native Welsh were patronized – if brilliantly – from an implicitly imperial and imperious viewpoint. More positive materials came from the AngloWelsh borders. Hilda Vaughan’s The Battle to the Weak (1925) presents social and gender debate from England-facing east Wales, first in a small town and then among the landowning gentry.
Iron and Gold (1948; first published in 1942 as The Fair Woman in the USA) moves toward Welsh myth. Geraint Goodwin, another London journalist, realized Anglo-Welsh encounters along the border in Call Back Yesterday (1935), while “Margiad Evans” (Peggy Whistler) wrote and illustrated the fine allegorical novella Country Dance (1932), in which a woman is courted by two men, one Welsh, the other English, with tragic outcome. The newly industrial landscape was also realized. Joseph Keating, a former collier, was the first to produce mining fiction in Son of Judith (1900). He deals with the dire pit context but romance is never far away: the viewpoint is never a worker’s, and gentry women remain central. Parallel distancing occurs in Rhys Davies’s first novel The Withered Root (1927), in which the hero eludes industry in his native Rhondda by becoming a revivalist preacher. The first thoroughgoing Welsh industrial novelist was Jack Jones. Raised in the iron and steel crucible of Merthyr, he wrote, while unemployed, Black Parade (1935), a richly colloquial tapestry of the lives and deaths of working men and women. Published first was the laterwritten Rhondda Roundabout (1934), less sprawling and challenging through being a malefocused romance, and then came Bidden to the Feast (1938), where Jones went back to the 1860s to present a full and vigorous origin-legend of Welsh industrialism. Leftism across 1930s Britain made Wales of wide interest, and Rhys Davies, now an established London literary figure, produced a trilogy taking the coalfield from its inception in Honey and Bread (1935), through the turn-of-the-century crisis in A Time to Laugh (1937), to the bitter crisis of the mid-1920s in Jubilee Blues (1938). Davies realizes memorably the socio-economic disaster of south Wales between the wars, though he was never fully a realist: his finest novel, The Black Venus (1944), uses myth to allegorize Welsh experiences, rural, industrial, and colonial. Political rigor entered Welsh fiction in Lewis Jones’s Cwmardy (1937) and We Live (1939). Len Roberts, son of a miner, is a left activist who resists wartime patriotism and Labour reformism alike, and, like Jones himself, joins the Communist Party. The novels can be gesturing, both in politics and personalities, but Jones narrates vividly the
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WELSH FICTION IN ENGLISH
human experience of and resistance to the thirties crises on the coalfield and in Spain. Gwyn Thomas’s politics were as left as Lewis Jones’s but he is remembered as a comedian. His first-written, but later-published, Sorrow for Thy Sons (1988) was darkly comic about 1930s south Wales, but a London publisher rejected it as being too somber. When he began publishing 10 years later, he mocked his targets rather than assaulting them. The World Cannot Hear You (1951) is the best of these dissenting comedies; but more political, perhaps because historical, and set in the 1830s is All Things Betray Thee (1949). Its US title was Leaves in the Wind, and although Thomas includes a gentry romance (with a nod to Gone with the Wind), the heroes are revolutionary trade unionists and the novel failed in America. Thomas is remembered as a writer who added to industrial fiction the verbal verve central to the Welsh self-concept. The best-known treatment of industrial Wales, unfortunately, is How Green Was My Valley (1939) by Richard Llewellyn, an army officer and film worker. Reversing the established south Wales novel, it recounts the origins of industrialism from a conservative position. As in firstcontact narratives, the Welsh are portrayed as being quaint and passionate, not collective and democratic, and at the novel’s end the men of the central family break a strike to save the mine for the owners. Widely rejected by those from south Wales, the novel was nevertheless a massive force, especially after the Oscar-winning film of 1941. Up till about 1960, London publishers sought another novel in the same vein, which explains the brief fame of Richard Vaughan’s rural sentimentalities like Moulded in Earth (1951). Negotiating that reductive pressure would be one of the tasks of the postwar writers of Welsh fiction. Dylan Thomas’s early prose was surrealism set in Wales, but his publisher preferred the amusing whimsy of Thomas’s later prose, as in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940). His friend Glyn Jones was also a poet and, as in his early collection The Blue Bed and Other Stories (1937), a fine symbolist. His major novel The Island of Apples (1965) is a European-style fable about transcendence in Jones’s own world of Merthyr. Alun Lewis, who died in action, made a wartime reputation with poetry and stories in The Last Inspection (1942), dealing with Wales as well as India,
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and in subtle and wide-ranging stories in the posthumous In the Green Tree (1948). Two postwar writers and intellectuals had a major impact both internationally and in Wales: Emyr Humphreys and Raymond Williams. Humphreys, like Glyn Jones and many Welshlanguage writers, was a conscientious objector and remained sympathetic to both the Welsh nationalist cause and pacifism. His first major book was A Man’s Estate (1955), exploring Welsh conservative masculinity and employing a mythic substructure drawing on Aeschylus. He then used Joyce’s Ulysses as the model for Outside the House of Baal (1965), which intercalates the limited life events of a retired minister and his sister-in-law with a sweeping historical and social account of most of the Welsh twentieth century, considering, very unusually, both the north and south. Many commentators regard this as the most important single Welsh novel in English, but Humphreys, who deliberately writes in English to address a larger audience, went on to work in a more widely accessible mode. His The Land of the Living series started with National Winner (1971), focusing on lawyer-poet John Cilydd More, whose oversensitivity leads to his early death. His youngest son’s inquiries take us back to More’s youth, his marriage with Amy Parry, and his engagements with politics, history, nationalism, and various forms of meretricious modernity. As the series continues, a south Welsh unionist, modeled on the novelist Lewis Jones, dies in Spain, while Amy, less sensitive than her husband, moves into Labour politics and high influence. As ever in Humphreys, and in Welsh writing generally, myth is close: the inquiring son is Peredur, the original Welsh name of the grailachiever Perceval, while his brothers Bedwyr and Gwydion also invoke a still potent Celtic past. National Winner, though the first published, was meant to constitute the dark end of the series, but the resurgence of the Welsh language and the nationalist spirit in the 1970s and 1980s led Humphreys to write a seventh book, Bonds of Attachment (1991). Now, while many forces remain hostile, and nationalist violence is seen as destructive by the pacifist Humphreys, he understands Wales as, pointing to his overall title, still a land of the living. While Raymond Williams was based in Cambridge and wrote on English literature and international theory, his fiction focused mostly on
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Wales. Border Country (1960) takes an Englandbased Welsh academic back home to his dying father’s memories of the 1926 strike. Continuing the trilogy, Second Generation (1964) follows Welsh workers to the car industry in postwar Oxford, and explores the class and generational strain created by education. The Fight for Manod (1977) deploys the central figures of the first two books to uncover plans by government and international capital for exploitative new technology developments in Powys, Williams’s own midWales region. Williams turned from the future to the past when, late in life and a member of the Welsh nationalist party, he planned a historical trilogy about his own region. Nevertheless, The People of the Black Mountains series was finished only as far as the middle ages (The Beginning, 1989; The Eggs of the Eagle, 1990). More recent industrial history has preoccupied several writers. Ron Berry, himself a miner, wrote vigorously about the male culture of the pits, varying from dynamic ethnography in Flame and Slag (1968) to retrospective sentiment in This Bygone (1996). Alun Richards realized with humor and sympathy the impact of industrial decline in short stories in Dai Country (1976). The major post-industrial novel is the darkly powerful Shifts (1988) by Christopher Meredith. In this work a south Wales steelworks is closing and three characters take varied paths: one of the men returns to England, one moves uncertainly toward local history and learning Welsh, while his wife, now ignored by both, lacks even those options. Meredith, a Welsh speaker, went on to write a medieval historical novel, Griffri (1991). Such links with Welsh-language material are common, notably in Lloyd Jones’s pan-Wales cultural travelogues Mr. Vogel (2004) and Mr. Cassini (2006). There are also many translations of novels from Welsh to English, the most important being Kate Roberts’s powerful account of an early twentieth-century family, Feet in Chains (1977), Islwyn Ffowc Elis’s post World War II political fantasy The Shadow of the Sickle (1998), and Caradog Prichard’s magic-realist One Moonlit Night (1995). While these look to the past in theme and mode, powerfully postmodern are Wil Owen Roberts’s The Pestilence (1991) and Mihangel Morgan’s Melog (2007). This last work was translated by Meredith, and he has also produced Sidereal Time (1998), which
explores the consciousness of a woman schoolteacher and so connects with another major element of modern Welsh writing: the development of a voice both Welsh and female. As well as the early romancers like “Allen Raine” and Hilda Vaughan, Welsh women had been writing all the time, often for magazines, as is shown in Jane Aaron’s important anthology A View across the Valley (1999). After the war Menna Gallie reshaped male industrial fiction through the mystery genre in Strike for a Kingdom (1959), in which the inquiring miner is also a Welsh-language poet, and in her second novel The Small Mine (1962) in which she emphasizes a female viewpoint. Cardiff-born Bernice Rubens has dealt with local women and their social world in I Sent a Letter to My Love (1975) and Yesterday in the Back Lane (1995), while Si^an James, after succeeding in England with often ironic romances, reconnects with Wales in A Small Country (1979). Yet James’s sharpest work is in her short stories, collected in Not Singing Exactly (1996). In State of Desire (1996) Catherine Merriman mixes women’s lives and post-industrial action. Stevie Davies interprets in telling detail the politics of gender and class in Wales in Kith and Kin (2004). Rachel Trezise’s In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl (2000) charts the pain experienced by a selfharming girl in modern Merthyr and her use of disability to image the human cost of social failure is common in other modern Welsh writing. In Richard John Evans’s ironically titled Entertainment (2000) a central character is wheelchairbound but also very aggressive; Lewis Davies’s My Piece of Happiness (2000) represents memorably the mentally disabled and their slim chance of a normal life; the central characters of Niall Griffiths’ successful and powerful novels of modern social resistance (often likened to the Scottish fiction of Irvine Welsh) are incapacitated by drugs (Grits, 2000) or by a missing limb in the prizewinning Stump (2003). Dolores, the central figure of Trezza Azzopardi’s The Hiding Place (2000), has a stump for a hand but her disability is used to focus ethnic tensions in the author’s own Maltese community, part of Cardiff’s maritime past, and shows the multicultural awareness that recurs in recent Welsh fiction. John Williams realizes more genially the multicultural Tiger Bay community in Cardiff Dead (2000), while more widespread
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WELSH FICTION IN ENGLISH
ethnic anxiety is explored in Charlotte Williams’s Sugar and Slate (2002), about a woman who, like the author, is both from north Wales and AfroCaribbean, and in Mr. Schnitzel (2001) by Stephen Knight (not the author of this essay), which deals, quasi-autobiographically, with a family that bridges Austria and Swansea. Tristan Hughes’s Send My Cold Bones Home (2006) links the island of Anglesey with the transatlantic world, past and present, while Peter Ho Davies, himself Chinese Welsh, deals in The Welsh Girl (2007) with a complex wartime interface in Wales between the Welsh (in both languages), the English, and the Germans. Further responses to the complexity of modern identity are John Sam Jones’s gay male fiction, as in Welsh Boys Too (2000) and Crawling through Thorns (2008), and the Newport-based lesbian novel by Erica Woof Mud Puppy (2002). Not all Welsh fiction fits readily into categories: Lily Tobias is an interwar Jewish writer using Welsh contexts in Eunice Fleet (1933); Nigel Heseltine’s Tales of the Squirearchy (1946) is surreal gentry farce; and Malcolm Pryce started a series of postmodern comedies with Last Tango in Aberystwyth (2004). There are also Welsh-born writers who have mostly dealt with English or international themes, such as Dorothy Edwards, Richard Hughes, Howard Spring, Bertha Thomas, Stuart Evans, and, today, Sarah Waters and Russell Celyn Davies. But many Welsh authors have worked with a nationally committed imagination to interpret their own time and their own place. Though English fiction in Wales is, in any substantial form, little more than 100 years old, the authors have generated both remarkable variety and striking quality in this small, ancient, and vociferous part of the world, and the long Welsh tradition of potent narrative has been powerfully continued in the English language. SEE ALSO: Colonial Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Working-Class Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Aaron, J. (ed.) (1999). A View across the Valley: Short Stories by Women from Wales. Dinas Powys: Honno. Aaron, J. (2007). Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing in Wales: Nation, Gender and Identity. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
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Aaron, J., & Williams, C. (eds.) (2005). Postcolonial Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Azzopardi, T. (2000). The Hiding Place. London: Picador. Berry, R. (1968). Flame and Slag. London: W. H. Allen. Bohata, K. (2004). Postcolonialism Revisited. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Davies, L. (2000). My Piece of Happiness. Cardiff: Parthian. Davies, R. (1927). The Withered Root. London: Holden. Davies, R. (1944). The Black Venus. London: Heinemann. Evans, C. (1915). My People. London: Melrose. Evans, M. (1932). Country Dance. London: Barker. Gallie, M. (1959). Strike for a Kingdom. London: Gollancz. Goodwin, G. (1935). Call Back Yesterday. London: Jonathan Cape. Gramich, K. (2007). Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing in Wales: Land, Gender, Belonging. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Green D. (2009). Emyr Humphreys: A Postcolonial Novelist. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Griffiths, N. (2000). Grits. London: Jonathan Cape. Hughes, T. (2006). Send My Cold Bones Home. Cardiff: Parthian. Humphreys, E. (1965). Outside the House of Baal. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Humphreys, E. (1971). National Winner. London: Macdonald. James, S. (1996). Not Singing Exactly. Dinas Powys: Honno. Jones, G. (1965). The Island of Apples. London: J. M. Dent. Jones, G. (2001). The Dragon Has Two Tongues [1968], rev. edn. (ed. T. Brown). Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Jones, J. (1938). Bidden to the Feast. London: Hamilton. Jones, J. S. (2000). Welsh Boys Too. Cardiff: Parthian. Jones, Lewis (1937). Cwmardy. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Jones, Lloyd (2004). Mr. Vogel. Bridgend: Seren. Keating, J. (1900). Son of Judith. London: G. Allen. Knight, S. (2001). Mr. Schnitzel. London: Viking. Knight, S. (2004). A Hundred Years of Fiction. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Lewis, A. (1942). The Last Inspection. London: Allen and Unwin. Llewellyn, R. (1939). How Green Was My Valley. London: Michael Joseph. Meredith, C. (1988). Shifts. Bridgend: Seren. Merriman, C. (1996). State of Desire. London: Macmillan. Prys-Williams, B. (2004). Twentieth-Century Autobiography. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
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Raine, A. (1906). The Queen of the Rushes. London: Hutchinson. Thomas, D. (1940). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. London: J. M. Dent. Thomas, G. (1949). All Things Betray Thee. London: Gollancz. (Published in US as Leaves in the Wind. Boston: Little, Brown.) Thomas, G. (1988). Sorrow for Thy Sons. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Thomas, M. W. (ed.) (2003). Welsh Writing in English. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Trezise, R. (2000). In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl. Cardiff: Parthian. Vaughan, H. (1925). The Battle to the Weak. London: Heinemann. Williams, C. (2002). Sugar and Slate. Aberystwyth: Planet. Williams, J. (2000). Cardiff Dead. London: Bloomsbury. Williams, R. (1960). Border Country. London: Chatto and Windus Williams, R. (1977). The Fight for Manod. London: Chatto and Windus. Woof, E. (2002). Mud Puppy. London: Women’s Press.
Welsh, Irvine ROBERT MORACE
Even in an age of hyper-consumerism accustomed to an endless supply of instant classics by new writers, Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) stands out as much for creating a cultural phenomenon as for launching an individual career, for appealing to postliterate youth as well as broadsheet reviewers, for helping put contemporary Scottish fiction on the world literary map, and for creating a sense of national self-confidence that played a part in the passage of the 1997 referendum on devolution. Welsh was born in 1958 in Leith, Edinburgh’s port area, and was raised in the city’s Muirhouse section, one of the numerous postwar council estates that were intended to improve living conditions for working-class families from places like Leith but instead created the social pathologies depicted in Welsh’s work. Welsh left school at 16, lived in London for a time, squatting in abandoned buildings, trying his hand at punk music, experimenting with drugs, and eventually buying and selling real estate during the London housing
boom. On visits back to Edinburgh, he discovered that many of his friends were either dead, addicted to heroin, or HIV-positive and was as angry over their failure to better themselves as he was over the Thatcher government’s policies and its devastating socio-economic effects. The result was Trainspotting, a novel that he never thought would be published and, given its small initial print run, that his publisher did not expect would be widely read. But Welsh’s novel about a group of Edinburgh no-hopers in their mid-twenties, most of them male, many of them addicted to heroin, some to alcohol and violence, all of them surrounded by death and urban decay, struck a nerve, reaching a worldwide audience following the release of Danny Boyle’s film version in 1996. Although influenced more by pop culture (film, music, television) than high art, Trainspotting should be understood as the most visible link in a chain of Scottish writers whose fiction appeared after the failed 1979 referendum: Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, William McIlvanney, Janice Galloway, and A. L. Kennedy. But Trainspotting eschews the philosophical, aesthetic, and psychological trappings of their fiction and more vehemently of the Oxbridge (and East Anglia) literary novel and creates interest in a new, more youth-oriented fiction in Scotland (Alan Warner and Laura Hird) and outside (John King in England, Niall Griffiths in Wales). Unlike a mythified William Wallace shouting “freedom” in Mel Gibson’s 1995 film Braveheart, Trainspotting offers “a bunch of voices shouting to be heard” in their own language (dialect), time, and place. Dependence here is not just an individual psychological condition but a powerful socio-political trope in a novel that ends with the central character (to the extent that it has one central character) escaping Scotland. The Acid House (1994), a collection of short stories and novella, quickly consolidated Welsh’s reputation as “the poet laureate of the chemical generation” and demonstrated the marketability of the Welsh brand within the “culture industries” transformed by Thatcher’s economic policies. His second novel, Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995), provides an arresting portrait of the pathological Scot as a young urban male, graphic not only in its language and depiction of violence (especially
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sexual violence) but in the way Welsh uses typography and page design to trace the comatose protagonist’s various states of (sub)consciousness as he tries both to confront his past and to escape it. The success of the film Trainspotting was not quite enough to offset negative reviews of Ecstasy (1996), a collection of three hastily written “chemical romances.” Originally hailed as “a literary Kasper Hauser,” Welsh was now being judged according to rather conventional literary standards and found wanting by reviewers who failed to understand that his fiction is rooted more deeply in visual culture than in “literature” and who seemed intent on putting the consistently bestselling Frankenstein’s monster they had helped create back in his place. Filth (1998), a 400-page monologue by a misogynistic, abusive, cocaine-fueled police detective (as well as his transvestite self and his tapeworm), and Welsh’s in-your-face play, You’ll Have Had Your Hole, the same year, offered additional proof, reviewers claimed, that Welsh’s stock-in-trade was shock for shock’s sake. Welsh did not publish his next book for three years. For all its continuities with the previous work, Glue (2001) signals a significant change in his writing, away from the energy and spontaneity of the early work and toward a more organized and self-consciously literary and much less engaging kind of fiction, less dependent on the vernacular and increasingly set outside Edinburgh: Glue, in four parts spanning four decades and narrated by four friends; Porno (2002), the Trainspotting sequel, set a decade later; The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (2006), which combines Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray with a long section set in California (also the setting of Babylon Heights, 2006, a play co-written with Dean Cavanagh); If You Like School, You’ll Love Work (2007), a remarkably lifeless collection of stories set in the US, Spain, and Fife; and a new novel, Crime (2008), set in Florida, where the Dublin-based author now resides part of the year. The Irvine Welsh once hailed as the enfant terrible of contemporary fiction, who claimed he would write only as long as he had something to say, has become Irvine Welsh, author. The
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urgency, authenticity, edginess, and demotic energy of his early fiction has given way to literary self-consciousness, offset by Welsh’s willingness to support numerous worthy projects and causes. Whether Welsh can return to form with his planned Trainspotting prequel remains to be seen. SEE ALSO: Politics and the Novel (BIF); Scottish Fiction (BIF); Warner, Alan (BIF); Working-Class Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Boyle, D. (dir.) (1996). Trainspotting. Miramax/ PolyGram. Craig, C. (1999). The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and Narration. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kelly, A. (2005). Irvine Welsh. Manchester: Manchester University Press. March, C. (2002). Rewriting Scotland: Welsh, McLean, Warner, Banks, Galloway, and Kennedy. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Morace, R. (2001). Irvine Welsh’s “Trainspotting”: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum. Morace, R. (2007). Irvine Welsh. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Petrie, D. (2000). Screening Scotland. London: BFI. Schoene, B. (2004). Nervous Men, Mobile Nation: Masculinity and Psychopathology in Irvine Welsh’s Filth and Glue. In E. Bell & G. Miller (eds.), Scotland in Theory: Reflections on Culture and Literature. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 121–45. Schoene-Harwood, B. (2000). Writing Men: Literary Masculinities from Frankenstein;1; to the New Man. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Welsh, I. (1993). Trainspotting. London: Secker and Warburg. Welsh, I. (1994). The Acid House. London: Jonathan Cape. Welsh, I. (1995). Marabou Stork Nightmares. London: Jonathan Cape. Welsh, I. (1996). Ecstasy. London: Jonathan Cape. Welsh, I. (1998). Filth. London: Jonathan Cape. Welsh, I. (1999). The Acid House: A Screenplay. London: Methuen. Welsh, I. (2001). Glue. London: Jonathan Cape. Welsh, I. (2002). Porno. London: Jonathan Cape. Welsh, I. (2006). Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs. London: Jonathan Cape. Welsh, I. (2007). If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work. London: Jonathan Cape. Welsh, I. (2008). Crime. London: Jonathan Cape.
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WEST, REBECCA
West, Rebecca BERNARD SCHWEIZER
Born Cicely Isabel Fairfield in London, in 1892, Rebecca West changed her name (inspired by Ibsen’s heroine in Rosmersholm) in 1911, at the cusp of what was to become a stellar writing career. She was awarded Britain’s highest honor in 1959, Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE), in recognition of her importance as an accomplished woman of letters. Coming from an impoverished family (her father was financially irresponsible and squandered money on stockmarket gambles), West approached the task of writing with a professionalism seldom seen in one so young. By the time she was 20, she had already made a name for herself by writing bold, unsparing critical articles and book reviews on women’s issues, suffrage, socialism, colonialism, and literature in newspapers and magazines in England and America. And she would go on to write in the genres of literary criticism, biography, journalism, cultural anatomy, short story, and novel. But while West’s across-the-board writing talents brought financial prosperity, her protean output resisted easy canonization. Her diverse achievements all compete for attention; while her brief, accessible journalistic work remains mostly uncollected, arguably her greatest book, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), weighs in at 1,200 closely printed pages, daunting all but the most intrepid readers; her crowning achievement as a novelist, the Aubrey saga (The Fountain Overflows, 1956; This Real Night, 1984; and Cousin Rosamund, 1985), presents its own difficulties: the story was “interrupted” for 30 years instead of stimulating reader interest by sequential publication, as the two sequels to the first installment appeared only after West’s death. Other novels by West such as Harriet Hume (1929) and The Birds Fall Down (1966) remain out of print. Nevertheless, a steady revival of West’s work is under way, with scholarly and general interest in her work galvanized by the foundation of the International Rebecca West Society in 2003. Her diverse output has been increasingly seen as a strength that warrants multidisciplinary and holistic approaches transcending period, movement, or genre. Indeed, Rebecca West grew up among the exciting ferment of modernism and
worked well into the era of postmodernism. She was a between-the-wars writer as well as a postwar writer. Some of her work does show typical signs of modernism, notably stylistic experimentation, shifting points of view, fragmentation, attention to subconscious processes, and an emphasis on gender and sexuality. Still, she can at best be identified as a kind of border modernist, or “intermodernist,” for she wrote in a manner that not only reflects literary innovation but also rehearses some conventions of the realist novel, even while anticipating developments that have come to be associated with postmodernism. Although no postmodernist in any definite sense, she was adept at deconstructing received dualisms and stereotypes, and her work celebrates peripheral social and historical perspectives even as it presents alternatives to the master-narratives of nation, empire, and modernity. To understand the work of Rebecca West, one must be attuned to its political and philosophical implications. West was a public intellectual of the first order who rubbed shoulders (and occasionally butted heads) with some of the century’s most prominent figures, including Emmeline Pankhurst, Emma Goldman, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., J. Edgar Hoover, Lionel Trilling, and many others. Ideologically, she was a paragon of liberalism. She based her feminism, her nationalism, her anti-totalitarianism, and her pro-civil rights stance on the principles of emancipation, freedom, rationalism, and fairness. Like other British public intellectuals, including George Orwell and Arthur Koestler, she became an ardent anti-communist from the mid-1940s onward, arguing that with the demise of fascism, communism had become the world’s most dangerous totalitarian ideology. Conservatives like William Buckley, Jr. admired West for that reason, even though she had been a socialist in her twenties and had been deeply marked by the anarchist radicals her father had brought into the house when she was a child. Rebecca West’s literary acquaintances include Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, Arnold Bennett, George Bernard Shaw, and D. H. Lawrence. She also had a 10-year liaison with H. G. Wells, who fathered her only child, Anthony Panther West, with whom she had a tense and often unhappy relationship marred by mutual recriminations. Such personal relationships have left a strong imprint on West’s fiction. A lover
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closely resembling H. G. Wells, an illegitimate child (reminiscent of Anthony), a father figure who abandons his family (just as West’s father, Charles, did when she was 9), a sister who is spiteful and meddling (based, perhaps unfairly, on her sister Letitia), as well as a musically gifted maternal figure (inspired by West’s own mother) are frequent staples in her novels. West drew literary inspiration from Charlotte Bront€e, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, and D. H. Lawrence, and her work accordingly reflects these writers’ preoccupation with gender relations and sexuality, with memory and origins, with social class conflict, and with man’s loneliness in an absurd universe. Her first novel, The Return of the Soldier (1918), resonates with all of these themes: a shell-shocked soldier in World War I returns home amnesiac, forgetting that he was married to a conventional society woman, desiring to be reunited with his first love, a soulful workingclass woman. Her next novel, The Judge (1922), is a long, passionate story about a doomed love relationship between a young suffragette and an older, Byronic expert in explosives, whose mother unwittingly sabotages the union (a nod to Freud) and whose illegitimate half-brother triggers a violent denouement. Again, the novel repays the obvious feminist and gender approach, while developing a Sophoclean pessimism that continues the existentialist vision hinted at in The Return of the Soldier. Harriet Hume (1929), West’s “London Fantasy,” is her strongest claim to mainstream modernism – a prismatic, introspective text that chronicles the fatal obsession of a successful career politician with a wraithlike, piano prodigy. This novel’s philosophical framework centers on Manichean dualisms, transposed into the relationship between the sexes. The Thinking Reed (1936) is a novel of manners about the corrupting effect of wealth on inherently decent people. By implying that wealth exercises an influence as pernicious as poverty, West displayed her inherent sympathy for the middle classes (although she herself eventually reached upperclass status). The series of novels often referred to as the Aubrey trilogy were planned as a “Saga of the Century,” according to West’s own notes. Even though the three existing volumes cover “only” about a quarter of the century, they constitute a masterpiece, filled with period detail, replete with historical and cultural significance,
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and crackling with imagination, wit, and drama. The rich palette of characters is suffused with deep psychological interest and spellbinding emotional power. It is a modern epic that, through the vicissitudes of the Aubrey family, dramatizes the larger forces that shaped the early twentieth century. West orchestrates the events to show the destructive (male) elements of the twentieth century are locked in struggle with the enlightening (female) potential of art, intellect, and compassion. The Birds Fall Down (1966), the last novel published during West’s lifetime, is a spy thriller. Although an explicitly political novel, this story about terrorists, agitators, spies, and traitors in the run-up to the Russian Revolution of 1905 also resonates with philosophical significance, as evidenced in discussions about the Trinity, the relevance of absolute political loyalty, and the meaning of the Hegelian dialectic in the context of treason. West’s preoccupation with treason was not limited to fiction, as evidenced by the two books The Meaning of Treason (1949) and The New Meaning of Treason (1964). These immensely successful works aim to solve the mystery why rational people can betray their own kind, a theme that goes back, once again, to the memory of her own father’s desertion of his family. And not just that – at times, she felt equally betrayed on this earth by the ultimate patriarch, God the Father. The spies and traitors, whose trials she observed in the courtroom, seemed to her symptoms of a larger, universal malaise. She analyzes the motives, backgrounds, and personalities of men like William Joyce, John Amery, and Alger Hiss as if she were trying to read their minds and plumb the depths of what to her constitutes the real original sin: betrayal of one’s country and home. West’s reportage of various treason trials and of the Nuremburg tribunal made her into a celebrity, and Time magazine put her on its front cover in 1948, proclaiming her to be the world’s foremost woman writer. But enduring literary reputations are seldom made on the strength of journalism, and it is therefore significant that the focus of scholarly interest is now gradually shifting back to Rebecca West as a gifted all-rounder, a thinker who was an accomplished reporter, a fine literary reviewer, a philosopher, and a premier novelist. When she died in March 1983, William Shawn, editor-in-chief of the New Yorker, wrote:
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WILSON, ANGUS
“Rebecca West was one of the giants and will have a lasting place in English literature. No one in this century wrote more dazzling prose, or had more wit, or looked at the intricacies of human character and the ways of the world more intelligently” (quoted in Charlton 1983). SEE ALSO: London in Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF); Wells, H. G. (BIF); World War I in Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bridges, A. (dir.) (1982). The Return of the Soldier. Barry R. Cooper Productions. Charlton, L. (1983). Dame Rebecca West Dies in London. New York Times, p. B7 (Mar. 16). Glendinning, V. (1987). Rebecca West. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Norton, A. (2000). Paradoxical Feminism: The Novels of Rebecca West. Lanham, MD: International Scholars. Rollyson, C. (1996). Rebecca West: A Life. New York: Scribner’s. Rollyson, C. (2005). Rebecca West and the God that Failed. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse. Schweizer, B. (2002). Rebecca West: Heroism, Rebellion, and the Female Epic. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Schweizer, B. (ed.) (2006). Rebecca West Today: Contemporary Critical Approaches. Newark: University of Delaware Press West, R. (1918). The Return of the Soldier. London: Nisbet. West, R. (1922). The Judge. London: Hutchinson. West, R. (1928). The Strange Necessity. London: Jonathan Cape. West, R. (1929). Harriet Hume. London: Hutchinson. West, R. (1933). St Augustine. London: Peter Davies. West, R. (1936). The Thinking Reed. London: Hutchinson. West, R. (1941). Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. London: Macmillan. West, R. (1949). The Meaning of Treason. London: Macmillan. West, R. (1955). A Train of Powder. London: Macmillan. West, R. (1956). The Fountain Overflows. New York: Viking. West, R. (1966). The Birds Fall Down. London: Macmillan. West, R. (1982). The Young Rebecca (ed. J. Marcus). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. West, R. (1984). This Real Night. London: Macmillan. West, R. (1985). Cousin Rosamund. London: Macmillan.
West, R. (2003). Survivors in Mexico (ed. B. Schweizer). New Haven: Yale University Press. West, R. (2005). Woman as Artist and Thinker. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse. Wolfe, P. (1971). Rebecca West: Artist and Thinker. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Wilson, Angus MARINA MACKAY
Although in his own lifetime (1913–91) he was considered one of the most important British novelists of the postwar period, Angus Wilson is nowhere near as widely read as he was. So to say that he is very much a writer of his time may seem faint praise, but perhaps his most obvious claim on our attention is the extraordinary archive of mid-century morals and manners represented by the eight novels and three collections of short stories that he produced in a career that ran from the immediate aftermath of World War II to the early 1980s. But what makes this oeuvre more than just a social record, albeit a more nuanced record than most of his contemporaries left behind, is Wilson’s sense, partly fascinated and partly appalled, of the ways in which those slick surfaces of everyday social interaction that he reproduces so meticulously are continuously jeopardized by the private and public sadisms they attempt to conceal. Concerns with the inauthenticity of social relations and the intractable reality of moral evil give Wilson’s fiction its primary themes and its characteristically edgy, theatrical forms. Although Wilson was almost 40 when he began his career as a published writer with a short story in Cyril Connolly’s magazine Horizon in 1947, the earlier years of his life shed useful light on what would become his characteristic obsession with both the entrapping realities and the ultimate depthlessness of class codes. Born on August 11, 1913 in the Sussex town of Bexhill-on-Sea, Wilson belonged to what might best be described as the “genteel poor,” or, in short, high class but no cash. His father was an upper-class AngloScottish gambler and his mother the daughter of bourgeois South Africans of English origin, and both were deeply committed to keeping up appearances without the income that would lend such appearances substance. With its frequent
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WILSON, ANGUS
moves from superficially realistic narration into pure playscript, Wilson’s most autobiographical novel, the parodic family saga No Laughing Matter (1967) brings into the foreground the necessary theatricality of a family whose financial insecurity and emotional instability perpetually endanger all their efforts to maintain a good social front. Notwithstanding his rackety and chaotic home life, Wilson was educated at the prestigious Westminster School, thanks to an unusual instance of fiscal foresight on the part of his mother, who died when he was 15. After completing a degree in history at Merton College, Oxford, he worked as a cataloguer of books for the British Museum until World War II took him to the famous code-breaking center at Bletchley Park. His career as a writer began after a serious nervous breakdown during the war, and the story he claimed was the first he ever wrote certainly gives a disturbing sense of his mid1940s state of mind. “Raspberry Jam” is the story of an imaginative but isolated upper-class boy witnessing the protracted torture and killing of a little bird at the hands of two deranged old women whom he has befriended – the “raspberry jam” of the title describes what the bird looks like when its killers have finished with it. This story appears in his first collection, The Wrong Set, published in 1949, which was followed by another enthusiastically received collection, Such Darling Dodos, in 1950 and a first novel Hemlock and After in 1952. These early successes allowed Wilson to give up his day job, and he continued to write fiction fulltime until 1980, the year in which he was knighted for services to literature. That year also saw the publication of his final novel, Setting the World on Fire, a highly stylized and self-referential meditation on the relationships between political violence and creative fantasy in which preparations for an operatic production of Lully’s Phaeton in an invented stately home in Westminster provide the cover for a terrorist plot to blow up a government building. From “Raspberry Jam,” his first work, to Setting the World on Fire, his last, Wilson’s writings return time and again to private acts of brutality and public acts of terror that threaten to explode the serene complacencies of England’s socially privileged classes. In the best-known of Wilson’s novels, AngloSaxon Attitudes (1956a), the aging medieval historian Gerald Middleton attempts to strip away the layers of deception that have accrued
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around his personal and professional lives. He has long suspected that an old friend, Gilbert Stokesay, a modernist artist killed in World War I, successfully deceived his eminent historian father by planting a pagan idol in the tomb of a seventhcentury bishop. It is now his final chance and his duty, Gerald feels, to expose the hoax even at the risk of confronting his involuntary complicity in the cover-up. Meanwhile, he has decided that the longstanding evasions of his relationship with his monstrously infantile Danish wife, Inge, must also come to an end; already in love with another woman, the wife of the dead Gilbert Stokesay, when he married her, Gerald has suspected for years that Inge was responsible for an accident that left his beloved daughter Kay with a disfiguring injury. Notwithstanding their mixed effects and outcomes – it turns out, for example, that the family is keen not to have its ancient prevarications and evasions laid bare – Gerald’s investigations, professional and personal, will liberate him from 40 years of debilitating self-reproach. Like his other early novels Hemlock and After and The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot (1958), AngloSaxon Attitudes is a novel of the liberal conscience that looks back to E. M. Forster in its concern with the moral necessity (and occasionally paralyzing outcomes) of the properly examined, fully selfaware life. Wilson may well have had mixed feelings about Forster, however, in view of the latter’s relative lack of candor about their shared homosexual identity: Forster had, for a start, the kind of moral authority in postwar England that might have made him a compelling voice in the ongoing struggle for equal rights for gay men. With that in mind, Wilson is historically an important figure because, openly gay but writing in an era before the decriminalization of homosexuality in Britain, all his novels treat gay male sexuality without any apology, whitewash, or special pleading. In Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, gay subculture performs a structural function. The novel is often described as “Dickensian” in its social range because it gives such a panoramic account of the English society of its time, but the double life of Gerald’s gay son is what introduces into the world of the rich and respectable Middletons the lowerclass survivors who know the truth about the archaeological hoax that Gerald is trying to unravel. The notorious persecution of gay men in the 1950s also helps to make sense of Wilson’s
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fictional interests in what lies beneath respectable social and psychological surfaces. The hero of his first novel, Hemlock and After, is the successful novelist Bernard Sands who, married with adult children while having affairs with younger men on the side, feels he is managing his complicated emotional life with maturity and integrity. His crisis comes when, waiting for a friend and former lover in Leicester Square, he sees the police arrest a gay man for importuning who, moments earlier, had accosted him. In a compellingly dramatic scene, Bernard collapses when he realizes that what he has found so devastating about the arrest is not the persecution of another gay man but his own thrill – sexual and, he thinks, fascistic – at the state’s exercise of its power. Gay dilemmas and liberal-humanist dilemmas also coincide in As If By Magic (1973). By far the worst received of Wilson’s novels, it is ironically the one that speaks most resonantly to the concerns of our own time, even leaving aside its compellingly bold treatment of gay sex – bold because it deliberately outrages high-minded liberal piety as it does conservative sanctimony. Playfully allusive and funny though it is, the subject of As If By Magic is, to borrow the title of Wilson’s other experimental novel, “no laughing matter.” This is a novel about planetary responsibility, about globalization, environmental racism, and the exploitation of the developing world. Its hero is the plant geneticist Hamo Langmuir, who heads east ostensibly to see at first hand the practical outcomes of his genetically modified super-rice “Magic” but also as a pretext to sleep with the beautiful young Asian men of his sexual fantasies. His travels across Asia intersect with those of his goddaughter Alexandra, who has dropped out, in true sixties style, and is now on the hippy trail to Goa. Through the Alexandra plot, the novel demonstrates how a renunciation of Western capitalism is more easily declared than accomplished: Alexandra’s “magic” – the New Age mysticism of the late twentieth century – is as suspect a quick fix as Hamo’s magic rice, which has turned out to be highly profitable but socially catastrophic; and Alexandra’s spiritual appropriation of the East is no less marked and problematic than the economic and sexual exploitations of Asia in which her godfather comes to recognize himself as complicit.
A writer of his own time, then, Wilson may ultimately be a writer of ours as well. For all the comic energy generated by his mimetic and satirical talents, Wilson was a novelist not only of real moral seriousness but also of enduring political relevance. And even on the basis of his technical accomplishments alone, he should occupy a central place in the story of the British novel in the second half of the twentieth century. In his restless pursuit of a fictional form that would convey both the substance and the staginess of social relationships and private self-knowledge, Wilson helps to explain how postwar realism, with its confidently documentary imperatives, could turn into something far more complex and unsettling. SEE ALSO: Forster, E. M. (BIF); Globalization and the Novel (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Conradi, P. J. (1997). Angus Wilson. Plymouth: Northcote House. Drabble, M. (1995). Angus Wilson: A Biography. London: Secker and Warburg. Gardner, A. (1985). Angus Wilson. Boston: Twayne. Faulkner, P. (1980). Angus Wilson: Mimic and Moralist. London: Secker and Warburg. Halio, J. L. (1985). Critical Essays on Angus Wilson. Boston: G. K. Hall. Wilson, A. (1949). The Wrong Set and Other Stories. London: Secker and Warburg. Wilson, A. (1950). Such Darling Dodos and Other Stories. London: Secker and Warburg. Wilson, A. (1952a). Emile Zola: An Introductory Study of His Novels. London: Secker and Warburg. Wilson, A. (1952b). Hemlock and After. London: Secker and Warburg. Wilson, A. (1956a). Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. London: Secker and Warburg. Wilson, A. (1956b). The Mulberry Bush. London: Secker and Warburg. Wilson, A. (1957). A Bit Off the Map and Other Stories. London: Secker and Warburg. Wilson, A. (1958). The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot. London: Secker and Warburg. Wilson, A. (1961). The Old Men at the Zoo. London: Secker and Warburg. Wilson, A. (1963). The Wild Garden; or, Speaking of Writing. London: Secker and Warburg. Wilson, A. (1964). Late Call. London: Secker and Warburg.
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WINTERSON, JEANETTE
Wilson, A. (1967). No Laughing Matter. London: Secker and Warburg. Wilson, A. (1970). The World of Charles Dickens. London: Secker and Warburg. Wilson, A. (1973). As If By Magic. London: Secker and Warburg. Wilson, A. (1977). The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works. London: Secker and Warburg. Wilson, A. (1980). Setting the World on Fire. London: Secker and Warburg. Wilson, A. (1983). Diversity and Depth in Fiction: Selected Critical Writings of Angus Wilson (ed. K. McSweeney). London: Secker and Warburg. Wilson, A. (1986). Reflections in a Writer’s Eye: Travel Pieces. London: Secker and Warburg.
Winterson, Jeanette JEFFREY ROESSNER
Jeanette Winterson has written some of the most provocative and original fiction to emerge in contemporary British literature. Her relentlessly inventive and magical imagination, along with a limpid prose style and her keen sense of romance, has won her a host of devoted fans. As she has taken her place in the contemporary literary landscape, it has become easy to overlook the striking quality of her early work, particularly the trio of novels through which most readers first encountered her – Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985b), The Passion (1987), and Sexing the Cherry (1989). These works sounded a new note in fiction, transmuting the influence of Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, and the magic realists into an original voice through which Winterson relentlessly assaulted restrictive social roles and heterosexist notions of identity. Most biographical accounts of Winterson have trouble distinguishing between the facts of her upbringing and her semiautobiographical transformation of them in her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Given Winterson’s self-identified role as fabulist, we should be skeptical of all but the broadest outline of her coming of age. She was born on August 27, 1959 in Manchester, England, and raised by adoptive evangelical parents who nursed her on biblical fervor and seemed intent on preparing her for the life of a missionary. As the adolescent Winterson came to terms with her identity as a lesbian, she broke with her church and family and pursued a literary education, read-
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ing English at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. She then moved to London to work on the Whitbread Award-winning Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Although Winterson rejected her religious upbringing, her writing reflects the spiritual zeal that suffused her childhood; such avidity appears in the seriousness with which she takes her vocation as a writer (see Art and Lies, 1994a), and in her neoromantic celebration of desire. In this respect, The Passion establishes the pattern for much of her later work. Set largely in Venice, the novel relates the tale of Henri, a cook in Napoleon’s army, and his love for an ethereal, web-footed woman named Villanelle, who embarks on her own quest to retrieve her heart from a female lover. Here as elsewhere, Winterson’s characters submit to the overwhelming, mystical force of passion and follow it wherever it leads – in this way, she naturalizes lesbian desire and subverts rigid gender roles. While Winterson revises history and traditional fairy tales in The Passion, she also consistently rewrites biblical narratives, mythology, children’s fables, and films – all of which she sees as upholding debilitating gender stereotypes. Sexing the Cherry, like The Passion, maps the debate about repression and desire onto history. Set mainly during the English Civil War, the novel endorses the profligate supporters of King Charles I while savaging his uptight puritan tormentors. Narrators include an oversized, grotesque figure named Dogwoman and her foundling son, Jordan, as well as contemporary incarnations of these characters. Detailing Jordan’s quest for adventure and his love for a mystical dancer, the novel includes meditations on romantic desire and the creation of a hybrid gender that would escape the male/female dichotomy. Throughout, Winterson critiques Enlightenment rationalism, explicitly denying uniform ideas of space and time, and radically experiments with form: she places Dogwoman and Jordan in episodic adventures and breaks the narrative frame by including revised fairy tales and rhetorical digressions. Often overtly moralistic in these vignettes, Winterson presents herself as the parabolist of the postmodern lesbian sublime. Supporting her challenge to restrictive notions of gender, Winterson often focuses on sexually ambiguous characters: her fourth novel, Written on the Body (1992), offers her first explicitly ungendered character. Having engaged in past relationships with both men and women, the
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first-person narrator of the novel offers an encomium to a female lover named Louise, who develops a terminal illness. The narrator ultimately makes the anguished choice to end the relationship and leaves Louise in the care of her physician husband. A meditation on passion and grief, the novel offers a haunting celebration of desire and the play of imagination that fuels it, and invites readers to ask how knowing the gender of the narrator would have changed the emotional terrain of this story. Winterson has relished the role of provocateur, in both her life and art, as her narrative experiments make clear. After her initial success, she became notorious for her hubris (proclaiming herself heir to Virginia Woolf, making grand claims about salvation through art, and undergoing public break-ups with her married lesbian lovers). Imaginatively, too, Winterson embraced the role of enfant terrible as part of her artistic mission; the contemporary incarnation of her character Dogwoman from Sexing the Cherry seems to voice her approach: “The trouble is that when most people are apathetic ordinary people like me have to go too far, have to ruin their lives and be made an object of scorn just to get the point across” (1989, 140). More recently, Winterson has developed a passion for technology and exploring the modes of communication it affords. She launched her own well-received website, where she posts regular columns, and traced the contours of gender identity through cyberspace in The PowerBook (2000) and into the realm of science fiction in The Stone Gods (2007). Offering a singular, uncompromising voice that provokes and delights her avid readers, Winterson continues to energize important cultural debates concerning gender, desire, and personal identity.
Postmodern. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 138–55. Grice, H., & Woods, T. (eds.) (1998). “I’m Telling You Stories”: Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of Reading. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Makinen, M. (2005). The Novels of Jeanette Winterson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Onega, S. (2006). Jeanette Winterson. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Winterson, J. (1985a). Boating for Beginners. London: Methuen. Winterson, J. (1985b). Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. London: Pandora. Winterson, J. (1986). Fit for the Future: The Guide for Women who Want to Live Well. London: Pandora. Winterson, J. (1987). The Passion. London: Bloomsbury. Winterson, J. (1989). Sexing the Cherry. London: Bloomsbury. Winterson, J. (1992). Written on the Body. London: Jonathan Cape. Winterson, J. (1994a). Art and Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd. London: Jonathan Cape. Winterson, J. (1994b). “Great Moments in Aviation” and “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit”: Two Filmscripts. London: Random House. Winterson, J. (1995). Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery. New York: Knopf. Winterson, J. (1997). Gut Symmetries. London: Granta. Winterson, J. (1998). The World and Other Places. New York: Knopf. Winterson, J. (2000). The PowerBook. London: Jonathan Cape. Winterson, J. (2003). The King of Capri. New York: Bloomsbury. Winterson, J. (2004). Lighthousekeeping. London: Fourth Estate. Winterson, J. (2005). Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles. Edinburgh: Canongate. Winterson, J. (2006). Tanglewreck. New York: Bloomsbury. Winterson, J. (2007). The Stone Gods. London: Hamish Hamilton.
SEE ALSO: Politics and the Novel (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF); Queer/ Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF); Woolf, Virginia (BIF)
Wodehouse, P. G KIRBY OLSON
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Andermahr, S. (ed.) (2007). Jeanette Winterson: A Contemporary Critical Guide. London: Continuum. Doan, L. (1994). Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Postmodern. In L. Doan (ed.), The Lesbian
Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was born on October 15, 1881 to Henry Ernest Wodehouse and Eleanor Deane. He was the third of the couple’s four children. Wodehouse’s parents lived in Hong Kong, but his father insisted that the
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WODEHOUSE, P. G
children be raised in England and receive an English education. Young Wodehouse and his siblings were raised in Bath and Croydon by surrogate parents. After enduring a series of boarding schools in his teens, Wodehouse attended and graduated from Dulwich College. He then survived a short stint as a banker, while writing in the evenings. In less than a year Wodehouse’s articles, stories, and eventually books caught on with the British public and he was able to spend the rest of his life as a full-time writer. He met Ethel Rowley on Long Island, New York in 1914 and, after a brief courtship, the two were married. She was a widow with a daughter from a previous marriage. The couple lived on Long Island in luxurious circumstances, although Wodehouse preferred to spend his days writing and only regretfully attended the lavish dinner parties that his wife loved to throw. When possible, his work days exceeded 10 hours. Wodehouse is best known for his super-valet character Jeeves, who appears in a dozen novels and short story collections. Jeeves is every aristocrat’s dream. He is a butler who knows how to make a perfect Martini, and also how to resolve the accompanying hangover. He can introduce one to a gorgeous young woman, yet help one escape the clutches of matrimony. Well versed in philosophy, he can quote Spinoza and Nietzsche, yet he is not above cheating at croquet. Jeeves’s “master” is Bertie Wooster, a facile young man who narrates the stories. Wooster has only two competencies: a knowledge of flowers and of biblical theology. Other than that he is a flop in almost every area of life, and so turns to Jeeves for help when he gets in trouble. The success of the Wooster–Jeeves sequence shouldn’t be allowed to overshadow Wodehouse’s other 90-odd books, his plays, or his acute memoirs. Such characters as the dapper and eccentric Lord Emsworth and his favorite pig, or the phenomenal Psmith (a forerunner of Jeeves), or Uncle Fred, to name but a few, are also considerable accomplishments, and would have made the name of many a lesser writer. But Jeeves has succeeded in dwarfing all his other creations, and is therefore the focus of critical interest. P. G. Wodehouse led an uneventful life, save for one controversial incident. At the onset of World War II, he was living in Brittany, France when the Nazis invaded and took him captive. Taken to
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Germany, Wodehouse was asked if he would like to give a series of radio broadcasts to England. Ever the ham, he agreed and penned five short radio addresses to England which he then proceeded to broadcast. He was apparently unaware that England was being blitzed by unmanned missiles; his radio addresses, which downplayed the Nazi threat, proved offensive to the British ear. As a result, he was banned from broadcasting on the BBC until as late as 1961. This single incident in Wodehouse’s life colored the critical reception of all his work and continues to do so to this day. In Wodehouse at War, Iain Sproat (1981) assembles all the radio broadcasts and provides a larger historical context for them. According to Sproat, “among various left-wing political groups and individuals, there was a sustained attempt, from the time of Wodehouse’s Berlin broadcasts onwards, to portray Wodehouse’s alleged action not merely as the aberration of a contemptible individual, but as being somehow typical of his ‘class’ ” (31). Some on the far left in Britain were interested in making a connection between the upper classes and treachery, and saw in Wodehouse a perfect symbol. At the same time, many writers came to Wodehouse’s defense. One of them was George Orwell, who wrote in his essay “In Defense of P. G. Wodehouse” that he “ ‘made an ideal whipping boy’ for the left” (194). Orwell did much to save Wodehouse’s reputation, but he resorted to presenting his client as perhaps much less shrewd than he actually was. This distortion has greatly colored the critical reception of Wodehouse, to the extent that it ought to be reconsidered at some length. “Nowhere,” Orwell writes, “so far as I know, does [Wodehouse] so much as use the word ‘Fascism’ or ‘Nazism’ ” (192). And yet, Sir Roderick Spode, a character who appears in Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters (1938), was clearly based on the British fascist Oswald Mosley. The Code of the Woosters was written shortly before the outbreak of World War II, and reveals that Wodehouse indeed had read the newspapers and that he understood what was at stake. Yet Orwell, in order to exonerate Wodehouse from responsibility for his wartime radio addresses, writes, “His picture of English society had been formed before 1914, and it was a na€ıve, traditional and, at bottom, admiring picture.” Orwell sums up, “If my analysis of
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Wodehouse’s mentality is accepted, the idea that in 1941 he consciously aided the Nazi propaganda machine becomes untenable and even ridiculous” (190–1). While the radio addresses are not ordinarily considered among Wodehouse’s masterpieces, his severest critics have given them extraordinary attention. However, close analysis reveals little in them that is even remotely objectionable. A typical passage on his stay at a lunatic asylum converted into a prison focuses on the discomfort of the place. To his critics on the far left this was nevertheless an example of a disengaged political stance. Always popular outside of academia, with many of his 100 books still in print more than a quarter century after his death, Wodehouse has never been accepted within the world of academic criticism. This should not surprise us, for he relentlessly mocks high culture and laughs at those who maintain that the acquisition of higher knowledge marks them as elite. Jeeves, a butler, even quotes the classics of philosophy in such a way as to undermine the erudition of the upper classes. The plots of Wodehouse novels almost invariably turn upon the eccentricities of the upper classes as they seek out silver cow-creamers and other collectible items, while the lower classes are more interested in love affairs. In the novel Thank You, Jeeves (1934), Jeeves has been replaced by another butler, Brinkley, after a spat. “Outwardly,” we read of the replacement butler, “he was all respectfulness, but inwardly you could see that he was a man who was musing on the coming Social Revolution and looked on [Bertie] as a tyrant and an oppressor” (62). An extremely thin veneer of social conventions keeps them from massacring each other. Bertie goes into the city of Bristol for a musical comedy and dinner and upon his return Jeeves encourages him to black-up his face to get aboard an American millionaire’s yacht with a minstrel group in order to visit a nubile woman in whom Bertie’s best friend is interested. The meeting is cut off, however, and suddenly Bertie is lost on his own aristocratic grounds in blackface, and is chased from one end of the grounds to the other by policemen who would ordinarily have defended him but now see him as constituting a danger by reason of what they suppose to be his race. Jeeves has deliberately arranged the scene in order to reveal to Bertie how essential Jeeves is to his well-being.
In the scene in which Bertie is in blackface, he returns home and is attacked by his supposedly communist butler Brinkley. Running upstairs to lock himself in his room, he is sure that the socialist revolution is on. But Brinkley believes he is actually defending Bertie against a black intruder of whom he has got wind, who, of course, is Bertie himself. Police are called, and they too join the hunt for the black intruder. Bertie runs from the house that in the melee has suffered a smashed lamp and has burned to the ground. The farce trades on social expectations, and quietly satirizes race, gender, and class relations of the period. While Wodehouse is not engaging in an open critical denunciation of bias, his best stories inadvertently turn upon and satirize these stereotypes and illustrate how such frameworks determine the perceptions of many of his compatriots. That Wodehouse is capable of spinning such a political thread through his many otherwise ostensibly light books reveals his political savvy, which is often overlooked because he is careful to wear his sharpness lightly. Because he has written in a lower genre of comedy, and his work has been thought to be escapist farce, he has only rarely been taken seriously by the academy. Alexander Cockburn (1938) has gone as far as to call the Wooster–Jeeves cycle “the central achievement of English fiction in the twentieth century,” while others view its creator as a traitor to his country. Wodehouse lived outside of England after World War II, on Long Island, New York. He continued to write and publish well-received work but, without question, a dark cloud remained over his head. In 1974, just before his death, he returned to England to be knighted by the Queen. Wodehouse died on February 14, 1975. SEE ALSO: Orwell, George (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS The main repository of Wodehouse papers is the Wodehouse Library at Dulwich College, London, to which Wodehouse bequeathed his letters and manuscripts, and a complete collection of his published books. Cockburn, A. (1938). Introduction. In P. G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters. New York: Doubleday, Doran, pp. v–xii.
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WOOLF, VIRGINIA
MacDermott, K. (1987). Light Humor and the Dark Underside of Wish Fulfillment: Conservative Anti-Realism. Studies in Popular Culture, 10, 37–53. Mooneyham, L. (1994). Comedy among the Modernists: P. G. Wodehouse and the Anachronism of Comic Form. Twentieth Century Literature, 40(1), 114–38. Olson, K. (2001). Bertie and Jeeves at the End of History: P. G. Wodehouse as Political Scientist. In Comedy After Postmodernism: Rereading Comedy from Edward Lear to Charles Willeford. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, pp. 93–112. Orwell, G. (1946). In Defense of P. G. Wodehouse. In Critical Essays. London: Secker and Warburg, pp. 179–95. Sproat, I. (1981). Wodehouse at War. New Haven: Ticknor and Fields. Wodehouse, P. G. (1923). Jeeves. New York: Doran. (Published in UK as The Inimitable Jeeves. London: Herbert Jenkins.) Wodehouse, P. G. (1930). Very Good, Jeeves. London: Herbert Jenkins. Wodehouse, P. G. (1934). Thank You, Jeeves. London: Herbert Jenkins. Wodehouse, P. G. (1938). The Code of the Woosters. London: Herbert Jenkins. Wodehouse, P. G. (1940). Quick Service. London: Herbert Jenkins. Wodehouse, P. G. (1947). Joy in the Morning. London: Herbert Jenkins. Wodehouse, P. G. (1949). The Mating Season. London: Herbert Jenkins. Wodehouse, P. G. (1953). Ring for Jeeves. London: Herbert Jenkins. (Published in US as The Return of Jeeves. New York: Simon and Schuster 1954.) Wodehouse, P. G. (1954). Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit. London: Herbert Jenkins. (Published in US as Bertie Wooster Sees It Through. New York: Simon and Schuster 1955.) Wodehouse, P. G. (1960). How Right You Are, Jeeves. New York: Simon and Schuster. (Published in UK as Jeeves in the Offing. London: Herbert Jenkins.) Wodehouse, P. G. (1963). Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves. London: Herbert Jenkins. Wodehouse, P. G. (1967). The World of Jeeves. London: Herbert Jenkins. Wodehouse, P. G. (1971). Jeeves and the Tie that Binds. New York: Simon and Schuster. (Published in UK as Much Obliged, Jeeves. London: Barrie and Jenkins.) Wodehouse, P. G. (1974). The Cat-Nappers: A Jeeves and Bertie Story. New York: Simon and Schuster. (Published as Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen: A Jeeves and Bertie Story. London: Barrie and Jenkins.)
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Wodehouse, P. G. (1976). Jeeves, Jeeves, Jeeves. New York: Avon. Wodehouse, P. G. (1980). Wodehouse on Wodehouse. London: Hutchinson.
Woolf, Virginia KATHLEEN WALL
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) wrote experimental novels notable for their expressive form and poetic language. While her primary reputation is that of an experimental novelist, her collected essays and her two book-length essays, A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), establish her importance as a feminist and cultural critic. Her experimental aesthetic, her founding of the Hogarth Press (along with her husband, Leonard Woolf), and her membership in the Bloomsbury Group, place her at the center of British modernism in the first 40 years of the twentieth century. Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882, the second daughter of Sir Leslie and Julia Stephen. It was the second marriage for both parents, so Woolf was born into a complex blended family that consisted of Leslie’s mentally challenged daughter Laura from his first marriage, and Julia’s children from her marriage to Herbert Duckworth: Stella, George, and Gerald Duckworth (all teenagers when Virginia was born), as well as her older siblings Vanessa and Thoby. Her younger brother Adrian would be born a year later. Leslie Stephen was an enthusiastic mountaineer who was variously the editor of Cornhill Magazine (1871–82) and the Dictionary of National Biography (1885–91), and wrote the well-respected History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876) and The Science of Ethics (1882). While Woolf resented her parents’ lack of investment in formal educations for herself and her elder sister, painter Vanessa Bell, she also recognized that Leslie’s place in the literary world, his encouragement of her reading, and his belief that she might one day make a fine historian, contributed to confidence in her ability to earn her living by writing. Julia Stephen (whose beauty was admired and recorded by photographer Julia Margaret
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Cameron and the Pre-Raphaelite painters) embodied the ideal of the Victorian Angel in the House, nursing relatives through illnesses, overseeing their deaths, teaching the Stephen children their lessons (at least until the boys went away to public school), caring about the welfare of the poor in her role as Lady Bountiful – often to the point of exhaustion. She died in 1895, when Woolf was 13. Julia’s daughter Stella, then 26, was expected to minister to Leslie’s grief and to embody the feminine sympathy required by his pessimistic temperament. It was with difficulty, then, that Stella obtained permission to marry; she died in 1897, three months after her wedding. These two deaths precipitated Woolf’s early breakdowns; more importantly, however, they shaped her writing in two profound ways. In her unpublished “Sketch of the Past” (written in 1939), Woolf admits that her “shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer” (1976, 72). The “intuition” that influences her view of the work of art is that behind the “cotton wool” of our unthinking daily lives “is hidden a pattern; that we – I mean all human beings – are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art . . . [T]here is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself” (72). It is almost a truism to say that what made early twentieth-century writers modern was their imposition of aesthetic order on the chaos around them. Woolf’s memoir makes it clear that this truism was at least partly true for her. Julia Stephen’s laborious nursing, Stella’s two years of self-sacrifice to Leslie’s demands (a role that Vanessa would play for seven years after Stella’s death), Leslie’s sometimes angry, sometimes sentimental outbursts, often about money, often about the lack of sympathy, called the Victorian family profoundly into question. Doubtless it gave rise to the feminism we see expressed most incisively in her two book-length works of non-fiction, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. At the same time, childhood memories (particularly summers at St. Ives in Cornwall) infuse works like Jacob’s Room, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves, providing some of her novels’ most luminous moments. This ambivalence toward the past is similarly modern.
The year 1904 marked new beginnings. Shortly after Leslie Stephen’s death that year, Vanessa and Thoby organized a move out of proper Hyde Park Gate to less hide-bound Bloomsbury. Vanessa and Virginia scandalized conventional friends and relatives by sitting up until midnight discussing “truth,” “beauty,” and “the good” with Thoby’s Cambridge friends. Thus began Bloomsbury, whose official cast included Saxon SydneyTurner, man of letters; Clive Bell, art critic; Desmond MacCarthy, literary critic and novelist; Lytton Strachey, biographer and man of letters; Duncan Grant, painter; Leonard Woolf, writer and political theorist (then a civil servant on leave from Ceylon); John Middleton Murray, literary critic; and John Maynard Keynes, economist. Bloomsbury’s boundaries would remain quite permeable and would later include on its fringes T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, and Roger Fry. (More complete biographies of these figures can be found in Hussey’s indispensable Virginia Woolf A–Z, 1995.) Certainly Bloomsbury represented significant intersections in British letters and art; its members, while untraditional in their views and practices, carried weight and had influence. Also in 1904, Virginia began to write. While her major reputation would be as a novelist, her writing life began with reviews and essays, often published anonymously in the women’s pages of the Guardian or the Times Literary Supplement. She was a generous reviewer, understanding the implicit contract between the writer and reader, and evaluating, for example, popular romances according to their generic conventions. Her critical practice is thus more in touch with “the common reader” (the title of two collections of essays she wrote to encourage readers’ conversations with what they read), than a critic such as T. S. Eliot. Melba Cuddy-Keane, in Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere (2006), argues that Woolf’s essays “have a social project: she wrote about literature to inculcate good reading practices, and she did so because she believed that an educated public is crucial to the success of democratic society” (2). Her essays were on subjects as varied as “Haworth Parsonage,” a description of a visit to the home of the Bront€es (Essays 1: 5–9); the way the events of World War I seemed disconnected from the person in the street (“The War from the
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Street,” Essays 3: 3–5); and her beloved London, which she returned to time and again, most famously in “Street Haunting” (1970, 20–36), and a series of essays written for the British Good Housekeeping (1931–2) and collected in The London Scene (1975). Andrew McNeillie, in his exhaustively annotated edition of Woolf’s essays (volume 5, edited by Stuart Clarke, is slated for publication in 2010), argues that “Virginia Woolf was arguably the last of the great English essayists” and that her “art [is] expressed in a fluent, witty and unwaveringly demotic prose” (Essays 1: ix). Beginning most noticeably with her review of Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction in 1922, Woolf’s essays mark her concern both with the changing form of the novel in response to the pressures of history and with trying to articulate a view of the work of art that balances its formal and aesthetic independence with its integral place in people’s lives. In 1912 Virginia accepted Leonard Woolf’s marriage proposal, though with clearly expressed reservations. Their marriage has been the subject of much controversy. Leonard is variously depicted as someone who controlled her, enforcing periods of quiet away from London and curtailing her social life, particularly during her recurring periods of mental illness, or as the man who, admiring of her genius and patient with the largely asexual nature of their relationship, made her work possible. There is more evidence, including Woolf’s suicide note, for the latter view. Woolf’s first two novels are formally conventional, though their plots examine changing relationships between men and women attendant on women’s entry into the workforce and their demands for suffrage. The Voyage Out was drafted and redrafted between 1908 and 1915, when it was published by her half-brother, Gerald Duckworth in 1915. A novel about a young woman’s sexual coming of age (it is often read as a disguised portrait of Virginia’s struggle with her own sexuality), it nevertheless ends with the heroine’s death rather than her marriage. Periods of mental breakdown followed Woolf’s marriage to Leonard and its publication. During her convalescence from the second of these, Woolf began her longest novel, Night and Day (1919). The novel’s conventionality has been criticized, but Woolf maintains that it was a kind of studio exercise, allowing
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her to learn how the realist novel works by copying from “plaster casts” (Letters 4: 231). In 1917 Leonard and Virginia bought a small printing press and a booklet on how to use it for less than £20. Thus the Hogarth Press was born out of a desire to give Virginia something to do with her hands as well as to provide a venue for shorter works that publishers would not consider. Their first publication consisted of stories written by both Leonard (“Three Jews”) and Virginia (“The Mark on the Wall”). (See Woolmer 1976 for the scope of the press’s offerings.) The press would go on to publish Katherine Mansfield’s “Prelude,” T. S. Eliot’s Poems (1919), and The Waste Land (1922), as well as all of Virginia Woolf’s novels after Night and Day. They later took on the publication of the papers of the International Psychoanalytic Institute, including the works of Freud in English, putting paid to the judgment that the press ministered to a selfindulgent and insular group of writers. It is unlikely that a commercial press would have risked the possible charge of obscenity attendant on publishing Freud. Hogarth Press permitted Woolf to become an experimental novelist, liberating her from the editorial expectations of Duckworth. Her experiments with form in “The Mark on the Wall” (1917), “Kew Gardens” (1919), and “An Unwritten Novel” (1920) translated into similar experiments with the novel, first manifested in Jacob’s Room (1922). An elegy for her brother Thoby, who died in 1906 of typhoid contracted during a trip to Greece, it is a novel of development that is characterized by Jacob’s absence and the elusiveness of his character – a form appropriate to its elegiac subtext. The room of the title suggests that in some ways the culture that contains Jacob – his family, his time at Cambridge, the literary milieu of London, his fascination with all things Greek and with Greece itself – is more easily represented than character. Here, as in “An Unwritten Novel” and “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Woolf questions whether we ever really know others. At the same time, Woolf historicizes the novel’s reading of character, suggesting that the machinery of the war has created an “unseizable force” that has gone “hurtling” through the “nets” of the novel, leaving the form “torn to ribbons.” Jacob’s Room evinces several preoccupations that would mark, to a certain degree, all of Woolf’s
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subsequent work. The first is her sense that both World Wars altered the human condition and experience in some profound and inescapable way. As a consequence, even autobiographical novels such as both Jacob’s Room and To the Lighthouse would have their time frames altered to include the war. Scenes from her most popular novel, The Years (1937), would be set in basements during air raids. Her final novel, Between the Acts (1941), would consider how we understand and how we create history on the eve of World War II. Her concern with war’s effect is closely related to her careful historicizing of all her characters’ lives. The second is her concern for a more aesthetic and meaningful relationship between her ideas and the forms of her novels, one less preoccupied with plot – which she suggested in her modernist manifesto, “Modern Fiction,” doesn’t reflect the lives we live: “The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old . . . Life is not a set of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” (1984 [1925], 150). The rest of her career was characterized by attempts to create forms for her works that fully elucidate her subjects; her working out of the forms of her works are recorded in her diaries and her letters. (See Hussey 1995 for thorough discussions of the genesis of each of her novels.) Of Jacob’s Room, for example, she writes in her diary – long before she knows what her subject will be – “this afternoon [I] arrived at some idea of a new form for a new novel . . . [T]he approach will be entirely different this time: no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen, all crepuscular, but the heart, the passion, humor, everything as bright as fire in mist . . . Then I’ll find room for so much . . . What the unity shall be I have yet to discover: the theme is a blank to me; but I see immense possibilities in the form I hit upon more or less by chance 2 weeks ago” (Diary 2: 13–14). Working on To the Lighthouse, she asserts “I will invent a new name for my books to supplant “novel.” A new —— by Virginia Woolf. but what? [sic]
Elegy?” (Diary 3: 34). When she worked on The Waves, she writes “Why not invent a new kind of play . . . prose yet poetry; a novel & a play” (Diary 3: 128). The Years and Three Guineas began their radical lives as an “essay novel.” The form of Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Woolf’s second experimental novel, makes use of focalization that is handed off like a baton in a relay between characters who hear the same sounds or view the same sights over a single day in London (a strategy she will use again in To the Lighthouse). In this way, the novel formally echoes the thematic balance between the intimacy of love and friendship that connects individuals with both the necessity and the ache of isolation. In her diary, Woolf wrote, “I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense” (Diary 2: 248). The main narrative arc follows Clarissa Dalloway, who is to give a party in the evening, a party she views as a creative offering to her community of friends; at the same time, however, Clarissa contemplates her isolation from her husband, from her daughter, from her one-time suitor, Peter Walsh. The second narrative arc follows Septimus Warren Smith, a young man suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder after serving in World War I, who is misunderstood and thus isolated by a medical establishment that advises him to get out of his “funk” by taking an interest in cricket. The arcs of the novel are connected when Smith’s suicide is revealed at Clarissa’s party and Clarissa intuits both his isolation and his attempts to communicate. Jacob’s Room and Mrs. Dalloway set the parameters between which Woolf would work for the remainder of her writing life. The aesthetic beauty and formal aptness of her work would be set off by her desire to “criticise the social system.” To the Lighthouse (1927), the novel that has received the most critical attention, is a study in the flexibility of focalization, as the thoughts of her cast of characters meld into one another. No event or act is recorded outside the perceiving perspective. The work’s overall structure is similarly unique: two narrative sections, “The Window” and “The Lighthouse,” record the intense experiences and ambivalent thoughts of her cast of characters on two days 10 years apart. The central “Time Passes” section, formally analogous to the line in Lily Briscoe’s painting, juxtaposes the metaphysical
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and epistemological questions of the solitary walker on the beach with the practical attempts of Mrs. McNab to restore order to the abandoned house, just as art creates order from the chaos of time and experience. The Waves (1931), in many respects the culmination of her experimental work, takes Woolf’s fascination with the individual perspective and her expertise with focalization to its extreme. Her six characters’ soliloquies are interpolated by poetic descriptions of the sea during a single day; the times of day echo the passing phases in the characters’ lives. The characters, all close friends, are never presented talking to one another; any action is conveyed (as it was in To the Lighthouse) from their individual perspectives. Thus Woolf combines intense and poetic expression of her characters’ phenomenal experience with a sense of their isolation and of their fluctuating and wavering subjectivity. Placing Woolf’s work exclusively in the narrative of modernist experimentation underestimates the importance of her final three novels, Orlando (1928), The Years, and Between the Acts, which have received less critical treatment, while A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas were viewed by her contemporaries as diatribes. After her death, her reputation declined, particularly because her work was censured by the Scrutiny critics who saw it as an exemplar of Bloomsbury elitism. Three occurrences in the 1970s conspired to create a new enthusiasm for her writing: the publications of Quentin Bell’s biography and her diaries; the rise of feminist criticism in the academy; and the development of postmodernism and narratology, which highlighted the kinds of reading strategies necessary to fully appreciate her craft. Feminism understood the way Orlando (her paean to her lover Vita Sackville-West) playfully questioned the efficacy of gender roles while examining the way a single individual’s transformation from a man into a woman influenced the shape of the eponymous character’s life. Feminists also saw in The Years the way women’s lives are shaped – and misshaped – by their historical contexts. Between the Acts posed a question completely missed by the Scrutiny critics: what is the role of art in our understanding of ourselves and our historical moment? Finally, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas were seen as a brilliantly incisive
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feminist critique of the patriarchal cultural and political establishments. Throughout her life, Woolf experienced periods of mental illness; Hermione Lee hypothesizes that she coped with manic-depressive episodes, but also notes that the medication she was given makes interpretation of her symptoms problematic. In late 1940 and early 1941, Woolf was shocked and dismayed by the bombing of London – which included the destruction of her house in Tavistock Square. She had finished a draft of Between the Acts, which she thought “silly and trivial.” Leonard saw some of the signs of Virginia’s distress and arranged a consultation in late March of 1941 with Octavia Wilberforce, a friend as well as a doctor. Woolf confessed she thought she would not write again and that she could not recover from another period of madness. On Thursday, March 28, she drowned herself, leaving Leonard a touching note. SEE ALSO: Feminist Fiction (BIF); Forster, E. M. (BIF); London in Fiction (BIF); Mansfield, Katherine (WF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Queer/ Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF); World War I in Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Briggs, J. (2006). Reading Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. British Library Help for Researchers: www.bl.uk/ reshelp/findhelpsubject/literature/authors/ woolfvirginia/woolf.html accessed Feb. 26, 2010. Cuddy-Keane, M. (2006). Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere. New York: Cambridge University Press. De Gay, J. (2006). Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Dymond, J. (2004). Virginia Woolf Scholarship from 1991 to 2003: A Selected Bibliography. Modern Fiction Studies, 50(1), 241–79. Froula, C. (2005). Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization. New York: Columbia University Press. Goldman, J. (2006). The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hollander, F R. (2007). Novel Ethics: Alterity and Form in Jacob’s Room. Twentieth Century Literature, 53(1), 40–66.
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Hussey, M. (1995). Virginia Woolf A-Z: The Essential Reference to Her Life and Writings. New York: Oxford University Press. International Virginia Woolf Society: www.utoronto. ca/IVWS/, accessed Feb. 26, 2010. Lee, H. (1997). Virginia Woolf. New York: Knopf. Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Washington State University, Pullman. McIntire, G. (2008). Modernism, Memory, and Desire: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. New York: Cambridge University Press. Monks House Papers. University of Sussex Special Collections. Parsons, D. Theorists of the Modernist Novel: James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf. New York: Routledge. Stelmach, K. (2006). From Text to Tableau: Ekphrastic Enchantment in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Studies in the Novel, 38(3), 304–27. The Virginia Woolf manuscripts. The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. Woolf, V. (1915). The Voyage Out. New York: Harcourt Brace. Woolf, V. (1919). Night and Day. New York: Harcourt Brace. Woolf, V. (1922). Jacob’s Room. New York: Harcourt Brace. Woolf, V. (1925). Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt Brace. Woolf, V. (1927). To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt Brace. Woolf, V. (1928). Orlando: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace. Woolf, V. (1931). The Waves. New York: Harcourt Brace. Woolf, V. (1937). The Years. New York: Harcourt Brace. Woolf, V. (1941). Between the Acts. New York: Harcourt Brace. Woolf, V. (1950). The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays. London: Hogarth. Woolf, V. (1970). The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace. Woolf, V. (1975a). Granite and Rainbow. New York: Harcourt Brace. Woolf, V. (1975b). The Moment and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace. Woolf, V. (1975 –80). The Letters of Virginia Woolf (ed. N. Nicolson.) London: Hogarth. Woolf, V. (1976). Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings (ed. J. Schulkind). London: Chatto and Windus for Sussex University Press. Woolf, V. (1977). Books and Portraits (ed. M. Lyon). London: Hogarth.
Woolf, V. (1977 –84). The Diary of Virginia Woolf (ed. A. O. Bell). New York: Harcourt Brace. Woolf, V. (1984). The Common Reader [1925] (ed. A. McNeillie). New York: Harcourt Brace. Woolf, V. (1986). The Second Common Reader [1932] (ed. A. McNeillie). New York: Harcourt Brace. Woolf, V. (1986–2010). The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1: 1904–1912; vol. 2: 1912–1918; vol. 3: 1919–1924; vol. 4: 1925–1928 (vols. 1–4 ed. A. McNeillie); vol. 5: 1929–1932 (ed. S. N. Clarke). New York: Harcourt Brace. Woolf, V. (1993). “A Room of One’s Own” and “Three Guineas” (ed. M. Barrett). London: Penguin. Woolmer, H. J. (1976). A Checklist of the Hogarth Press 1917–1946. London: Hogarth.
Working-Class Fiction AARON KELLY
To consider working-class fiction is almost to confront an anomaly. The time and leisure necessary to think and create is nominally the preserve of social classes other than those consigned to function only as workers. But the history of working-class writing is a continual contestation of this division between who has the right to think and articulate the world and those whose role is only to labor in order to produce the privilege by which others create culture. A key early twentieth-century example of such a proletarian author is Patrick MacGill, an itinerant manual laborer who migrated from Donegal in Ireland to Scotland, and who eventually became a journalist, a writer, and fought for Britain in World War I. MacGill’s autobiographical novel, Children of the Dead End: The Autobiography of a Navvy (1914) centers on Dermod Flynn, a hired laborer or “hand,” whose hands are so dirty that he is told he is not meant to touch books when he first encounters them. This highly symbolic moment discloses a great deal about access to literature and education in capitalist society, about who has the leisure of time to think and write and who does not. Against the odds, Flynn, as with his creator, does become a writer. But it is not that Dermod betrays his class so much as that he radically redefines what it is, what it is capable of, what it can say and think. The major contribution to working-class writing and politics in the early twentieth century is Robert Tressell’s posthumously published The
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Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914). The novel is set among artisanal laborers in Musborough, a fictionalized version of Hastings. There is also an autobiographical dimension to this work since Tressell (born Robert Noonan) was the illegitimate son of an Irish policeman who became a migrant artisan in England. The central character is the committed socialist Owen, who attempts to convince his fellow workers that they are the real philanthropists in society; it is they who give up their labor and time for the benefit of their bosses. The novel has an unashamedly political mission: to stop working-class people from being “mugs,” dupes of capitalism. It contains diagrams explaining the class system, documents such as timesheets, the use of allegorical and symbolic structures, and satire, and often steps out of third-person narrative to directly confront different readerships. The final chapter, “The End,” is also not the end but a beginning: it looks forward to a socialist future (hence the first publishers expurgated this incendiary chapter and it was restored only in later, full editions from 1955 onward). Another proletarian writer with connections to Hastings was Lionel Britton. Unlike authors such as George Bernard Shaw, who visited the Soviet Union and left impressed by the workers’ paradise that the Communist Party selectively showed him, Britton had originally traveled to Russia seeking Soviet citizenship in the 1920s but returned to England thoroughly disenchanted at the dictatorship he clearly perceived there. The Left back home really did not want to hear this message and this goes some way to explaining the neglect of his work. Also a dramatist, Britton’s only novel was Hunger and Love (1931). It is highly significant in its rewriting of the Bildungsroman, which usually charts the development of the individual self. The novel details the life of Arthur Phelps, a working-class lad who comes to love Shakespeare, science, and philosophy. But this proletarian intellectual eventually dies in World War I and here the narrative gives us not the ascent of the individual subject but its obliteration. Unusually, the individual who is the focus of this Bildingsroman disappears and we are left with a blank space filled with collective slaughter in the trenches. More affirmatively, the whole novel disrupts individual perspectives, which are the norm of subjectivity in bourgeois
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society, and opens up a collective space of enunciation centered on “we” rather than “I.” Indeed, many working-class writers across the 1920s and 1930s recast culture in collective rather than individual terms as a means of challenging the individualism of bourgeois society and of forging a solidarity able to resist the poverty, workplace degradations, and unemployment of these decades. Certain areas of work, especially mines and factories, produced key writers and solidarities. These fictions include the work of James C. Welsh, a Lanarkshire miner, whose novels The Underworld (1920) and The Morlocks (1924) are more conciliatory in that they urge bosses to act more responsibly in ameliorating the brutality of working conditions; and the more radical work of Harold Heslop, whose The Gate of a Strange Field (1929) urges revolution rather than reformism. The South Wales communist Lewis Jones, who was imprisoned for sedition during the 1926 General Strike, wrote Cwmardy (1937) and We Live (1939), sadly dying of exhaustion after completing the latter. Most resonantly, Jones always maintained that he wrote not as an individual but as the collective representative of the community of which he was a part. In terms of communal rather than personal agency, the communist ex-seaman John Sommerfield’s May Day (1936) is striking in how it compiles an almost cinematic montage of aggregated working-class perspectives in the run-up to May Day in London, which advance collective rather than individual action. London is also the setting for Willy Goldman’s East End My Cradle: Portrait of an Environment (1940), which comprises a fragmentary assemblage of stories and set pieces about slum life. There is also a strong body of writing by women in the 1920s and 1930s that does not always receive the attention which it deserves. This Slavery (1925), by the mill worker Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, highlights the plight of working-class women, whose slavery is shown to be the product of both capitalism and patriarchy. Ellen Wilkinson’s Clash (1929) is the key novel with regard not only to representations of the General Strike of 1926 (in which Wilkinson was an active participant) but also to the importance of both feminism and socialism for any full redress of the inequalities of working-class life. As with Carnie Holdsworth, Wilkinson was a factory worker and
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she went on to become MP for Jarrow, most notably taking part in the famous Jarrow March to London in 1936, which sought to fight unemployment. Wilkinson renegotiates emancipation in terms both economic and gendered and looks forward, as traditional mores and demands relent, to a time when women are freed from class and patriarchal constraints to assert a new agency and empowerment. Hannah Mitchell, born on a farm in Derbyshire, was also a lifelong activist who argued in her posthumously published autobiography that “socialists are not necessarily feminists” (1990 [1968], 100). Her short stories are driven by the belief that the emancipation of women is a necessary part of the full equality promised by socialism. However, some fiction by men was able to criticize patriarchy. Walter Brierley’s Means Test Man (1935) features an unemployed miner assuming a domestic, traditionally feminized role looking after his son. Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933) suggests that powerless workingclass men do not have to retreat into reactionary attitudes toward women as a means of asserting themselves and strives instead to rethink the demands placed on both men and women by class and patriarchy. Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s trilogy A Scots Quair (1992 [1932–4]) is distinctive in that, although written by a male author (whose real name was James Leslie Mitchell), it centers on a female protagonist, Chris Guthrie. The trilogy traces the emergence of class consciousness among agricultural workers in rural Scotland with the added dimension of gender inequality. Gibbon’s work is also notable for its linguistic radicalism: it dispenses with Standard English and its narrative – rather than merely the speech of the characters – is rendered in demotic. A distinctively nomadic set of perspectives emerged in the first half of the twentieth century from Liverpool in the form of three working-class writers, all of whom have Irish connections: Jim Phelan originally hailed from Ireland, while George Garrett and James Hanley were both born in Liverpool to Irish parents. Phelan was a tramp who was convicted of gunrunning for the IRA and twice had the attendant death sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Phelan’s experience of prison informs both his novel Lifer (1938) and the more autobiographical Jail Journey (1940). The composition of both works helped Phelan pre-
serve his own sanity and integrity while incarcerated. Phelan’s work was known to Orwell and Phelan’s sense of how prison provided a model for a wider regimentation of society clearly filters into the writing of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Additionally, Orwell’s own diary credits George Garrett as one of the people who guided him when he was researching The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). But Garrett deserves to be remembered as more than just a worker who facilitated someone else’s account of working-class life. Garrett’s own short stories, which were often published under the pseudonym Matt Low, brilliantly capture the disruptions of working-class lives on the seas. So too Hanley’s dark, existential novels and short stories etch out the brutalities – both economic and spiritual – of those on the receiving end of capitalism’s effects, of families so oppressed that their members begin to oppress one another. Such writers reflect the abject hunger, pain, and despair endured by the working class through the first half of the century before the establishment of the Welfare State from 1945 onward and its guiding principles of free health care, education, and social provision for all. The austerity of life before, during, and after World War II was replaced in the 1950s by a new trend of consumerism. In part, this consumerism helped the Conservative Party return to power in place of the Labour government, which had won a landslide victory in 1945 as part of a mood that the victory against Fascism should actually mean something substantial in terms of the plight of ordinary people. In the 1950s consumer goods and leisure opportunities that were unheard of before World War II began to become a feature of life in general and for working-class communities. Added to the social, educational, and health provision facilitated by the Welfare State, a recurrent question in the period was, as Stuart Laing puts it, “what had the new working class to complain about?” (1986, 66). Indeed, in a speech in 1957 the Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan commented that “most of our people have never had it so good” (quoted in Campaign Guide 1964, 173). The Britain that reconstructed itself after the war still required someone to do the necessary work, including workers from Ireland and the former colonies. These economic migrations are culturally reflected by the appearance on the British literary scene of writers such as the
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Trinidadian Sam Selvon, whose The Lonely Londoners (1956) signals the emergence of a new demographic of migrant workers ghettoized by both their race and class. Nonetheless, one of the recurrent tropes in the fiction of the postwar period is the former working-class boy taking advantage of the perceived new social mobility to enter bourgeois life. A paradigmatic example is John Braine’s fiction, especially Room at the Top (1957), which features the character Joe Lampton. But there is also ambivalence here about the middle-class values encountered in the journey by which such characters climb the social ladder. Lampton, like so many characters of the period, is caught between the collapse of traditional working-class life (on which he has turned his back) and the vacuity of the bourgeois materialism that he desires and hates in equal measure. Lampton ends up lost, hollow, and rootless. Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) similarly expresses a disdain for consumerism. While its protagonist Arthur Seaton is a factory worker who does not have access to the mobility of Joe Lampton, this novel makes comparable social criticisms to Braine’s fiction. In this case, Seaton acknowledges that he is materially much better off than previous generations of his family, but his nihilistic, rebellious hedonism indicts the saturating conformity of a world standardized by consumerism. The strain of existentialism in Sillitoe’s work points to an emptiness in post-World War II working-class life and articulates a strong sense that material improvement is the bargaining chip by which a new social consensus forestalls any meaningful emancipation of working-class people politically, spiritually, or culturally. Sillitoe also uses the short story form very effectively to depict the alienation of his antihero characters at odds as much with traditional working-class values as they are with the bourgeois individualism that is supplanting them. Not all the fiction of the 1950s and 1960s tallies with the prevailing account of a consumerist society, which, even if its effects deemed negative, was assumed to have permeated all aspects of life. Indeed, any consideration of class issues will always remind us that dominant worldviews are notable as much by whom they exclude as include. Barry Hines’s novel A Kestrel for a Knave (1968) is
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an account of Billy Casper, a boy from a broken, dysfunctional home whose one attempted redemption in life – the furtive training of a wild kestrel – is smashed by a brutal, uncaring world that numbers not only wider figures of social authority but even Billy’s own family. If anything, Hines’s utterly excluded and oppressed character prefigures the emergence of a marginalized and disenfranchised underclass that emerges in cultural form from the late 1970s to the present. Furthermore, in addition to the more common working-class boy encountering bourgeois society tale of these times, there also continued a workerist tradition of fiction still based on collective solidarity and purpose: the communist Len Doherty’s A Miner’s Sons (1955) and The Man Beneath (1957), and the autodidact miner Sid Chaplin’s The Leaping Lad (1946) and The Watchers and the Watched (1962). David Storey, who was the son of a miner, offers another key voice in the 1950s and 1960s. This Sporting Life (1960) speaks to the contemporary vogue for considering the predicament of the former working-class figure introduced to a supposedly better life, in this instance the ascent of a professional rugby league player to riches beyond his wildest dreams but also tormented by a concomitant, restless soullessness. Storey’s Flight into Camden (1961) is distinctive in that it is narrated by a miner’s daughter as opposed to a male figure, while Radcliffe (1963) bravely broaches the repressed issue of working-class homosexuality. In terms of gender, the 1960s witnessed a number of key works dealing particularly with the experiences of women. Jeremy Sandforth’s Cathy Come Home (1967) traces the descent into homelessness of a young working-class couple whose children are eventually taken into state care. The underside of the apparent liberation and hedonism of the 1960s is also laid bare by Nell Dunn’s work. Up the Junction (1963) details a working-class Battersea milieu in which backstreet abortionists are the culmination of the supposed emancipation of women. The working-class characters featured in this set of vignettes find consolation for their powerless in sex, alcohol, and racism. Dunn’s Poor Cow (1967) centers on the ironically named Joy whose method of escape is to dream of being a glamour girl. A long way from promiscuity, hedonism, and petty thrills are Raymond Williams’s Border
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Country (1960) and its sequel Second Generation (1964). Williams, the son of a Welsh railway worker, is a classic example of the working-class intellectual who benefited from the principle of free education in the Welfare State; he went to Cambridge University and became one of the leading literary critics and icons of the cultural Left in his generation. His fiction mediates on the continuance of class politics and struggle in an epic realist form and seeks to contextualize contemporary social change historically in terms of the shifts and convulsions of capitalism rather than pander to the pleasures and thrills of the moment. However, from the 1970s to the present this strong sense of a history to class experience and indeed to changes and shifts in class increasingly disappeared. One exception is William McIlvanney’s Docherty (1975), which looks back to a west Scotland mining community in the 1910s and 1920s in order to sustain a tradition of heroic working-class resistance. Also in Scotland, the 1970s saw the emergence of James Kelman, a Glaswegian writer equally at home in both the novel and short story forms. There is a distinct absence of community or collective purpose in Kelman’s work but the perennially alienated individuals who people his stories remind us that even isolation can transcend itself by returning us to the social conditions that are its cause. Kelman’s fiction articulates the damage caused by the sustained assault upon the traditional, organized working class by the state. This turn is usually associated with the rise to power of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, though her marketdriven agenda also finds its roots in the last Labour government of the 1970s, which secured loans from the International Monetary Fund in exchange for massive cuts in public spending. In other words, the ethos behind the Welfare State was already under duress before the advent of Thatcherism. But Thatcher certainly brought this slow process to a head, as exemplified by her notorious statement that “there is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families” (quoted in Lash & Urry 34). Her government directly attacked the Welfare State and the politically organized working class (especially the National Union of Mineworkers during the 1984–5 strike) and privileged individualism and neoliberal or laissez-faire economics. In fact, successive British governments have continued this
assault not only on the organized working class but also on the very concept of class itself, on the idea that class is a determining factor in contemporary society. Hence, John Major, Thatcher’s successor as Conservative prime minister in the 1990s, often spoke of his vision of a “classless society” (quoted in Childs 272) while Tony Blair’s New Labour administration from 1997 onward pursued its idea of the “Third Way,” of a society supposedly beyond the old polarities of Left and Right in which everyone was now a stakeholder and class no longer mattered. Kelman’s fiction castigates this promise of opportunity and success for all. Against the grain of notions of social mobility, Kelman darkly focuses on characters who are displaced but yet ironically have nowhere to go. This rootless stasis anticipates the work of the Edinburgh author Irvine Welsh, whose novel Trainspotting (1993) unerringly holds a dark mirror up to the individualism of contemporary society in order to unveil not personal success and achievement but greed, alienation, drug addiction, and despair. Here, in a situation where most of Welsh’s working-class characters do not actually work, the last vestiges of traditional, industrial labor and its solidarities are effaced by internecine bitterness and alienated escapism. From the perspective of women, Pat Barker’s Union Street (1982) details the disintegration of traditional community life from women’s perspective, while Livi Michael’s Under a Thin Moon (1992) relays the claustrophobic environment endured by working-class women in a land of supposed opportunity. In Ireland, the so-called Celtic Tiger economy was heralded in terms parallel to those of the Third Way in Britain, yet the exclusion of many from this apparent social paradise is reflected in the emergence of a tradition of gritty realist fiction based in the housing schemes of north Dublin, as reflected most popularly in the fiction of Roddy Doyle. In the North of Ireland, where the Troubles since 1969 have tended to displace class consciousness into a sectarian or religious view of the struggle, Frances Molloy’s fiction stands out. Unfortunately, Molloy’s work ended with her premature death. Her novel No Mate for the Magpie (1985) not only charts the life of a female migrant worker but is undertaken purely in a vernacular idiom. This distinctive strategy refuses the normal linguistic hierarchy in fiction where vernacular is
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used only in speech but the narrative is carried by Standard English. In Molloy, as in Grassic Gibbon and Kelman, the vernacular voice establishes a linguistic democracy in which working-class dialect assumes narrative control rather than being reduced merely to speech and local coloring. All the aforementioned writers from the 1980s to the present uncover a stark contradiction in the governing logic of our times: we are asked to accept that class has disappeared at the same time that we are told the system that causes it in the first place – capitalism – is inevitably here to stay forever. The work of Kelman, Michael, Welsh, Doyle, and Molloy continues to insist, firstly, that class most certainly shifts and changes through history, taking on new forms and identities, but, equally, that this historical contingency is not synonymous with the disappearance of class and the onset of a classless society. If anything, working-class fiction has an increasingly vital role to play in the present given that mainstream politics has attempted to banish the discourse of class from its register entirely. It is through such fiction that an array of voices and experiences clamor to dispute the consensual assumptions of representative democracy and neo-liberal economics. SEE ALSO: Angry Young Man Fiction (BIF); Irish Fiction (BIF); Jewish Fiction (BIF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Scottish Fiction (BIF); Welsh Fiction in English (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Barker, P. (1982). Union Street London: Virago. Braine, J. (1957). Room at the Top. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Brierley, W. (1935). Means Test Man. London: Methuen. Britton, L. (1931). Hunger and Love. London: Putnam’s. Campaign Guide, The (1964) London: Conservative and Unionist Central Office. Carnie Holdsworth, E. (1925). This Slavery. London: Labor Publishing Co. Chaplin, S. (1946). The Leaping Lad. London: Phoenix House. Chaplin, S. (1962). The Watchers and the Watched. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Childs, D. (2001). Britain Since 1945: A Political History. London: Routledge. Day, G. (2001). Class. London: Routledge. Doherty, L. (1955). A Miner’s Sons. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
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Doherty, L. (1957). The Man Beneath. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Doyle, R. (1992). The Barrytown Trilogy. London: Secker and Warburg. Dunn, N. (1963). Up the Junction. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Dunn, N. (1967). Poor Cow. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Fox, P. (1994). Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the Working-Class Novel 1890–1945. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Garrett, G. (1999). The Collected George Garrett (ed. M. Murphy). Nottingham: Trent. Gibbon, L. G. (1992). A Scots Quair [1932–4]. London: Penguin. Goldman, W. (1940). East End My Cradle: Portrait of an Environment. London: Faber and Faber. Greenwood, W. (1933). Love on the Dole. London: Jonathan Cape. Hanley, J. (1931). Boy. London: Boriswood. Hanley, J. (1935). The Furys. London: Chatto and Windus. Haywood, I. (1997). Working-Class Fiction: From Chartism to Trainspotting. Plymouth: Northcote House. Heslop, H. (1929). The Gate of a Strange Field. London: Brentano’s. Hines, B. (1968). A Kestrel for a Knave. London: Penguin. Jones, L. (1937). Cwmardy. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Jones, L. (1939). We Live. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Kelman, J. (1994). How Late It Was, How Late. London: Minerva. Klaus, H. G., & Knight, S. (eds.) (2000). British Industrial Fictions. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Laing, S. (1986). Representations of Working-Class Life 1957–1964. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Lash, S., & Urry, J. (eds.) (1994). Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage. MacGill, P. (1914). Children of the Dead End: The Autobiography of A Navvy. London: Herbert Jenkins. McIlvanney, W. (1975). Docherty. London: Allen and Unwin. Michael, L. (1992). Under a Thin Moon. London: Secker and Warburg. Mitchell, H. (1990). The Hard Way Up: The Autobiography of Hannah Mitchell, Suffragette and Rebel [1968]. London: Virago. Mitchell, H. (1993). May Day. In G. H. Klaus (ed.), Tramps, Workmates and Revolutionaries: Working Class Stories of the 1920s. London: Journeyman, pp. 141–2.
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Molloy, F. (1985). No Mate for the Magpie. London: Virago. Phelan, J. (1938). Lifer. London: Peter Davies. Phelan, J. (1940). Jail Journey. London: Secker and Warburg. Sandford, J. (1967). Cathy Come Home. London: Pan. Selvon, S. (1956). The Lonely Londoners. London: Allan Wingate. Sillitoe, A. (1958). Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. London: W. H. Allen. Sillitoe, A. (1959). The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. London: W. H. Allen. Sommerfield, J. (1936). May Day. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Storey, D. (1960). This Sporting Life. London: Longman. Welsh, I. (1993). Trainspotting. London: Secker and Warburg. Welsh, J. C. (1920). The Underworld. London: Herbert Jenkins. Welsh, J. C. (1924). The Morlocks. London: Herbert Jenkins. Wilkinson, E. (1929). Clash. London: Harrap. Williams, R. (1960). Border Country. London: Chatto and Windus. Williams, R. (1964). Second Generation. London: Chatto and Windus. Worpole, K. (1983). Dockers and Detectives. London: Verso.
World War I in Fiction ARIELA FREEDMAN
The literary response to World War I in prose fiction and memoir was prolific, multifaceted, and extended. From the memoirs and combat novels contemporary to the war, to the autobiographies and postwar novels that began to appear with more frequency after a decade’s delay, to the modernist masterpieces of the 1920s that took the war’s civilian impact as their subject, to the celebrated late twentieth-century World War I novels of Sebastian Faulks and Pat Barker, the Great War has long been a traumatic preoccupation and source of inspiration for British writers. War writers wrote from the home front and from the front lines; they wrote in the heat of the war and decades after it had finished; they wrote in familiar genres and they broke conventions to explore new traumas and experiences; they fictionalized their autobiographies and drew on their lives for
their fictions. In his memoir Blasting and Bombadiering Wyndham Lewis wrote “we say pre-war and post-war as we say BC or AD” (1967 [1937], 1). While both writers and critics may have at times overstated the degree of the break both with prewar life and with prewar forms of writing occasioned by the war, it is clear that World War I prompted a vast reconsideration both of Britain and of British writing in response to what was seen as an unprecedented and unique catastrophe that demanded, in Katherine Mansfield’s terms, “new expressions, new moulds for our thoughts & feelings” (1991, 204–5). Early critics of World War I literature frequently associated its fiction with the figure of the soldier-author. In Heroes’ Twilight (1965) Bernard Bergonzi focused on the narratives of heroism and antiheroism of World War I, and cemented a canon of male soldier-writers as the privileged documenters of the war experience. Bergonzi’s book was followed a decade later by Paul Fussell’s influential The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), which added to Bergonzi’s emphasis on the soldier-author a narrative about the development of modernism as a response to the crisis of World War I, and an argument about the effect of the war in the formation of a demystified and ironic literary style. World War I, Fussell wrote in a formulation that is still famous, “was more ironic than any before or since” (8). Fussell’s study of the demystified modern voice of the soldier-author had an early formative influence on literary criticism of World War I through his vivid portrait of a collective betrayal that gave birth to a new national literature. Beginning in the 1980s, feminist critics including Gilbert & Gubar (1988), Claire Tylee (1990) and Angela Smith (2000a, 2000b) called attention to the uneven critical emphasis on male voices from World War I and began the process of reclaiming female writers. More recently, criticism of World War I fiction has moved to the recovery of popular fiction and subaltern accounts, to the application of trauma theory and the incorporation of cultural studies (Tate 1998), to post-Fussellian analyses of modernism in relation to the war (Sherry 2003), and to a more nuanced understanding of the ways that the demands of propaganda and the forces of censorship shaped war fiction (Buitenhuis 1987; Wollaeger 2006).
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The war entered British fiction almost as quickly as it became a historical reality. “War,” complained the Times Literary Supplement as early as 1916, “has become as much the stock-in-trade of the novelist as are treasure islands, pirate schooners, or the Great North Road” (Tylee 107). Memoirs and novels featuring the war began to appear soon after the fighting had begun. Early accounts of the war tended to emphasize patriotism and adventure. The Scottish novelist and playwright John Hay Beith, writing under the pen name Ian Hay, wrote one of the first soldiers’ accounts of the war, The First Hundred Thousand (1916). Beith, who served as an officer in a K1 battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, told the story of an infantry unit of Kitchener’s volunteer army from 1914 to 1915 in the form of a tragicomic picaresque that met the trauma and confusion of the war with humor and military fortitude. His novel’s preface outlines a tension between memoir and fictionalization that was to be repeated in much prose fiction on the war; “The characters are all entirely fictitious.” he wrote, “but the incidents described all actually occurred” (1916, 1). Other early war novels included H. G. Wells’s bestselling Mr. Britling Sees it Through (1916), the story of a middle-aged man left at home while his son fights at the front. John Buchan used the war as plot device in his “shocker” The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), the first of five novels featuring Richard Hannay, and returned to Hannay’s wartime adventures in Greenmantle (1916) and Mr. Standfast (1919). Buchan’s novels, popular among soldiers and veterans during and after the war, offered both escapism and an example of personal heroism that could inspire the men in the trenches. Despite the appearance of numerous novels and memoirs during World War I, the most influential literary representations during the war years were accomplished not through prose fiction but through poetry. In the years following the war, prose fiction and memoir would take a more prominent position as privileged chronicles of the war experience. There was little public appetite for war fiction or memoir in the years immediately after the Treaty of Versailles. When in 1919 Herbert Read tried to publish his memoir In Retreat he found that “publishers were not interested in ‘anything bleak’ ”(quoted in Edwards 2005, 15); the book
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was not published until 1926. One exception was R. H. Mottram’s Spanish Farm trilogy (2005 [1914–18] ), which told the story of the war through the multiple perspectives of a Frenchwoman, a young British officer, and a Norwich bank clerk. Mottram’s war trilogy gained considerable acclaim at the time, and in its use of multiple points of view and intermixing of combatant and non-combatant experiences of the war prefigured the more self-consciously modernist experimentation of Ford Madox Ford in Parade’s End (1950 [1924–8] ). The “war boom” in fiction occurred in the late 1920s and early 1930s, as writers gained some distance on their experiences and felt compelled to document them, and as the reading public developed an appetite for fictional accounts of a war that was no longer too fresh and too painful to dwell upon. A number of the memoirs that appeared in the late 1920s represented the war from a demystified and cynical position; Robert Graves in Goodbye to All That (1929), C. E. Montague in Disenchantment (1922), Edmund Blunden in Undertones of War (1929), and Wilfred Bion in the posthumously published The Long Weekend (1982) depicted the war as an act of bad faith that left a tragic and fraught legacy to the witnesses who survived it. As Vera Brittain wrote in the preface to Testament of Youth, “It is not by accident that what I have written constitutes in effect the indictment of a civilization” (1933, 12). Many narratives had memorial as their explicit purpose; frequently, the books were dedicated to fallen comrades from the front. By contrast, in the famous preface to Goodbye to All That, perhaps the best-known British autobiography of World War I, Robert Graves presented his ostensive purpose as to forget. Despite his ambivalence about memorializing the war, Graves’s book is a powerful anti-war account that combines humor with a sense of immediacy in his portrayal of a battle poorly conceived and poorly endured; Graves’s ironic distance came to exemplify the cynicism of the survivors of the lost generation. Even as memoirs of the war were distorted by what Blunden calls the “discolored and lacunary” (p. xii) qualities of memory, many novels of the war bore the heavy thumbprint of autobiographical experience. The second and third volumes of Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of
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George Sherston, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston’s Progress (1936) told the loosely camouflaged story of Sassoon’s service at the front. Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero (1929), while less extensively autobiographical, was partially based on his experiences on the Western Front and on his collapsing marriage to the poet Hilda Doolittle. Death of a Hero incorporated colloquial language, obscenity, and sexuality in its modernist satire of the war years; Aldington was forced to redact certain passages in order to avoid censorship. Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune, also heavily based on its author’s service at the front and distinctive in its emphasis on the soldier rather than the officer, was published privately in 1929 and appeared the next year under the suggestively lewd title Her Privates We in an edition that expurgated and censored the vernacular language that lent vividness and authenticity to Manning’s original version. The public interest in World War I stories evident in the late 1920s was still shaped and contained by the censor’s determination of what could and could not said. While many of the novels and memoirs of World War I were written in a realist style, the style was inflected and modified by the effort of depicting a deeply traumatic experience. As Paul Edwards writes, “the stress that traditional forms undergo in these memoirs . . . is sufficient to turn the writers into something very close to modernists, almost against their will, and in relation to the war only” (15). A few books, however, selfconsciously used the emergent techniques of modernism in order to represent the experience of war. David Jones’s novel/memoir In Parenthesis (1937) was explicitly positioned in relation to modernist experimentation with language and style. Jones’s poetic and labyrinthine juxtaposition of trench warfare with ancient myth, like Eliot’s Waste Land, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Pound’s Cantos, created a modern fragmentary epic that forced the past and present into unlikely, dissonant juxtaposition. Perhaps the most extended attempt to merge a modernist poetics with an account of a soldier’s experience of the war and of postwar life was undertaken in Ford Madox Ford’s famous wartime tetralogy, Parade’s End (1950 [1924–8]). Parade’s End tells the story of Christopher Tietjens, “the last English Tory,” an
anachronistic gentleman beset by the tribulations of the Great War and of modern life. Ford’s impressionistic style filters the experience of the war, vacillating between the front lines and the home front in order to represent the interweaving of the personal and political. Noted for its psychological complexity and stylistic virtuosity, Ford’s quartet remains one of the great literary accounts of the war. The impact of the war was monumental for women as well as men. As Vera Brittain wrote, “There was no way of escaping that echo; I belonged to an accursed generation which had to listen and look whether I wanted to do so or not” (366). Testament of Youth, Brittain’s impassioned account of her war work and personal losses, remains among the most influential chronicles of the war. Some of the earliest books on the war were by women who served as nurses, drivers, ambulance attendants, journalists, and witnesses from the home front. In 1915 May Sinclair published Journal of Impressions of Belgium, based on her weeks with an ambulance unit at the Belgian front in the first year of the war; the war later featured prominently in six of her novels, including the jingoistic Tree of Heaven (1917). Rose Macaulay’s 1916 novel NonCombatants and Others deftly called attention to the predicament of the men and women who remained in London while their friends and peers fought at the front, while in Bid Me To Live (1960) H.D. presented her own fictionalized account of the same marriage and wartime London society that Aldington had memorialized in Death of a Hero. Mary Borden’s selfconsciously modernist The Forbidden Zone (1929) shattered realist narrative to striking and powerful effect in order to imitate the fragmentation and chaos of the field hospital. In The Well of Loneliness (1928) Radclyffe Hall told the controversial story of a female ambulance driver whose professional freedom leads to sexual selfdiscovery, and in her story “An Indiscreet Journey” Katherine Mansfield fictionalized the tensely exhilarating experience of an affair at the front. Rebecca West used the new phenomenon of shell-shock in The Return of the Soldier to dramatize the lasting effects of the war and the battles fought on the home front long after the men had returned, while Dorothy Sayers added depth to her flippant detective gentleman Lord
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Peter Wimsey by using shell-shock both in character development and as plot device in perhaps her most complicated and most socially invested novel, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928). Though the war was in some ways, as Vincent Sherry calls it, “the signal event of artistic modernism” (113) prominent modernists often incorporated the war in their writing tangentially and through tropes of indirection. Virginia Woolf mobilized the trope of absence in a trilogy of novels that evoked the war; in the first, Jacob’s Room (1922), the empty room of a young man signals the losses of the war, while in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) Woolf tells the story of a shell-shocked veteran who commits suicide alongside a narrative of a party thrown by the wife of a minister who is oblivious to his trauma. In the third of these novels, To the Lighthouse (1928), the war figures in dreamlike ellipses. The section “Time Passes” marks the fissure between pre- and postwar society, while battles and deaths are reported in infrequent, terse square brackets that punctuate the section like bullet holes. D. H. Lawrence’s resistance to the war is evident in the “Nightmare” section of his novel Kangaroo (1923), which presents a powerful account of forced conscription. The Great War resonated in the modernist fiction of the late 1920s and the 1930s, even in the absence of explicit reference. World War I has also remained a potent preoccupation for contemporary British authors. In her award-winning Regeneration trilogy (1996 [1991–5] ) Pat Barker used fiction and fact to tell the story of the traumatic effects of the war, while in The Girl at the Lion d’Or (1999) and Birdsong (1994) Sebastian Faulks mixed the genres of war novel and romance. Recently, Barker has returned to World War I in her novel Life Class (2007), this time telling the story of three young art students forced to confront the war in their life and work. As we approach its first centenary World War I continues to inspire new fictions and interpretations by writers drawn to make art out of catastrophe.
SEE ALSO: Edwardian Fiction (BIF); Historical Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); The Novel and War (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Aldington, R. (1929). Death of a Hero: A Novel. London: Chatto and Windus. Barker, P. (1996). The Regeneration Trilogy [1991–5]. London: Viking. Barker, P. (2007). Life Class. London: Hamish Hamilton. Bergonzi, B. (1965). Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War. London: Constable. Bion, W. R. (1986). The Long Week-End 1897–1979: Part of a Life (ed. F. Bion). London: Free Association. Blunden, E. (1929). Undertones of War. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran. Borden, M. (1929). The Forbidden Zone. London: Heinemann. Brittain, V. (1933). Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900–1925. New York: Macmillan. Buchan, J. (1919). Adventures of Richard Hannay, comprising The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle, Mr. Standfast. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Buitenhuis, P. (1987). The Great War of Words: British, American and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction 1914–1933. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Edwards, P. (2005). British War Memoirs. In V. Sherry (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 15–33. Faulks, S. (1994). Birdsong. New York: Vintage. Faulks, S. (1999). The Girl at the Lion d’Or. New York: Vintage. Ford, F. M. (1950). Parade’s End [1924–8]. New York: Knopf. Fussell, P. (1975). The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press. Gilbert, S. M., & Gubar, S. (1988). No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, vol 1. New Haven: Yale University Press. Graves, R. (1929). Good-Bye to All That: An Autobiography. London: Jonathan Cape. H.D. (1960). Bid Me to Live: A Madrigal. New York: Grove. Hall, R. (1928). The Well of Loneliness. London: Jonathan Cape. Hay, I. (1916). The First Hundred Thousand: Being the Unofficial Chronicle of a Unit of “K(1).” New York: Grosset and Dunlap. Jones, D. (1961). In Parenthesis/Seinnyessit e Gledyf ym Penn Mameu [1937] (intro. T. S. Eliot). London: Faber and Faber. Lawrence, D. H. (1923). Kangaroo. London: Secker. Lewis, W. (1967). Blasting and Bombardiering [1937]. London: Calder and Boyars. Macaulay, R. (1916). Non-Combatants and Others. New York: Hodder and Stoughton.
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Manning, F. (1930). Her Privates We. London: Peter Davies. Mansfield, K. (1974). The Complete Stories of Katherine Mansfield. Auckland: Golden Press. Mansfield, K. (1991). Letters between Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry (sel. & ed. C. A. Hankin). New York: New Amsterdam. Montague, C. E. (1922). Disenchantment. London: Chatto and Windus. Mottram, R. H. (2005). The Spanish Farm Trilogy 1914–1918. London: Chatto and Windus. Sassoon, S. (1937). The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. London: Faber and Faber. Sayers, D. L. (1928). The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. New York: Payson and Clarke. Sherry, V. B. (2003). The Great War and the Language of Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sinclair, M. (1915). A Journal of Impressions in Belgium. New York: Macmillan. Smith, A. K. (2000a). The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Smith, A. K. (ed.) (2000b). Women’s Writing of the First World War: An Anthology. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tate, T. (1998). Modernism, History and the First World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tylee, C. M. (1990). The Great War and Women’s Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women’s Writings 1914–64. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Wells, H. G. (1916). Mr. Britling Sees It Through. New York: Macmillan. West, R. (1918). The Return of the Soldier. London: Nisbet. Wollaeger, M. A. (2006). Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Woolf, V. (1922). Jacob’s Room. London: Hogarth. Woolf, V. (1925). Mrs. Dalloway. London: Hogarth.
World War II in Fiction DAMON MARCEL DECOSTE
Less studied than World War I literature, British fiction of World War II nonetheless constitutes a discrete moment in the literary history of the last century. Rather than soldiers detailing grim disillusion in combat, the fiction of the Second War focuses on civilians and the home front as the true agents and battleground of this even more comprehensive conflict. This fiction is marked by
the anxious anticipation of war, the transposition of both frontier and enemy to the home front, the emptiness of victory, and an equation of history with warfare that produces expectations of more war to come. The merits of this story, more often dismissed than analyzed, have only very recently been recognized. Calder (1969) denies that the war produced memorable fiction, a position adopted as axiomatic by various critics (Hewison 1977; Fussell 1989). Munton’s (1989) groundbreaking monograph initiated a series of challenges to these assessments, but whether this fiction will yet figure so prominently in accounts of the twentieth century as its Great War counterpart remains to be seen. This war’s literary record is distinguished, first, by its prophetic foretelling. Indeed, fiction of World War II avoids a narrative of disillusion largely because the war was a doom forecast long before the outbreak of hostilities. Variously dubbed the “Literature of Anticipation” (Knowles 2), the literature of the “prelude” (Plain 35), or the “Literature of Preparation” (Hynes 341), this insistent imagining of looming conflict has been widely identified as peculiar to World War II. Apart from serving as a harbinger of the war itself, this fiction also establishes a set of subjects and treatments that recur through both wartime and more retrospective literature. Waugh’s Vile Bodies outlines a world overshadowed by the certainty of war’s return and culminates with its characters stranded on “the biggest battleground in the history of the world” (1965 [1930], 220). This may be the earliest anticipatory war fiction, but the 1930s were punctuated by several subsequent texts of this sort. Both Greene’s A Gun for Sale (1936) and Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) deal with a world expecting, even longing for, a war that seems very near. The desire for war in these novels stems not, as in early World War I texts, from any urge to protect the nation, but rather from the lust for profit of shadowy arms dealers on the one hand, and the contrary wish to see the capitalist system go up in flames on the other. Smith’s Over the Frontier both heralds coming war with Germany and delineates again a homegrown hunger for war. Smith’s Pompey seems to be prosecuting a war already engaged, if undeclared, and is eager for violence, thus establishing that the will to power behind Continental fascism
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is also ingrained in the British psyche (1989 [1938], 272). This Literature of Preparation continues to the very eve of war and beyond, consistently presenting this national character as central to war’s perceived inevitability. Orwell’s Coming Up for Air (1939) relates George Bowling’s failed attempt to escape into boyhood memory from a present in which war is clearly coming. The novel’s conclusion, which has British planes accidentally bomb Bowling’s home town, suggests again that the war has come and that the enemy is not only across the Channel. Woolf’s posthumously published Between the Acts retrospectively reconstructs this moment of anticipation and again fears the home front is already a battle front and Britons themselves foes. Begun in 1938, set in the summer of 1939, and completed during the Blitz, the novel deals with characters all too aware of the war that awaits them, but unable to find “a new plot,” free of erotic and martial aggression, by which to live (Woolf 1990 [1941], 134). This literature of expectation establishes the literary war well in advance of September 1, 1939, and inaugurates British fiction of the Second War as a record of unsurprising and seemingly unavoidable cataclysm. By locating the seeds of war as much in the heart of Britain as in the ambitions of Nazi Germany, these texts introduce a set of collapsed binaries that persist through later war fiction. British fiction’s war is one, then, in which heroes are also villains, victims also culprits, private spaces also political, loving relations violent. Rooting these equations in a view of human nature as inherently belligerent, this early fiction presents the coming war as simply the latest installment of a history fundamentally coterminous with war. As preparatory fiction demonstrates, British fiction’s war is the home-front war, and this focus is only intensified by the declaration of war. Britain’s war begins with what has been named the “phoney” war, the “funny” war, or the “Bore War” (Calder 57): seven months virtually devoid of British military engagement. This was still a time of anticipation, during which even servicemen found themselves confined to the home front. Following the evacuation of British forces at Dunkirk, the war became more deadly, but especially so, for Britons, at home, with the Battle of Britain transforming into the Germans’ sus-
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tained bombing of urban centers – the Blitz – in September 1940. In this way, the reality of war conformed to the expectations of novels of the 1930s. The fiction of wartime, too, aptly emerges as a fiction of British homes. Even texts set offshore, such as Green’s Loving (1945) or Manning’s Balkan (1981 [1960–5] ) and Levant (1982 [1977–80] ) trilogies, tend to focus on conflicts between civilians in domestic space. Indeed, even works, such as Powell’s The Valley of the Bones (1964) and The Soldier’s Art (1976), which focus on soldiers, often situate themselves on British soil and present the war primarily in terms of the Blitz’s civilian casualties. The sacrifice and service across class lines mandated by this home-front war helped generate rhetoric of a battle for the democratic renewal of Britain. Thus, it was heralded as a “People’s War” of social solidarity and the overthrow of old hierarchies (Donnelly 37). Such talk is rarer in the lasting fiction of the period, however. While Priestley’s Daylight on Saturday (1943) pays tribute to munitions workers in such terms, homefront literature more often undercuts claims of broadening social sympathy, instead depicting home-front pettiness, fractiousness, and egotism. The wartime prologue of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), with its unflattering portrait of “common man” Hooper, reveals Waugh’s impatience with People’s War cant. Similarly, Put Out More Flags (1942) and Men at Arms (1952) offer visions of a home front typified not by sacrifice but by tawdry self-seeking, whether centered on the billeting of evacuee children in the former, or on the possession of a chemical toilet in the latter. This warfare between Britons is not strictly a matter of comedy. Green’s Caught (1943) details the petty intrigues of the Auxiliary Fire Services, but these are rendered less risible by the fact that the greatest threat protagonist Richard Roe faces until the very end of the novel stems not from some foreign enemy, but from the sister of his superior, who has abducted his son at the start of the narrative. Similarly, neither this son, Christopher, nor the children in Green’s Loving are cast as innocent antitheses to German aggression. Christopher happily imagines he is a German policeman beating Polish prisoners (2001 [1943], 188), while young Albert of Loving is described as a “little storm trooper” after he
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throttles a peacock (2000 [1945], 39). Wartime fiction thus treats the domestic as home to the same violence playing out globally, in a way that not only blurs the line between “us” and “them,” but also dissolves clear borders between the personal and the political. Repeatedly, the war proves what prelude literature had already contended: that the values of private English life mirror and enable the carnage of public history. As The Heat of the Day insists, “War . . . hasn’t started anything that wasn’t there already” (Bowen 1976 [1948], 33). For Bowen, war’s devastation has been produced by personal obsessions and the households that engender them. This is revealed in the death of Stella Rodney’s and Robert Kelway’s affair, doomed by Robert’s status as a Nazi traitor, a role Bowen suggests is fashioned for him by his quintessentially English upbringing. This readiness to discern the fascist at home, even while foreigners bombard London, is remarkably widespread. Warner’s The Aerodrome (1941) imagines a homegrown fascist state, governed by a ruthless, yet revered Air Force, whose power is sustained by the civilian Villagers’ kinship with it and its adoration of brute force. Greene’s Arthur Rowe, from The Ministry of Fear (1943), also welcomes war’s destruction, hoping the obliteration of the landscape of his adulthood might free him from guilt over euthanizing his sick wife. Both this treacherous readiness to see his nation leveled and the nature of his crime make him a brother to Greene’s Nazis, especially homegrown Dr. Forester, who is both champion of euthanasia and willing fifth columnist. This fear that the greatest enemy is bred by Britain itself recurs in retrospective war fiction. The great villains of Waugh’s Sword of Honour (1952–61) are not Germans but Britons like the aristocratic Ivor Claire, who deserts his command during the fall of Crete, or the sinister Ludovic, who murders Major Hound in order to save himself. Likewise, Manning’s protagonists, the Pringles, are most endangered when they are almost abandoned in Athens by decamping fellow Britons (Manning 1981). Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) extends this thesis late into the century, its tale of Lord Darlington’s, and the historical Lord Halifax’s, sympathy with Hitler’s regime helping to make an identification of war with home-grown treachery a lasting legacy of British fiction of World War II.
Because of the sense that war’s true seeds are to be found at home, the Second War is seldom written as culminating in meaningful victory. Indeed, in some texts it never ends at all. Bowen’s Heat of the Day chronicles the Normandy invasion, but stops short of Allied triumph. Waugh’s Sword of Honour elides the war’s conclusion, its final volume jumping from German defeat in Yugoslavia to a postwar reunion of Guy Crouchback’s Commandos. Powell’s Military Philosophers shifts from the autumn of 1944 to the summer of 1945, omitting narration of Allied success in Europe. This novel does conclude with a Victory Service at St. Paul’s, yet there is no sense of having won anything at all: “The country, there could be no doubt, was absolutely worn out” (1991 [1968], 217–18). Even Manning’s six novels bring the Pringles’ tale to a halt a full two years before the war’s end. Indeed, so far as it looks to the historical outcomes of the war, British fiction presents ostensible victory as a kind of defeat. If, as this fiction has maintained, war is preordained by a will to power that defines Britons as much as the enemy, then unconditional surrender of hostile nations means only that this most recent installment in history’s cycle of wars has come to an end. The bloody dynamics that mandate war’s repetition have scarcely been defeated. Thus, even when writers offer scenes of victory celebrations, they are at pains to underline how the enemies within persist. Spark’s Girls of Slender Means (1963), for example, concludes with London crowds marking Japanese surrender, but also makes the crowd itself a fearsome agent of senseless violence. Rather than shouts of joy, its language is the screams of those stabbed or molested in its midst. The view that this global war is ultimately the projection of personal, though universal, struggles with humanity’s own savagery is characteristic of British fiction and leads to texts more obsessed with the next war than satisfied with this one’s conclusion. Lowry’s war-haunted Under the Volcano (1947) concludes by warning that, even after the war, the garden of the world still faces imminent destruction. Manning’s two trilogies only barely descry a peace understood as “precarious” (1982 [1977–80], 571). Most definitively, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) imagines a future that only repeats the war just passed, fought by a Britain become the very totalitarian
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monster VE Day had supposedly slain. The nightmare of Ingsoc, born of a homegrown lust for power, precludes any true victory or end to war. The achievement of O’Brien’s utopia – “a boot stamping on a human face – for ever” (1976 [1949], 215) – means that conflicts with Eurasia or Eastasia must be perpetual. Despite decades of critical scorn, this war literature has itself persisted as an object of inquiry. Recent years have seen the publication of several studies seeking to establish World War II as a literary epoch in its own right. This project of writing the war into literary history begins with Munton’s pioneering study of 1989. Scrutinizing war fiction through the lens of the “People’s War,” Munton opposes it to interbellum modernism, presenting it as a return to realism, relevance, and progressive politics (1989, 4). This “People’s War” idiom resonates in Hartley’s survey of women’s war fiction (1997). Hartley argues this represents a literature of engaged citizenship, reflecting women’s increased wartime involvement in the public sphere (1). Hartley’s work exemplifies a major trend in scholarship on wartime fiction, namely the focus on women writers and the extent to which they offer an alternative record of this war. Such work all but dominates criticism of the 1990s, which also welcomed publications by Plain (1996), Schneider (1997), and Lassner (1998). More focused than Hartley’s, Plain’s study also charts women’s emergence from the domestic sphere, highlighting the ambivalence of contemporary discourses of womanhood. Schneider’s examination of “the war/ gender matrix” (1997, 8) highlights this fiction’s sense that present-day struggles, erotic and military, indicate a history of repetitions. According to Schneider, women’s fiction maintains both that war’s rehearsal is sustained by corrosive notions of gender and that such rehearsals may be avoided only if gender norms are radically recast (173). Finally, Lassner offers women’s literary output as a rebuttal to criticism that dismisses the Second War as a literary nullity (1998, 1), using this alternate literary history to modify assumptions about both Britain’s war and women’s own supposedly default pacifism (22). The 1990s also saw a modest flourishing of more thematic studies. Knowles [13] explores how seven writers make sense of World War II through the governing metaphor of purgatory.
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Piette’s exploration (1995) is more wide-ranging, encompassing poetry and POW writings, and arguing that these texts present the war in terms of waxing personal and national isolation. Closing out the decade, Rawlinson’s equally ambitious survey (2000) contends that wartime literature works to delegitimize discourses that justify military conflict while often replicating the strategies of these discourses. The new century has seen, in MacKay’s work (2007), an important new direction in this developing field. Contra Munton, MacKay situates the war relative to prewar modernism, on the one hand, and postwar understandings of England, on the other. Insofar as the literature of this war is shot through with skepticism regarding traditional values and modes of expression, World War II is, for MacKay, “the really modernist war” (2007, 79). In looking not just to establish the war as a period worthy of study, but also to clarify how this period relates to what came before and after, MacKay opens a promising path for future criticism to pursue. Much remains to be said about the manner in which wartime literature draws upon modernist achievements. Even more might yet be hazarded as to how this moment serves as a bridge between the high modernism of the 1920s and the emergent postmodernism of the 1950s. Having finally discovered the war as a literary-historical moment, criticism will ensure it becomes entrenched in accounts of the twentieth century if scholars turn now to making clearer its pedigree and its issue.
SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (BIF); London in Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); The Novel and War (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); World War I in Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bowen, E. (1976). The Heat of the Day [1948]. London: Penguin. Calder, A. (1969). The People’s War: Britain, 1939–1945. New York: Random House. Donnelly, M. (1999). Britain in the Second World War. London: Routledge. Fussell, P. (1989). Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Green, H. (2000). Loving [1945]. London: Vintage. Green, H. (2001). Caught [1943]. London: Harvill. Greene, G. (1936). A Gun for Sale. London: Heinemann. Greene, G. (1943). The Ministry of Fear. London: Heinemann. Hartley, J. (1997). Millions Like Us: British Women’s Fiction of the Second World War. London: Virago. Hewison, R. (1977). Under Siege: Literary Life in London 1939–1945. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Hynes, S. (1979). The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s. London: Faber and Faber. Ishiguro, K. (1989). The Remains of the Day. Toronto: Key Porter. Knowles, S. (1990). A Purgatorial Flame: Seven British Writers in the Second World War. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lassner, P. (1998). British Women Writers of World War II: Battlegrounds of Their Own. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Lowry, M. (1947). Under the Volcano. London: Jonathan Cape. MacKay, M. (2007). Modernism and World War II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manning, Olivia. (1981). The Balkan Trilogy [1960–5]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Manning, Olivia. (1982). The Levant Trilogy [1977–80]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Munton, A. (1989). English Fiction of the Second World War. London: Faber and Faber. Orwell, G. (1936). Keep the Aspidistra Flying. London: Gollancz.
Orwell, G. (1939). Coming Up for Air. London: Gollancz. Orwell, G. (1976). Nineteen Eighty-Four [1949]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Piette, A. (1995). Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry 1939–1945. London: Macmillan. Plain, G. (1996). Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and Resistance. New York: St. Martin’s. Powell, A. (1991). The Military Philosophers [1968]. London: Mandarin. Priestley, J. B. (1943). Daylight on Saturday. London: Heinemann. Rawlinson, M. (2000). British Writing of the Second World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schneider, K. (1997). Loving Arms: British Women Writing the Second World War. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Smith, S. (1989). Over the Frontier [1938]. London: Virago. Spark, M. (1963). The Girls of Slender Means. London: Macmillan. Warner, R. (1941). The Aerodrome. London: Bodley Head. Waugh, E. (1942). Put Out More Flags. London: Chapman and Hall. Waugh, E. (1945). Brideshead Revisited. London: Chapman and Hall. Waugh, E. (1965). Vile Bodies [1930]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Waugh, E. (1994). The Sword of Honour Trilogy [1952–61]. New York: Knopf. Woolf, V. (1990). Between the Acts [1941]. London: Hogarth.
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Editors Brian W. Shaffer is Professor of English and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs for Faculty Development at Rhodes College, USA. His previous publications include Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro (1998), and Reading the Novel in English 1950–2000 (Wiley-Blackwell 2006). He is the co-editor of Approaches to Teaching Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and “The Secret Sharer” (2002), and Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro (2008), and the editor of A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945–2000 (Wiley-Blackwell 2005). Patrick O’Donnell is Professor of English and American Literature at Michigan State University, USA. His previous works include Echo Chambers: Figuring Voice in Modern Narrative (1992), Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative (2000), and The American Novel Now (Wiley-Blackwell 2010). David W. Madden is Professor of English at California State University, Sacramento, USA. He is the author of Understanding Paul West (1993) and the editor of Critical Essays on Thomas Berger (1995). Justus Nieland is Assistant Professor of English at Michigan State University, USA. He has written many papers in the fields of modernism, the avant-garde, and film studies, and is author of Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life (2008).
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer
Volume II
Twentieth-Century American Fiction Volume editors: Patrick O’Donnell, David W. Madden, and Justus Nieland
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Acknowledgments
Patrick O’Donnell thanks the Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies at Michigan State University for an IRPG grant, as well the MSU English Department chair, Stephen Arch, for a research-leave semester – both were instrumental in the completion of the volume. He thanks Diane O’Donnell for her love and patience throughout. David W. Madden thanks the California State University, Sacramento, Office of Human Resources for a single-semester sabbatical and the Office of Research and Sponsored Projects for a research grant that aided in the completion of this project.
He further thanks his chair, Professor Sheree Meyer, for her encouragement and support, and he dedicates his work on this project to his wife, Mary Davis, for all her love, help, and support. Justus Nieland thanks Sarah Wohlford, Lila Nieland, and Iris Nieland for the everyday joy they provide. All of the editors wish to acknowledge the inestimable generosity, good humor, and fine efforts of the contributors to this volume; it has been a pleasure to work with them. Patrick O’Donnell, David W. Madden, and Justus Nieland
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Notes on Contributors to Volume II
Victoria Aarons is professor and chair, Department of English, Trinity University, where she teaches courses on American Jewish and Holocaust literatures. In addition to numerous scholarly articles and book chapters, Aarons is the author of A Measure of Memory: Storytelling and Identity in American Jewish Fiction and What Happened to Abraham? Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction, both of which received a CHOICE Award. A scholar of Holocaust literature, Aarons is a contributor to Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work. She is the 2006 recipient of the Piper Professor Award and the 1993 recipient of Trinity University’s Z. T. Scott Faculty Fellowship. Joseph Alkana is associate professor at the University of Miami, where he teaches American literature before 1900. He is the author of The Social Self: Hawthorne, Howells, William James, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (1997); coeditor of Cohesion and Dissent in America (1994); and author of articles for scholarly journals on American literature and culture. Carole Allamand is an associate professor of French literature at Rutgers University. She is the author of a book on Marguerite Yourcenar and numerous articles on twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury French and American fiction, and autobiography. Thomas C. Austenfeld is professor of American literature at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He is the author of American Women Writers and the Nazis: Ethics and Politics in Boyle, Porter, Stafford, and Hellman (2001), and editor of Kay Boyle for the Twenty-First Century: New Essays (2008). He has published scholarly articles on Katherine Anne Porter, Frank Norris, Derek Walcott, Wallace Stevens, Louise Erdrich, Philip Roth, and Peter Taylor. He is a contributor to the annual American Literary Scholarship and was
named Alumni Distinguished Professor at North Georgia College & State University in 2006. Peter J. Bailey is Piskor Professor of English at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, where he chairs the English Department. He is the author of Reading Stanley Elkin, The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen, and Rabbit (Un)Redeemed: The Drama of Belief in John Updike’s Fiction. Alexander M. Bain is assistant professor of twentieth-century British and American literature at the University of Oklahoma. His articles have appeared in NOVEL and American Literary History, and he is currently working on a book entitled Making the Heart of the World: Patriotism and Print Culture from Versailles to Bandung. Jessica S. Baldanzi teaches American literature, international literature, graphic novels, and creative writing at Goshen College, where she is an assistant professor. Her publications include articles on topics from Jean Toomer to The Sopranos. She is currently exploring the history of eugenics in Indiana, and working on a book about representations of eugenic ideology in the literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Debra Romanick Baldwin is associate professor at the University of Dallas. While most of her research is devoted to the work of Joseph Conrad, she has also published essays on St. Augustine, Flannery O’Connor, and Primo Levi. Laura Barrett is associate professor of English literature at Wilkes Honors College/Florida Atlantic University, Jupiter. Her essays on Don DeLillo, E. L. Doctorow, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wright Morris, and others have appeared in Journal of Modern Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Papers on Language and Literature, Studies in the Novel, and Western American Literature.
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME II
Victor Bascara is associate professor of Asian American studies in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Model Minority Imperialism (2006) and various articles, reviews, and entries on American cultural politics, US imperialism, critical race theory, and gender and sexuality. Ludmiła Gruszewska Blaim is an associate professor of English and American literature at the University of Gdansk, Poland. Her field of interest is space and genre conventions in modernist and postmodernist literature. She is author of Wizje i re-wizje w poezji T. S. Eliota (1996) and Gra w SS. Poetyka (nie)powiesci Jerzego Kosinskiego (2005), and coeditor of Texts of Literature, Texts of Culture (2005) and Eseje o wspołczesnej poezji brytyjskiej i irlandzkiej (2005). Martyn Bone is associate professor of American literature at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is the author of The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction (2005) and editor of Perspectives on Barry Hannah (2006). He has published articles in numerous journals including American Literature, Journal of American Studies, Comparative American Studies, and Mississippi Quarterly. Virginia Brackett is associate professor of English at Park University, located just north of Kansas City. She has authored 13 books, including the award-winning Restless Genius: The Story of Virginia Woolf and the Facts on File Companion to 16th and 17th-Century British Poetry. She has published numerous articles, reviews, and stories for both adults and young readers and directs the Park University Ethnic Poetry Reading Series and the University’s Honors Program. Brackett received Outstanding Faculty Awards in 2006 and 2008. Patricia L. Bradley is an associate professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. She is the author of Robert Penn Warren’s Circus Aesthetic and the Southern Renaissance (2004) and other scholarly articles on Bobbie Ann Mason, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Ward, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Kate Chopin as well as on Warren. She is the past president of the Robert Penn Warren Circle and has served on the Circle Board
of Directors and with the Advisory Group to the Robert Penn Warren Center at Western Kentucky University. Judith Brown is assistant professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is author of Glamour in 6 Dimensions: Modernism, Aesthetics, Culture (2009). Her articles include “A Certain Laughter: Sherwood Anderson’s Experiment in Form” (2007); “Borderline, Sensation, and the Machinery of Expression” (2007); and “Cellophane Glamour” (2008). Cedric Gael Bryant holds the Lee Family Professorship in English and American Literature at Colby College. His scholarly work has appeared in various academic journals and volumes, including Southern Review, African American Review, MELUS, Mississippi Quarterly, and The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. His current book project explores the gothic tradition within African American fiction and poetry in the modernist and postmodernist periods. David Buehrer is a professor of English at Valdosta State University, Georgia, where he teaches courses in modern and contemporary American fiction, critical theory, and world literature. His review essay on Joseph Heller appeared in Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists: A BioCritical Sourcebook, edited by Joel Shatzky and Michael Taub (1997). He has published numerous articles and reviews on twentieth-century American and Latin American novelists, including Saul Bellow, Gabriel Garcıa Marquez, and Manuel Puig, and in scholarly journals such as Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, and WVU Philological Papers. Nancy Bunge, a professor at Michigan State University, is the interviewer and editor of Finding the Words: Conversations With Writers Who Teach (1985) and Master Class: Lessons from Leading Writers (2005); the editor of Conversations With Clarence Major (2002); and the author of Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Study of the Short Fiction (1993). She has held senior Fulbright lectureships at the University of Vienna in Austria, the Free University of Brussels and the University of Ghent in Belgium, and the University of
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME II
Siegen in Germany. At Michigan State, she has won the Teacher-Scholar Award and the Fintz Award for her teaching. Stephen J. Burn is the author of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide (2003) and Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism (2008), and coeditor of Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers (2008). He is an associate professor at Northern Michigan University. Michael Butter is junior research fellow in the School of Language and Literature at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany. He has published essays on American and German literature, film, and popular culture, and coedited Zeichen der Zeit, a collection of interdisciplinary essays on semiotics, and American Studies/Shifting Gears, a volume that probes new venues for European American studies. Donna M. Campbell is associate professor of English at Washington State University. She is the author of Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885–1915 (1997), and her work has appeared in Studies in American Fiction, Legacy, American Literary Realism, and Studies in American Naturalism. In addition to the Edith Wharton chapter in Resisting Regionalism, her work on Wharton includes essays in Jack London: One Hundred Years a Writer (2002) and Twisted From the Ordinary: Essays on American Literary Naturalism (2003), and articles forthcoming in the Edith Wharton Review and the Journal of Popular Culture. Benjamin D. Carson is an assistant professor of English and coordinator of the US Ethnic Studies Minor at Bridgewater State College, Bridgewater, Massachusetts. He has published articles on Gerald Vizenor, Ana Castillo, Virginia Woolf, and Edith Wharton, among other writers, and is currently editing a collection of essays on Native American literature entitled Sovereignty, Separatism, and Survivance: Ideological Encounters in the Literature of Native North America. Daniela Caselli teaches English and American literature at the University of Manchester, UK. She is the author of Beckett’s Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism (2005) and Improper Modernism: Djuna Barnes’s Bewildering Corpus (2009). Her articles on modernism,
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critical theory, and comparative literature have appeared in Textual Practice, Journal of Beckett Studies, Yearbook of English Studies, Critical Survey, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, The Italianist, and Strumenti Critici. Tom Cerasulo is assistant professor of English and Shaughness Family Chair for the Study of the Humanities at Elms College in Chicopee, Massachusetts. He has published on film adaptations, on ethnicity, and on the cultural history of American authorship. Recent work appears in Arizona Quarterly, MELUS, and Studies in American Culture. He is currently writing a book reconsidering Hollywood’s effect on American literary authors. Hillary L. Chute is junior fellow in literature in the Harvard Society of Fellows. In addition to articles and reviews in American Periodicals, Literature and Medicine, Modern Fiction Studies, PMLA, Postmodern Culture, Twentieth-Century Literature, and WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, Chute was coeditor of the special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on “Graphic Narrative” (2006). She is the author of the forthcoming book Out of the Gutter: Women’s Contemporary Graphic Narrative, and is associate editor of Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus. Deborah Clarke is a professor of English at Arizona State University. She is the author of Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America (2007); Robbing the Mother: Women in Faulkner (1994); and numerous articles on twentieth-century American fiction. Gavin Cologne-Brookes is professor of American literature at Bath Spa University. He is the author of The Novels of William Styron: From Harmony to History (1995). As well as essays on John Steinbeck’s legacy in the work of Joyce Carol Oates, Cormac McCarthy, and Bruce Springsteen, he has also written Dark Eyes on America: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates (2005); coedited Writing and America (1996) with Neil Sammells and David Timms; and guest-edited a Studies in the Novel special issue on Oates (2006). Lauren Coodley attended University of California, Berkeley, majoring in conservation, and has two master’s degrees, in psychology and history, from Sonoma State University. She has been a
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community college teacher for three decades. Her books include Napa: The Transformation of an American Town (2004, rev. 2007); The Land of Orange Groves and Jails: Upton Sinclair’s California (2004); California: A Multicultural Documentary History (2008); and If Not to History: Recovering the Stories of Women in Napa (2009). David Coughlan is a lecturer in the Department of Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Limerick, Ireland. His publications include articles on Paul Auster in Modern Fiction Studies and on Thomas Pynchon in Critique, and essays in the edited collections The Visual–Narrative Matrix; Spaces and Crossings; Space, Haunting, Discourse; and Heroes and Home Fronts. He would like to acknowledge the support of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences in the writing of his entry on Paul Auster. Gloria Cronin teaches African American, Jewish American, women’s, and twentieth-century American literatures, and contemporary theory, at Brigham Young University. She is editor of the Saul Bellow Journal and executive director of the International Saul Bellow Society. She is an executive coordinator of the American Literature Association, and has served on committees for the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1991 her Sixty Other Jewish Fiction Writers (9,000 entries) won the Pozner Bibliography Prize awarded by the Jewish Library Association. She has published extensively in the fields of Jewish American and African American literatures. Her Encyclopedia of Jewish American Literature (with Alan L. Berger) is forthcoming from Facts on File. In 2007 she was named to the Brigham Young University College of Humanities professorship. Kirk Curnutt is professor and chair of English at Troy University Montgomery in Montgomery, Alabama. He is the author of The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald and managing editor of the Fitzgerald Review, published by the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society. He also serves as vice president of the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum, which is located in Montgomery. Leland de la Durantaye is the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of English at Harvard University. He is the author of Style Is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov (2007), and
Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (2009), as well as articles on twentieth-century literature and philosophy. Annette Debo is associate professor of English at Western Carolina University. She is currently at work on The American H.D.: Nation and Modernist Identity. Her articles have appeared in African American Review, Callaloo, Paideuma, South Atlantic Quarterly, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, CLA Journal, and College Literature. James M. Decker is an associate professor of English at Illinois Central College. He is author of Ideology (2003) and Henry Miller and Narrative Form: Constructing the Self, Rejecting Modernity (2005). In addition to contributing numerous articles to such publications as College Literature and Style, he is editor of Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal. In 2007, Decker received his college’s Gallion Award for outstanding teaching. Joseph Dewey is an associate professor of American literature at the University of Pittsburgh– Johnston. In addition to numerous articles on modern and contemporary American literature and culture, he is author of In a Dark Time: The Apocalyptic Temper in the American Novel of the Nuclear Age (1992), Novels From Reagan’s America (1996), Understanding Richard Powers (2002), and Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo (2007). Tamas Dobozy is a professor of twentieth-century American literature in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He has published articles on Charles Bukowski, Mavis Gallant, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and John Coltrane in journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, Canadian Literature, Philip Roth Studies, Critical Survey, and Genre. Christopher Douglas is associate professor of English at the University of Victoria. He is the author of A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism (2009) and Reciting America: Culture and Cliche in Contemporary American Fiction (2001). Leigh Anne Duck is an associate professor of English at the University of Memphis. She is author of The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism (2006), as
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME II
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well as essays on “postplantation” literature and film, the comparative study of Southern US and South African literature, and the work of William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Walker.
Conviction: The Personal Politics of Zona Gale, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Rose Wilder Lane, and Josephine Herbst (2004), and several articles on twentieth-century American women writers.
John Dudley is associate professor of English and coordinator of graduate studies for the English Department at the University of South Dakota. He is the author of A Man’s Game: Masculinity and the Anti-Aesthetics of American Literary Naturalism, published in 2004 by the University of Alabama Press. He has published several articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and is currently working on a study of African American literature and culture between 1890 and 1920.
Nikolai Endres is an associate professor of world literature at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green. He teaches great books, literary criticism, classics, mythology, and gay and lesbian studies. His research focuses on the classical tradition and includes articles on Plato, Petronius, Gustave Flaubert, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, Andre Gide, E. M. Forster, Mary Renault, Gore Vidal, and others.
John N. Duvall is professor of English and the editor of MFS Modern Fiction Studies at Purdue University. Among his books are Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction (2008), The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison (2000), and Faulkner’s Marginal Couple: Invisible, Outlaw, and Unspeakable Communities (1990). He also has edited several collections, including The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo (2008) and Productive Postmodernism: Consuming Histories and Cultural Studies (2002). Jonathan P. Eburne teaches in the Departments of Comparative Literature and English at the Pennsylvania State University, where he is Josephine Berry Weiss Early Career Professor in the Humanities. He is the author of Surrealism and the Art of Crime (2008). Justin D. Edwards is professor and head of English at Bangor University. He is author of Postcolonial Literature (2008); Understanding Jamaica Kincaid (2007); Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature (2005); Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic (2003); and Exotic Journeys: Exploring the Erotics of U.S. Travel Literature (2001). He is also the coeditor of Other Routes: 1500 Years of Travel Writing by Asians and Africans (2006); Downtown Canada: Writing Canadian Cities (2005); and American Modernism Across the Arts (1999). Julia Ehrhardt is Reach for Excellence Associate Professor of American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Oklahoma Honors College. She is the author of Writers of
Daylanne K. English is chair of the English Department and associate professor of African American literature at Macalester College. She is the author of Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (2004), and has published articles on African American literature and culture in African American Review, American Literary History, American Literature, and Critical Inquiry. She is also the recipient of the MLA’s Foerster Prize for her essay “W. E. B. Du Bois’s Family Crisis.” English is currently at work on a second book titled Political Fictions: Time and Justice in African American Literature. Mark S. Ferrara is an assistant professor of English at the State University of New York College at Oneonta. His recent scholarly work on literary utopia includes “A Religion of Solidarity: Looking Backward as a Rational Utopia,” and “Utopia, Desire, and Enlightenment in Honglou meng,” appearing in the journals Renascence and Mosaic, respectively. He is the former director of the Chinese Cultural Exchange Program at Drake University and has taught in South Korea, in China, and on a Fulbright Scholarship in Turkey. Andre Furlani is associate professor in the Department of English, Concordia University, Montreal. His publications are primarily in the fields of modern and contemporary American, British, and Canadian literature. He is the author of Guy Davenport: Postmodern and After, and is preparing a Wittgensteinian study of Samuel Beckett.
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME II
Samuel Gaustad is a professor of humanities at Seminole Community College. He has served on the faculties of Florida Community College at Jacksonville, Phillips Community College of the University of Arkansas, University at Albany, and Hartwick College. Gaustad has contributed articles to the Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 278, and The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Authors, as well as serving as a contributing editor for Listener Magazine. James R. Giles is professor emeritus at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of nine books, including The Spaces of Violence (2006); Violence in the Contemporary American Novel (2000); Understanding Hubert Selby, Jr. (1998); and The Naturalistic Inner-City Novel in America (1995). He is also the coeditor of seven books, including five volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Michael Patrick Gillespie is the Louise Edna Goeden Professor of English at Marquette University. In addition to his work on the writings of William Kennedy, he has written books on James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and chaos theory as applied to literary criticism. His latest work, The Myth of an Irish Cinema, appeared in the fall of 2008. Mimi Reisel Gladstein is a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, where she has chaired the English and Philosophy Departments and the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Film, and was first director of women’s studies. Gladstein is president of the John Steinbeck Society of America and the author of three books about Ayn Rand. Her latest book is The Last Supper of Chicano Heroes: The Works of Jose Antonio Burciaga, coedited with Daniel Chacon. William Gleason is associate professor of English at Princeton University, where he teaches in the Department of English and the Program in American Studies. A specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and culture, with particular interest in popular culture, social history, and material culture, he is the author of The Leisure Ethic: Work and Play in American Literature, 1840–1940 (1999), as well as essays on such figures as Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edith Wharton, Thomas Pynchon, Louise Erdrich, and Charles Johnson.
Sarah Gleeson-White is senior lecturer in US literature in the Department of English at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Strange Bodies: Gender and Identity in the Novels of Carson McCullers, as well as articles on McCullers, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Cormac McCarthy. Andrew S. Gross is assistant professor of American literature at the John F. Kennedy Institute of the Free University of Berlin. His research interests include road narratives, representations of the Holocaust, and mid-century American poetry. He has published widely on these and related fields and is currently completing a book on the Holocaust and trauma theory. Huey Guagliardo is professor and coordinator of English at Louisiana State University–Eunice. He edited Perspectives on Richard Ford (2000) and Conversations With Richard Ford (2001). He also has published numerous essays, interviews, and reviews in scholarly journals. P. Jane Hafen (Taos Pueblo) is a professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is author of Reading Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, and “‘Story Speaks for Us’: Centering the Voice of Simon Ortiz”; editor of Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems and the Sun Dance Opera by Zitkala-Sa; and coeditor of A Great Plains Reader. She is a Clan Mother for the Native American Literature Symposium. Jaime Harker is an assistant professor of English at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of America the Middlebrow: Women’s Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship Between the Wars, and the coeditor of The Oprah Effect: Essays on Oprah’s Book Club. Oliver Harris is professor of American literature at Keele University. He has edited The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945–1959 (1993); Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk” (2003); The Yage Letters Redux (2006); and “Everything Lost”: The Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs (2008). The author of William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination (2003), he is the coeditor of Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays (2009), as well as the editor of a new edition of Burroughs’s novel, Queer (forthcoming in 2010).
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME II
Matthew Hart is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he teaches in the Department of English and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as American Literary History, Contemporary Literature, Modernism/Modernity, and Twentieth-Century Literature. Steven Hartman is senior research fellow in American literature at Uppsala University and associate professor of Anglophone literature at V€axj€ o University, both in Sweden. Hartman has received grants from the Swedish Research Council, the US Fulbright Program, and the Thoreau Society and Wenner-Gren Foundations and was selected, on the basis of his short fiction, as the 2001 New York State Thayer Fellow in the Arts. His literary scholarship and creative writing have appeared in many journals internationally. Maria Hebert-Leiter is currently teaching at Pennsylvania College of Technology and studies the representation of Louisiana ethnicities in American literature and contemporary American ethnic and Southern literature generally. Her latest book, Becoming Cajun, Becoming American: The Acadian in American Literature From Longfellow to James Lee Burke, was published by Louisiana State University Press in 2009. Her work on the literature of the US South and Louisiana has been published in MELUS (Journal of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States) and Mississippi Quarterly. Scott Henkel is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Binghamton University, State University of New York. His writing has appeared in Workplace: A Journal of Academic Labor and is forthcoming in the Rodopi Press collection of essays commemorating the 70th anniversary of John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, and in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. He is currently working on a book titled “Leaves of Grassroots Politics: Democracy, the Swarm, and the Literatures of the Americas.” Luc Herman teaches American literature and narrative theory at the University of Antwerp. Besides publishing widely on Pynchon, he is the author of Concepts of Realism (1996), and co-
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author and translator (with Bart Vervaeck) of Handbook of Narrative Analysis (2005). Peter C. Herman is professor of English literature at San Diego State University. He is the author of “Royal Poetrie”: Monarchic Verse and the Political Imaginary of Early Modern England (2010); Destabilizing Milton: Paradise Lost and the Poetics of Incertitude (2005); and Squitter-Wits and MuseHaters: Sidney, Spenser, Milton and Renaissance Antipoetic Sentiment (1996). He has also edited numerous anthologies, including Approaches to Teaching Milton’s Shorter Poetry and Prose (2007), Historicizing Theory (2004), and Rethinking the Henrician Era: New Essays on Early Tudor Texts and Contexts (1994). Lisa Hinrichsen is an assistant professor of English at the University of Arkansas, where she teaches courses on American literature, literary theory, and the literature of the American South. She has contributed essays to the Southern Literary Journal, the Journal of Modern Literature, and Etudes Faulkneriennes, and she is currently finishing a manuscript on the roles that trauma, fantasy, and misrecognition play in modern and contemporary Southern literature. Andrew Hoberek is associate professor of English at the University of Missouri–Columbia, where he teaches courses in twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury US literature. He is the author of The Twilight of the Middle-Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work, and the guest editor of the Fall 2007 special issue of Twentieth-Century Literature on the topic “After Postmodernism.” Matthew Hofer teaches American and British modernism at the University of New Mexico, where he is a member of the English Department faculty. He has published scholarly work on many twentieth-century authors, including Langston Hughes. Melissa J. Homestead is associate professor of English and women’s and gender studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and vice president for membership and finance of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. She is the author of American Women Authors and Literary Property 1822–1869 (2005) and essays on American women authors such as Susanna
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME II
Rowson, Catharine Sedgwick, Fanny Fern, Augusta Jane Evans, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Bess Streeter Aldrich. With Anne L. Kaufman, she is working on a study of the creative partnership between Willa Cather and Edith Lewis. Alex Hunt is an associate professor of English at West Texas A&M University. He has published scholarship on Western and Southwestern American literature, neo-regionalism, eco-criticism, and multicultural literatures. Anthony Hutchison is a lecturer in American intellectual and cultural history at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. He is the author of Writing the Republic: Liberalism and Morality in American Political Fiction (2007). James M. Hutchisson is professor of American literature and director of graduate studies in English at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. He has written widely on American and Southern literature, including books on Lewis, Poe, DuBose Heyward, and the Southern literary renaissance. His scholarly articles have appeared in such journals as Studies in the Novel, American Literary Realism, and Journal of Modern Literature. He was twice winner of The Citadel’s award for Outstanding Faculty Achievement in Scholarship. Katharine Nicholson Ings is associate professor of American literature and journalism as well as director of gender studies at Manchester College, Indiana. She specializes in literary narratives about black and white men and women during the Civil War. Her publications on this topic include “Blackness and the Literary Imagination: Uncovering The Hidden Hand” (1996), and “Between Hoax and Hope: Miscegenation and Nineteenth-Century Interracial Romance” (2006). In addition, Ings has over 10 years of experience as a copyeditor for W. W. Norton. Mark C. Jerng is assistant professor of English at University of California, Davis. He has published articles on Chang-rae Lee, Kazuo Ishiguro, William Faulkner, and Charles Chesnutt. He is currently completing a book manuscript on stories of transracial adoption in American literature. Scott J. Juengel is associate professor of English at Michigan State University, where he teaches
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transatlantic literature, as well as the history and theory of the novel. His work has appeared in ELH, Novel, differences, Studies in Romanticism, Studies in Popular Culture, Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and other journals. Kathy Jurado is an assistant professor of English and affiliated faculty of the Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies Program at Michigan State University. She recently received her PhD from the American Culture Program at the University of Michigan, where she completed her dissertation titled “Alienated Citizens: ‘Hispanophobia’ and the Mexican Im/migrant Body.” Her research interests reside in the areas of popular culture, im/ migration studies, and Chicana/o-Latina/o literature. Catherine Kasper is an associate professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is the author of Field Stone (2005), Notes from the Committee (2009), and several other works of fiction and poetry. She is the author of the article “Steven Millhauser’s American Gothic.” She has worked as an editor and guest editor for several publications, and currently is coeditor of American Letters & Commentary. Steven G. Kellman is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He is the author of Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth (2005), The Translingual Imagination (2000), and The Self-Begetting Novel (1980); editor of Switching Languages: Translingual Writers Reflect on Their Craft (2003); and coeditor of volumes on Don DeLillo, Leslie Fiedler, William Gass, and Vladimir Nabokov. In 2007 Kellman was awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. John M. Krafft teaches English at the Hamilton campus of Miami University. He is a founding coeditor of the journal Pynchon Notes. Michael Kreyling is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Among his critical work are three books on Eudora Welty: Eudora Welty’s Achievement of Order (1980); Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell (1991); and Understanding Eudora Welty (1999).
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME II
Daphne Lamothe is an associate professor in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Smith College. She is the author of Inventing the New Negro: Narrative, Culture, Ethnography (2008), which focuses on the intersection of ethnography and the African American imagination during the New Negro Movement. She has also written essays for a number of publications on Zora Neale Hurston’s use of Vodou imagery to represent New Negro subjectivity, Jean Toomer’s incorporation of Gothic figures of racial miscegenation in Cane, and Gloria Naylor’s representation of migration and cultural memory in Mama Day. Hellen Lee-Keller is an assistant professor of multiethnic literatures at California State University, Sacramento. She is the author of several articles and book reviews on labor history, women writers, and immigration in scholarly journals and literary encyclopedias. Mark Levene teaches English at the University of Toronto. He has written about Arthur Koestler, the short story, Canadian literature, and Robert Stone. Jonathan P. Lewis is assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, where he teaches composition and literary studies. He did his doctoral work at the University of California, Riverside and edited Tomorrow Through the Past: Neal Stephenson and the Project of Global Modernization (2006). Saundra Liggins is an associate professor of English at the State University of New York at Fredonia. Her current project involves exploring the influence of the gothic tradition in African American literature. Tiffany Ana L opez is associate professor of English at the University of California, Riverside and editor of Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social. Her books include Growing Up Chicana/o (1993) and The Alchemy of Blood: Violence as Critical Discourse in U.S. Latina/o Writing (forthcoming). Her research focuses on issues of violence and trauma in American literature. Among her awards, she is the recipient of a Fulbright Award in Barcelona, Spain and resident fellowships at the Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California, Riverside. She gratefully acknowledges
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Joelle Guzman and Lisette Lasater for their generous and talented research contributions to this entry. Gerald R. Lucas is an assistant professor of English at Macon State College in central Georgia, where he teaches composition, literature, and media studies. His interests include speculative fiction, new media, and online pedagogy. He is a member of the executive board of the Norman Mailer Society and serves as deputy editor of the Mailer Review. Josh Lukin is a visiting assistant professor in Temple University’s English Department and a faculty affiliate of Temple’s Institute on Disabilities. He is the editor of Invisible Suburbs: Recovering Protest Fiction in the 1950s United States (2008), and coeditor of “Fifties Fictions” in Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres (2003). He has contributed chapters to the anthologies Daughters of Earth: Twentieth-Century Feminist Science Fiction (2006) and Engaging Tradition, Making It New: Essays on Teaching Recent African American Literature (2008). His work has also appeared in Anarchist Studies, MLN, New York Review of Science Fiction, Extrapolation, and Minnesota Review. David W. Madden is a professor of American and Irish literatures at California State University, Sacramento. He is author of Understanding Paul West (1993) and editor of Critical Essay on Thomas Berger (1995). In addition to numerous articles and reviews in scholarly journals, he has guestedited two issues of the Review of Contemporary Fiction on Paul West (1991) and Alan Burns (1997). Madden was awarded his campus’s Outstanding Scholarly Achievement Award in 2007 and an Outstanding Teaching Award in 1999. Joshua J. Masters is an assistant professor of English at the University of West Georgia. His articles have appeared in Arizona Quarterly, American Studies, the Journal of Narrative Theory, Critique, and MAWA Review, and he is currently completing a manuscript tentatively titled “The Bullet and the Book: The Symbol of the Book and the Adventure of Writing the American West, 1803–93.” John T. Matthews is professor of English at Boston University. He is the author of The Play
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of Faulkner’s Language, “The Sound and the Fury”: Faulkner and the Lost Cause, and William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South, as well as numerous essays on Faulkner, modern American fiction, and Southern literature. He has recently edited The Blackwell Companion to the Modern American Novel, 1900–1950, and is presently at work on a book on narrative representations of Southern plantation history in American literature. Pamela R. Matthews is professor of English and associate dean in the College of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. She is the author of Ellen Glasgow and a Woman’s Traditions (1994), and the editor of Perfect Companionship: Ellen Glasgow’s Selected Correspondence With Women (2005) and, with David McWhirter, Aesthetic Subjects (2003). Jake Mattox is assistant professor in the Department of English at Indiana University South Bend. He has published articles and book reviews in scholarly journals on Martin Delany, Black Nationalism in the Americas, and the US West. Adam McKible is associate professor of English at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, where he teaches American and African American literature. He is coeditor, with Suzanne Churchill, of Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches (2007). He rediscovered and introduced When Washington Was in Vogue by Edward Christopher Williams (2004) and is the author of The Space and Place of Modernism: The Russian Revolution, Little Magazines, and New York (2002), as well as various essays on modernism, little magazines, and African American literature. Marci R. McMahon is an assistant professor of multiethnic literature at the University of Texas–Pan American. Her essays on feminist history and early-twentieth-century Mexican American women authors appear in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies; The Hispanic American Literature Volume; and Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Her manuscript, “Domestic Negotiations: Chicana Domesticity as a Critical Discourse of US Literature and Culture,” highlights the fraught relationship between domesticity and nation in several Chicana literary and visual texts produced in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Sheree L. Meyer is a professor of English and currently chair at California State University, Sacramento. In addition to her primary field of interest in early modern British literature, she is the author of numerous articles on literary theory and pedagogy published in journals such as College English, College Literature, and Pedagogy. She was proud to have the opportunity of offering a preview lecture on Norman Mailer and meeting him during his final book tour for Castle in the Forest. Carey Mickalites is an assistant professor of English at the University of Memphis, and specializes in modernism and twentieth-century British and American fiction. He has published or has work forthcoming on Ford, Joyce, and Conrad in Studies in the Novel, the Journal of Modern Literature, and Criticism. Tyrus Miller is professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is author of Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (1999) and Singular Examples: Artistic Politics and the Neo-AvantGarde (2009). Douglas L. Mitchell received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is currently assistant professor of English at the University of Mobile in Alabama and is the author of A Disturbing and Alien Memory: Southern Novelists Writing History (2008). Deborah M. Mix is an associate professor of English at Ball State University and the author of “A Vocabulary of Thinking”: Gertrude Stein and Contemporary North American Women’s Innovative Writing (2007). Robert Morace teaches at Daemen College in Amherst, New York. His publications include John Gardner: Critical Perspectives (coedited with Kathryn VanSpanckeren, 1982); John Gardner: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography (1984); The Dialogic Novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge (1989); Irvine Welsh’s “Trainspotting” (2001); and Irvine Welsh, a study of the Welsh phenomenon (2007). His “Life and Times of Death and the Maiden” won the 1997 Berger Prize for best theater essay.
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME II
Michael P. Moreno is assistant professor of English: Diversity Emphasis at Green River Community College in Auburn, Washington. In addition to a number of scholarly journal articles on cross-ethnic literature and the American suburb, he has contributed to several collections including Reel Histories: Studies in American Film (2008), and We Wear the Mask: Paul Lawrence Dunbar and the Politics of Representative Reality (2009). He holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Riverside with emphases in Latina/o literature, twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature, and spatial theory. Paul Morrison is professor of English and film studies at Brandeis University. He is the author of The Poetics of Fascism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Paul de Man (1996), and The Explanation for Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity (2002). Omri Moses is an assistant professor of English literature at Concordia University, Montreal. He is the author of several scholarly essays about modernist literature and painting, including a work in progress on Gertrude Stein’s investment in “lively” habits, and its pertinence to the Darwinian account of life. Roark Mulligan is an associate professor at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia, where he teaches literature and writing. He has authored essays on Theodore Dreiser that have appeared in American Literary Realism and Dreiser Studies. Currently, he is editing The Financier for the Dreiser edition and is serving as president of the International Theodore Dreiser Society. Brenda Murphy is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Among her books are The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity (2005); Congressional Theatre: Dramatizing McCarthyism on Stage, Film, and Television (1999); Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan: A Collaboration in the Theatre (1992); American Realism and American Drama, 1880–1940 (1987); and, as editor, the Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights (1999) and a special issue of Lit on Mary McCarthy (2004). Leonard Mustazza is distinguished professor of English and American studies at Pennsylvania State University. In addition to numerous schol-
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arly articles, among them one on Tom Wolfe, he is the author of nine books, including Forever Pursuing Genesis: The Myth of Eden in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut; The Critical Response to Kurt Vonnegut; and Ol’ Blue Eyes: A Frank Sinatra Encyclopedia. His latest book is a two-volume edition titled The Literary Filmography: 6,200 Adaptations of Books, Short Stories and Other Nondramatic Works. Neil Nakadate teaches literature in the Department of English at Iowa State University, where he received the award for Outstanding Achievement in Teaching and has been named university professor. He has edited two books on Robert Penn Warren and has written a critical study of Jane Smiley’s fiction (1999). Other publications have appeared in Aethlon, ISLE, Cottonwood, Flyway, Mississippi Quarterly, Western Humanities Review, Genre, Tennessee Studies in Literature, and Annals of Internal Medicine. Justus Nieland is associate professor of English at Michigan State University, where he specializes in literary and visual modernisms, the avant garde, and film studies. He is the author of Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life (2008), and co-author of Film Noir: Hard-Boiled Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization (2009). His work has appeared in the journals Modernism/ modernity, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Modernist Cultures, and Arizona Quarterly, and in the Blackwell Companion to the Modern American Novel. Margot Norris is Chancellor’s Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include modernist literature and art, James Joyce, literature and war, and feminism and gender studies. She is the author of Writing War in the Twentieth Century (2000), Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s “Dubliners” (2003), Joyce’s Web: The Social Unraveling of Modernism (1992), Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kakfa, Ernst, and Lawrence (1985), and The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake (1976). Patrick O’Donnell is professor of English and American literature at Michigan State University. He is the author of several books on modern and contemporary fiction, including John Hawkes; Passionate Doubts: Designs of Interpretation in
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Contemporary American Fiction; Echo Chambers: Figuring Voice in Modern Narrative; Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia in Contemporary US Narrative; and The American Novel Now: Reading American Fiction Since 1980. He is coeditor of Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, editor of New Essays on “The Crying of Lot 49,” and an associate editor of The Columbia History of the American Novel. He has provided the introduction and notes to the Penguin Twentieth Century Classics editions of two works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories. Kevin Ohi is the author of Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov (2005); Henry James and the Queerness of Style (forthcoming); and numerous articles on Victorian and American literature, queer theory, and film. Currently at work on a book entitled “Dead Letters Sent: Queer Literary Traditions,” he is associate professor of English at Boston College. Marc Oxoby has taught English and general humanities classes at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he also completed his doctoral work. He has contributed to Critique, Film & History, The St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, and other publications. He is also the author of The 1990s (2003), the concluding volume of the Greenwood Press American Popular Culture Through History series. Tim Page is a professor of journalism and music at the University of Southern California. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1997. He wrote or edited more than a dozen books, including The Glenn Gould Reader, The Unknown Sigrid Undset, Tim Page on Music, and Parallel Play. Page became interested in the life and work of Dawn Powell in 1991 and was instrumental in the discovery of Powell’s papers and subsequent reissue of most of her books. Page has edited Powell’s diaries, letters, plays, and short stories, and written introductions to a half dozen of her novels. He wrote the biography Dawn Powell (1998) and edited and annotated the Library of America’s two-volume collection of Powell’s work in 2001.
Linda Palmer is professor emeritus at California State University, Sacramento, where she was vice chair of the English Department and director of writing programs, specializing in Native American writers. She has published works on Leslie Silko and delivered conference papers on James Welch, Simon Ortiz, and Linda Hogan. She was awarded her campus’ Outstanding Teaching Award and Outstanding Contribution to the University Award. Jennifer Parchesky is assistant professor of English at Arizona State University. Her work on popular women writers and filmmakers of the 1920s and 1930s has appeared in Legacy, Cinema Journal, and Film History. She is currently completing a book on middle-class and middlebrow fiction in the early twentieth century. Donald E. Pease is the Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities at Dartmouth College and director of the Futures of American Studies Institute. He is the author of Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context and The New American Exceptionalism, and the editor of several volumes including National Identities and Postnational Narratives and, with Amy Kaplan, Cultures of United States Imperialism. Nancy J. Peterson, an associate professor of English and American studies at Purdue University, focuses on contemporary American literature and culture, with a particular interest in ethnic American literatures. She is the author of Beloved: Character Studies (2008) and Against Amnesia: Contemporary Women Writers and the Crises of Historical Memory (2001), and editor of Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches (1997). She serves on the advisory board for Modern Fiction Studies and has guest-edited special issues of the journal on Toni Morrison (2006 and 1993), “Racechange and the Fictions of Identity” (2003), and “Native American Literature” (1999). Rhonda S. Pettit teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Cincinnati–Raymond Walters College in Blue Ash, Ohio. In addition to her scholarship on Parker (A Gendered Collision, 2000; and The Critical Waltz, 2005), she has published articles on other poets as well as her
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME II
own poetry. She is the recipient of writing grants from the Kentucky Arts Council, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and Hedgebrook. Kathleen Pfeiffer is associate professor of English and coordinator of the American Studies Program at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. She is the author of Race Passing and American Individualism (2003) and has edited and introduced the reissues of Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven (2000) and Waldo Frank’s Holiday (2003). She has published essays in African American Review, Women’s Studies, and Legacy; her forthcoming book is titled Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank. Jonathan L. Price is a professor of English at California State University, Sacramento and has taught contemporary American fiction, film, composition, and grammar there since 1968. He has also taught at the University of Rome and Ramkhamhaeng University in Bangkok. In addition to several articles and presentations on modern and contemporary fiction and poetry, he is the co-author of two texts, Write in Time (1992) and Grammar Demystified (2006). David M. Raabe is professor emeritus of English at the University of Nebraska–Omaha. He has published a number of articles on American writers, including Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway. Paula Rabinowitz is professor of English at the University of Minnesota. Her books include Black & White & Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism (2002) and They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary (1994). She is currently coediting a four-volume series with Cristina Giorcelli for the University of Minnesota Press entitled “Habits of Being: Clothing and Identity,” as well as completing a manuscript on early paperbacks, popularized modernism, and censorship. Christopher T. Raczkowski is an assistant professor of English literature at the University of South Alabama, Mobile. He has authored articles and essays on noir aesthetics, modernism, and crime published in Modern Fiction Studies, Studies in the Novel, and elsewhere. Nicholas F. Radel is professor of English at Furman University, South Carolina. Coeditor of The
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Puritan Origins of American Sex (2000), he has written numerous articles on early modern and modern literature and sexuality, including early scholarly and biographical studies of Edmund White. A new study of White and race is forthcoming in Modern Fiction Studies. Robert Rebein is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Indiana University–Purdue University, Indianapolis. He is the author of Hicks, Tribes, & Dirty Realists: American Fiction After Postmodernism (2001), as well as numerous essays and reviews in literary magazines and journals. Doug Rice is a professor of creative writing and film at California State University, Sacramento. He is the author of Skin Prayer: Fragments of Abject Memory; A Good C–tboy is Hard to Find; and Blood of Mugwump. He coedited Federman: A to X-X-X-X. He is the executive publisher of Nobodaddies Press and has published numerous works in journals and anthologies, including Discourse, Fiction International, Zyzzyva, Gargoyle, and Black Ice. In 2004, Rice was the recipient of his campus’s President’s Award for Research and Creative Activity. Chaunce Ridley is a professor of African American, American, and minority literatures at California State University, Sacramento. His most recent publications are “The Blues, Unamuno, and the Triumph of Self-Mockingly Examined Lives in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man,” in Interdisciplinary Humanities (2006); and “Tension, Conversation, and Collectivity: Examining the Space of Double-Consciousness in the Search for Shared Knowledge,” in Complicating Constructions: Race, Ethnicity, and Hybridity in American Texts (2005), the latter co-written with CSUS colleagues Sheree Meyer and Olivia Castellano. Martin Riker is associate director of Dalkey Archive Press. He received his PhD from the University of Denver, and his critical writing on contemporary fiction has appeared in numerous publications. Terry Roberts is the director of the National Paideia Center at the University of North Carolina. He is the former editor of the Thomas Wolfe Review and author of the Literary Masterpieces volume on Look Homeward, Angel.
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Sarah Robertson is senior lecturer of American literature at the University of the West of England, Bristol. She is the author of The Secret Country: Decoding Jayne Anne Phillips’s Cryptic Fiction (2007). Along with articles and reviews in scholarly journals, her work has also appeared in Poverty and Progress in the U.S. South Since 1920 (2006) and Transatlantic Exchanges: The American South in Europe – Europe in the American South (2007). Warren G. Rochelle is an associate professor of English at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He is the author of Communities of the Heart: The Rhetoric of Myth in the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin (2001), and other articles on Le Guin, as well as other reviews and articles on science fiction, fantasy, and rhetoric. In addition to his academic work, he has published two novels, The Wild Boy (2001) and Harvest of Changelings (2007), as well as short stories and poetry. David Roessel is the Yiannos Professor of Greek language and literature at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. He is the associate editor of The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes and the coeditor of The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams. Leah Reade Rosenberg is an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Florida, where she teaches Caribbean, postcolonial, and Atlantic studies. She is the author of Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature (2007). Derek Parker Royal is an associate professor of English at Texas A&M University–Commerce as well as the founder and executive editor of Philip Roth Studies. His essays on American literature and graphic narrative have appeared in such journals as Contemporary Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Modern Drama, Studies in the Novel, Critique, MELUS, Shofar, Studies in American Jewish Literature, and Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism. He is the editor of Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author (2005), and is also completing a manuscript, “More Than Jewish Mischief: Narrating Subjectivity in the Later Fiction of Philip Roth.” Claudia Sadowski-Smith is assistant professor of English at Arizona State University. She is the
author of Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States (2008) and the editor of Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at U.S. Borders (2002). In addition, Sadowski-Smith has published several articles on border theory, literatures of the US–Mexico border, the internationalization of American studies, and cross-ethnic approaches to immigration in such journals as American Studies, South Atlantic Quarterly, Comparative American Studies, Arizona Quarterly, and Diaspora. Jeffrey Santa Ana is assistant professor of English at Stony Brook University, State University of New York. He has articles in Signs, positions, Critical Sense, and Asian North American Identities: Beyond the Hyphen. Santa Ana is currently working on a book entitled Critical Feelings: The Politics of Emotion and Racial Subjectivity in the Culture of American Capital. James Robert Saunders is a professor of English at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. He is the author of Tightrope Walk: Identity, Survival and the Corporate World in African American Literature (1997), and The Wayward Preacher in the Literature of African American Women (1995). He is also co-author of Black Winning Jockeys in the Kentucky Derby (2003) and Urban Renewal and the End of Black Culture in Charlottesville, Virginia (1998), and coeditor of The Dorothy West Martha’s Vineyard (2001). Bill Savage is a senior lecturer in the English Department at Northwestern University, where he teaches twentieth-century American literature. His teaching and scholarship focus on urban literature, especially that of his native Chicago, and the way that writers create a sense of place and identity. He has coedited two editions of works by Nelson Algren – The Man With the Golden Arm: 50th Anniversary Critical Edition, and the annotated edition of Chicago: City on the Make – and he works as an editor for the University of Chicago Press’s Chicago: Visions and Revisions series of new non-fiction books about Chicago. Sohnya Sayres teaches humanities at The Cooper Union in New York City. Lynn Orilla Scott is a visiting assistant professor at James Madison College in Michigan State
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME II
University. She is the author of James Baldwin’s Later Fiction (2002) and coeditor of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays (2006). Kerstin W. Shands is professor of English at S€ odert€ orn University College in south Stockholm. She is the author of Escaping the Castle of Patriarchy: Patterns of Development in the Novels of Gail Godwin (1990); The Repair of the World: The Novels of Marge Piercy (1994); and Embracing Space: Spatial Metaphors in Feminist Discourse (1999). In addition to numerous articles and reviews in scholarly journals, she has edited three anthologies: Collusion and Resistance: Women Writing in English (2002); Notions of America: Swedish Perspectives (2004, coedited with Rolf Lunden and Dag Blanck); and Neither East Nor West: Postcolonial Essays on Literature, Culture and Religion (2008). She is a member of the editorial board of the Oxford-based journal Contemporary Women’s Writing. Yuan Shu is an associate professor of English at Texas Tech University. He has published articles on Asian American literature and culture in Cultural Critique, College Literature, Amerasia Journal, Journal of Popular Film and Television, and book collections. He is currently finishing his book on Chinese American literature. Robin Silbergleid is an assistant professor of English at Michigan State University. She is the author of the chapbook Pas de Deux: Prose and Other Poems (Basilisk Press), as well as critical essays on twentieth-century American literature and popular culture. She is currently working on a book-length study of Carole Maso. Ryan Simmons is the author of Chesnutt and Realism: A Study of the Novels (2006). He lives in Spokane, Washington and teaches at Spokane Falls Community College. Tyrone Simpson is an assistant professor of English and urban studies at Vassar College. He was a recipient of the Career Enhancement Fellowship Award from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation in 2007–8. He is presently completing a manuscript entitled “Writing Apartheid: The Ghetto Imaginary in Twentieth-Century American Literature.”
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Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr. is professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has published work on African American writers in American Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Callaloo, Studies in Short Fiction, and elsewhere, as well as in volumes edited by Harold Bloom, Kimberly Benston, Arnold Rampersad, Valerie Smith, and Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers. From 1987 to 1999 he was the editor of MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. Bill Solomon is associate professor of American literature at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. He is the author of Literature, Amusement, and Technology in the Great Depression (2002). He has published articles in, among other scholarly journals, American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, and Modern Fiction Studies. He is currently working on a book-length project entitled Slapstick Modernism: Experimental Writing and Silent Comedy, 1909–1969. Gary Storhoff is an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut, Stamford. He has published widely on African American and American literature, and is the author of Understanding Charles Johnson (2004). He is the coeditor with John Whalen-Bridge of the forthcoming The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature and American Buddhism as a Way of Life, both by the State University of New York Press. Victor Strandberg has published widely on American authors, including books on Robert Penn Warren, William James, William Faulkner, and Cynthia Ozick. He has taught in the Duke English Department since 1966. Andrew Strombeck has written on conspiracy theory, Ishmael Reed, Richard Wright, William Gibson, and the fundamentalist Left Behind novels. His published work appears in African American Review, Cultural Critique, Postmodern Culture, Science Fiction Studies, and Studies in American Naturalism. Currently completing a manuscript on conspiracy theory and masculinity in the postwar United States, he is an assistant professor of English at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. Thomas Strychacz teaches American literature at Mills College in California. His work on modernist
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literature includes three books: Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (1993); Hemingway’s Theaters of Masculinity (2003); and Dangerous Masculinities: Conrad, Hemingway, and Lawrence (2007). Juan A. Suarez is an associate professor of English at the University of Murcia, Spain. He is the author of Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars (1996); Pop Modernism (2007), and Jim Jarmusch (2007), and of essays, in both English and Spanish, on literature, film, and contemporary visual culture. Susan Elizabeth Sweeney is associate professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross. She has published many essays on Anne Tyler, Edith Wharton, and other female writers, and coedited Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women (1993). Sweeney also studies postmodernist revisions of mysteries, gothics, ghost stories, and folktales; her work on detective fiction, in particular, includes the coedited volume Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism (1999). An expert on Vladimir Nabokov, she is a past president of the Nabokov Society and coedits the Vladimir Nabokov Electronic Forum. Joseph P. Tabbi is the author of Cognitive Fictions (2002) and Postmodern Sublime (1995), books that examine the effects of new technologies on contemporary American fiction. He edits the electronic book review, and has edited and introduced William Gaddis’s last fiction and collected non-fiction. His essay on Kate Armstrong’s and Michael Tippit’s Grafik Dynamo appears in a catalogue publication from the Prairie Art Gallery, Alberta, and his essay on Mark Amerika appears at the Walker Art Center’s phon:e:me site, a 2000 Webby Award nominee. Also online (at the Iowa Review Web) is an essay-narrative titled “Overwriting,” an interview, and a review of his work. He is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Laura E. Tanner is a professor of English at Boston College, where she teaches classes on modern and contemporary American fiction. Her publications include Lost Bodies: Inhabiting the Borders of Life and Death (2006), and Intimate Violence: Reading Rape and Torture (1994), as well as numerous articles in academic journals includ-
ing American Literature, American Literary History, Contemporary Literature, and Genre. Tatiana Teslenko is senior instructor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and lives in Vancouver, Canada. Her recent publications include books on the rhetoric of genre (Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre, 2002) and feminist criticism (Feminist Utopian Novels of the 70s, 2003), and a textbook (Fundamental Competencies for Engineers, 2006). She teaches professional writing courses and has designed and launched several programs for international students. She was the founder and inaugural director of the Centre for Professional Skills Development at the UBC Faculty of Applied Science. Matt Theado is a professor of English at GardnerWebb University in North Carolina. He is the author of Understanding Jack Kerouac (2000) and The Beats: A Literary Reference (2003). He has written numerous articles and reviews on Kerouac and other Beat Generation writers, and he has been an invited speaker at the Jack Kerouac Conference on Beat Literature, held in Kerouac’s home town of Lowell, Massachusetts. Jane F. Thrailkill is associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A specialist in literary realism and naturalism, she writes on the connections between the literature, philosophy, and biological sciences of the late nineteenth century. Her essays have appeared in American Literature, ELH, and Journal of Narrative Theory, and her book Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism was published by Harvard University Press in 2007. She is currently at work on a monograph entitled Talking Back: The Subversive Child in American Literature. Anne-Laure Tissut teaches in the English Department at the Sorbonne University in Paris as a specialist of contemporary American fiction and translation. She is Percival Everett’s French translator, and the author of a monograph on Paul West, Paul West: La Prosea sensations (2001), as well as of many articles on the most recent American fiction. Susan Tomlinson is an assistant professor of English at University of Massachusetts Boston, where she teaches courses in nineteenth- and
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME II
twentieth-century American literature. She has published articles and book chapters on Jessie Fauset, Zona Gale, and Walter White, and she is completing a book-length manuscript entitled Keeping It Decent: Jessie Fauset, Virtue, and the Crisis of New Negro Womanhood. Bonnie TuSmith is an associate professor of English at Northeastern University with a PhD in American studies. She is author of All My Relatives: Community in Ethnic American Literatures (1993); editor of Conversations with John Edgar Wideman (1998); and coeditor of American Family Album: 28 Contemporary Ethnic Stories (2000); Race in the College Classroom: Pedagogy and Politics (2002); and Critical Essays on John Edgar Wideman (2006). Darlene Harbour Unrue is distinguished professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Past president of the Katherine Anne Porter Society, she is the author of Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter’s Fiction (1985), Understanding Katherine Anne Porter (1988), and Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist (2005). She has edited “This Strange, Old World” and Other Book Reviews by Katherine Anne Porter (1991), Critical Essays on Katherine Anne Porter (1997), Katherine Anne Porter’s Poetry (1996), and the Library of America’s Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories and Other Writings (2008). Aliki Varvogli is a lecturer in English and American literature in the School of Humanities at the University of Dundee, Scotland. She has written books on Paul Auster and Annie Proulx, and articles on Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, Jay McInerney, and others. She is working on a book called Travel and Dislocation in Contemporary American Fiction, to be published by Routledge. Kelley Wagers is an assistant professor of English at Penn State Worthington Scranton. Her current research explores relationships between historiography and literary modernism in early twentiethcentury American writing. She has published articles recently in Arizona Quarterly and Journal of Modern Literature. Wendy W. Walters is an associate professor in the Department of Writing, Literature and Pub-
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lishing at Emerson College. In 2001–2, she was a non-resident fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard University. She is the author of At Home in Diaspora: Black International Writing (2005). Her other publications include “‘Object Into Subject’: Michelle Cliff, John Ruskin, and the Terrors of Visual Art”; and “Writing the Diaspora in Black International Literature ‘With Wider Hope in Some More Benign Fluid . . .’: Diaspora Consciousness and Literary Expression.” Margaret Earley Whitt is professor of English at the University of Denver. She is the author of Understanding Gloria Naylor (1999) and Understanding Flannery O’Connor (1995), and editor of Short Stories of the Civil Rights Movement: An Anthology (2006). In addition to articles on Naylor, O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and Zora Neale Hurston, Whitt is the recipient of all three of her university’s major outstanding teaching awards (1990, 1993, 2007). Keith Wilhite is a lecturing fellow in the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University. He has published articles on John Cheever, Chester Himes, Walt Whitman, and Richard Wright, and he is currently working on a book manuscript, Re-Framing Suburbia: U.S. Literature and the Postwar Suburban Region. Jennifer D. Williams is an assistant professor of English at Michigan State University. She is on postdoctoral fellowship leave at New York University completing a book on trauma, visuality, and black subjectivity. Williams’s published reviews and articles can be found in Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature, Southern Literary Journal, and Africanizing Knowledge (edited by Toyin Falola and Christian Jennings, 2002). Greg Wright is a visiting assistant professor of American literature and film studies at Kalamazoo College. His research focuses on issues of media forms, intertextuality, and adaptation. He earned his PhD in American literature and film at Michigan State University in 2007, and his work has appeared in the Journal of Popular Culture and the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. Michael Wutz is Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Weber State University and the editor of Weber: The
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Contemporary West. He is the coeditor of Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology (with Joseph Tabbi, 1997), the co-translator of Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (with Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, 1999), and the author of numerous essays on American and British fiction. His new book, Mobilizing Media Narratives: Literary Case Studies in the Modern Media Ecology, is forthcoming. Heide Ziegler teaches American and English literature at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. Her research focus is on modern and
postmodernist literature; she is the author of a number of books and articles, including John Barth, and, as editor, Facing Texts: Encounters Between Contemporary Writers and Critics. Her time has been almost equally divided between university administration (as rector of the University of Stuttgart and president of the International University in Germany– Bruchsal) and research and teaching at home and abroad. She founded and directed the Stuttgart Seminar in Cultural Studies at Monrepos near Stuttgart, where she organized five international sessions.
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Introduction to Volume II
From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, Ezra Pound’s battle cry for twentiethcentury modernism – “Make It New” – retains its currency, even its radicalism, in the heterogeneous and diverse literary environment of contemporary America. Pound’s vexed expression is fraught with complications: as Louis Menand has recently suggested, for Pound’s own work, the “It in ‘Make It New’ is the old – what is valuable in the culture of the past.”1 Superficial novelty, parochialism, and the debased linguistic coin of “rhetoric” were Pound’s enemies, and in sounding the resonances of “Make It New,” he meant, in part, that literature must be radically disruptive lest it sink into the oblivion of the status quo. But Pound was also stumping for an international modernism, not something that could be conceived within the national boundaries of the United States or solely with a concept of “America” in mind. Yet the countercurrent in American literature has always been to link “the new” with notions of a discrete, if fractious, identity for American writing: near mid-century, in the preface to one of the first comprehensive assessments of modern American literature, Alfred Kazin wrote that “for me the single greatest fact about our modern American writing [is] our writers’ absorption in every last detail of their American world together with their deep and subtle alienation from it.”2 In the age of globalization, following the explosion of the canon and the proliferation of multicultural literatures after mid-century, “their American world” appears chauvinistic and narrow, yet it reveals a set of tensions felt by the editors of this volume as we set about assembling an encyclopedia of twentieth-century
American fiction: the tension raised by deciding what to include and what to exclude, and thus deciding between what is symptomatically “new,” additive, and what is simply repetitive; the tension that exists between conceiving of American writing within the boundaries of the United States and the knowledge that such writing – in terms of genre, influence, and historical context – can only be fully understood and appreciated within broader hemispheric, transatlantic, and international parameters; the tension brought about by recognizing that the very act of producing an encyclopedia is to participate in formulating a canon (as is also the case whenever we teach and make up a syllabus) while acknowledging, ironically, that any canon, however diverse, delimits as much as it expands, and excludes as much as it includes. Twentieth-century American writing is rich with such tensions; in retrospect, this writing seems to be much about these tensions in its proliferation. Every canon tells a story, and we believe that the Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century American Fiction, composed of 191 author entries and 23 topic entries, appropriately pursues multiple narrative lines of flight. One of these, most assuredly, is the contribution that twentieth-century American fiction makes to the twinned, if often ill-defined, and hardly separable movements of modernism and postmodernism. Often, the differences between these movements are posed as a contestation between the high and low, between “literary” language or semantic complexity, and the vernacular, popular, or mass-mediated.3 Yet the writing itself tells a different story: in the novels
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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of Ernest Hemingway or the short fictions of Sherwood Anderson, the complexities of consciousness and the symbolic fetishes produced by the unconscious (reflecting the enormous impact of Freud upon modern writing) are conveyed through a bare style that informs the realism of Nelson Algren, Kay Boyle, and Henry Roth, or defines the hard-boiled vernacular of noir writers like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain, and, later in the century, writers as different in their re-creation of the vernacular as Raymond Carver, Grace Paley, Charles Bukowski, and James Ellroy. In Gertrude Stein’s language experiments erected upon the plane of the proletarian subject in Three Lives, there is to be found the attempt to match word with world (the intersubjective “world” of the individuated self) such that language itself becomes a form of embodiment – a project equally reflected in William H. Gass’s stories of Midwestern eccentrics, Annie Proulx’s novels of stranded isolates and found objects, and Paul Auster’s wandering detectives of New York’s semiotic chaos. Performance, or the act of self-projection before the crowd, the mass, is foregrounded in the high-wire stylistics and multiple vocal embodiments of “high modernists” such as Djuna Barnes, John Dos Passos, Jean Toomer, and Nathanael West, and seen as well in the “postmodern” writing of William Gaddis and Don DeLillo, or, quite differently, Kathy Acker and Carole Maso. The attention to local, regional detail and the interstices of the social order combined with experiments in style that we find in the novels of William Faulkner can equally be found in the contemporary writing of Cormac McCarthy, John Edgar Wideman, and Leslie Marmon Silko. In short, one of the implicit narratives of the Encyclopedia, written by over 200 hands, is that there are remarkable continuities between the modern and the postmodern, the prewar and the contemporary, the “literary” and the “vernacular” – the latter, to some degree, indistinguishable in the contemporaneity of American writing across the century. There are other stories that inform the assemblage of authors and subjects gathered under the heading of an encyclopedia of modern
American fiction, and to rehearse all of them here with any specificity would be to replicate, to a large degree, the substantive and wonderfully varied topic entries included in this volume, which extend the number and range of authors and works considered in the volume well beyond those listed in the separate author entries. Ideally, users of this volume will navigate freely between the author and topic entries in order to gain access to the sheer proliferation and diversity of the prose fiction written in the United States during the twentieth century, extending into the twenty-first. Under the topic of “Border Fictions,” in an essay that discusses the rich assemblage of fictions that portray the subjectival states of citizens and immigrants, borders geographical and symbolic, and the nomadism that characterizes American life in the twentieth century, the reader encounters not only Rudolfo Anaya, Leslie Marmon Silko, Cormac McCarthy, John Rechy, and Helena Viramontes, all of whom are also discussed in separate author entries, but also the border fictions of Rolando Hinojosa, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, and Alberto Rıos. “The Avant Garde Novel” offers a detailed discussion of Gertrude Stein, whose dazzling early-twentieth-century experiments inaugurate a fractured genealogy of vanguard expression that not only enriches the perspective on Stein to be found when she is considered as an individual author, but also places her in relation to such contemporary writers as William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Lyn Hejinian, Ben Marcus, and Walter Abish; in the available cross-hatchings of a project such as this one, references to many of these writers can be found in the entries on “Modernist Fiction” and “Postmodernist Fiction.” The stories of modernism, postmodernism, and the avant garde can be heard in a different key in such entries as that on “Queer Modernism,” which places such figures as Stein, Willa Cather, James Baldwin, and Henry James within the evolving contexts of queer theory as it has emerged over the last three decades. One discovers in “Queer Modernism” an effective mapping of sexuality and the sexualized body onto the aesthetic concerns of a modernism that has, for too long, been severed from a key element of modernity
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INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME II
writ large: to recite Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick from the entry, the “chronic modern crisis of homo/ heterosexual definition.” What’s more, this elision of sexuality from the terrain of the modern, a legacy of American modernism’s Cold War critical consolidation, has been repeated in the striking resurgence of interest in modernism over the past decade. Reading “Queer Modernism,” and then returning to the author entries on Cather, Baldwin, James, and Stein, or coming to the topic entry having read the separate author entries, the reader gains an interactive perspective on modernism as itself a continually contested aesthetic legacy, one literary critics and historians today labor to make new by asking modernism to confess its unstable truths all over again. The to-and-fro movement between author and topic entries yields other insights, additional stories: the entry on “Historiographic Metafiction” is premised on the term developed by theorist Linda Hutcheon to describe the tendency in postmodern prose to portray the writing of history as a kind of fiction or narrative containing rhetorics and ideologies that reflect our identities as historical subjects. In the entry on historiographic metafiction, Hutcheon’s critical discovery extends back to the novels of John Dos Passos and Henry Adams, forward to the very recent fiction of Mark Danielewski and Jonathan Safran Foer, and across the range of contemporary writing, including the work of Toni Morrison, Gerald Vizenor, Paul West, and Maxine Hong Kingston. When read in light of the entries on “Social Realist Fiction” or “Ethnicity and Fiction,” the insights yielded by reading twentieth-century fiction historiographically become interwoven with those arising from viewing fiction as bound by a mimetic imperative to faithfully represent the social order, or as a negotiation between the assimilative story of the US’s incorporation of ethnic identities and the fractious, poetic, or performative manifestations of ethnicity in writing. In considering the list of topics for the encyclopedia, the editors have attempted to generate multiple contexts for understanding modern American fiction, many of them somewhat unfamiliar. Alongside topics devoted to major move-
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ments and well-known approaches, the reader will find topic entries about “Noir Fiction,” which explores the aesthetics, style, and worldview of “noir” – perhaps more familiar as a French term that applies to postwar American film. In this volume, the term usefully raises the problem of genre and national boundaries, since the category has its roots in the gothic tradition and the mysteries of the nineteenth-century metropolis, but today designates an unruly cross-section of twentieth-century writing from the reactionary “pulp fiction” of Mickey Spillane or the romantic idealism of Raymond Chandler, to the materialist social protest fiction of Richard Wright and Chester Himes, and extending from the high modernism of William Faulkner to the mid-century modernism of Patricia Highsmith. “The Little Magazines” explores those vital venues for the development of twentieth-century American fiction, the small-circulation literary magazines that were critical to the evolution of such movements as the Harlem Renaissance, that provided modern American writers with an internationalist frame for their vanguard experiments, and that continue to be critical to contemporary writing, both in its more traditional and in its riskier manifestations. “WPA and Popular Front Fiction” considers the writing that emerged out of the Federal Writers’ Project and proletarian fiction as essential to our understanding of what constitutes twentieth-century American fiction; “The Road Novel” discusses how the picaresque tradition and the quest romance have been transmitted in twentieth- century writing via that most “American” of tropes – the highway – in novels by figures as diverse as Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion, Stephen King, and Sherman Alexie. Once more, there are multiple pathways to be explored between these entries and topics pursued by others: to mention a spare few, the grittiness of noir fiction as it expands the dimensions of twentieth-century realism, the low light of the small magazines interpenetrating the bright lights of canonical trade modernism, and the intersections between representations of class and race to be seen in a wide range of novels that fall under various categories of naturalist, realist, ethnic, and proletariat writing.
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For the editors, one of the most difficult tasks of this project is to arrive at a delimited list of authors and topics that navigates between the representative and the symptomatic. Given that there were understandable constraints placed upon the number of twentieth-century American writers who could be included in the encyclopedia, we had to engage in difficult questions about who and what to include (and, necessarily, who and what to exclude) when we might have as easily developed a list of 500 or 1,000 authors and topics rather than the slightly over 200 that space allowed. To some degree, the choices became more difficult and, perhaps to some eyes, more arbitrary, as we moved toward authors whose careers began in the latter part of the twentieth century and continue into the twenty-first. That process of canonization of which this project is a part certainly made it clear that, for the first half of the twentieth century, we would include major entries on modernists like James, Stein, Hurston, Faulkner; on epochal events like the World Wars (“The Novel and War”); as well as on modernist fiction, postmodernist fiction, realism, and the avant garde. But we have also striven to include entries on important but lesser-known figures of the first half-century, whose place in the volume signals some of the revisionist lines of flight opened by the topics entries. Modernism, as Pound knew, was always a richly international phenomenon, and scholars of the field have been newly attentive to the transnational character of its circulation and utopian visions. For this reason, we’ve included not only topic entries like “Expatriate Fiction,” or “The Little Magazines,” but also the work of undervalued modern experimentalists like Kay Boyle, whose vanguard aesthetic, like that of Pound or Eliot, is only imperfectly “American,” or the kind of black internationalism glimpsed in the speculative fiction of George Schuyler, a neglected figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Here and elsewhere in the early twentieth century, our choices speak to the expanded field of “modernist” literary production that has emerged over the past few decades. This picture includes modernism’s constitutive relationship with the technologies of mass culture, as seen in “Modern Fiction in Hollywood”; or the comic, satirical mode of Dorothy Parker and
Dawn Powell, a mode often sacrificed to preserve an image of high modernist seriousness; or the work of bestselling writers like Pearl S. Buck, Edna Ferber, Ellen Glasgow, and Dorothy Canfield, whose achievements have been forgotten in the dismissal of so-called middlebrow writing. But this more generous reading of Pound’s celebration of the new also includes radical writers like Mike Gold, novelists like Anzia Yezierska, poets like H.D. and Langston Hughes who also wrote fiction, and Harlem Renaissance writers like Jessie Redmon Fauset, Claude McKay, and Carl Van Vechten. From the modernism you choose, so the line goes, you get the postmodernism you deserve. Part of our aim, then, is to show that the fractured terrain of US literary production in postmodernist fiction need not depend on any illusory wholeness of the modernist project. At mid-century, writers such as Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Mary McCarthy seem obvious; others whom we have included, such as Nelson Algren, James T. Farrell (whose prolific work spans the decades from the 1930s to the 1970s), Ayn Rand, and Ann Petry, have acquired considerably less canonical visibility. As we progress chronologically toward those writing on the cusp of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, the choices become even harder: given the remarkable proliferation of multicultural literatures in the United States after World War II, easily at least a half of the space available for contemporary writers could have been devoted solely to African American, Chicano/Latino, Asian American, and Native American novelists. The proliferation of experimental styles and aesthetics that fall largely under the rubric of postmodernist writing made any kind of choice based upon representational criteria difficult. The large number of significant women writers in the marketplace – again, increasing dramatically in number and visibility since World War II – posed complex questions for us about choice. To some extent, our choices as we moved into the contemporary arena were increasingly based on an attempt to represent the proliferate diversity of post-World War II American writing, and to include as many different kinds of writing, and as many authors writing within (or writing against) different
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INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME II
traditions and heritages, as possible. Across the century, we have included writers working primarily in the genre of fiction, though even these choices become complicated when one considers that much modern and postmodern writing crosses generic boundaries and blurs any lines that might be drawn between, for example, poetry and fiction. For younger writers, we made choices based on the bulk of the work produced up to this point in time, even as we understood that many of the writers we did not include because they have produced one or two novels at present have already established themselves as important presences going into the twenty-first century; and, after all, a writer such as Ralph Ellison produced only one novel in his lifetime, yet few undergraduate courses on the twentiethcentury American novel fail to take Invisible Man into account. We have not attempted to include the enormous range of “popular” fiction or primarily “genre” authors as, once more, the entire space made available to us could have been taken up with authors and topics devoted to science fiction, the detective novel, or romance; however, across the range of topic entries that are offered here, the reader can find reference to many of the writers who fall in these categories, particularly as so many modern and contemporary writers develop generic hybridities that partake equally of (the now inseparable) “high” and “low” cultural forms. In general, our choices comprise an attempt to represent the range and diversity of recent writing in an array that is more symptomatic than totally (and impossibly) representative. To be sure, in selecting the authors to be covered who wrote the bulk of their work since World War II, we have been able to rely on some “canonical” formations: Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Maxine Hong Kingston,
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Joan Didion, Paul Auster, Philip Roth, and Grace Paley all are, by now, firmly established as often taught figures whose writing has accrued a significant amount of critical attention and are likely to remain in place as amongst the most important US writers of the twentieth century 50 or 100 years from now (even as the future of the book, in the first place, is a matter of vigorous ongoing debate). But others – for example, Carole Maso, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Lethem, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Louise Erdrich – are in relatively earlier stages of developing a body of work that has well begun the process of acquiring the kind of visibility – that is, being taught, talked about, and written about – that would seem to ensure their vital presence over the long term. And, finally, there are writers listed such as David Markson, Rikki Ducornet, and Maureen Howard, whose work may not have acquired high visibility and whose names do not appear on many of the “100 best” lists, yet we feel they are important writers who are contributing to the vitality of emerging traditions in American writing. We thus invite the reader to use the Encyclopedia as a springboard for reading modern and contemporary American fiction, and for exploring a body of literature that continues to reveal its complexities and innovations. Going through the process of making decisions about the list of authors and topics for the volume has, for the editors, been an education in its own right, and it is our hope that readers will find in both the lists and the content food for thought and motivation for the unfailingly rewarding act of reading more. Patrick O’Donnell David W. Madden Justus Nieland
Notes 1 Louis Menand, “The Pound Error,” New Yorker, June 9, 2008. At www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/06/ 09/080609crbo_books_menand, accessed Jan. 19, 2010. 2 Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (1942; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), p. ix.
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3 See Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), for a revealing discussion of the interaction of “high” and “low” literatures and cultures across twentieth-century writing, and the collapse of these distinctions across the “divides” of modernism and postmodernism.
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A Acker, Kathy DOUG RICE
Labeled postmodern, plagiarized, literary terrorism, Kathy Acker’s writing disturbs commonly held assumptions about literary aesthetics and political power. Her writing is diseased – a foreign narrative body that undermines institutional structures for reading. More than posing metafictional conundrums, Acker’s writing explores the politics of women’s bodies and desires as they have been situated inside the patriarchal gaze of late market capital. More importantly, Acker’s rewriting of literary history provides daughters with treasure maps for escaping the stranglehold of language designed to domesticate young girls. Kathy Acker was born Karen Alexander in 1944 (some sources suggest 1948) in New York City and died in Tijuana, Mexico in 1997. Her father abandoned her mother before Acker was born. Her mother committed suicide when Acker was 30, and these two abandonments figure heavily in her work. At 18, Acker ran away from home and lived on the streets, working in the sex industry as a stripper and a voiceover in pornographic films. She studied at Brandeis University before moving on to the University of California, San Diego, where she received her BA, and she taught literature and writing at numerous universities. Acker wrote novels, plays, opera librettos, essays, a screenplay, and poetry, and also collaborated with a pair of rock bands. Acker’s writing has many influences, some of which include the
Black Mountain poets, the Beats, punk rock, and French theorists, and is fueled by a subversive desire to deconstruct childhood myths designed by patriarchy. Her writing confounds genre expectations, inhabiting those liminal spaces of becoming that transform sentences into lines of flight and writing against stable notions of meaning and identity. Her work blurs and blends various genres, from autobiography to science fiction, pornography, and children’s stories. By using plagiarism and cut-up techniques, Acker experiments with syntax and identities in ways that disturb notions of ownership. Her career began by peddling stories on the streets of New York. She copied stories in order to expose the ways that language worked on her body, a theme common to all her writing. Kathy Goes to Haiti (1988), a twisted Nancy Drew porn novel, is representative of this critique; as is Hello, I’m Erica Jong (1982), where Acker parodies “acceptable” bourgeois notions of sexuality as imagined by the bestselling “feminist” author. In Stein-like fashion, the style of Acker’s books performs their content. Fragmentation and alienation are embodied in broken sentences, syntaxes fail to clarify intention, and mutilated body parts clutter sentences in fractured nonsense. The subject of her sentences, her I/eye, and her protagonists are fluid, changing sex and desire to experience the wor(l)d in an other way. Her subjects often become objects, and her narrative eye observes her narrating I. In rewriting Great Expectations (1983) and Don Quixote (1986), Acker’s I
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steals male narratives and creates a space for an avowedly anti-romantic girl to breathe. She extends her reading into dream spaces that the original texts fail to make possible and repeatedly penetrates these texts with autobiographical tales. Blood and Guts in High School (1984) remains Acker’s most direct attack on the fascism of family values. From its explicit ink drawings to its transgressive narratives of incest, sexuality, and power, the novel relentlessly attacks misogyny. Characters challenge readers to hold their gaze, to look deeper into the ideological structures writing over female experiences. Some feminists perceived Acker’s explicit writing of sex as further objectifying the female body and have attacked her for contributing to the very power structures she critiqued. Nevertheless, Janey, the protagonist, resists every societal institution that attempts to control her lust for life. Her later work, beginning with Empire of the Senseless (1988), does more than show disrespect for the literary canon. Here she begins to offer a way to push critique toward political action. Her characters remain addicted to sex, need sex, but push this need beyond being controlled by it. They make it into a desire that allows for other actions. Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996b), the last book she completed, ends with a pirate “grrrl” map leading toward freedom. After ransacking literary history and beating language down to its originary core, two ex-prostitute protagonists search for buried treasures in a matriarchal society and thus open doors for the reinscription of languages for female experiences. Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective, and The Burning Bombing of America (compiled in Acker 2002b), written in the early 1970s, appear hauntingly contemporary. More than simply being urtexts filled with themes that Acker would later explore more deeply in her mature works, they provide reflections on these concerns. Acker’s oeuvre is most powerful when read as a whole project concerned with questioning the limits of language, taboo, perversion, politics, and tradition.
SEE ALSO: The Avant Garde Novel (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Acker, K. (1982). Hello, I’m Erica Jong. New York: Contact II. Acker, K. (1983). Great Expectations. New York: Grove. Acker, K. (1984). Blood and Guts in High School. New York: Grove. Acker, K. (1986). Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream. New York: Grove. Acker, K. (1988). Empire of the Senseless. New York: Grove. Acker, K. (1990). In Memoriam to Identity. New York: Grove. Acker, K. (1991). Hannibal Lecter, My Father. New York: Semiotext(e). Acker, K. (1993). My Mother: Demonology. New York: Pantheon. Acker, K. (1995). Pussycat Fever (illus. D. DiMassa & F. Baer). San Francisco: AK Press. Acker, K. (1996a). Bodies of Work: Essays. London: Serpent’s Tail. Acker, K. (1996b). Pussy, King of the Pirates. New York: Grove. Acker, K. (2002a). Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker (ed. A. Scholder & J. Winterson). New York: Grove. Acker, K. (2002b). Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective and The Burning Bombing of America. New York: Grove. Brulotte, G., & Phillips, J. (2006). Rice, Doug & Acker, Kathy. In G. Brulotte & J. Phillips (eds.), Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature, vol. 1. New York: Routledge. Caspar, B. (dir.) (2008). Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker? Cameo Films. Hardin, M. (2005). Devouring Institutions: The Life Work of Kathy Acker. San Diego: Hyperbole Books. Hawkins, S. (2004). All in the Family: Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School. Contemporary Literature, 45(4), 637–58. Kocela, C. (2006). Resighting Gender: Butler’s Lesbian Phallus in Acker’s Pussy. LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, 17(1), 77–104. Scholder, A., Harriman, C., & Ronell, A. (eds.) (2006). Lust for Life: On the Writing of Kathy Acker. London: Verso.
Agee, James JUSTUS NIELAND
The cult of James Agee – poet, novelist, journalist, film critic, screenwriter, and co-creator of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), one of the single most remarkable and radical texts of the twentieth
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century – began shortly after his death from a heart attack in 1955. Two years later, his lyrical autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family, was published; it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1958. In the same year, Agee on Film appeared, and a second volume followed in 1960. These landmark collections of Agee’s eccentric and brilliant film criticism would prove decisive for the mid-century transformation of film’s cultural status in the US from mere entertainment or big business to the century’s most vital and aesthetically promising medium. In 1960, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a “nonfictional” account of Depression-era Alabama tenant farmers, was reissued for the first time since its initial publication, when it had sold a meager 600 copies. At the dawn of the US Civil Rights Movement, the book was enthusiastically rediscovered by a new generation moved by Agee and Walker Evans’s intermedial experiment in the limits of human sympathy and the extremes of suffering. Agee’s literary significance today lies in his success in testing the aesthetic and political potential of a uniquely rhythmic, poetic prose. Agee’s passionate, often hallucinatory style (what he once called “amphibious”) exploded conventional aesthetic boundaries, blurring documentary realism, surrealist automatism, and modernist psychological interiority, and turning lyrical prose into finely wrought, synaesthetic experiments in aurality and visuality. Born in an upper-middle-class family in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1909, James Rufus Agee (known as “Rufus” at home) was the son of Laura Tyler Agee, a devout, Anglo-Catholic mother from a well-to-do Knoxville family, and Hugh James Agee (“Jay”), who worked for his wife’s family’s construction business. When Agee was 7, his father was killed in an automobile accident, a traumatic event fictionally rendered in the titular death of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. The story of the Follet family’s immediate response to the loss of their vital young father, A Death in the Family privileges the perspective of Jay’s young son Rufus, taken by his father to see a Charlie Chaplin film in the opening chapter’s act of paternal love. While drifting to Jay’s pious wife Catherine, who thinks the Tramp is “vulgar” and whose faith is shaken by her husband’s death, Agee’s subjective third-person narration returns repeatedly to Rufus’s attempts to process the
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complex family dynamics surrounding his father’s death and ensuing funeral. Agee gives narrative shape to trauma by interrupting the progress of the narrative with Rufus’s extended, lyrical memories of his father. The novel’s affecting, unsentimental portrait of grief lays bare the internal fractures of the Follet family along the fault lines of faith and belief, and offers an unflinching critique of Christian hypocrisy. Instead, Agee’s brand of carnal humanism opts for the quotidian, sensual “miracles” enjoyed by Jay and “blind animal sympathy” with the everydayness of human loss. After graduating from Harvard in 1932 in the midst of the Depression, Agee was recommended by his friend Dwight MacDonald for an editor’s job at Fortune, one of the organs of Henry Luce’s media empire. Agee would work for Luce in some fashion through 1948 – first as a staff writer at Fortune in the early 1930s, where he wrote business stories and idiosyncratic, descriptive essays; then at Time magazine, where he served as a movie critic and developed feature articles; and later at Life, where his seminal, nostalgic essay on silent screen comedy, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” was published as a cover story in 1949. During this period, Agee also published a collection of his poems, Permit Me Voyage (1934), with Yale’s Younger Poets series; devoured Freud, Jung, and James Joyce; published a moving recollection of his childhood, “Knoxville: Summer 1915,” in MacDonald’s Partisan Review in 1938 that would find its way into A Death in the Family; became a regular film critic for the Nation; wrote a number of screenplays, including those for John Huston’s The African Queen (1951) and Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955); and waged an unsuccessful campaign to woo his cinematic hero, Charlie Chaplin, to star in Agee’s remarkable screenplay, “The Tramp’s New World,” in which Chaplin’s Tramp is left to rebuild human civilization in the wake of an atomic catastrophe. Agee’s often conflicted labors in the culture industry also allowed him to work against the boundaries of media and genre, and to conceive more innovative crossings between them. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men remains the most enduring example of Agee’s media experimentation. In 1936, Agee and Evans were assigned by Fortune to document the struggles of Alabama sharecroppers. The duo spent three weeks amongst three
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impoverished families, chronicling their lives in Agee’s feverish words and Evans’s stark, haunting photographs. Rejected by their editors at Fortune, the project was expanded and finally published by Houghton Mifflin to angry and confused reviews. A work of documentary modernism, Praise is both a sincere attempt to witness the trials and humanity of the impoverished families and a highly self-reflective work of fiction. Agee and Evans themselves become self-critical characters, anxious about their inevitable status as privileged, middle-class voyeurs or “spies” positioned to exploit, by visualizing and voicing, the suffering of others. A work of what Agee called “antisociology,” Praise is a meditation on the ethics of representation, parodying the conventions of the “sharecropper book” and the naturalist presumptions of the documentary, and declaring its own shameful impotence in the face of a tragic human reality whose depths it can never fully witness, and which it can’t help but turn into art. In the process, Agee strains against the representational limits of his own prose: “If I could do it,” he explains, “I’d do no writing at all here.” Confined to language, but aimed at Being itself, Agee’s prose pushes outside of speech and toward song, or turns its narrating consciousness into an instrument of “sensuous knowledge” or a mechanical recording device (a “bodiless eye”), or merges with the symphonic cries of foxes. In many senses, Praise’s experimentalism testifies to the insight of a young Agee, who, while a budding poet and cinephile at Harvard, lamented to Dwight MacDonald how “every kind of recognized ‘art,’” including writing, “has been worked pretty near to the limit.” At his best, Agee pitched his writing at precisely that limit. SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (AF); SocialRealist Fiction (AF); The Southern Novel (AF); WPA and Popular Front Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Agee, J. (1934). Permit Me Voyage. New Haven: Yale University Press. Agee, J. (1941). Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (photo. W. Evans). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Agee, J. (1951). The Morning Watch. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Agee, J. (1957). A Death in the Family. New York: McDowell, Obolensky. Agee, J. (1958). Agee on Film, vol. 1: Reviews and Comments. Boston: Beacon. Agee, J. (1972). Collected Short Prose of James Agee (ed. R. Fitzgerald). London: Calder and Boyards. Agee, J. (1985). James Agee: Selected Journalism (ed. P. Ashdown). Chattanooga: University of Tennessee Press. Bergreen, L. (1984). James Agee: A Life. New York: E. P. Dutton. Entin, J. B. (2007). Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Lofaro, M. (1992). James Agee: Reconsiderations. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Rabinowitz, P. (1991). Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Stott, W. (1986). Documentary Expression and Thirties Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Suarez, J. A. (2006). Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Wranovics, J. (2005). Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of the Tramp, the Writer, and the Lost Screenplay. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Alexie, Sherman NANCY J. PETERSON
From the moment his first collection of poems and stories appeared in 1992, Spokane–Coeur d’Alene writer Sherman Alexie was hailed as an original voice among Native American writers. In fact, James Kincaid (1992), writing for the New York Times Book Review, recognized Alexie as “one of the major lyric voices of our time.” Since that auspicious review, Alexie has written and published four novels, three collections of short stories, two feature-length films, as well as several mixed-genre collections and volumes of poetry. His work has been acclaimed by Native and non-Native readers, reviewers, and scholars for its realistic portrayal of reservation life, its critique of stereotypes and identity politics, as well as its brilliant deployment of Indian humor. Born on October 7, 1966, in Spokane, Washington, Sherman Joseph Alexie, Jr. grew up in the town of Wellpinit on the Spokane Indian Reservation. He is Spokane through his
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mother and Coeur d’Alene through his father. Today, he lives in the city of Seattle with his wife, Diane, and their two sons, Joseph and David. Parallel to Alexie’s life, his early works typically are set on the reservation or in the Spokane area and explore the often thwarted desires of young Indian men, while his later works are set in Seattle and use the city to explore the lives of urban Indians – from the homeless to the upwardly mobile. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, published in 1993, offers a series of interrelated stories featuring three characters – Victor Joseph, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, and Junior Polatkin – young Indian men searching for ways to be warriors, leaders, and storytellers in the contemporary world. Alexie writes about reservation life unflinchingly, detailing such serious problems as alcoholism, poverty, and despair, while also honoring basketball, stories, humor, and affection as forces of survival and hope. Several of the stories depict the strength of Indian women to hold families together, and the complicated relationships between Indian fathers and sons, a theme that recurs in Alexie’s work, is particularly compelling in “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona.” This story became the basis for the 1998 acclaimed feature-length film Smoke Signals, which Alexie wrote the script for and co-produced. Victor, Thomas, and Junior reappear in Alexie’s 1995 novel, Reservation Blues, which begins when the legendary African American bluesman Robert Johnson comes to the Spokane Reservation in search of his soul. Johnson relinquishes his guitar, which propels Victor, Thomas, and Junior to form a band and write songs in a new musical genre – the “reservation blues.” The novel Indian Killer, published in 1996, represents a shift in Alexie’s work. Set primarily in Seattle, it narrates the story of a troubled character named John Smith, who was taken away from his Native mother at birth and adopted by a white couple, together with a mystery-detective plot about a racially motivated series of murders and hate crimes. Often called his darkest work, Indian Killer presents a bleak picture of Indian– white relations. The Toughest Indian in the World (2000) and Ten Little Indians (2003) have earned Alexie widespread recognition for his mastery of the short story form. Many of Alexie’s recent stories
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depict situations in which a character’s sense of Native identity is shaped by considerations of class, gender, and sexuality, as in the acclaimed title story “The Toughest Indian in the World,” in which a journalist of Spokane ancestry, but distanced from his people, has a sexual encounter with an Indian man, an encounter that is linked to a desire to see himself as a warrior. Alexie’s humane and sympathetic depiction of characters under duress, a quality that has elicited favorable comparisons to Raymond Carver, is most notable in “What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” a story from Ten Little Indians that follows a homeless, alcoholic Indian man on a quest to reclaim his grandmother’s regalia from a pawnshop. This story was selected for inclusion in both The Best American Short Stories 2004 and O. Henry Prize Stories 2005. Alexie’s novel Flight (2007b), inspired by Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, depicts a troubled Indian teenager nicknamed Zits, who participates in an armed robbery and becomes unstuck in time, causing him to drop into climactic moments of American Indian history. Despite his traumatic journeying, all ends well for Zits, and Alexie has commented that he wrote Flight to counteract the anger and bitterness of Indian Killer. Also published in 2007 was Alexie’s first novel targeted toward young adult readers: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007a). The novel, drawing on Alexie’s own experiences, features Arnold Spirit, Jr., who decides to leave the reservation to go to high school in a nearby, predominantly white town and, through various struggles, learns that it is possible to have two home towns and to walk in both worlds. Alexie won a 2007 National Book Award for The Absolutely True Diary of a PartTime Indian, and as this recent award indicates, Alexie occupies an increasingly important place in contemporary Native American and ethnic American literatures. SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); The Road Novel (AF); Vonnegut, Kurt (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Alexie, S. (1992). The Business of Fancydancing: Stories and Poems. New York: Hanging Loose.
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Alexie, S. (1993). The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press; (expanded edn. New York: Grove Press, 2005). Alexie, S. (1995). Reservation Blues. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Alexie, S. (1996). Indian Killer. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Alexie, S. (1998). Smoke Signals. Los Angeles: ShadowCatcher/Miramax. Alexie, S. (2000). The Toughest Indian in the World. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Alexie, S. (2003). Ten Little Indians. New York: Grove. Alexie, S. (2007a). The Absolutely True Diary of a PartTime Indian. New York: Little, Brown. Alexie, S. (2007b). Flight. New York: Black Cat/ Grove. Cox, J. H. (2006). Muting White Noise: Native American and European American Novel Traditions. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Cutter, M. J. (2005). Lost and Found in Translation: Contemporary Ethnic American Writing and the Politics of Language Diversity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Grassian, D. (2005). Understanding Sherman Alexie. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Hollrah, P. E. M. (2004). “The Old Lady Trill, the Victory Yell”: The Power of Women in Native American Literature. New York: Routledge. Kincaid, J. R. (1992). Who Gets to Tell Their Stories? New York Times Book Review, pp. 1, 24–29 (May 3). Vonnegut, K. (1969). Slaughterhouse-Five, or the Children’s Crusade. New York: Dell.
Algren, Nelson BILL SAVAGE
Nelson Algren began his writing career in the depths of the Great Depression. Like many writers of his generation, he had been radicalized, and he set out to write literature which would enable people to see, and change, the world. But the world changed in a different direction, and his career was derailed by the rightward drift of American literary politics, and so despite his many accomplishments, he remains an outsider in American literature, often recalled more for his affair with Simone de Beauvoir than for literary accomplishments. His first novel, Somebody in Boots (1935), told the picaresque story of Cass McCay, a petty criminal from East Texas, wandering from New Orleans to Chicago’s Century of Progress
World’s Fair. With his second novel, Never Come Morning (1942), Algren found his subject matter and his voice: the Polish American immigrants of Chicago’s near northwest side, and their vernacular language—the speech of street corners, police lineups, bars, and back-alley poker rooms. Like his friends and fellow Chicago realists James T. Farrell and Richard Wright, Algren staked out his literary neighborhood, and created an enduring portrait of industrial Chicago and American culture. His 1947 collection of short stories, The Neon Wilderness, added to his growing reputation for finely crafted fiction which engaged with the key political and social issues of the day. As he would later write in an afterword to Chicago: City on the Make, he believed that “literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity” (81). Throughout his career, Algren asserted that it was the writer’s job to give a voice to the voiceless. Unlike many of his contemporaries, such as Farrell or Saul Bellow or his long-time lover, Simone de Beauvoir, Algren never wrote fiction about writers or intellectuals; he maintained an unrelenting focus on America’s outsiders, the Lumpenproletariat, who suffered from “the great secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the one land where ownership and virtue are one” (Man With the Golden Arm, 1949, 19). Algren made this critique most vividly and subtly in The Man With the Golden Arm, which won the first National Book Award; with this accomplishment, Algren seemed poised to join the canon of American fiction. Algren’s depiction of Frankie Machine, morphine addict and dealer in an illegal card game, portrays Chicago on the edge of its postwar transformation. Frankie’s relationships with his wife Sophie, his sidekick Sparrow, his friend Antek, and his nemesis Captain Bednar take place in a richly evoked urban setting changing in ways none of the characters can quite identify. The tragedy of Frankie’s life, his inability to live authentically, links the novel to key works of existentialism, and with its finely wrought (almost overwrought) prose is a unique contribution to American literature. But that contribution would be marginalized due to the conformist political atmosphere of McCarthyism, with its Red Scares and blacklists. Literary culture in America turned away from
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direct political engagement to the safe academic haven of formalism, and conservative critics like Alfred Kazin, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman Podhoretz panned Algren’s satiric 1956 novel AWalk on the Wild Side as warmed-over 1930s proletarian melodrama. This critical attack was ironic, given that Wild Side is a revision of Somebody in Boots, made because Algren believed that direct political fiction was no longer desired or effective in Eisenhower’s America. His grim tragedy of 1933 became satiric high farce, and yet was dismissed nonetheless by critics unable or unwilling to look past its setting, Depression-era New Orleans, and its cast of hookers, panderers, con men, and thieves. This critical reversal left Algren unable to get an advance to write another big novel. He was not financially astute, and so had made little money on the film adaptations of The Man With the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side. He also suffered a crisis of faith in his readers, believing that the sort of fiction he wanted to write no longer had an audience. For most of the rest of his career, he made a living by reselling old stories to new magazines, and with occasional journalism and book reviews. This phase in Algren’s career also shows most clearly what his close friend Studs Terkel insists is Algren’s most salient characteristic: his sense of humor. However dark or brutal the situation, Algren always sees the humanizing humor in it—the power of laughter to ridicule power and injustice, and to enable people to connect across the barriers of race, ethnicity, and class which divide them. Nelson Algren’s work combined every key aspect of American fiction. He had the social conscience and political intent of the naturalist writers of his generation, like Conroy, John Steinbeck, Farrell, and Wright. He expressed his vision of American urban culture with the writerly precision and care of the modernists who were his other models, especially F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Finally, he spoke in the American vernacular, the rollicking, wideopen language that realists since Mark Twain had made available to American writers and readers. He combined these powerful traditions in a series of novels and short stories which express a unique vision of America, a dark vision brightened with humor and an insistence that, as one character in The Man With the Golden
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Arm put it, “We are all members of one another” (196). SEE ALSO: Bellow, Saul (AF); The City in Fiction (AF); Farrell, James. T. (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); WPA and Popular Front Fiction (AF); Wright, Richard (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Algren, N. (1935). Somebody in Boots. New York: Vanguard. Algren, N. (1942). Never Come Morning. New York: Harper. Algren, N. (1947). The Neon Wilderness. New York: Doubleday. Algren, N. (1949). The Man With the Golden Arm. New York: Doubleday. Algren, N. (1951). Chicago: City on the Make. New York: Doubleday. Algren, N. (1956). A Walk on the Wild Side. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. Algren, N. (1962). Nelson Algren’s Own Book of Lonesome Monsters. New York: Lancer. Algren, N. (1963). Who Lost an American? New York: Macmillan. Algren, N.(with Donohue, H. E. F.) (1965). Conversations With Nelson Algren. New York: Hill and Wang. Algren, N. (1965). Notes From a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way. New York: Putnam’s. Algren, N. (1973). The Last Carousel. New York: Putnam’s. Algren, N. (1983). The Devil’s Stocking. New York: Arbor House. Algren, N. (1996). Nonconformity: Writing on Writing. New York: Seven Stories. Algren, N. (2009). Entrapment and Other Writings. New York: Seven Stories. Cappetti, C. (1993). Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography and the Novel. New York: Columbia University Press. Drew, B. (1989). Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side. New York: Putnam’s. Giles, J. R. (1989). Confronting the Horror: The Novels of Nelson Algren. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Rotella, C. (1998). October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ward, R. E. (2005). Nelson Algren: A Collection of Critical Essays. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
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Anaya, Rudolfo ALEX HUNT
Rudolfo Anaya is known as the “godfather” of Chicano literature. Since his 1972 novel Bless Me, Ultima, he has been a prolific writer of fiction, non-fiction, drama, and poetry as well as an editor and scholar. Anaya’s magical realist fiction is set in and deeply engaged with the US Southwest and features Chicano characters, creating a powerful sense of place. Thematically and stylistically, Anaya’s fiction strives for a hybrid fusion of European and indigenous American ideas and forms. While his efforts in this respect occasionally go too far in search of Jungian-style universal archetypes, at his best Anaya balances the experience of common humanity with the culturally and politically specific concerns of Chicanos of the American Southwest. Rudolfo Alfonso Anaya was born in Pastura, New Mexico in 1937 and grew up in Santa Rosa before his family moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1952. He later attended the University of New Mexico, where he earned a BA (1963) and an MA in English (1968). After teaching high school, he became a professor of creative writing at the University of New Mexico in 1974, a position from which he retired in 1993. Bless Me, Ultima is a novel contemporaneous with the Chicano movement and its cultural nationalist reappropriation of the Southwest as Aztlan, the ancestral homeland of the Aztec and spiritual homeland of Chicanos. Combining the Bildungsroman and Chicano folklore through the prism of magical realism, Bless Me, Ultima is the first-person account of growing up Chicano in World War II-era rural New Mexico, finding identity between the institutions of church and school and between indigenous and colonial ancestries. The novel won the Premio Quinto Sol award in 1971 and is the most celebrated of the Chicano novels of the Civil Rights era. Bless Me, Ultima was followed by two other novels, Heart of Aztlan (1976) and Tortuga (1979), which continue in the Bildungsroman form and which weave personal, cultural, and mythical narratives. Heart of Aztlan follows the Chavez family from rural New Mexico to Albuquerque, documenting a post-World War II urban migration of Chicanos in the Southwest. Tortuga narrates the healing process of an adolescent boy
confined to a body cast in a children’s hospital and involves his spiritual and emotional maturation. All three novels bear comparison to Anaya’s early life experiences. Ultima and subsequent novels occasionally face criticism from Chicano scholars and activists seeking a more overtly politically engaged social realism from Chicano artists, criticism that Anaya has refuted in favor of his mythopoetic project of creating Chicano identity. In the 1980s, Anaya’s work demonstrates an increasingly expansive literary exploration of the historical, geographical, and imaginative space of Chicano identity. The novellas The Legend of La Llorona (1984) and Lord of the Dawn (1987) and the narrative poem The Adventures of Juan Chicaspatas (1985) rework Chicano and Mexican folklore and myth, while A Chicano in China (1986) is a travelogue of Anaya’s travels to the Far East. These works dramatize ideas that Anaya articulates in essays like “The New World Man” (1989) and “Aztlan: A Homeland without Boundaries” (1989), republished in The Anaya Reader (1995a), for the future of Chicanos. Alburquerque (1992), winner of the 1993 PEN West award, is noteworthy for its engagement with the city’s political power structure and its economic development struggles, counterposed against the story of a young man in search of his biological parents. Anaya continues with his contemporary Albuquerque setting with the Sonny Baca detective novel tetralogy – Zia Summer (1995b), Rio Grande Fall (1996), Shaman Winter (1999), and Jemez Spring (2005) – in which Baca travels the pueblos and barrios solving sinister and supernatural crimes, inevitably perpetuated by his archnemesis, Raven. In addition to these recent works, Anaya has continued his writing of children’s and young adults’ books, including Elegy on the Death of Cesar Chavez (2000) and Curse of the ChupaCabra (2006). Writing for all age groups and through numerous genres, Anaya continues to validate and celebrate Chicano experience. Anaya’s illustrious career has brought him much recognition, including the 1997 Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western Literature Association and, in 2001, the National Medal of Arts in literature and the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award. Anaya’s achievement has been his affirmations of Chicano identity, of cultural hybridity as a source of pride
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and strength, and of connection to place. Yet place, for Anaya, means understanding home as a global crossroads, a borderlands of ecological, mythical, and cultural complexity. SEE ALSO: Border Fictions (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Anaya, R. (1972). Bless Me, Ultima. Berkeley: Tonatiuh International. Anaya, R. (1976). Heart of Aztlan. Berkeley: Editorial Justa. Anaya, R. (1979). Tortuga. Berkeley: Editorial Justa. Anaya, R. (1984). The Silence of the Llano. Berkeley: Tonatiuh/Quinto Sol International. Anaya, R.(with Lomeli, F.) (1986). A Chicano in China. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Anaya, R. (1989). Aztlan: Essays on the Chicano Homeland. Albuquerque, NM: El Norte. Anaya, R. (1992). Alburquerque. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Anaya, R. (1995a). The Anaya Reader. New York: Warner. Anaya, R. (1995b). Zia Summer. New York: Warner. Anaya, R. (1996). Rio Grande Fall. New York: Warner. Anaya, R. (1999). Shaman Winter. New York: Warner. Anaya, R. (2005). Jemez Spring. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Dick, B., & Sirias, S. (eds.) (1998). Conversations with Rudolfo Anaya. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Gonzalez-T., C. A. (ed.) (1990). Rudolfo A. Anaya: Focus on Criticism. La Jolla, CA: Lalo Press. Fernandez Olmos, M. (1999). Rudolfo A. Anaya: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Gish, R. F. (1997). Rudolfo A. Anaya. In T. J. Lyon (ed.), Updating the Literary West. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, pp. 532–36. Hunt, A. (2005). In Search of Anaya’s Carp: Mapping Ecological Consciousness and Chicano Myth. ISLE, 12(2), 179–206.
Anderson, Sherwood JUDITH BROWN
Sherwood Anderson’s writing career took off with the 1919 publication of his third book, Winesburg, Ohio, when he was 43. From that moment, he exerted a profound influence over a generation of young writers, including Ernest
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Hemingway and William Faulkner, who looked to his small-town sketches as a model for modern American writing. Anderson offered a fresh approach to characterization, plot, and the frank depiction of sexuality, and his work expressed something of the anxiety and loneliness brought about by an increasingly mechanized twentieth century. Anderson’s position in the literary world, however, would not be evenly sustained throughout his lifetime or after. Despite his seven novels, six volumes of essays, two plays, two collections of poetry, three published collections of stories, and three memoirs, Anderson’s enduring legacy remains that of his short story cycle, Winesburg, Ohio. Born in Camden, Ohio on September 13, 1876, Anderson’s childhood was remarkable only for its migrations across rural Ohio as his father found work, first as a harness maker, then as a house painter. He would move to Chicago in 1896, taking a number of unskilled jobs before enlisting as a private in the Spanish–American War. This experience expanded his worldview, allowing him to see some of the American South, and Cuba. He returned to Chicago, this time finding work at an advertising firm, then eventually in 1907 he established a manufacturing business in Elyria, Ohio, where he moved with his wife and children. It was at his factory that he made his break from conventional life on November 27, 1912, an event that he would later narrate as central in his formation as a writer. He claimed he faked a nervous collapse in order to escape his stultifying life, yet records suggest that Anderson was admitted to a hospital four days after this episode. Nevertheless, from here he would forge his new persona as a modern American writer. Anderson moved back to Chicago and found himself in an exciting intellectual atmosphere permeated by socialist discourse and literary ambition. There he met Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, and Margaret Anderson, and participated in what would later be called the Chicago Renaissance. He continued to work in advertising while he wrote two novels, Windy McPherson’s Son (1916) and Marching Men (1917), and his first collection of poetry, Mid-American Chants (1918). In these, Anderson established his lifelong literary interest in small-town life, the dignity of the laborer, and the poetry of the vernacular.
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In the years 1919 through 1923, Anderson would publish what would prove to be his best works: Winesburg, Ohio (1919); a novel, Poor White (1920); and two collections of stories, The Triumph of the Egg (1921) and Horses and Men (1923a). Nothing, however, would top Winesburg, his collection of 23 linked stories that announced a new approach to fictional technique. Beginning with “The Book of the Grotesque,” he presented an array of eccentric characters (the “grotesques”), united in their vivid characterization and air of defeatedness, as well as by a central character, a young reporter named George Willard at the cusp of adulthood. Anderson did not shy away from the open depiction of sexuality – something some critics would decry – and suggested a spectrum of sexual desires. His stories delved into the repercussions of both the engagement and suppression of desire. “Hands,” for example, gives a sympathetic account of Wing Biddlebaum, whose love for his students and expressive hands lead to an accusation of pederasty. Biddlebaum retreats to Winesburg, where he spends his life trying to quell the life force of his hands, and thereby his shame. Winesburg would signal a new era in American literature, and a commitment to the inarticulate, frustrated lives lived on the peripheries of society. Some of these themes carry over to the stories collected in Triumph of the Egg and Horses and Men. Anderson’s stories, in particular, met with critical acclaim and made him, during this period, a “writer’s writer.” One frequently anthologized story, “The Egg,” chronicles the tragicomic life of a rural man who banks on his deformed chickens and egg tricks to bring him fortune. Another, “The Man Who Became a Woman,” offers the story of developing adolescent sexuality in the muscular and sexually charged atmosphere of the race track. In both, Anderson depicts the fragility of human experience against a harsh and money-driven society. Anderson’s fascination with literary form and the depiction of desire would be visible throughout his career. Indeed, he would ask, “What of the sensual love of life, of surfaces, words with a rich flavor on the tongue, colors, the soft texture of the skin of women, the play of muscles through the bodies of men?” (1924, 80). In Anderson’s ques-
tion, one might hear multiple literary influences at work, including the commitment to the sensual lives of all men and women advocated by Walt Whitman. One also hears, in the attention to the surfaces of words—their texture and form divorced from meaning—the influence of Gertrude Stein. Anderson befriended Stein, whom he met on two trips to Europe in the 1920s, and admired her efforts to simplify and thus cut away the deadening past from the literature of the present. Anderson admired Stein’s Three Lives and would share the fascination with race and sexuality presented in the centerpiece story, “Melanctha.” Echoes of D. H. Lawrence also resonate in Anderson’s formulation of primitive vitality and his insistence on imagining sexuality without shame. More than these writers, however, Anderson’s work conveys the persistence of loneliness in modern life, and the failed venture of sex as communication. By the early 1920s, Anderson had achieved both financial and critical success. His friends included the photographer Alfred Stieglitz and the painter Georgia O’Keeffe, and his trips to Europe brought him into contact with leading writers, including James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ernest Hemingway, whose own career was gaining ground, made Anderson his mentor, as William Faulkner would later do. Anderson’s position within the modern literary movement reached its zenith in the 1920s, and would enter into a period of steady decline over the next several years. This decline may have begun with Anderson’s critically panned novel, Many Marriages (1923b), but certainly the publication of Dark Laughter (1925) – his only bestseller, but a critical flop – harmed his reputation. The novel covered now familiar ground: the escape of a middle-class man from the stultifying effects of conventional life into a primitive playground along the banks of the Mississippi River. Bohemian modernists meet naturally vital African Americans in Anderson’s narrative, which presents a view of race that was quickly becoming its own cliche in the 1920s. Hemingway wrote a parody of the novel, Torrents of Spring, in 1926 which loudly announced his break from his former mentor and publicly humiliated Anderson. Despite the appearance of a third strong collection of stories in 1933, Death in
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the Woods, and the particular beauty of its title story, Anderson’s readership dwindled throughout the 1930s. Like the protagonist of Dark Laughter, Bruce Dudley, Anderson became more peripatetic, leaving Chicago for New York; then New Orleans, where he lived for a short time with Faulkner; then moving in 1927 to Marion, Virginia with his third wife. He built a house he called “Ripshin” and bought two newspapers. Anderson threw himself into newspaper life, writing about all order of local events, and eventually creating a fictional reporter named Buck Fever. During this period, he was divorced and remarried. His interests turned toward the poor and disadvantaged; Anderson with his fourth wife began to travel throughout the South, visiting factories and mills, and writing about labor conditions. His concern about poor working conditions found its way into his writing, including his newspaper sketches in Hello Towns (1929), his essays collected in Puzzled America (1935), and his novels Beyond Desire (1932) and Kit Brandon (1936). During his lifetime, Anderson published two autobiographical narratives: A Story Teller’s Story (1924) that chronicled his life up until 1923, and Tar: A Midwest Childhood (1926), in which he filtered his own experiences through a character he named Tar Moorehead. Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs (1942) were unfinished at the time of his death and published posthumously. Anderson died of peritonitis while en route to South America on March 8, 1941. Anderson anticipated the arc of his career in 1924 when he wrote, “In the end I had become a teller of tales. I liked my job. Sometimes I did it fairly well and sometimes I blundered horribly” (1924, 409). Most critics agree with Malcolm Cowley’s estimation that Anderson’s work was “desperately uneven” (Cowley 1992, 1). Any account of Anderson’s place in literary history must encompass both this patchwork record and his undisputed literary success, particularly in the form of the modern short story. With the publication of a two-volume biography in 2006, new attention to Anderson’s contributions to the short story form, interest in his renderings of race and sexuality, and a recognition of the significance of his late writings, there is promise for renewed study of this important early-twentieth-century writer.
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SEE ALSO: Faulkner, William (AF); Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); Stein, Gertrude (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Anderson, S. (1916). Windy McPherson’s Son. New York: John Lane. Anderson, S. (1917). Marching Men. New York: John Lane. Anderson, S. (1918). Mid-American Chants. New York: John Lane. Anderson, S. (1919). Winesburg, Ohio. New York: B. W. Heubsch. Anderson, S. (1920). Poor White. New York: B. W. Heubsch. Anderson, S. (1921). Triumph of the Egg. New York: B. W. Heubsch. Anderson, S. (1923a). Horses and Men. New York: B. W. Heubsch. Anderson, S. (1923b). Many Marriages. New York: B. W. Heubsch. Anderson, S. (1924). A Story Teller’s Story. New York: B. W. Heubsch. Anderson, S. (1925). Dark Laughter. New York: Boni and Liveright. Anderson, S. (1926). Tar: A Midwest Childhood. New York: Boni and Liveright. Anderson, S. (1929). Hello Towns. New York: Liveright. Anderson, S. (1932). Beyond Desire. New York: Liveright. Anderson, S. (1933). Death in the Woods. New York: Liveright. Anderson, S. (1935). Puzzled America. New York: Scribner’s. Anderson, S. (1936). Kit Brandon. New York: Scribner’s. Anderson, S. (1942). Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Brown, J. (2007). A Certain Laughter: Sherwood Anderson’s Experiment in Form. Modernist Cultures, 2(2), 132–44. Conner, M. C. (2001). Fathers and Sons: Winesburg, Ohio and the Revision of Modernism. Studies in American Fiction, 29(2), 209–38. Cowley, M. (1992). Introduction to Winesburg, Ohio. New York: Penguin. Ellis, J. (1993). Sherwood Anderson’s Fear of Sexuality: Horses, Men, and Homosexuality. Studies in Short Fiction, 30(4), 595–601. Dunne, R. (2005). A New Book of Grotesques: Contemporary Approaches to Sherwood Anderson’s Early Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.
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Rideout, W. B. (2006). Sherwood Anderson: A Writer in America, vols. 1–2. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Townsend, K. (1987). Sherwood Anderson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Whalan, M. (2002). Dreams of Manhood: Narrative, Gender, and History in Winesburg, Ohio. Studies in American Fiction, 30(2), 229–48.
Auster, Paul DAVID COUGHLAN
Paul Auster is a poet, essayist, filmmaker, and, above all, novelist whose philosophical and frequently metafictional works have won popular and critical acclaim for the restrained beauty of their storytelling. Auster was born February 3, 1947 in Newark, New Jersey, the grandson of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. After graduating from Columbia University, he lived in France for over three years, returning to New York in July 1974. Later that same year, he married Lydia Davis, also a writer, with whom he has a son, Daniel. Accounts of these times, and of the extreme financial difficulties which marked them, are given in autobiographical writings in the collections The Art of Hunger (1997a) and Hand to Mouth (1997b), while autobiographical allusions appear often in Auster’s fiction as well. Between 1974 and 1980, Auster wrote four oneact plays and published six collections of poetry. Influenced especially by the American objectivists, Paul Celan, and the French surrealists, Auster’s poetry has received less critical attention than his prose. However, it establishes key themes around language and the self found in his novels too. Lines written in 1967, “The world is in my head. My body is in the world” (Auster 2004a), affirm that any experience of the world is defined by the words used to represent it, but that the material world exceeds the limits of that language. Auster has the body mediate between words and world, resulting in recurring motifs in his work of food and hunger (relating to the ideal transparency of the body), the room (where the body writes in solitude), and the city (where the body is alienated from society by the failure of language). Auster describes the dance-inspired White Spaces (1979) as his bridge between writing poetry and writing prose. It also happened that he fin-
ished it on the night his father died, and it was in response to that loss that Auster wrote his first published prose work, a memoir, The Invention of Solitude (1982). Auster came to prominence with his next three novels, the remarkable City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), and The Locked Room (1986), together published as The New York Trilogy (1987a). Termed postmodern detective stories, these novels play with their generic conventions even as In the Country of Last Things (1987b), where Anna Blume searches for her brother; Moon Palace (1989), about the orphan M. S. Fogg; and The Music of Chance (1990), about the final consequences of a lost card game, work as variations on dystopian fiction, the picaresque, and the road novel, respectively. Leviathan (1992), about an American terrorist; Mr Vertigo (1994), about a boy who can fly; and Timbuktu (1999), a dog’s tale, reinforced his reputation as an original and clever writer. Although Auster considers himself a realist, the reality of his novels, influenced by Samuel Beckett, Maurice Blanchot, Miguel de Cervantes, Knut Hamsun, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Franz Kafka, and Edgar Allan Poe, includes absurdity, grotesques, and uncanny doubles. As in The Book of Illusions (2002) and Oracle Night (2004b), characters are often removed from the everyday by an inheritance, illness, or loss before chance intervenes to re-engage them in a process of self-authoring. That these characters learn to live again might suggest that despair, nihilism, and hopelessness no longer motivate his work as Auster once maintained (Barone 1995), but even the lifesustaining happiness of Nathan Glass at the end of The Brooklyn Follies (2005) is not unqualified. Indeed, the pervasively intertextual Travels in the Scriptorium (2006) concerns a writer’s guilt and enforced life sentence in a locked room. Auster is the recipient of numerous awards. His work, sometimes accused by American critics of emptiness or repetitiveness, is applauded in Europe and widely translated. Auster is himself a translator; has edited The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry (1984), the NPR National Story Project anthology I Thought My Father Was God (2001), and Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition (2006); and wrote, under the pseudonym Paul Benjamin, the crime thriller Squeeze Play (1982). He has worked as a director on four films, notably Smoke (1995) with Wayne
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Wang, and as a screenwriter on nine, including adaptations of The Music of Chance (1993) and In the Country of Last Things (2008). Artistic collaborations include City of Glass: The Graphic Novel (1994) with Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, Double Game (1998) with Sophie Calle, The Story of My Typewriter (2002) with Sam Messer, and The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2006) with Glenn Thomas. His manuscripts have been acquired by the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library. Auster lives and writes in Brooklyn with his second wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt, with whom he has a daughter, Sophie.
Barone, D. (ed.) (1995). Beyond The Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bloom, H. (ed.) (2004). Paul Auster. Philadelphia: Chelsea House. Brown, M. (2007). Paul Auster. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Herzogenrath, B. (1999). An Art of Desire: Reading Paul Auster. Postmodern Studies 21. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); DeLillo, Don (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); The Road Novel (AF); Spiegelman, Art (AF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (AF)
The term “avant garde” is typically applied to works of writing in reference to individual writers or groups of artists oriented toward a programmatically defined artistic movement, and especially toward one of the competing “isms” (e.g., cubism, futurism, or surrealism) that proliferated from the early twentieth century on. This orientation toward a movement, or at least toward a definite theoretical and ideological position expressed by their artistic activity, implies that certain genres of literature, seen as more suited to avant garde functions, have tended to be favored over others by these writers. For example, as critics such as Marjorie Perloff, Janet Lyon, and Martin Puchner have demonstrated, the new genre of “manifesto” appeared tailor-made, both formally and rhetorically, to express the avant garde’s provocative, activist aspirations. In addition, since avant gardes typically, at least at their outset, stand in a marginal, oppositional relation toward mainstream literature and its institutions, they have usually had to make use of publication venues with limited readerships and little hope of commercial support, such as the small press, the little magazine, and the chapbook. Both for intrinsic and extrinsic reasons, literary avant gardes have above all favored brief, immediate, and more rapidly produced forms such as the manifesto and the lyric poem, as well as forms of theater and performance that can be staged or published at little expense, and that directly affect their audience without further mediation or delay. Because of its length, the long duration of its production, its solid tradition of conventions, its relatively great expense for publisher and reader, and its indirect communication through fictive
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Auster, P. (1982). The Invention of Solitude. New York: Sun Press. Auster, P. (1987a). The New York Trilogy. London: Faber and Faber. Auster, P. (1987b). In the Country of Last Things. New York: Viking Penguin. Auster, P. (1989). Moon Palace. New York: Viking Penguin. Auster, P. (1990). The Music of Chance. New York: Viking Penguin. Auster, P. (1992). Leviathan. New York: Viking Penguin. Auster, P. (1994). Mr Vertigo. London: Faber and Faber. Auster, P. (1997a). The Art of Hunger: Essays, Prefaces, Interviews and The Red Notebook. New York: Penguin. Auster, P. (1997b). Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure. New York: Henry Holt. Auster, P. (1999). Timbuktu. London: Faber and Faber. Auster, P. (2002). The Book of Illusions. New York: Henry Holt. Auster, P. (2004a). Collected Poems. Woodstock, NY: Overlook. Auster, P. (2004b). Oracle Night. New York: Henry Holt. Auster, P. (2005). The Brooklyn Follies. London: Faber and Faber. Auster, P. (2006). Travels in the Scriptorium. London: Faber and Faber. Auster, P. (2008). Man in the Dark. New York: Henry Holt.
The Avant Garde Novel TYRUS MILLER
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“worlds,” the novel has thus often been seen as too unwieldy, too mediated, and too expensive to be well adapted to literary avant gardism. Nevertheless, there are novels that have been influenced in significant ways by their authors’ attempts to realize directly, within the form of the novel, the artistic innovations of canonical avant garde movements such as cubism (for example, Gertrude Stein), dadaism (early William Carlos Williams, Robert Coates’s The Eater of Darkness [1924]), and surrealism (Mina Loy in her uncompleted novel Insel [1991]). Moreover, there has been a very strong tendency of writers working primarily in lyric poetry – from Williams and E. E. Cummings to John Ashbery and James Schuyler – to cross over to the longer prose forms typically associated with and generically identified as “the novel.” Finally, without any direct connection with particular avant garde tendencies, but affected by the innovative dynamism in form and style characteristic of twentieth-century art in general, the conventional form of the novel too has been subjected to “avant gardistic” interventions, and new techniques and contents have been introduced that resonate with the broader activities of the avant garde. It would hardly be an exaggeration to assert that Gertrude Stein stands as a point of departure for a major part of the avant garde formal and stylistic innovations developed following her composition of Three Lives (composed 1905–6) and The Making of Americans (composed 1906–9). Especially in her massive “family’s progress” The Making of Americans, she not only exhibited the changes in the character and cohesion of American families as they moved into twentieth-century modernity, but also dramatized how these modernizing changes dissolved the infrastructure of traditional narrative at its social roots: the rhythmic patterning of time that resided in the continuity of generations and in the habits of everyday life. Stein began her book with a more or less conventional family story using an obtrusive but familiar enough narrator. But by the time less than a quarter of the novel’s more than 900 pages have passed, an analytic, schematizing, typologizing consciousness has taken command, an authorial “arranger” who is more concerned with the abstract combinations of psychological qualities of her characters than in narratively developing the fictive persons themselves. Narra-
tive time slows to a halt and a new time takes over: the time that slowly passes for the reader as the narrator enumerates the various permutations that are possible from certain basic emotional traits. Even this last trace of “character,” however, is exhausted in the course of these enumerations, so that by the last quarter of the novel, any momentum and interest have shifted to the grammatical and rhythmic variation of the sentences as such. This transition from a fictional world occupied by fictive persons to a purely linguistic, grammatical space in which only words move is one of Stein’s most important legacies to twentieth-century writing. In this regard, Stein’s works have proven inspirational for many later writers who occupy a border zone between poetry, performance, and narrative prose, including Robert Creeley’s prose improvisations in Mabel: A Story (1988), David Antin’s “talk poems” set as unpunctuated prose, Robert Ashley’s “television opera” Perfect Lives, John Ashbery’s Three Poems (1991), Ron Silliman’s Ketjak (1978) and Tjanting (1981), and Leslie Scalapino’s prose trilogy The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion (1997). Another aspect of Stein’s work, however, proved even more germinal for later writers of the avant garde novel: her nominalistic play with the conventions of existing and invented genres, from the “novel” itself to her unconventional “plays,” “operas,” “how to” books, “portraits,” and “valentines.” In this regard, however, even at her most avant garde, she tapped into one of the deep historical veins of the novelistic genre itself : its omnivorous borrowing from other sorts of literary and non-literary discourse and its renewal of its formal conventions by incorporating discourses apparently foreign to its forms. In the history of the novel, as the Russian formalist theorist Viktor Shklovsky and his contemporary Mikhail Bakhtin both emphasized, a wide range of formal elements, from philosophical dialogues to speeches and essays to lyric poetry to folktales to documentary data, may pass through the wide, flexible boundaries of this mega-genre. Stein’s experimental avant gardism, which moves between essay and grammatical exercise, from captured voices to musical sound-play, in this sense simply updates a highly traditional aspect of the novel with new material. It also makes this inner clash of generic elements an important part of the “content” of her novels. As
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“story” disappears, the drama of formal elements clashing and connecting in new ways takes over in its place. Stein’s example of using fragments of different generic features as constructive building blocks of new texts proved extremely productive for her younger contemporaries and those who have followed her example, up to the present day. For example, already by the 1920s and 1930s, William Carlos Williams in his mixed-genre poetry-proseessayistic works such as Kora in Hell (1920), Spring and All (1923), In the American Grain (1925), and The Great American Novel (1923), and e. e. cummings in his novel-memoirs The Enormous Room (1949) and Eimi (1933), had added important complements to their more purely lyric oeuvres, prose works that in many respects were even more daring and unconventional than their verse. Within this earlier, modernist context, another striking example of a work that uses generic hybridization as its fulcrum for literary innovation is Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), which binds together lyrical character sketches, short narratives, verse, and song in a rhapsodic form that eschews traditional novelistic structure. In another vein, Nathanael West’s first short novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), is a parodic “anatomy” whose pseudo-epic hero enters literary history through the anus of the Trojan Horse and passes through generic realms of philosophical speculation, mystical hagiography, diaries, pamphlets, letters, dramatic dialogue, biography, and the epistolary novel. Such generic hybrids also inspired later writers like Jack Spicer in the second part of his poetic sequence The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether (1975), which is written in Stein-like short “books” and “chapters” and bears the title A Fake Novel About the Life of Arthur Rimbaud (1965); LeRoi Jones in The System of Dante’s Hell (1973); David Antin in After the War: A Long Novel With Few Words (1984); Nathaniel Mackey in his serial epistolary novels Bedouin Hornbook (1993), Djbot Baghostus’s Run (2001), Atet A.D. (2008), and Bass Cathedral (1982); Kathy Acker in Great Expectations (1986), My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1986a), and Don Quixote (1985); Robert Gluck in Jack the Modernist (1994) and Margery Kempe (1998); Dodie Bellamy in The Letters of Mina Harker (1980); and Lyn Hejinian in My Life and Oxota: A Short Russian Novel
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(1991), which is formally a book-length sequence of short verse lyrics. Another impulse toward innovation in the avant garde novel and related new prose forms was the exploration of the new psychology of the twentieth century as a source of formal and thematic ideas, including Freudian and other psychoanalytic conceptions of the unconscious, psychic “automatism,” psychopathologies, and drug experiences. In Kora in Hell, for example, Williams developed his text out of rapid nighttime improvisations, to which he added commentaries, such as a psychoanalyst might have given to a dream protocol or a piece of automatic writing. The title implies that he saw these as a descent into the infernal underworld of his everyday mind to recapture something lost or imprisoned there. A similar metaphor is implied by the title of Djuna Barnes’s extravagantly stylized novel of obsessive, unhappy passion, Nightwood (1937). Each of Barnes’s characters wanders in the dark forest of their own intense longings – their insatiable desire for love, for possession, for recognition, for redemption, or for oblivion. At the frustrated, tragic terminus of their quest, Barnes exposes the archaic core of the interior voice that haunted them. Mixing highly lyrical imagery, ribald and even obscene satire, and a near-absence of narrative incident, Barnes captures the inner pulse of characters who have become progressively unmoored from social norms, and ever more consumed by a spreading spiritual and psychic darkness. In his novels Naked Lunch (1959), The Soft Machine (1969), Nova Express (1969), and The Ticket That Exploded (1967), William Burroughs utilized a highly disjunctive “cut-up” form to create a dystopian science fiction, a satirical world in which surveillance, torture, drug addiction, and sexual perversity are all part of a single self-contradictory system of social control. As he indicated in the introduction to his Naked Lunch, his intention was to bring the content of these dark, obscene, enslaving forces to light, exposing the “naked lunch” that corresponded to our bodily and psychic hungers, “a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork” (p. xxxvii). A related field of inquiry, investigating subjective experience and its divergence from standard narrative and stylistic conventions of traditional novelistic prose, might be called “phenomenological” in its orientation: relating
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the writer’s interests to the forms of immediate appearance of space, time, speech, bodily feeling, and the emotions. These concerns connected strongly with parallel explorations in the visual and performance arts, as well as in new forms of technological mediation such as cinema, video, and digital media. Phenomenological concerns, for example, constituted a major aspect of classic modern novels in the use of “stream-ofconsciousness” techniques. In The Sound and the Fury (1929), thus, William Faulkner explored how four different characters, from the mentally handicapped Benjy to the melancholic Quentin, experienced their environment in different ways, emphasizing different sensory aspects and ascribing different meanings to common things and events. Robert Creeley’s novel The Island (1988), like his short fiction in The Gold Diggers (1988) and much of his verse as well, sensitively registers the rises and falls of the characters’ inner feelings in ways that mark not just the style of the story, but also even the description of “objective” elements such as incident and outer appearance. An even more radical instance of this phenomenological orientation, directly connected with avant garde tendencies in the visual arts, is Madeline Gins’s novel Helen Keller or Arakawa (1994), which takes the deaf-mute figure Helen Keller as a first-person narrator of her own experience of the world. With chapters bearing titles such as “Thinking Field,” “Every Millennium Is an Instant,” and “Tissues of Density,” Gins seeks to occupy Helen Keller’s experienced world from within, exploring the relations of embodiment, perception, and language, which stand in a different relation of correspondence than in sighted people. The manifest forms of visual and auditory perception, and the linguistic references they undergird, are not available to Helen Keller; she must use abstraction, circumlocution, and perceptual and conceptual metaphor to express her experience of an only partially accessible world. In doing so, however, Keller gives descriptions that in turn evoke the conceptual artworks of Madeline Gins’s partner, the artist Arakawa, whose corresponding works are even referenced in notes to passages of Keller’s text. In another mode, Jack Kerouac in Visions of Cody (1972) and Andy Warhol in a: A Novel (1968) both utilize the encounter of the human voice, the tape recorder, and drugs to transcribe literal instances of speech
and spoken thought, which differ wildly from the tidied-up patterns of dialogue, response, and meditation one finds in traditional novels. A final area of formal experimentation in the novel is the use of arbitrary constraints to force language and narration out of its habitual pathways. By setting rules or necessary forms that must be observed, writers compel themselves to seek innovative solutions to the compositional problems thrown up by such restrictions and regulations. This work has been especially influenced by the novels of the early-twentieth-century French eccentric Raymond Roussel, who used puns and other arbitrary linguistic associations to generate fantastic descriptions and narrative episodes, and by the French literary circle Oulipo, the society for “potential literature,” which explored a wide range of arbitrary formal devices, algorithms and other mathematical formulae, and combinatoric techniques to generate new, unforeseen texts. The most orthodox follower of Oulipo, indeed an official member of the group, is Harry Mathews, who in such works as The Conversions (1997) and The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium (1999) used Oulipian techniques to spin out strange, humorous quest stories, stories questing in search of their own object. Another renowned practitioner of postmodernist metafiction, Gilbert Sorrentino, turned to Oulipian techniques in later works such as his trilogy Odd Number (1985), Rose Theatre (1987), and Misterioso (1989). These techniques offered him new ways of exhibiting the self-reflexive relations of texts to themselves and other texts, which was a typical concern of Sorrentino’s pre-Oulipian texts as well. Walter Abish, in texts such as Alphabetical Africa (1974) and 99: The New Meaning (1990), explored the tensions between particular contents and abstract systems, alphabetical or numerical, governing how these contents were selected, sorted, and arranged. A more recent example of this sort of avant garde novel is the interconnected story collection by Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String (1995). Utilizing both constraints and Rousselian-type transformations, Marcus builds up uncanny episodes and objects that seem to resemble one another in tangible but irrational ways. This lends the stories a surface coherence and completeness, while leaving enigmatic their ultimate explanation and meaning. This effect is typical of all the novels of this type, which conjoin
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arbitrary structural or formal features with the “motivated” structure of a narrative. The reader experiences an odd mixture of rational and irrational features, of surface clarity and deeper obscurity, foiling any attempt on her part to make definitive sense of the fictive world the novel presents. SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Abish, W. (1974). Alphabetical Africa. New York: New Directions. Abish, W. (1990). 99: The New Meaning. Providence, RI: Burning Deck. Acker, K. (1982). Great Expectations. Barrytown, NY: Open Book. Acker, K. (1986a). Don Quixote. New York: Grove. Acker, K. (1986b). My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini. In Literal Madness: Three Novels. New York: Grove. Antin, D. (1973). After the War: A Long Novel With Few Words. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow. Antin, D. (1976). Talking at the Boundaries. New York: New Directions. Ashbery, J. (1977). Three Poems. New York: Penguin. Ashbery, J., & Schulyer, J. (1969). A Nest of Ninnies. New York: E. P. Dutton. Ashley, R. (1991). Perfect Lives. Santa Fe, NM: Burning Books. Bakhtin, M. (1981). The Dialogical Imagination: Four Essays (trans. C. Emerson & M. Holquist). Austin: University of Texas Press. Barnes, D. (1937). Nightwood. New York: New Directions. Bellamy, D. (1998). The Letters of Mina Harker. West Stockbridge, MA: Hard Books. Bok, C. (2001). Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Brooke-Rose, C. (1991). Stories, Theories, and Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burger, M. (ed.) (2004). Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative. Toronto: Coach House. B€ urger, P. (1984). Theory of the Avant-Garde (trans. M. Shaw). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Burroughs, W. S. (1959). Naked Lunch. New York: Grove. Burroughs, W. S. (1964). Nova Express. New York: Grove. Burroughs, W. S. (1967). The Ticket That Exploded. New York: Grove Press.
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Burroughs, W. S. (1992). The Soft Machine. New York: Grove. Coates, R. (1926). The Eater of Darkness. New York: Contact. Creeley, R. (1988). The Collected Prose of Robert Creeley. Berkeley: University of California Press. cummings, e.e. (1933). Eimi. New York: Sloane. cummings, e.e. (1949). The Enormous Room. New York: Modern Library. Dydo, U. E., & Rice, W. (2008). Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, 1923–1934. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Faulkner, W. (1929). The Sound and the Fury. New York: Cape and Smith. Fredman, S. (1983). Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gins, M. (1994). Helen Keller or Arakawa. New York: Burning Books. Gluck, R. (1985). Jack the Modernist. New York: Gay Presses of New York. Gluck, R. (1994). Margery Kempe. New York: High Risk. Hayman, D. (1987). Re-forming the Narrative: Toward a Mechanics of Modernist Fiction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Heise, U. (1997). Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hejinian, L. (1980). My Life. Providence, RI: Burning Deck. Hejinian, L. (1991). Oxota: A Short Russian Novel. Great Barrington, MA: The Figures. Jones, L. (Baraka, A.) (1965). The System of Dante’s Hell. New York: Grove. Kerouac, J. (1972). Visions of Cody. New York: McGraw-Hill. Loy, M. (1991). Insel (ed. E. Arnold) Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow. Lyon, J. (1999). Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mackey, N. (1986). Bedouin Hornbook. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Mackey, N. (1993a). Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mackey, N. (1993b). Djbot Baghostus’s Run. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon. Mackey, N. (2001). Atet A.D. San Francisco: City Lights. Mackey, N. (2008). Bass Cathedral. New York: New Directions. Marcus, B. (1995). The Age of Wire and String. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive. Mathews, H. (1997). The Conversions. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive. Mathews, H. (1999). The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive.
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McHale, B. (1987). Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen. Miller, T. (2009). Singular Examples: Artistic Politics and the Neo-Avant-Garde. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Perloff, M. (1986). The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Puchner, M. (2006). Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Garde. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Scalapino, L. (1997). “The Return of Painting,” “The Pearl ” and “Orion”: A Trilogy. Jersey City, NJ: Talisman. Shklovsky, V. (1990). Theory of Prose (trans. B. Sher). Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive. Silliman, R. (1978). Ketjak. San Francisco: This. Silliman, R. (1981). Tjanting. Berkeley: Figures. Sorrentino, G. (1984). Something Said: Essays. San Francisco: North Point. Sorrentino, G. (1985). Odd Number. San Francisco: North Point.
Sorrentino, G. (1987). Rose Theatre. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive. Sorrentino, G. (1989). Misterioso. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive. Spicer, J. (1975). The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (ed. Robin Blaser). Los Angeles: Black Sparrow. Stein, G. (1993). Three Lives. New York: Modern Library. Stein, G. (1995). The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive. Toomer, J. (1994). Cane. New York: Modern Library [1923]. Warhol, A. (1968). a: A Novel. New York: Grove. West, N. (2006). A Cool Million; The Dream Life of Balso Snell: Two Novels. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Williams, W. C. (1970). Imaginations (ed. W. Schott,). New York: New Directions. Williams, W. C. (1956). In the American Grain. New York: New Directions.
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B Baker, Nicholson PATRICK O’DONNELL
Born in New York City in 1957, Nicholson Baker is the author of seven novels that explore the minutiae of daily life, sexual eroticism, and bodily functions in writing that is recognized for its detail and capacity to explore the intricacies of the interior life. The Mezzanine (1988) is a meticulous description of the thoughts and actions of an ordinary office worker during a single lunch hour as he rides up an escalator in a crowded building. Taking place over a mere 20 minutes, Room Temperature (1990) records the perceptions and small actions of a man who is bottlefeeding his infant daughter. In these minimalist narratives, Baker is not so much interested in portraying “stream of consciousness” in the manner of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf as he is in clinically observing the most subtle movements of the body and the rich associative logic of the mind. In The Mezzanine, for example, the narrator records that he is carrying a small paper bag that contains his lunch: this leads to a pages-long reflection on the history of paper bags, paper versus plastic straws, and the mom-and-pop grocery industry, complete with footnotes. The impact of these early novels comes about through the accumulation of details and the presentation of a complete world made up entirely of minute particulars. Baker’s third novel, Vox (1992), gained considerable notoriety in its portrayal of a phone sex conversation between a man and a woman. The novel is primarily composed of the dialogue between its two interlocutors, and though it
contains its share of erotic fantasies, the focus is once more on minutiae of the principals’ lives: the clothes they are wearing as they talk, their daily routines, their memories. Vox thus exemplifies the eroticism of daily life (and, conversely, the ordinariness of eroticism), and garnered additional attention when it was revealed that Monica Lewinsky gave the novel to Bill Clinton as a gift. The Fermata followed in 1994: in this novel, an office worker who has the fantastic ability to stop time for brief periods records his erotic adventures with a series of women whom he engages during these momentary pauses in reality. As in Vox, it is not erotic or pornographic representations that are the main issue, but the relation between distance and intimacy, and the attempt to gain understanding through the observation of detail. The Everlasting Story of Nory (1998) sounds like the title of a children’s book, and to some degree it is in its portrayal of a year in the life of a precocious and imaginative 9-year-old American girl who spends a year abroad in England with her family. Nory brings to the world around her the same keen sense of observation and attention to detail that typify Baker’s narrators, but these are filtered through the mind of a child compelled to tell stories in order to make sense of her world. Taking place over a relatively lengthy span of time for a novel by Nicholson Baker, The Everlasting Story of Nory develops a full-blown character engaged with the question of what, in life, is “everlasting.” A Box of Matches (2003), titled after the familiar domestic object that the narrator uses to light his fireplace each morning, is composed of the daily reflections of a 35-year-old textbook editor as he
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approaches the dark wood of the midlife journey. As in Baker’s first two novels, the focus in A Box of Matches is not on the great philosophical issues or traumatic memories of the past, but on the seemingly insignificant particulars of daily life; yet observing in detail the holes in his socks or the lint in his navel leads the narrator to a comprehension of his place in the world. Checkpoint (2004) is something of a departure in that it develops a blatantly political theme. Framed, like Vox, as a conversation between two characters, the novel records a volatile discussion between two old friends: one who reveals his decision to attempt the assassination of President George W. Bush because of his policies in Iraq, and the other, equally distressed at Bush’s policies, who attempts to talk his friend down from his plan of action. The novel raised some controversy given its subject, but like all of Baker’s work, Checkpoint is inductively engaged in understanding the particularities of the war and how the observation of details leads to rhetorical stance and political action. Baker, raised near Rochester, New York, received his BA in philosophy from Haverford College, and just as his novels imply a philosophy of minutiae, so too his non-fiction offers a series of pointed philosophical reflections on books, objects, and history. U and I: A True Story (1991) is a compelling account of Baker’s encounter with the work of John Updike, and a study of reading and intertextuality in its depiction of how the consciousness of one writer is infiltrated by the specificities of another. The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber (1996) comprises Baker’s reflections on matters and objects often overlooked, but of considerable significance when properly viewed: the history of punctuation, the construction of paper clips, and model airplanes. Double Fold: The Assault on Libraries and Paper (2001) discusses the destruction of books in the era of microfilming and digitalization, and offers a stirring call for the preservation of all books and documents in their traditional forms. In Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (2008), Baker studies myriad documents and communications in order to formulate a controversial argument that World War II was, in part, instigated by the Allies, and ultimately unnecessary. In this debatable premise, Baker relies, as always, on the particulars to offer gravity and illumination.
SEE ALSO: Minimalist/Maximalist Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Updike, John (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Baker, N. (1988). The Mezzanine. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Baker, N. (1990). Room Temperature. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Baker, N. (1991). U and I: A True Story. New York: Random House. Baker, N. (1992). Vox. New York: Random House. Baker, N. (1994). The Fermata. New York: Random House. Baker, N. (1996). The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber. New York: Random House. Baker, N. (1998). The Everlasting Story of Nory. New York: Random House. Baker, N. (2001). Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. New York: Random House. Baker, N. (2003). A Box of Matches. New York: Random House. Baker, N. (2004). Checkpoint. New York Knopf. Baker, N. (2008). Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. New York: Simon and Schuster. Chambers, R. (1994). Meditation and the Escalator Principle (on Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine). Modern Fiction Studies, 40(4), 765–806. Hall, D. (1995). Nicholson Baker’s Vox: An Exercise in the Literature of Sensibility. Connecticut Review, 17(1), 35–40. Saltzman, A. M. (1999). Understanding Nicholson Baker. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
Baldwin, James LYNN ORILLA SCOTT
James Baldwin (1924–87) was a great twentiethcentury American essayist, novelist, and public intellectual. His work explores the relationship between racism and sexual inequalities, prefiguring developments in gender theory and queer studies. In addition to six novels, seven collections of essays, two plays, two collections of poetry, and a collection of short stories, Baldwin co-authored a phototext, a children’s story, and a screenplay. In addition, his extraordinary speaking ability is captured in numerous published and recorded interviews and dialogues.
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Baldwin, the eldest of nine children, grew up in poverty in Harlem. Although close to his mother, Berdis, and his siblings, Baldwin was terrified of his puritanical and righteously angry stepfather, David. At 14, Baldwin experienced a religious conversion and became a boy preacher in a holiness church. He would later interpret his conversion as a desperate effort to defeat his stepfather’s power, escape the dangers of the street, and flee the recognition of his own transgressive sexual desire. These experiences are the focus of much of Baldwin’s semiautobiographical writing. His eloquent style was influenced not only by Henry James, whose work he greatly admired, but also by the King James Bible, the African American sermon, and black blues, spiritual, and gospel music. Although he would break with the church while he was still a young man, condemning Christianity for its complicity with slavery and imperialism, Baldwin would retain his preacherly voice, employing the jeremiad to shape his moral vision of a new person and a new nation. An avid reader and precocious child, Baldwin was encouraged by his teachers from an early age. He attended the prestigious, predominately white and Jewish De Witt Clinton High School, where he became editor of the literary magazine, The Magpie, and friends with Richard Avedon (with whom he collaborated, years later, on the phototext Nothing Personal; Baldwin 1969). After high school, Baldwin spent a miserable year working in a defense plant in New Jersey, then moved to the East Village to begin his career as a struggling writer, publishing book reviews for the Nation, New Leader, and Commentary. Awarded a Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship in 1945 with the help of Richard Wright, Baldwin followed Wright to Paris three years later, looking for refuge from racism and a place to finish his novel. First, however, Baldwin published his controversial literary manifesto, “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949). Comparing Wright’s Native Son to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Baldwin argued that both novels reduced human beings to their social categories and, thus, failed as art and as protest. Bigger Thomas was just the flip side of Uncle Tom, one a monster, the other a victim. In this essay Baldwin conflates a Jamesian aesthetic of intricately developed character with the moral/political goal of liberating whites and blacks from the myth that blacks are not fully
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human. In “Many Thousands Gone” (1951), Baldwin complained that Wright had not represented “the relationship that Negroes bear to one another, that depth of involvement and unspoken recognition of shared experience which creates a way of life.” Baldwin would beautifully render this dimension of black life in his semiautobiographical first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), which tells the story of John Grimes’s religious conversion through multiple perspectives and family histories. Ironically, Baldwin completed this novel in a remote Swiss village whose inhabitants had never before seen a black person. Based on that experience, “Stranger in the Village” (1953) meditates on the black writer’s relationship to Western culture. Baldwin’s eloquent rendering of a complex black subjectivity and intraracial relationships deeply influenced Toni Morrison, who, like Baldwin, considers American racial history and the black experience as central to questions of national identity. The essay “Notes of a Native Son” (1955), like Baldwin’s first novel, explores his relationship with his father and the problem of racial anger, “some dread chronic disease.” Appropriately taking its title from Wright’s famous novel, Baldwin frames the essay around his father’s death and funeral in 1943, the simultaneous birth of his youngest sister, and the 1943 race riots in Harlem. Culminating in a paradox, the essay instructs Baldwin himself and his reader to accept life as it is, keeping the “heart free of hatred and despair,” while fighting injustice “with all one’s strength” – an apt anticipation of the challenges in the coming decade of racial rebellion and white backlash. “Sonny’s Blues” (1957), Baldwin’s most frequently anthologized short story, portrays the reconciliation of two brothers who represent the divide between black respectability and the black artist. The story prefigures major concerns of two later novels, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968b) and especially Just Above My Head (1979), where Baldwin examines relationships between brothers and the importance of black music as a means of reconciling a people to a difficult past and an uncertain future. Baldwin’s great theme is the denial of America’s interracial history and its effect on the private lives of individuals. At the heart of this denial is the
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myth of a dangerous and desirable black sexuality, which has led to a homophobic and misogynistic notion of masculinity. “Preservation of Innocence” (1949), an early essay on the problem of American masculinity, is a thematic blueprint for Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956). Because all of the novel’s characters are “white,” the racial theme wasn’t initially apparent. Yet the “whiteness” of the protagonist, David, an American expatriate whose ancestors “conquered a continent,” is racially marked. Trying to escape the American version of masculinity, David flees to Europe only to betray his Italian lover, Giovanni. This betrayal is part of a larger failure of love that Baldwin believed to be endemic to American society. While homosexuality is explicit in most of Baldwin’s fiction, for the most part he avoided the subject in his non-fiction; an important exception, however, is the late essay “Here Be Dragons” (1985c). After nine years’ absence, Baldwin returned to the US in the summer of 1957 to cover the emerging Civil Rights Movement for Harper’s and Partisan Review. Over the next few years he made several trips to the American South, writing two important essays on his early trips: “A Letter from the South: Nobody Knows My Name” (1959) and “The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King” (1961). These essays focus less on events than on the psychological effects of changes in race consciousness and the price being paid by activists. Baldwin characterizes the South as a place “designed for violence” and of “private, unspeakable longings,” the place of his “inescapable identity.” Other important essays from this period are “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American” (1959) and “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy” (1961), the latter of which is Baldwin’s response to Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro” (1957). With the publication of The Fire Next Time (1963), Baldwin gained an international reputation and became a spokesman for the movement. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine, brought black intellectuals to meet with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, traveled across the country on speaking engagements for the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student NonViolent Coordinating Committee, organized support for the March on Washington in Paris, and marched in Selma. In The Fire Next Time, a post-
Christian version of an Old Testament jeremiad, Baldwin makes rage speak eloquently. Exposing the criminal white innocence that denies the reality of black suffering, the essay also cautions blacks against accepting the white world’s version of themselves. It ends with a plea to “the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks . . . to end the racial nightmare and achieve our country.” The essay also describes Baldwin’s meeting with Elijah Muhammad at the Nation of Islam (NOI) headquarters in Chicago. Baldwin had come to NOI’s attention following his public debates with Malcolm X. During the 1960s, Baldwin characterized himself as a “transatlantic commuter.” Recent scholarship examines Baldwin as a transatlantic writer, and considers the significance of the locations from which he wrote on his work. His third novel, Another Country (1962), was finished in Istanbul, where he went to escape pressures he felt in the United States. The Fire Next Time was conceived and written from several locations: it was begun in Switzerland, influenced by a trip to Africa, and completed in Turkey. His fourth novel, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, written mostly in Turkey and dedicated to the Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, was much better received there than in the United States. Another Country, which draws on Baldwin’s experiences in the East Village in the late 1940s, explores interracial and homosexual relationships. A meditation on the ways intimacy is affected by racism, homophobia, and gender inequality, it has been called Baldwin’s novelistic response to the Civil Rights Movement. Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968b) deals explicitly with the radicalization of the movement and the dilemma of a Baldwin-like character, Leo Proudhammer, who has fallen in love with the militant, Black Christopher. Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), a play loosely based on the Emmett Till case and on another murder that Baldwin helped Medgar Evers investigate in Mississippi, is a powerful rendering of the Civil Rights Movement at the crossroads between non-violent resistance and militant self-defense. It also explores the psychology of a white racist character, as does Baldwin’s disturbing short story, “Going to Meet the Man” (1965). By the mid-1960s, Baldwin’s work was negatively reviewed as Black Power propaganda by the
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liberal press, which characterized him as bitter and out of touch with racial progress. Baldwin wrote a screenplay on the life of Malcolm X for Columbia Studios, publically defended Angela Davis, and befriended the Black Panthers. At the same time, he came under attack by Eldridge Cleaver and others for his homosexuality; Baldwin’s responses to Black Power and to the attacks on his sexuality have been contentious issues for literary critics. No Name in the Street (1972) is Baldwin’s retrospective essay on his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. In the mid-1970s, Baldwin bought a house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in southern France. In the 1980s, he made trips to the United States to cover the Atlanta child murders, the subject of Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985a), and to teach after being awarded an honorary degree by the University of Massachusetts. His last two novels, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Just Above My Head (1979), explore the role of the black family in sustaining the black artist and the importance of passing on a resistant, black, blues culture to the next generation. His project of redefining masculinity and exploring the interdependence of individual identities finds its most complete expression in the protagonist of his last novel, Arthur Montana, a gay gospel singer, and his lover, appropriately named “Jimmy.” James Baldwin died of cancer at home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence on December 1, 1987. He was 63. SEE ALSO: Ellison, Ralph (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Expatriate Fiction (AF); James, Henry (AF); Mailer, Norman (AF); Queer Modernism (AF); Wright, Richard (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Note: All individual essays mentioned are reprinted in Baldwin (1985c) unless otherwise listed. Baldwin, J. (1949). Preservation of Innocence. Zero, 1(2), 14–22. Baldwin, J. (1953). Go Tell It on the Mountain. New York: Dial. Baldwin, J. (1956). Giovanni’s Room. New York: Dial. Baldwin, J. (1962). Another Country. New York: Dial. Baldwin, J. (1964). Blues for Mister Charlie: A Play. New York: Dell. Baldwin, J. (1965). Going to Meet the Man. New York: Dial. Baldwin, J. (1968a). Amen Corner: A Play. New York: Dial.
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Baldwin, J. (1968b). Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone. New York: Dial. Baldwin, J. (1971). A Rap on Race by Margaret Mead and James Baldwin. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Baldwin, J. (1973a). A Dialogue by James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Baldwin, J. (1973b). One Day When I Was Lost: A Scenario. New York: Dial. Baldwin, J. (1974). If Beale Street Could Talk. New York: Dial. Baldwin, J. (1976). Little Man, Little Man. New York: Dial. Baldwin, J. (1979). Just Above My Head. New York: Dial. Baldwin, J. (1985a). Evidence of Things Not Seen. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Baldwin, J. (1985b). Jimmy’s Blues: Selected Poems. New York: St. Martin’s. Baldwin, J. (1985c). The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948–1985. New York: St. Martin’s/ Marek. Baldwin, J. (1989). Conversations with James Baldwin (ed. F. L. Standley & L. H. Pratt). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Baldwin, J., & Avedon, R. (1964). Nothing Personal. New York: Penguin. Field, D. (2009). A Historical Guide to James Baldwin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harris, T. (1996). New Essays on “Go Tell It on the Mountain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. King, L., & Scott, L. O. (2006). James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Leeming, D. (1994). James Baldwin: A Biography. New York: Knopf. McBride, D. A. (ed.) (1999). James Baldwin Now. New York: New York University Press. Miller, Q. D. (ed.) (2000). Reviewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Scott, L. O. (2002). James Baldwin’s Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Troupe, Q. (ed.) (1989). James Baldwin: The Legacy. New York: Simon and Schuster. Zaborowska, M. (2009). James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Banks, Russell ANTHONY HUTCHISON
Born in New Hampshire in 1940, Russell Banks has risen from humble blue-collar origins to
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become an increasingly prominent figure in American letters. Having left college after a few months in 1959, Banks headed south with the intention of joining Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra mountains but wound up staying in Florida, where he accumulated much of the experience – of divorce, alcoholism, and violence – that would form the basis of his early fiction. In the 1970s Banks began publishing short fiction in small journals. By the end of the decade, he was supplementing this output with novels influenced by the playful postmodernist fiction of the 1960s. Nonetheless, works from this period such as Family Life (1975a) and Hamilton Stark (1978a) were equally concerned with the “idle cruelties” of families struggling to come to terms with post-industrial economic and cultural conditions. It is thus perhaps unsurprising that Banks’s fiction started to find a more mainstream readership during the greater socio-economic polarization of the Reagan years. The acclaimed story collection Trailerpark (1981) and the novels Continental Drift (1985) and Affliction depict the culturally underrepresented working-class communities of upstate New York and New England at this time. This work also resonated with the “dirty realism” then in vogue, although Banks’s cultural milieu is very much his own. His is the modern invisible republic of the Northern poor eking out existences in isolated trailer parks and decaying family homes built by earlier generations. These are men and women whose American dreams have been eroded by long, unrelenting processes of generational attrition (a fact ironically affirmed in the title of the 1986 collection, Success Stories). They inhabit histories marked by frontier hubris and Protestant fatalism. This frequently gives Banks’s work a spiritual depth – a theological dimension rendered most explicit in the testimony of a seventeenthcentury Puritan divine that forms the basis of the allegorical novella The Relation of My Imprisonment (1983). The fact that Banks’s father and three grandparents were Canadian may well explain the critical distance and the forensic quality of the cultural diagnoses offered in his work. Yet in these novels and others, such as The Sweet Hereafter (1991) in which a small Adirondack town is devastated by a school bus accident, he also
demonstrates an astonishing capacity to convey sympathy and a sense of the complex interior lives of his characters. Banks’s stress on the impact of geography on human consciousness and his preoccupation with modes of communal history as they manifest themselves in parent–child relations are also crucial. In his later fiction, the latter element particularly comes to the fore. Cloudsplitter, his longest novel, is an impressive fictional depiction of the life of the radical abolitionist John Brown as perceived through the eyes of his son Owen. This approach – perhaps modeled on the conflicted narrative provided in Moby-Dick, directed at another nineteenth-century “monomaniac” – yields a profound meditation on the tortuous racial history of the United States. Cloudsplitter might be regarded as the most important work of American historical fiction since Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Race has always been one of Banks’s central themes. Indeed, aside from Mark Twain and William Faulkner, it is difficult to think of a white male writer who has negotiated the issue in as sustained, unflinching, and intelligent a fashion. A good degree of significance is attached to white working-class characters’ racial attitudes throughout the short fiction. However, it is in the novels that scrutiny of the topic becomes at once more intense and expansive. Having spent some time in Jamaica in the mid1970s, Banks uses it as the setting for The Book of Jamaica (1980), an early tale of a US college professor’s ill-fated encounter with the Maroon tribe. The island is also the backdrop for the latter half of Rule of the Bone (1995), a not altogether convincing Huck Finn-type yarn that tells of an American teenager’s marijuana-fueled adventures in the US and the Caribbean. Transnational contexts for “African America” also feature in Continental Drift, one narrative strand of which deals with a young Haitian refugee’s desperate efforts to make it to the United States, and The Darling (2004). The latter is the story of Hannah Musgrave, a 1960s radical, and her subsequent life underground in the US and Liberia. The novel is especially powerful in its depiction of her fraught marriage to a politician in the West African state and, even more poignantly, her ultimate estrangement from her African children.
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Despite much thematic continuity, there has undoubtedly been a turn toward the historical in Banks’s later work. As a consequence, his subject matter has become increasingly difficult to predict. The Reserve (2008) bemused a number of reviewers with its focus on the Depression-proof 1930s aristocracy of the Northeast and a Hollywood-friendly plot that veered toward melodrama. Nonetheless, despite receiving relatively little attention from literary scholars in the academy, Russell Banks’s work remains among the most eagerly awaited and widely reviewed outside the very top rank of American novelists.
Hutchison, A. (2007). Representative Man: John Brown and the Politics of Redemption in Russell Banks. Cloudsplitter: Journal of American Studies, 41(1), 67–82. Niemi, R. (1997). Russell Banks. New York: Twayne. O’Loughlin, J. (2002). The Whiteness of Bone: Russell Banks’ Rule of the Bone and the Contradictory Legacy of Huckleberry Finn. Modern Language Studies, 32(1), 31–42.
SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); Working Class Fiction (BIF)
Born in 1892, Djuna Barnes was active as a writer between 1913 and 1982, the date of her death. Her most famous work is the now classic modernist novel, Nightwood (2007 [1936]), first published with an enthusiastic introduction by T. S. Eliot. Her experimental oeuvre spans a dazzling range of genres and media. Her first collection of “rhymes and rhythms,” which she illustrated, was published in 1915 (1994 [1915]), and a collection of short stories, plays, and portraits entitled A Book appeared in 1923, and was later republished as A Night Among the Horses (1929). Her illustrated picaresque novel Ryder (1928) was briefly a bestseller, while the same year she privately distributed in Paris her illustrated Ladies Almanack (2006 [1928]). A sample of her artwork can be accessed in the volume Poe’s Mother (1995), while a larger number of originals are available in the Djuna Barnes Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland, College Park. In 1958 Faber and Faber published her verse play, The Antiphon. Most of her poems were published posthumously, in 1982 and in 2005. Barnes’s oeuvre is both an extraordinary example of modernist linguistic and thematic experimentalism and a trenchant critique of key modernist concepts such as authority, heterosexuality, and literary purity. Fearlessly engaging with themes spanning from lesbianism to polygamy and with cultural manifestations ranging from popular amusement parks to seventeenth-century poetry, Barnes’s work never exempts itself from the critical and linguistic dissections it performs. Between 1913 and the early 1920s, Barnes regularly contributed as a journalist to New York newspapers and magazines, including the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, New York Press, New York World
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Banks, R. (1974). Snow. Orem, UT: Granite. Banks, R. (1975a). Family Life. New York: Avon. Banks, R. (1975b). Searching for Survivors. New York: Fiction Collective. Banks, R. (1978a). Hamilton Stark. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Banks, R. (1978b). The New World. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Banks, R. (1980). The Book of Jamaica. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Banks, R. (1981). Trailerpark. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Banks, R. (1983). The Relation of My Imprisonment. Washington, DC: Sun and Moon. Banks, R. (1985). Continental Drift. New York: Harper and Row. Banks, R. (1986). Success Stories. New York: Harper and Row. Banks, R. (1989). Affliction. New York: Harper and Row. Banks, R. (1991). The Sweet Hereafter. New York: HarperCollins. Banks, R. (1995). Rule of the Bone. New York: HarperCollins. Banks, R. (1998). Cloudsplitter. New York: HarperCollins. Banks, R. (2000). The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks. New York: HarperCollins. Banks, R. (2004). The Darling. New York: HarperCollins. Banks, R. (2008a). Dreaming Up America. New York: Seven Stories. Banks, R. (2008b). The Reserve. New York: HarperCollins.
Barnes, Djuna DANIELA CASELLI
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Magazine, New York Tribune, New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine, and New York Sun Magazine. She also wrote, sometimes under pseudonyms, for Vanity Fair and Shadowland. Her work covers a wide variety of topics and subjects, from interviews with famous New York stage and screen personalities and cultural figures (e.g., Lillian Russell, Flo Ziegfield, Alfred Stieglitz, Helen Westley, and Coco Chanel) to short stories (e.g., “The Murder in the Palm-Room: An Adventure with the Woman in Silver and Black” and “What Is Good Form in Dying: In Which a Dozen Dainty Deaths Are Suggested for Daring Damsels”). She also wrote short plays (e.g., The Death of Life and At the Roots of the Stars) and critical articles, such as the two pieces on James Joyce that appeared in Vanity Fair and the Double Dealer in 1922. While writing for wide-circulation papers, Barnes also sporadically contributed to avant garde and little magazines like Bruno’s Weekly, the Double Dealer, the Little Review, and, in Paris, transition. Some of her early plays, including Three From the Earth, Kurzy of the Sea, and An Irish Triangle, were produced by the Provincetown Players and performed in New York between 1919 and 1920. In 1922 she was sent by McCall’s magazine on an assignment in Paris, where she lived until the outbreak of World War II; during these two decades she traveled to Berlin, London, and Hayford Hall (Peggy Guggenheim’s country house), frequenting many literary circles and building a reputation for being as witty as she was beautiful. In the early 1930s she was also a contributor to the Theatre Guild Magazine with her illustrated column, “The Playgoer’s Almanac.” Barnes survived her mythical 1920s self by living from 1940 onward what she describes as the life of “a Trappist” in a studio flat in Patchin Place, Greenwich Village, New York. Barnes’s post-1940 reclusiveness is part of her longstanding antipathy toward the “cult of the self,” which made her systematically decline requests for interviews and forms of public participation. Barnes’s correspondence indicates that she relentlessly discouraged biographical approaches to her work or legendary reconstructions of her life. Nevertheless, criticism has had much to say about her long-term relationship with Thelma Wood and her unconventional upbringing in Cornwall-onHudson, New York, with her larger-than-life
feminist and intellectual grandmother and her Whitmanesque father, who championed free love and autarchic educational theories and practiced bigamy. Both Ryder and The Antiphon stage the complexities inherent in family dynamics and the deadly consequences of attempting to love vicariously the bohemian myth of the artist. Barnes’s oeuvre is committed to a high modernist notion of art as a supremely difficult undertaking; however, it has never been fully absorbed within the literary history of the twentieth century because of its inherent skepticism toward literary genealogy and of its staged illegitimate and belated self-conception. In her correspondence, Barnes often quotes approvingly a clipping from a German magazine that reads, “[H]er work will not fall into oblivion – it was predestined for it from the outset” (Barnes to Cristina Campo, 1969b). The entire Barnes oeuvre makes large use of intertextual references, from Donne to Middleton, from Blake to Eliot, from Fielding to Chaucer, from Shakespeare to nursery rhymes, from Radclyffe Hall to popular genres such as the almanac. It sabotages novelty in favor of anachronistic recuperations of previous literary ages and strives to be not “modern” but “avant-garde” (Barnes to Christine Koschel, 1969a). Barnes’s musical, often ungrammatical use of American English destroys the possibility of transparency and naturalness, while her corpus is pervaded by archaisms that produce a language that is wornout, used, and never innocent. Much has been made of the obscurity, unintelligibility, difficulty, and impenetrability of Barnes’s corpus; her difficulty, however, should be read not as elitism or opacity, but as the figure of the unending complexity that in her work pervades every aspect of reality. Gender and sexuality are key components of this anachronistic, inopportune, and impenetrable modernism, since the obscene quality of Barnes’s improper modernism has much to do with authority, femininity, and sexual orientation. Like Miranda in The Antiphon, abused as the “somewhat well-used spinster” who “stands for Virgo,” Barnes refuses to have herself “clapped between the palms of their approval,” rejects the family as the basis of heterosexual procreation, dissects the politics of lesbianism, and stages the tragedy of self-birth and annihilation. A persistent engagement with genealogy on the thematic level
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BARNES, DJUNA
goes hand in hand with a refusal to either acknowledge a literary legacy or produce lawful offspring, thus openly waging war against linguistic and literary legitimacy. These characteristics can be seen throughout her work. Ladies Almanack has been read as a spoof of Natalie Clifford Barney’s expatriate lesbian coterie in Paris, even though Barnes always resisted this interpretation. The book is a visually stunning artifact that follows a monthly structure to produce a potted history and a mythology of lesbianism, a narrative of the dealings of the circle of Evangeline Musset, and an implacable dissection of the class and sexual politics at work within the group. Both popular and sophisticated, the almanac is an example of the playful way in which Barnes equivocates with the languages of the past (from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries in this case) and of the power of her biting satire. Importantly, this text neither offers up lesbianism as a spectacle nor uncritically celebrates these early experiments in communitarian lesbian life. Defined by Barnes as a female Tom Jones, her 1928 picaresque novel Ryder makes the most of learnedness, intertextuality, and equivocation. Ryder is Joycean in its use of neologisms but spurns Ulysses’s mythological scaffolding and boldly uses a bigamous family as the threadbarest of frameworks. The novel sports epistolary chapters and a long Chaucerian poem, and opens with a long biblical injunction; however, its own “Jesus mundane” is a parody of a Whitmanian hero who has misread Emerson. It is a great American novel in commerce with England, and an originally illustrated modernist work whose Rabelaisian bawdiness marks the pervasive instability of meaning. When Nightwood was first published, it was hailed as an ambitious and extraordinary experimental novel but not universally liked. The novel narrates the love between Nora Flood and the restless Robin Vote, “meet of child and desperado,” whom even Nora’s boundless love cannot keep still; the story of Guido Volkbein, whose barony is fabricated and progeny doomed; and the wanderings of Dr. Matthew-mighty-grainof-salt-Dante-O’Connor, the cross-dressing unlicensed practitioner, whose magnificent wit, ingenuity, and desperation are expressed in his soliloquies. Like its characters, Nightwood dis-
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obeys all the rules it lies down, tainting modernist purity with baroque inscriptions and lamentations of biblical proportions. A novel which challenges the very structure of the genre, Nightwood produces a language both modernist in its experimentalism and “ancient” in its use of literary sources. Its unexpurgated sentences deflower themselves, questioning their origins and destiny, metamorphosing under our eyes through a seductive and tormenting game of mirrors, repetition, and similes. The Antiphon is a play in three acts, published after much internal debate at Faber and Faber and translated into Swedish in 1960 by Dag Hammarskj€ old (then secretary-general to the United Nations) and Karl Ragnar Gierow. It premiered at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theatre on February 17, 1961. The play revolves around the history of the Burley Hobbs family; in Acts I and II, Miranda, Jack, her attendant (later to be revealed as Jeremy, one of her brothers), the two brothers Elisha and Dudley, uncle Jonathan Burley, and Augusta, the mother, narrate stories about the absent characters (Titus Higby Hobbs of Salem, the father; Victoria, the grandmother; and Titus’s mistresses) and times gone by (Augusta’s childhood, Miranda’s Parisian years). This “most impossible cabinet drama of the century” (Barnes to Janet Flanner and Solita Solano, n.d.) was “not written as the ‘well made drama’ is written” but as she “had to write it, for ‘nothing’ and ‘nobody’” (Barnes to Emily Coleman 1958). Miranda is the melancholic woman placed center stage: she is scorned by her brothers; she writes “her savage comedies in French” (II: 147); and she makes her mother exclaim, “May God protect us! I wonder what you’ll write / When I am dead and gone” (III: 209). The play concludes with the tragic death of mother and daughter on a gryphon-shaped bed/carriage. By confronting us with complexity and difficulty, by interrogating the relation between modernity and the past, and by denaturalizing sexuality and textuality, Barnes’s oeuvre is an extraordinary example of twentieth-century American experimental literature. SEE ALSO: The Avant Garde Novel (AF); Expatriate Fiction (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Queer Modernism (AF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Barnes, D. (1923). A Book. New York: Boni and Liveright. Barnes, D. (1928). Ryder. New York: Liveright. Barnes, D. (1929). A Night Among the Horses. New York: Liveright. Barnes, D. (1958). [Correspondence to Emily Coleman]. Aug. 23. Djuna Barnes Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland, College Park. Barnes, D. (1969a). [Correspondence to Christine Koschel]. April 15. Djuna Barnes Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland, College Park, series II, box 10, folder 47. Barnes, D. (1969b). [Correspondence to Cristina Campo]. Djuna Barnes Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland, College Park, series II, box 2, folder 43. Barnes, D. (1982). Creatures in an Alphabet. New York: Dial Press. Barnes, D. (1987). I Could Never Be Lonely Without a Husband: Interviews by Djuna Barnes (ed. A. Barry, foreword and commentary D. Messerli). London: Virago. Barnes, D. (1989). New York (ed. with commentary A. Barry, foreword D. Messerli). Los Angeles: Sun and Moon. Barnes, D. (1994). A Book of Repulsive Women: 8 Rhythms and 5 Drawings [1915]. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon. Barnes, D. (1995). Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts (ed. C. J. Plumb). Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive. Barnes, D. (1995). Poe’s Mother (ed. D. Messerli). Los Angeles: Sun and Moon. Barnes, D. (1998). Selected Works of Djuna Barnes: Spillway/The Antiphon/Nightwood [1962]. London: Faber and Faber. Barnes, D. (2005). Collected Poems with Notes Towards a Memoir (ed. P. Herring & O. Stutman). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Barnes, D. (2006). Ladies Almanack [1928] (afterword D. Caselli). Manchester: Carcanet. Barnes, D. (2007). Nightwood [1936] (new intro. J. Winterson, pref. T. S. Eliot). London: Faber and Faber. Barnes, D.(n.d.). [Correspondence to Janet Flanner and Solita Solano]. Djuna Barnes Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland, College Park. Broe, M. L. (ed.) (1991). Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes (afterword C. Stimpson). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Cagidemetrio, A. (1979). Una Strada Nel Bosco: Scrittura e Coscienza in Djuna Barnes. Vicenza: Neri Pozza.
Caselli, D. (2009). Improper Modernism: Djuna Barnes’s Bewildering Corpus. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Frank, J. (1996). The Widening Gyre. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Goody, A. (2007). Modernist Articulations: A Cultural Study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Miller, T. (1999). Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars. Berkeley: University of California Press. Parsons, D. (2003). Djuna Barnes. Horndon: Northcote House. Wallace, J.-A., & Elliott, B. (1994). Women Artists and Writers: Modernist (Im)positionings. London: Routledge. West, P. (1990). The Havoc of This Nicety (Djuna Barnes). Parnassus: Poetry in Review, 16(1), 157–64. (Reprinted as an Afterword in Djuna Barnes, Ryder. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1995.).
Barth, John HEIDE ZIEGLER
John Barth’s role in defining and shaping literary postmodernism has been essential: the epoch may be conceived as having begun with the publication of his third novel, The Sot-Weed Factor (1967 [1960]). This novel contains all the elements that later critics have listed as marking the transition from late modernism to a new (American) period in the old art of storytelling: rewriting history in ironic fashion (in the case of The Sot-Weed Factor, the history of colonial Maryland), parodying the American quest for identity (through the hero’s literal preservation of his innocence), and transcending the boundaries between different genres (in this case, between the poem “The Sot-Weed Factor” of one Ebenezer Cooke, first published in 1708, and Barth’s mid-twentieth-century novel of the same title). To be an exponent of this new era in which self-reflexivity increasingly came to pervade all traditional narrative devices has been Barth’s self-appointed mission ever since. Despite his indebtedness to non-US writers like Lawrence Sterne, Gustave Flaubert, Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino, Barth’s stance is nevertheless that of a decidedly contemporary American writer who mainly works his own corner of the land: Maryland, its Eastern Shore, and Chesapeake Bay. Here he writes and rewrites his fictions in order to create his own great narrative cycle.
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BARTH, JOHN
John Simmons Barth was born on May 27, 1930, in Cambridge, Maryland. After attending Cambridge High School, Barth, in the summer of 1947, entered the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, where he studied harmony and orchestration for a few months. Later in 1947, he entered Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he took a BA in 1951 and an MA in 1952. From 1953 to 1972, Barth taught at Pennsylvania State University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and Boston University. In 1973, he accepted the post of professor in the graduate writing seminars at Johns Hopkins, thus returning both to his alma mater and to Maryland. When he retired from that position, he and his second wife, the regular dedicatee of all his books since their marriage in 1970, moved to their present home on the Eastern Shore in Chestertown, Maryland – whence they often sail the waters of Chesapeake Bay, the “planet’s largest estuarine system” (2008, 154), and beyond. John Barth’s fiction has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. Living at the “center” of a world that permits reaching out to other times and places, Barth ambitiously set out to develop his own chain of being. From the tale of the anonymous minstrel of the Third Book of the Odyssey (eighth century BCE) who was marooned on a lonely island in the Aegean by Agamemnon’s rival, Aegisthus, and who, according to Barth in Lost in the Funhouse (1968), invented all of the literary genres and set his fictions afloat in nine amphorae to be deciphered by future generations of readers; to the re-orchestration of Scheherazade’s One Thousand and One Nights (collected between the eighth and the sixteenth centuries CE in Baghdad and in Cairo), especially the stories of Sindbad the Sailor, in The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991); up to autobiographical present-day Chesapeake Bay cruising stories, Barth has become more and more obsessed with waterways and voyages as a means to connect literary tradition and his own fictions. For an understanding of the beginnings of literary postmodernism, two essays by John Barth have for a long time served as landmarks: “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1968) and its corrective, “The Literature of Replenishment” (1979), both published first in the Atlantic Monthly and
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later collected in The Friday Book (1984). The core message of the first essay is “that the forms and modes of art live in human history and are therefore subject to used-upness, at least in the minds of significant numbers of artists in particular times and places: in other words, that artistic conventions are liable to be retired, subverted, transcended, transformed, or even deployed against themselves to generate new and lively work” (1984, 205). The second essay exfoliates this statement by maintaining that postmodernist fiction is the synthesis or transcension of the antithesis of premodernism and modernism. Reading “The Literature of Exhaustion” as a manifesto on the end of literature is, therefore, clearly a misreading; however, the message that Barth himself seemed to send with his first collection of short fictions, published in the same year (Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice), appears to validate that nihilistic suspicion. Its “Frame-Tale,” a M€ obius strip which turns upon itself, endlessly repeating, “Once upon a time there was a story that began,” did not seem to promise a healthy future for postmodernist writers who also wanted to be masters of the storyteller’s art. To undo this impression and to prove instead that the true postmodernist writer’s work is marked by Umberto Eco’s “double coding,” which accepts the challenges of the past and extends them in the playful and ironic reinventions of the present, have been Barth’s endeavors ever since. At first, Barth’s novels seemed to come in pairs, an impression shared by the author himself – at least up to the publication of LETTERS (1979), an epistolary novel that brings together the main characters of his former books as writers of letters to each other, abetted by the (capital A) Author himself who, by calling into question the role of implied author, liberates his characters from the restrictions of their former textual positions. Thus, The Floating Opera (1967a [1956]) and The End of the Road (1958), both written in 1955, have often been dubbed existentialist novels, or novels of black humor. Todd Andrews, the narrator of The Floating Opera, interprets the unexplained suicide of his late father as the reason for having lost faith in the value of free will, ultimately coming to the conclusion that “nothing has intrinsic value” (1967a [1956] 223), including living or taking one’s own life. Jacob Horner, in The End
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of the Road, succumbs to the “mythotherapy” of his black doctor, which involves the contingent use of any number of myths as a therapeutic framework for one’s choices, thereby deliberately negating any absolute values. In LETTERS, however, Todd Andrews manages to have a relationship with Jeannine, who is possibly his daughter, offspring of a more or less acknowledged adulterous triangle in The Floating Opera; thus, at 70 years of age, he reverses his former attitude, maintaining, “Nothing has intrinsic value . . . which is as much as to say: Everything has intrinsic value!” (1979, 96). In retrospect, it becomes clear that the mythotherapy of The End of the Road harks forward to the myth of the Wandering Hero in Giles Goat-Boy: or, The Revised New Syllabus (1966), and even to the “Perseid” and “Bellerophoniad” of Chimera (1972), and that the intertextual relationship between Todd Andrews and Jacob Horner resembles that of Ebenezer Cooke and Henry Burlingame in The Sot-Weed Factor. John Barth’s novels and series of short fictions, in other words, do not come in pairs, but in narrative cycles, and the main topic of his fictions is not nihilism, but innocence (and its counterpart, wise experience). The Sot-Weed Factor is a mid-twentieth-century novel that echoes late-seventeenth-century English and acknowledges Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones as its literary precursor. Barth’s hero fails as a character, but eventually, with the help of his midtwentieth-century mentor, who in the novel takes the form of Henry Burlingame III, succeeds as a writer. Ebenezer is a naive and programmatically virginal tobacco factor, or trading agent, misadventuring in the New World. His artificially sustained innocence, which rests on unfounded idealism, is challenged time and again by his harsh encounters with reality; but when he understands that arrested development is potentially disastrous not only to himself but also to those related to him, he marries the former whore Joan Toast, thereby also regaining his lost estate. Meanwhile Burlingame, Barth’s proxy in the conquest of Maryland’s past, has been creating his own fictitious and playful “reality” in the interstices of recorded history, thereby proving history itself to be a kind of fiction. With this monumental work about North America’s colonial past and the locale of tidewater Maryland, as well as the several
differences between art and life, Barth had found his voice as a postmodern writer. He has been both Ebenezer Cooke and Henry Burlingame in all the fictions he has written since, although those two characters, like innocence and experience, art and life, tend to become more and more indistinguishable as Barth’s life cycle and his tale cycles progress. All of Barth’s fictions are long stories, even those that claim to be collections of short stories or novellas, like Lost in the Funhouse, Chimera, On With the Story: Stories (1996); The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories (2005); Where Three Roads Meet (2005); or The Development (2008), because Barth creates a new fictional universe for each of his books, which he then inhabits for several years. Yet while his books are “about,” for instance, the myth of the Wandering Hero, formerly and in present times; the role of the storyteller over the course of the centuries; identity and the frame-tale; the function of endings in art and in life; Borgesian forms of intertextuality; or the relationship of author and reader as that of lovers, they are also self-reflexively focalized upon their own language and processes and narrative architecture. The myth of the Wandering Hero, “who is all of us, writ large” (in Further Fridays, 1995, 269), is most clearly expounded in Giles Goat-Boy, and parallels Barth’s own sense of adventure at that time of his life, the High Sixties—“the adventure of a transcendental, life-changing and even culture-changing sort” (268). Giles Goat-Boy not only has been sired by a computer, but also is dictating his life story to that very machine, a life story that combines tragic and mystic aspects by way of the comic. Scheherazade, the storyteller for whom storytelling is an existential “ground situation,” is met by the author himself in the “Dunyazadiad.” When they mutually come up with the idea that “the key to the treasure is the treasure” (in Chimera, 1972, 11), the author is translated from his desk to her library. He then proceeds to tell Scheherazade the stories of her One Thousand and One Nights day after day, which she in turn tells to King Shahryar at night. Similarly, in The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, a twentieth-century New Journalist drops out of his American century into Sindbad’s. Through the telling of stories, an intertextuality is established that not only
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BARTH, JOHN
confuses the notion of literary precursor and successor, but also compensates the original loss of virginity (or narrative authenticity) by replenishing the reader with what amounts to a “virgin” story that is also “about” the loss of virginity. The frame-tale begins to figure in Lost in the Funhouse, not only in the M€ obius strip of “FrameTale” but also in an intricate story about the loss of identity, called “Menelaiad,” a series of seven concentric stories-within-stories, so arranged that the climax of the innermost precipitates that of the next tale out, and so on, until the narrative voices can no longer remember their own time and place. Tales-within-tales can also be found in The Tidewater Tales (1987) and The Book of Ten Nights and a Night. In a sense, each further book by John Barth frames his former ones, “re-cycling” former themes and characters by establishing one more concentric tale. Endings in Barth’s fictions therefore are not of metaphysical importance, as exemplified in the “Bellorophoniad,” the last of the three novellas of Chimera, where the last incomplete sentence is reincorporated into the tale itself: “It’s no Bellerophoniad. It’s a [Chimera]” (1972, 308); nor do they carry significance as linguistic transformations, because they may also be rebeginnings, as in Sabbatical: A Romance (1982): “If that’s going to be our story, then let’s begin it at the end and end at the beginning, so we can go on forever. Begin with our living happily ever after” (1982, 365). Finally, the author’s conviction that writing and reading, or telling and listening, are literally ways of making love is first revealed in “Dunyazadiad,” the first of the Chimera novellas; it has been informing Barth’s fictions ever since, connecting art and life in various forms of “passionate virtuosity” (1972, 24). However, this is the stance of the professional storyteller, and the relationship is that of author and “ideal” reader. Barth’s “real” readers find their place in the image of The Floating Opera. This is the name of a showboat that used to travel around the Virginia and Maryland tidewater areas in the 1930s. Todd Andrews, the narrator of Barth’s first novel, imagines a showboat which would drift along the shores of Chesapeake Bay and keep a play going continuously while the audience would sit along both banks. The showboat metaphor tends to reappear in Barth’s fiction, in the title of the partly autobiographical book Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera (1994) and
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again, in extensive realistic detail, in Coming Soon!!! A Narrative (2001). It connects with many of Barth’s “amateur” interests: sailing practicalities first and foremost among them, but also science, music, and present-day American politics and economics. SEE ALSO: Barthelme, Donald (AF); Coover, Robert (AF); Gass, William H. (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Minimalist/ Maximalist Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); The Road Novel (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Barth, J. (1958). The End of the Road. New York: Doubleday. Barth, J. (1966). Giles Goat-Boy: or, The Revised New Syllabus. New York: Doubleday. Barth, J. (1967a). The Floating Opera [1956]. New York: Doubleday. Barth, J. (1967b). The Sot-Weed Factor [1960]. New York: Doubleday. Barth, J. (1968). Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice. New York: Doubleday. Barth, J. (1972). Chimera. New York: Random House. Barth, J. (1979). LETTERS: A Novel. New York: Putnam’s. Barth, J. (1982). Sabbatical: A Romance. New York: Putnam’s. Barth, J. (1984). The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction. New York: Putnam’s. Barth, J. (1987). The Tidewater Tales: A Novel. New York: Putnam’s. Barth, J. (1991). The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor. Boston: Little, Brown. Barth, J. (1994). Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera. Boston: Little, Brown. Barth, J. (1995). Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction 1984–1994. Boston: Little, Brown. Barth, J. (1996). On with the Story: Stories. Boston: Little, Brown. Barth, J. (2001). Coming Soon!!! A Narrative. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Barth, J. (2004). The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Barth, J. (2005). Where Three Roads Meet: Novellas. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Barth, J. (2008). The Development: Nine Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Clavier, B. (2007). John Barth and Postmodernism: Spatiality, Travel, Montage. New York: Peter Lang.
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O’Donnell, P. (1986). Passionate Doubts: Designs of Interpretation in Contemporary American Fiction. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Scott, S. D. (2000). The Gamefulness of American Postmodernism: John Barth & Louise Erdrich. New York: Peter Lang. Tobin, P. (1992). John Barth and the Anxiety of Continuance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ziegler, H. (1987). John Barth. London: Methuen.
Barthelme, Donald PATRICK O’DONNELL
Donald Barthelme (1931–89) is, along with writers such as John Barth and Robert Coover, one of the founders of postmodernist American writing. Working primarily, but certainly not exclusively, in the genre of the short story, Barthelme’s fictions, while sometimes considered to be elaborate conceptual constructions, are better conceived as jazz riffs on a theme or idea, even a single word, that layer discourses and images from an encyclopedic realm of disciplines and knowledge. Barthelme’s narratives are often examples of postmodern pastiche, in which a single story can reference dozens of previous works across the range of Western literature through parodic citation. The son of a professor of architecture, Barthelme’s stories can be thought of as architectural experiments on the levels of form and genre that contain, at times, noisy, multidiscursive linguistic forays that challenge the boundaries of form. Born in Philadelphia, Barthelme spent much of the early part of his life in Houston, Texas, where his father taught at the University of Houston. The eldest son in a family of writers (his two brothers, Frederick and Steven, are both well-published writers and teachers of creative writing), Barthelme studied philosophy and art at the University of Houston, and began a career as, briefly, a journalist, and then a writer of fiction, publishing his first story in 1961 while serving for a short period as director of the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston. He moved to New York City and published his first of many stories with the New Yorker in 1963. Over the course of his career, Barthelme
authored over 100 stories; taught at Boston University, the University of Buffalo, and the City College of New York; and was one of the founding members of the creative writing program at the University of Houston. Barthelme was the recipient of numerous awards during his career, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Book Award, and National Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Barthelme’s first collection of stories, Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964), provided clear indications of the eclectic, genre-bending, ironic elements that would come to characterize his work: “A Shower of Gold” is an absurdist tale of a game show contestant; “Me and Miss Mandible” offers excerpts from the diary of a precocious, and possibly insane, sixth grader who harbors adult desires for his schoolteacher; and “The Viennese Opera Ball” is an assemblage of conversations, descriptions, and narratives on an unlikely assortment of topics ranging from abortion to the building of Islamabad. A second collection of stories, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968b), established Barthelme as one of the leading experimental writers of the time. Published following the appearance of his first novel, Snow White (1967), a contemporary fractured fairy tale based on the classic story, Unspeakable Practices contains several of Barthelme’s signature stories, including “The Indian Uprising,” in which scenes of troubled domestic life become intertwined with a contemporary revolution in Paris and episodes from the Wild West; “Robert Kennedy, Saved from Drowning,” presented as a series of disconnected scenarios from the life and times of one “K.,” who is the image of the public man; and “The Balloon,” which depicts the sudden and sublime manifestation of an ever-growing air-filled object over New York City. Barthelme’s first collection of non-fiction, Guilty Pleasures (1968a), is a parodic take on numerous topics, including television, contemporary popular writing, and science; several short story collections followed as Barthelme hit the peak of his writing, including City Life (1970), which contains the notable language experiments of “Bone Bubbles” and “Brain Damage,” as well as “Views of My Father Weeping,” a fragmented, displaced account of fatherhood which was a frequent subject of concern for Barthelme given his own deep, problematic relationship with his
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BELLOW, SAUL
father. Subsequently, Barthelme collected stories in Sadness (1972), Amateurs (1976), and Great Days (1979), and his first comprehensive collection, Sixty Stories, was published in 1981. Barthelme’s second novel, The Dead Father (1975), amplifies his interest in fatherhood and paternity in a narrative of a father-cyborg whose monstrosity is equaled only by his outlandish absurdity. A third novel, Paradise (1986), is a domestic satire about a middle-aged architect who seemingly has all he can desire when three young women move into his apartment. In the last several years of his life, Barthelme continued to write prolifically, publishing the story collections Overnight to Many Distant Cities in 1983, the illustrated stories of Sam’s Bar in 1987 and a second comprehensive collection, Forty Stories, in 1987; a novel, The King (1990), offering another contemporary take on classic stories – in this case, the tales of King Arthur – was published posthumously. Barthelme also published plays, a children’s book, and numerous pieces that could be classified variously as fiction, parable, parody, essay, or fragment; some of these are included in the posthumous The Teachings of Don B. (1992) and Not-Knowing (1997). Certainly one of the most inventive of contemporary American writers, Barthelme’s work continues to exert considerable influence on a number of younger experimental writers, including Donald Antrim and Ben Marcus. SEE ALSO: Barth, John (AF); Coover, Robert (AF); Minimalist/Maximalist Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
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Barthelme, D. (1975). The Dead Father. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Barthelme, D. (1976). Amateurs. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Barthelme, D. (1979). Great Days. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Barthelme, D. (1981). Sixty Stories. New York: Putnam’s. Barthelme, D. (1983). Overnight to Many Distant Cities. New York: Putnam’s. Barthelme, D. (1986). Paradise. New York: Putnam’s. Barthelme, D. (1987a). Forty Stories. New York: Putnam’s. Barthelme, D. (1987b). Sam’s Bar. New York: Doubleday. Barthelme, D. (1990). The King. New York: Harper and Row. Barthelme, D. (1992). The Teachings of Don B.: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme. New York: Turtle Bay Books. Barthelme, D. (1997). Not Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme. New York: Random House. Couturier, M. (1982). Donald Barthelme. New York: Methuen. Klinkowitz, J. (1991). Donald Barthelme: An Exhibition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Maltby, P. (1991). Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. McCaffery, L. (1982). The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Gass. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Molesworth, C. (1982). Donald Barthelme’s Fiction: The Ironist Saved from Drowning. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Stengel, W. B. (1985). The Shape of Art in the Stories of Donald Barthelme. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Barthelme, D. (1964). Come Back, Dr. Caligari. Boston: Little, Brown. Barthelme, D. (1967). Snow White. New York: Atheneum. Barthelme, D. (1968a). Guilty Pleasures. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Barthelme, D. (1968b). Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts: New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Barthelme, D. (1970). City Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Barthelme, D. (1972). Sadness. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Bellow, Saul GLORIA L. CRONIN
Saul Bellow’s fiction dominated the American literary scene during the 1960s and 1970s, as Jewish American literature came into the literary mainstream. Novelist, short story and novella writer, essayist, playwright, and memoirist, he set most of his works in Chicago, and wrote out of the Midwestern realist tradition of Theodore Dreiser and Ernest Hemingway. Nearly all of his works feature male personae (only one female) who
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anguish over the legacy of early modernist nihilism, reflect on the immigrant Jewish American experience, explore the fraught issues of twentiethcentury American masculinities, depict the high comedy of failed heterosexual romance, and wrangle incessantly with the religious issue of transcendence. By 1976, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize, he had created what critics identified as the quintessential modern American urban literary voice. Born in Lachine, Montreal, Canada on June 10, 1915, Saul Bellow was the fourth child of Abraham and Lescha (Liza) Belo, a Jewish couple who emigrated from St. Petersburg, Russia in 1913. In working-class Lachine, the Bellows had their first experience with the North American melting pot of Ukrainians, Russians, Italians, Greeks, Hungarians, and Poles. In 1918, the family moved to Montreal and finally to Chicago, where Bellow entered the ethnic locale of the North Side Jewish poor, a group whose presence would mark nearly all of his fiction. Out of this ethnic mix Bellow created the urban American voice of late-twentieth-century America. Ernest Hemingway’s monumental literary reputation during the 1940s was a major goad to Bellow, who rejected the successors of high modernism who were content with recycling the pathological modernist despair and nihilism typical of high modernism. He understood the genuine despair of the early modernists, but questioned their philosophical dismissal of the question of transcendence and death. Displacing alienation ethics, crisis mentality, absurdism, nihilism, and fears of the imminent collapse of Western civilization become the intellectual hallmarks of Bellow’s work. His sharp awareness that careless intellectuals and artists could easily undermine belief, the human contract, humane values, and civilization itself lies at the root of his later political conservatism. Dangling Man, Bellow’s first novella, appeared in 1947. Joseph, his prototypical protagonist, is primarily interested in his own sensibility. His striking self-ironic narcissism, the exclusion of the female voice, the exclusively homosocial male world, and the often comic misogyny of such a protagonist are repeated throughout his fiction. Joseph quarrels with friends and relatives, lives unashamedly off the earnings of his faithful wife, despises her for her lack of intellectuality, suc-
cumbs to fits of paranoia and anger, engages in a desultory affair, hates the physical decay of his elderly neighbors, and is increasingly haunted by death anxieties. Finally, Joseph admits, his romantic retreat into his own psyche has merely imprisoned him within his own four walls. No sublime enlightenment occurs within this miserably urban version of Walden Pond. The Victim (1949), also written to a European and Flaubertian standard, explores victimization and paranoia within the hellish, nightmare world of anti-Semitic 1940s America. As it captures the atmosphere of the immediate post-Holocaust Jewish American moment, it culminates with Asa Levanthal, like Joseph before him, admitting his dependency on love and friendship and accepting himself as that “eternal Jew” who must indeed become his brother’s keeper. These two brilliant early works earned Bellow much literary attention and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1948). By 1953 his breakthrough novel, The Adventures of Augie March, appeared, featuring a first-generation Jewish American picaro, who comes of age in the transitional world of Depression-era Chicago immigrants. The novel presents a rich series of Hogarthian portraits of Jewish immigrant neighbors and relatives, including March; his brother, Simon; and their gentle and witless mother, Grandma Lausch, a true Bolshevik, along with her everpresent poodle, Winnie. It is a rich Dreiserian chronicle of Bellow’s early immigrant neighborhoods, but more importantly, it is the novel in which he parts with his European literary precursors and finds his own voice and subject matter. He would later be embarrassed about the unabashed ebullience and optimism of the book. Seize the Day (1956), Bellow’s most read and anthologized book, belongs to the era of the first two “victim” novellas, as evidenced by its setting in the sepulchral Hotel Gloriana, populated almost entirely by decrepit, disapproving “fathers” of American capitalism, and its classic Jewish schlemiel, the hapless Tommy Wilhelm, who begs his arrogant and unloving father for help. A type of Willy Loman, Tommy is jobless and estranged from his wife and children. All of Bellow’s subsequent protagonists would find themselves at odds with the entrepreneurial culture of American capitalism and the men it breeds. Tommy is clearly
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at the beginning of a spiritual quest for something other than money and success. Henderson the Rain King (1959), possibly Bellow’s most loved book, contains hilarious parodies of Joseph Conrad’s and Hemingway’s renditions of Africa, the colonial adventure novel, and modernist literary aesthetics. It is an anthropologically rendered comic analysis of the antiromantic philosophical and aesthetic assumptions of literary modernism. While it reveals all the classic colonialist racial ideologies of Western modernism, it also steadily inserts Bellow’s only WASP character, Eugene Henderson, as a burlesque of the Hemingway hero, the romantic questing artist-hero of the Stephen Dedalus variety, and also a version of that emerging literary figure, the ugly American. A violinist and pig farmer, Henderson is an ex-marine and a menopausal social outcast who is metaphysically earnest, bumbling, and egocentric. Like his Eliotic Fisher King forebears, he romantically believes that there is a curse on the land that he must cure. He is Bellow’s comic answer to a generation of early modern writers heavily steeped in anthropology, structuralism, and primitivism, who had, in his opinion, reacted with exaggerated disappointment to the failed promises of Rousseauistic romanticism. With his initials E. H., his heavy drinking, his .357 magnum rifle, his private firing range, his fascination with African safaris, and his participation in a foreign war, Henderson is also Bellow’s attempt to historicize and thus render passe the gigantic Hemingway mythos. Since Hemingway’s was the principal literary reputation standing in the way of his own rise to fame, with Henderson the Rain King Bellow announced that its time had come and gone. In 1962 Bellow joined the prestigious Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and remained there for most of his life. Here he finished Herzog (1964), his massively conceived Joycean masterpiece. Herzog is a victimized divorce and failed academic whose grand treatise on romanticism will never be finished, far less published. Bellow critiques the errors of the modernist philosophical tradition; records his own profound shock at discovering Sondra’s (in reality Alexandra Tschacbasov, his second wife) affair with their mutual friend, Jack Ludwig; and registers his deep depression over this latest divorce. Herzog is the quintessential self-ironic, self-justifying
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Bellow hero – intellectual, vain, tearful – in full intellectual, spiritual, and financial crisis. Throughout 1965 Bellow continued to garner honors for Herzog, including the prestigious International Prize. As he worked on his subsequent short fictions and next novel, he traveled in 1967 to Israel to report on the Six Day War for Newsday magazine; the book account was later published in 1976. Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories, his first short story collection, appeared in 1968, the same year he received the French honor of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and an important award from B’nai Brith. Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), his most criticized novel, appeared in 1970. It depicts 1960s New York City at the height of the student radical movement and features the misogynous, racist Mr. Sammler, a classic Old World “Western Civ” literary thinker, European aristocrat, and Holocaust survivor. Sammler, the petted son of a Polish aristocrat, and humanly aloof Bloomsbury Anglophile, is caught on the eve of World War II as he accompanies his wife and daughter to Europe to help his wife settle her father’s estate. The Nazi invasion subsequently destroys his family and leads to his near death in an extermination pit. When Sammler and his unhinged daughter are reunited after the war, Sammler is nearly incapable of love and empathy. Only at the novel’s end is Sammler able to take responsibility for his damaged daughter and realize and reclaim human feeling. This is Bellow’s first explicit fictional treatment of Holocaust history, a subject he would apologize repeatedly for neglecting as he entered his last decade. Despite its relative unpopularity, Mr. Sammler’s Planet won the National Book Award. That same year Bellow’s play, The Last Analysis, was performed at an off-Broadway theater and closed after just five unsuccessful weeks. Humboldt’s Gift (1975) registers Bellow’s final disapproval of much of psychotherapy and Freud’s notions of the unconscious. The novel reflects its hero’s avid reading of anthroposophists Rudolph Steiner and Owen Barfield, as well as a summary of the power of the crassly material American experience to threaten the inner life of the American artist. Charlie Citrine, a Chicago writer and intellectual with a taste for low pursuits, gangland excitement, and pneumatic young women, is so spiritually depleted that at mid-life he has nearly lost his poetic gifts. In part, Charlie is
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Bellow’s tribute to the beloved, defeated, and deceased friends of his early life, Delmore Schwartz and Isaac Rosenfeld, in the figures of Charlie Citrine and his friend Humboldt. In 1976, the year Saul Bellow received the Nobel Prize for Literature, he finally published To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account, which presents firsthand accounts of many interviews with Israeli personalities, a chronology of his stay in Israel, fictional stories, reported conversations, travelogues, bits of essays, and pieces of public addresses. It earned for Bellow disapprobation as a “neoconservative” and many negative reviews from critics, who accused him of political neutrality and lack of sympathy for Zionism, Israel, and Islam. Some were furious at what they called his international political naivety, while others thought the book lacked a unifying vision and political commitment. The Dean’s December (1981) lacks the balancing comedy of Humboldt’s Gift in attempting to deal with racism, urban violence and decay, and the fate of the poor in America’s increasingly impoverished inner cities. Dean Albert Corde attempts a Houdini-like escape from false sociological and economic descriptions of human experience. Like Charlie Citrine, Corde also tries to resist the modernist nightmare, to read for signs of an ultimate reality beyond dismal quotidian experience, and to explore the possibility of a Platonic home-world. This task, he realizes, requires he build a powerful buffer zone between himself and all outer manifestations of disorder. His angst stems largely from the sheer unknowability of “Truth” and the sheer concoctedness of what passes for academic and media-based versions of reality. From the vantage point of Romania, Corde makes his comparison of Bucharest and Chicago in what becomes a twentieth-century “tale of two cities” living under two different kinds of fascism in which entire human groups are essentially canceled, and in which moral decay is only too evident. Bellow’s counterpointing of the fascist regime in Bucharest with capitalist democracy in raw Chicago was received with shock and critical outrage. A second collection of short stories, Him With His Foot in His Mouth (1984), was followed by another novel, More Die of Heartbreak (1987), which contains some of the old Bellow energy and comedy, but falls short of the intellectual scope of
Herzog or Humboldt’s Gift. It is an amusing Prufrockian lament about failed men and absent mermaids, and is loaded with self-ironic misogynous love-lore, comic characters, botched loves, and fatal forays into the danger zones of sex and romance. In 1989 two novellas, A Theft (1989b) and The Bellarosa Connection (1989a), appeared simultaneously as paperbacks. A Theft stages yet another Bellow comic opera on the failed dynamics of the heterosexual pair, this time with Bellow’s first female protagonist. Clara Velde, a woman raised on old-time countrified Midwestern religious values yet four times divorced and still in love with her elusive lover, Ithiel Regler, is still romantically convinced of the viability of the heterosexual human pair. Regler, on the other hand, is the classic “running man,” unable to commit to any notions of romantic love. Here Bellow rehearses once again the classic comic evasions of the male lover, the social chaos of “Gogmagogsville,” the seeming impossibility of higher synthesis, the human comedy of sexual desire, and other familiar themes. The Bellarosa Connection features the end-oflife moral drama of an unnamed narrator who tries desperately, through memory, to recapture a lost relationship with the remarkable and mysterious Sorella Fonstein and her husband, Harry. Sorella, an overweight American Jewess who missed out on early romance, has ultimately married Harry, a Holocaust survivor brought out of Italy by the infamous and now totally indifferent Billy Rose. The narrator, obsessed with repenting of his own American Jewish amnesia about the consequences of the Holocaust, tries to find the couple. Burdened by the knowledge that he has lived more through memory than through actual relationships, he realizes a moral lack he can never redress. The Bellarosa Connection would appear to be Bellow’s mea culpa on his own human neglect of the living and of the subject of the Holocaust in his fiction. It All Adds Up, Bellow’s essay collection, appeared amid mixed reviews in 1994, followed three years later by The Actual (1997), another novella, which tells the familiar story of a seemingly lost adolescent love of one who may well have been Harry Trellman’s Platonic “actual.” Trellman, worldly, brilliant, and a grand noticer of things, is invited to “notice” on behalf of
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another grand old noticer, Sigmund Adletsky. Since Adletsky is now socially exiled and bored, Harry will be his intellectual informer and brain trust. Adletsky discerns Harry’s unrequited adolescent love for Amy Wustrin and brings the two together in their advancing years, representing another of Bellow’s explorations of the Platonic idea of finding one’s “actual.” His last work, Ravelstein (2000), is an autoethnographic fiction, ostensibly written as a memorial to the late Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago. Here Chick (Bellow) poses as the great biographer Boswell, writing a Johnsonian tribute to his late friend Ravelstein. In his manuscript Chick can also imagine himself more fully as he chronicles his special brotherhood with Ravelstein. Like Saul Bellow and Allan Bloom’s famous friendship, this too is a friendship of two famous first-generation Russian Jewish American intellectuals. In it Bellow enacts his own recovery of what it means to be the son of Russian Jewish immigrants and his own distinctly Jewish voice and anxiety. A thoroughly voiced and performative text, Ravelstein is full of one-liners and Catskill comedian gags which capture a distinctly first-generation Jewish American wit, neuroses, manners, ethical humanism, and intellectual passion. Late in life, it would appear, Bellow, long estranged from his own father and brothers, and burdened with the weight of numerous other failed male friendships, finally finds his Jewish soul-mate and brother in the quirky dying Ravelstein. The book produced much criticism from those who considered Bellow had “outed” his friend, who had never actually “come out” to his friends and colleagues. Saul Bellow’s status in the post-World War II period of American literature can only be compared to that of Ernest Hemingway or William Faulkner. One of the most written-about fiction writers of twentieth-century American literature, he has analyzed exhaustively the effects of American cultural anxiety with the age of technology, rationalism, existentialism, and secularism. He has consistently defended the embattled masculine “Self” of Western metaphysics, affirmed Judeo-Christian religious and ethical values, and explored the high comedy of problematic heterosexual relations in our age. Likewise, he has enumerated multiple, defeating “masculinities” to which the American male is heir. He has mostly
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failed to deal adequately with “femininity” and people of color, a failing he shares in common with most of the male writers of his generation. However, it is the complexity of Bellow’s failure that is of particular interest, since his protagonists are not Bellow, but comic constructions whose inadequacies their author makes more than apparent and which are also apparent to themselves. Bellow’s death on April 5, 2005 raises the question of just how many posthumous works might yet appear. Apparently he never finished his rumored work-in-progress, “All Marbles Still Accounted For,” and no doubt the large deposit of papers at the University of Chicago Regenstein Library will reveal a rich collection of unpublished manuscripts. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Dreiser, Theodore (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Jewish Fiction (BIF); Joyce, James (BIF); Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SELECTED READINGS Atlas, J. (2000). Bellow: A Biography. New York: Random House. Bach, G. (ed.) (1995). The Critical Response to Saul Bellow. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Bach, G., & Cronin, G. (eds.) (2000). Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Bellow, S. (1944). Dangling Man. New York: Vanguard. Bellow, S. (1947). The Victim. New York: Vanguard. Bellow, S. (1953). The Adventures of Augie March. New York: Viking. Bellow, S. (1956). Seize the Day. New York: Viking. Bellow, S. (1959). Henderson the Rain King. New York: Viking. Bellow, S. (1962). The Last Analysis. New York: Viking. Bellow, S. (1964). Herzog. New York: Viking. Bellow, S. (1968). Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories. New York: Viking. Bellow, S. (1969). Mr. Sammler’s Planet. New York: Viking. Bellow, S. (1975). Humboldt’s Gift. New York: Viking. Bellow, S. (1976). To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account. New York: Viking. Bellow, S. (1982). The Dean’s December. New York: Harper. Bellow, S. (1984). Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. New York: Harper.
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Bellow, S. (1987). More Die of Heartbreak. New York: Morrow. Bellow, S. (1989a). The Bellarosa Connection. New York: Penguin. Bellow, S. (1989b). A Theft. New York: Penguin. Bellow, S. (1992). Something to Remember Me By. New York: Viking. Bellow, S. (1994). It All Adds Up. New York: Viking. Bellow, S. (1997). The Actual. New York: Viking. Bellow, S. (2000). Ravelstein. New York: Viking. Bellow, S. (2001). Collected Stories. New York: Viking. Bradbury, M. (1982). Saul Bellow. New York: Methuen. Cronin, G. L. (2001). A Room of His Own: In Search of the Feminine in the Novels of Saul Bellow. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Cronin, G. L., & Siegel, B. (eds.) (1994). Conversations with Saul Bellow. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Friedrich, M. M. (1995). Character and Narration in the Short Fiction of Saul Bellow. New York: Lang. Fuchs, D. (1984). Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Goldman, L. H. (1983). Saul Bellow’s Moral Vision: A Critical Study of the Jewish Experience. New York: Irvington.
Berger, Thomas DAVID W. MADDEN
Thomas Berger is a rare figure in modern American literature – a writer who has worked steadily since the publication of his first novel, living entirely by his pen. Berger has shunned publicity, granted few interviews, and devoted himself to one fictional experiment after another. Although he rejects the labels of comic writer or social critic, his novels are among the most relentlessly ironic and incisive of any modern American writer. Thomas Louis Berger was born July 20, 1924 in Cincinnati, Ohio. His education at the University of Cincinnati was interrupted by service in the United States’ occupation forces in Germany at the close of World War II. This experience was crucial to the writing of his first novel, Crazy in Berlin (1958), which featured a hapless protagonist, Carlo Reinhart, whom Berger returned to in three more novels – Reinhart in Love (1962), Vital Parts (1970), and Reinhart’s Women (1981). As Reinhart ages, American culture undergoes various upheavals, and while the protagonist often stumbles and fails, he is a perfect barometer of social instability.
Jack Crabbe, another easily overlooked nobody, is the central figure in Little Big Man (1964), Berger’s most acclaimed work. Here Berger experiments with the possibilities of a subjective narrator who speaks in a wild, unlettered, but remarkably expressive idiom inspired by a minor character from a Saroyan play. The novel is an acerbic reevaluation of the myth of the West in which Manifest Destiny presumably improves lives and a national culture. As Crabbe oscillates between the white and Native American worlds, Berger is even-handed in his treatment of each culture; however, there is no question that the relentless exploitativeness of whites will lead to the extermination of the Cheyenne and other tribes but doom America to its own worst proclivities. Berger returns to his 113-year-old narrator in a sequel, The Return of Little Big Man (1999), which traces more of his adventures in a rapidly vanishing frontier. A persistent theme in Berger’s works is the intrusion of crime and criminality in the lives of ordinary, unprepossessing figures. Killing Time (1967), modeled on a police procedural, reveals law enforcement to be as ethically bankrupt as the criminal. Who Is Teddy Villanova? (1977) and its sequel, Nowhere (1985), follow another of Berger’s classic losers, Russell Wren, a former English graduate student who is equally unskilled at solving crimes and mastering the hard-boiled argot. Meeting Evil (1992) and Suspects (1996) are sinister examinations of the ways in which one’s exposure to threats and violence can reveal unacknowledged capacities for violence of one’s own. Berger has also revealed a marked interest in the seemingly ordinary lives of bourgeois figures simply trying to survive life in small towns. The first of these novels, Sneaky People (1975), is a Bildungsroman in which a young boy comes to the uncomfortable conclusion that no one, including his demure mother, is precisely who he or she appears to be. The ironic dichotomy between appearance and essence is more outrageously developed in Neighbors (1980), a tour de force in which a complacent suburbanite, Earl Keese, has his quiet life invaded by new neighbors, Harry and Ramona, outrageous embodiments of the id who challenge everything Keese has taken for granted. The Feud (1983), like Sneaky People, is another return to the Depression era of Berger’s
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youth, but there is little nostalgia in this modern depiction of the Montagues and Capulets as residents of neighboring towns quickly go to virtual war over the most ridiculous of misunderstandings. Once again, a young na€ıf is caught in the middle and must come of age without the guidance of any mature adult. Berger has long insisted that each of his novels is a homage to another writer, a particular style, or a distinct genre. Examples of these include Regiment of Women (1973; a homage to Orwell’s 1984), Arthur Rex (1978; Malory’s Morte d’Arthur), Orrie’s Story (1990; the Oresteia), and Robert Crews (1994; Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe). The imitations are never slavish or simply parasitic reworkings offered for a few cheap laughs. In every case, Berger uses his sources to create brilliant counterpoints between the sensibilities and values of one era and another. Berger has received various awards, among them a Dial Fellowship (1962) and the Western Heritage and Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Awards in 1965 for Little Big Man. In 1982 he received the Ohioana Book Award for Reinhart’s Women and was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for The Feud. In 1986 he was honored with a doctor of letters degree by Long Island University. SEE ALSO: The Avant Garde Novel (AF); The City in Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Berger, T. (1958). Crazy in Berlin. New York: Scribner’s. Berger, T. (1962). Reinhart in Love. New York: Scribner’s. Berger, T. (1964). Little Big Man. New York: Dial Press. Berger, T. (1967). Killing Time. New York: Dial Press. Berger, T. (1970). Vital Parts. New York: Baron. Berger, T. (1973). Regiment of Women. New York: Simon and Schuster. Berger, T. (1975). Sneaky People. New York: Simon and Schuster. Berger, T. (1977). Who Is Teddy Villanova? New York: Delacorte. Berger, T. (1978). Arthur Rex: A Legendary Novel. New York: Delacorte. Berger, T. (1980). Neighbors. New York: Delacorte. Berger, T. (1981). Reinhart’s Women. New York: Delacorte. Berger, T. (1983). The Feud. New York: Delacorte.
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Berger, T. (1985). Nowhere. New York: Delacorte. Berger, T. (1988). The Houseguest. Boston: Little, Brown. Berger, T. (1990). Orrie’s Story. Boston: Little, Brown. Berger, T. (1992). Meeting Evil. Boston: Little, Brown. Berger, T. (1994). Robert Crews. New York: Morrow. Berger, T. (1996). Suspects. New York: Morrow. Berger, T. (1999). The Return of Little Big Man. Boston: Little, Brown. Landon, B. (1989). Thomas Berger. Boston: Twayne. Madden, D. W. (ed.) (1995). Critical Essays on Thomas Berger. New York: G. K. Hall. Schulz, M. F. (1973). The Politics of Parody; and, the Comic Apocalypses of Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Berger, Thomas Pynchon, and Robert Coover. In Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties: A Pluralistic Definition of Man and His World. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 66–90. Trachtenberg, S. (1978). Berger and Barth: The Comedy of Decomposition. In S. B. Cohen (ed.), Comic Relief. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 45–69. Weber, B. (ed.) (1983). Special Issue Honoring Thomas Berger. Studies in American Humor, 2(1–2): 1–152.
Border Fictions CLAUDIA SADOWSKI-SMITH
The existence of fictional representations of US national boundaries can be traced back to the very creation of hemispheric borders in the nineteenth century. But the production of fiction about US national boundaries has surged at the turn of the twenty-first century in the context of dramatic changes in this geography. As defined here, border fiction encompasses narrative productions about US borders that are set at the seams of the United States and one of its neighboring nations. Because its border settings are so closely interlinked with its subject matter, this fiction could not easily be moved to another place without distortion or loss of significance. Border texts thus illustrate the mutual constituency of a particular place and its representation – just as depictions of border regions are affected by the specificities of the geopolitical boundary, the border landscape itself is also shaped by human projection and (often contesting) representations. In currently dominant critical usage, border fiction tends to be equated with literature produced by US Chicana/o writers, that is, by members of an ethnicized group that was created
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with the 1848 redrawing of the Mexico/US border. Chicana/o literary production is also generally linked to the US Southwest, understood as border territory, as a consequence of the 1950s–1970s Chicano activist and cultural-nationalist struggles for inclusion into full US citizenship. This activism largely took place in the border states of California, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. The culturalnationalist version of Chicano civil rights struggles was also firmly grounded in the US Southwest as it articulated land claims in the idea of a Chicana/o homeland, Aztlan, located in this area. In the founding document of Chicanismo, “El Plan Espiritual,” the poet Alurista supported such territorial claims by declaring Chicana/os to be the descendants of the Aztecs, the aboriginal inhabitants of (parts of) the Southwest before they migrated to today’s Mexico. Despite these close connections between Chicana/o literary production and the US Southwest, however, only a surprisingly small number of Chicana/o literary works deal explicitly with the Mexico/US border (Alarco´n 1992, 65). These works include texts by authors like Gloria Anzaldu´a, Aristeo Brito, Norma Elia Cantu´, Dagoberto Gilb, Rolando Hinojosa, Arturo Islas, Miguel Mendez, Americo Paredes, John Rechy, Alberto Alvaro Rıos, and Helena Marıa Viramontes. Their writing employs the border as theme and setting, while also contributing to the area’s longstanding symbolic value as a signifier of the mythic Chicano homeland Aztlan and Chicana/o culture. Originally published in 1974, though as the author claimed finished well before the start of Chicana/o civil rights struggles, Miguel Mendez’s Peregrinos de Aztlan (translated as Pilgrims in Aztlan in 1992) adds to the cultural-nationalist myth of Aztlan a quite contemporary emphasis on the transnational character of the Mexico/ US borderlands. Set in Tijuana and in the Californian and Arizonan portions of the US Southwest – near Yuma and Sonora – the novel chronicles the transformation of a peasant, rural, and agricultural world by new economic realities. These changes include realignments affected by the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the enormous demographic growth of the Southwest and of northern Mexican border cities throughout the 1960s, both of which provided the context for the creation of a Mexican (American) migrant culture.
The more numerous Chicana/o border fiction from the 1980s and 1990s largely disposes of the image of Aztlan in favor of the notion of borderlands, which is a space related to but not identical with the Mexico/US border. The notion of borderlands serves to highlight the result of the shifted geopolitical border and ongoing Mexican (im)migration into the United States – the formation of hybrid Chicana/o cultures and identities. The most famous border text from this period, Anzaldu´a’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), poetically refigures the US Southwest and its designation as Aztlan in the explicitly transnational notion of la frontera in order to theorize questions of Chicana identity. Borderlands/La Frontera opens with a geographical focus on the Texas/Chihuahua borderlands, whose division by the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo has served as the model for narratives about Aztlan. But the book quickly moves beyond observations of new border realities – including border militarization, the surge in the number of export-processing factories in Mexican border towns, and the transformation of ranching by large agricultural corporations along the US part of the borderlands – to questions of Anzaldu´a’s identity as a Chicana. To theorize divisions inherent in this identity, Anzaldu´a metaphorically employs the fortified border, writing that the fence is “running down the length of my body, /staking rods in my flesh, /splits me splits me /me raja me raja / This is my home /this thin edge of barbwire” (1987, 2–3). Work by Alberto Rıos and Norma Cantu´ from the same time period also employs a thematic focus on the Mexico/US border territory to examine notions of multiple boundaries and Chicana/o life. Rıos is the author of various books and chapbooks of poetry, collections of short stories, and a memoir. Much of Rıos’s poetry, two short story collections – The Curtain of Trees (1999b) and The Iguana Killers (1984) – as well as Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir (1999a) take place in southern Arizona and perform periodic border crossings into Mexico. Even though Capirotada often acknowledges the ongoing hardening of the international boundary, the memoir emphasizes the permeability of the border, especially in the cultural and mental realms. The short story “The Child” in Iguana Killer is particularly noteworthy for its focus on the politically charged issue of drug smuggling across the Mexico/US border.
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BORDER FICTIONS
Norma Cantu´’s Canı´cula, which she calls a “fictional autobioethnography,” is an account of the author’s upbringing in the late 1940s to mid1960s along the south Texas/Nuevo Leo´n border, particularly in the twin cities of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo. Similar to Anzaldu´a’s and Rıos’s approach to the Mexico/US border, Cantu´ describes the Laredo metropolitan area as a territory without divisions that has shaped the creation of a hybrid Mexican American identity. To trace the border-crossing family traditions that have provided the context for Cantu´’s upbringing, Canı cula employs an experimental form of memoir, in which photographs and narratives are mismatched, and pictures omitted or retouched. While many of the 1980s and 1990s Chicana/o border writers have continued publishing, new writing about the Mexico/US boundary, such as Ito Romo’s El Puente ¼ The Bridge (2000), Richard Yan˜ez’s El Paso del Norte (2003), and Lucrecia Guerrero’s Chasing Shadows (2000), places Chicana/o communities more explicitly in relation to a border geography that has been reconfigured by forces of globalization. El Puente focuses on environmental effects of the maquiladora industry created in the context of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The book’s individual vignettes explore the lives of 14 women, who become part of a crowd that gathers at the international bridge to watch the river change color as a sign of protest against environmental pollution. The more loosely connected stories in Yan˜ez’s El Paso del Norte are set in El Paso’s working-class neighborhood Ysleta, which is located less than a mile from the Zaragoza International Bridge. The transnational geography of Ysleta not only marks divisions between Mexico and the United States, but also signifies internal differences among the Mexican majority population of El Paso. “Rio Grande,” the last story in the collection, explores the effects of border militarization on Mexican American residents. The interconnected stories in Lucrecia Guerrero’s Chasing Shadows are also held together by their geographical focus on a fictional border town named Mesquite, located in Arizona. Individual characters’ lives intersect in the neighborhood of Frontera Street, which is located literally along the border. While this work focuses on the US side of the border, fictionalized accounts of the surge in the
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murders of women in Mexico’s border town Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, by two Chicana authors – Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders (2005) and Stella Pope Duarte’s If I Die in Juarez (2008) – move more explicitly across the international boundary into the northern Mexican borderlands. Desert Blood recounts the growth in femicide since 1993 from the point of view of a Chicana/o protagonist. The novel emphasizes not only the role of Mexican elites, but also the existence of US victims and the possible involvement of US-based sexual offenders and US enforcement agencies in the killings. If I Die in Juarez focuses on the fate of three Mexican women who become involved with a woman-killing cartel in Ciudad Juarez. Because it is less interested in symbolic questions of cultural and identity formation, this recent Chicana/o border literature about US and Mexican border cities creates fewer opportunities for the persistent conflation of the symbolic and literal meanings of the national boundary. In addition to border literature written by Chicana/o authors, literary productions by or about indigenous, Asian-descended, white, Mexican, and Canadian border dwellers, which have traditionally not been associated with the label of border fiction, have also explored developments in US border regions. Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Almanac of the Dead (1991) spans 500 years and several locations in the United States and Mexico, including the border states of Arizona, Texas, California, New Mexico, Baja California, and (on the Mexico/Guatemala border) Chiapas. Almanac fictionalizes mass border crossings by Mexican Indians and landless war refugees from Guatemala and El Salvador into Tucson, Arizona, where they demand the return of indigenous land and the free passage of people across national borders. The novel articulates an understanding of national boundaries as ancestral homelands, that is, geographies that are sacred, home to deities, ceremonial sites, and generations of ancestors, even when histories of displacement or the loss of the homelands may be part of a particular tribal or national experience. Set in Baja California and Mazatlan, Mexico and in Los Angeles, Japanese American writer Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Tropic of Orange (1997) depicts growing intersections among various communities in the border region and in Los Angeles, a city
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BORDER FICTIONS
whose urban sprawl reaches and is shaped by the international boundary. As it traces the lives of seven characters over the course of a week, the novel highlights connections among inhabitants of border areas who are separated by ethnicity and class status, and focuses especially on parallels among Asian- and Mexican-descended communities. Examples of fiction about US borders by white US American authors include Cormac McCarthy’s border trilogy – All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Desert of the Plains (1998) – as well as his more recent novel No Country For Old Men (2005); Susan Straight’s Highwire Moon (2001); George Rabasa’s Floating Kingdom (1997); and T. Coraghessan Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain (1995). While McCarthy’s trilogy focuses on border crossings by Anglo protagonists into Mexico, No Country for Old Men explores the effects of transnational drug smuggling on the Texan border region. Straight’s Highwire Moon is set in the fictional California town of Rio Seco and explores the separation (and eventual reunification) of a Mexican Indian farm worker, who is forcibly repatriated to Mexico, with her daughter in the United States. Rabasa’s Floating Kingdom fictionalizes the relationship between a white teenager from Texas and a Mexican family living on an island in the middle of the Rio Grande that separates the United States and Mexico. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain highlights the divided nature of California by juxtaposing a pair of wealthy, liberal suburbanites with undocumented immigrants from Mexico living in Los Angeles. In addition to fiction written by US authors, work about the northern Mexican borderlands by Mexican authors has also surged since the 1980s. Examples include work by Rosina Conde, Federico Campbell, Victor Zun˜iga, Sergio Go´mez Montero, Humberto Felix Berumen, and Luis Humberto Crosthwaite. Of this work, Campbell’s Tijuanenses (1989), translated as Tijuana: Stories on the Border (1995), and Conde’s Women on the Road (1994) are readily available in English translation. Mexico City-based writer Carlos Fuentes’s The Crystal Frontier (La Frontera de Cristal; 1995) also addresses changes along the northern border. Some examples of English-language fiction about the Canada/US border include work by
authors Thomas King, Guillermo Verdecchia, Jeannette Turner Hospital, and Kelly Rebar. Born and raised in the United States, Thomas King moved to Canada to work as a professor of Native studies and now self-identifies as a native Canadian author. Some of King’s short fiction collected in One Good Story, That One (1993) and his border trilogy – Medicine River (1991), Green Grass, Running Water (1993), and Truth and Bright Water (2000) – are set on or near a Blackfoot reservation located on the border between Alberta and Montana, and emphasize indigenous people’s relationships to this national boundary. In addition to this work, a growing list of detective fiction is also set in US border regions. Some examples include work by Chicano writer Rolando Hinojosa as well as by Mexican authors Paco Ignacio Taibo II (La Vida Misma [1987], ˜ os de translated as Life Itself in 1995; and Suen Frontera [1990], translated as Frontera Dreams in 2002) and Gabriel Trujillo Mun˜oz’s Tijuana City Blues (1999). Using the pseudonym Hartley Goodweather, Thomas King has also produced detective fiction set along the US portion of the Canada/US border. The fiction mentioned here represents only a fraction of available work on US borders. But this writing by a wide variety of authors about multiple border communities complicates the persisting conflation of border literature with work by Chicana/o authors as well as the prevailing symbolic view of borders in US literary studies. SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Alarco´n, J. S. (1992). The Border: To Cross at the Crossroads in Three Chicano Literary Texts. In A. Ramırez & J. Villarino (eds.), Chicano Border Culture & Folklore. San Diego: Marin, pp. 65–75. Anaya, R. A., & Lomelı, F. A. (eds.) (1989). Aztlan: Essays on the Chicano Homeland. Albuquerque, NM: Academia/El Norte. Anzaldu´a, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. Boyle, R. C. (1995). The Tortilla Curtain. New York: Viking.
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Brito, A. (1990). The Devil in Texas ¼ El Diablo en Texas (trans. David William Foster). Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/Editorial Biling€ ue. Caldero´n, H., & Saldıvar, J. D. (eds.) (1991). Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Campbell, F. (1995). Tijuana: Stories on the Border (trans. Debra A. Castillo). Berkeley: University of California Press. Cantu´, N. E. (1995). Canı´cula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Conde, R. (1994). Women on the Road. San Diego: San Diego State University Press. Fuentes, C. (1997). The Crystal Frontier: A Novel in Nine Stories (trans. Alfred Mac Adam). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Gilb, D. (1990). The Magic of Blood. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press Guerrero, L. (2000). Chasing Shadows: Stories. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Hinojosa, R. (1987). Klail City. Houston: Arte Pu´blico. Hinojosa, R. (1990). Becky and Her Friends. Houston: Arte Pu´blico. Hospital, J. T. (1985). Borderline. New York: E. P. Dutton. Islas, A. (1990). Migrant Souls: A Novel. New York: Morrow. King, T. (1993). Green Grass, Running Water. Toronto: Harper. King, T. (2000). Truth and Bright Water. Toronto: Harper. Mendez, M. M. (1992). Pilgrims in Aztlan (trans. David William Foster). Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/ Editorial Biling€ ue. Paredes, A. (1958). “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero. Austin: University of Texas Press. ´ mez: A Paredes, A. (1990). George Washington Go Mexicotexan Novel. Houston: Arte Pu´blico. Rabasa, G. (1997). Floating Kingdom. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. Rebar, K. (1989). Bordertown Cafe. Winnipeg: Blizzard. Rechy, J. (1963). City of Night. New York: Grove. Rıos, A. A. (1984). The Iguana Killer: Twelve Stories of the Heart. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Rıos, A. A. (1999a). Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Rıos, A. A. (1999b). The Curtain of Trees: Stories. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Romo, I. (2000). El Puente ¼ The Bridge. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
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Saldıvar, J. D. (1997). Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Silko, L. (1991). Almanac of the Dead. New York: Simon and Schuster. Straight, S. (2001). Highwire Moon. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. TaiboII, P. I. (1994). Life Itself (trans. Beth Henson). New York: Mysterious Press. TaiboII, P. I. (2002). Frontera Dreams: A Hector Belascoaran Shayne Detective Novel (trans. Bill Verter). El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos. Trujillo Mun˜oz, G. (1999). Tijuana City Blues: Tres Novelas Cortas. Mexico City: Sansores y Aljure. Verdecchia, G. (1993). Fronteras Americanas/American Borders. Vancouver: Talonbooks. Viramontes, H. M. (1985). The Moths and Other Stories. Houston: Arte Pu´blico. Viramontes, H. M. (1995). Under the Feet of Jesus. New York: E. P. Dutton. Yamashita, K. T. (1997). Tropic of Orange. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. Yan˜ez, R. (2003). El Paso del Norte: Stories on the Border. Reno: University of Nevada Press.
Boyle, Kay THOMAS C. AUSTENFELD
Kay Boyle (1902–92) considered writing, personal integrity, and political activism as inseparable. A modernist who helped revolutionize literary style, she was also a woman who chose sexual freedom but embraced motherhood. An expatriate in France and Austria from 1923 to 1941 and a keen observer and critic of totalitarianism in Austria and Germany, she also became a historically thoughtful chronicler of the American occupation of Germany after 1945. She was victimized by loyalty-security hearings in 1952, taught at San Francisco State University from 1962 to 1979, and protested against the Vietnam War. Boyle wrote short fiction, novels, essays, poems, and memoirs. By revising Robert McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together 1920–1930 and interspersing her own chapters to reissue the book in 1968, she became one of the historiographers of modernism. Among her close literary associates were William Carlos Williams, Emanuel Carnevali, Samuel Beckett, Harry and Caresse Crosby, Eugene Jolas, Marianne Moore, Robert Carlton Brown, and Howard Nemerov. “Artist and activist” (in
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Sandra Spanier’s words) through eight decades, Boyle embodies many of the contradictions of the twentieth century but also helped write its literary history. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota and raised in Cincinnati, Kay Boyle was initiated into the world of art, literature, and politics by her mother, Katherine Evans Boyle, who took her to the Armory Show in 1913. Their close relationship is acknowledged in a mother–daughter pair in Boyle’s first novel, Process, completed in 1925 and long considered lost until discovered and published in 2001. Process experiments with streamof-consciousness technique and synesthesia; its prose is often suggestive of lyric poetry. After working on Broom with Lola Ridge in New York and meeting William Carlos Williams, Boyle married Richard Brault, a French exchange student, and accompanied him to Brittany. Boyle’s next four novels are fictional transformations of autobiographical and biographical occurrences: Plagued by the Nightingale (1966 [1931]) investigates the cross-cultural drama of an American daughter-in-law upsetting traditional social structures in a French family; Gentlemen, I Address You Privately (1991 [1933]) is an opaque story of homosexual love steeped in the atmosphere of a northern French coastal town; Year Before Last (1969 [1932]) is based on Boyle’s relationship with the dying poet Ernest Walsh, editor of This Quarter, who fathered a child she bore in 1927; and My Next Bride (1986 [1934]) arises from Boyle’s experiences in Raymond Duncan’s Neuilly colony. In these years, Boyle was a major contributor to Eugene Jolas’s journal transition as well. Divorced from Brault and married to Laurence Vail, Boyle spent the early 1930s mostly in the South of France and then in the French and Austrian Alps, with a sojourn in England. Death of a Man (1989 [1936]), an early and astute fictional analysis of fascism’s dangerous attraction, is one of her best novels, though it was received doubtfully at the time. Death of a Man signals her breakthrough into an almost “prescient” (Hatlen 1989) political consciousness as well as a sure hand in style. Psychological analysis of characters takes precedence over autobiography from here forward, yet Boyle’s emotional investment in France also produced such “potboilers” as Primer for Combat (1942) and
Avalanche (1944). Boyle’s short stories of the 1930s propelled her to national visibility in the New Yorker, Harper’s, and the Saturday Evening Post. Boyle returned to the United States in 1941, divorced Vail, and married the Austrian expatriate Baron Joseph von Franckenstein in 1943. Living with Franckenstein in occupied Germany after the war, Boyle assembled The Smoking Mountain: Stories of Postwar Germany (1951) and later published a novel called Generation Without Farewell (1960), in which the German protagonist, J€ager, becomes Boyle’s most eloquent test case—among many—for the redemptive potential of the human spirit. Boyle and Franckenstein suffered professional setbacks after congressional hearings in 1952. Boyle eventually found a new home in San Francisco, where she taught and opened her house to social causes she supported. Her anti-Vietnam War stance and imprisonment are fictionalized in The Underground Woman (1975). For her entire life, Boyle consistently remained a critical American, a Francophile, and a supporter of young writers and progressive causes. She embodied what Kwame Anthony Appiah has called “rooted cosmopolitanism” (1998, 91). SEE ALSO: Expatriate Fiction (AF); The Little Magazines (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Appiah, K. A. (1998). Cosmopolitan Patriots. In P. Cheah & B. Robbins (eds.), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 91–114. Austenfeld, T. (ed.) (2008). Kay Boyle for the TwentyFirst Century: New Essays. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Boyle, K. (1936). The White Horses of Vienna and Other Stories. New York: Harcourt Brace. Boyle, K. (1940). The Crazy Hunter: Three Short Novels. New York: Harcourt Brace. Boyle, K. (1942). Primer for Combat. New York: Simon and Schuster. Boyle, K. (1944). Avalanche. New York: Simon and Schuster. Boyle, K. (1946). A Frenchman Must Die. New York: Simon and Schuster. Boyle, K. (1947). Monday Night [1938]. New York: New Directions. Boyle, K. (1948). 1939. New York: Simon and Schuster.
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BRAUTIGAN, RICHARD
Boyle, K. (1951). Smoking Mountain: Stories of Postwar Germany. New York: McGraw-Hill. Boyle, K. (1960). Generation Without Farewell. New York: Knopf. Boyle, K. (1962). Collected Poems. New York: Knopf. Boyle, K. (1966). Plagued by the Nightingale [1931]. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Boyle, K. (1969). Year Before Last [1932]. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Boyle, K. (1970). Testament for My Students and Other Poems. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Boyle, K. (1975). The Underground Woman. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Boyle, K. (1985). Words that Must Somehow Be Said (ed. E. Bell). San Francisco: North Point. Boyle, K. (1986). My Next Bride [1934]. London: Virago. Boyle, K. (1989). Death of a Man [1936]. New York: New Directions. Boyle, K. (1991). Gentlemen, I Address You Privately [1933]. Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press. Boyle, K. (1992). Fifty Stories (intro. L. Erdrich). New York: New Directions. Boyle, K. (2001). Process (ed. S. Spanier). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Elkins, M. (1993). Metamorphosizing the Novel: Kay Boyle’s Narrative Innovations. New York: Peter Lang. Elkins, M. (ed.) (1997). Critical Essays on Kay Boyle. New York: G. K. Hall. Hatlen, B. (1989). Introduction. In K. Boyle, Death of a Man. New York: New Directions. Koch, D. V. (1980). Kay Boyle. In K. L. Rood (ed.), American Writers in Paris, 1920–1939. Detroit: Gale, pp. 46–56. Mellen, J. (1994). Kay Boyle: Author of Herself. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Spanier, S. W. (1986). Kay Boyle: Artist and Activist. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Brautigan, Richard DAVID W. MADDEN
Richard Brautigan is a controversial figure – remembered by some as a symbol of the hippie movement, by scholars as a serious literary figure, and by many critics as a benign mediocrity. He published 11 novels, nine volumes of poetry, and one collection of short stories and developed a distinctive style that was unmistakably his own. Brautigan was born on January 30, 1935 in Spokane (some say Tacoma), Washington to Bernard F. and Lula Mary Brautigan. He never
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attended college, and there is some dispute as to whether he even graduated from high school, but in 1956 he moved to San Francisco and hovered on the edges of the Beat movement, writing poetry. He turned to writing fiction in the early 1960s and later became a frequent contributor to the fledgling Rolling Stone magazine. The identifiable Brautigan style was a combination of poetic concision and Hemingwayesque minimalism. He typically relies upon strong, eccentric images arranged in a seemingly random, associative manner. His narratives are divided into multiple, brief chapters with often curious titles that emphasize the mundane, commonplace, or trivial. His first completed novel, Trout Fishing in America (1967), established his reputation and marks the zenith of his creative abilities. Although it was originally published by a small press, the book found an audience with young readers and catapulted Brautigan to international fame. On the surface the 47 abbreviated chapters seem random and the plot discontinuous. However, there are a number of interrelated narratives, the most conventional of which is a camping trip throughout Idaho where the narrator and his family stop at various fishing locations. The book is also a meditation on the American pastoral myth and the prospects for renewal in a landscape that is rapidly vanishing or abused. A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964) offers a more conventional plot with a wild misfit, Lee Mellon, inveigling the narrator, Jesse, to visit him in Big Sur. They live in abject poverty, romance a pair of women, and generally wreak havoc. Brautigan has always championed misfits and oddballs, and Lee Mellon, who believes himself descended from a Confederate general, essentially secedes from the competitive quest for success to live a spontaneous, untrammeled life. As Terence Malley argues, Mellon is a parody of the self-reliant American hero. In Watermelon Sugar (1968) is an adult fantasy of a commune, existing some time after a cataclysm that has obliterated all signs of civilization. Another subjective narrator relates the community’s efforts at survival against tigers and an absurd outlaw gang in a place called iDeath, where inhabitants lead simple, uncomplicated lives. The Abortion: An Historical Romance (1971) also centers on a recluse who works in a library housing
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unpublished books until he is rocked from his routines and must help his girlfriend obtain an abortion in Mexico. The narrative is diffuse and often uneventful and marks the beginning of Brautigan’s artistic decline. In the 1970s he turned to genre fictions – The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western (1974), Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel (1976), and Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel, 1942 (1977) – which have moments of inspiration but lack much seriousness. The exception is Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery (1975), which revolves around three parallel narratives that coalesce in tragedy at the novel’s close. The Tokyo-Montana Press (1980), with its 31 sections, appears to be a reprise of Trout Fishing, but with little success. The book has no clear narrative thread, and the observations, while whimsical and abrupt, are often banal and trivial. The last novel published in his lifetime, So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away (1982), is the best of his later works. It centers on a narrator’s reflections about poverty, marginalization, and an accidental shooting, all of which haunt him throughout his life. The elegiac tone and tight construction are impressive, though the book garnered little critical attention and sold poorly. His last novel, published posthumously, An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey (2000), offers another meditation on mortality, isolation, and the failure of intimacy. In October 1984 Brautigan committed suicide, leaving no note but clearly despondent over his life and diminished career. He will, however, be remembered for his audacious imagination and insistence on creative potentiality and personal freedom. His novels stand in the forefront of postmodern metafictionality and consistently feature a bevy of self-reflective techniques. The subjective narrators, lonely outsiders, frequent asides to the audience, and self-conscious comments on the novels’ construction all remind one of contemporaries such as Kurt Vonnegut and Donald Barthelme. Trout Fishing has sold over 3 million copies and shows no signs of vanishing from the literary landscape. SEE ALSO: Barthelme, Donald (AF); Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Minimalist/Maximalist Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Vonnegut, Kurt (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Abbot, K. (1989). Downstream from Trout Fishing in America: A Memoir of Richard Brautigan. Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press. Barber, J. F. (ed.) (2006). Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Boyer, J. (1987). Richard Brautigan. Boise, ID: Boise State University Press. Brautigan, I. (2000). You Can’t Catch Death: A Daughter’s Memoir. New York: St. Martin’s. Brautigan, R. (1964). A Confederate General from Big Sur. New York: Grove. Brautigan, R. (1967). Trout Fishing in America. San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation. Brautigan, R. (1968). In Watermelon Sugar. San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation. Brautigan, R. (1971). The Abortion: An Historical Romance. New York: Simon and Schuster. Brautigan, R. (1974). The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western. New York: Simon and Schuster. Brautigan, R. (1975). Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery. New York: Simon and Schuster. Brautigan, R. (1976). Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel. New York: Simon and Schuster. Brautigan, R. (1977). Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel, 1942. New York: Delacorte. Brautigan, R. (1980). The Tokyo-Montana Press. New York: Delacorte. Brautigan, R. (1982). So The Wind Won’t Blow It All Away. New York: Delacorte. Brautigan, R. (2000). An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey. New York: St. Martin’s. Chenetier, M. (1983). Richard Brautigan. New York: Methuen. Foster, E. H. (1983). Richard Brautigan. New York: Twayne. Malley, T. (1972). Richard Brautigan: Writers for the Seventies. New York: Warner. Mellard, J. M. (1980). The Exploded Form: The Modernist Novel in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Buck, Pearl S. JAIME HARKER
Pearl S. Buck continues to inhabit a kind of critical purgatory. A beloved, bestselling novelist whose writing career spanned over 40 years and 100 books, Buck has remained in print, and refused to fade away into hellish obscurity like so many interwar popular novelists. Her 1938 Nobel Prize keeps her just on the edge of critical acceptability.
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BUCK, PEARL S.
Critics, however, refuse to accept her into paradise, insisting that, for her literary sins (melodrama, sentimentality, popularity, and activism) she continue in limbo, neither art nor trash. This critical ambivalence is unfortunate, because Buck’s literary, cultural, and political significance is unparalleled in twentieth-century letters. Pearl Buck was born in West Virginia in 1892, but her spiritual and cultural home was China. The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, Buck grew up at the intersection of Chinese and American culture. As she stated in a controversial address to the Presbyterian Mission Board, “By birth I am an American, by belief I am a Christian, but by culture, I am Chinese.” The belief fell away, and the Americanness increased when, in her forties, she returned to the United States for good; yet her cultural identification with China continued throughout her life. Fluent in Chinese, Buck developed her authorial voice based on the model of Chinese folk novels. This led to a problem of categorization for Buck’s critics, although recent interest in transnational work provides another paradigm with which to make sense of her career. Buck’s first book, East Wind, West Wind (1930), was sent to every publishing house in New York before being accepted by the brandnew John Day Company. Publisher Richard Walsh’s gamble paid off handsomely with the publication of her first novel, The Good Earth (1931). The success of the novel is legendary; Book of the Month Club judge Dorothy Canfield read the novel on the train back to Vermont, and insisted that they select it – an action that sent Pearl Buck, an unknown writer living in China, into literary stardom. From then on, Buck was feted by highbrow moderns as well as middlebrow popularizers – a liminal status that continued through her biographies of her missionary parents (The Exile [1936a] and Fighting Angel [1936b]) and additional novels: two sequels to The Good Earth, Sons (1932), and A House Divided (1935). Her 1938 Nobel Prize transformed Buck into an affront to many of those highbrow writers who coveted the honor for themselves. The chorus of dissatisfaction with Buck’s success only grew louder as time went on and the New Critics confronted the popular appeal of Buck. But Buck’s cultural influence continued throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s. Her 1939 novel,
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The Patriot, was lauded in the New Republic as an exemplary Popular Front text, mixing fictional appeals with progressive political activism. She also published nonfiction articles in a variety of forums, advocating against racial discrimination in the United States and against imperialism abroad. During World War II, she argued that American racism and British imperialism were hurting the war effort, and she linked anti-racism and anti-imperialism with American nationalism. Buck’s post-Nobel career has received scant critical attention, which is a shame, because she continued to be a productive writer from the 1930s until her death in 1973, publishing over 70 books. Buck continued to advocate for racial equality, even when the politics of the Cold War made anti-Communism more important than anti-imperialism. Despite losing access to the periodicals that she enjoyed in the 1930s and 1940s, Buck used her Cold War novels to explore miscegenation, critique American foreign policy, and teach Americans about the complex history of Asian nations, all within the genre confines of love triangles, epic journeys, and melodramatic plots. From critiques of American racism and the embrace of miscegenation (The Angry Wife [1947], The Hidden Flower [1952], and The New Year [1968]) to historical and political primers on Korea (The Living Reed [1963]), India (Mandala [1970]), and China, both past (Imperial Woman [1956]) and present (Letter from Peking [1957] and Three Daughters of Madame Liang [1969]) – including one of the first fictional critiques of the Cultural Revolution – Buck insisted on the significance of her brand of progressive middlebrow authorial identity. Buck’s continued relevance today lies in her conscious efforts to merge popular fiction with liberal activism, and to promote this aesthetic as both a Chinese tradition and an American ideal. SEE ALSO: Canfield, Dorothy (AF); Cather, Willa (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); WPA and Popular Front Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Buck, P. (1930). East Wind, West Wind. New York: John Day. Buck, P. (1931). The Good Earth. New York: John Day. Buck, P. (1932). Sons. New York: John Day.
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Buck, P. (1936a). The Exile. New York: John Day. Buck, P. (1936b). Fighting Angel. New York: John Day. Buck, P. (1939). The Patriot. New York: John Day. Buck, P. (1947). The Angry Wife. New York: John Day. Buck, P. (1951). God’s Men. New York: John Day. Buck, P. (1952). The Hidden Flower. New York: John Day. Buck, P. (1956). Imperial Woman. New York: John Day. Buck, P. (1957). Letter from Peking. New York: John Day. Buck, P. (1963). The Living Reed. New York: John Day. Buck, P. (1968). The New Year. New York: John Day. Buck, P. (1969). Three Daughters of Madame Liang. New York: John Day. Buck, P. (1970). Mandala. New York: John Day. Conn, P. (1996). Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harker, J. (2007). America the Middlebrow: Women’s Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship Between the Wars. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Leong, K. (2005). The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Liao, K. (1997). Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Bridge Across the Pacific. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Lipscomb, E., Webb, F. E., & Conn, P. (eds.) (1994). The Several Worlds of Pearl S. Buck: Essays Presented at a Centennial Symposium (intro. P. Conn). Westport, CT: Greenwood. Schaeffer, R. (1999). Women and International Relations: Pearl S. Buck’s Critique of the Cold War. Journal of Women’s History, 11(3), 151–75. Yoshihara, M. (2002). Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bukowski, Charles TAMAS DOBOZY
Charles Bukowski, author of novels, poetry, short stories, journalism, drama, comic books, travel writing, and screenplays, emerged to prominence in the 1960s, and was a counterculture figure who wrote about urban life in southern California, notably Los Angeles. Variously identified as an heir of the Beats, a “dirty realist,” and even an author in the transcendentalist tradition, Bukowski plays with a generic ambiguity between fiction and autobiography to present a fatalistic but comic view of the American underclass. His
work is associated with the stereotype, portrayed in the film Barfly (Schroeder 1987), of the chronically and unrepentantly drunk, unemployed, street-fighting, iconoclastic author, an image promoted by Bukowski’s work, though not without irony, especially in the novel Hollywood (1987) and the poems of Septuagenarian Stew (1990), which treat the disparity between the myth and reality of Bukowski, particularly his later financial and commercial success. Henry Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany on August 16, 1920 and died on March 9, 1994 in San Pedro, California. His family immigrated to the United States in 1923. While Bukowski published fiction early on, his first important publications were poetry, collected in Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems 1946–1966 (1988) and Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame: Selected Poems 1955–1973 (1974). These poems, written in free verse, address poverty, alcoholism, gambling, disease, sex, violence, and aesthetics in a style at once colloquial and lyrical. They are notable for their direct, unsentimental treatment of the underclass milieu, as if drawn directly from Bukowski’s personal experiences. Bukowski’s later poetry – in collections such as Love Is a Dog From Hell: Poems 1974–1977 (1977) and You Get So Alone at Times It Just Makes Sense (1986) – witness a gradual stripping away of the early lyricism, a willful arbitrariness of line breaks, and a treatment of greater banality (taking showers, typing, listening to the radio, going to the race track) that celebrates the everyday while testing literature’s capacity to address it. They are also an assault on the conventions of poetry itself, undermining its exalted status to critique the expectations that readers place on art. Frequently acknowledging his debt to Hemingway, Bukowski’s prose is laconic, even crude, equating its rejection of embellishment with writing “from the gut,” suggesting that artifice masks an ugly, banal reality. Bukowski thus conflates his aesthetic with an ethical imperative: a style is “true” insofar as it offers as little redemption and meaning as reality does. This sets his work squarely within the tradition of realism, whose emphasis on mimesis resulted in a prose conflicted between creating “art” and “telling it like it is.” Bukowski was an influence on later writers of minimalism and realism such as Raymond Carver, and
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BUKOWSKI, CHARLES
participated in the rejection of the experimentation that occupied American fiction in the 1960s. Like his poetry, Bukowski’s novels are ostensibly drawn from his experiences, and frequently feature the alter ego Henry Chinaski from the early chapbook Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live With Beasts (1965). Chinaski is a chronic outsider whose refusal to live by middleclass conventions both alienates and empowers him. The works are frequently structured as picaresques, alternating between social criticism and slapstick adventure. Ham on Rye (1982) deals with Chinaski’s fractious relationship with his father and difficult adolescence in Los Angeles during the Great Depression. Post Office (1971) and Factotum (1975) detail experiences in the labor force, humorously voicing a disdain for material gain and the soul-destroying machinery of the workplace. Women (1978) examines Bukowski’s rise to celebrity at age 50 and dwells on the romantic and sexual entanglements that came with it. Like much of Bukowski’s writing, Women has been criticized for misogyny, a claim Bukowski celebrated rather than denied, saying that the charge lent fame to his career. The late Pulp (1994), the last novel to be published in Bukowski’s lifetime, parodies the hard-boiled novels of writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler to grotesque extremes, including the appearance of aliens, a personification of death, and a search for the still-living French author Louis-Ferdinand Celine, along with Bukowski’s chosen milieu of low-life bars, street brawls, and the underclass. Its vision is arguably the most nihilistic of all his works. Other important Bukowski texts include Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969), a generic hybrid of fiction, commentary, and journalism, collecting the columns he penned for the underground Los Angeles newspaper Open City. These columns, many of which read like short stories, detail Bukowski’s cynical outlook on establishment religion and politics while sympathizing with the poor and disenfranchised. Shakespeare Never Did This (1979) recounts a book tour in Europe. Collections of correspondence, The Bukowski/ Purdy Letters (1983), Screams from the Balcony (1993), and Beerspit Night and Cursing (2001), illuminate Bukowski’s literary tastes and his critical reception of much of contemporary American writing.
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SEE ALSO: Carver, Raymond (AF); Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Noir Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Brewer, G. (1997). Charles Bukowski. Woodbridge, CT: Twayne. Bukowski, C. (1965). Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live With Beasts. Bensenville, IL: Mimeo/ Publishers of Ole. Bukowski, C. (1969). Notes of a Dirty Old Man. Hollywood, CA: Essex House. Bukowski, C. (1971). Post Office. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow. Bukowski, C. (1974). Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame: Selected Poems 1955–1973. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow. Bukowski, C. (1975). Factotum. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow. Bukowski, C. (1977). Love Is a Dog From Hell: Poems 1974–1977. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow. Bukowski, C. (1978). Women. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow. Bukowski, C. (1979). Shakespeare Never Did This. San Francisco: City Lights. Bukowski, C. (1982). Ham on Rye. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow. Bukowski, C. (1983). The Bukowski/Purdy Letters 1964–1974. Sutton West, ON: Paget. Bukowski, C. (1986). You Get So Alone at Times It Just Makes Sense. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow. Bukowski, C. (1988). Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems 1946–1966. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow. Bukowski, C. (1989). Hollywood. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow. Bukowski, C. (1990). Septuagenarian Stew: Stories and Poems. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow. Bukowski, C. (1993). Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960–1970. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow. Bukowski, C. (1994). Pulp. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow. Bukowski, C. (2001). Beerspit Night and Cursing: The Correspondence of Charles Bukowski and Sheri Martinelli 1960–1967. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow. Harrison, R. (ed.) (1994). Against the American Dream: Essays on Charles Bukowski. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow. Richmond, S. (1996). Spinning Off Bukowski. Northville, MI: Sun Dog. Schroeder, B.(dir.) (1987). Barfly. Los Angeles: Warner Brothers.
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Burroughs, William OLIVER HARRIS
William Burroughs (1914–97) is widely recognized as one of the most original, innovative, and culturally influential writers of the twentieth century. At the same time, his place in the academy and within American literary history has remained highly problematic and controversial, a position that has three principal causes. First, while Burroughs initially emerged in the late 1950s as part of the Beat generation, even that context was more apparent than real and became increasingly tenuous as a result of his longstanding expatriation, which lasted for a quarter of a century until the mid-1970s. Second, both the uncompromising sexual and political content of Burroughs’s writing and the sensational drama of his personal life brought him in conflict with the law, which guaranteed his status as a countercultural icon while deterring serious academic attention. And third, Burroughs’s relationship to American literary history has been complicated by the radical experimental methods in several media that he developed during the decade he lived in Paris and London, and that came largely out of European avant garde art traditions. Significantly, the first book-length critical studies appeared not in America but in England and France. William Seward Burroughs was born on February 5, 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri, the heir to two families that played significant roles in the modernization of corporate America. His paternal grandfather perfected the modern adding machine and founded the international company that bore the Burroughs name, while his maternal uncle, “Poison” Ivy Lee, also achieved national fame as one of the pioneers of modern public relations. After attending Harvard during the 1930s, Burroughs’s subsequent trajectory inverted the expectations of his class and so established his identity as a disaffected insider. His homosexuality further alienated him from the social and religious values of his background, and led him away from the career promises of official culture and toward a milieu of outcasts and nonconformist artists. Following graduate studies in anthropology at Columbia and Harvard, Burroughs settled in
New York in the early 1940s, where he moved in a circle of students, street criminals, and drug addicts. Here he met Joan Vollmer, who became his common-law wife, and befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, acting as an elder mentor figure for the would-be writers and fellow founders of the Beat generation. While this New York scene has become one of the most familiar episodes in American literary history and popular culture, Burroughs’s own writing did not begin seriously until the end of the decade, when, after moving first to Louisiana and then Texas, he settled with Joan and their two young children in Mexico City. The accidental shooting death of his wife there, in September 1951, confirmed Burroughs’s notoriety and exile from America. Although only the first was published at the time, Burroughs wrote two comparatively realist autobiographical novellas in Mexico, Junkie (2003a [1953]; later republished as Junky) and Queer (1985). A seemingly cool and ironic work of reportage, the former documented his life as a heroin addict, while the latter dramatized his experience as a homosexual. Each constituted an implicit blast against the moral and political order of Cold War America, but Burroughs’s persona as the Ugly American in Queer, given to manic flights of sadistic fantasy, more significantly anticipated the unsettling and ambiguous politics of his later work, especially to do with race and religion in Naked Lunch (2003b [1959]). Published as a pulp paperback, Junkie did not receive any critical attention, but during the 1950s Burroughs was already achieving an underground reputation through the writing of Ginsberg and, especially, Kerouac. In 1953, Burroughs left Mexico for a long expedition through the jungles of South America to discover yage, a hallucinogen long used by native peoples but barely studied by Western science. The result was “In Search of Yage” (later published in The Yage Letters [1963]), a short hybrid text that combined picaresque satire with ethnography. Its epistolary format (largely contrived from original journals) was also significant as a sign of Burroughs’s unique investment of his creative energy in correspondence during the 1950s, mainly through regular long-distance letters to Allen Ginsberg.
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BURROUGHS, WILLIAM
Burroughs’s most important and influential work, Naked Lunch, grew out of the next four years, which he spent in Tangier, then a colonially administered International Zone and haven for Western outcasts. Naked Lunch is often labeled a story about drug addiction, but this is wildly simplistic and ignores the origins of much of the text, obscuring the desire-driven creativity behind its sexual content. For while Burroughs struggled with a desperate narcotics addiction, his most famous novel (or, more properly, anti-novel) was paradoxically the result of his protracted failure to sustain conventional linear narrative or to impose a stable and coherent structure. Instead, he produced material that parodied various pulp genres, showing an extraordinary command of idiom, and a multitude of politically and sexually explosive satirical fragments of fantasy he termed “routines.” The final collage form of Naked Lunch was inseparable from the rehearsal of these routines in Burroughs’s letters to Ginsberg, his would-be lover, and then the haphazard circumstances of his manuscript’s editing. Naked Lunch was a significantly collaborative and contingent venture, benefiting first from the editorial input of Kerouac and Ginsberg in Tangier, and then the artist Brion Gysin and others in Paris, where Burroughs moved in early 1958. This long and exotic history of production would become mythologized as a key part in the novel’s popular reception. The unbridled dystopian content of Naked Lunch, as well as its challenging form, led to publication in Paris rather than America. However, Olympia Press in Paris published Burroughs’s book only after the appearance of episodes in American little magazines had caused a scandal and generated publicity. Burroughs’s confrontation with obscenity laws and the book’s subsequent trial in Boston (resolved in his favor only in 1966) firmly established Naked Lunch in the tradition of works such as Ulysses, as a crucial test case of cultural change in terms of literary freedom from censorship. Following Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956) and Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), Naked Lunch became the dark, third key text of the Beat generation. However, its publication in 1959 coincided with a dramatic shift in Burroughs’s work and allegiances, as he took the aesthetic innovations of
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Naked Lunch to an entirely new level with his development, in partnership with Gysin, of “cut-up” methods. In the tradition of dada and surrealist practices of the 1920s, and coinciding with a more general postwar revival of collage techniques and chance operations, Burroughs invested the splicing and recombination of texts with quasi-magical, scientific, and political aims. He also applied cut-up methods beyond the text to produce scrapbooks, photomontages, tapes, and films. Announcing a radical assault on traditional definitions of authorship and the ambitions of a literary career, the wraparound band attached to the multiauthor pamphlet that launched the method, Minutes to Go (1960), declared its avant garde aim: “Un reglement de comptes avec la literature.” The brinkmanship of Burroughs’s enthusiasm for his experimental methods was highly productive, resulting in a trilogy of novel-length works and a mass of short texts in various formats that circulated through the burgeoning little magazines of the 1960s and established Burroughs as a singular countercultural presence. His trilogy, whose chronology became confused through constant revisions, comprised The Soft Machine (1968 [1961, 1966]), The Ticket That Exploded (1967 [1962]), and Nova Express (1964). Minimally structured through an apocalyptic science fiction conspiracy scenario that pitted Nova Police against Nova Criminals, these three highly discontinuous texts integrated the radical methods of their production into a revolutionary call to sabotage the power structures of “reality” based on language, or “the word virus.” Burroughs’s trilogy thereby combined a strident didacticism, advocating an insurgency against “Control,” with an extraordinarily complex and challenging textual experience, by turns poetic, shocking, repetitive, inspiring, and disturbing. Toward the end of the 1960s, Burroughs’s experimental project began to suffer from a law of diminishing returns, and sales. Although he and Gysin produced an illustrated volume of cutup collage and theory, The Third Mind, it would not be published until 1978, and The Wild Boys (1971) was his last novel to use cut-up texts to any great extent. This novel, a utopian queer fantasy of terrorist boy heroes, also saw a return to more sustained narrative and marked a period of
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transition in his oeuvre. Burroughs summarized his theories of politics and writing in The Job (1970), but the direction of his oeuvre was on the point of major change, a shift that coincided with his decision to leave London in the early 1970s and return, after 25 years abroad, to America. Burroughs’s identity in his homeland had not advanced significantly since the days of his mythologization by the Beats, but when he settled in New York in 1974, he began to reinvent his image and reputation as a writer. Moving in celebrity avant garde and rock music circles, in 1978 Burroughs was feted at the Nova Convention held in his honor, where figures from Laurie Anderson to Frank Zappa and from John Cage to Timothy Leary confirmed his totemic status and reasserted his cultural influence. Under the guidance of James Grauerholz, and relocating with him to Kansas, Burroughs published a final major trilogy of novels, beginning with Cities of the Red Night in 1981. Generally regarded as his most consistently impressive work since Naked Lunch, the novel interwove a series of genre narratives stamped with Burroughs’s trademark political conspiracies and satirical humor. The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands completed the trilogy. Although these were Burroughs’s last major works, the 1980s and early 1990s were more remarkable for his own new career as an exhibiting artist and, above all, for the fertility of his influence on other innovative writers, artists, and musicians, from William Gibson and Keith Haring to U2, which led to numerous important collaborations. Now a key figure in postmodern culture, Burroughs began to receive sustained critical attention, but gained only an ambivalent place in the canon, a situation he embraced. “Twenty years ago, they were saying I belonged in jail,” he said after his induction into the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983. “Now they’re saying I belong in their club. I didn’t listen to them then, and I don’t listen to them now” (Morgan 1988, 13). SEE ALSO: Acker, Kathy (AF); Kerouac, Jack (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Queer Modernism (AF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Burroughs, W.(with Beiles, S., Corso, G., & Gysin, B.) (1960). Minutes to Go. Paris: Two Cities. Burroughs, W. (1964). Nova Express. New York: Grove. Burroughs, W. (1967). The Ticket That Exploded [1962]. New York Grove. Burroughs, W. (1968). The Soft Machine [1961, 1966]. London: Calder and Boyards. Burroughs, W. (1971). The Wild Boys. New York: Grove. Burroughs, W.(with Gysin, B.) (1978). The Third Mind. New York: Viking Burroughs, W. (1981). Cities of the Red Night. New York: Henry Holt. Burroughs, W. (1984). The Place of Dead Roads. New York: Henry Holt. Burroughs, W. (1985). Queer. New York: Viking. Burroughs, W. (1987). The Western Lands. New York: Viking. Burroughs, W. (1993). The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945–1959 (ed. O. Harris). New York: Viking. Burroughs, W. (2003a). Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk” (ed. O. Harris). New York: Penguin. Burroughs, W. (2003b). Naked Lunch: The Restored Text (ed. J. Grauerholz & B. Miles). New York: Grove. Burroughs, W. (2006). The Yage Letters Redux (ed. O. Harris). San Francisco: City Lights. Harris, O. (2003). William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Johnson, R. (2006). The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas. College Station: Texas A&M Press. Lydenberg, R. (1987). Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs’ Fiction. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Lydenberg, R., & Skerl, J. (1991). William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception: 1959–1989. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Morgan, T. (1988). Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. New York: Henry Holt. Murphy, T. (1997). Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs. Berkeley: University of California Press. Russell, J. (2001). Queer Burroughs. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schneiderman, D., & Walsh, P. (2004). Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization. London: Pluto. Skerl, J. (1985). William S. Burroughs. Boston: Twayne.
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BUTLER, OCTAVIA
Butler, Octavia PEZ TIFFANY ANA LO
Octavia Butler is heralded as the first African American female writer of science fiction and fantasy, also termed speculative fiction. Her published works include 12 novels, a novelette, and one collection of stories; only two of her novels (Kindred and Fledgling) were written to stand alone, with all others envisioned as part of a collection of books: the Xenogenesis trilogy, the five-volume Patternist series, and Parable of the Talents and Parable of the Sower. Butler began writing science fiction out of frustration with the genre’s glaring lack of female protagonists and ethnic minorities. Her work is acclaimed for its bold projections of future worlds driven by complex explorations of race, sexuality, spirituality, and violence as foundational in shaping people and building community. Butler was born on June 22, 1947 in Pasadena, California and died February 24, 2006. She studied at California State University, Los Angeles, and has credited the Open Door Program of the Screen Writers Guild and the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop as influential in her development as a writer. As a young woman she witnessed the dramatic cultural shifts in an era of segregation and a revolutionary Civil Rights Movement. Her landmark novel, Kindred (1979), was inspired by Butler grappling with emotions elicited by the Black Power movement and the complexities of racial violence. Here she creates a black woman, married to a white man, who is transported from her established life in multicultural Los Angeles in 1976 to antebellum Maryland, where she must negotiate the hazards of slavery on an American plantation owned by a distant relative. The novel’s events culminate in her being challenged to save the life of a would-be slave master in order to preserve her own family line. While some critics read the novel as a cross-genre work that blends the slave narrative with science fiction, Butler refuses the latter category and prefers the term “grim fantasy” to clarify her use of time travel as a means to grapple with technology and with the grim role of violence in American history. While Butler’s writing is studied across disciplines, Kindred remains her most widely taught work.
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Throughout her career, Butler eschewed labels, preferring to position herself as a writer engaged with the vast array of human experience. Through characters capable of changing race, gender, and species, her work challenges the imposition of boundaries on thinking about identity by showing the value of embracing complexities and contradictions. Notably, her characters often face the test of balancing a quest for personal strength with accountability to community, something consistently positioned as paramount to survival. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy – Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989) – takes place after a war has nearly destroyed the human race. The few survivors owe their lives to the Oankali, a highly evolved, though seemingly monstrous and parasitic, alien race who interbreed with humans to rebuild an assuredly resilient society. Butler’s prequel, Wild Seed (1980), the last book in her Patternist series, follows over hundreds of years the immortal characters of Anyanwu, a shape-shifter, and Doro, a being who kills and takes over the bodies and identities of others. The novel explores their efforts to build life on earth, while all five novels in the series are devoted to the historical resonance of their legacy. The two-part series Parable of the Sower (1995) and Parable of the Talents (1998) explores the role of spirituality in matters of identity and community. The first novel tracks the development and urgency of the Earthseed religion (built on the belief that “God is Change”) during extreme times of violence, while the second focuses on the postwar conflicts in the aftermath, including generational resentment. Her final novel, Fledgling (2005), presents a protagonist, an amnesiac adult female vampire, with the physical appearance of a black child. Her struggle to regain memory is intertwined with her need to build a community that will provide the physical and emotional support required for her survival. Butler’s portraits of people of color as rich contributors to a burgeoning technoculture have distinctly added to the evolution of science fiction, most especially the subgenre “Afrofuturism,” and her work has provided a launching point for posing urgent questions in American cultural studies. A leading scholar of Butler’s writing extrapolates the term “Chicanafuturism” as a
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means of further exploring both the promise and the limits of technology for communities of color (Ramirez 2008). Butler’s writing has been recognized through numerous prestigious awards. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (1995), a Hugo Award in science fiction (1984), and Nebula Awards for her novella Bloodchild (1984) and her novel Parable of the Talents (1999). In 2000, she received a lifetime achievement award from PEN American Center. SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Speculative Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Butler, O. (1976). Patternmaster. New York: Doubleday. Butler, O. (1977). Mind of My Mind. New York: Doubleday. Butler, O. (1978). Survivor. New York: Doubleday. Butler, O. (1979). Kindred. New York: Doubleday. Butler, O. (1980). Wild Seed. New York: Doubleday. Butler, O. (1984). Clay’s Ark. New York: St. Martin’s. Butler, O. (1987). Dawn. New York: Warner. Butler, O. (1988). Adulthood Rites. New York: Warner
Butler, O. (1989). Imago. New York: Warner. Butler, O. (1995). Parable of the Sower. New York: Warner. Butler, O. (1998). Parable of the Talents. New York: Seven Stories. Butler, O. (2000). Lilith’s Brood. New York: Warner. Butler, O. (2005). Fledgling. New York: Warner. Butler, O. (2007). Seed to Harvest. New York: Warner. Govan, S. Y. (1986). Homage to Tradition: Octavia Butler Renovates the Historical Novel. MELUS, 13(1–2), 79–86. Govan, S. (2005). Going to See the Woman: A Visit with Octavia E. Butler. Obsidian III, 6–7(2–1), 14–39. Helford, E. R. (1994). “Would You Really Rather Die Than Bear My Young?” The Construction of Gender, Race, and Species in Octavia E. Butler. African American Review, 28(2), 259–71. Keating, A. L., & Mehaffy, M. (2001). “Radio Imagination”: Octavia Butler on the Poetics of Narrative Embodiment. MELUS, 26(1), 45–76. Ramirez, Catherine S. (2002). Cyborg Feminism: The Science Fiction of Octavia Butler and Gloria Anzaldu´a. In M. Flanagan & A. Booth (eds.), Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ramirez, Catherine S. (2008). Afrofuturism/ Chicanafuturism: Fictive Kin. Aztlan, 33(1), 185–94.
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C Cain, James M. DAVID W. MADDEN
Remembered for his early novels and tough-guy style, James M. Cain was a prolific author whose career spanned 58 years as a journalist, playwright, screenwriter, short story writer, and novelist. Although he suffered from obscurity in his last 25 years, Cain’s novels and the film adaptations of his works have continually fascinated audiences and spawned imitators. Key elements of this popularity are his swift-paced plotting, “hard-boiled” dialogue, and commonplace characters whose worlds change radically when confronted with the possibility of the fulfillment of their dreams. Born July 1, 1892 in Annapolis, Maryland, Cain was the first of five children of James and Rose Cain. After graduating from college, he eventually settled on journalism and published some short stories in magazines. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) became a popular and critical success and illustrates some of the fictional practices central to his works. The outstanding feature is his “tough-guy” style, which relies upon a subjective realism of a lowerclass world presented in the idiom of those at the bottom. Middle-class ethics and traditional morality are luxuries for Cain’s characters; they represent individuals following overwhelming impulses, struggling in a world that frustrates the free expression of those drives. A friend coined the term “love-rack” to describe these figures, and here Cain found his fictional formula. He often joins a pair of lovers out of lust or greed as they commit murder,
separate, and reunite, either triumphing or more often succumbing to some form of punishment. In Cain’s world, the most ordinary, even lawabiding, people commit crimes because they dream forbidden dreams. In Postman, he blends these elements masterfully, producing a work that is as taut as any written by his contemporaries Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. A drifter, Frank Chambers, takes a temporary job, falls in love with his employer’s wife, kills the man, and then escapes justice. When he and Cora reunite, they distrust one another, then reconcile, and she dies in an ocean accident. Chambers is executed for her death, though he is guiltless. The novel’s success led to a Hollywood screenwriting career and other compelling fictions, such as Double Indemnity (1936), which presents Walter Huff, an insurance agent who falls in love with a client’s wife, sells her an accident policy on her husband, and then conspires to murder the man. Deciding that the wife will betray him, Huff plots her murder but is shot instead. Like his best works, Double Indemnity further explores the possibilities inherent in using a first-person narrator who reviews and evaluates his past actions. Serenade (1937) centers on a destitute baritone, John Howard Sharp, who falls in love with a sultry Mexican prostitute and enjoys success in Hollywood but remains frustrated that he has betrayed his true talent. The novel is full of exaggerated homo- and heterosexual liaisons, distrust, and overripe melodrama that reinforce the Cain formula of individuals whose lives are suddenly transformed by overwhelming passion.
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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Mildred Pierce (1941), another of Cain’s most famous works, is a novel that departs from previous fictions with its objective narrator and female protagonist. Pierce is a determined woman who divorces her feckless husband, raises two children, and eventually launches a successful business. When a former lover romances her daughter, Pierce descends into bankruptcy and reunites with her first husband. In spite of its melodramatic structure, the novel stands as a paean to the middle class struggling through the Depression and largely eschews the love-rack formula. Instead, the novel concentrates on an ordinary person’s desire to rise above mediocrity and transcend individual limitations. Exaggerated and improbable as the plot may be, The Butterfly (1947a) is the best of Cain’s experiments in regional fiction, and its conciseness is a major reason for its success. Here Cain returns to a rapidly paced, first-person narrative, which emphasizes the rule that Cain is at his best with a subjective narrator. Replete with moonshine, sexual temptation, and incest, the novel is no match for Faulkner’s, but Cain’s inversion of the love-rack, to include family members, allows him to explore tortured characters who pay a steep price. In 1948 Cain published the more ambitious The Moth, another chronicle of the Depression, whose plot extends over 35 years. The novel is a Bildungsroman that follows the fortunes of a child prodigy whose singing ambitions are thwarted and who is forced to embark on a life of rootless wandering. Through all his vicissitudes, like Mildred Pierce, Jack Dillon remains an optimist. The Moth, Cain’s longest work, is nevertheless diluted by the realist’s compulsion to include extraneous details that devolve into episodic rambling. On October 27, 1977, at the age of 85, Cain died in Hyattsville, Maryland. Film adaptations of his works and an influential biography led to a resurgence of interest in his career in the 1980s. Cain will always be remembered as a writer who both defined and epitomized the hard-boiled style. As a technique, it represents a fitting fictional response to an era in which longstanding values and ideals were called radically into question. SEE ALSO: Chandler, Raymond (AF); Hammett, Dashiell (AF); Modern Fiction in Hollywood
(AF); Noir Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Cain, J. M. (1934). The Postman Always Rings Twice. New York: Knopf. Cain, J. M. (1937). Serenade. New York: Knopf. Cain, J. M. (1941). Mildred Pierce. New York: Knopf. Cain, J. M. (1942). Love’s Lovely Counterfeit. New York: Knopf. Cain, J. M. (1943). Three of a Kind (includes Double Indemnity). New York: Knopf. Cain, J. M. (1944). The Embezzler. New York: Avon Library. Cain, J. M. (1947a). The Butterfly. New York: Knopf. Cain, J. M. (1947b). Sinful Woman. New York: Avon. Cain, J. M. (1948). The Moth. New York: Knopf. Cain, J. M. (1950). Jealous Woman. New York: Avon. Cain, J. M. (1951). The Root of His Evil. New York: Avon. Cain, J. M. (1962). Mignon. New York: Dial Press. Fine, R. (1992). James M. Cain and the American Authors’ Authority. Austin: University of Texas Press. Frohock, W. M. (1950). The Novel of Violence in America: 1920–1950. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press. Hoopes, R. (1982). Cain: The Biography of James M. Cain. New York: Henry Holt. Madden, D. (1970). James M. Cain. New York: Twayne. Marling, W. (1995). The American Roman Noir: Hammett, Cain, and Chandler. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Nyman, J. (1998). Hard-Boiled Fiction and Dark Romanticism. New York: Peter Lang. Skenazy, P. (1989). James M. Cain. New York: Continuum.
Canfield, Dorothy JENNIFER PARCHESKY
From the 1910s to the 1950s, Dorothy Canfield was a leading figure in American literature and culture, authoring 11 novels, 18 non-fiction books (published under her married name, Dorothy Canfield Fisher), and hundreds of stories and essays. Her fiction focuses on individual psychological and moral development within realistic social settings. Although she explored controversial issues – gender roles, industrialization, war, and civil rights – her accessible style and ability to connect new ideas with traditional values of
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CANFIELD, DOROTHY
family, community, and democracy appealed to mainstream audiences. As a long-time member of the Book of the Month Club Board of Selection and spokesperson for a variety of progressive organizations, she helped shape American taste and opinion: Eleanor Roosevelt praised her in 1935 as one of the 10 most influential women in America. The settings of Canfield’s fiction reflect three very different backgrounds – the Midwest, Europe, and Vermont. Born in 1879 in Lawrence, Kansas, where her father was an economics professor, she also lived in Lincoln, Nebraska (where he became university chancellor) and attended Ohio State University (where he was president). These years were interspersed with extended sojourns in Europe with her artist mother and at the Vermont homestead of her father’s family. After earning a PhD in romance languages at Columbia in 1902, she began to publish short fiction. In 1907, she published her first novel, Gunhild; married John Fisher; and moved to Arlington, Vermont in search of a simpler life and more authentic community. Many aspects of her biography – particularly the family’s move during World War I to France, where John served in the ambulance corps and Dorothy worked with refugees – are fictionalized in The Deepening Stream. Despite many national and international involvements, Canfield’s life and work remained centered in Vermont until her death in 1958. As the title of her child-rearing book SelfReliance suggests, Canfield was profoundly influenced by the Emersonian tradition of democratic individualism, particularly as developed by John Dewey and other progressive educators. Throughout her writing, Canfield contrasts the moral value of meaningful work – for women, men, and children – with the hollow satisfactions of consumer culture. Many of her characters renounce wealth and leisure to embrace a simpler life of productive labor. Her first bestseller, The Brimming Cup (1921), was lauded as “the other side of Main Street,” a counter to Sinclair Lewis’s contemporaneous satire of small-town life. Although the intelligent, artistic heroine is tempted by a cosmopolitan life of romance and culture, she ultimately embraces the deeper satisfactions of family and community life in a small Vermont village. Canfield’s next bestseller, The Home-Maker (1924), depicts an
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unhappy family transformed by a reversal of gender roles: the active, energetic wife pursues a sales career while the children thrive under the care of her thoughtful, nurturing husband. In a postsuffrage era increasingly accepting of women’s work outside the home, the novel created a sensation with its radical suggestion that a man might find fulfillment in domesticity. But Canfield is probably best remembered for her portraits of Vermont as an exemplar of American democracy, a view epitomized in her popular children’s novel Understood Betsy (1917) and the historical memoir Vermont Tradition (1953). Although some critics have suggested that her idealization of this ethnically homogeneous state inadvertently aligned her with racist movements, Canfield herself was a lifelong supporter of civil rights. Many of her novels feature characters who fight for social justice, most notably Seasoned Timber (1939), in which a Vermont school principal rallies townsfolk and trustees to reject a major endowment conditioned on the exclusion of Jewish students. Canfield’s fiction sold well throughout her lifetime and was frequently anthologized and taught in schools. Yet while her works were beloved by readers, modernist critics dismissed her realist style as old-fashioned and her celebration of everyday life as sentimental. In recent years, however, both her fiction and Book of the Month Club work have gained attention from scholars who see her as an exemplar of an unjustly ignored “middlebrow” culture and an important lens through which to examine the changing tides of American social and cultural history in the first half of the twentieth century. SEE ALSO: Buck, Pearl S. (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Lewis, Sinclair (AF); SocialRealist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Canfield, D. (1907). Canfield, D. (1917). Henry Holt. Canfield, D. (1921). Harcourt Brace. Canfield, D. (1924). Harcourt Brace. Canfield, D. (1926). Harcourt Brace.
Gunhild. New York: Henry Holt. Understood Betsy. New York: The Brimming Cup. New York: The Home-Maker. New York: Her Son’s Wife. New York:
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Canfield, D. (1930). The Deepening Stream. New York: Harcourt Brace. Canfield, D. (1939). Seasoned Timber. New York: Harcourt Brace. Ehrhardt, J. C. (2004). Writers of Conviction: The Personal Politics of Zona Gale, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Rose Wilder Lane, and Josephine Herbst. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Fisher, D. C. (1916). Self-Reliance: A Practical and Informal Discussion of Methods of Teaching SelfReliance, Initiative and Responsibility to Modern Children. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Fisher, D. C. (1953). Vermont Tradition: The Biography of an Outlook on Life. Boston: Little, Brown. Fisher, D. C., & Madigan, M. J. (1996). The Bedquilt and Other Stories. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Fisher, D. C., & Washington, I. H. (2000). Early Stories of Dorothy Canfield. Weybridge, VT: Cherry Tree Books. Harker, J. (2007). America the Middlebrow: Women’s Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship Between the Wars. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Parchesky, J. (2000). The Business of Living and the Labor of Love: Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Feminism, and Middle-Class Redemption. Colby Quarterly, 36(1), 29–47. Parchesky, J. (2002). “You Make Us Articulate”: Reading, Education, and Community in Dorothy Canfield’s Middlebrow America. In B. Ryan & A. M. Thomas (eds.), Reading Acts: U.S. Readers’ Interactions with Literature, 1800–1950. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, pp. 229–58. Washington, I. H. (1982). Dorothy Canfield Fisher: A Biography. Shelburne, VT: New England Press. Wright, E. J. (2007). Home Economics: Children, Consumption, and Montessori Education in Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Understood Betsy. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 32(3), 213–30.
Carver, Raymond DAVID M. RAABE
Raymond Carver, whose tightly controlled, compelling style gripped readers and inspired writers, provided the main impetus for the revitalization of the short story in English during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Resisting critical categorizing, he rose from humble beginnings to national acclaim and international fame.
Carver was born May 25, 1938 of working-class parents in the lumber mill town of Clatskanie, Oregon and grew up in Yakima, Washington. Married and with a family as a teenager, he persistently produced stories and poems throughout the loving but conflictive relationship. He was locked into a series of low-paying jobs which delayed his formal education but provided subject matter for his stories, many of which deal with what one critic calls “hardscrabble domesticity” (Nesset 1995, 11). At Chico (California) State College in 1959, Carver found a conscientious writing mentor in novelist John Gardner, also a model for Carver’s subsequent teaching. Carver graduated from Humboldt State College in 1963 and spent the next year at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with a small stipend. A style-forming period with first publications in little magazines was followed by association with amputative editor Gordon Lish and broader-circulation exposure. Carver’s first major-publisher story collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (McGraw-Hill, 1976), received a National Book Award nomination. His next book established his reputation: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Knopf, 1981). The stories had been harshly slashed by Lish, but Carver did some restoration in subsequent versions. Cathedral (Knopf, 1983) revealed work of a more expansive style and a less abject life view. Finally came Where I’m Calling From (1988). The latter two collections were nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Among Carver’s other honors were a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Brandeis University Creative Arts Award. Carver taught at a number of US universities, including the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Texas at El Paso; and Syracuse University. A long-time smoker and drinker, Carver barely survived an onslaught of acute alcoholism and quit drinking in 1977. He was separated from his first wife in 1978 and spent his last 10 years with poet Tess Gallagher. In May 1988, Carver was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In June, he and Gallagher married, and he succumbed to lung cancer in August.
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CARVER, RAYMOND
Carver acknowledged literary debts to such forebears as Flannery O’Connor and Ernest Hemingway, but he most identified with Anton Chekhov. Carver’s last story, “Errand,” which shows a new direction for his writing, puts the death of Chekhov in a moving fictional frame. Critics have invoked or invented many appellations to try to characterize Carver’s subjects and style: “blue collar” or “dirty” realism, or “Kmart fiction,” for example. More than most writers, he has suffered the indignity of being pushed into ill-defined pigeonholes. Some labels border on the silly: “post-postmodern modernist,” “miniaturist,” etc. Only one “ism” comfortably embraces Carver’s fiction. He was a realist, disdaining gimmicks or the experimentation of the mid-twentieth century. Generalities about his characters have been overly harsh: “fringe figures,” “marginal lives of hardship and squalor,” “unhappily estranged . . . disillusioned . . . battered . . . alienated,” “selfdestructive . . . life’s losers.” Part of this misperception stems from Poe’s dictum, which Carver knew and followed, that a story or poem should concentrate on a single emotion or effect. Since conflict is what drives most stories, Carver’s people are usually presented in moments of stress or confusion, without contrastive pleasure or satisfaction. Carver said in a magazine profile, “I never felt the people I was writing about were so bad off. Know what I mean? The waitress, the bus driver, the mechanic, the hotel keeper. God, the country is filled with these people. They’re good people. People doing the best they could” (quoted in Weber 1990 [1984], 92). Carver’s typical setting is domestic: 34 of 67 stories center on the household, while another 22 have domestic backgrounds like recent divorce. In 14, husband–wife conflict is the principal plot focus, but in 20 a couple is facing a problem together. As for money or its lack, Carver’s early poverty (two bankruptcies) does not show up in his stories as much as is commonly thought. In only three are the principals desperately poor. Most are middle-class or in an irrelevant economic situation. The Carver protagonist often finds himself (or herself) in an encounter with someone or something unusual. But critics who see the plots as bizarre ignore the fact that they are mundane situations that could arise in anyone’s life –
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dealing with earwax build-up or talking to a fat man – things which can be life-altering or even life-threatening in a Carver story but well within the creative purview of realism. His focus is on the emotion which the situation evokes. Carver’s fiction has been translated into more than 20 languages. His growing popularity with academics and non-academics alike is evidence of skillfully depicted slices of life, presented with a full array of tools available to the accomplished literary artist. SEE ALSO: Gardner, John (AF); Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Minimalist/Maximalist Fiction (AF); O’Connor, Flannery (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Adelman, B., & Gallagher, T. (1990). Carver Country: The World of Raymond Carver. New York: Scribner’s. Campbell, E. (1992). Raymond Carver: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne. Carver, M. B. (2006). What It Used to Be Like: A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver. New York: St. Martin’s. Carver, R. (1976). Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? New York: McGraw-Hill. Carver, R. (1981). What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. New York: Knopf. Carver, R. (1983). Cathedral: Stories. New York: Knopf. Carver, R. (1985). Where Water Comes Together with Other Water. New York: Random House. Carver, R. (1988). Where I’m Calling From. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Carver, R. (1996). All of Us: The Collected Poems. New York: Vintage. Carver, R. (2001). Call if You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose. New York: Vintage. Halpert, S. (1995). Raymond Carver: An Oral Biography. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Meyers, A. (1995). Raymond Carver. New York: Twayne. Nesset, K. (1995). The Stories of Raymond Carver: A Critical Study. Athens: Ohio University Press. Stull, W. L., & Carroll, M. P. (eds.) (1993). Remembering Ray: A Composite Biography of Raymond Carver. Santa Barbara, CA: Capra. Weber, B. (1990). Raymond Carver: A Chronicler of Blue-Collar Despair [1984]. In M. B. Gentry & W. L. Stull (eds.), Conversations With Raymond Carver. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 84–97.
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Castillo, Ana BENJAMIN D. CARSON
Since the publication of The Mixquiahuala Letters in 1986, Ana Castillo has become one of the most recognized Chicana voices in American literature. While Castillo has not been afraid to experiment stylistically, the central concerns of her work have remained constant. In her six novels, one collection of short stories, five poetry collections, and two plays, and her seminal collection of essays on Xicanisma, Castillo consistently addresses racial, social, and economic injustice; the consequences of environmental degradation; the plight of immigrants; the inescapable pull of sexual desire and love; and the importance of family and traditions and the equally abiding need for individual autonomy. Ana Castillo was born into a family of Mexican immigrants in Chicago on June 15, 1953. In 1975 Castillo graduated with a BA in art and secondary education from Northeastern Illinois University, and in 1979 she earned an MA in Latin American and Caribbean studies. In 1991 she received a PhD in American studies from the University of Bremen, Germany. Along with Norma Alarc on and others, Castillo co-founded the literary magazine Third Woman and has since been a contributing editor to Third Woman and Humanizarte magazines. Castillo’s creative work could be characterized as “border fiction.” Castillo’s characters are nomadic, moving back and forth across both literal and metaphorical borders. Winner of the American Book Award in 1987, The Mixquiahuala Letters, an epistolary novel, records Teresa’s search for identity as she and her friend Alicia travel across the US/Mexican border. Like so many characters in Castillo’s fiction, Teresa is in search of an identity. Teresa and Alicia travel to Mexico in search of a cultural home but soon realize that integrating into Mexican culture – despite looking like mestizas – is more difficult than they anticipated. Teresa realizes that selffashioning requires negotiating with society and the ideology to which it adheres, and the society Teresa encounters in Mexico threatens to restrict, silence, and marginalize her. Castillo’s second novel, Sapagonia (1994 [1990]), follows the sexually carnivorous Maximo
Madrigal on a bohemian journey from Sapagonia to Paris to New York to Chicago and Los Angeles. Sapagonia, Castillo explains, is a “distinct place in the Americas where all mestizos reside, regardless of nationality, individual racial composition, or legal residential status.” While Sapagonia descends into political chaos and violence, resulting in the death of his grandparents, Maximo goes in search of stardom, first as a musician, then as a sculptor, all the while indulging in the pleasures of the flesh, primarily with Pastore Ake, a musician and composer. Even though Maximo is the central character in the novel, the narrative is told from multiple points of view. In her 1993 novel So Far From God, Castillo creates an ironic allegory by revising an early Christian story involving Sophia (Wisdom) and her three daughters, Fe (Faith), Esperanza (Hope), and Caridad (Charity). So Far From God, like The Mixquiahuala Letters and Sapagonia, is stylistically inventive. Combining poetry, folk literature, recipes, indigenous remedies for various ailments, social and political commentary, along with a fragmented and disjunctive style, this magic-realist novel subverts essentialist notions of the self and challenges dominant ideologies, making it, in both form and content, a powerful work of political and aesthetic expression. Castillo’s Peel My Love Like an Onion (1999) is about an aging flamenco dancer who is struggling to come to terms with the reality that the polio she contracted as a child has returned to end her career as a dancer. But more importantly, this is a novel about living and loving intensely. The Guardians (2007), too, is about love, but it is about the love of a sister for a brother and a son for a father (and God). When Regina’s brother Rafa goes missing after trying to enter the US via Mexico, Regina and her nephew do everything in their power to find him. The Guardians brings together all of the major themes that have concerned Castillo since the publication of The Mixquiahuala Letters, and, thus, embodies all of the attributes that make Castillo one of the finest contemporary American authors. SEE ALSO: Border Fictions (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
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CATHER, WILLA
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Cather, Willa
Alarc on, N. (1989). The Sardonic Powers of the Erotic in the Work of Ana Castillo. In A. Horn-Delgado, E. Ortega, N. M. Scott, & N. Saporta Sternbach (eds.), Breaking the Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Castillo, A. (1979). The Invitation. Berkeley: Third Woman. Castillo, A. (1984). Women Are Not Roses. Houston: Arte Publico. Castillo, A. (1986). The Mixquiahuala Letters. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/Editorial Biling€ ue. Castillo, A. (1993). So Far From God. New York: Plume. Castillo, A. (1994). Sapagonia: An Anti-Romance in 3/8 Meter [1990]. New York: Anchor. Castillo, A. (1995a). Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. New York: Plume. Castillo, A. (1995b). My Father Was a Toltec and Selected Poems: 1973–1988. New York: Norton. Castillo, A. (ed.) (1996a). Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe. New York: Riverhead Trade. Castillo, A. (1996b). Loverboys: Stories. New York: Norton. Castillo, A. (2000a). I Ask the Impossible: Poems. New York: Anchor. Castillo, A. (2000b). My Daughter, My Son, the Eagle, the Dove. New York: Dutton Juvenile. Castillo, A. (2000c). Peel My Love Like an Onion. New York: Anchor. Castillo, A. (2005a). Psst . . .: I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor: Two Plays. San Antonio, TX: Wings Press. Castillo, A. (2005b). Watercolor Women/Opaque Men: A Novel in Verse. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press. Castillo, A. (2007). The Guardians. New York: Random House. Castillo, A. (with Alarc on, N., & Moraga, C.) (eds.) (1993). Third Woman: The Sexuality of Latinas. Berkeley: Third Woman Press. Madsen, D. L. (2000). Contemporary Chicana Literature: Bernice Zamora, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Denise Chavez, Alma Luz Villanueva, Lorna Dee Cervantes. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Mujcinovic, F. (2004). Postmodern Cross-Culturalism and Politicization in U.S. Latina Literature: From Ana Castillo to Julia Alvarez. New York: Peter Lang. Spurgeon, S. L. (2004). Ana Castillo. Boise, ID: Boise State University. Yarbo-Bejarano, Y. (1992). The Multiple Subject in the Writing of Ana Castillo. Americas Review, 20, 65–72.
MELISSA J. HOMESTEAD
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Willa Cather is known primarily for her novels representing the experiences of women immigrants on the Nebraska prairies in the late nineteenth century, but Cather’s 10 novels and scores of short stories produced over a career spanning 50 years actually range widely over space and time, from seventeenth-century Quebec to twentiethcentury New York. A social conservative who proudly identified herself as one of the backwardlooking, her experiments with fictional form and her approach to culture nevertheless ally her with modernism. It is, perhaps, the depth and diversity of Cather’s body of work and the impossibility of reducing her achievement to a single descriptive formula that have secured her reputation as a major American novelist. Born Wilella Cather in Back Creek, Virginia in 1873, Cather moved with her family to Webster County in south-central Nebraska in 1883. After a year living on a farm, the family moved to the county seat of Red Cloud, where Cather attended high school. She then attended the University of Nebraska in the state capital of Lincoln, majoring in English and working both on student publications and professionally as a journalist (primarily writing theater and book reviews). After her graduation in 1895, she spent a year doing journalistic writing and looking for work before moving to Pittsburgh in 1896 to take an editorial position at a regional women’s magazine. The magazine was short-lived, but Cather stayed on in Pittsburgh, returning to journalism and then turning to high school teaching to give herself more time to write fiction. She finally left Pittsburgh in 1906 to accept an editorial position at McClure’s Magazine in New York City, which became her primary residence until her death. She did not make her final break from McClure’s until 1912, becoming a full-time creative artist for the first time when she was nearly 40 years old. She died in New York City in 1947. Willa Cather’s life and works represent a number of seemingly irresolvable contradictions. She is best known for two Nebraska novels, My Antonia (1918) and O Pioneers! (1913), but she lived in Nebraska barely more than a decade, and the majority of her fiction is set outside of
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Nebraska. Feminist critics have found the strong female heroines of her Nebraska pioneer novels and of The Song of the Lark (1915) compelling, but Cather never embraced feminism, and two of her novels most admired by critics in her own day and today, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and The Professor’s House (1925), focus on the lives of men. Her primary affective ties throughout her life were with other women, and late twentiethand early twenty-first-century critics have interpreted her fiction through the theoretical lenses of lesbian and gay studies and queer theory. Critics and biographers remain strongly divided, however, on the question of Cather’s sexual identity, and her fiction includes no overt representations of same-sex intimacy. Later in her career, Cather sometimes downplayed, or even denied the existence of, much of her early short fiction. However, she was still in college when her first short story appeared in a national magazine, and she had been publishing short fiction for two decades by the time her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge (1912), appeared. Much of Alexander’s Bridge takes place in drawing rooms in Boston and London, as Bartley Alexander, an engineer, becomes entangled in an extramarital affair while building an innovative bridge in Canada. The novel ends with the collapsing bridge taking the life of its designer. Cather later dismissed Alexander’s Bridge as a shallow “studio picture” produced under the influence of Henry James and Edith Wharton. Her first short story collection, A Troll Garden (1905), likewise features a number of “artist tales” in the manner of James; however, the line between her Nebraskan and Jamesian fiction is not wholly distinct. For instance, “A Wagner Matinee” takes place in Boston and is narrated by a Boston lawyer, but he spent much of his childhood in Nebraska. His aunt, who comes to Boston to settle family business, is a former Boston conservatory piano teacher who left her career to follow her husband to Nebraska, where she has spent decades as a poor farm wife. “The Sculptor’s Funeral” reverses the geographical trajectory of “A Wagner Matinee,” but again crosses the artist tale and prairie fiction as the student of a world-famous sculptor accompanies his mentor’s body from Boston home to his bleak Kansas home town for burial. O Pioneers!, the novel Cather claimed as her real “first novel” in opposition to Alexander’s Bridge,
continues to define her in the public imagination as a prairie novelist who focuses on strong immigrant heroines (thus in 2002, Cather was paired with Laura Ingalls Wilder and Edna Ferber in a White House symposium on “Women and the American West”). However, O Pioneers! also marks the beginning of Cather’s experiments with novelistic form. Although heroine Alexandra Bergson successfully masters the prairie that defeated her father’s agricultural enterprise, Cather does not write a social-realist novel representing the work of farming. Instead, Cather represents Alexandra as a visionary artist of the land, with the years of labor converting unplowed farmland into a large and prosperous farm absent in the novel. Cather also created what she called a “two part pastoral,” complexly intertwining Alexandra’s story with that of the doomed love affair between Alexandra’s brother Emil and a married neighbor, Marie Shabata. The Song of the Lark (1915) is also set largely in the American west, but Cather again connects West and East in the life of an artist. Heroine Thea Kronborg, the child of Swedish immigrants, grows up in Moonstone, Colorado, but on her journey to a career as a major opera singer, she moves to Chicago, then New York, and even Europe, before returning to New York as a performer. In between, she makes a significant trip to the American southwest, where she discovers her true vocation as a singer, having trained primarily as a pianist. Cather later regretted the “full-blooded” method she employed in this conventionally and chronologically plotted novel, and when she prepared a collected edition of her works in the 1930s, she heavily revised and shortened The Song of the Lark, her longest novel. While her next novel, My Antonia, is set entirely in a thinly fictionalized version of Webster County, Nebraska, a key portion of the novel, its introduction, takes place on a train between New York and Nebraska. The introduction’s narrator (implicitly Cather herself) discusses Nebraska childhood memories with Jim Burden, who also grew up in Nebraska, but who lives and works in New York. The introduction thus frames the main body of the novel as a printed version of Jim’s manuscript reminiscences about his childhood and his friendship with Bohemian immigrant Antonia Shimerda. This was not the first time that Cather had written in a man’s voice. After she
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CATHER, WILLA
left McClure’s Magazine, she ghostwrote the memoir of S. S. McClure, who had lost control of the magazine bearing his name. Despite the novel’s title, My Antonia is as much about Jim Burden as it is about Antonia, and like O Pioneers! the book violates novelistic convention. The novel combines fragments of Jim’s and Antonia’s intertwined, yet very different, life stories. Furthermore, oral storytelling occasions repeatedly disrupt the novel’s forward movement. Positive responses to My Antonia from cultural arbiters such as H. L. Mencken seemingly cemented Cather’s reputation as a major American novelist. However, her World War I novel One of Ours (1922) incurred the wrath of highbrow critics, while also gaining her a much larger readership than she had previously enjoyed. Based loosely on the experiences of her cousin G. P. Cather, more than half of the novel is set in Nebraska, where protagonist Claude Wheeler feels stifled and frustrated. For Claude, the battlefields of France are a convenient escape from a disastrous marriage, and in the comradeship of his fellow soldiers, and especially violinist David Gerhardt, he finds the meaning and purpose he could not find in rural Nebraska. Like Cather’s cousin, Claude dies relatively early in the American engagement on the ground in France, and Cather’s protagonist is thus spared the postwar disillusionment that colors the fiction of John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and others. Mencken unfavorably compared the French section of One of Ours to Dos Passos’s unambiguously ironic and anti-war novel Three Soldiers (1921), and modern critics of One of Ours remain divided on the question of whether Cather treats Claude’s perspective ironically. One of Ours was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, but Cather’s subsequent novels of the 1920s continue to receive more critical attention and approbation than One of Ours. In the brief and elegiac A Lost Lady (1923), Cather returned to nineteenth-century Nebraska, shifting her focus from European immigrant farmers to the entrepreneurial “American” class of railroad builders. Title character Marian Forrester is married to Captain Daniel Forrester, a moving force behind the Burlington and Northern railroad that crossed Nebraska and enabled its development. As in My Antonia, readers see the main female character through the eyes of a male character.
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Orphaned Neil Herbert is studying the law in the office of his uncle in the small town of Sweet Water, and he idolizes and idealizes Marian as a representation of the community’s pioneer era. As her husband loses his physical vitality to repeated strokes and his assets in a bank failure, Neil expects Marian to devote herself entirely to her husband and to the past, but Marian finds sexual fulfillment outside of marriage and accommodates herself to the new economic order. Our last glimpse of the widowed Marian Forrester living happily in Argentina with her second husband suggests that she is far from “lost,” even if Neil insists on framing her that way. The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop are Cather’s most formally experimental novels and her most insistently focused on relationships between men. Godfrey St. Peter is a university history professor contemplating a move from one house to another, and he is similarly caught between his vague dissatisfaction with his marriage and haunting memories of his student Tom Outland, who died while serving in the Foreign Legion in World War I. The first and the third sections of the novel take place in the fictional present after Tom’s death; the second and central section, however, presents Tom speaking in the first person as he tells St. Peter the story of how he and a male friend discovered the ruins of a Native American community of cliff dwellers while working as cowboys. Both A Lost Lady and The Professor’s House helped to recover Cather’s reputation with critics. Death Comes for the Archbishop both solidified Cather’s reputation for innovation and technical mastery and marked a turn to the past and history that would fuel attacks on her from the Left in the 1930s. Set during the early days of New Mexico’s territorial annexation to the United States, Death Comes for the Archbishop traces the careers of two French priests sent to establish a new apostolic vicarate. As contemporary reviews recognized, the novel’s organization is more visual and spatial than narrative and plotted, and Cather subsequently identified the murals of French painter Puvis de Chavannes as an important influence on her technique. The deep love between Bishop Jean Latour and Father Joseph Vaillant, their love of God and the Catholic Church, and Cather’s engaged and respectful representation of Catholicism led many
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readers to believe that Cather herself was a Catholic. Cather was not a Catholic, but her next novel, Shadows on the Rock (1931), only intensified such assumptions, as Cather turned even further back into North American history to the intensely Catholic community of seventeenth-century Quebec, a frontier community built on both literal rock and the rock of religious faith. The relationship between apothecary Euclide Auclaire and his patron Count Frontenac is important to the novel, but the domestic world of his young daughter, Cecile, takes center stage. Indeed, the novel’s celebration of Cecile’s kitchen as central to the preservation of French culture on foreign soil led male critics on the Left to dismiss the novel and to lament Cather’s retreat into the past and bourgeois domesticity. Despite such critical attacks, and despite the fact that the novel is visually organized and largely plotless, digressing through oral storytelling occasions like My Antonia, tens of thousands of ordinary readers embraced the novel. As a result, Shadows was Cather’s first novel to reach the bestseller list, coming in at number two for the year behind Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth. Throughout her career, Cather’s fiction appeared in magazines. For instance, all of her novels of the 1920s were serialized in magazines before appearing as books, and the fiction she did not collect for book publication sometimes presents an instructive contrast to her novels and collected fictions of the same period. In the teens, for instance, while she was writing her prairie novels, many of her short stories were set in New York City, including a series of stories she anticipated publishing together under the title Office Wives. In Obscure Destinies (1932), a collection of three long short stories first published in the Woman’s Home Companion and the Ladies’ Home Journal, Cather returned to Nebraska as subject matter, writing stories deeply grounded in her childhood experiences and the lives of her family and friends. Her slender novel Lucy Gayheart (1935) (serialized in the Woman’s Home Companion) represents another layer of return in Cather’s late career. Not only is the novel set in central Nebraska, but also it repeats, in both a lighter and more melancholic vein, the story of a young woman’s artistic development, which Cather first explored in The Song of the Lark. Cather’s last finished novel continued her turn to family history, but the southern family
history that is only tangentially visible in earlier fiction. Jim Burden in My Antonia is from the South, but his story begins when he is on his way to Nebraska, his southern childhood quickly receding into memory. “Old Mrs. Harris” (collected in Obscure Destinies) represents Grandmother Harris and her daughter Victoria Templeton as displaced southern “ladies” struggling to understand the social mores of the “snappy little Western democracy” of a Nebraska small town, but, again, the South is only a memory. Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) turns back the clock before Cather’s birth to a fictionalized version of her family’s pre-Civil War history in Virginia. The troubled relationship between Sapphira Dodderidge Colbert and her slave (and probable niece) Nancy Till is at the center of the novel. Sapphira’s husband Martin, her adult daughters, and her nephew all become implicated in a struggle over control of Nancy’s budding sexuality. Cather anatomizes Sapphira’s psyche in unflinching detail, stripping the relation between mistress and slave of any supposed patina of romance, a fictional psychological journey praised by Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark (1992). The novel’s firstperson epilogue, however, in which Cather wrote herself into the story, has troubled modern critics. Recalling Nancy’s postwar return from Canada to visit her aging mother from her perspective as a child, Cather turns Nancy’s story into a white southern girl’s most prized possession. At the time of her death in 1947, Cather was working on yet another historical novel about French Catholics, Hard Punishments, set in medieval Avignon. Cather named as her executor Edith Lewis, a magazine editor and advertising copywriter with whom she shared a home in New York City for 38 years. In accord with Cather’s wishes, Lewis destroyed all but a few pages of the manuscript of Hard Punishments. Lewis arranged for publication of a few short stories that remained in manuscript at the time of Cather’s death as The Old Beauty and Others (1948). SEE ALSO: Dos Passos, John (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF); James, Henry (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Queer Modernism (AF); Wharton, Edith (AF)
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CHABON, MICHAEL
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Carlin, D. (1992). Cather, Canon, and the Politics of Reading. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Cather, W. (1905). The Troll Garden. New York: McClure, Phillips. Cather, W. (1912). Alexander’s Bridge. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Cather, W. (1913). O Pioneers! Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Cather, W. (1915). The Song of the Lark. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Cather, W. (1918). My Antonia. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Cather, W. (1920). Youth and the Bright Medusa. New York: Knopf. Cather, W. (1922). One of Ours. New York: Knopf. Cather, W. (1923). A Lost Lady. New York: Knopf. Cather, W. (1925). The Professor’s House. New York: Knopf. Cather, W. (1926). My Mortal Enemy. New York: Knopf. Cather, W. (1927). Death Comes for the Archbishop. New York: Knopf. Cather, W. (1931). Shadows on the Rock. New York: Knopf. Cather, W. (1932). Obscure Destinies. New York: Knopf. Cather, W. (1935). Lucy Gayheart. New York: Knopf. Cather, W. (1936). Not Under Forty. New York: Knopf. Cather, W. (1940). Sapphira and the Slave Girl. New York: Knopf. Cather, W. (1948). The Old Beauty and Others. New York: Knopf. Cather, W. (1949). Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art. New York: Knopf. Cather, W. (1986). Uncle Valentine and Other Stories: Willa Cather’s Uncollected Short Fiction, 1915–1929. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Cather, W. (with McClure, S. S.) (1914). My Autobiography [ghostwritten]. New York: Frederick A. Stokes. Goldberg, J. (2001). Willa Cather and Others. Durham: Duke University Press. Jewell, A. (ed.) (N.d.). The Willa Cather Archive. University of Nebraska–Lincoln. At http://cather. unl.edu, accessed Jan. 19, 2010. Lindemann, M. (1999). Willa Cather: Queering America. New York: Columbia University Press. Lindemann, M. (ed.) (2005). Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Brien, S. (1987). Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York: Oxford University Press. Romines, A. (ed.) (2000). Willa Cather’s Southern Connections: New Essays on Cather and the South. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
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Rosowski, S. J. (1986). The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather’s Romanticism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Skaggs, M. M. (ed.) (2000). Willa Cather’s New York: New Essays on Cather and the City. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Stout, J. (2000). Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Swift, J. N., & Urgo, J. R. (eds.) (2002). Willa Cather and the American Southwest. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Trout, S. (2002). Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Urgo, J. R. (1995). Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Williams, D. L. (2001). Not in Sisterhood: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zona Gale, and the Politics of Female Authorship. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Woodress, J. (1987). Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Chabon, Michael PATRICK O’DONNELL
The author of seven novels, two short story collections, and a collection of essays, Michael Chabon is a writer committed to exploring genres and writing entertaining, serious fiction that contains protagonists who are experiencing complex personal and social conflicts at various stages of life. Born in Washington, DC in 1963 of Jewish parents and growing up as a teenager in Pittsburgh, Chabon now lives in Berkeley, California with his wife, Ayelet Waldman, who is also a novelist, and four children. Chabon’s first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), which he began as an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh, was originally written as his MFA thesis at the University of California, Irvine. It is the story of Art Bechstein, a recent college graduate who engages in affairs with both male and female partners, thus confronting his own sexual and social identity in ways reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel of the youth generation in the wake of World War I, This Side of Paradise (1920). Chabon’s next work, Wonder Boys, reflects his own difficulties in writing a second novel: its
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protagonist, Grady Tripp, a novelist and college professor suffering from writer’s block, is at a crossroads in his life. Having spent seven years attempting to complete a follow-up to his prizewinning first novel, Tripp discovers that his mistress, the chancellor of the college at which he teaches, is pregnant; meanwhile, his wife has walked out on him, his 2,500-plus-page unfinished manuscript sits unattended, and he is compelled to deal with one of his students, a budding author with deep personality problems, who has stolen an armful of Marilyn Monroe collectibles from the chancellor’s house and accidentally killed her dog in the process. The comic action of the novel takes place over a weekend, and portrays the interwoven personal and professional crises of a character whose life is chaotic and unresolved. A successful film version of the novel starring Michael Douglas, Francis McDormand, and Toby McGuire was released in 2000. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Chabon’s most ambitious novel to date, appeared in 2000. The novel reflects Chabon’s fascination with comics and the history of newspaper comic strips; it portrays the decades-long collaboration between a comic strip illustrator, the Czech-born Joe Kavalier, and a strip writer, Sam Clay, born in Brooklyn. Kavalier and Clay ascend to prominence during the “Golden Age” of comics during the 1930s and 1940s; their relationship and professional success unfold primarily against the backdrop of the Great Depression and World War II, but the novel’s historical sweep extends back to the legends of the Jewish golem arising in sixteenth-century Prague and considers the differences between the protagonists’ childhoods growing up in America and Europe. Like Wonder Boys, Kavalier & Clay depicts the interrelationship of personal and professional crises paralleling the complex relation between imagined and historical worlds. The novel won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The two novels that followed achieved less visibility: Summerland (2002) is a novel for young adults, a fantasy about a boy growing up on a small island who becomes involved in worldsaving adventures; The Final Solution (2004) is a relatively slim detective novel titled in homage to A. Conan Doyle, and starring an elderly detective who investigates a murder and the disappearance of a young German Jewish refugee’s talking parrot in wartime England.
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (2007b) is also, in many respects, a detective novel, but it returns to the “epic” dimensions of Kavalier & Clay in the alternative history story of a crime committed in the “Federal District of Sitka,” which has been created in Alaska as a temporary Jewish homeland following World War II and the quick defeat of attempts to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. In the novel’s historical present, the district is about to revert to Alaskan control, and the question of what will happen to the people, customs, and laws of the temporary Yiddish-speaking state is up in the air. Amidst this uncertainty, homicide detective Meyer Landsman is called upon to investigate the murder of a former chess prodigy who has fallen on hard times and dies in the same seedy hotel where Landsman resides. Like most of Chabon’s protagonists, Landsman is experiencing combined personal and professional difficulties: he has just left his wife, his sister has died recently in a mysterious plane crash, and his future as a homicide cop in the shifting sands of the Federal District is uncertain. As the labyrinthine plot unfolds, it becomes clear that the death of Landsman’s sister is somehow connected to the murder case which ripples outward to the political history of the Federal District and the approaching diaspora of its people. This ambitious and entertaining novel is often comic in tone while engaging the reader in more sober reflections on the current situation in the Middle East and the fate of the Jewish people. Chabon’s most recent work, Gentleman of the Road (2007a), is a picaresque novel originally published serially in the New York Times Magazine. The novel is set in the Middle East of the tenth century and relates the wild adventures of two Jewish bandits as they travel the world in search of victims. In addition to his novels, Chabon has published A Model of the World and Other Stories (1991); Werewolves in Their Youth: Stories (1999); and Maps and Legends (2008), a collection of essays. He is a contributing editor to McSweeney’s, and was one of the writers for the superhero film Spiderman 2, directed by Sam Raimi. SEE ALSO: Fitzgerald, F. Scott (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); The Road Novel (AF)
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CHANDLER, RAYMOND
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Chabon, M. (1988). The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. New York: Morrow. Chabon, M. (1991). A Model of the World and Other Stories. New York: HarperCollins. Chabon, M. (1995). Wonder Boys. New York: Villard. Chabon, M. (1999). Werewolves in Their Youths: Stories. New York: Picador. Chabon, M. (2000). The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. New York: Random House. Chabon, M. (2002). Summerland. New York: Hyperion. Chabon, M. (2004). The Final Solution: A Story of Detection. New York: HarperCollins. Chabon, M. (2007a). Gentlemen of the Road. New York: Random House. Chabon, M. (2007b). The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. New York: HarperCollins. Chabon, M. (2008). Maps and Legends. New York: McSweeney’s. Chute, H. (2008). Ragtime, Kavalier & Clay, and the Framing of Comics. Modern Fiction Studies, 54(2), 268–301. Meyers, D. G. (2008). Michael Chabon’s Imaginary Jews. Sewanee Review, 116(4), 572–88. Singer, M. (2008). Embodiments of the Real: The Counterlinguistic Turn in the Comic-Book Novel. Critique, 49(3), 273–91.
Chandler, Raymond DAVID W. MADDEN
Although he came to writing novels accidentally, Chandler, along with Dashiell Hammett, proved that fictional entertainments could rise to the level of serious art. Chandler wrote in the hard-boiled style of the day, but extended the idiom’s possibilities through sharp wit, exaggerated metaphors, and subjective narration. Chandler also brought an astringent social criticism to his works that revealed a sharp intellect and probing insight. All of this was accomplished in only seven novels, two dozen short stories, and some articles and screenplays. Born July 23, 1888 in Chicago, Illinois, he was the only child of Maurice and Florence Chandler, Chandler’s parents separated, and his mother relocated to London for his education. He served in the Canadian Army in World War I and then the Royal Air Force, and after his discharge began a career in the California oil business, in which he was initially successful until his dismissal for
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drinking and erratic behavior. In 1933 Black Mask magazine published his first story, and he continued writing for the pulps until the publication of his first novel, The Big Sleep (1939), the success of which propelled him into an equally successful career as a Hollywood screenwriter. In his first novel Chandler presents Philip Marlowe, a Los Angeles private detective who would become the quintessential Chandler hero in each of his other works. Marlowe is not a typical detective, being a man of some education and refined sensibilities. Chandler’s model came from Arthurian romance, and Marlowe is presented as a modern knight, a man of chivalric instincts who typically enters cases for neither money nor revenge but out of a sense of personal justice. Further, like a knight, Marlowe remains aloof from women, often regarding them as distractions or potent threats to his mission. Marlowe’s stringent ethics bring him forever into conflict with both police and criminals. The police are often sloppy, incompetent, or vicious, and Marlowe accords them little respect and spares them no criticism. The criminals – mobsters, killers, small-time hustlers, and so on – are depicted as morally bankrupt and exploitative. In a world where the police are lazy or inefficient and where the criminals are allowed to run roughshod over the populace, Marlowe sees himself as the last line of resistance to pure chaos. The Big Sleep establishes the outlines for the other novels and some consistent concerns. Set in Los Angeles, Chandler’s metaphor for a society obsessed with money and thrills, Marlowe takes an extortion case that reveals the utter corruption of a seemingly respectable family, and the same general situation pertains in The High Window (1942), revealing Chandler’s exploration of the nexus between wealth and corruption. While plotting is never Chandler’s strong suit, he rebels against what he sees as the limitations of the traditional detective fiction formula – plot-driven puzzles that end predictably with the discovery of the villain and the restoration of a violated world. These two novels end with Marlowe withholding information and feeling soiled by his association with the families. Farewell, My Lovely (1940) and The Lady in the Lake (1943) center on disguised identities and hidden pasts. In each, self-serving, dangerous women kill to preserve their new personae, and
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each reveals Marlowe’s great strength – wise-guy dialogue, his most potent weapon. In all the novels, he rarely draws a gun or strikes anyone, but he is never averse to verbally reducing an adversary. The novels also feature some compelling character studies. The theme of altered or hidden identities continues in The Little Sister (1948), which could be described as Chandler’s Hollywood novel. An air of unreality pervades relationships and the plot itself, and as the bodies pile up and identities shift, Marlowe admits he feels like an audience to a performance. The Long Goodbye (1954) has an elegiac tone and is a compelling study of friendship deceived. Again Chandler creates an amoral world with Marlowe cast as the lone defender of a forgotten ideal. For the first time, Marlowe is depicted as having close personal attachments, in a brief friendship with Terry Lennox, whom he must dismiss for moral defeatism, and a love affair with Linda Loring. Chandler’s concern once more is with character development and detailed psychological analysis, and the novel, though it has its murders, is less an exercise in detection than in ethical questioning. Playback (1958), his last novel, is a disaster, poorly written, thinly developed, and lifeless. By this time Chandler’s wife had died, and he was suffering from bouts of alcoholism, declining health, and professional frustration. Shortly after accepting the presidency of the Mystery Writers of America, he died on March 26, 1959. Chandler was first and foremost a stylist, someone who brought to a popular genre a sense of moral seriousness and social scrutiny. In these ways he was indebted to Ernest Hemingway and the urban fictions of Theodore Dreiser, but he was no imitator, though he spawned legions of acolytes. SEE ALSO: Cain, James M. (AF); Detective/ Crime Fiction (WF); Dreiser, Theodore (AF); Hammett, Dashiell (AF); Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Modern Fiction in Hollywood (AF); Noir Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Chandler, R. (1939). The Big Sleep. New York: Knopf. Chandler, R. (1940). Farewell, My Lovely. New York: Knopf.
Chandler, R. (1942). The High Window. New York: Knopf. Chandler, R. (1943). The Lady in the Lake. New York: Knopf. Chandler, R. (1949). The Little Sister. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Chandler, R. (1954). The Long Goodbye. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Chandler, R. (1958). Playback. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Chandler, R. (1950). Trouble Is My Business. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Chandler, R. (1952). Pick-Up on Noon Street. New York: Pocket Books. Chandler, R. (1953). Pearls Are a Nuisance. London: Hamish Hamilton. Chandler, R. (1964). Killer in the Rain. London: Hamish Hamilton. Durham, P. (1963). Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Go: Raymond Chandler’s Knight. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Gross, M. (ed.) (1978). The World of Raymond Chandler. New York: A & W. Hiney, T. (1997). Raymond Chandler: A Biography. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. MacShane, F. (1976). The Life of Raymond Chandler. New York: E. P. Dutton. Marling, W. (1986). Raymond Chandler. Boston: Twayne. Phillips, G. D. (2000). Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Speir, J. (1981). Raymond Chandler. New York: Ungar. Thorpe, E. (1983). Chandlertown: The Los Angeles of Philip Marlowe. London: Vermilion. Wolfe, P. (1985). Something More Than Night: The Case of Raymond Chandler. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
Cheever, John KEITH WILHITE
Hailed as the “Ovid of Ossining” and the “Chekhov of the Suburbs,” John Cheever emerged as one of America’s most popular writers after World War II. Though an accomplished novelist, Cheever made his name as a short story writer, best exemplified by his long association with the New Yorker. His fiction embraces the absurdity and irresistible allure of a pastoral vision in the modern era of alienation and dispossession.
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CHEEVER, JOHN
Cheever was born on May 27, 1912 in Quincy, Massachusetts, a town that served as a model for St. Botolphs in The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), which won the National Book Award, and its sequel The Wapshot Scandal (1964). Between 1943 and 1982, he published five novels and seven collections of short stories, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Stories of John Cheever (1978). Before his death in 1982, he was awarded the National Medal for Literature by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His New England childhood, his relationship with his brother, his life in Manhattan and Westchester County, and his struggles with alcohol exercised an extraordinary influence over his work. Cheever’s fiction draws on romantic and modern traditions in American literature. Scholars have long read the influence of Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and Hawthorne in his writing, pointing specifically to Cheever’s use of allegory and the way his work draws upon symbols and figures from Christianity and classical mythology (Coale 1982; Meanor 1995). His virtuoso talents as a short story writer also place him among the modern masters of American short fiction – Anderson, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and O’Connor – and his thematic explorations of family, alienation, and infidelity anticipate aspects of John Updike’s and Raymond Carver’s work. The stories collected in The Enormous Radio (1953) and The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (1958) established themes Cheever would return to throughout his career: couples ensconced in tenuous marriages, urbanites and suburbanites struggling to maintain their social and economic standing, and families laboring under the weight of history and genealogy. The Cain and Abel conflict in “Goodbye, My Brother” dovetails with the cosmic struggle between fundamental dualisms in his work: light and dark, life and death, earthly beauty and spiritual suffering. The story’s “recurring mythic patterns” (Meanor, 1995, 43) also establish the restorative power of nature as an important strain in his fiction. The fantastic blend of realism and surrealism distinguishes “The Enormous Radio” as an important transitional piece in the development of Cheever’s literary style. The Shady Hill collection solidified his reputation as “a chronicler of suburban life” (Donaldson, 1988, 170) and contains some of his most widely read pieces: “The Country
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Husband,” “The Five-Forty-Eight,” “O Youth and Beauty!” and the title story. These stories offer nuanced explorations of spiritual, psychological, and economic insecurity, embodied in the quasi-pastoral setting the characters inhabit. Cheever’s “Wapshot novels” trace the slow disintegration of the Wapshot family through financial insolvency, sexual affairs, alcoholism, and suicide. Many of the dualisms and mythic strains of “Goodbye, My Brother” are writ large in the Wapshots’ fall, but there is also a distinctly Cold War feel to these works. The novels introduce themes of bisexuality and guilt through the character Coverly Wapshot, and Cheever’s depictions of suburbia turn decidedly menacing. The suburban community in which Coverly and his wife live is built around the missile site where he works. The loss of Edenic innocence, represented by the Wapshot home in St. Botolphs, gives way to a vision of homogeneous homes overshadowed by the destructive power of nuclear war. This darkness reaches its apex in his third novel, Bullet Park (1969), in which the characters Paul Hammer and Eliot Nailles reprise Cheever’s trademark dualism to more sinister effect. Unlike Shady Hill, the suburb of Bullet Park seems devoid of community, and the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane lingering in the background suggests the irrevocable presence of danger within this suburban haven. Bullet Park is also the setting for Cheever’s iconic story, “The Swimmer.” The story recounts Neddy Merrill’s journey across the swimming pools of affluent suburban homes and is, in many ways, the apotheosis of Cheever’s investment in mythic patterns and the central importance of geography. But the final image of a forlorn and dispossessed Merrill undercuts the symbolic restorative power of water one finds in earlier works. Cheever’s final two novels, written after he had overcome his addiction to alcohol, embrace themes of renewal and rebirth. Bisexuality plays a central, liberating role in Falconer (1977). Where Coverly Wapshot agonized over latent homosexual desires, Zeke Farragut’s homosexual relationship with Jody frees him from the physical and spiritual isolation of his life in prison – a transition that, as reflected in his Journals, indicates a change in Cheever’s thinking about his own bisexuality. Oh, What a Paradise It Seems (1982) further explores themes of renewal in a story that
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literalizes the loss of an Edenic landscape through environmental degradation. But the “coda” paragraph – posing questions about criminals who have escaped punishment, complicity, and selfincrimination – reaffirms a central ambivalence and ambiguity to Cheever’s work at the end of his accomplished career. SEE ALSO: Anderson, Sherwood (AF); Carver, Raymond (AF); Fitzgerald, F. Scott (AF); Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); O’Connor, Flannery (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); Updike, John (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Aubry, T. (2003). John Cheever and the Management of Middlebrow Misery. Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, 3, 64–83. Beuka, R. (2004). Finding the Worm in the Apple. In SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscapes in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 65–106. Bosha, F. J. (ed.) (1994). The Critical Response to John Cheever. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Cheever, J. (1953). The Enormous Radio, and Other Stories. New York: Funk and Wagnalls. Cheever, J. (1957). The Wapshot Chronicle. New York: Harper. Cheever, J. (1958). The Housebreaker of Shady Hill, and Other Stories. New York: Harper. Cheever, J. (1964). The Wapshot Scandal. New York: Harper and Row. Cheever, J. (1969). Bullet Park. New York: Knopf. Cheever, J. (1977). Falconer. New York: Knopf. Cheever, J. (1978). The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Knopf. Cheever, J. (1982). Oh, What a Paradise It Seems. New York: Knopf. Cheever, J. (1991). The Journals of John Cheever. New York: Knopf. Coale, S. (1982). Cheever and Hawthorne: The American Romancer’s Art. In R. G. Collins (ed.), Critical Essays on John Cheever. Boston: G. K. Hall, pp. 193–209. Donaldson, S. (1988). John Cheever: A Biography. New York: Random House. Meanor, P. (1995). John Cheever Revisited. New York: Twayne. O’Hara, J. E. (1989). John Cheever: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne. Waldeland, L. (1979). John Cheever. Boston: Twayne. Wilhite, K. (2006). John Cheever’s Shady Hill, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Suburbs. Studies in American Fiction, 34(2), 215–39.
Chesnutt, Charles W. RYAN SIMMONS
Charles W. Chesnutt is widely regarded as the most significant African American fiction writer between the end of slavery and the Harlem Renaissance. The author of five books published between 1899 and 1905, and the recipient of accolades from William Dean Howells and other important contemporaries, Chesnutt’s literary career nonetheless failed to meet his expectations. While his two short story collections (both published in 1899) were critically well received and commercially promising, his subsequent novels were marked by mixed reviews and increasingly disappointing sales. Moreover, more of Chesnutt’s books were rejected than accepted by publishers during his lifetime, leaving the bulk of his short fiction uncollected, and six of his novels unpublished, at his death. Most of these writings have been brought into print during a late-twentieth-century renaissance of Chesnutt scholarship instigated by books such as William L. Andrews’s The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt (1980) and Eric J. Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993). These critics built Chesnutt’s reputation by demonstrating his effectiveness in using literature as a tool for political advocacy. His most lasting legacy, however, may arise from a characteristic explored by later critics such as Dean McWilliams and SallyAnn H. Ferguson: Chesnutt’s very contemporary perspective on race, which not only decries racism (or, according to critics such as Ferguson, fails sufficiently to decry racism) but also regards racial categories themselves as constructed and deeply political. Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland, Ohio to biracial parents, Andrew and Ann Maria Chesnutt, both of whom were covertly involved in the anti-slavery movement. At age 8, he moved with his family to Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he was educated at a Freedman’s Bureau school until 1872, when his mother passed away and his father’s business failed. At that time he put aside his own formal education and became a teacher, later taking the position of principal of the Fayetteville Normal School. In 1878 he married Susan Perry, a teacher. After an abortive run for local political office, which he abandoned due to the
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racial slurs often directed at him, Chesnutt moved to New York City, and then to Cleveland, in 1883. He worked in a railroad office and as a legal stenographer while studying law, and passed the bar in 1887. His ambitions, however, were now directed toward writing. In an 1880 journal entry, Chesnutt voiced his desire to become an author, describing “a high, holy purpose,” which he regarded as “not so much the elevation of the colored people as the elevation of the whites – for I consider the unjust spirit of caste which is so insidious as to pervade a whole nation . . . a barrier to the moral progress of the American people.” This theme, that racism harms all Americans – black and white, but in unequal severity – would be explored by Chesnutt throughout the 50 years of his writing career, during which he attempted to persuade a primarily white readership that understanding and rectifying racism were in their own interests. Chesnutt’s first significant publication, a short story titled “The Goophered Grapevine,” appeared in 1887 in the Atlantic Monthly. The story, like his subsequent “conjure tales,” utilizes a dualnarration framework in which a prosperous white Northerner, having moved to the South to accommodate his wife’s poor health, recounts a tale by a former slave, Julius. Written primarily in Julius’s voice, the story appeals to contemporary readers’ tastes for the kind of dialect fiction that Joel Chandler Harris had popularized in the Uncle Remus tales, and does not overtly challenge conventional narratives about African Americans. Chesnutt, however, introduced a new element in the framing device narrated by the white Northerner, John: as recent critics have pointed out, the “conjure” stories operate on multiple levels. In most of the stories, Julius employs narrative skill to acquire some desired end (such as a church for former slaves), frequently taking advantage of John’s obtuseness in doing so; John is unable to recognize the full import of the story even as he relates it. Narrative that operates on two levels, the overt and covert, became a hallmark of Chesnutt’s fiction, which often appeals to popular tastes while subtly undercutting the racial codes upon which they rely. Of all his works, the “conjure tales,” in which this strategy is especially notable, received the lion’s share of critical appreciation
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during the late twentieth century, just as they received the most popular attention during the late nineteenth century. Chesnutt, however, did not remain satisfied in producing dialect writing, and began to publish stories that focused on the lives of middle-class, Northern, African Americans, many of whom – like Chesnutt himself – were light-skinned enough to consider “passing” as whites. Although he published numerous short works during the late 1880s, in the 1890s he devoted himself primarily to producing a book. He was unsuccessful in several such attempts: a proposed collection of his “conjure” tales; two novellas set in the South, “Mandy Oxendine” and “Rena”; and a Northern novel, “A Business Career,” were all rejected by publishers. Finally in 1899, two volumes of short fiction appeared: The Conjure Woman, comprising most of Chesnutt’s dialect stories, and The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, which contains his relatively politically overt stories of Northern blacks. An additional book, a biography of Frederick Douglass, was also published that year. Buoyed by his success, Chesnutt sold his legal stenography business and pursued a career as a full-time writer between 1899 and 1902. Initially, Chesnutt’s hopes for the future seemed attainable. In 1900, a revised and extended version of “Rena,” now titled The House Behind the Cedars, was published by Houghton Mifflin, which accepted it in place of another submitted Chesnutt novel, “The Rainbow Chasers.” The latter work – the only Chesnutt novel that remains unpublished – deals obliquely with racial “passing” by creating a female protagonist who seems subtly marked as a light-skinned African American, although the novel never directly refers to her as such. In The House Behind the Cedars, the message is less covert – or, put another way, the covert nature of the protagonist’s racial identity is explicitly, rather than implicitly, a theme of the novel. The House Behind the Cedars plots the fates of John and Rena Walden, siblings who elect to pass as white, and whose respective fates (John prospers, and Rena perishes) seem to indicate their author’s attunement to the role of gender as well as race in determining social agency. The novel sold barely well enough to justify the publication of a second one. For his follow-up, Chesnutt selected as his subject the Wilmington, North Carolina “riots” of 1898, in which a white
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supremacist minority violently usurped local political control by terrorizing, and in several instances murdering, the town’s African American population. He returned to North Carolina to research the brutal events, and the resulting novel weaves together documentary evidence and deeply imagined personal perspectives, including – in a partially sympathetic portrayal – that of the white supremacist instigator of the riot. In rendering the events of Wilmington in fictional form, Chesnutt aspired to produce a work comparable to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that could expose to a mass audience the reality of racial injustice in the South. Although The Marrow of Tradition is often regarded as his best novel, and generated some controversy when published, it did not sell well, and Chesnutt returned to the business of legal stenography. He completed two more novels in the next few years, “Evelyn’s Husband” (a South Seas adventure which was rejected) and The Colonel’s Dream, the latter an unflinching analysis of capitalism in the South. In The Colonel’s Dream, Chesnutt’s protagonist, a Confederate officer turned wealthy Northern businessman, returns to his Southern home and attempts to revitalize its economy by infusing it with capitalist principles. Despite his confident prediction of success, his ambitions are thwarted by the South’s prevalently feudalistic political economy, and by power relations which the colonel’s romantic perspective prevents him from comprehending. Among the novel’s more striking assertions is the claim that racism – which hinders the colonel’s ability to properly hire or motivate workers – is incompatible with capitalism. The Colonel’s Dream is perhaps Chesnutt’s most challenging novel, formally as well as thematically. Nonetheless, with few exceptions, both Chesnutt’s contemporaries and recent critics have regarded The Colonel’s Dream as Chesnutt’s worst novel, and its poor sales effectively ended the author’s career as a novelist. Chesnutt continued, however, to give lectures, to write non-fiction essays on racism and other issues, and to write fiction. He replaced W. E. B. Du Bois as a member of the Committee of Twelve for the Advancement of the Interests of the Negro Race beginning in 1905, and also served locally in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and (in various formal and informal capacities) as a consultant and
public voice on issues of race. In 1910, he also became a member of Cleveland’s Rowfant Club, an exclusive social club that had previously blackballed him on the basis of race; he accepted the invitation despite having satirized the Rowfant Club in his story “Baxter’s Procrustes.” Although very little of his fiction saw print during this period, Chesnutt did compose at least two more novels before his death from arteriosclerosis in 1932: Paul Marchand, F.M.C. (c. 1921), a depiction of the injustices faced by a “free man of color” in 1820s New Orleans, and The Quarry (c. 1928), an account of an exceptional young man of the modern age who, raised as an African American, discovers that he is white. Both novels were rejected, and Chesnutt made only passing mention of his continuing literary ambitions when he received the Spingarn Medal of the NAACP in 1928, choosing instead to assume the role of an elder statesman in African American literary history. He described himself then as the “first man in the United States who shared his blood, to write serious fiction about the Negro.” Recent critics have corrected Chesnutt’s perception that he was the first in this regard – citing the examples of William Wells Brown, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Frances E. W. Harper, and others – but they have largely embraced his self-concept as an important pioneer. SEE ALSO: Du Bois, W. E. B. (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); The Harlem Renaissance (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); The Southern Novel (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Andrews, W. (1980). The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Chesnutt, C. W. (1905). The Colonel’s Dream. New York: Doubleday, Page. Chesnutt, C. W. (1993). The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt (ed. R. H. Brodhead). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chesnutt, C. W. (1997). “To Be an Author”: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1889–1905 (ed. J. R. McElrath Jr. & R. C. Leitz III). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chesnutt, C. W. (1999). Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches (ed. J. R. McElrath Jr., R. C. Leitz III, & J. S. Crisler). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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Chesnutt, C. W. (2002a). An Exemplary Citizen: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1906–1932 (ed. J. R. McElrath, Jr., R. C. Leitz III, & J. S. Crisler). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Chesnutt, C. W. (2002b). Stories, Novels, and Essays [1905] (ed. W. Sollors). New York: Library of America. Chesnutt, H. M. (1952). Charles Waddell Chesnutt: Pioneer of the Color Line. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Duncan. C. (1999). The Absent Man: The Narrative Craft of Charles W. Chesnutt. Athens: Ohio University Press. Ellison, C. W., & Metcalf , E. W., Jr. (1977). Charles W. Chesnutt: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall. Ferguson, S. H. (2002). Chesnutt’s Genuine Blacks and Future Americans. In S. H. Ferguson (ed.), New York: Houghton Mifflin. Keller, F. R. (1978). An American Crusade: The Life of Charles Waddell Chesnutt. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press. McElrath , J. R., Jr. (ed.) (1999). Critical Essays on Charles W. Chesnutt. New York: G. K. Hall. McWilliams, D. (2002). Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Pickens, E. W. (1994). Charles W. Chesnutt and the Progressive Movement. New York: Pace University Press. Render, S. L. (1980). Charles W. Chesnutt. Boston: Twayne. Simmons, R. (2006). Chesnutt and Realism: A Study of the Novels. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Sundquist, E. J. (1993). To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Wilson, M. (2004). Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Wonham, H. B. (1998). Charles W. Chesnutt: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne.
Cisneros, Sandra VIRGINIA M. BRACKETT
The protagonist of Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street reflects Cisneros’s childhood experience, moving often within the poverty of the barrio. The novel’s popularity and adoption in countless classrooms allowed many readers to discover for the first time a voice with which they identified. With that novel, Cisneros captured an enormous audience and led a group of Chicana/o voices that would greatly affect the landscape of reading in the English language.
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Cisneros was born on December 20, 1954 in Chicago to native Mexican parents. Later answering why she began writing, Cisneros stated, “I am the only daughter in a family of six sons.. . . That explains everything” (1990, 3–4). The isolation her characters suffer mirrors that of her youth, as her family moved often between Mexico and Chicago, resulting in her lack of attachment to either culture. However, later in the University of Iowa graduate writing program she realized her dissonance could afford her a valuable narrative point of view differing from that of others. As she worked on The House on Mango Street in 1980, she released 100 copies of a poetry collection titled Bad Boys and also received the first of two National Endowment for the Arts awards. Relocating to Europe, Cisneros worked full-time on the novel, which she published in 1984. A hybrid collection of poetry and fiction, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, followed in 1987. Her coy cover photo elicited accusations of Chicana stereotypes. Cisneros countered that the photo represented independence and power, like her writing. In 1991 she set a precedent for a Chicana, receiving $100,000 from Random House for Woman Hollering Creek, which earned a Lannan Literary Award. She published Loose Woman in 1994 and won a 1995 MacArthur Fellowship. Cisneros settled in San Antonio, comparing its influences by both Mexico and the United States to her own influences by dual cultures. She debuted her 2002 novel, Caramelo, in Chicago. A self-described slow writer, she states on her website that she continues working on numerous projects. Cisneros’s writing expresses independence from expectations of Chicanas and women in general. Her characters adopt bold, uninhibited voices, and she often mixes English with Spanish. Her style reflects her story, yet her characters’ search for their own voices strikes a universal chord with readers. In The House on Mango Street the narrator’s name, Esperanza, means hope in Spanish, an emotion she symbolizes for her readers. Esperanza struggles courageously against ethnic stereotypes promoted by her teachers and gender stereotypes forced by her Chicano culture. Ultimately, her desire to write overcomes the repressive barrio life that threatens to block her imaginative and literal escape. A Bildungsroman, the story empowers
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Esperanza through her traditionally male adventurer role. Esperanza gains independence, yet readers understand she will return to the barrio, her inspiration and her heart. Single chapters have been widely anthologized for high school and college texts. Cisneros labels the stories “lazy poems” (1987, 79). One Booklist critic wrote that her “loose and deliberately simple style,” mixing poetry with prose, at times “annoys” readers with its “cuteness.” Others, however, believe that her “apparent randomness” represents a skilled “exploration” of themes (Booklist 281). Carol Muske values Cisneros’s effortless slide from poetry to prose, writing that the movement proves “utterly spontaneous,” even “volatile, a rose-inthe-teeth passion refashioned to contemporary taste.” The novel won the Before Columbus American Book Award. According to Cisneros, My Wicked, Wicked Ways represents a liberating self-view. She credits Catholicism for the guilt she suffered when attempting to conceive of herself as a sexual being and has stated that through writing, she hoped to dismiss her haunting past. However, she eventually realized that she could write about her hardearned coexistence with her ghosts. She wanted to counter the tradition labeling strong women evil or insane, blaming religion for that negative perception. Woman Hollering Creek and Loose Woman represent her dismantling of gender stereotypes. Caramelo delighted critics with its use of magic realism and “Spanglish” to shape its narrator, Lana, who survives through an instinct for story. Her epiphany occurs outside a locked Catholic church, emphasizing a paradox of religion. While Cisneros rejects Catholicism’s ritual, her characters do express their spirituality through application of the imagination. Cisneros is a Chicana whose non-traditional style challenges readers to embrace that difference and to learn from it. She enjoys writing poetry and fiction, explaining that when words come easily, they appear as fiction, and when more difficult to form, they generally take the shape of poetry. SEE ALSO: Border Fictions (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Realism/ Magical Realism (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Aranda, P. E. R. (1990). On the Solitary Fate of Being Mexican, Female, Wicked and Thirty-Three: An Interview with Sandra Cisneros. Americas Review, 19(1), 65. Buckendorff, J. (2008). Father’s Death Opened New Insights for ‘‘Caramelo’’ Author Sandra Cisneros. Seattle Times. At http://community.seattletimes. nwsource.com, accessed June 3, 2008. Cisneros, S. (1980). Bad Boys. San Jose, CA: Mango. Cisneros, S. (1985). My Wicked, Wicked Ways. Bloomington, IN: Third Woman. Cisneros, S. (1987). Do You Know Me? I Wrote The House on Mango Street. Americas Review, 15(1), 71. Cisneros, S. (1988). The House on Mango Street. Houston: Arte Publico. Cisneros, S. (1990). Only Daughter. Glamour, pp. 256–8 (Nov.). Cisneros, S. (1991). Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. New York: Random House. Cisneros, S. (1994). Loose Woman. New York: Knopf. Cisneros, S. (2002). Caramelo. New York: Knopf. Ganz, R. (1994). Sandra Cisneros: Border Crossings and Beyond. MELUS, 19(1), 19–29. Muske, C. (1995). The House on Mango Street [book review]. Parnassus: Poetry in Review, 20, 409–23. Parks, M. (2004). Mango Street Was Path to Finding Herself, Hispanic Author Reveals. Arkansas Democrat Gazette, pp. 55ff. (April 18). Review of the House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros. Booklist (1984), p. 281 (Oct. 15). Reardon, P. T. (2002). Escape from the City. Chicago Tribune, sec. 5, pp. 1ff. (Oct. 22). Sandra Cisneros. At www.sandracisneros.com, accessed June 3, 2008.
The City in Fiction TYRONE SIMPSON
Challenging the romantic precept that only nature affords the tranquility hospitable to the artist’s muse, many writers of the past century have found an aesthetic resource in the built environment of the city. So different from the rural and agrarian spaces that gave it raw materials to process, and from the suburban tracts that would give its middle managers refuge, the twentieth-century city, and its dynamic impact on American character, demanded comprehension. By making the metropolis their central preoccu-
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pation, twentieth-century writers described the profound change that industrial modernity wrought upon city life, and the ways a renewed infrastructure gave birth to the agoraphobia that organizes postmodern urbanity. In limning the impact of either market regime, these artists captured the crisis of a new urban order: the extent to which city life enabled or frustrated a functional social order and facilitated the urban dweller’s belonging to or alienation from the American mainstream. Skeptical of urban modernity, the nineteenthcentury romantics desired to insulate themselves from the corruptive forces and money imperatives of capitalism. The bottom line, to them, seemed to contort irredeemably our sense of human value. Urban writers of the past century were not so quick to leave capital to its own devices. They chose instead to linger on its machinations and have their imaginations feed upon its effects. They found that the city was equipped with its own romantic raw materials. The majesty of an urban skyscraper, the picturesque of the boulevard and its imposing monuments, the frenetic throng of midtown, the blinding luminescence of an opera house marquis, the scattered refuse of a glutted back-alley garbage can, or the shocking spectacle of human desperation that the indigent brought to view – all have proven amenable to poetry and inspired prose. Art resided in the city. It only required a courageous and sensitive observer to bring it to awareness. Unsurprisingly, several journalists people the ranks of urban litterateurs: writers as diverse as Frank Norris, Ann Petry, Upton Sinclair, Michael Gold, and Colson Whitehead all scribbled at one time in their careers for the popular press. Other writers like Chester Himes and Hubert Selby, Jr. became notorious for their slumming, hopeful that ethnography would shore up their palpable talent for realism and its occasional absurdities. If a politic motivated such endeavors, it was not always a progressive one. Urban writers were fl^aneurs of the first order. They inhabited urban terrain like bourgeois ghosts, virtually unseen chroniclers of the human environment that they sought to sublimate in print. Most were prophets, like Whitehead, whose parable, The Intuitionist (1998), promises – in addition to technological progress – the arrival of a postracial future that will delay itself no longer. Others, writing much
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earlier in the century, presaged less cosmopolitan imaginings. The Wasteland (1922), T. S. Eliot’s city-phobic eulogizing of European supremacy in the wake of World War I, vilifies rather than celebrates the ethno-cultural intermingling facilitated by modern transportation and modernity’s unmoored social relations. The poem’s alternate title, “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” deployed a vaudevillian and minstrelized vernacular to speak more candidly to another impulse important to urban writing: to discipline in word and verse those people and places that resist authoritarian rule in real life. One prototype for urban literature of the twentieth century can be found in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), a tale that sets the template for creative urbanists like Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, both revered documentarians of Paris’s rise in the mid nineteenth century. Perched behind the window of a London coffee shop, the hero finds himself titillated by the orgy of activity before his eyes, not merely because it presents a stunning spectacle, but because the unharnessed humanity he views falls squarely within the bounds of his cognition. In a quasierotic experiment in knowledge and legibility, he breaks the crowd into types, and, in cataloguing the pickpockets, street peddlers, and clerks that ignite the city, produces a taxonomy that brings its myriad parts and participants under his psychic control. The protagonist becomes obsessed with understanding a man that defies his typology, and leaves the safety of the cafe to track him until his curiosity is satisfied or he is undone. The pursuit ends in a sector that “wore the worst impress of the most deplorable poverty,” and the exasperated narrator closes the tale with the epigrammatic concession that began it, posed ominously in German, “Es lasst sich nicht lesen” (“It does not permit itself to be read”). Before arriving at this despairing terminus, the protagonist experiences the crowd, the coffee shop, a bazaar, a gin-shop, an unlit alley, a ghetto, and all the unseemly urban types imaginable – the monied, the exploited, the impoverished, and the unwashed. Poe demonstrates that the organizing principle of the city is veneer – the tricks of clothing, cosmetics, concrete, glass, and light that hide the horrors that the built city is prone to produce. The twentieth century of literary urbanism began in earnest with the German immigrant
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Theodore Dreiser, who extended Poe’s project in Sister Carrie (1900), a novel about a young female na€ıf that tries her fate in the metropolitan spaces of Chicago and New York. Here, Dreiser demonstrates the organic affinity between urban writing and naturalist literary production. Predicated on the idea that multiple forces, irreducible to reason alone, govern man’s will, naturalism features human creatures who strive within the behemoth of the city only to stumble upon serendipity or misfortune. Dreiser attributes the once-genteel businessman Hurstwood’s fateful choice of theft to the undeniable truth that “[m]en are led by instinct before they are regulated by knowledge” (184). It is the failure of rationality at the moment of embezzlement that forces him to uproot himself from Chicago, the home of both his social and commercial networks and his illicit romantic liaison with Carrie, and move to the unfriendly environs of metropolitan New York, where Hurstwood finds himself bereft of his status, friendships, and financial well-being. Naturalism’s penchant for urban determinism warps human will decidedly: it moves Norris’s McTeague (McTeague, 1899) to kill his wife Trina over lottery money; it pressures Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas (Native Son, 1940) to kill the white debutante he befriends and chauffeurs around the city; it fails to keep a junkie, Nelson Algren’s Frankie Majcinek (Man With a Golden Arm, 1949), from the drugs that most certainly will kill him; it impels Petry’s heroine Lutie Johnson (The Street, 1946) to brain an unsuspecting suitor to death; and it leads Gloria Naylor’s Lorraine (The Woman of Brewster Place, 1980) to stray down the alleyway that will most certainly orchestrate her violent rape. Urbanists writing in non-naturalist modes in the first half of the century continued to explore “the walled city” so important to Dreiser. The city spawned petty prejudices that, in turn, begat ingroup and out-group politics. As spatial host to state and market, the city was the primary arena for forging (or undermining) citizenship and social belonging. Migrants of various ethno-racial strands were aware of this and sought cities to have their Americanness tested and judged. Artists portrayed the trial variously. Eliot’s The Wasteland seems to insist that what made the city “unreal” were the undesirability and thus certain failure of the multicultural experiment
that the urban enabled. This was the attitude of the Old New York characters that populated Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920) and the avowed xenophobes, like Tom Buchanan, who orchestrated the tragedy in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939) showed that the salubrious escape from the encroachment of non-Anglos that Los Angeles promised was as fantastical as the Hollywood plots the culture industry compulsively concocted. Writers depicting the plight of those who found their Americanness in question and subject to judgment complained in whatever accents they could. Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), for example, argued that the Northern cities that swelled following the Great Migration threatened to domesticate the raw humanity that defined and valorized the blackness of Southern blacks. Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1928) demonstrated that the Polish immigrant craved clean living and American whiteness at the regrettable expense of ethnic community, and Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money (1930) cast immigrant striving as a struggle that could only be ennobled by class activism. Possibly the most vivid contemplation of the city as site of confrontation and difference is Flannery O’Connor’s gothic short story, “The Artificial Nigger” (1955). In it, the Heads – a white grandfather and grandson – leave their idyllic town with the intent of tutoring the younger in the certain cultural blight that is the city. The stain of modernity is figured not only as urban but also quite explicitly as black. In addition to wandering into the Negro district and suffering a strange enchantment by a bosomy black woman, the Heads are mesmerized at the story’s denouement by a black lawn jockey that rests in the front yard of a lavish home in the white part of town. O’Connor’s tale seems to posit not only black commodification as the central practice of modernity, but also that contact with the other, particularly the mediated and artificial type, is certain. Indeed, from Eliot to O’Connor, urban literature suggests that the city’s social borders will be transgressed, regardless of the obstacles contrived to prevent it. The Negro figurine raises two other concerns germane to the century’s urban writing. First is the prominence of media and mass culture as formative influences on urban life. Fitzgerald
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THE CITY IN FICTION
and Wright are responsible for two of the most famous billboards of American fiction: that of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg and State Attorney Buckley. The former, conspicuous during the train ride from West Egg to New York, signals the novel’s preoccupation with the corruptive pursuit of profit. The latter, arrogantly situated in the Chicago Black Belt, broadcasts the colonial stranglehold the suburbs command over the ghetto and the intent to incarcerate those who dare challenge the present arrangement of racial power. As significant as billboards was the popular press. Wright, like his predecessor and fellow traveler John Dos Passos (in his U.S.A. trilogy, 1930–6), made newspaper copy central to the technique of insinuating the “official story” and its ideological nature into his depiction of the city. Toomer and Nella Larsen (Quicksand, 1928), like Eliot, felt that the minstrel was the preeminent mass artist of urban modernity. More often the butt than the brain of the joke, the minstrel signals in their texts the horror of what black character can become under market pressure. In a similar vein, musicianship is central to the urban imaginations of James Weldon Johnson (Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 1912) and Petry. Johnson’s New York City shows how sophisticated the allegedly “low” art of ragtime truly is. And for Petry, a black woman’s desire for a singing career remains the only protection against her certain ghetto ruin. Whether it was to communicate or entertain, the imagined city often came equipped with the means to keep its masses captivated and enthralled. Its mass culture kept the urban order intact by mediating human desire into the least volatile expressive channels possible. Urban writers were sensitive to the fact that the city’s capacity to enchant made it a site of artifice and dissemblance. Georg Simmel’s claim that in the city, “man is tempted to adopt the most tendentious peculiarities, that is, the specifically metropolitan extravagances of mannerism, caprice, and preciousness” attested to the city’s coziness with the “phony,” as soberly as Salinger’s Holden Caulfield would (Catcher in the Rye, 1965, 57). Others dramatized how urban masquerade broadened the possibilities for both individual self-fashioning and observer misconstruction. Dreiser makes clear that Carrie Meeber only experiences true comfort when she is Carrie Madenda, the stage alias that allows her to be
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everything but herself. Gold’s young hero Mikey fancies himself an immigrant Buffalo Bill, a persona that allows him to brave the treacherous terrain of ethnic warfare. Sandra Cisneros’s Esperanza (The House on Mango Street, 1984) and James Baldwin’s John Grimes (Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1953) both find their ego ideal in the femme fatale of film noir. Larsen, Yezierska, and Chester Himes (If He Hollers Let Him Go, 1945) demonstrate that the most viable public option for the ethnic heroine is to racially pass because being reified as an exotic is too excruciating to bear. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) is the consummate study in urban impostorship and subterfuge. The character Rinehart provides the eponymous hero with an object lesson in the multiple impersonations that the signifier of blackness affords: one could be pimp, preacher, or numbers runner without anyone discovering the charades. Rinehart’s example, when juxtaposed with the protagonist’s pirating of electricity from an underground hideout, insists that the city’s ethos of manufacture enables the camouflage of the self in both body and space. West’s Locust demonstrates how Los Angeles takes this ethos to a nightmarish extreme. The challenge for the protagonist Tod Hackett is to represent artistically an environment saturated by representation. As all the Angelenos are settlers from elsewhere, the culture of Los Angeles is an ersatz hybrid of imports. In the category of authenticity, people fare even worse. Like Hackett himself, they are struggling, if not failed, artists, maladroit thespians who cannot satisfy Hollywood’s demand for performance and fiction – in other words, people who do not represent well. West shows how frustrated desire multiplies in this environment of secondrate artifice, and culminates with a riot in the middle of the Hollywood streets – undeniable evidence of the American dream’s vacuity and its promise to disappoint deeply. Eliot’s unreal city comes alive in West’s tale, only to reveal itself to be as dead and deadening as the poet predicted. Changes in the metropolis’s mode of production and the advances in communication and transportation technology have accentuated certain concerns of the modernist city and continued to preoccupy urban writers in the postmodern period. Writers have tended to focus more on the abject spaces of the urban ethnic enclaves,
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like Naylor’s Brewster Place, that mid-century project of urban renewal amputated from the metropolitan center. This preoccupation is coupled with the profound anxiety over representation anticipated in West’s Los Angeles. The fax, the television, and the Internet, in addition to trains, planes, and automobiles, have hastened the mobility of people and culture. More so than in previous decades, the origins of things – like architectural styles – are unknown. Disorientation plagues an epoch in which mere hours separate breakfasting in Chicago and Dubai. With our sense of time and space so confounded, we are able solely to reckon with surfaces, appearances, and signs, if they sit still long enough for us to apprehend them. Epistemological doubt and uncertainty are inevitable. Junot Dıaz’s short story collection Drown (1996) meditates on the cognitive insecurity that comes with transplanting oneself from the Caribbean to an American city. While psychically trying to resolve two spaces – the one left and the one adopted – Diaz’s characters face the additional spatial challenge of determining whether they need to move again: from the marginal urban spaces that the US reserves for them to more comfortable sites of assimilation. The drugdealing hero learns from his former best friend and shoplifting accomplice, Beto, that the best thing to do is leave the neighborhood. What seems to forestall the protagonist’s flight is the vexing knowledge that his friend is gay and has enlisted him in clandestine homosexual activity before leaving for school. To follow him in ghetto departure, the tale suggests, is to risk an ethnic unmanning that the hero may not be willing to undergo. Like the other literary urbanists interested in the immigrant story – like Yezierska, Gold, Henry Roth, and Abraham Cahan early this century; and Paule Marshall, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Donald Barthelme, and Grace Paley in its latter stages – Dıaz shows that negotiation of the American city requires costly and sometimes painful identitarian change. John Edgar Wideman’s urbanism, in contrast, describes the disastrous results of those who are not able to abandon the cities that incarcerate them. Both Philadelphia Fire (1990) and Two Cities (1998) argue that the matter of representation specifically underwrites postmodern ghettoization. The stigmatization of the inner city as a
lawless, degenerate culture of violent music, broken families, and gang warfare defrocks ghetto denizens of the ability to gain the support of a hardhearted, more neoliberal American society. In the latter novel, the hero, Mr. Mallory, is a war veteran turned photographer who finds the camera to be a viable counter to the unflattering representations that provide a rationale for the enclave’s spatial banishment. Mallory takes to fl^anerie, traversing the cities of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia documenting black male trauma for the aesthetic appreciation of anyone who would care to view the photos and be moved by them. Anxieties about representation have inspired Ernesto Quin ~ onez (Bodega Dreams, 2000) and Chang-rae Lee (Native Speaker, 1995) to refashion the Gatsby assimilation myth to explore other ethnic struggles for urban belonging. In distinct contrast to the tale of Jay Gatz, however, both Quin ~ onez and Lee create characters that are not only metonyms for their ethnic communities, but also community builders who surreptitiously engage politics, finance, and real estate to shift power into the hands of the people for whom they strive. These writers thus imagine an ethnic response to the forces of urban globalism. In Native Speaker, the protagonist Henry Park works for a suburban-based spy agency, avowedly contracted by transnational corporations, that seeks to monitor ethnic insurgency all over the world. His particular target on this occasion is a Korean American politician named John Kwang, whose flawless and gallant Americanism poses not only an eerie prototype for Barack Obama but also the threat of fostering too much hope among the ethnic residents of Queens. The politician has secretly expanded the Korean ggeh (private banking system) to scores of non-white New Yorkers and by doing so has secured the electoral fealty of its participants. These private maneuvers are not to disrupt the impeccable image of Kwang as a media darling. Betraying the narrative’s preoccupation with mediation are the lengthy meditations on bilingualism throughout the story, as well as the detailed mappings Kwang’s machine conducts of the city in the interest of pristine photo opportunities for the savvy pol. The scene highlights the extent to which media are used to parcel the city into mobile and consumable parts, building a narrative of the metropolis from fragments of imagery
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COOVER, ROBERT
that the privileged premeditate. Poe’s frantically perambulatory protagonist, some 155 years later, has given way to a bigger brother, one whose surveillance practices and mechanically reproduced reports on the city require much less human vigilance. Wideman, Quinonez, Lee, and Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49, 1965) suggest that in urban writing of the twenty-first century, it is not merely telling the story of the city that will be of interest, but also what technological means will be deployed to do so. SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); SocialRealist Fiction (AF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (AF)
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Realism in Wideman’s Two Cities. In B. TuSmith & K. Byerman (eds.), Critical Essays on John Edgar Wideman. Nashville: University of Tennessee Press, pp. 221–39. Simpson, T. (2009). “The Love of Colour in Me”: Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers and the Space of White Racial Manufacture. MELUS, 34(3), 93–114. West, N. (1933). The Day of the Locust. In Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust. New York: New Directions. Wirth-Nesher, H. (2008). City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Coover, Robert PATRICK O’DONNELL
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bremmer, E. S. (2005). Unreal City and Dream Deferred: Psychogeographies of Modernism in T. S. Eliot and Langston Hughes. In L. Doyle & L. Winkiel (eds.), Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 206–25. Dıaz, J. (1996). Drown. New York: Riverhead. Dreiser, T. (2006). Sister Carrie. (ed. D. Pizer). New York: Norton. Eliot, T. S. (2003). The WasteLand and Other Poems (ed. F. Kermode). New York: Penguin. Highmore, B. (2005). Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lee, C.-R. (1995). Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead. Lehan, R. D. (1998). The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press. North, M. (1994). The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. O’Connor, F. (1955). The Artificial Nigger. In A Good Man is Hard to Find, and Other Stories. New York: Harcourt Brace pp. 96–125. Poe, E.A. (1969). The Man of The Crowd. In T. O. Mabbott (ed.), Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Vol. IV. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, pp. 134–45. Simmel, G. (1969). The Metropolis and Mental Life. In Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities (ed. R. S. Sennett), New York: Appleton, pp. 47–60. Simpson, T. (2006). “And the Arc of His Witness Explained Nothing”: Black Flanerie and Traumatic
A leading member of the group of “high postmodernists” of the 1970s and 1980s which includes John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, William H. Gass, and Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover has continued for over 40 years to write fictions that challenge the conventions of form and genre while serving as sharp critiques of social norms, religious piety, and political hegemony. Coover was born in Charles City, Iowa on February 4, 1932; raised in the Midwest, he received a BA in Slavic studies from Indiana University, served in the US Navy for several years, then studied for the MA in the humanities from the University of Chicago. Coover has held a number of teaching positions at Bard College, the University of Iowa, and Princeton; since 1980, he has taught in the distinguished creative writing program at Brown University, and is the recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment of the Arts. His first novel, The Origin of the Brunists (1966), features a small-town prophet and a religious cult; it won the prestigious William Faulkner Foundation Award for the best first novel. Since then, Coover has published over 20 novels and novellas, and has been a strong advocate for experimental writing and hypertext fiction. In a succession of novels and stories following his first, Coover established himself as a writer whose comedic and critical gifts are unparalleled
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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among contemporary writers in the service of social satire. The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1967) is the story of a man who invents an imaginary baseball league and simulates the creation of a world in determining the fate of its inhabitants. Decades in advance of popular computer simulation games, Coover’s novel is a satiric parable of the powers and failures of a god. Pricksongs & Descants (1969) remains, perhaps, Coover’s most widely read work; as its title indicates, it is a collection of twisted, dark, and erotic fairy tales and fables that includes a contemporary version of “Hansel and Gretel,” a story that plays upon erotic stereotypes of baby sitters, and a hilarious, phallic version of The Tempest in “The Magic Poker.” The Public Burning (1977) is Coover’s most avowedly political novel: it portrays the antics of “Tricky Dick” Nixon during the Cold War 1950s and the events surrounding the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg spy trails and execution, and it embodies a barbed attack on US political institutions, nationalism, and global ambitions. In Gerald’s Party (1986), Coover turns to a smaller stage in the narrative of a house party gone terribly wrong as dead bodies are discovered and erotic chaos takes place. The pun on “death” in the title of Pricksongs & Descants indicates one of Coover’s key interests which finds its most extensive articulation in Gerald’s Party: the relation between mortality, the body, and the erotic. A Night at the Movies: or, You Must Remember This (1987) is one of Coover’s most vibrant fictions; it is a collection of stories and scenarios organized according to the kind of multigenre billings to be found at an old-fashioned cinema and offers a send-up of movie stereotypes as well as deconstructing, as Coover does throughout his work, the permeable boundary between reality and fantasy. The title of Pinocchio in Venice (1991) reveals yet again Coover’s interest in the fractured fairy tale; in this version, the human Pinocchio is an aging scholar who returns to his Venetian birthplace as he is slowly becoming wooden again – a reversal that allows Coover the opportunity to mediate on death and the illusion of living happily ever after. A fairy tale – Sleeping Beauty – is the pretext for a novella on misfortunes and reversals of desire in Briar Rose (1996a). In John’s Wife (1996b), Coover turns toward contemporary suburbia in a novel about the
paradoxes of domesticity and worldly ambition. Ghost Town (1998) is a mock western full of derailed stereotypes and mutable eccentrics, and is one of the purest examples of the parody of genre in Coover’s opus. Coover’s recent novels include The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Director’s Cut (2002), which parodies pornographic movies in its “reels” featuring a male porn star acting in nine films directed by women; and A Child Again (2005), a collection of 18 stories that offer comic and absurdist variations on legends, folk tales, and fairy tales. Coover’s inventiveness and narrative energy have operated at a high level throughout his career; his zest for experimenting with traditional narrative forms is unceasing and always serves as a provocation to the reader to reconsider cultural assumptions and values. SEE ALSO: Barth, John (AF); Barthelme, Donald (AF); Gass, William H. (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Pynchon, Thomas (AF); Realism/ Magical Realism (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGSTED READINGS Anderson, R. (1981). Robert Coover. New York: G. K. Hall. Coover, R. (1966). The Origin of the Brunists. New York: Viking. Coover, R. (1967). The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. New York: Random House. Coover, R. (1969). Pricksongs & Descants. New York: E. P. Dutton. Coover, R. (1977). The Public Burning. New York: Viking. Coover, R. (1980). A Political Fable. New York: Viking. Coover, R. (1982). Spanking the Maid. New York: Grove Press. Coover, R. (1983). In Bed One Night and Other Brief Encounters. Providence, RI: Burning Deck. Coover, R. (1986). Gerald’s Party. New York: Linden. Coover, R. (1987). A Night at the Movies: or, You Must Remember This. New York: Simon and Schuster. Coover, R. (1991). Pinocchio in Venice. New York: Simon and Schuster. Coover, R. (1996a). Briar Rose. New York: Grove. Coover, R. (1996b). John’s Wife. New York: Simon and Schuster. Coover, R. (1998). Ghost Town. New York: Henry Holt.
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COOVER, ROBERT
Coover, R. (2002). The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Director’s Cut. New York: Grove. Coover, R. (2004). Stepmother. San Francisco: McSweeney’s. Coover, R. (2005). A Child Again. San Francisco: McSweeney’s.
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Cope, J. I. (1986). Robert Coover’s Fictions. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Evenson, B. (2003). Understanding Robert Coover. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Gordon, L. G. (1983). Robert Coover: The Universal Fictionmaking Process. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
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D Dahlberg, Edward BILL SOLOMON
Though his status remains that of a minor figure in the history of American letters, Edward Dahlberg’s fictional practice and critical ideas inspired several prominent writers in the periods before and after World War II. He began his career in the Depression era as an autobiographical novelist, and was classified somewhat inaccurately at this time as a participant in the left-wing movement known as proletarian literature. By the early 1940s, he had started to devote his energies exclusively to criticism, ultimately producing a fascinatingly idiosyncratic though infrequently read body of critical work. Toward the end of his career, having returned to narrative prose, he received considerable praise for a highly stylized memoir of his youthful experiences. Born in Boston in 1900, Dahlberg had a tumultuous early life, accompanying his struggling mother (who deposited him in the Jewish Orphan Asylum in Cleveland for a year) as she moved from Kansas City to New York in search of a financially stable existence. These events supplied the subject matter for his two finest novels, Bottom Dogs (1930) and From Flushing to Calvary (1932), the publication of which earned him a reputation as one of the most promising young writers to come of age after the collapse of the stock market. However, his lack of commercial success led him shortly thereafter to refashion himself as an outrageously scathing, eccentric artist of critical prose, a transformation first marked in 1941 by the publication of Can These Bones Live. The most
highly regarded of his later work in this critical mode was The Sorrows of Priapus (1957). Upon the appearance of Because I Was Flesh (1964), the work generally regarded as his masterpiece, his career had come full circle. The adventures of Lorry Lewis, Dahlberg’s fictional alter ego, provided a template for an emergent set of writers determined to record the specificity of everyday life within socially marginal communities, and from the point of view of those marginalized. (In his preface to Bottom Dogs, D. H. Lawrence praised the young writer’s skillful and thorough rendering of the character’s degraded consciousness.) At the level of content and formal technique, Bottom Dogs influenced, among others, James T. Farrell, Nelson Algren, Henry Miller, and Richard Wright, and it was subsequently considered by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (who later reissued it under the City Lights imprint) to be a direct precursor of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The importance of Dahlberg’s greatly underappreciated From Flushing to Calvary derives in part from its effort to extend the aesthetic legacy of modernist experimentation; but Dahlberg’s second novel is equally distinguished as a comic, yet sympathetic, portrait of the artist’s mother, and it is on this basis that Allen Ginsberg recognized its affinity with his own “Kaddish” (1961). Dahlberg’s rather unsuccessful third and final fiction, For Those Who Perish (1934) – composed during the brief period of time that he aligned himself politically with the Communist Party – is remembered primarily as the first American novel to draw attention to the rising threat of fascism in this country.
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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DANTICAT, EDWIDGE
Published in 1929, Dahlberg’s first piece of literary criticism, “Ariel in Caliban,” is notable as a provocative attempt to formulate a machine aesthetic. However, if at the onset of his career Dahlberg argued in support of a literature attuned to urban–industrial modernity, from the 1940s on he devoted his energies to denouncing mechanization and city life, alongside mass culture, as the conditions of collective degradation. Do These Bones Live (1960 [1941]) was the first in a series of critical performances in which he adopted the stance of a lonely, outraged prophet in the wilderness, railing against humankind’s ongoing alienation from nature and engagement in “impure,” because non-procreative, acts of sexuality. Can These Bones Live is additionally significant as a decidedly non-academic reappraisal of nineteenth-century American literature. Published in the same year as F. O. Matthiessen’s canonical account of the period (American Renaissance; 1941), Dahlberg’s study is unique in that it abandons all claims to scholarly objectivity, exhibiting instead a profound emotional investment in those artists he perceived to be neglected and abused. Dahlberg’s most passionate identification was with Herman Melville, an interest he shared with Charles Olson, whom Dahlberg had met and befriended in the late 1930s. In fact, Olson not only dedicated Call Me Ishmael (1947) to Dahlberg but also, in “Projective Verse” (1950), parenthetically attributed a crucial component of his new poetic credo to his former mentor. It was as a result of Dahlberg’s relentless instructions that Olson discovered, as he later put it, how to make one perception lead directly to another. And when Dahlberg was in the process of leaving Black Mountain College, where he had briefly secured a teaching appointment in 1948, he managed to convince Olson to serve as his replacement. In 1964, Because I Was Flesh garnered Dahlberg considerable attention. Though a return to the subject matter of his first two novels, he now recalled the events of his youth with inimitable linguistic virtuosity and dazzling erudition. The triumph was, however, short-lived, and by the time of his death 13 years later his work was again known only to a select few. The general ignorance of his achievement persists unabated today. SEE ALSO: Algren, Nelson (AF); The City in Fiction (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF);
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Farrell, James T. (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); Wright, Richard (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Billings, H. (ed.) (1968). Edward Dahlberg: American Ishmael of Letters. Austin, TX: Roger Beacham. Dahlberg, E. (1930). Bottom Dogs. New York: Simon and Schuster. Dahlberg, E. (1932). From Flushing to Calvary. New York: Harcourt Brace. Dahlberg, E. (1934). Those Who Perish. New York: John Day. Dahlberg, E. (1956). The Sorrows of Priapus. New York: New Directions. Dahlberg, E. (1960). Can These Bones Live (originally published as Do These Bones Live, 1941). New York: New Directions. Dahlberg, E. (1964). Because I Was Flesh: The Autobiography of Edward Dahlberg. New York: New Directions. Dahlberg, E. (1989). Samuel Beckett’s Wake and Other Uncollected Prose. Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive. DeFanti, C. (1978). The Wages of Expectation: A Biography of Edward Dahlberg. New York: New York University Press. Matthiessen, F. O. (1941). American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford University Press. Solomon, W. (2002). Literature, Amusement, and Technology in the Great Depression. New York: Cambridge University Press. Williams, J. (ed.) (1970). Edward Dahlberg: A Tribute. New York: Northwestern University Press.
Danticat, Edwidge HELLEN LEE-KELLER
Edwidge Danticat has earned critical acclaim writing about the Haitian diaspora in the United States. By focusing on intimate stories of the lives of poor and working-class families, Danticat calls attention to the profound impact that international political events have on individual lives. Since publishing her first book in 1994 at 25 years old, she has added three novels, one collection of short stories, two children’s books, and two nonfiction works. In addition to editing two volumes of collected stories, she has had her short stories
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DANTICAT, EDWIDGE
published in numerous magazines and anthologies. She has co-produced one documentary and acted in two films. Edwidge Dantica was born in 1969 to Andre and Rose Dantica in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Hoping to secure economic stability and physical safety in the United States, her parents fled during President Fran¸cois “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s regime (1957–71). Upon arrival, a clerical error changed the family name to Danticat. Because of strict immigration policies regarding Haitians, Danticat and her brother were unable to join their parents and two US-born siblings for 10 years. Danticat graduated from Barnard College in 1990, majoring in French literature, and earned an MFA at Brown University in 1993. A native French and Haitian Creole speaker, Danticat began writing in her adopted language, English. While her first influences in Haitian schools were largely French writers, such as Victor Hugo, once Danticat arrived in the US, she found inspiration from writers such as Paule Marshall and Maya Angelou. At 18 years old, she published an essay, which would later become the basis for her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994). Her second book, Krik? Krak!, a collection of short stories, and her next two novels, The Farming of Bones (1998) and The Dew Breaker (2004), firmly established Danticat as a versatile writer, with command over a variety of genres and styles and with an ability to portray a variety of perspectives. Danticat intricately crafts stories of private individuals embedded in the complex historical, political, and economic connections between the US and Haiti. Her poignant narratives move between the past and present. They frequently employ flashbacks to situate the main storyline in a broader history and across national boundaries by incorporating the Haitian Creole, Spanish, French, and English languages. These stylistic devices work together to highlight the personal aspects of larger social issues, such as immigration and exile to the US, the violent physical and sexual repercussions of corrupt Haitian politics, the struggle for survival that working-class rural men and women face in Haiti, and the endurance of emotional bonds in transnational families. Themes of hope and despair figure prominently in Danticat’s literary corpus. On one hand, her writings celebrate the strength of family ties, the
close bonds among women, and an optimism for Haiti and Haitian people. They are frequently set, on the other hand, against a background of the physical and mental toll of sugar-cane farming, the emotional distance and strain on families resulting from emigration and exile, the lingering traumas of physical and sexual violence, and the economic despair individuals encounter because of political corruption. For instance, in The Farming of Bones, Danticat sets a love story between two Haitian exiles living in the Dominican Republic amidst deadly anti-Haitian violence peaking in 1937. Another example occurs in The Dew Breakers (2004), in which Danticat places a former tonton macoute, or member of Duvalier’s brutal paramilitary police force, at the center of the story about a young woman coming to terms with her family’s secret past. Danticat’s sharp critique of political abuses are not only reserved for Haiti, but also directed at her adopted country. The memoir Brother, I’m Dying is largely an account of her uncle’s untimely death while being held by immigration officials in Florida; it thus belies the promise of the US as a land of freedom and safety. Danticat was named a MacArthur Foundation fellow in 2009. She won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2007 for her autobiography Brother, I’m Dying; an American Book Award in 1999 for The Farming of Bones; a Story Prize in 2004 for The Dew Breaker; a Lila Wallace–Readers Digest Foundation Grant in 1996; and a Pushcart Short Story Prize in 1995. She has been nominated for several distinguished literary awards: a National Book Award for Brother, I’m Dying in 2007 and for Krik? Krak! in 1995, as well as a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2004 and a PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2005 for The Dew Breaker. Danticat resides on the edge of the Little Haiti section of Miami with her spouse and daughter. SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Marshall, Paule (AF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Chancey, M. J. A. (1997). Lepousa Fe Viv: Female Identity and the Politics of Textual Sexuality in Nadine Magloire’s Le Mal de Vivre and Edwidge
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DAVENPORT, GUY
Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory. In Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp 104–33. Danticat, E. (1994). Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: SoHo Press. Danticat, E. (1995). Krik? Krak! New York: SoHo Press. Danticat, E. (1998). The Farming of Bones. New York: SoHo Press. Danticat, E. (guest ed.) (2000). The Beacon Best of 2000: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures. Boston: Beacon. Danticat, E. (ed.) (2001). The Butterfly’s Way: Voices From the Haitian Diaspora in the United States. New York: SoHo Press. Danticat, E. (2002a). After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti. New York: Crown Journeys. Danticat, E. (2002b). Behind the Mountains. New York: Orchard. Danticat, E. (2004). The Dew Breaker. New York: Knopf. Danticat, E. (2005). Anaconda, Golden Flower. New York: Scholastic. Danticat, E. (2007). Brother, I’m Dying. New York: Knopf. Davis, R. G. (2001). Oral Narrative as Short Story Cycle: Forging Community in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak! MELUS, 26(2), 65–81. Francis, D. A. (2004). “Silences Too Horrific to Disturb”: Writing Sexual Histories in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory. Research in African Literatures, 35(2), 75–90. Lyons, B. (2003). An Interview With Edwidge Danticat. Contemporary Literature, 44(2), 183–98. Mardorossian, C. M. (2005). Reclaiming Difference: Caribbean Women Rewrite Postcolonialism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Renda, M. A. (2001). Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Davenport, Guy ANDRE FURLANI
By the time he started publishing fiction in the late 1960s, Guy Davenport (1927–2005) had already made a career as a scholar, translator, and editor of modern and classical literature. As a typesetter he had produced the first edition of Ezra Pound’s Canto 110 and illustrated several books and periodicals. It was by assimilating this versatility to fiction that Davenport pioneered a hybrid form
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eluding classification. A typical story, laid out as a collage, combines realist and documentary narrative with scholarship, visual imagery, captions, and decontextualized citation. It is the collage method of Ezra Pound’s The Cantos transposed to fiction, and it yielded eight volumes of fiction, including some of the finest and most original of postwar American stories. Davenport entitled his second collection of essays Every Force Evolves a Form (1987a), and this Shaker maxim became a credo. He assumed that a new subject entails a new form, and hence he essayed many, including the travelogue (e.g., “The Antiquities of Elis”), memoir (“Ithaka”), journal (“The Death of Picasso”), letter (“The Chair”), postcard (“Belinda’s World Tour”), dramatic monologue (“A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg”), adventure tale (“Robot”), propaganda piece (“Bronze Leaves and Red”), eclogue (“On Some Lines of Virgil”), decasyllabic mime (“We Often Think of Lenin in the Clothespin Factory”), biblical legend (“Jonah”), and utopian romance (“The Jules Verne Steam Balloon”). Davenport’s facility was such that he could treat a subject in a variety of forms. A touchstone in several essays, the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus is the subject of an eponymous story (in Tatlin! [1974]) and a painting, while his extant fragments are translated in Herakleitos and Diogenes (1979). Franz Kafka is the subject of one of his finest essays (“The Hunter Gracchus”), a portrait (reproduced in Reece’s A Balance of Quinces), and four stories, including the first he published, “The Aeroplanes at Brescia.” His fiction – “assemblages of fact and necessary fiction,” he called his first collection, Tatlin! – abounds in the recombination and conjunction of recovered texts and artifacts: “The Trees at Lystra” from Acts of the Apostles, “The Lavender Fields of Apta Julia” from a Bernard Fau¸con photograph, “Mesoroposthonippidon” from Diogenes Laertes’ account of Diogenes, and “The Concord Sonata” from Henry Thoreau’s journals. “Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier” incorporates pen-and-ink collages, apian lore, Dogon tribal cosmology, Charles Fourier’s utopian projections, and firsts: the Wright Brothers’ first flight, Jacques-Henri Lartigue’s first camera, and Gertrude Stein’s first car. Like his later “The Bowmen of Shu,” it is an elegy for the modern renaissance that, for Davenport, perished in World War I.
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Although he was a native of Anderson, South Carolina living in Lexington, Kentucky, the Southern setting of these last two stories is an exception. After graduating in English and classics from Duke University in 1948 and leaving to study at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, he ceased writing fiction about the South, which he had been publishing in the Duke Archive. And when he returned for good in 1966 to teach English literature at the University of Kentucky, it did not revive that impulse. Davenport resisted autobiography and self-disclosure, assailing expressivist theories of creativity and insisting on textual autonomy. What he trawls for in his classical and modern European locales is the archaic. To write about Pound’s support of fascism, he tells a story largely about a persecuted Roman stoic (“C. Musonius Rufus”); to write a eulogy to the poet Lorine Niedecker, he adapts a Bronze Age lyric by Alcman. To write about the Vietnam War, this member of the Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg retells, from Plutarch, a Roman infantryman’s anecdote of the Etruscan campaign (“The Juno of the Veii”). Davenport celebrates the archaic as an exemplary unity of intellectual, creative, and sexual drives. Both the Neolithic painters and the French teenagers who discover their murals in the caves of Lascaux are, in “Robot,” enlightened primitives – that is, primitive to the very distinction between mind and body. The characters in Davenport’s erotic idylls are portrayed as intellectually enhanced by their sexual liberality. Davenport grants a primary place to erotic curiosity, free of prurience or taboo, and thereby affirms an ideal of reciprocating human freedom. The pastoral is a zone of such freedom, and Davenport rescues it from both reactionary nostalgia and postmodern irony. In “Concert Champ^etre in D Minor,” bright teens initiate an uncouth reprobate into their intellectual and erotic sodality, and redeem him. In “The Bicycle Rider” a similar attempt fails, because of the effects of 1960s drug culture. In “The Death of Picasso” a Dutch philosopher and his recidivist ward share a rugged island retreat, where the youth has as much to teach as the professor. The recipient of an award for fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a PEN Translation Prize for 7 Greeks
(1980), as well as a MacArthur Fellowship, Davenport also wrote a book on the still life and a monograph on Balthus, translated the sayings of the ancient Egyptians and those of Diogenes and (with Benjamin Urrutia) Jesus, edited two volumes of O. Henry’s fiction, published an exegesis of The Cantos, and contributed the “New Books” column to Harper’s. His selected verse and translations appeared as Thasos and Ohio. Two collections of correspondence (with the publisher-poets James Laughlin and Jonathan Williams) show the same combination of verbal and visual originality, deep erudition, and high spirits. SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Stein, Gertrude (AF) REFERENCES AND SELECTED READINGS Bawer, B. (1984). Guy Davenport: Fiction a la Fourier. New Criterion, 3(4), 8–14. Davenport, G. (1974). Tatlin! Six Stories. New York: Scribner’s. Davenport, G. (1979). Da Vinci’s Bicycle: Ten Stories. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Davenport, G. (1981a). Ecologues: Eight Stories. San Francisco: North Point. Davenport, G. (1981b). The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays. San Francisco: North Point. Davenport, G. (1984). Apples and Pears and Other Stories. San Francisco: North Point. Davenport, G. (1987a). Every Force Evolves a Form. San Francisco: North Point. Davenport, G. (1987b). The Jules Verne Steam Balloon: Nine Stories. San Francisco: North Point. Davenport, G. (1989). The Balthus Notebook. New York: Ecco. Davenport, G. (1993). A Table of Green Fields: Ten Stories. New York: New Directions. Davenport, G. (1996). The Cardiff Team: Ten Stories. New York: New Directions. Furlani, A. (2007). Guy Davenport: Postmodern and After. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Hoepffner, B. (1995). Guy Davenport: L’Utopie Localisee. Paris: Editions Belin. Reece, E. A. (1996). A Balance of Quinces: The Paintings and Drawings of Guy Davenport. New York: New Directions. Sullivan, J. J. (2002). Guy Davenport: The Art of Fiction CLXXIV. Paris Review, 163, 42–87.
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
DELANY, SAMUEL R.
Delany, Samuel R. JOSH LUKIN
Samuel R. Delany is a radical gay black New York critic and novelist who has written, famously and influentially, on the role of race, sexual orientation, New York City, and semiotics in his life and in US society. Styling himself a Marxist but deeply influenced by Michel Foucault and deconstruction, he has brought a poststructuralist and classconscious sensibility to works of science fiction and fantasy. Outside of those genres, he has published three volumes of pornography, four of memoir, three of literary fiction, and eight of criticism. Delany was born on April 1, 1942 and lived as a professional writer from the mid-1960s until 1988; since then, he has earned his living as a university professor. Delany chose early on to focus his energies on writing science fiction because mainstream publishers thought his brands of narrative experimentation would be unacceptable and alienating to an early 1960s reading public; he published his first science fiction novel at the age of 20. He began to receive substantial attention in 1967, when his interstellar adventure Babel-17 earned him the first of his four Nebula Awards from the Science Fiction Writers of America. The novel’s plot addresses the extent to which language determines human beings’ interpretation of, and conduct in, the world. The year 1967 also saw the composition of Delany’s ninth novel, Nova, which would be published successfully a year later; in the interval, however, a prominent science fiction editor refused to serialize it, explaining that readers were not ready for a story about a black starship captain. In 1968, overflowing with rage over the sexual politics of pre-Stonewall America, Delany wrote Hogg, a pornographic novel about a young boy’s submissive relationship with a professional rapist; over 25 years later, it was finally published to some acclaim (1995 [1968]). Sexual libertarianism, racism, and class antagonism all collide in Delany’s 1975 novel Dhalgren, an 800-page work that sold over a million copies in its first 16 years in print. Set in an unnamed US city that has been mysteriously abandoned by the forces of government to the forces of nature, its population decimated, and its people assembling into impromptu gangs for mutual aid, Dhalgren
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is in part a science-fictional depiction of American cities that had been gutted by economic decline; hence its characters are mostly bohemian squatters and members of the urban underclass rather than the galactic superheroes and futuristic bureaucrats who populate much science fiction. But Delany was not trying to challenge old conventions of science fiction from outside the genre; he sees his work as having been in dialogue with the works of his science fiction contemporaries, Thomas Disch, Joanna Russ, and Ursula Le Guin. Delany’s focus on marginal characters who do not aspire to be mainstream produces work at odds with the postmodern tradition of paranoia in US novels: a character such as Gorgik the Liberator in the Return to Never€yon tetralogy (1979–87) does not start out believing in a just, comforting, and meritocratic world; perceive that he is excluded from it; and conclude that the rules of success are being withheld from him by a conspiracy. Instead, he understands that learning the rules in whatever social stratum he finds himself is the most urgent of tasks, but approaches that task as a practical matter of his own survival, rather than evidence that someone is denying him his due. This open-minded autodidacticism is the only mode in which he can survive: the conviction of entitlement that goes with assuming one’s middleclass status to be “natural” or “deserved” shows up in Delany’s novels as a most destructive psychopathology. His 1976 novel Trouble on Triton shows how a narcissistic angry white man such as are dominant in the present-day world would fare in a society more equitable than our own. Delany’s post-1990 fiction explicitly contests the irrational social taboos, mental categorizations, and emotional barriers that block productive interclass contact and mutual respect in society. The Mad Man, a long novel that details the promiscuous intellectual and sexual lives of a young gay black scholar in 1980s New York, dramatizes the potential for community and compassion that could accompany the demystification of sex and other bodily realities. Atlantis: Three Tales begins with a rich lyrical novella, “Atlantis: Model 1924,” that builds up to a fantasized meeting between a black adolescent, based closely on Delany’s father, and the poet Hart Crane on the Brooklyn Bridge; the subsequent tales address issues of aesthetics, sex, and
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morality in fictionalized accounts of Delany’s own experiences. 2007’s Dark Reflections (2007) tells the story of an elderly gay black poet whose times and temperament collided so as to deprive him of fulfilling human contact, sexual or otherwise, for most of his life. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Le Guin, Ursula (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Queer Modernism (AF); Russ, Joanna (AF); Speculative Fiction (AF)
Govan, S. Y. (1984). The Insistent Presence of Black Folk in the Novels of Samuel R. Delany. Black American Literature Forum, 18(2), 43–8. Jackson, E., Jr. (1995). Strategies of Deviance: Studies in Gay Male Representation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sallis, J. (ed.) (1996). Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Tucker, J. A. (2004). A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
DeLillo, Don
Broderick, D. (1994). Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction. New York: Routledge. Delany, S. (1966). Babel-17. New York: Ace. Delany, S. (1968). Nova. New York: Ace. Delany, S. (1975). Dhalgren. New York: Bantam. Delany, S. (1976). Trouble on Triton. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Delany, S. (1978). Tales of Never€yon. New York: Bantam. Delany, S. (1982). Neveryona, or: The Tale of Signs and Cities. New York: Bantam. Delany, S. (1984). Stars in My Pocket, Like Grains of Sand. New York: Bantam. Delany, S. (1985). Flight from Never€y on. New York: Bantam. Delany, S. (1987). Return to Never€yon. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Delany, S. (1994). The Bridge of Lost Desire [reprint of Return to Never€yon]. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Delany, S. (1995). Atlantis: Three Tales. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Delany, S. (1995). Hogg [1968]. Normal, IL: FC2. Delany, S. (1996). Triton [reprint of Trouble on Triton]. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Delany, S. (2002). The Mad Man [1996]. Rutherford, NJ: Voyant. Delany, S. (2003). Aye, and Gomorrah: and Other Stories. New York: Vintage. Delany, S. (2007). Dark Reflections. New York: Carroll & Graf. Fox, R. E. (1987). Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany. New York: Greenwood. Freedman, C. (2006). About Delany Writing: An Anatomical Meditation. Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 47(1), 6–29.
JOHN N. DUVALL
Don DeLillo is one of the most significant contemporary American novelists. Depicting an age of media and advertising saturation in which politics have been reduced to sound bites and images, his fiction has often felt eerily prescient about contemporary crises. Published in 1985 just after the environmental disaster in Bhopal, India, White Noise seemed to many like an uncanny commentary on the event. Since Players (1977), which imagines a plot to blow up the New York Stock Exchange, DeLillo’s fiction repeatedly has explored the possibilities of terrorism on American soil, so much so that his fiction almost seems to have foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks on the United States. But to see DeLillo merely as a kind of contemporary Nostradamus is to miss what is central to his work. His most important fiction invites the reader to think historically. DeLillo may write about American postmodernity, but in his belief that the novel may help the engaged reader to think historically there remains a decidedly high modernist belief in the power of art to create a critical purchase on the present. This modernist undercurrent to DeLillo’s postmodernism is not surprising given his admiration for William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and especially James Joyce. The son of an Italian immigrant, DeLillo was born in a working-class, Italian American, North Bronx neighborhood of New York City in 1936. Although a lapsed Catholic, DeLillo acknowledges that his religious upbringing has prompted his interest in the eschatological. DeLillo writes with a sense of the mystery of life and often seems
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DELILLO, DON
to seek the possibility of a sustaining communion, however secular or provisional that communion may be. After attending Fordham University and earning a BA in communication arts in 1958, he took a position with a Madison Avenue advertising agency, where he worked until 1964. DeLillo’s understanding of the imbricated nature of capital and advertising, therefore, comes from firsthand experience. Working as a freelance writer, DeLillo began drafting his first novel, Americana, in 1966, though it would not be published until 1971. Here, a young television executive, David Bell, leaves his job for the road in order to find himself. End Zone (1972), his second novel, is allegorical: college football players at a school in Texas embody various philosophical positions that explore resonances between the language of football and nuclear warfare. In Great Jones Street (1973), DeLillo examines a media hungry for celebrity content. When rock star Bucky Wonderlick leaves his band mid-tour, his star status only grows. DeLillo’s most ambitious early novel is Ratner’s Star (1976). It focuses on the 14-year-old mathematical genius, Billy Twillig, who joins Nobel Prize-winning scientists in an underground desert think tank. Encompassing the history of mathematics, the novel ultimately has Billy discover that humanity is not constantly evolving but moving in cycles with periods of devolving. Satiric and full of paranoid conspiracies, DeLillo’s fiction from the 1970s is largely apprentice work. At their best these novels play with the conventions of genre, particularly the thriller as a vehicle for social commentary. However, had DeLillo stopped writing at this point, we would remember him today as an imitator of Thomas Pynchon. In 1979, DeLillo was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and spent the next three years in Greece. This time abroad seems to have fundamentally broadened his perspective, and he became a more worldly writer. Since then, satire has become a progressively more muted note in his fiction, as his prose grows more deliberate and crafted. Of his 14 novels, six were published in the 1970s, while eight have appeared between 1982 and 2007. His first novel after his time abroad is the underappreciated The Names (1982), a kind of The Sun Also Rises for the post-Vietnam generation. Set in Greece, the novel explores an expatriate community of British and American
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corporate workers. Although the main character, James Axton, stumbles onto an ancient death cult and ultimately finds he has been an unwitting agent of the CIA, The Names is about language and the possibility of meaning. Despite the leap in power and sophistication of The Names, DeLillo’s major breakthrough came with the publication of White Noise in 1985. This comic novel blends several genres – the academic novel, the domestic novel, and the environmental disaster narrative – to satirize American consumer culture and identify its latent fascist impulses. The main character, Jack Gladney, is chair of the Department of Hitler Studies at an expensive liberal arts college. When a chemical spill forces the evacuation of the college town of Blacksmith, Jack’s direct exposure to the toxic cloud turns his fear of death into an obsession. The absurdity of Jack’s world is a function of the extent to which simulacra and simulation dominate almost every aspect of the characters’ lives. DeLillo’s depiction of American postmodernity embodies the notion of French sociologist Jean Baudrillard that models of reality no longer represent the world but rather constitute it. This is nowhere clearer than with the emergency preparedness organization known as SIMUVAC, which models responses by staging disasters; however, when the actual disaster occurs, SIMUVAC uses the occasion to rehearse their simulation. Jack himself is a kind of simulation, the worldfamous scholar of Hitler who neither reads nor speaks German. His status as simulacrum helps mark White Noise as the historical novel manque. Because his area of expertise is Nazi aesthetics, Jack misses the horror of Hitler and the Holocaust and repeatedly fails to make connections between the American present and the Nazi past. Of DeLillo’s subsequent novels, the only one that has such a satiric edge is Cosmopolis (2003), which follows billionaire financial expert Eric Packer in his self-indulgent, self-destructive limousine ride across Manhattan for a haircut. Libra (1988) marks DeLillo’s turn to history proper. The novel’s chapters alternate between a chronologically ordered biography of Lee Oswald and a conspiracy among rogue CIA agents to stage a simulated assassination of President Kennedy that, as more people become involved, morphs into the actual assassination in Dallas, Texas. The
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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timelines of the two plots converge in the moment that Kennedy is killed. As a metafictional umbrella over these two narratives is the CIA analyst, Nicholas Branch, whose role doubles DeLillo’s, since the character is charged with the impossible task of writing a definitive account of the assassination that would both supplement and supplant the Warren Commission Report. Mao II (1991) also has a metafictional element in its treatment of terrorism. Its central character, the reclusive novelist Bill Gray, worries that the terrorist now fills a role that the novelist once played, namely, the ability to reshape mass consciousness. Unquestionably, DeLillo’s masterwork is Underworld (1997), his sprawling 728-page history of the Cold War. The prologue particularly is a tour de force that unpacks a massive historical irony: if October 3, 1951, is remembered in America, it is for Bobby Thomson’s ninth-inning, three-run homerun that gave the Giants the National League pennant rather than for the day’s importance to the Cold War. On this same day, the Soviet Union exploded its second nuclear device, which confirmed for US intelligence Russia’s nuclear capability. Seen from three points of view – an African American teenager, Russ Hodges (radio announcer for the Giants), and a group consisting of Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, Toots Shore, and J. Edgar Hoover – the post-game celebration figures the possibility of nuclear apocalypse. From this day, DeLillo traces a 40-year history of the ownership of the ball Thomson hit and the social and environmental costs of America’s dubious victory in the Cold War. Throughout, DeLillo imagines the responses of various outsider artists to the threat of a secular apocalypse, from Russian filmmaker Serge Eisenstein and underground comic Lenny Bruce to a subway graffiti artist. If DeLillo’s early novels may be compared to Pynchon’s, Libra and Underworld are more akin to E. L. Doctorow’s self-conscious blending of history and fiction in The Book of Daniel and World’s Fair, a kind of postmodernism that critic Linda Hutcheon has termed “historiographic metafiction.” Since Underworld, DeLillo has worked on a smaller scale but continues to imagine a transforming role for art in the media age. The Body Artist (2001) examines the life of Lauren Hartke, a performance artist, in the aftermath of the suicide of her husband and continues DeLillo’s
exploration of mystery and language. Shortly after her husband’s death, Lauren finds a young man in her house who apparently cannot speak; however, beginning with single words he ultimately begins channeling phrases that Lauren’s dead husband spoke. Whether this man is a ghostly presence or Lauren’s delusion is unclear, but her interactions with him enable her most triumphant artist performance by the novel’s end. DeLillo’s most recent novel explores the aftermath of terrorist attacks on America. Falling Man (2007) begins immediately following the collapse of the World Trade Center. Keith Neudecker, a lawyer who escapes from the North Tower, wanders injured and confused to the apartment of his estranged wife, Lianne. Through the couple’s attempted reconciliation, DeLillo stages trauma at both the personal and national levels. In addressing 9/11, DeLillo works with a similar problem that Theodor Adorno addressed in the aftermath of World War II. For Adorno, poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. The question Adorno raises concerns the role of aesthetics and the limitations of representation. DeLillo’s meta-artistic reflection on this topic comes through his imagined outsider performance artist, David Janiak, who becomes known as Falling Man. Shortly after the destruction of the towers, Janiak begins staging unannounced falls from various structures throughout Manhattan. His falls are arrested by ropes and harnesses so that he hangs suspended in the attitude of freefall. Janiak’s disturbing art depends on the images of people who jumped from the World Trade Center on 9/11, but his art is not simply representational; instead, it carries an element of witness precisely because of its effect on his unsuspecting audience. When Lianne happens to see one of Falling Man’s performances, it erases all distance between artistic re-enactment and the actual horrific moment when people chose to jump rather than burn to death. For her, then, witnessing Falling Man’s performance is not a representation of the horror of 9/11; it is the horror of 9/11 itself. Three years later, Lianne reads an obituary of Janiak and realizes that he had been staging the suppressed image of 9/11, a stunningly composed photo by an AP photographer of a man falling to his death. The photo ran on September 12, 2001 in the New York Times and syndicated around the country, causing
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outrage from readers that the image was immoral, a voyeuristic invasion of this man’s privacy. The photo came to be known as Falling Man. This visual intertext underscores that Janiak’s art, like DeLillo’s, does not produce a final healing of collective wounds but probes at hidden recesses of memories of that day.
Lentricchia, F. (ed.) (1991). Introducing Don DeLillo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Osteen, M. (2000). American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue With Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
SEE ALSO: Critical Theory and Fiction (WF); Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Minimalist/Maximalist Fiction (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Pynchon, Thomas (AF); Television and Fiction (AF)
Dick, Philip K.
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Boxall, P. (2006). Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction. London: Routledge. Cowart, D. (2002). Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Athens: University of Georgia Press. DeLillo, D. (1971). Americana. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. DeLillo, D. (1972). End Zone. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. DeLillo, D. (1973). Great Jones Street. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. DeLillo, D. (1976). Ratner’s Star. New York: Knopf. DeLillo, D. (1977). Players. New York: Knopf. DeLillo, D. (1978). Running Dog. New York: Knopf. DeLillo, D. (1985). White Noise. New York: Viking. DeLillo, D. (1988). Libra. New York: Viking. DeLillo, D. (1991). Mao II. New York: Viking. DeLillo, D. (1992). The Names. New York: Knopf. DeLillo, D. (1997). Underworld. New York: Scribner’s. DeLillo, D. (2001). The Body Artist. New York: Scribner’s. DeLillo, D. (2003). Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner’s. DeLillo, D. (2007). Falling Man. New York: Scribner’s. DePietro, T. (ed.) (2005). Conversations with Don DeLillo. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Dwey, J. (2006). Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Duvall, J. N. (ed.). (2008). The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutcheon, L. (1989). The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Keesey, D. (1993). Don DeLillo. New York: Twayne. LeClair, T. (1987). In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
GREG WRIGHT
Philip K. Dick was a popular and prolific writer of science fiction, and many of his critically acclaimed novels are associated with California’s leftist counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. During his lifetime, he published 36 novels and over 100 short stories. Nine of Dick’s novel manuscripts were published posthumously. Philip Kindred Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and graduated from high school in Berkeley. He briefly attended the University of California, Berkeley, dropping out before completing his first semester. Dick initially experimented with novels featuring realistic settings and domestic conflict, but he eventually found success as a science fiction writer. He published his first novel, Solar Lottery, in 1955. Many of Dick’s common themes – the respective natures of reality, humanity, divinity, and free will – emerge in his early novels. Dick’s style mixes theoretical musings with a dark sense of humor, and he addresses the philosophical implications of concepts such as entropy, artificial intelligence, and the borders of what makes us human. Dick wrote at a frenetic pace due to financial pressures, and his creativity and intelligence materialize less through his repetitive stock characters than through his unconventional, unpredictable plots and his ability to transform the tropes of science fiction into serious metaphysical considerations. In Dick’s fiction, the everyday world is an illusion, and such collective fantasy might be due to recreational drugs, political conspiracy, or even a deity’s intervention. Dick’s first major critical success was The Man in the High Castle (1962), an alternate history in which the Axis powers win World War II and divide the US between Germany and Japan. In Martian Time-Slip (1964) and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Dick utilizes the setting of Martian colonies to explore unreliable
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perceptions of time and space, through, respectively, an individual’s mental disorder and several colonists’ consumption of hallucinogens. Now Wait for Last Year (1966) likewise centers on a drug that enables time travel, and the novel’s backdrop of an interplanetary war imitates Cold War politics. Fears of nuclear holocaust also appear among Dick’s themes, and several of his stories occur in the aftermath of nuclear war, including 1965’s Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Learned to Get Along After the Bomb, in which survivors must adapt to the new social order, the toxic levels of radiation, and the mutations such radiation engenders. Many of Dick’s complicated plots involve layers of unreliable realities. For instance, Ubik (1969) depicts a world in which the dead can exchange broadcasts with the living; however, their communications are subject to static interference and an eroding sense of shared reality. Similarly, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974) concerns a celebrity protagonist who finds himself in an unstable reality, suddenly unable to prove his own existence within a repressive police state. In Dick’s sole non-science-fiction novel published during his lifetime, Confessions of a Crap Artist (1975), the skewed perceptions of a crank amateur scientist lead him to conclusions that counter the experiences of those around him. Dick habitually consumed illicit drugs and was married five times, and such life experiences greatly impacted his writing. But perhaps the most influential period in Dick’s life was in 1974, when he received a series of visions. Dick attributed these experiences to a higher power he called VALIS, an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Dick spent years recording and interpreting the information of his visions, and they inspired much of his later work, including VALIS (1981), a largely autobiographical novel featuring an unreliable narrator who calls himself sometimes Horselover Fat and sometimes Philip K. Dick. Beyond bringing literary respectability to science fiction, Dick’s writing has also had tremendous influence on film. To date, nine films have been adapted from Dick’s short stories and novels, the most renowned being Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), about a bounty hunter tracking androids who blur the line of
humanity; Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990), loosely based on “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (1966), about a man who purchases artificial vacation memories and ultimately destabilizes his own sense of reality; Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002), based on a 1956 short story about a detective who uses clairvoyants to prevent future crimes, only to find himself falsely under suspicion for murder; and Richard Linklater’s animated A Scanner Darkly (2006), based on Dick’s 1977 novel (1977b) about an undercover narcotics officer who becomes addicted to a schizophrenia-inducing drug that splits his personality until he winds up informing on himself. In addition to other critical awards and accolades, Dick won the Hugo Award in 1963 for The Man in the High Castle and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1975 for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. In 1982, Philip K. Dick died in Santa Ana, California of heart failure following a stroke. SEE ALSO: Fantasy Fiction (BIF); Noir Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Speculative Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Dick, P. K. (1962). The Man in the High Castle. New York: Putnam’s. Dick, P. K. (1964). Martian Time-Slip. New York: Ballantine. Dick, P. K. (1965a). Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb. New York: Ace. Dick, P. K. (1965b). The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. New York: Doubleday. Dick, P. K. (1966). Now Wait for Last Year. New York: Doubleday. Dick, P. K. (1968). Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Doubleday. Dick, P. K. (1969). Ubik. New York: Doubleday. Dick, P. K. (1974). Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. New York: Doubleday. Dick, P. K. (1975). Confessions of a Crap Artist. New York: Entwhistle. Dick, P. K. (1977a). The Best of Philip K. Dick. New York: Del Rey. Dick, P. K. (1977b). A Scanner Darkly. New York: Doubleday. Dick, P. K. (1981). VALIS. New York: Bantam.
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Palmer, C. (2003). Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Robb, B. J. (2006). Counterfeit Worlds: Philip K. Dick on Film. New York: Titan. Robinson, K. S. (1989). The Novels of Philip K. Dick. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Warrick, P. S. (1987). Mind in Motion: The Fiction of Philip K. Dick. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Didion, Joan DAVID W. MADDEN
Joan Didion established her initial literary reputation as an avatar of the “new journalism,” and the techniques she developed in her essays, particularly her elliptical, minimalist style, she applied to her fiction. Didion is known for her jaundiced eye, penetrating insights, and general dissatisfaction with the direction of modern American life and politics. She has been labeled a provincialist, existentialist, and arch-conservative, but she is first and foremost her own person, a writer with a distinctive style and vision. Didion was born on December 5, 1934 in Sacramento, California to Frank and Eduene Didion. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley in 1956, she moved to New York City and spent the next eight years working at Vogue magazine. During that time she wrote her first novel, Run River (1963), a chronicle of a disintegrating farm family in the Sacramento valley. The novel is reminiscent of Faulkner in its depiction of an insular world where longstanding traditions give way to a new, more commercial world order. A Southerner, Ryder Channing, is Didion’s ironic version of a carpetbagger who arrives to establish real estate dealerships. He seduces, and then abandons, Martha McClellan and later turns his attention to her sister-in-law, Lily. Suicide, financial ruin, and murder follow and destroy the McClellans, who stand as symbols of a rapidly vanishing California. Her second novel, Play It As It Lays (1970), is set in southern California and centers on Maria Wyeth, a minor film actress who suffers an abortion and mental collapse. When she is not aimlessly traveling the freeways, she wanders among lovers and memories that reveal a life of radical
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instability. In the preface to her first collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), Didion reveals her unifying theme as that of “atomization,” her coinage for a society rapidly fragmenting. Conditions of social chaos and disintegration run through her entire canon, in both fiction and non-fiction. A Book of Common Prayer (1977) further develops the theme of atomization by concentrating on Charlotte Douglas, middle-aged mother of a would-be terrorist who has retired to a fictitious Central American country, where she sadly awaits the daughter who will never arrive. Douglas is another of what one critic has described as Didion’s characteristic neurasthenic heroines who suffer disasters and typically participate in their own dissolution. The novel employs one of Didion’s most ambitious experiments: it is told by a subjective narrator, Grace, another American expatriate, who does not know Charlotte intimately yet somehow divines her deepest thoughts and emotions. Democracy (1984) features another female protagonist, Inez Christian Victor, wife of a senator ambitious to be president and lover to a man involved in counterintelligence and political intrigue. As her children drift off into the social unrest of the 1960s and her father is arrested for murder, the protagonist’s world disintegrates, and the novel parallels America’s misguided adventures in Vietnam. Unlike other Didion heroines, Victor eventually leaves her dysfunctional family with her lover, only to be abandoned when he dies, and she elects to reside in Kuala Lumpur, where she devotes herself to Vietnamese refugees. Twelve years later, after more freelance journalism and three works of non-fiction, Didion published her fifth novel, The Last Thing He Wanted (1996), which deals once more with Central America (Didion had published Salvador in 1983, an excoriating view of a corrupt and vicious political regime) and a reporter, Elena McMahon, who abruptly quits her assignment covering the 1984 presidential campaign to visit her ailing father in Florida. The father is another of Didion’s shadowy international figures who runs guns to Nicaragua and inveigles his daughter to accompany a shipment to Costa Rica and collect his fee. Soon she is enmeshed in a world of conspiracies, assassinations, and quasi-military
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operations. McMahon is a now familiar Didion protagonist; however, the novel has a forced quality and is the least successful of her fictions. After moving to New York in the late 1980s, Didion returned to native California in Where I Was From (2003), a book she had been working on for decades that traces her family ties to the Golden State (some ancestors were among the original Donner Party). Didion mourns, once again, the decay of the place that legions regard as Edenic but that to her is now a locale of greed and exploitation. Two years later, as her daughter lay gravely ill, her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, suddenly died of a heart attack. Didion coped with her grief by writing The Year of Magical Thinking, a powerful memoir of their extraordinarily close life (the two acted as each other’s advisor and were collaborators on many film scripts). The work won a National Book Award in 2005. Didion has generated mixed reviews from critics and scholars, but has also enjoyed considerable notoriety and honors. In addition to awards, she has been recognized with the Gold Medal, Belles Lettres and Criticism, by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in honor of her distinguished writing career (2005), and a National Book Award medal for her Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2007. SEE ALSO: Faulkner, William (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Didion, J. (1963). Run River. New York: Obolensky. Didion, J. (1968). Slouching Towards Bethlehem. New York: Farrar, Straus. Didion, J. (1970). Play It As It Lays. New York: Farrar, Straus. Didion, J. (1977). A Book of Common Prayer. New York: Simon and Schuster. Didion, J. (1979). The White Album. New York: Simon and Schuster. Didion, J. (1983). Salvador. New York: Simon and Schuster. Didion, J. (1984). Democracy. New York: Simon and Schuster. Didion, J. (1992). After Henry. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Didion, J. (1996). The Last Thing He Wanted. New York: Knopf. Didion, J. (2001). Political Fictions. New York: Knopf. Didion, J. (2003). Where I Was From. New York: Knopf. Didion, J. (2005). The Year of Magical Thinking. New York: Knopf. Friedman, E. G. (ed.) (1984). Joan Didion: Essays and Conversations. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press. Henderson, K. (1981). Joan Didion. New York: Ungar. Loris, M. (1989). Innocence, Loss, and Recovery in the Art of Joan Didion. New York: Peter Lang. Reaves, G. (2001). Mapping the Private Geography: Autobiography, Identity, and America. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Stout, J. P. (1990). Strategies of Reticence: Silence and Meaning in the Works of Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Joan Didion. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Winchell, M. (1980). Joan Didion. Boston: Twayne.
Dixon, Stephen PATRICK O’DONNELL
Even though he did not publish his first volume of stories until he was 40, Stephen Dixon (b. 1936) is the prolific author of 14 novels and 13 collections of short stories; has been twice nominated for a National Book Award; and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, three O. Henry Awards, and an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Prize for Fiction. Despite that, he is not as well-known as comparable contemporary writers such as Grace Paley and Donald Barthelme, perhaps because much of his work requires readers invested in the complexities of Dixon’s intricate monologues, often going on for hundreds of pages without breaks, as well as in the ironies and mordant humor of his work. Dixon was born in New York City and graduated from the City College of New York in 1958; after several years spent as a radio reporter, he entered the creative writing program at Stanford University. Before becoming a teacher of creative writing, he served in a number of occupations (bartender, technical writer, artist’s model, department store salesman, bus driver, and cab driver) that inform his work, especially its evocative patois and habits of speech. Dixon married the noted translator, Anne Frydman, and began
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DIXON, STEPHEN
teaching in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University in 1981; he retired from Johns Hopkins in 2007, and continues an active career of writing stories and novels. Dixon’s early works include the novels Work (1977) and Too Late, and stories collected in No Relief (1976), Quite Contrary: The Mary and Newt Story (1979), and 14 Stories (1980). The title story of the last volume cited in this list (“14 Stories”) is characteristic: it is a series of interconnected vignettes depicting the lives of New York inhabitants whose stories come into contact when the bullet of a man who has just shot himself flies through the window of his apartment onto the roof of a brownstone blocks away. The story evinces Dixon’s interest in contingent narratives that form around objects or accidents; indeed, accidents and their consequences, and the countervailing quest for purpose and closure in life, constitute the ironic dialectic of many of Dixon’s novels and stories. The succession of Dixon’s next four novels established him as a significant contemporary writer whose work is equally inventive and demanding: Fall and Rise (1985), Garbage (1988a), Frog (1991), and Interstate (1995). Of these, the latter two are particularly notable: Frog, a finalist for the National Book Award, is a labyrinthine series of stories, fantasies, and scenes from the life of Howard Tetch, college professor, and the related stories of his family, ancestors, and associates. Containing, in one instance, a single paragraph that runs over 100 pages, Frog is Joycean in its verbosity and its linguistic play, and unique in its portrait of a complex character who is variously revolting and seductive. Interstate is a Rashomon-like narrative that recounts from eight different perspectives a tragic event in which a child riding in a car is shot and killed by a random gunman; here, the human need to understand and control the irrational and accidental is compellingly delineated. During this period, and despite the considerable energies required by the writing of big novels, Dixon published the story collections Movies (1983), Time to Go (1984), The Play and Other Stories (1988b), Love and Will (1989), All Gone (1990), Friends (1990), and Long Made Short (1994). After the mid-1990s, Dixon continued to publish a succession of impressive novels. Gould: A Novel in Two Novels (1997) is the extended,
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run-on monologue of Gould Bookbinder, a writer trapped by and attempting to overcome his own sexual desires; 30: Pieces of a Novel (1999b) continues Gould’s narrative, and completes the portrait of a character who stands, like Philip Roth’s Zuckerman, as Dixon’s alter ego. I. (2002) and End of I. (2006) also offer a writer/alter ego as the protagonist of interconnected stories about an aging writer who reflects on the complex, painful, yet fulfilling relationships of his life. Phone Rings (2005) begins when a brother receives a phone call about the death by freak accident of his brother; in Meyer (2007), Dixon’s protagonist suffers from the unlikely malady (for Dixon) of writer’s block. Of the short story collections published during this time in which Dixon was clearly focusing on the novel, Sleep (1999a) is the most notable: a collection of Dixon’s stories over the last quartercentury, it features protagonists who reflect at length on the small incidents, seemingly meaningless incidents of life – a forgotten kiss goodbye, a slipping hairpiece, a mote in the eye during a daily drive to work. Many readers will not have the patience for the elaborate stories of inner life spun out at length (even typographically) in Dixon’s work, but for those who do, they are rewarded with a deepened comprehension of the relation between the noise and busyness of the contemporary world and the multifarious mental landscapes we have developed to cope with it. SEE ALSO: Barthelme, Donald (AF); Paley, Grace (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Roth, Philip (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Barry, J. (2007). The End of U: Novelist Stephen Dixon Talks About Writing, Reading, and Retiring from Johns Hopkins. Baltimore City Paper. At www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id¼13229, accessed Dec. 21, 2009. Dixon, S. (1976). Work. Ann Arbor: Street Fiction. Dixon, S. (1977). No Relief. Ann Arbor: Street Fiction. Dixon, S. (1978). Too Late. New York: Harper and Row. Dixon, S. (1979). Quite Contrary: The Mary and Newt Story. New York: Harper and Row. Dixon, S. (1980). 14 Stories. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dixon, S. (1983). Movies: Seventeen Stories. San Francisco: North Point.
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Dixon, S. (1984). Time to Go. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dixon, S. (1985). Fall and Rise. San Francisco: North Point. Dixon, S. (1988a). Garbage. New York: Cane Hill. Dixon, S. (1988b). The Play and Other Stories. Minneapolis: Coffee House. Dixon, S. (1989). Love and Will: Twenty Stories. New York: Paris Review Editions. Dixon, S. (1990). All Gone: 18 Short Stories. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dixon, S. (1991). Frog. Latham, NY: British American. Dixon, S. (1994). Long Made Short. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dixon, S. (1995). Interstate. New York: Henry Holt. Dixon, S. (1997). Gould. New York: Henry Holt. Dixon, S. (1998). The Stories of Stephen Dixon. New York: Henry Holt. Dixon, S. (1999a). Sleep. Minneapolis: Coffee House. Dixon, S. (1999b). 30: Pieces of a Novel. New York: Henry Holt. Dixon, S. (2002). I. New York: McSweeney’s. Dixon, S. (2005). Phone Rings. Hoboken, NJ: Melville House. Dixon, S. (2006). End of I. New York: McSweeney’s. Dixon, S. (2007). Meyer. Hoboken, NJ: Melville House. Klinkowitz, J. (1984). The Self-Apparent Word: Fiction as Language/Language as Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Stephens, M. (1986). The Dramaturgy of Style: Voice in Short Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Doctorow, E. L. MICHAEL WUTZ
E. L. Doctorow has the honor of being among a small cadre of American novelists admired by a wide international readership and scholars. Thoroughly anchored in a post-World War II American context, and often investigating the popular myths and self-constructions of America, Doctorow’s literary sensibilities address current global political and cultural concerns: the intersection of official and unofficial history, the relays between print culture and post-print media, literature and the discourses of science and technology, as well as the notion of narrative as “a system of knowledge” (Morris 1999, 172). While Doctorow understands the novelist as an archaeologist of unacknowl-
edged knowledge, the novelist him- or herself transmutes such leftovers into forms of telling knowledge that speak volumes about a culture’s historical moment. Born and raised in New York City within a secular humanist and Jewish cultural milieu, Doctorow often uses the city as an urban microcosm for the larger national and international themes that are at the center of his fiction. For that reason, his narratives tend to have suggestive allegorical overtones with a wide swath of signification akin to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s romances, and offer a running commentary on current developments. Often associated with a liberal tradition that has strong sympathies for the Left, Doctorow is careful not to infuse his fiction with overt politics and ideology. On the contrary, while his work often figures as a counter-narrative to the narratives of state power, he has repeatedly asserted that the novel is the province of art that has no place for propaganda. Doctorow began his examination of the idea(l) of America, its myths and history, with Welcome to Hard Times (1960), a parody of the classic Western, and has continued this narrative investigation by focusing on critical cultural moments: The Book of Daniel (1971) deals with the Rosenberg trial, mapping the prevailing national sensibilities in the wake of McCarthyism; Ragtime (1975), Doctorow’s first international bestseller, looks at turn-of-the-twentieth-century politics, racism, and immigration in the manner of a pastiche; The Waterworks (1994) shows the dark underbelly of postbellum prosperity and the perpetual balancing act of an ethical science in the genre of the mystery novel; and Loon Lake (1980) and Billy Bathgate (1989) interrogate the myth of the self-made man in the (under)world of crime. Often, it is through the lens of a distant historical event that Doctorow reflects on the present, by laying bare the gap between America’s idealistic promise and its political and cultural reality. At the same time, philosophical and theological speculations are never far away, as in City of God (2000), in which fictional and historical voices (among them, Einstein and Wittgenstein) ruminate about the imponderables of the universe. More recently, Doctorow has returned to the subject of history in The March (2005), which reconstructs Union General William
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DOCTOROW, E. L.
T. Sherman’s monumental march from Atlanta to Savannah toward the end of the Civil War which left both hope and destruction, a new political order yet profound social disorientation, in its wake. Doctorow’s work has, not surprisingly, been identified with the notion of “historiographic metafiction” (Hutcheon 88), given his profound interest in the narrative representation and reconstruction of history. The chronological dislocations, multiple ruptures, and polyphonic narratives similarly suggest a postmodern understanding of novel writing, as does Doctorow’s epistemological inquiry into the nature of textuality and memory. His rise to prominence in the 1970s would also seem to connect him with a more postmodern sensibility, as would his deep interest in literary form. Doctorow himself, however, has routinely dismissed such associations, preferring to disarmingly call himself a “postpost-modernist” (Morris 1999, 193) and referring to a literary tradition that is distinctly (pre)modernist. Aside from numerous allusions to earlier novelists, Doctorow has written introductions and forewords to reissued editions of the work of Jack London, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and Sinclair Lewis. His literary affinities are symbolically embedded in his two first names – Edgar and Lawrence – which derive from Edgar Allan Poe and D. H. Lawrence, and he regards fiction as “an ancient way of knowing, the first science” (Morris 1999, 181). Fundamentally oral without presuming to be oracular, narrative fiction for Doctorow is capacious and encyclopedic with the intent of offering pertinent cultural critique in the service of human betterment. As the recipient of many distinguished prizes, among them the National Book Award, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, the PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction, the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Humanities Medal, Doctorow has written himself into the canon of American literature. He embodies the virtues of a classical storyteller who is singularly capable of rendering his cultural diagnoses in ambitious and lyrical and powerful and ever-changing narratives that have rightly made him an international bestseller.
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SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Dos Passos, John (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bloom, H. (2001). E. L. Doctorow. London: Chelsea House. Doctorow, E. L. (1960). Welcome to Hard Times. New York: Simon and Schuster. Doctorow, E. L. (1971). The Book of Daniel. New York: Random House. Doctorow, E. L. (1975). Ragtime. New York: Random House. Doctorow, E. L. (1980). Loon Lake. New York: Random House. Doctorow, E. L. (1984). Lives of the Poets. New York: Random House. Doctorow, E. L. (1985). World’s Fair. New York: Random House. Doctorow, E. L. (1989). Billy Bathgate. New York: Random House. Doctorow, E. L. (1994). The Waterworks. New York: Random House. Doctorow, E. L. (2000). City of God. New York: Random House. Doctorow, E. L. (2002). Lamentation 9/11 (pref. K. Annan; photos by D. Finn). New York: Ruder Finn. Doctorow, E. L. (2003). Reporting the Universe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Doctorow, E. L. (2004). Sweet Land Stories. New York: Random House. Doctorow, E. L. (2005). The March. New York: Random House. Doctorow, E. L. (2006). Creationists: Selected Essays, 1993–2006. New York: Random House. Harpham, G. G. (1985). E. L. Doctorow and the Technology of Narrative. PMLA, 100, 81–95. Hutcheon, L. (1988). A Poetics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Morris, C. D. (1991). Models of Misrepresentation: On the Fiction of E. L. Doctorow. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Morris, C. D. (ed.) (1999). Conversations with E. L. Doctorow. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Wutz, M. (2003). Literary Narrative and Information Culture: Garbage, Waste, and Residue in the Work of E. L. Doctorow. Contemporary Literature, 44(3), 501–35.
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Dos Passos, John JUSTUS NIELAND
John Dos Passos (1896–1970) published 13 novels over the course of his life, and more than a dozen non-fictional works, including histories, biographies, books of social and political criticism, and travel writing. Dos Passos is best known today as the author of the novel trilogy U.S.A. (1930–6), a dazzling combination of modernist technique, Popular Front politics, Whitmanian epic vision, and sharp social satire that put him on the cover of Time magazine in 1936. But Dos Passos is equally notorious for the transformation of his political sentiments and its impact on his art. Arguably the most visible US left-wing novelist in the 1930s – his radical vision shaped by international vanguards across the arts – by the end of his life, Dos Passos was a gentleman farmer and Goldwater Republican. He died nostalgic for America’s vanished colonial past, skeptical of collectivismas-bureaucracy, receptive to his father’s theories of Anglo-Saxon supremacy (set forth in Dos Passos, Sr.’s 1903 political treatise The AngloSaxon Century and the Unification of the English Speaking People), and despairing of the future of democracy in America’s mediated-image culture. Yet the themes and preoccupations of his major work from the 1920s and 1930s – the destruction of idealistic individuals by wartime bureaucracies, the power of modern mass culture to shape and deform historical truth and reality, the imperial ambitions of finance capital, and the hollowness of citizenship in a nation pervaded by seekers of “the big money” – are as germane to Dos Passos’s early anarchic democratic vision as they are to his fiery late libertarianism. While his version of the US national epic today seems narrow and oldfashioned in light of more recent, hemispheric approaches like those of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead or Eduardo Galleano’s La Memoria Del Fuego trilogy, his self-aware technical mastery of the “historical novel” decisively influenced the historiography of the postmodern novel, and played a central part in recent critical attempts to embed literary modernism in the heady visual cultures of the early twentieth century. Born John Rodrigo Madison, the well-heeled child of Lucy Addison Sprigg Madison and John
Randolph Dos Passos – the son of a Portuguese immigrant and prominent New York City corporate lawyer – the young Dos Passos traveled extensively in Europe with his ailing mother. He attended Choate boarding school before enrolling at Harvard University in 1912, where he studied European languages and literature, wrote poetry and fiction, and was exposed to aesthetic modernism. Dos Passos’s first two fictions, One Man’s Initiation: 1917 (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921), are loosely based on the author’s postcollegiate duty in the Norton–Harjes volunteer ambulance service during World War I. One Man’s Initiation offers an episodic account of the war focalized through the sensitive perceptions of Martin Howe. A romantic young man, Howe finds his idealism destroyed by the cruel discrepancy between the jingoistic lies of wartime propaganda and the brutal realities of trench warfare. Stylistically, the novel is indebted to the unshrinking naturalism of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, and Dos Passos was forced to cut a number of the novel’s “offensive” passages before it could be published in England. But in the novel’s celebrated, poetic renderings of war’s chaos as a disorienting sensory event, Dos Passos draws on the impressionist intensity of Walter Pater and James Joyce, and anticipates the more overly paratactical, modernist style of Manhattan Transfer and U.S.A. More immediately, the novella prepared Dos Passos for Three Soldiers, a book begun during his travels in Spain, completed in Paris, and reportedly rejected by 14 publishers before eventually finding its way into print. An influential protest against human lives wasted in inhuman wartime bureaucracies, Three Soldiers tracks the Great War’s steady destruction of three privates: Andrews, a Harvard-educated composer; Fuselli, a San Francisco optical worker; and Chrisfield, an Indiana farm boy. From diverse cultural and economic backgrounds and of discrepant temperaments, these three soldiers are both individuals and types. As representatives of broader cross sections of American life, the men signal Dos Passos’s incipient tendency toward epic forms of novelistic character, where individuals exemplify the stories of larger groups or sociohistorical currents, and are often less psychologically “developed” or “rounded” as a result. In this novel – as in fellow ambulance corps member
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DOS PASSOS, JOHN
and Harvard pal e. e. cummings’s The Enormous Room (1922) – what is typical of military life, besides his hollow nationalism, is anti-individualism and its deadening brand of hierarchical social organization. War, as Dos Passos’s chapter titles indicate, is not politics by other means, but the work of dehumanizing “Machines” that place soldiers “Under the Wheels.” Within these gears, the three soldiers are doomed: Fuselli contracts venereal disease and is court-martialed for it; Chrisfield kills a hated commanding officer, is consumed by paranoia over the crime, and eventually deserts; and Andrews, abused by the military police and sent to a labor battalion, escapes to join his French girlfriend only to be later arrested and sentenced to prison. Today regarded as Dos Passos’s first major novel, in the United States’ climate of postwar optimism many contemporary reviewers decried the “yellowness” of Three Soldiers’ antimilitarism and antinationalism. But the book’s despairing tone would influence later war novels like Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones’s From Here to Eternity. Dos Passos followed Three Soldiers with Streets of Night (1923), a now-overlooked novel about sexual desire explored through the love triangle between three cultured bourgeoisie: Fanshaw McDougan, a sexually conflicted Harvard art teacher who fantasizes about marrying Nancibel (“Nan,” Dos Passos’s first major female character) but is also attracted to David Wendell (“Wenny”), an anthropology graduate student. Tormented by the oppressive religious values of his father, Wenny kills himself. Fanshaw’s homoerotic desire for Wenny is, after the suicide, displaced onto his attraction to the erotic spectacle of romanticized laborers and vagabonds, who stand in for the sexual vitality lacking in the alienated bourgeois protagonists, enervated by genteel norms. While not an explicitly political novel, Streets of Night marks Dos Passos’s first celebration of the laborer and of the erotic freedom of vagabondage, and a provocative challenge to conventional sexual identities. Manhattan Transfer (2000 [1925]), published by Harper and Brothers to mixed reviews, is arguably his single greatest novel and one of the most exhilarating modernist treatments of urban modernity ever written. Sinclair Lewis extolled it in an early review, “[I]t may be the foundation of a whole new school of novel-writing” (quoted in
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2000 [1925], 68). Steeped in the visual idioms of the transatlantic avant garde (cubism, impressionism, and expressionism) that Dos Passos had been grappling with in his painting and writing at least since his response to the New York Armory Show in 1914, Manhattan Transfer is an experimental paean to the sensual frenzy of New York City. It takes the dynamic, chaotic pulse of a metropolis throbbing with desire; explores the lure of the city’s erotic nexus of sex, commodification, and personal advancement; limns the semiotic excess and distraction of a polis bound by advertising; and measures the psychological toll of a public world dominated by spectacle and technologies of mass publicity like the newspaper. Reminiscent of both Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1922) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Manhattan Transfer expands those novels’ focus from a single day in the life of a city to a historical sweep of roughly 25 years, beginning around 1900 and continuing through the heyday of the jazz age. Like the city, the book is a swirling vortex of energy populated by a multitude of desperate strivers: journalists, tramps, actors, dancers, Bowery bums, politicians, prostitutes, shady lawyers, bootleggers, flapper bandits, and desperate garment workers on the verge of class consciousness. These characters experience dizzying reversals of fortune, find their fates linked to larger economic cycles of boom and bust, and are – like the reader – carried breathlessly through the dynamic spaces of a city whose only laws are chance, contingency, and the novel’s one certainty: “Goddam it’s hell to be broke” (2000b [1925] 138). The novel’s breathless, fragmented narrative and impressionistic prose style – attentive to the dense physical texture of light, sound, and smell in the city – have been characterized as not only “kaleidoscopic” but also specifically cinematic. This is evident in Manhattan Transfer’s titular tendency to cross-cut between panoramic views of the city and novelistic close-ups of its individual characters, and in the way Dos Passos’s sensitive prose approximates an inhuman recording mechanism. As an admiring D. H. Lawrence described it, “If you set a blank record revolving to receive all the sounds, and a film-camera going to photograph all the motions of a scattered group of individuals, at the point where they meet and touch in New York, you
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would more or less get Mr. Dos Passos’s method” (quoted in 2000 [1925], 75). Interested in the teeming, discontinuous life of a city rather than the gradual development of individual characters, Manhattan Transfer is punctuated by ellipses and abrupt cuts between the ups and downs of its individual characters, who often disappear only to reemerge, transformed, years later. The French immigrant “Congo,” for example, begins the book destitute, fresh off the boat, and announces, “A workingman has no country. I’m going to be an American citizen.” But just as democracy is synonymous with “commercial freedom” to the book’s captains of industry, so is US citizenship, for Dos Passos’s eager immigrant, tantamount to fat pockets: Congo reappears first as a lovable bootlegger, and later is remade as “Armand Duval,” a Park Avenue swell (2000 [1925], 145). Here, and through the intertwined stories of the novel’s two protagonists – Ellen Thatcher, an aspiring actress, and Jimmy Herf, an idealistic journalist – Dos Passos’s satirical mode establishes a number of themes that will come to dominate the cynical socio-political vision of the U.S.A. trilogy. Ellen, born in the novel’s opening pages, tells her doting accountant father early on that she’d love him more if he were rich. Her serial sexual relationships with several of the novel’s male characters, loveless forms of social advancement to which masculine idealism falls victim, confirm the bankruptcy of her desire. Dos Passos links her to many of the ills of urban modernity – insincerity, theatricality, emotional frigidity, and the commodification of human personality – in a fashion typical of male novelists’ gendering of modernity. If Ellen is both femme fatale and a familiar sign of modern mass culture as woman, she also embodies a moribund distance from history and politics. Jimmy Herf, by contrast, begins the novel as a sheltered member of the upper middle class, but gradually descends the social scale into the throng of city life in a search of meaning and authenticity. Jimmy’s path in the novel enmeshes him in the reified world of the newspaper, chasing after sensationalistic stories; eventually, what remains of his personality is alienated by the mechanisms of mass publicity, and he loses his “faith in words” (2000 [1925], 310). The loss is doubled by the unhappy end of his marriage to Ellen, who admits she is only capable of loving dead things,
and divorces him to marry a wealthy and corrupt lawyer. In the novel’s ambivalent final pages Jimmy, almost 30 and “anxious to live,” takes a ferry out of the city and hitches a ride on a furniture truck to an uncertain future. Of Jimmy’s position within Manhattan Transfer’s despairing picture of a public world, Mike Gold, founder of the left-wing New Masses, explained that in order to “help” Jimmy out of his crisis of “middle-class bewilderment,” Dos Passos “must read history, psychology and economics and plunge himself into the labor movement” (quoted in 2000 [1925] 74). Following Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passos would undergo precisely the radicalization called for by Gold. Early in 1926, he joined the editorial board of Gold’s New Masses and, with leftist activist and dramatist John Howard Lawson, agreed to serve as director of the radical New Playwrights’ Theatre in New York. Also in 1926, Dos Passos was involved in a textile strike in Passaic, New Jersey and traveled to Boston to interview the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in prison. Working to secure a new trial, Dos Passos reported on the case in New Masses, and wrote a defense pamphlet – Facing the Chair: Story of the Americanization of Two Foreignborn Workmen – published shortly before their execution in August 1927. Over the next five years, which spanned the publication of the first two novels of U.S.A., Dos Passos became, in Michael Denning’s terms, America’s “most visible radical novelist, campaigning for political prisoners, supporting striking miners, and writing accounts of his travels to Mexico and the Soviet Union” (164). Published as a three-volume set in 1938, U.S.A. consists of three novels: The 42nd Parallel (1930), Nineteen Nineteen (1932), and The Big Money (2000 [1936]). The trilogy stands as the fictional culmination of Dos Passos’s turn toward the Left, a central text of the Popular Front, and one of the most ambitious technical experiments in a kind of modernist historiography, blending history, fiction, and autobiography, and joining modernist formal explorations of novelistic subjectivity to the avant garde montage aesthetics of Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevelod Pudovkin. As historical novels, the books move from 1893 to 1929, and the formal architecture of the trilogy consists of four interspersed fictional modes – 68 “Newsreels,” collages of newspaper headings,
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ads, and popular song lyrics; 51 “Camera Eye” sections, lyrical, impressionistic prose poems; 27 biographical portraits of major historical figures like Thorstein Veblen, Henry Ford, Big Bill Haywood, and Isadora Duncan; and fictional narratives that focus on 12 major characters – a number of whom appear in several of the novels – drawn largely from the middle classes (public relations maestros, social workers, labor leaders, migrant workers, interior designers, and aspiring actresses), and hundreds of minor characters. While the trilogy, especially its first two books, testifies to the strength of Dos Passos’s democratic hopes by satirically foregrounding the very failures of labor and the utopian aspirations of many of his characters, the trilogy ends, with The Big Money (2000a), in considerable political cynicism. “Alright then,” a late Camera Eye section concludes, “we are two nations.” By 1934, Dos Passos had become increasingly critical of Marxist party politics and Stalinist communism, and The Big Money, while widely praised, was also critiqued for its pessimism about left-wing causes. One cannot appraise the politics of U.S.A. without grappling with its flashy literary technique. The trilogy’s various discursive modes make clear that the novels are in many ways about the relationship between politics, discourse, and historicity. The voice of the people emerges only negatively, in its silencing, distortion, or manipulation by the technicians and technologies of modern mass media whose public operations are mimicked in the ahistorical hash of the Newsreels; or whose power is extolled or challenged in the Biographies; or whose refusal of history and memory is combated in the lyrical privacy of the Camera Eyes, recording, paradoxically, dimensions of life unseen by the camera. As a result, modern experience itself in U.S.A. splits between the atomized subjectivity of the Camera Eyes and the ahistorical collective consciousness of the Newsreels (North 2005). This dark picture of modernity, in which visuality is inherently reifying, alienating, and ahistorical, becomes especially clear in The Big Money’s story of Hollywood actress Margo Dowling, another figure of mass culture as feminized inauthenticity. Amidst the faux populist depredations of Margo’s spectacular public world, The Big Money – in a famous late Camera Eye section – decries the befouling of America’s “clean words” by “strangers who have
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turned our language inside out,” and extols how “the old American speech” of immigrants and “haters of oppression is new tonight” in the voices of a “beaten nation” (2000 [1936], 371, 372). Dos Passos’s ambivalence about the linguistic renewal of America’s national promise in the blood of oppressed immigrants today rings somewhat hollow, given U.S.A.’s white, middle-class focus and its unwillingness to inhabit fully a proletarian environment, or to imagine, in its character narratives, stories of race or immigration as central to its account of nationhood. Despite its technical genius and passionate critique of the dispossession of the masses, in its skepticism about mass culture and in the exclusions to its story of the nation, U.S.A. foreshadows the conservative strains in Dos Passos’s thinking that would only deepen in his late period, beginning with his District of Columbia trilogy (published as a three-volume set in 1952). Here, Dos Passos’s fictional vision was supplemented by his prolific non-fictional work – historical and biographical studies of America’s colonial past and works of political and social philosophy marked by racialist nationalism and, during the Cold War, an increasingly strident libertarianism. The District of Columbia trilogy is loosely united through the Washington, DC, Spotswood family. Adventures of a Young Man (1939), the novel that would mark Dos Passos’s break with the Left and his turn toward an increasingly vehement anticommunism, is a picaresque narrative protagonized by the hopeful Glenn Spotswood, whose idealism leads him to join the Communist Party. Glenn eventually becomes critical of the exploitive and abusive party politics he witnesses, is jailed as a Trotskyite, and is eventually released only to be led to his death on a party mission. Number One (1942) critiques the power mongering of a loosely fictionalized Huey Long, whose abuses of the democratic process are seen through Glenn’s older brother, Tyler Spotswood. The Grand Design (1949), arguably the strongest book in the trilogy, is a devastating anatomy of Washingtonian bureaucracy at the height of the New Deal; Dos Passos’s new skepticism about Roosevelt’s liberalism is most acute in the novel’s parallel between Roosevelt’s deft manipulation of the American citizenry through his “fireside chats” and the more obviously dubious work of powerful radio commentator and member of the
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Washington elite, Herbert Spotswood, father of Glenn and Tyler. In the 1950s, Dos Passos returned to the autobiographical mode of the early war novels, only now Dos Passos’s character Jay Pignatelli became, in Chosen Country (1951) and The Great Days (1958), an obvious surrogate for the author’s conservative political and social views. And the collage technique that energized the epistemological uncertainty of Dos Passos’s great modernist work in the 1920s and 1930s became a tool of moral and ethical dogmatism. In Midcentury (1961), perhaps the finest novel from Dos Passos’s late period and the last book published in his lifetime, Dos Passos returns to the formal structure of U.S.A. (the “Newsreels” have been renamed “Documentaries,” and the “Camera Eye” label has been dropped for more pontificating prose poems). However, the hermeneutics of suspicion about language, which redounded to Dos Passos’s own epic vision in U.S.A. and made its critique of national paralysis all the more self-reflexive, has all but vanished. Midcentury’s dexterous form serves the book’s hectoring critique of one more bureaucratic bogeyman – here labor unions and their perversion of “brotherhood.” Near the end of his career, Dos Passos’s modernism had lost its faith in the future, his satire finally hardening into despair. SEE ALSO: The Avant Garde Novel (AF); Gold, Mike (AF); Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Mailer, Norman (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); The Novel and War (AF)
Dos Passos, J. (1923). Streets of Night. New York: Doran. Dos Passos, J. (1930). The 42nd Parallel. New York: Harper. Dos Passos, J. (1932). 1919. New York: Harcourt. Dos Passos, J. (1939). Adventures of a Young Man. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Dos Passos, J. (1943). Number One. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Dos Passos, J. (1949). The Grand Design. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Dos Passos, J. (1954). Most Likely to Succeed. New York: Prentice Hall. Dos Passos, J. (1958). The Great Days. New York: Sagamore. Dos Passos, J. (1961). Midcentury. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Dos Passos, J. (1975). Century’s Ebb: The Thirteenth Chronicle. Boston: Gambit. Dos Passos, J. (2000a). The Big Money [1936]. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Dos Passos, J. (2000b). Manhattan Transfer [1925]. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Magny, C. E. (1972). The Age of the American Novel: The Film Aesthetic of Fiction Between the Wars [1947] (trans. E. Hochman). New York: Ungar. Maine, B. (1988). Dos Passos: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge. North, M. (2005). Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pizer, D. (1988). John Dos Passos’s USA: A Critical Study. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Sartre, J.-P. (1974). John Dos Passos and 1919 [1936]. In Dos Passos: A Collection of Critical Essays (ed. A. Hook). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, pp. 61–9.
Dreiser, Theodore REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
ROARK MULLIGAN
Carr, V. S. (1984). Dos Passos: A Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Casey, J. C. (1998). Dos Passos and the Ideology of the Feminine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Denning, M. (1996). The Decline and Fall of the Lincoln Republic: Dos Passos’s U.S.A. In The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, pp. 163–99. Dos Passos, J. (1920). One Man’s Initiation: 1917. London: Allen and Unwin. Dos Passos, J. (1921). Three Soldiers. New York: Doran.
Born into an immigrant family that suffered financial hardships, Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) brought a new perspective to American letters, realistically depicting a changing urban landscape. As the author of eight novels, including Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925), Dreiser was a pioneer of literary naturalism, graphically capturing the monetary and cultural forces that transformed American cities. The twelfth of 13 children (three died in infancy), Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana. His father, John Paul Dreiser, immigrated to the
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United States from Mayen, Germany, where he had trained as a weaver. His mother, Sarah Maria Sch€an€ab, was born on a Mennonite farm outside of Dayton, Ohio – her family was of Czech ancestry, but she was disowned at 17 when she married John Paul and converted to Catholicism. Theodore Dreiser’s birth on August 27, 1871 marked a divide in the family’s history. Before 1871, the Dreisers had been relatively prosperous, with the father managing and at times owning a share of woolen mills, but after Theodore’s birth, the family suffered a number of financial setbacks when the father lost work due to a head injury, a mill fire, and a bankruptcy. Theodore viewed his father as an inept authoritarian who was zealously religious and who imposed unrealistic expectations on his wife and children. Economic pressures forced the family to move often and to separate, with the mother and younger children often living apart from the father and older children. To support her family, Sarah ran rooming houses and washed neighbors’ clothes, but she was as unsuccessful at business as her husband. The traumatic events of his youth provided Dreiser with painful memories that would fill his novels and shape his views. When he was still a boy, Dreiser’s sister Mame (Mary Frances) became pregnant. The father of Mame’s child, a wealthy lawyer, would not marry the underaged girl, but he did help the family – Mame would serve as the model for the title character in Dreiser’s second novel, Jennie Gerhardt (1911). A few years later, at the age of 10, Dreiser remembered seeing his brother Paul for the first time. Fourteen years older than Theodore, Paul had left the family to sing with various minstrel shows and had changed his last name to Dresser. To support his mother and siblings, Paul settled in Evansville, Indiana, where he lived with a madam in a house of prostitution and performed at the local theater. A love triangle involving Paul may have resulted in a child, which would have forced Paul to move, leaving his mother and siblings to fend for themselves again. Their sister Emma, who had been living in Chicago, ran off with L. A. Hopkins – he had stolen money from his employer’s saloon. Emma and Hopkins became the models for Carrie Meeber and George Hurstwood in Dreiser’s first novel, Sister Carrie. Before the Dreisers left Evansville, Theodore’s sister Sylvia became pregnant and was forced to move to New York because the
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wealthy young father refused marriage or support. As a shy and isolated youth, Theodore Dreiser suffered greatly through these events. Later, he dramatized this suffering powerfully and honestly in novels and autobiographies. The Dreisers’ social and economic problems encouraged the children, including Theodore, to leave home as soon as possible. After dropping out of high school and moving to Chicago, Dreiser struggled to find and keep employment, but a former teacher (Mildred Fielding) rescued him by paying for a year at Indiana University. With this limited education, Dreiser was able to return to Chicago, where he began his writing career as a journalist at the Daily Globe. An ambitious young man, he quickly moved to a more respected paper in St. Louis, the Globe-Democrat. With a strong desire for success and recognition, Dreiser moved east, first to Toledo, Ohio, then to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he worked for the Pittsburgh Dispatch. By 1895, at the urging of his brother Paul, who was now a nationally known singer and songwriter, Dreiser moved to New York City. Unable to support himself as a freelance journalist, Dreiser accepted an offer from Paul to edit Ev’ry Month, a musical journal published by Howley and Haviland. For two years, Dreiser successfully managed this magazine, learning to write and edit for a broad audience. By the time he left Ev’ry Month, Dreiser was regularly selling his own articles to popular magazines, such as Cosmopolitan, Munsey’s, and Ainslee’s, earning a good living as a freelance magazine writer before he turned to fiction. Dreiser’s first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), tells the story of a young woman (Carrie Meeber) who leaves a small Midwestern farm town for Chicago where she, like Dreiser and his sisters, seeks opportunities. Dissatisfied both with the lowpaying work available and with life in her sister’s modest home, Carrie accepts money and shelter from Charles Drouet, a traveling salesman. She eventually develops a relationship with Drouet’s friend, George Hurstwood, and unwittingly departs Chicago for New York after Hurstwood absconds with funds from the saloon that he manages. In New York, Hurstwood fails and eventually commits suicide, but Carrie succeeds as an actress. The novel is seen as a groundbreaking work of realism that depicts the struggles of a young woman in urban America. Carrie enters
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romantic relationships without the sanction of marriage. In 1900, when the novel was first published, her behavior, especially her success at the end of the novel, violated conventional narrative patterns. Despite a number of good reviews, Dreiser was devastated by the novel’s reception and sales – he sank into a depression that lasted almost three years, during which he was unable to complete his second novel or write for magazines. Again, his brother Paul interceded, arranging for Dreiser to visit a rehabilitation center, where exercise aided in his recovery. By 1904, Dreiser returned to New York’s magazine world, proving himself to be a superb editor of women’s magazines. And by 1907, Butterick hired Dreiser as editor of three magazines, including The Delineator. This same year, Sister Carrie was successfully republished. As an editor and author, Dreiser was earning a good living and gaining the recognition that he had long desired, but his editing career was to end abruptly. Forced to resign his position at Butterick after a scandal involving the daughter of a co-worker, Dreiser turned his immense energies to writing books. Between 1911 and 1916, a time when he was questioning if he could support himself as a creative writer, he published seven full-length works: Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier (1912), A Traveler at Forty (1913), The Titan (1914a), The Genius (1915), Plays of the Natural and Supernatural (1916b), and A Hoosier Holiday (1916a). Throughout his life, Dreiser continued to write at an extraordinary rate – he published more than 28 volumes, including novels, collections of poems, short stories, biographical sketches, autobiographies, travel narratives, plays, literary criticism, political commentary, and philosophical reflections. Dreiser’s works vary greatly in both structure and content. For example, his first two novels draw on autobiographical materials, but his Trilogy of Desire (The Financier, The Titan, and The Stoic) required extensive research because these novels realistically chronicle the life of Frank Cowperwood, an American robber baron whose character is based on a historical figure, Charles T. Yerkes. In An American Tragedy (1925), written 25 years after Sister Carrie, Dreiser again challenged social and literary conventions by sympathetically and realistically depicting a murderer, Clyde Griffiths, who is executed for killing his pregnant
girlfriend. Clyde, like Dreiser and his siblings, grew up in a poor, religious family, longing for escape and success. At his uncle’s factory, Clyde develops an intimate relationship with a fellow worker, Roberta Alden, as he slowly climbs the town’s social ladder. When the daughter of a wealthy manufacturer finds him attractive, Clyde determines to rid himself of Roberta, but she is pregnant. On a trip to a mountain lake, Clyde murders Roberta in a rowboat, but he is caught, tried, and executed. The novel assiduously explores Clyde’s degree of guilt. Despite the work’s realistic exploration of taboo subjects (premarital sex, birth control, abortion, class conflict, and capital punishment), critics and the public praised this long novel (over 800 pages). Dreiser was 54 when he finally enjoyed the success of this bestseller, but after completing An American Tragedy, a work that influenced authors such as Norman Mailer and Richard Wright, he wrote very little fiction. During the 1930s, although he published no novels, Dreiser’s productivity did not slow; his interests merely shifted. He collected and arranged research materials and notes for a philosophical work that was to be his magnum opus, Notes on Life, a work that he never completed. In trying to find answers to the great philosophical questions, Dreiser turned to religious, scientific, political, philosophical, economic, and supernatural sources, taking in and blending divergent beliefs into a philosophical system that was not always consistent but that was thought-provoking and sincere. Always searching and never resting, Dreiser dedicated his life to his art, attempting to discover and communicate the realities and mysteries of life. Shortly before his death on December 28, 1945 at age 74, Dreiser was still completing two novels that he had begun decades earlier: The Bulwark (1946) and The Stoic (1947). Since his death, Dreiser’s short stories have appeared in college anthologies, and his many works are read by scholars, but he is now best known as the author of Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925), two works that redefined the American novel. As a writer, Dreiser honestly faced the world and realistically depicted what he saw and felt. In narrating the struggles of a farm girl in an urban setting and in chronicling the struggles of a hapless young man who seeks
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DU BOIS, W. E. B.
social advancement, Dreiser achieved a level of literary realism that transformed American fiction. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Mailer, Norman (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF); Norris, Frank (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); Wright, Richard (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Dreiser, T. (1900). Sister Carrie. New York: Doubleday and Page. Dreiser, T. (1911). Jennie Gerhardt. New York: Harper. Dreiser, T. (1912). The Financier. New York: Harper. Dreiser, T. (1914a). The Titan. New York: John Lane. Dreiser, T. (1914b). A Traveler at Forty. New York: Century. Dreiser, T. (1915). The Genius. New York: John Lane. Dreiser, T. (1916a). A Hoosier Holiday. New York: John Lane. Dreiser, T. (1916b). Plays: Natural and Supernatural. New York: John Lane. Dreiser, T. (1918). Free and Other Stories. New York: Boni and Liveright. Dreiser, T. (1919a). The Hand of the Potter. New York: Boni and Liveright. Dreiser, T. (1919b). Twelve Men. New York: Boni and Liveright. Dreiser, T. (1922). A Book about Myself. New York: Boni and Liveright. Dreiser, T. (1923). The Color of a Great City. New York: Boni and Liveright. Dreiser, T. (1925). An American Tragedy. New York: Boni and Liveright. Dreiser, T. (1927). Chains. New York: Boni and Liveright. Dreiser, T. (1928). Moods: Cadenced & Declaimed. New York: Boni and Liveright. Dreiser, T. (1929). A Gallery of Women. New York: Liveright. Dreiser, T. (1931). Dawn. New York: Liveright. Dreiser, T. (1946). The Bulwark. New York: Doubleday. Dreiser, T. (1947). The Stoic. New York: Doubleday. Dreiser, T. (1986). Dreiser–Mencken Letters, 2 vols. (ed. T. P. Riggio). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Eby, C. (1998). Dreiser and Veblen: Saboteurs of the Status Quo. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Elias, R. H. (1949). Theodore Dreiser: Apostle of Nature. New York: Knopf.
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Fishkin, S. F. (1985). From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lehan, R. (1969). Theodore Dreiser: His World and His Novels. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Loving, J. (2005). The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser. Berkeley: University of California Press. Michaels, W. B. (1987). The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Newlin, K. (ed.) (2003). A Theodore Dreiser Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Pizer, D. (1975). Theodore Dreiser: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall. Pizer, D. (1976). The Novels of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Study. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Salzman, J. (ed.) (1972). Theodore Dreiser: The Critical Reception. New York: David Lewis. Swanberg, W. A. (1967). Dreiser. New York: Bantam. Zanine, L. J. (1991). Mechanism and Mysticism: The Influence of Science on the Thoughts and Works of Theodore Dreiser. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Du Bois, W. E. B. KELLEY WAGERS
During a career that spanned much of the twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in nearly every genre while aiming each of his varied texts at solving the vast social problem he identified in 1900: “The problem of the twentieth century,” he said, “is the problem of the color line.” Taken as a whole, Du Bois’s 22 monographs, countless essays, and multiple editorial and collaborative projects outline the major questions, methods, and debates that continue to comprise black cultural history and theory. Du Bois researched and represented African and African American experiences within international frames; investigated the material and psychological causes and effects of racism; reflected – and, at times, upheld – gender and class divisions; and traversed the lines between social theory and practice. He interrogated the boundaries between science and art, employed textual and musical modes of communication, and sought, especially by way
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of education and intellectual work, justice and redress for people of color worldwide. Du Bois’s description of “double-consciousness,” a condition of and response to racist society, is central to twentieth-century literary history even as it continues to shape psychological and sociological studies of race. While Du Bois is more often recognized as a historian and essayist, he wrote five novels over the course of his career and included fictional sketches within his major books of essays. Like his non-fiction, Du Bois’s fiction is foremost concerned with confronting the history of racist societies and achieving economic and social justice. Du Bois made frequent use of the intersections between autobiography, sociology, history, and literature, whether by extending and amplifying his arguments with personal experience, crafting autobiographical protagonists, or bringing historical figures directly onto the stage of his novels. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on February 23, 1868. Like many of his fictional protagonists, Du Bois was identified early on as an exceptional student and pursued education as a primary goal. He earned degrees from Fisk University (where he encountered the Fisk Singers’s influential performances of African American spirituals), Harvard College and Harvard Graduate School (where he studied with American philosopher William James), and attended Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. In 1895, he became the first black scholar to receive a PhD from Harvard. Du Bois taught for two summers in Tennessee and at Wilberforce University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Atlanta University before holding foundational positions within the Niagara Movement and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His lifelong study of economic and social justice led eventually to involvement with Marxism and communism, affiliations which contributed to his indictment by the US government in 1951. He became a citizen of the newly independent Ghana shortly before his death on August 27, 1963, the eve of the March on Washington. Du Bois’s opposition to racial segregation, along with his commitment to classical education and the arts, sometimes spurred debates with other prominent black leaders, most famously
Booker T. Washington. Du Bois opposed Washington’s turn-of-the-twentieth-century plan for seeking racial equality through industrial training and economic independence. “Work, culture, liberty, – all these we need, not singly but together,” Du Bois argued (1903, 15). In addition to teaching and public speaking (vocations typically shared by his protagonists), Du Bois used publishing – including his contributions to the major publications of the period and his positions as founder and editor of others (Horizon, The Crisis, Phylon) – in order to seek economic, political, educational, and cultural opportunities for black people immediately and at once. In 1896, Du Bois’s doctoral thesis, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870, a groundbreaking documentary study of the United States’ participation in the international slave economy, was published as the first volume of Harvard’s Historical Monograph Series. His next study, The Philadelphia Negro (1899), provides an exhaustive description – credited as the first example of sociological scholarship – of the dire conditions in which black Philadelphians were living at the time. Du Bois’s next book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in many ways marks a change in his scholarly research and writing methods. For this collection of 14 essays and sketches, he abandoned the apparently objective voice of the historian and social scientist for a more emotive, personal, and directly political address. Du Bois later recalled his discovery that he “could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved” (1940, 67). Yet The Souls of Black Folk also develops the strategies of his earlier studies: Du Bois revised several chapters from his prior publications and further used cultural texts as modes of political argument. He prefaced each chapter with the musical score of an African American spiritual (texts he referred to as “sorrow songs”) and a quotation from a white author, and he included a fictional sketch, “Of the Coming of John.” The two major theoretical tools – the concept of “double-consciousness” and the image of “the veil” – which Du Bois presents in Souls are also meetings of scientific and literary methods. Du Bois described “double-consciousness” as the
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split in self-knowledge brought about by living in racist society. “One ever feels his two-ness,” he wrote, “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (1903, 11). By showing the resolution of this division as necessary not just for African American citizens but also for the larger American nation, Du Bois theorized a debilitating psychological state as well as an important position for critique. Novelists and poets – among them James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker – have since adapted and criticized the Du Boisian “double-consciousness,” a condition critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. calls “a fundamental aspect of modernity itself.” The image of “the veil” likewise identifies the subtle and overt divisions drawn in racist societies. The image’s changeability – “the veil” obscures and reveals, prohibits and protects – indicates the complex task of translating racist structures into language. While Du Bois returned most obviously to The Souls of Black Folk’s style and method in its sequel, Darkwater (1920), and Dusk of Dawn (1940), Souls also outlined the key historical moments that Du Bois would expand in later studies and novels. He pursued the topic of African Americans’ centrality to United States history in The Gift of Black Folk (1924), which focuses on artistic and literary production, and Black Folk Then and Now (1939). His Black Reconstruction (1935) reveals the replacement of the American slave industry with the “new slavery of the working class” and identifies African Americans as primary actors working toward democratic ideals in the post-Civil War South (724). Du Bois meanwhile investigated international economic and social systems with equal thoroughness. In The Negro (1915), he presented a fully global view of black cultural history, emphasizing racial identity as a constantly evolving collectivity bound by historical experience rather than geography. His African studies, including his pageant, The Star of Ethiopia (1913), two volumes titled Africa (1930), Color and Democracy (1945), and The World and Africa (1947), likewise examine global economic structures and cultural histories as they develop a transnational sense of black identity.
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The novels Du Bois wrote during these years coincide with the development of literary modernism, but the topics rather than the style or form of his fiction reflect the era’s emphasis on innovation. The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) tracks the post-Civil War cotton industry in the US, especially the plot of Northern business and Southern aristocracy to disenfranchise and separate black and white labor groups. While Quest presents new aspects of Du Bois’s views on women – Zora Cresswell, a “child of the swamp” (1911, 33), surpasses her more conventionally educated male counterpart as a social and political leader – it also confirms the view of readers who criticize Du Bois’s emphasis on the need to master the Western canon more than recognize a vibrant black folk culture in order to confront the contradictions of modernity. Du Bois’s Dark Princess (1928) moves related themes to an international stage. Exiled to Europe by race-based prejudice in the 1920s US, the protagonist, Matthew Towns, joins an effort – orchestrated by the high-born Princess Kautilya of the title – to unite people of color in a revolt against white supremacy worldwide. Du Bois again pursues politics and history alongside fantasy and romance by developing characters at once real and symbolic; their acts register as “world movements” (1928, 17). In this sense, the novel illustrates his controversial 1926 claim that “all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists” (Sundquist, 1996, 328). Du Bois’s most ambitious fictional project, The Black Flame trilogy, incorporates major events in US and world history from 1876 to 1956. The Ordeal of Mansart (1957), Mansart Builds a School (1959b), and Worlds of Color (1961) follow several generations in the male line of a black family, the Mansarts, although these characters often step aside while Du Bois revisits historical events and topics, including Reconstruction, the Atlanta riots (also the subject of Du Bois’s most famous poem, A Litany of Atlanta [1906]), educational reform, colonialism, and pan-African and global politics. In a postscript to his 1957 novel, Du Bois drew together his historical and fictional endeavors as a strategy still crucial to contemporary African American literary history. Confronted by the “eternal paradox of history” – the unavoidably incomplete effort to know the past – Du Bois saw “the use of imagination” as a critical means of
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redress. In a historical field where one finds “much omitted, much forgotten, much distorted,” the writer must use fiction in order to interpret the facts (1957, 229). SEE ALSO: Baldwin, James (AF); Ellison, Ralph (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); The Harlem Renaissance (AF); Hughes, Langston (AF); Hurston, Zora Neale (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); Wright, Richard (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Aptheker, H. (1989). The Literary Legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois. White Plains, NY: Kraus International. Bhabha, H. (2004). The Black Savant and the Dark Princess. ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 50(1–3), 137–55. Blight, D. (1994). W. E. B. Du Bois and the Struggle for American Historical Memory. In G. Fabre & R. O’Meally (eds.), History and Memory in African-American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 45–71. Carby, H. V. (1998). Race Men. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1896). The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States os America, 1638– 1870. New York: Longmans, Green. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1899). The Philadelphia Negro. Boston: Ginn. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903). The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: McClurg. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1909). John Brown. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1911). The Quest of the Silver Fleece: A Novel. Chicago: McClurg. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1915). The Negro. New York: Henry Holt. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1920). Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1924). The Gift of Black Folk. Boston: Stratford. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1928). Dark Princess: A Romance. New York: Harcourt Brace. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1935). Black Reconstruction. New York: Harcourt Brace. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1939). Black Folk Then and Now. New York: Henry Holt. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1940). Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Races Concept. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1945). Color and Democracy. New York: Harcourt Brace. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1947). The World and Africa. New York: Viking. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1957). The Ordeal of Mansart. New York: Mainstream. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1959a). In Battle for Peace: The Story of My 83rd Birthday. New York: Masses & Mainstream. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1959b). Mansart Builds a School. New York: Mainstream. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1961). Worlds of Color. New York: Mainstream. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1968). The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois (ed. H. Aptheker). New York: International. Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lewis, D. L. (1993). W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919. New York: Henry Holt. Marable, M. (1986). W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat. Boston: Twayne. Rampersad, A. (1976). The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smith, S. M. (2004). Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture. Durham: Duke University Press. Stepto, R. (1979). From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Sundquist, E. (ed.) (1996). The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader. New York: Oxford University Press. Zamir, S. (1995). Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–1903. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ducornet, Rikki PATRICK O’DONNELL
The prolific author of seven novels, four short fiction collections, and several volumes of poetry, essays, and children’s books, Rikki Ducornet is one of the most inventive of contemporary American writers. Like fellow travelers John Hawkes, Robert Coover, and Angela Carter, she is fascinated with the play, eroticism, and origins of language throughout her work. Born in Canton, New York in 1949 and raised in an academic environment, she received a degree in fine arts from Bard College in 1964; in addition to being
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a writer, Ducornet is an artist who has illustrated a number of books by such figures as Robert Coover and Jorge Luis Borges, as well as her own. Ducornet taught for many years at the University of Denver, and is currently writer-in-residence at the University of Louisiana–Lafayette. She is the winner of several writing awards, including the prestigious Lannan Literary Award in Fiction and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Ducornet’s first four novels – The Stain (1984), Entering Fire (1986), The Fountains of Neptune (1992), and The Jade Cabinet (1993) – comprise her Tetralogy of Elements, with each novel associated, consecutively, with the elements of earth, fire, water, and air. The Stain, set in nineteenthcentury France, is a phantasmagoric narrative of eroticism and violence charting the youth and maturation of its protagonist, born with a fatal birthmark that consigns her to a life of rejection and often horrific adventure. Entering Fire, also partially set in France (where Ducornet lived for several years), takes place in the twentieth century, and narrates the strange, separate, but homologous life-journeys of a father and son, the former an obsessive botanist who discovers an exotic woman in the midst of the Amazon jungle, and the latter raised by his mother in Europe, a fascist madman whose dystopian hell serves as the polar extreme of the paradise his father has discovered in South America. In The Fountains of Neptune, a man who has been in a coma for 50 years recounts his childhood in a French seaside village in a hallucinatory vision that discovers the connection between dream and memory. The Jade Cabinet is an allegory of memory, set in Victorian England and relating the lives of two sisters (Etheria and Memory) who have been raised by a father, Angus Sphery, bent upon discovering or inventing a primal language that will become the native tongue for his children. The novel contains a cast of eccentric characters, including the remarkable Hungerk€unstler, or “hunger artist” (recollecting Kafka’s tale of that title), a female creature obtained by Sphery who supposedly speaks the primal language he has searched for all of his life. In all of the novels of the tetralogy, language is the real protagonist, which in Ducornet’s fiction gains density and materiality as her characters navigate worlds that continuously verge upon the realm of the unconscious.
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In subsequent fictions, Ducornet has expanded this terrain. Especially notable amongst her short fiction collections, The Complete Butcher’s Tales (1994) is a hybrid assemblage of 54 short pieces containing exotic, often bizarre narratives that move between the mundane and the unimaginable. Phospher in Dreamland (1995) is an epistolary novel recounting the history of an imaginary island, Birdland, a cross between Prospero’s realm in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Jonathan Swift’s Laputa, the floating island of Gulliver’s Travels where Reason is king and the butt of Swift’s satire. In Ducornet’s novel, youth, isolation, and the instruments of vision combine to enable a unique world where fantasy and reality, and science and the imagination, merge. The Fanmaker’s Inquistion (1999a) portrays the relationship between the Marquis de Sade, imprisoned for “sexual crimes,” and Gabrielle, a fanmaker who is being interrogated for her friendship and collaboration with the infamous philosopher of eroticism. The novel is, like all of Ducornet’s fiction, a defense of the pleasures of the mind and body against the repressive forces of the social order. Ducornet’s most recent novel, Gazelle (2003), is set in Cairo and tells the story of a young girl navigating the relationship between warring parents, an intellectual father who represents the mind and a philandering mother who represents the body, corporeality, and the erotic. Indeed, Ducornet’s fiction as a whole can be viewed as an exploration and deconstruction of the Cartesian relation between mind and body, and the pleasure that arises when they meet in language and dream. SEE ALSO: Carter, Angela (BIF); Coover, Robert (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Hawkes, John (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ducornet, R. (1986). Entering Fire. San Francisco: City Lights. Ducornet, R. (1989). The Fountains of Neptune. Toronto: McClelland and Steward. Ducornet, R. (1993). The Jade Cabinet. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archives. Ducornet, R. (1994). The Complete Butcher’s Tales. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archives. Ducornet, R. (1995). Phospher in Dreamland. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archives.
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Ducornet, R. (1995). The Stain [1984]. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archives. Ducornet, R. (1997). The Word “Desire”. New York: Henry Holt. Ducornet, R. (1999a). The Fanmaker’s Inquisition. New York: Henry Holt. Ducornet, R. (1999b). The Monstrous and the Marvelous. San Francisco: City Lights. Ducornet, R. (2003). Gazelle. New York: Knopf. Ducornet, R. (2008). The One Marvelous Thing. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archives. Matthews, J. H. (1989). Rikki Ducornet’s Non-Nonsense Almost-Fairy Tales. Symposium, 42(4), 312–28. Moore, S. (1998). Reveries of Desire: An Interview With Rikki Ducornet. Bloomsbury Review, 18, 11–12. Review of Contemporary Fiction. (1998). Essays (by S. Gregory, R. Williams, A. Guttmann, R. Martin, L. Diamond-Nigh, G. Covi, & W. Motte) [special part-issue], 18(3), 110–230.
Dybek, Stuart BILL SAVAGE
Stuart Dybek has taken what many people dismiss as the dull gray lead of Chicago’s post-industrial landscape and transmuted it into fictional and poetic gold. Raised in Chicago’s South Side Pilsen neighborhood, as its dominant population shifted from Eastern European immigrants and their descendants to Latin American immigrants and theirs, Dybek attended Catholic schools, graduated from Loyola University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and served in the Peace Corps. He has had a distinguished career teaching creative writing at Western Michigan University, its Prague Summer Program at Charles University, and Northwestern University. Despite his many literary awards – O. Henry Awards, Guggenheim Fellowships, inclusion in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Poetry collections, and in 2007 a MacArthur Genius Award – relatively few critics have written about Dybek’s fiction. The most astute approach to Dybek’s work comes from Carlo Rotella, who identifies Dybek as the postindustrial heir of earlier Chicago “neighborhood novelists” James T. Farrell, Richard Wright, and Nelson Algren. Like his Chicago forebears,
Dybek has staked out a particular slice of urban turf as his own. Dybek reimagines the Chicago tradition to express the post-industrial city and its myriad beauties and brutalities. His characters inhabit and interpret the landscape of ethnic urban villages transformed by postwar deindustrialization, white flight, neighborhoods obliterated for urban renewal, and familiar streetscapes bulldozed for expressways. In stark contrast to much of the Chicago literary tradition, his work – especially in his first two short story collections, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods (1980) and The Coast of Chicago (1991) – has a dreamlike, hallucinatory quality that has been compared by reviewers to the “magic realism” of many Latin American and Eastern European writers. For instance, Dybek’s first published story, “The Palatski Man” (1971), portrays a brother and sister who follow a streetcart sweets vendor from Sunday mass at their parish church through an archetypal urban landscape of slums, decayed railroads, and abandoned factories and warehouses to a hidden riverside encampment where all of the city’s wandering outcasts gather in almost sacred communion. Rich religious imagery informs the story’s depiction of the mundane city as rife with beauty and mystery. Dybek forges his stories’ magic from a sense of musical tone and dream logic, rather than the more directly surrealistic approach usually associated with magic realism. His aesthetics derive from film; musical traditions from classical to jazz, blues, and rock; and the Russian, Irish, and American short story canon of writers like Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, and Sherwood Anderson. In his later fiction, I Sailed with Magellan (2003), Dybek creates a novel-in-stories which revolves around two brothers, Perry and Mick Katzek; their relationships with each other, their parents, and their neighborhood; and the vast changes that took place in American culture from the 1950s through the 1970s. Compared to Dybek’s earlier stories, the tone of the mystic and the elegiac in Magellan is muted, but persists nonetheless. What most distinguishes Dybek’s literary approach is his rejection, or complication, of formal genre distinctions so often made between novel and short story collection, memoir and fiction, fiction and poetry. As an accomplished writer in
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all of these genres, Dybek prefers to begin with “Unidentified Written Objects,” which start in no particular genre, and only in the process of writing settle into more recognizable generic shapes. His embrace of the lyric informs his fiction with a poetic sense of figurative language and mythic metaphor far beyond anything associated with realism or the Chicago tradition. For instance, in the multipart story “Nighthawks” in The Coast of Chicago, he reimagines Orpheus as a GI gone AWOL, a conga drummer seeking his lost love down tunnels beneath Chicago’s subway by invoking the help of a Santerıa god. Yet Dybek’s sense of magic never strays too far from the real world and its everyday concerns. “Nighthawks” also depicts an unemployed young man using Chicago’s Art Institute bathrooms to prepare for fruitless job interviews, always drawn past the Impressionists to Edward Hopper’s titular painting. This blend of the mythic and mundane is the key feature of Dybek’s literary neighborhood. And nowhere does he express this better than in the short story “Blight,” from The Coast of Chicago. “Blight” tells of four friends coming of age in Chicago in the late 1950s and early 1960s, searching for a sense of identity and place after their neighborhood “was declared an official blight area” (1991, 42). Where so much of the Chicago tradition sees the city as inherently limiting, for Dybek’s characters it is a grid of possibilities. They transform the industrial viaducts
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and abandoned cars so symbolic of urban decay into improvisational musical instruments, and explore the city from one end to the other, in search of beauty, moments of ecstasy inspired by art and architecture, and the presence of the natural world within the built environment. By being open to the beauty of the urban landscape and the memories it offers and withholds, Dybek’s characters achieve fleeting moments of aesthetic transcendence. Throughout his fiction – and his poetry and memoirs – Dybek also offers such moments to his readers. SEE ALSO: Algren, Nelson (AF); Anderson, Sherwood (AF); The City in Fiction (AF); Farrell, James T. (AF); Joyce, James (BIF); Wright, Richard (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READING Dybek, S. (1980). Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. New York: Viking. Dybek, S. (1991). The Coast of Chicago. Boston: Faber and Faber. Dybek, S. (2003). I Sailed with Magellan. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Dybek, S. (1979). Brass Knuckles. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Dybek, S. (2004). Streets in Their Own Ink. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Rotella, C. (1998). October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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E Elkin, Stanley PETER J. BAILEY
If being a “writer’s writer” meant not selling many books, Stanley Elkin wasn’t interested. It was the expansiveness of his imagination and his delight in producing “fierce language” that made him a writer so widely admired and celebrated by his literary contemporaries but that, simultaneously, reduced his accessibility to a popular audience. His reputation as “America’s funniest serious writer” increased his appeal, but Elkin maintained that producing schtick never was his major objective in writing fiction. He was drawn primarily toward “creating a palimpsest of metaphor right there on the page. . . That’s where the fun of writing is for me. . . What I enjoy about fiction – the great gift of fiction – is that it gives language an opportunity to happen” (Bernt & Bernt 16). Between 1964, when he published Boswell: A Modern Comedy, his first novel, and 1995, when Mrs. Ted Bliss appeared, Elkin published 14 works of fiction and an essay collection, Pieces of Soap, all of which gave language extravagant opportunities to happen. Born in Brooklyn in 1930 to Zelda Feldman Elkin and Philip Elkin, a costume jewelry salesman whose mastery of commercial rhetoric significantly influenced the fiction his son would write, Elkin grew up on the South Shore of Chicago. He attended the University of Illinois, where he received his BA and MA. In 1953, he married Joan Marion Jacobson, whose husband he remained for 42 years, dedicating all but three
of his 15 books to her. Elkin spent 1955–7 in the Army, returning to the University of Illinois following his discharge and receiving his PhD in English in 1961. In 1960, Elkin accepted an instructorship at Washington University in St. Louis, commencing an institutional commitment which would continue until his death and would see him named Merle King Professor of Modern Letters in 1983. Because perception and its precise evocation were so central to Elkin’s aesthetic, his characters often experience moments ofextraordinary vision. Jake Greenspahn, a grocer who has recently lost his son in Elkin’s most widely anthologized story, “Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers,” thinks, “Death was an education.. . . On the street, in the store, he saw everything. Everything. It was as if everybody else were made of glass. Why all of a sudden was he like that?” (1965, 9). Ben Flesh, the protagonist of The Franchiser, who very descriptively suffers from the multiple sclerosis that afflicted Elkin, wonders, “where did he get these ideas? how had vision come to perch on his eyes like pince-nez?” (1976, 215). The novel’s implicit answer is that Flesh’s visionary experiences and moments of rhetorical exhilaration are pathologically induced, symptoms of the degeneration of the nervous system that makes the perceptions possible. When Ellerbee dies and rises to Heaven in Elkin’s most popular novel, The Living End, he notices a change in both his perception and his language: the angel of death reminds Ellerbee that, when he was on earth, he had a vocabulary of 1700–1800 words, before asking him, “Who am I?”
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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ELKIN, STANLEY
“An eschatological angel,” Ellerbee said shyly. “One hundred percent,” the angel of death said. “Why do we do that?” “To heighten perception,” Ellerbee said, and shuddered. (1979, 25) “Heightened perception” is both the means and the end of much of Elkin’s fiction, which was no less interested in precisely depicting unrealities (for example, the neurological illusions generated by Ben Flesh’s disease) as it was committed to reproducing the shop talk of the everyday world (such as Dick Gibson’s radio apprenticeship in The Dick Gibson Show or the mayoral duties of Bobbo Druff in The MacGuffin). Elkin insisted that George Mills, his most ambitious novel and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1983, had been so exhausting to compose – seven years in the writing – that it was the last fiction he’d ever write. The novel followed the blue-collar Millses over 10 centuries and through four countries, creating Elkin’s most lavish and expansive literary stage upon which to make language happen. Watching a British TV news report about doomed children visiting Disney World, however, confounded his resolution to cease writing fiction, and Stanley Elkin’s The Magic Kingdom resulted. In memory of his son, whom he had subjected to endless medical procedures in the futile hope of saving his life, Eddy Bale organizes a “dream holiday” to Disney World for seven fatally ill children. The children find little magical in this kingdom, but it inspired from Elkin a level of magic realism only fragmentally present in his novels outside The Living End, while prompting him, in contrast to his practice of remaining within his protagonist’s point of view, to enter the perspectives of all the adults and children traveling to Florida, creating a textured fabric of funny and deeply sympathetic characters. If The Magic Kingdom has become Elkin’s most respected novel, it is also because, like The Franchiser and sections of George Mills, it addresses the theme that gradually eclipsed language as Elkin’s central literary preoccupation. As the physician accompanying the dying kids to Disney World reflects, “Disease, not health, was at the core of things; his idea of pith and gist and soul obsolete now, revised downward to flaw, nubbin, rift; incipient sickness the seed which sent forth its
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contaged shoots raging through the poisoned circuits of being” (1985, 64). SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Jewish Fiction (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bailey, P. J. (1985). Reading Stanley Elkin. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Bailey, P. J. (1995). “A Hat Where There Never Was a Hat”: Stanley Elkin’s Fifteenth Interview [in Elkin special issue]. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 15, 15–26. Bernt, P., & Bernt, J. (1976). Stanley Elkin on Fiction: An Interview. Prairie Schooner, 50(1), 14–25. Dougherty, D. C. (1991). Stanley Elkin. Boston: Twayne. Duncan, J. L. (1976). A Conversation With Stanley Elkin and William H. Gass. Iowa Review, 7(1), 48–76. Elkin, S. (1964). Boswell: A Modern Comedy. New York: Random House. Elkin, S. (1965). Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers. New York: Random House. Elkin, S. (1967). A Bad Man. New York: Random House. Elkin, S. (1971). The Dick Gibson Show. New York: Random House. Elkin, S. (1976). The Franchiser. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Elkin, S. (1979). The Living End. New York: E. P. Dutton. Elkin, S. (1982). George Mills. New York: E. P. Dutton. Elkin, S. (1985). Stanley Elkin’s The Magic Kingdom. New York: E. P. Dutton. Elkin, S. (1991). The MacGuffin. New York: Simon and Schuster. Elkin, S. (1995). Mrs. Ted Bliss. New York: Hyperion. LeClair, T. (1976). Stanley Elkin: The Art of Fiction LXI. Paris Review, 66, 54–86. O’Donnell, P. (1986). The Wor(l)d Made Flesh: Stanley Elkin’s The Franchiser. In Passionate Doubts: Designs of Interpretation in Contemporary American Fiction. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Sanders, S. (1975). An Interview With Stanley Elkin. Contemporary Literature, 16(2), 131–45. Wilde, A. (1981). A Map of Suspensiveness: Irony in the Postmodern Age. In Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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ELLISON, RALPH
Ellison, Ralph CHAUNCEY RIDLEY
Despite a distinguished and vastly more prolific career as an essayist, Ralph Ellison is best known as a novelist. Rarely in any tradition has an author’s first and only novel achieved the enduring eminence of Invisible Man. Published in March 1952, it won the 1953 National Book Award. In 1965, a Book Week poll voted it the post-World War II novel most likely to endure: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita took second, followed by J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye; Saul Bellow was voted the most important novelist. In 1978, a Wilson Quarterly poll affirmed the Book Week results by voting Invisible Man the most distinguished American novel since World War II. By 2002, it had been translated into 20 languages, and over a million copies had been sold since Ellison’s death on April 16, 1994. He was planning a second novel as early as 1951, and the first published fragment, “And Hickman Arrives,” appeared nine years later in the inaugural issue of Saul Bellow’s journal, The Noble Savage (1960). By 1967, other journals had published six additional fragments, and Ellison felt nearly satisfied with one novel distilled from part of an envisioned three-volume novel, but a house fire destroyed the only copy of that hardwon distillation. He never again came so close to completing a second novel, although for the remainder of his life, he continued to revise and expand that three-volume opus. From the middle section of that work, John F. Callahan – his literary executor – cobbled together Juneteenth (1999), the title taken from a fragment serialized in two issues of Quarterly Review of Literature (1965a). From 1937 to the end of his life, Ellison published 75 signed essays, reviews, and keynote addresses, collecting nearly half in Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (1995) appeared posthumously. Edited by Callahan, it includes a preface by Saul Bellow, all of Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory, and 20 previously uncollected or unpublished essays. Born to Lewis and Ida Ellison on March 1, 1913 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Ralph Waldo Ellison was named after Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803–82), the abolitionist, poet, and transcendentalist philosopher highly esteemed among educated African Americans aspiring to the middle class at the turn of the twentieth century. Then, Lewis Ellison’s accidental death in 1916 plunged Ida, Ralph, and Ida’s newborn, Herbert, into poverty. Forty-eight years later, from a lectern at the Library of Congress, Ralph redeemed that middle-class gesture of naming in the address, “Hidden Name and Complex Fate: A Writer’s Experience in the United States” (1964), a confidently self-mocking meditation upon his own and America’s efforts to live up to the hopes and history resonant in their names. In the meantime, Ida, although educated, became a maid to support the family, which was forced to move, often suddenly, to poorer neighborhoods and new school districts, delaying Ralph’s progress through elementary school. By 1924, Ida had buried a second husband and married a third (she died in 1937), but Ralph retained his father’s name, and his last moments with Lewis Ellison haunt the surreal rapture of violent ritual in “Tell It Like It Is, Baby” published in The Nation (1965b) and reprinted in The Collected Essays. Although generally an average student, he excelled at the trumpet through Oklahoma City’s impressive Frederick Douglass High School music program, winning a music scholarship to Tuskegee University in 1932. For lack of travel funds, he hopped freight trains, arriving on campus with two head wounds due to trouble with “bulls,” that is, railroad security. He never disclosed further details, but his rough passage from Oklahoma to Alabama inspired his first known short story, “Hymie’s Bull” (1937), written in Harlem. He made no apparent effort to write for publication in college, yet he voraciously read literature and criticism from the library, a habit cultivated since childhood, when he pored over copies of Vanity Fair Ida brought home from cleaning jobs. In 1936, incidental to shifting his emphasis from performance to orchestral composition, he lost his scholarship. He then moved to New York City to earn tuition money. There, through Alain Locke, he met, impressed, and befriended poet Langston Hughes, who widened his literary horizons. Ellison also showed promise as a sculptor,
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ELLISON, RALPH
completing two busts and starting a torso during several glamorous weeks as Richmond Barthe’s first protege. He never resumed his music studies, although he is one of the founders of jazz criticism, and his celebrated essay “The Little Man at Chehaw Station” (1977) pays homage to his mentor at Tuskegee, concert pianist Hazel Harrison. In 1937, Hughes brokered him an introduction to Richard Wright. With some distinctive poems to his name, with “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (1937) hot off the typewriter, and with the unsold manuscript of Cesspool (published posthumously as Lawd Today) in his briefcase, Wright recently had left Chicago to assume leadership of the Harlem Bureau of the Daily Worker and of the journal New Challenge. Within three years, after Uncle Tom’s Children (1939) and Native Son (1940), Wright would become one of the most famous writers of his generation. Impressed by Ellison’s fluent grasp of American and European literature, Wright mentored him, shared drafts of works in progress, and assigned him a book review – of Waters Turpin’s These Low Grounds – appearing in the inaugural issue of New Challenge (1937). When Wright persuaded him to attempt a short story, he wrote “Hymie’s Bull,” slated to appear in the second issue, but New Challenge folded abruptly; the story appears posthumously in Flying Home and Other Stories (1996). His apparently effortless transition from music and sculpture to polished, professional prose indicates that he learned more from castoff copies of Vanity Fair, the dated collection of reference books and Readers Digest at the Oklahoma City library annex for Negroes (housed in a former pool hall), and three years at Tuskegee than anyone free to use Oklahoma City’s state-of-the-art Carnegie Public Library, which remained “whites only” throughout Ellison’s youth. By 1938, he was working for the Federal Writers’ Project and freelancing reviews and stories. Appearing in Direction (September 1939), his first published story, “Slick Gonna Learn,” is most significant for its independence from the Manichaean racial vision often attributed to Wright. Slick, a name implying a talent for getting into and out of trouble, has been tortured by the racist police who are transporting him to an isolated spot to murder him, when a call for all cars to put
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down a riot in town interrupts. The cops race off after dumping him, bleeding and broken, onto the pavement. Then, a white truck driver rescues him, the story’s title implying that Slick’s confusion before the racially irreconcilable conduct of the white police and white truck driver is temporary. By 1944, Ellison had published 20 reviews and seven short stories and coedited four issues of Negro Quarterly. “Flying Home,” his most important story of that period, appeared in Edwin Seaver’s Cross-Section: A Collection of New American Writing (1944) in the company of Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground, Arthur Miller’s The Man Who Had All the Luck, and an early fragment of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and The Dead. Of all his early fiction, the one that best anticipates the comedy of Invisible Man, “Flying Home,” redeems Todd – an unjustly maligned and abused Tuskegee airman – not with rage or pathos, but with a sharecropper’s bluesy anecdote and the cathartic mockery of a surreal little laughing man, artistically complementing Ellison’s evolving blues aesthetic theory. In June 1941, at the Fourth American Writers’ Congress, he surmised that the blues lyric was a profoundly cathartic tragic form, a theory greeted with derision by Communist Party conference organizers. Later, in his famous review of Black Boy, “Richard Wright’s Blues” (1945), he more confidently formulates the blues impulse to finger the jagged grain of open wounds and transform the ensuing laughter-through-tears into cathartic, tragicomic lyricism. This elegantly calls to mind the structure of many traditional blues lyrics (i.e., retrospective tales or episodes framed by refrains of self-mocking, and 20/20 hindsight). In interviews from the 1950s and 1960s, he credits, especially, the divine laughter in Miguel Unamuno’s A Tragic Sense of Life with helping him to fathom the “deep,” existential meaning of secular, blues laughter-through-tears. His Jamesian introduction to the thirtieth anniversary edition of Invisible Man (1981) offers a more figurative account of how experience too tragic for tears yields his discovery of his own blues voice. Invisible Man (1952) is the fullest artistic flowering of that blues aesthetic. Unmarked by a name, the hero-narrator’s prologue and epilogue frame his first-person, retrospective narrative with self-mocking hindsight: cognizance of
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ELLISON, RALPH
his complicity in his own psychic and physical wounding. Thus, he fingers the jagged grain of those wounds and, to paraphrase Ellison’s “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” (1958), the ensuing laughter-through-tears transforms his ethical descent into a process of rising to self-critical insight and authentic agency. The prologue opens with the hero complaining that, above ground, he is invisible because others refuse to see past the color of his skin, so for a while he has resided underground in an abandoned and brightly lit coal cellar (powered by electricity stolen from Monopolated Power and Light). Then sloe gin, grass, and a recording of Louis Armstrong’s “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?” induce a surreal vision: a hellfire-anddamnation preacher affirming that blackness, indeed, plunges one into the Melvillean whale’s belly of binary racial consciousness yet dismissing blackness as an essence preceding existence. The prologue closes with the hero’s callow query, “What did I do to be so blue?” His story follows, rife with laughter (of his grandfather, the drunken veteran in a roadhouse, those attending his surreal castration scene, etc.) mocking his avid pursuit of any orthodoxy – millionaire trustees at one moment and communists the next – that might launch him as a national leader. Thus, he awakens to the nightmare he has made of his existence. Dostoevsky’s antihero in Notes From the Underground being an obvious precursor to the voice from underground addressing the surface world, European writers’ further influence is evident in that narrative’s rewriting of the picaresque. Alienated and adrift in a world of random encounters and multiple setbacks, invisible man wanders through a series of episodic adventures, encountering memorable characters along the way – such as the self-serving college president A. Herbert Bledsoe, the socially conscious Mary Rambo, the tragic Tod Clifton, the indomitable Ras the Exhorter/Destroyer, and the members of the Brotherhood. Nevertheless, reminiscent of jazz or blues flights of improvisation that return to repeating, thematic refrains, each hopeful new prospect collapses into violent farce due to the same inauthentic motives: each a verse, so to speak, in his picaresque blues narrative. By the epilogue, now eschewing all orthodoxy, rank, or any other limit, his self-abnegating innocence is behind him. Before him is boundless
existential freedom, and hence responsibility: his decision to undertake a socially responsible role back in the world foreshadowed by the sharecropper, Jim Trueblood, of all people. After fleeing several hours into the deep forest following his “dream sin” of raping his daughter in his sleep, Trueblood collapses in fatigue and shame, then sings a soulful blues, whereupon he rises to assume full responsibility for his crime. He returns home, risks lynching and prison, endures daily rigid scorn both within and outside his home, and pursues an absurd career as a one-man freak show: the pariah, on display most days outside his log cabin, netting large tips to support his family in return for recounting his tale of crime and blues redemption to whites less interested in cathartic aesthetics and ethics than details of bestial black lust. The final words of the epilogue do not disclose the hero’s imminent socially responsible role. Rather, they ponder the universal significance of the self-mocking blues singer that restores the will to face the world by purging, not sin, but the self-abnegating and socially toxic innocence of unexamined lives. Hickman, the itinerant black preacher in Juneteenth, is also prone to blues laughter issuing from knowledge too tragic for tears, but most emphatic in that novel is its dialogic meditation on America’s love/hate race relations. An imaginatively indirect, Faulknerian dialogue between Hickman and the white senator, Bliss – an effectively comatose victim of an assassination attempt – recollects the extreme gesture of Bliss’s mother; out of regret for a brutal racist incident, she hands over her white infant boy to Hickman for upbringing. The dialogue recalls Bliss’s mimicry of Hickman’s signature black style of ministry, by means of which he becomes a charismatic child preacher and, decades later, a racist senator. Thus, no less than “optic white” paint (the whitest manufactured pigment in Invisible Man) is a result of Lucius Brockway’s secret drops of a black catalyst that seem to grow blacker before mixed into each gallon, Bliss’s racist articulation of white difference derives from signature black rhetorical sources. Bliss calls to mind another crucial figure in Invisible Man, the chameleon Bliss Proteus Rinehart, no less an aesthetically beautiful yet pitiless embodiment of the American melting pot:
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ELLISON, RALPH
a coldhearted pimp, reverend, runner, gambler, briber, lover, and so on who thrives in ceaseless transformation. The ambivalence of Bliss and Rinehart connotes the melting pot’s ambivalence; more an impersonal, democracy-prodded force than a pluralistic ideal, the melting pot facilitates spectacular transformations and interweavings of diverse peoples while inflaming fears of gross miscegenations and other crises of tribal identity, which the cynical and self-serving can exploit. Ellison considered the hopes and hazards of the melting pot for decades, most notably in his American Book Award address, “Brave Words on a Startling Occasion” (1953), and the essays “The Novel as a Function of American Democracy” (1967) and “The Little Man at Chehaw Station” (1977). From within that tension, he evolves general ethics and aesthetics. In his “Address at the Whiting Foundation” (1992), he ethically challenges novelists to help a racially divided nation live up to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights: touchstones of the conviction that, here, social categories are open and one is not only presumed free to transform oneself but also encouraged to do so. Aesthetically, his prose aspires to an eclectic range of experience and erudition, for the ubiquitous and preeminently American little man at Chehaw Station, as a reader, demands revelations of the fluid, ever-shifting interconnections between the diverse wellsprings of American identity. One of the founders of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and National Public Broadcasting (NPR/PBS), Ellison was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1964. President Lyndon Johnson awarded him the Medal of Freedom in 1969. The following year, Andre Malraux, then French minister of culture, dubbed him Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Five years later, Oklahoma City opened the Ralph Waldo Ellison Library and, in 1985, President Ronald Reagan awarded him the National Medal of the Arts. SEE ALSO: Baldwin, James (AF); Bellow, Saul (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Hughes, Langston (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF); The Road Novel (AF); WPA and Popular Front Fiction (AF); Wright, Richard (AF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Note: All cited essays are reprinted in Ellison (2003). Baker, H. A. (1984). The Blues, Ideology, and Afro American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bloom, H. (ed.) (1986). Modern Critical Views: Ralph Ellison. New York: Chelsea House. Byerman, K. (1986). Fingering the Jagged Grain. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Dostoevsky, F. (1961). Notes From the Underground. New York: Signet. Ellison, R. W. (1937). Creative and Cultural Lag. New Challenge, 2, 90–1. Ellison, R. W. (1939). Slick Gonna Learn. Direction, 2 (5), 10–11, 14, 16. Ellison, R. W. (1944). In a Strange Country. Tomorrow, 3, 41–44. Ellison, R. W. (1960). And Hickman Arrives. The Noble Savage, 1, 5–49. Ellison, R. W. (1964). Shadow and Act. New York: Random House. Ellison, R. W. (1965a). Juneteenth. Quarterly Review of Literature, 13(3–4). Ellison, R. W. (1981). Invisible Man. New York: Vintage. Ellison, R. W. (1986). Going to the Territory. New York: Random House. Ellison, R. W. (1996). Flying Home and Other Stories (ed. J. Callahan). New York: Random House. Ellison, R. W. (1999). Juneteenth (ed. J. Callahan). New York: Random House. Ellison, R. W. (2003). The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (ed. J. Callahan). New York: Modern Library. Ellison, R. W., & Murray, A. (2000). Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. New York: Modern Library. Graham, M. (ed.) (1995). Conversations With Ralph Ellison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Jackson, L. P. (2002). Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius. New York: John Wiley. Posnock, R. (ed.) (2005). The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rampersand, A. (2007). Ralph Ellison: A Biography. New York: Knopf. Seaver, E. (ed.) (1944). Cross-Section: A Collection of New American Writing. New York City: L. B. Fischer. Steele, S. (1976). Ralph Ellison’s Blues. Journal of Black Studies, 7(2), 151–68. Turpin, W. (1937). These Low Grounds. New York: Harper. Unamuno, M. (1972). A Tragic Sense of Life (trans. A. Kerrigan). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Wright, J. S. (2006). Shadowing Ralph Ellison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Wright, R. N. (1937). Blueprint for Negro Writing. New Challenge, 1, 53–65.
Ellroy, James CAROLE ALLAMAND
James Ellroy’s panoptic study of corruption far exceeds the boundaries of noir fiction. Beginning with Brown’s Requiem in 1981, his novels have gradually broadened in scope, moving away from the inner world of psychopaths to reveal the underworld of twentieth-century America. Born on March 4, 1948 in Los Angeles, Lee Earle Ellroy is no stranger to society’s darkest corners. When he was 10, his mother’s partially undressed body was found in a bush near their home in El Monte, a stocking wrapped around her neck. After his father’s death in 1965 and successive expulsions from high school, the Army, and his apartment, Ellroy drifted into vagrancy and petty crime. His twisted journey through LA parks, slums, rehab clinics, and jails, from Jean Ellroy’s unsolved murder to a career as a crime fiction writer, is depicted in his memoir My Dark Places. Even when they were centered on murder cases, Ellroy’s early plots challenge the hard-boiled genre with their relentless subversion of the distinction between law enforcers and lawbreakers. Inspired by Joseph Wambaugh’s realistic depiction of urban life and human weakness, Ellroy’s seedy streets rarely fail to corrupt those who walk them. Burglary, perjury, and assault are daily routine for officers who, like L.A. Noir’s Lloyd Hopkins, sometimes kill in the name of justice. The line between heroes and villains is further blurred as Ellroy’s cops often share a traumatic past with the killers they pursue. Both “Crazy Lloyd” and the “Hollywood Slaughterer” were raped as youths, while Jacob Herzog, Because the Night’s legendary policeman, falls prey to his mirror image, the mad psychiatrist John Havilland, himself the son of a sadistic killer. If this keen interest in his characters’ early life experiences, reminiscent of Ross Macdonald, gives Ellroy’s investigations the depth of psychopathology, it also uncovers the personal motives behind all police work that ultimately compromise true case
resolution. With bleaker endings than Dashiell Hammett’s, Ellroy’s novels attest to the impossibility of order and closure. Ellroy’s widely acclaimed The Black Dahlia offers a fictional resolution to the gruesome 1947 murder of aspiring actress Elizabeth Short, Jean Ellroy’s admitted “symbiotic substitute.” Taking corruption a step further, the opening volume of the L.A. Quartet is the harrowing tale of cops losing not only their integrity, but their minds and lives as well. Warped by guilt over harming or failing to save a loved one, LAPD partners Dwight “Bucky” Bleichert and Lee Blanchard perpetuate the very injustice they seek to expiate. Blowing immorality up to mythical proportions, the Quartet works hard – too hard for some – at dismantling the great taboos of Western culture through its array of incestuous relationships, graphic scenes of dismemberment or disfiguration, and episodes of cannibalism and infanticide. The Black Dahlia also marks a shift in Ellroy’s literary career as historical events and personages are woven into the novel’s thread, in this case with the Zoot Suit Riots and Hollywood’s backstage. Foraying deeper into institutional bribery, the entertainment business, and city planning, The Big Nowhere laces together the 1950s Red Scare and a conspiracy between organized crime and the police, while L.A. Confidential and White Jazz imagine the fraudulent foundation of LA landmarks such as Disneyland, the California freeway system, and Dodgers Stadium. As politics move to the fore of this ambitious chronicle, it is exposed as a collusion of grudge, greed, and prejudice. To depict this intricate network of interests, Ellroy creates polyphonic narratives where multiple points of view are expressed through registers ranging from tabloid prose to police communication, from 1950s gangster slang to ethnic speech. The need to shorten the manuscript of L.A. Confidential, the cycle’s most complex novel, allegedly spurred Ellroy’s use of a terser style consisting of short declarative sentences and hyperfocalized narration. This staccato prose is pushed to an experimental, if not dissuasive, level in White Jazz, Ellroy’s last ode to the City of Fallen Angels. “America was never innocent,” Ellroy declares in his preface of American Tabloid, a masterful demythicization of the Camelot years. The plot,
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ERDRICH, LOUISE
spanning 1958 to 1963, follows two FBI agents and one ex-cop through the conspiracies and crimes behind the Bay of Pigs and, ultimately, JFK’s assassination. Devoted to “the unsung legbreakers of history,” the first volume of Underworld U.S.A. projects the corruption that plagued the LAPD onto the CIA, the FBI, and the White House while retaining Ellroy’s hallmarks: a three-strand plot involving morally unredeemable agents haunted by their past and a telegraphic or documentary style fashioned after news headlines, conversation transcripts, or official records. The Cold Six Thousand continues to expose politics as crime, through Vegas casinos and CIA-sponsored heroin labs in Vietnam, during the five years that led to the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. The last installment of Ellroy’s alternate history of America, Blood’s a Rover (2009), should secure his place, next to Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, and Thomas Pynchon, among the most provocative voices in contemporary American literature. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Hammett, Dashiell (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Mystery/Detective/Crime Fiction (BIF); Noir Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Allamand, C. (2006). A Tooth for a Private Eye: James Ellroy’s Detective Fiction. Journal of Popular Culture, 39(3), 349–64. Cohen, J. (1996). James Ellroy, Los Angeles and the Spectacular Crisis of Masculinity. Women: A Cultural Review, 7(1), 1–15. Ellroy, J. (1981). Brown’s Requiem. New York: Avon. Ellroy, J. (1982). Clandestine. New York: Avon. Ellroy, J. (1984a). L. A. Noir or the Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy, vol. 1: Blood on the Moon. New York: Mysterious Press. Ellroy, J. (1984b). L. A. Noir or the Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy, vol. 2: Because the Night. New York: Mysterious Press. Ellroy, J. (1986a). A Killer on the Road. New York: Avon. Ellroy, J. (1986b). L. A. Noir or the Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy, vol. 3: Suicide Hill. New York: Mysterious Press. Ellroy, J. (1987). L. A. Quartet, vol. 1: The Black Dahlia. New York: Mysterious Press.
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Ellroy, J. (1988). L. A. Quartet, vol. 2: The Big Nowhere. New York: Mysterious Press. Ellroy, J. (1990). L. A. Quartet, vol. 3: L.A. Confidential. New York: Knopf. Ellroy, J. (1992). L. A. Quartet, vol. 4: White Jazz. New York: Knopf. Ellroy, J. (1995). Underworld U.S.A., vol. 1: American Tabloid. New York: Knopf. Ellroy, J. (1996). My Dark Places. New York: Knopf. Ellroy, J. (2001). Underworld U.S.A., vol. 2: The Cold Six Thousand. New York: Knopf. Ellroy, J. (2009). Underworld U.S.A., vol. 3: Blood’s a Rover. New York: Knopf. Horsley, L. (1998). Founding Fathers: “Genealogies of Violence” in James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet. Clues: A Journal of Detection, 19(1), 139–61. Jayanti, V. (2003). James Ellroy’s Feast of Death. Asheville, NC: Dokument Films. Silet, C. P. (1995). Mad Dog and Glory: A Conversation with James Ellroy. Armchair Detective, 28(3), 238–44. Wolfe, P. (2005). Like Hot Knives to The Brain: James Ellroy’s Search for Himself. Lanham, MD: Lexington.
Erdrich, Louise NANCY J. PETERSON
Louise Erdrich’s compelling portrayal of contemporary urban and reservation Ojibwe characters has earned her a central place in the Native American literary renaissance that began in 1969, when N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa) won the Pulitzer Prize and inspired a generation of Native writers. From 1984 to 2008, Erdrich has published 12 novels, two memoirs, three volumes of poetry, as well as three young-adult novels and a picture book geared for younger readers. Erdrich is a prolific and accomplished chronicler of stories involving Ojibwe characters and their neighbors, on and off the reservation, and she is also highly regarded as a stylist, noted for the lyrical prose rhythms of her novels. Born Karen Louise Erdrich in Little Falls, Minnesota on June 7, 1954, Erdrich is Ojibwe (Turtle Mountain Band) on her mother’s side and German on her father’s side. Erdrich grew up mostly in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her parents were employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In 1972, Erdrich was in the first class of women to be admitted to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire; there she met Michael Dorris
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(Modoc), a faculty member in anthropology who founded the Native Studies program. Erdrich and Dorris married in 1981, and were co-authors and collaborators until their marriage failed and Dorris committed suicide in 1997. Erdrich’s first novel, Love Medicine (1993 [1984]), was published to great acclaim. It introduces several major families – the Kashpaws, Pillagers, Lamartines, Nanapushes, and Lazarres – that reappear in other novels. It focuses on the generation coming of age in the 1980s but flashes back to episodes set 40 and 50 years earlier to weave a series of connections that have shaped presentday conflicts and crises, both personal and tribal. The Beet Queen (1986) focuses primarily on the town of Argus, adjacent to the reservation, but for her subsequent novels – Tracks (1988), The Bingo Palace (1994), and Tales of Burning Love (1996) – Erdrich develops stories related to the Ojibwe families and characters introduced in Love Medicine. Like Toni Morrison, Erdrich has been influenced by the interlinked characters and stories of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. In Erdrich’s North Dakota, the casinos and Native communities of the reservation adjoin the beet fields and butcher shops of towns settled primarily by German immigrants. Like Faulkner’s Snopeses, Bundrens, and Compsons, Erdrich’s Morrisseys, Nanapushes, and Kashpaws lead complicated daily lives that take on epic dimensions and come to represent the history of an entire region. Also, like Faulkner, Erdrich has forged her own distinctive literary style: she employs a lyricism that heightens the meaningfulness and potency of even the most ordinary objects and circumstances. Critics have admired Erdrich’s ability to juxtapose the real and the magical, the ordinary and the strange, the historical and the mythical. While some readers have described her fiction as employing aspects of magic realism, Erdrich’s later novels often include notes pointing to a historical or factual basis for some extraordinary elements. Because of Erdrich’s adept ability to create novels that shift fluidly from present to past and back again, as well as her tendency to employ multiple narrative perspectives in one novel, some of Erdrich’s work falls under what scholars have termed “historiographic metafiction.” Erdrich is concerned with the way that Native American
history has been marginalized, and the loss of Ojibwe traditions, language, and land forms a central theme in her novels. In 1998, Erdrich published The Antelope Wife, a novel set in Minneapolis, Minnesota and the first of her novels not to focus on the families introduced in Love Medicine. Since then, Erdrich has published five other novels, two that extend the stories of characters introduced in previous novels (The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse and Four Souls), and three others that focus on new characters (The Master Butchers Singing Club, The Painted Drum, and The Plague of Doves). In all of her work, Erdrich creates a strong sense of place (location and time) that shapes her characters in significant ways, she portrays the pull of love and desire in sometimes astonishing ways, she develops a fierce critique of injustice, and she leavens her most serious episodes with moments of humor. The thread that links all of her characters – Natives and non-Natives alike – is their endurance and tenacity. Throughout her works, Erdrich portrays tremendous hardships and disappointments, but her emphasis lies firmly on what enables people to survive. Erdrich has also written two memoirs: The Blue Jay’s Dance chronicles her struggle to balance motherhood and her work as a writer, while Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country narrates a physical and spiritual journey into the islands and waters lying between northern Minnesota and Ontario. Erdrich brings the accomplished lyrical prose style and the marvelous storytelling ability of her novels into these non-fiction works. SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Faulkner, William (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Momaday, N. Scott (AF); Morrison, Toni (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Beidler, P. G., & Barton, G. (2006). A Reader’s Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich, rev. edn. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Chavkin, A. (ed.) (1999). The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Chavkin, A., & Chavkin, N. F. (eds.) (1994). Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
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Erdrich, L. (1986). The Beet Queen. New York: Henry Holt. Erdrich, L. (1988). Tracks. New York: Harper. Erdrich, L. (with Dorris, M.) (1991). The Crown of Columbus. New York: HarperCollins. Erdrich, L. (1993). Love Medicine [1984]. New York: Henry Holt. Erdrich, L. (1994). The Bingo Palace. New York: HarperCollins. Erdrich, L. (1995). The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year. New York: HarperCollins. Erdrich, L. (1996). Tales of Burning Love. New York: HarperCollins. Erdrich, L. (1998). The Antelope Wife. New York: HarperFlamingo. Erdrich, L. (2001). The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. New York: HarperCollins. Erdrich, L. (2003a). Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country. Washington, DC: National Geographic. Erdrich, L. (2003b). The Master Butchers Singing Club. New York: HarperCollins. Erdrich, L. (2004). Four Souls. New York: HarperCollins. Erdrich, L. (2005). The Painted Drum. New York: HarperCollins. Erdrich, L. (2008). The Plague of Doves. New York: HarperCollins. Hollrah, P. E. M. (2004). “The Old Lady Trill, the Victory Yell”: The Power of Women in Native American Literature. New York: Routledge. Peterson, N. J. (2001). Against Amnesia: Contemporary Women Writers and the Crises of Historical Memory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Wong, H. D. S. (ed.) (2000). Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ethnicity and Fiction VICTOR BASCARA
Ethnicity, as an idea, forms a productive throughline for the literary history of twentieth-century American fiction. The changing fate of ethnicity, whether it is celebrated, assimilated away, or futilely eschewed, charts the cultural politics of the American century. In terms of literary movements, ethnicity is commonly associated with realism, naturalism, and regionalism, that is, with literary movements that are presumed to emphasize content over form. Ethnicity, in this way of thinking, functions as a source from which content emanates via an otherwise transparent text.
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And so various elements become visible in the form of ethnic traces – distinct cultural markers and practices that set off an identifiably ethnic group from other groups. A list of those traces would include everything from food, religion, language, and fashion choices to aesthetic priorities, architecture, and kinship structures. But ethnicity is also a vital component of modernist and postmodernist experiments in representation, for ethnicity can be appreciated not only as a source of material but also as an epistemological standpoint that makes manifest the heterogeneity of perspectives that twentieth-century fiction has drawn upon to give critical expression to America. The arc of the twentieth century, viewed from the standpoint of ethnicity, sketches out a hesitant hope for melting-pot uniformity, leading to disillusionment in the face of deep and persistent factionalization. Despite the fact of conspicuous stories of social mobility, even for the ethnically marked, American civilization continued to be materially and ideologically maintained by its historical intersections of class formation and gendered racialization. Out of those ethnic problems, the mid to late twentieth century witnessed the emergence of pluralistic mosaic and salad bowl models. The promises and pitfalls of neoliberal globalization continue to test those models in ever larger frames. Rather than exhaustively catalog the many works that engage with ethnicity and fiction, two influential studies, considered together, may serve as reasonably representative of the critical discourse on the cultural politics of fiction and ethnicity: Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), and Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (1997). Although it emerges from Southeast Asian studies, Anderson’s book has shaped the study of nationalism more broadly through its examination of the epistemologies and institutions that produce national consciousness out of diverse populations across vast geographical terrain. And Lowe’s book, while principally about Asian America, offers far-reaching formulations for tracing the culture of contradiction that emerges when national culture and the US state struggle to imagine community against terms and conditions upon which (late) capitalism has relied, such as race, class, and gender.
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Two related themes then play out through ethnicity in twentieth-century American fiction: the ability or inability to conflate calcified barriers of race into ethnicities that can be shed, and the hopes and horrors that are pinned on the persistence of ethnicity in the face of a mainstream US national consciousness. In appreciating these two themes, we can appreciate the role of fiction in shaping ethnicity and the role of ethnicity in the shaping of fiction. From the turn of the twentieth century to the 1920s, ethnicity falls out of favor as modernist experimentation develops and ascends. While American poetry has generally had more prominence in these experiments, ethnic fiction, particularly stories of immigrant assimilation and other forms of uneasy adjustment, became an important genre in the social institution of the novel. Two experimental, non-fictional texts from the turn of the century threw down a gauntlet to challenge the capacities of fiction: Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1980) and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Riis’s thinly veiled reformist sensibilities and observational acuity, along with photographic documentation, proved every bit as engaging as any invented realities. Indeed, the realness of his subject matter and the vividness and partiality of his narration anticipated everything from the cynical hard-boiled noir detective and postwar alienation to twentieth-century incarnations of the flan^eur and postmodern irony. The great majority of Riis’s subjects were marked by their ethnicity in his study, as indeed they were in social and economic practice. New York becomes a stand-in for the nation and its racial and ethnic “problems.” Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk both embraced and exceeded the methods of the nascent social sciences, especially sociology and anthropology. He infused these methods of analysis with the autobiographical, the historical, and even the musical, giving textual form to an epistemology systematically marginalized and marked as the antithesis to the West’s thesis. Perhaps a third topically pertinent but formally less adventurous text can be added to this list of influential nonfiction renderings of ethnicity at the turn of the century: Theodore Roosevelt’s The Rough Riders. Roosevelt’s narrative holds up an image of diver-
sity of ethnicity amidst sameness of purpose. The Riders can be considered the Platonic ideal of functional American heterogeneity, realized in the form of a military unit of volunteers fighting shoulder to shoulder for the liberation of Cuba from Spanish rule, and to avenge the alleged Spanish sinking of the USS Maine. At the dawn of the twentieth century, these three texts clarify how the form and content of American fiction is integrally linked to the fate of ethnicity. By taking up the issue of how the other half lives, Riis and Du Bois show how “how it feels to be a problem” can mean “how it feels to have ethnicity.” And when fiction takes up these matters, the results test the capacities of representation and of the nation itself. Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives (1909), particularly “Melanctha,” is an instance of experimentation intersecting with ethnicity. The story’s monotonous narration conveys a sense of being trapped in a cycle of reproduced social relations, pathologized as individuated failure. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) concerns, among other things, the familiar trope of American reinvention. And ethnicity is seen as the millstone around the neck of Fitzgerald’s titular Trimalchio of West Egg. The doffing of one ethnicity – contained in the name Gatz – and the donning of another – the more Anglophilic Gatsby – is the classic abortive attempt to outrun one’s roots. In both Stein’s and Fitzgerald’s texts, the genres they take on, short story and novel respectively, are to some extent reinvented to express the experience of ethnicity. The short story and the novel become media of incommensurability and failure, instead of artworks that manage to incorporate the individual into the nation, however elegantly or messily. While neither of these texts is overtly political, they draw on ethnicity to articulate the inequalities and illusions of the American dream for those for whom ethnic difference is a personal characteristic and a historical inheritance. The more overtly political fiction of the early twentieth century, particularly the writing generally associated with literary naturalism, such as Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903), White Fang (1906), and The Sea Wolf (1904); Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906); and Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899) and The Octopus (1901), focuses on the impersonality of a universe that obeys only
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ETHNICITY AND FICTION
the harsh laws of nature. With the notable exception of The Jungle’s Lithuanian American protagonist, overtly ethnic characters do not occupy the center of these narratives. Vaguely unmarked whiteness is reproduced, emphasizing a blankness of character in the face of forces larger than private will and community sentiment. With the onset of the Great Depression and the social upheavals and possibilities that such a crisis brings, ethnicity returns as both a problem and a source of alternative visions at a time when alternative visions are badly needed. California writer John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is the most ironically monumental text about the hard times of the 1930s and 1940s, a period which witnessed an unquestionable flowering of leftist cultural production. The Joads, while not bearing any version of ethnicity tied to Old World traditions (as do, say, the Bohemian Shimerdas of Willa Cather’s prairies in My Antonia [1918]), embody the emergence of a new regionalist ethnicity rooted in New World conditions. As Okies, they fashion an ethnicity forged in both the privations of natural disaster and the man-made dispossession made possible through the failures of finance capitalism to sustain the family farm as a business model. As the Okies migrate westward to California, their ethnicity is made brutally operational as they become the target of exploitation, fear, and hatred; at the same time, they adhere to their identities as a source of community and morality in the face of alienation and immorality. Chicago’s prolific Richard Wright rose to national attention by giving expression to the explosive convergence of regionalism, race, and political economy. His autobiographical Black Boy (1945), especially in its fuller form as American Hunger (1977), his novel Native Son (1940), and his “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” are all searing indictments of the failures of both capitalist-conservative and socialist-progressive positions in American political debates about post-Emancipation, urbanizing African Americans. Bigger Thomas, Wright himself, and the idea of “Negro writing,” provide complex and compelling evidence of the dynamics of racial and ethnic difference and the maintenance of the American underclass. In hindsight, it is possible to see how Wright, even before Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), dramatizes the shift away
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from 1930s socialism as an answer to the problems of American inequality and toward the heterogeneous postwar political coalitions that would usher in the New Left on the ruins of the Old. For some World War II-era writers, the solidarity of the anti-fascist cause makes ethnicity and class position disposable in American fiction. A book like John Hersey’s A Bell for Adano (1944) draws on the trope of the innocent abroad as a vehicle for Americanism. Victor Joppolo is not only an American in occupied Italy, but also an Italian American. He is both knowing and wideeyed, the very embodiment of post-isolationist America. The war may have begun with the winning over of Humphrey Bogart’s expatriate left-winger Rick Blaine in Casablanca, a loyalist participant in the Spanish Civil War and gun runner to Ethiopia, but it ends with the everyman Joppolo, who endures the comical foibles of Italian villagers unlearning fascism with the help of an ethnic American soldier who presages the predicament of the Jack Lemmon-esque postwar middle manager. The early postwar years are known for their fabled conformity and prosperity. Despite and because of this conformity, this era would produce masterpieces of countercultural literature, such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Even J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) taps into the period’s growing skepticism of the overwhelming pressure to adhere to unsustainable social, economic, and political conditions. And, fittingly, those are the texts of that era that were and are celebrated. Kerouac’s motley assemblage of itinerants in Eisenhower’s America is the latest edition of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, an ethnically diverse but ideologically uniform band of siblings. They carry on the tradition of a functional – or at least not dysfunctional – diversity. Holden Caulfield, while about as non-ethnic as one can get, nevertheless continues to reach across the ethnic divide by being discontented with the hypocrisy demanded of him. His failure to reconcile his behavior with his beliefs becomes an analogous form of ineradicable ethnicity that leads to his breakdown. What may seem to be individually pathologized as the failure of one northeastern prep school adolescent becomes a stand-in for any constituency similarly at cross
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purposes with the round hole available to their collective square peg. The continued postwar appeal (and cinematic adaptations) of the noir literature of James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler is of a piece with Holden’s desire to be drawn into the underbelly of the presentable and decidedly non-ethnic America of the Cleavers and Ozzie and Harriet. Sensational and scandalous crime fiction then can be understood as a form of literature about ethnic difference – difference explored not only through the actual depiction of urban diversity but also through the desired disillusionment of mainstream, unmarked America, drawn to the Hades in its midst. Ellison’s Invisible Man is the most sustained and devastating examination of the alienated individual, ethnicity, or class unable to reconcile himself, herself, or itself with the historically sedimented and deeply interested order of things as they are. The unnamed narrator is an African American young man from the South who makes his way from disgrace at a historically black college to prominence in the Brotherhood (the Communist Party) in New York City to a state of isolation and hibernation. The novel’s narrative ends with the race riot that occasioned the narrator’s subterranean occlusion, and an epilogue that speculates on the possibility of the alienated racial/ethnic individual on the threshold of reentering the above-ground world. And on the occasion of the narrator’s return and all that it may symbolize, the era loosely called the 1960s is born. The 1960s, broadly understood, occasions the emergence of the New Left social movements that enshrine ethnicity as a source of power. The much commented-upon flowering of self-determining, self-affirming, identity-based mobilizations in the US would include movements like Black Power, Brown Power, Yellow Power, La Raza, Aztlan, the American Indian Movement, Women’s Liberation, Stonewall/Gay Rights, and the Third World Liberation Front, among others. Ethnic fiction’s role in characterizing and inspiring these times is arguably less central than the power of nonfiction and other art forms such as music, visual art, and film. Key non-fiction works, such as those by Frantz Fanon, Betty Friedan, Herbert Marcuse, Eldridge Cleaver, Truman Capote, and Rachel Carson, were literary and intellectual bombshells
exploding the complacency of the postwar era. Ethnic literature of this era, particularly loosely autobiographical works, gave voice to protest and articulated the contemporary condition and its origins. Paule Marshall’s pioneering Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) tells a coming-of-age story of Selina Boyce, a daughter of Barbadian immigrants in 1930s Brooklyn. As with Marshall’s later fiction, Brown Girl, Brownstones weaves together personal and family dramas with larger economic, social, and historical concerns. Selina rejects her community’s embrace of mainstream, capitalistic ideals and embraces instead a more critical and artistic future. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) is perhaps the great example of this use of autobiographical social protest literature. Widower Atticus Finch, who believes that Tom Robinson will get a fair trial in 1930s Alabama, is the hero of progressive ideals. Lee’s novel manages to avoid saccharine sentimental ideals by having the single dad Finch thoughtfully compromise his ideals in a way that generations of the novel’s readers have approved of. Lee’s novel thus becomes a radical critique of the terms by which raced and classed differences have functional meaning. And it offers a potentially ruthless and devastating solution that shakes enlightenment liberalism to its very foundations. The 1980s and 1990s turn the ethnic empowerment of the 1960s and 1970s into multiculturalism and its defanging of difference, for better or for worse. Ethnicity is seen mainly as a private family matter; over are the days of turning for public and even governmental means to redress racial and ethnic inequalities. The extremely popular writings of Amy Tan, Terry MacMillan, and E. Lynn Harris continue to find a readership that finds these more conservative visions of ethnic difference palatable. Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) was era-defining. It offered four sets of paired stories about mothers and daughters, whose intergenerational tensions and resolutions successfully negotiate the trials and tribulations of being ethnic in America. Here, intrafamilial ethnicity is the source of both the problems and their solutions. Shame about one’s ethnicity in the second generation and shame about one’s immigrant ethnic mother are eventually overcome in an affirmation of being Chinese American. But, broadly speaking, any ethnicity could be imagined as that source of shame-cum-pride.
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ETHNICITY AND FICTION
With the turn of the twenty-first century, ethnicity empowered the fictions of globalized neoliberalism through ethnic cosmopolitanism. But it also demonstrated the limitations of utopian conceptions of a world aligned through markets but deferential to alternative, yet contained, cultural practices. Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1991), with its collage-like form and fever-dream vision of postcolonial Manila, exploited both the capaciousness as well as the limitations of the novel form to represent Philippine and Philippine American conditions. At a moment when a global village ideal was reaching its apex, the representability of ethnicity in American fiction got both a shot in the arm and a shot in the head. Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1998) is similarly epic, taking on the rise and fall of Jewish American industrialist Seymour “Swede” Levov. The story of his life and his ethnicity is a powerful through-line for appreciating the waxing and waning of US industrialization, as postwar urban blight, deindustrialization, Cold War decolonization, and desegregation reach into the life of one Newark-based glove manufacturer. That story, like that of ethnicity in twentiethcentury American fiction more broadly, reads like a tragedy. It remains to be seen whether the twenty-first century will reap the transformative catharsis such a tragedy can produce. SEE ALSO: Gender and the Novel (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Postmodemist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Cain, J. M. (1947). Double Indemnity. New York: Avon. Capote, T. (1994). In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences. New York: Vintage. Carson, R. (1962). Silent Spring. New York: Fawcett Crest. Cather, W. (1988). My Antonia. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Chandler, R. (1992). Farewell, My Lovely. New York: Vintage. Cleaver, E. (1967). Soul on Ice. New York: McGraw-Hill. DuBois, W. E. B. (1999). The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Norton.
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Ellison, R. (2002). Invisible Man. New York: Random House. Fanon, F. (2004). The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Fitzgerald, F. S. (1991). The Great Gatsby. New York: Cambridge University Press. Friedan, B. (1963). The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton. Hagedorn, J. (1990). Dogeaters. New York: Pantheon. Hammett, D. (1974). The Maltese Falcon. New York: Universe. Harris, E. L. (1994). Invisible Life. New York: Anchor. Hersey, J. (1946). A Bell for Adano. New York: Modern Library. Kerouac, J. (1957). On the Road. New York: Viking. Lee, H. (1960). To Kill a Mockingbird. Philadelphia: Lippincott. London, J. (1962). The Call of the Wild. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. London, J. (1973). White Fang. Avon, CT: Heritage. London, J. (1992). The Sea Wolf. New York: Oxford University Press. Lowe, L. (1997). Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. MacMillan, T. (1992). Waiting to Exhale. New York: Washington Square. Marcuse, H. (1964). The One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Societies. Boston: Beacon. Marshall, P. (1959). Brown Girl, Brownstones. New York: Random House. Norris, F. (1982). McTeague: A Story of San Francisco. New York: Penguin. Norris, F. (1986). The Octopus: A Story of California. New York: Penguin. Riis, J. (1997). How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. New York: Penguin. Roosevelt, T. (1961). The Rough Riders. New York: New American Library. Roth, P. (1998). American Pastoral. New York: Vintage. Salinger, J. D. (1994). The Catcher in the Rye. New York: Penguin. Sinclair, U. (1985). The Jungle. New York: Penguin. Stein, G. (1970). Three Lives. New York: Peter Owen. Steinbeck, J. (1976). The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin. Tan, A. (1989). The Joy Luck Club. New York: Putnam’s. Wright, R. (1945). Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth. New York: Harper. Wright, R. (1977). American Hunger. New York: Harper and Row. Wright, R. (2004). Blueprint for Negro Writing. In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: Norton pp. 1403–10.
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EUGENIDES, JEFFREY
Eugenides, Jeffrey PATRICK O’DONNELL
A writer attentive to the eccentricities and hazards of middle-class life and coming of age in America, Jeffrey Eugenides is the author of two novels and a spate of short stories that have catapulted him into visibility as one of the premiere young novelists of the post-1980 generation. Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1960 and raised in the affluent suburb of Grosse Point, Eugenides attended Brown University as an undergraduate (where as an aspiring writer he would have encountered John Hawkes and Robert Coover), and received the MFA in creative writing from Stanford University. He currently resides with his wife and daughter in Princeton, New Jersey. Eugenides’s first novel, The Virgin Suicides (1993), is set in his native Grosse Point. Told from the perspective of an anonymous narrator who grew up with the five daughters of the Lisbon family, the novel is a story of a fall from grace and the false utopia of normalcy. The Lisbons are a Catholic, middle-class family who, to all outward appearances, seem to live quietly successful lives behind the fa¸cade of a well-kept house located in a safe, orderly suburban neighborhood. The five beautiful Lisbon daughters – ranging from the oldest, Therese, who is 17, to the youngest, Cecilia, who is 13 – appear to be happy teenagers, if somewhat mysterious and reclusive, a club unto themselves. But everything changes when Cecilia first attempts a failed suicide by slashing her wrists, then leaps from a window and dies horrifically, impaled on a fence post, suggesting the utter reversal of fortune that has descended upon the Lisbon family and the whitepicket-fence neighborhood of Grosse Point. Following the suicide and the spreading rumors about what caused Cecilia to take her life, the Lisbon family becomes more reclusive even as they become a source of greater attention and fascination to their neighbors. The Lisbon house literally begins to fall apart, and the remaining four girls are rarely seen outside the house (they are taken out of school by their mother in order to help them recover from the tragedy). The narrator, one of a group of teenage boys who form an unofficial club of their own as they become increasingly enamored with
the increasingly mysterious Lisbon daughters, recounts a succession of months in which the boys communicate with the girls by playing records over the phone. In the novel’s stunning climax, the boys are invited to visit the Lisbon girls, but shortly after their arrival, the four Lisbon daughters commit mass suicide (one daughter survives the attempt for a few days, but subsequently dies in the hospital). This inexplicable act of self-destruction haunts the boys’ lives into adulthood, and as the narrator looks back on this traumatic incident of his adolescence, he reflects upon the death of innocence and the potential for destruction lying just beneath the surface of the normal. The Virgin Suicides was made into a film directed by Sofia Coppola in 1999. The illusion of normalcy and the non-normative is also at the center of Middlesex (2002), which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The novel’s narrator and protagonist is Calliope Stephanides, who is born and raised as a girl but who discovers, at the age of 14, that “she” is hermaphroditic (possessing female sex organs but male chromosomes) and who chooses to become male, thus necessitating a complicated and painful operation. In many ways, Middlesex is a mutation of the classic Bildungsroman – the novel of the young man growing up – as it recounts multiple family stories of Cal’s family migrating from a small Greek village to Detroit, and Callie’s youth and adolescence in “Motown” during the 1960s and 1970s. Told from the perspective of Cal at the age of 41, the novel observes the quest for identity under difficult circumstances as Callie/Cal experiences the extremes of gender confusion and the pressure to conform to the expectations and “norms” of the sexuality into which one has been born. Eugenides’s protagonist embodies the idea that one’s gender is both a biological and social construction, and that patterns of behavior and desire are both innate and imposed from without. In paralleling Cal’s story to the story of his grandparents’ immigration to America, the novel also suggests that the family story is one of mutation, adaptation, and assimilation over time – one in which difference and alterity are vital parts. Eugenides’s short stories have appeared in notable venues such as the New Yorker, Granta, Best American Short Stories, and the Pushcart Prize annual. Like his novels, Eugenides’s stories
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EVERETT, PERCIVAL
often reflect the odd interactions of family life beneath the veneer of the everyday, and the ways in which domesticity and normalcy conflict with the idiosyncrasies of identity. Eugenides has also written a number of important introductions to reissues of key contemporary novels, including John Hawkes’s Second Skin, Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, and Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams; he has edited an anthology of short stories entitled My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories From Chekhov to Munro (2008). Eugenides’s non-fiction includes an interest in contemporary photography, and he has contributed to volumes on the German photographer Thomas Demand and the American model architect and photographer James Casebere. Focusing on interiority and perspective, Eugenides is notable amongst contemporary American novelists for his attention to domestic realism and psychological detail while charting the strange adventures of identity, in postmodernist senses, as mutable and always in the process of becoming. SEE ALSO: Coover, Robert (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Hawkes, John (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Cohen, S. (2007). The Novel in a Time of Terror: Middlesex, History, and Contemporary American Fiction. Twentieth Century Literature, 53(3), 371–95. Eugenides, J. (1993). The Virgin Suicides. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Eugenides, J. (1997a). Air Mail. In E. Annie Proulx (ed.), The Best American Short Stories 1997. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Eugenides, J. (1997b). The Speed of Sperm. Granta, 54. At www.granta.com/Magazine/54 (by subscription). Eugenides, J. (1999). Timeshare. In The Pushcart Prize XXIII. New York: Pushcart, pp. 127–38. Eugenides, J. (2002). Middlesex: A Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Eugenides, J. (2005). Early Music. New Yorker, pp. 72–9 (Oct. 10). Miller, L. (2002). Interview with Jeff Eugenides. Salon (Oct. 10). At www.salon.com/audio/interview/2002/ 10/15/eugenides/index.html accessed Jan. 19, 2010.
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Person, L. (2005). Middlesex: What Men Like in Men. American Literary History, 17(4), 753–64. Womack, K., & Mallory-Kani, A. (2007). “Why Don’t You Just Leave It Up to Nature?” An Adaptationist Reading of the Novels of Jeffrey Eugenides. Mosaic, 40(3), 157–74.
Everett, Percival ANNE-LAURE TISSUT
Percival Everett is a novelist whose varied work escapes categories. It is formally inventive, is intellectually challenging, and abounds in crosscultural references, from Greek antiquity to European philosophers via American music, pop culture, history, and current events. He is first and foremost a storyteller whose narratives offer deftly created suspense, often unresolved endings, as well as fully realized figures. His recurring concerns are intolerance, cruelty, the uncertainties of identity, and, more recently, creation and the production of meaning. His canon includes 17 novels, three collections of short stories, a children’s book, and a collection of poems, and has been translated into four languages. Everett was born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1956, and majored in philosophy and biochemistry at the University of Miami. He is the recipient of several literary awards and has served as a judge for many. He currently teaches fiction writing at the University of Southern California. Increasingly his focus is on the functioning – and dysfunctioning – of language as well as on its relation to truth and our perception of reality, in which the major and lasting influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein is evident. From his earliest novels, Everett plays with the vacillation between the real and unreal, thus puzzling readers. While he refuses to be viewed simply as a black writer, his work addresses the issues related to ethnic identity but without focusing on them exclusively. References to the African American literary tradition abound – to Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright – among references to many others, such as Wittgenstein, Roland Barthes, and Greek philosophers. Zulus (1990b) is a futuristic tale with apocalyptic undertones, offering a highly poetic and
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subtle play of language. In a society in which all but one woman have been sterilized, language seems to be the only means left for renewal, as suggested by the introductions to each chapter, consisting in poetic elaborations around the letters of the alphabet taken successively. A number of his novels follow the pattern of detective stories, namely, Walk Me to the Distance (1985), The Body of Martin Aguilera (1994), Watershed (1996), Glyph (1999), and most recently Wounded (2005). Glyph narrates the comic adventures of a baby who will not speak but can read the most complex philosophical treatises and write abstract poems, later published in the collection re: f (gesture). Through the story of his abduction by secret agents who hope to use him as a spy, Everett reflects on the act of signification. Everett regards the novel as that closest to his way of thinking, while he sees Wounded as his most experimental, because he had rarely explored the realistic genre before. Erasure (2001a) is probably his most notorious novel, or at least the book that established him in Europe, and deals with issues of identity and the artist’s dilemma and between creative honesty and compromising one’s art under financial pressures. The question of literary categorization is explicit in this novel: should a rewriting of Greek mythology or tragedies by an African American writer be classified as African American fiction? In The Water Cure (2007), the major questions underlying Everett’s work as a whole come to the fore, such as how meaning is produced. The narrator’s young daughter has been raped and murdered, and he takes revenge upon the presumed culprit by submitting him to water board torture. The novel is a denunciation of the United States’ culture of violence and international military interventions, especially the war in Iraq. The reader is led to wonder about communication and the fact that a man can “make no sense and still have the senselessness of his utterances be true” (2007, 66). In addition to explicitly addressing the issue, the narrator produces paragraphs in a private argot reminiscent of Finnegans Wake. Such questioning is complemented by Everett’s important work as a painter, and his admission that he is drawn to this art form as an alternative to language. Throughout The Water Cure, the reader is compelled to invent new reading modes, which question not only one’s relation to text and
its understanding but also the very notion of genre as an organizing principle. Everett has been investigating all literary genres, from poetry to the epistolary pastiche, with the hilarious A History of the African-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond: As Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid (2006), co-written with James Kincaid, as well as more intellectual and philosophical investigations in Glyph, Erasure, and The Water Cure. His short stories are typically open-ended and surreal, characterized by fantastic accounts of facts. His latest novel, I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2008), plays with the construct of Sidney Poitier and the notions of identity and misunderstandings due to language structures. SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Berben-Masi, J. (2004). Percival Everett’s Glyph. Prisons of the Body Physical, Political and Academic. In M. Fludernik (ed.), In the Grip of the Law: Trials, Prisons and the Space Between (intro. M. Fludernik). Frankfurt: Peter Lang, pp. 223–39. Eaton, K. (2006). Deconstructing the Narrative, Language, Genre, and Experience in Erasure. Nebula, 3(2–3), 220–32. Everett, P. (1990a). For Her Dark Skin. Seattle: Owl Creek. Everett, P. (1990b). Zulus. Sag Harbor, NY: Permanent Press. Everett, P. (1997). Frenzy. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf. Everett, P. (1999). Glyph. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf. Everett, P. (2001a). Erasure. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Everett, P. (2001b). Grand Canyon, Inc. San Francisco: Versus. Everett, P. (2004a). American Desert. New York: Hyperion. Everett, P. (2004b). A History of the African-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond: As Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid. New York: Akashic. Everett, P. (2005). Wounded. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf. Everett, P. (2006). re: f (gesture). Los Angeles: Red Hen. Everett, P. (2007). The Water Cure. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf. Everett, P. (2008). I Am Not Sidney Poitier. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf.
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Julien, C., & Tissut, A.-L. (eds.) (2007). Reading Percival Everett: European Perspectives. Tours, France: PUFR. Kincaid, J. (ed.) (2005). Percival Everett [special issue]. Callalloo, 28(2), 292–381. Maniez, C., & Tissut, A.-L. (eds.) (2007). Percival Everett: Transatlantic Readings. Paris: Le Manuscrit. Ramsey, W. M. (2005). Knowing Their Place: Three Black Writers and the Postmodern South. Southern Literary Journal, 37(2), 119–39. Sanchez-Arce, A. M. (2007). “Authenticism,” or the Authority of Authenticity. Mosaic, 40(3), 139–55.
Expatriate Fiction MATTHEW HART
At its simplest, the term “expatriate fiction” identifies narratives written by Americans who happen to live overseas; more narrowly, it refers to fiction in which the fact of an author’s residence abroad is matched by a concern with how modern life is shaped by the crossing of national borders and the interaction of diverse cultures. An example of the first type is Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911), which despite its New England setting was written in France (and begun as a French-language composition). The second group is nicely illustrated by Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) – a work of American fiction, largely composed in an English country house, which finds its subject matter in the world of the Parisian avant garde. Indeed, the formal and linguistic estrangement of a novel like Nightwood is partly due to the way that, by the beginning of the twentieth century, cities like Paris and London were home to a bewildering array of different languages and peoples. In the artistic quarters of such cities, not only was the expatriate artist an increasingly common social type, but also the experience of a foreign person in an unfamiliar city becomes a metaphor for our encounter with the deeper alienations of modern literature (Williams 1989, 37–48). However, it is finally difficult to maintain a hard distinction between wholly and merely circumstantial expatriate fiction. Richard Wright’s The Outsider (1953), for instance, follows the Wharton example by being written in Paris and set in the US. But as a meditation on African American subjectivity, it mixes the author’s
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homegrown experience of racial politics with the existentialist worldview that flowered in postwar France. The situation is still more different when one considers Patricia Highsmith’s Ripliad series (five novels published between 1955 and 1991). While the first volume in the series, The Talented Mr. Ripley, predates Highsmith’s move from New York to Europe by several years, it nevertheless offers a profound meditation on the way that, taken to violent extremes, the desire to reinvent the self outside the boundaries of the nation can exact a terrible price on all involved. For the orphaned American youth Tom Ripley, the journey from New York to Italy is a crucial stage in the “annihilation of his past and of himself,” a metaphorical self-slaughter that joins a cosmopolitan’s love for European high culture with a distinctly vernacular taste for murder (Highsmith 1955, 111). Such liminal texts point to the difficulty of erecting a taxonomical barrier between narratives that are expatriate in origin or theme. Although expatriate narratives account for a small proportion of twentieth-century American fiction, many of the country’s leading fiction writers have lived abroad. Take, for example, the American literary community in Paris, which has at times possessed a luminosity befitting the so-called City of Lights. In the years between the World Wars, Paris was home to such talents as Sherwood Anderson, Barnes, Emily Coleman, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Robert McAlmon, Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, and Wharton herself. And not only novelists decamped to the city that has been called “the capital of the literary world . . . an idealized city where artistic freedom could be proclaimed and lived” (Casanova 1994, 24). Even restricting the list to Americans alone, the group of modernist-era expatriates includes the poets e. e. cummings, Eugene Jolas, and Ezra Pound; visual artists like Man Ray and Alexander Calder; patrons and publishers such as Sylvia Beach and Mary Phelps Jacob; and performers of the stature of Josephine Baker and Isadora Duncan. This phenomenon was repeated to a lesser degree after World War II, when African American writers like Wright, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes left Jim Crow America and Norman Mailer studied at the Sorbonne. In both periods, the American presence in Paris came in the
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wake of the country’s involvement in global conflagrations that (through combat service or experience in the vast auxiliary machinery of total war) introduced thousands of men and women to the pleasures of life overseas, teaching them new languages and habits of mind, and letting them reap the foreign fruits of American victory. While Hemingway wrote that “there is never any ending to Paris,” the modernists were in fact only continuing a long tradition of literary expatriation (Hemingway 1964, 211). Benjamin Franklin famously spent long years in England and France; nineteenth-century novelists like James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne also spent considerable time in Europe; and a generation before Hemingway, Henry James established a critical and commercial market for narratives about the American encounter with the Old World. Indeed, between early and late novels like Roderick Hudson (1875–6) and The Golden Bowl (1904), James made the clash between American naivety and European cynicism one of the principal themes of his writing. Europe was not, however, the only destination for American writers. The literary and humanitarian career of Pearl S. Buck carries the unmistakable stamp of her experiences in China. Highsmith lived in Mexico City before going to England and France, while that city was briefly home to Beat Generation novelists like Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. In mid-twentieth-century Africa, Paul Bowles and Jane Auer Bowles were instrumental (along with non-Americans like Andre Gide) in setting up a literary colony in the International Zone of Tangiers. And the Bowleses would later be followed to Morocco by the everperipatetic Burroughs, who was later visited by Kerouac and their poet friends Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. If expatriatism is a relatively common fact and theme of American literature, readers have nevertheless disagreed about its broader social and literary-historical meanings. For some, expatriatism is just a matter of perspective. Considering a trip to the Alps for winter, for instance, Hemingway muses, “Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan” (1964, 7). In this context, residence abroad involves no anxiety about American culture; it is just a technical precondition for authentic American writing. For others, the pres-
ence of American writers overseas symbolizes the new energy and maturity of the national literature, which in the twentieth century came to rival – or even surpass – more established national traditions such as those of the English and French. This is something that T. S. Eliot celebrated when in 1953 he compared expatriate writers to the American robin, whose transatlantic flights provide a metaphor for the increasing influence of US literature on the British tradition (Eliot 1965, 43–60). And as Hugh Kenner showed in his influential readings of modernism, far from being a sign of a continuing debt to the Old World, American expatriatism can be interpreted as a sign that the nation’s writers had escaped literary provincialism and joined the supranational tradition of literary modernism. For Kenner, then, Henry James’s residence in England represents the last gasp of the British capital’s claim to occupy the symbolic center of the Anglophone world, a pretension that the expatriate modernists finally laid to rest (Kenner 1984, 52–5). Yet not everybody expressed such confidence in the merits of expatriatism. William Carlos Williams pointed out the expatriates’ apparent obeisance to European culture when he wrote, “Paris will be more than slightly abashed to find parodies of the middle ages” feted as the peak of the new American writing (1971, 26). Meanwhile, the Pulitzer Prize winner Vernon Louis Parrington (1927) refused to judge James with the generosity of hindsight, interpreting his expatriation as sign that he remained indifferent to the vivid grotesqueries of the country he had left behind. Even Eliot is far from consistent on this question. For whatever his later confidence in the ability of expatriate Americans to affect the European scene, in 1921 he justified his move to London by referring to the history of English civilization – the implication being that while English culture may be on the wane, America had nothing to merit the name (Eliot 1988, 431). Eliot was far from the first to worry that the US was infertile soil for artistic creation. Fenimore Cooper, for instance, combined the patriotic sentiment that Americans “shall never get to be the thoroughly manly people we ought to be, until we cease to look to European opinions,” with the contrary observation that “if any man is excusable for deserting his country, it is the American artist” (quoted in Bradbury 1978, 27).
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EXPATRIATE FICTION
These disagreements point to the debate about whether a national literature is best served by cultivating foreign experience or encouraging the development of an autarchic literary culture. Looking back on the twentieth-century American novel, however, it seems like the stakes of this argument are as much social and political as aesthetic. Dos Passos’s sojourns in France, Spain, and Russia did not, for instance, prevent him from writing the U.S.A. trilogy (1938), which harnesses the formal techniques of the international avant garde to advance a patriotic and populist brand of left-wing politics. Nor does Anderson’s later life in France somehow make Winesburg, Ohio (1919) any less important to the literary history of the American Midwest. Ambivalence about the social meanings of expatriatism seems to inhere, however, in the very meanings of the word. As an adjective or noun, “expatriate” denotes the condition of choosing to live in a foreign country; its verb form, however, refers to the act of forcing a person or group to leave their native land. In this sense, the word implies an uneasy mix of freedom and coercion. Yet “expatriate” has very different connotations from other words in the lexicon of migration. Whereas the exile, emigre, or refugee is generally presumed to have escaped from physical or spiritual oppression, the expatriate is more typically pulled to a foreign country than compelled to leave home. And unlike the immigrant who tries to assimilate to a new country, the expatriate is defined by remaining out of place. This is partly a matter of having dollars to spend in countries whose economies are malformed by underdevelopment, war, or colonialism. As we see in Paul Bowles’s Let It Come Down (1952), the cosmopolitan atmosphere of a city like Tangiers is created not by the merging of discrete cultures, but by the maintenance of social and economic distinctions between national groups. Sitting in a fashionable bar in the International Zone, Bowles’s American protagonist casts his eye across the crowd and easily separates the Moroccans, Germans, and English from his fellow countrymen, who carry their wealth with recognizable ostentation (1952, 80–1). Though an expatriate’s acquaintance may be broad, and her palette diverse, she remains unmistakably national, like Gertrude Stein driving her Model T Ford around interwar France. And, indeed, as Stein
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wrote in Paris France (1940), “[W]riters have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but is really there” (1970, 2). Expatriatism, then, is often figured as a kind of distinction or liberty. There is first of all the freedom to travel or to live in a manner one could not afford at home. But expatriate fictions also celebrate the imaginative freedom of occupying more than one place at one time: a romantic dualism between home and abroad that enables the ability to conceive oneself as beyond nationality or, alternatively, as at home in all nations (Caesar 1995, 110). Such freedoms, however, are not easily won. This is the subject of Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, which offers a darker take on expatriatism than we find in Stein. Baldwin’s narrator, David, has come to France from America. He is the scion of the men who “conquered a continent” (1956, 3). He also happens to be gay, and Baldwin’s narrative tells the story of his fateful affair with Giovanni, a young Italian immigrant whom he loves but eventually abandons, with terrible consequences. Given the pressure on David to live up to his heritage, his residence in France is a contradictory mixture of self-betrayal and an ecstatic attempt to live freely, “under a foreign sky, with no-one to watch, no penalties attached” (1956, 8). On the night before he leaves his rented house in the French countryside, David recalls how he left America “to find myself”; but as he surveys the wreck of his life, he notes with bitter irony that “if I had had any intimation that the self I was going to find would be the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home” (1956, 31). At the level of plot and character, then, Giovanni’s Room suggests the social and imaginative limits of expatriatism. For Baldwin, expatriate life is a condition in which the human subject is encouraged to float free of tradition and circumstance. But in a society that still polices human behavior and desire, such freedoms will inevitably founder against the tendency to internalize social conventions, crashing against the unconscious self that (as David puts it) “is trapped in the room with me, always has been, and always will be, and . . . is yet more foreign to me than those foreign hills outside” (1956, 14).
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David’s failure to escape the presumed judgment of his ancestors points to the way, as Stein would appreciate, that expatriate fictions are often more about America than the countries in which they are set. With this irony in mind, it may be appropriate to expand the category of “expatriate fiction” one more time so that it includes not just narratives written by (or about) Americans abroad but also the texts of foreign nationals resident in the US, especially when their writing engages American culture from the perspective of one who is simultaneously intimate and alien. The late novels of the Anglo-American novelist Christopher Isherwood fall into this class, especially a work like A Single Man (1964), whose classically English protagonist is more than familiar with subjects like “the basic American dogma that it is always a good morning” (1978, 381; italics in original). Along with German writers like Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann, Isherwood formed part of an important 1940s community of European expatriates in the US. Unlike the Germans, however, Isherwood remained in California after the war, taking American citizenship and becoming a major figure in the gay subculture of the west coast. The admission of a writer like Isherwood to the canons of American expatriatism clearly risks doing damage to both his native Englishness and the specificity of American literature; nevertheless, his writing serves to remind us of the way all expatriate writings trouble the autonomy of national literary traditions. As a veteran of expatriate scenes in California and Berlin (see Isherwood 1945), Isherwood now seems to belong to a bygone age, when the realization of cosmopolitan dreams meant longdelayed visas, arduous steamboat journeys, and hours at the poste restante. In the present day, telecommunications and cheap foreign travel have made it easier to travel abroad without having to make a lifestyle of the experience. At the same time, however, these same processes have made it easier for immigrants to (and from) the US to maintain contact with their home countries. One result of these changes may be that distinctions between expatriate and domestic fiction will give way to a new emphasis on the dynamism of twenty-first-century culture, where a British-born Indian-American writer like Jhumpa Lahiri can live in the US for three decades, write
narratives about the immigrant experience, and still be considered by India Today (1999) as a representative of the new generation of Non Resident Indians, whose lives abroad are no barrier to a primary identification with subcontinental culture. There are, of course, profound limits to such transnational flows, many of them functions of the great power still in the hands of nation-states and national economies (Lionnet & Shih 2005). But in an age of globalization, the literary-historical taxonomy of “expatriate fiction” is likely to become more diffuse and overdetermined than ever. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Baldwin, J. (1956). Giovanni’s Room. New York: Dial Press. Benstock, S. (1986). Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bowles, P. (1952). Let It Come Down. New York: Random House. Bradbury, M. (1978). Second Countries: The Expatriate Tradition in American Writing. Yearbook of English Studies, 8, 15–39. Braddock, J., & Eburne, J. (eds.) (2005). Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic [special issue]. MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 51(4). Caesar, T. (1995). Forgiving the Boundaries: Home as Abroad in American Travel Writing. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Campbell, James. (2003). Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, and Others on the Left Bank. Berkeley: University of California Press. Casanova, P. (2004). The World Republic of Letters (trans. M. B. DeBevoise). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Eliot, T. S. (1965). To Criticize the Critic. London: Faber and Faber. Eliot, V. (ed.) (1988). Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1. London: Faber and Faber. Gopnik, A. (ed.) (2004). Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology. New York: Library of America. Hemingway, E. (1964). A Moveable Feast. New York: Macmillan. Highsmith, P. (1955). The Talented Mr. Ripley. New York: Coward-McCann. Isherwood, C. (1945). The Berlin Stories. New York: New Directions. Isherwood, C. (1978). A Single Man. New York: Bard/ Avon.
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Kennedy, G. J. (1993). Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kenner, H. (1984). The Making of the Modernist Canon. Chicago Review, 34(2), 49–61. Kenner, H. (1998). The Elsewhere Community. Concord, ON: Anansi. Lionnet, F., & Shih, S. (eds.) (2005). Minor Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Parrington, V. L. (1927). Main Currents in American Thought, vol. 3: The Beginnings of
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Critical Realism in America, 1860–1920. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Stein, G. (1970). Paris France. New York: Liveright. Williams, W. C. (1971). Imaginations. New York: New Directions. Williams, R. (1989). The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (ed. T. Pinkney). London: Verso. Zwerdling, A. (1998). Improvised Europeans: American Literary Expatriates and the Siege of London. New York: Basic Books.
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F Farrell, James T. BILL SAVAGE
Despite that fact that James T. Farrell wrote 27 novels, scores of short stories and essays, and more than a dozen collections of literary criticism, he is at once remembered and forgotten primarily for one work, the Studs Lonigan Trilogy (1932–5). Farrell’s vast accomplishments have faded away due to two otherwise contrary trends in literary criticism and canon construction. Early in his career, Farrell was lauded as a crucial new voice in American letters, representing the experience of Irish Americans and other Chicagoans in realistic fiction which could trace its roots to the plain-language directness of writers like Theodore Dreiser. But such praise came back to haunt leftist writers, as the formalist canon makers of the postwar period rejected such fiction in favor of the highly wrought modernism of writers like Faulkner and Hemingway. When that formalist canon was in turn supplanted by a broader one which incorporated and valorized literature by women, African Americans, and writers from marginalized groups, Farrell’s fiction remained on the sidelines despite its engagement with many of the key topics of this new canon, especially the construction of ethnic and racial identities in American cities. The Irish, having become the most assimilated ethnic immigrant group, were no longer perceived as marginal enough for inclusion in canons of American outsiders. Yet Farrell and his milieu were only one generation removed from the bitterest anti-Irish
prejudice of the nineteenth century, and the conflicted identity politics that prejudice produced. They had to face one overarching question: does their Irishness, often seen as coterminous with Catholicism, keep them out of the American mainstream, as Protestant antiimmigrant forces in the culture would assert? Or are they able to negotiate the complexities of being at once both Irish and American? Possessing a broadly inclusive interest in the world, Farrell offered complex fictional answers to these dilemmas of ethnic identity. Charles Fanning, Farrell’s most astute critic, identifies the two sorts of characters Farrell most often portrayed: “the artist as an urban Irish American . . . and working class urban Americans who lives are thwarted by limited self-awareness” (1998, p. xxi). The two sides of this conflict are played out in Farrell’s two monumental works, the Studs Lonigan Trilogy and the O’Neill–O’Flaherty Pentalogy (1936–54), together known as the Washington Park Cycle. Critics have long misread the Studs Lonigan Trilogy in terms of both its aesthetics and its ideology. Under the influence of Joyce, Dos Passos, and other modernists, Farrell’s portrait of Washington Park uses stream of consciousness as well as the intertextual interpolation of newspapers, films, and other discourses. Farrell’s realism deftly combines careful observation of the environment with modernist literary technique. The Trilogy is also mistakenly thought to depict working-class Irish life. This happens only in flashbacks, as the Lonigan family has risen from immigrant poverty to the middle class. William Lonigan, Sr. owns his own contracting company
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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and the family home in Washington Park. Studs’s sisters get good educations and advance in life while he drinks himself to death at an early age. The obverse of Studs’s tragic narrative is the story of Danny O’Neill, the Irish American intellectual. Farrell depicts the conflict between American intellectual culture and the personal, religious, and political pieties and prejudices that defined much of Irish American culture. In doing so, Farrell asks an essential American question: how do we understand ethnic identity? Near the end of Judgment Day (1935), the final work of the Trilogy, Farrell portrays an array of what could be, in lesser hands, Irish American stereotypes: the sentimentalist, the drunk, and the cop. Early in the Great Depression, Old Man Lonigan faces two crises: the bank with all his savings has failed, the bank which holds his mortgage is demanding payment for his building, and his son is deathly ill. Blaming the banking crisis on “international Jews,” he drives back to the neighborhood of his youth, now African American, and goes to his old parish church to pray. Exhausted, he drives around, sentimentally remembering his childhood, until he encounters a Leftist political demonstration and the son of his friend, now a policeman on the beat. Lonigan is shocked to find that young Jim Doyle protects the “Red” marchers from the hostile crowd on the sidewalk and sympathizes with the unemployed blacks, Jews, and Italians whom Lonigan dismisses as scum of the earth. Afterward, Lonigan repairs to a speakeasy, where alongside an older immigrant who sings for whiskey, he drinks himself into oblivion, unable to face any of the catastrophes in his life. Who, in this telling episode, is the “real” Irish American? The devout but weak businessman? The ancient drunk? The politically progressive police officer? Farrell suggests all of them, and none. No one subject position can include all of the potential ways of being Irish or American. Priests, politicians, drunks, and brawlers occupy one corner, but in the other you have reformers, intellectuals, writers, and labor organizers. The stereotypes that the Irish community itself promotes to advance into the American middle class are as limiting as those imposed on Irish immigrants by the bigoted WASPs who kept the famine generation immigrants living in shanty towns outside the Chicago city limits.
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But Farrell’s fiction extends beyond the question of Irishness. In a career spanning five decades, he depicted the material struggles and the inner lives of African Americans and Jews, men and women, the powerful and the powerless, as they attempt to find their way in Chicago and beyond. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Dreiser, Theodore (AF); Fitzgerald, F. Scott (AF); Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READING Branch, E. M. (1996). Studs Lonigan’s Neighborhood and the Making of James T. Farrell. Newton, MA: Arts End. Farrell, J. T. (1932). Young Lonigan. New York: Vanguard. Farrell, J. T. (1934). The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan. New York: Vanguard. Farrell, J. T. (1935). Judgment Day. New York: Vanguard. Farrell, J. T. (1936). A World I Never Made. New York: Vanguard. Farrell, J. T. (1938). No Star Is Lost. New York: Vanguard. Farrell, J. T. (1940). Father and Son. New York: Vanguard. Farrell, J. T. (1943). My Days of Anger. New York: Vanguard. Farrell, J. T. (1945). League of Frightened Philistines. New York: Vanguard. Farrell, J. T. (1947). Literature and Morality. New York: Vanguard. Farrell, J. T. (1954). The Face of Time. New York: Vanguard. Farrell, J. T. (1998). Chicago Stories (ed. C. Fanning). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Landers, R. K. (2004). An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell. San Francisco: Encounter.
Faulkner, William JOHN T. MATTHEWS
William Faulkner’s signature novel – The Sound and the Fury (1929) – captures the tumult of a collapsing world giving way to a new. Set across the first quarter of the twentieth century, in the fictional
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town of Jefferson, center of the imaginary Mississippi county Faulkner called Yoknapatawpha, The Sound and the Fury displays in four isolated segments the breakdown of the once distinguished Compson family. Descendants of planter gentry, the present generation of Compsons has been reduced to three hopeless brothers – a mental deficient (Benjy), a melancholic suicide (Quentin), and a resentful failure (Jason) – and their sister Caddy, a renegade from Southern decorum. The reader inhabits the mentalities of one pitiable martyr to lost causes after the next. Even the most “innocent” Compson brother proves a monster of selfish incomprehension, while another dwells in fantasies of a defunct past, and the last can’t figure out how to translate former privilege into the future. The novel bursts open in its final section, with the servant Dilsey celebrating new hope in precincts unappreciated by the Compsons: the black church where faith grows from a collective determination to be free. Faulkner’s great subject was the realization that the plantation South’s “eternal verities,” finally surrendering to the upheavals of modernity, had never been other than illegitimate; his great artistry, an experimental method that slowed things down to comprehend change. Born in 1897, Faulkner came of age with the Great War (1914–18). Following an abortive attempt to train as a combat pilot with the Royal Air Force in Toronto in 1918, he returned to Oxford, Mississippi, where he chafed under small-town proprieties. Faulkner already burned with literary ambition, and he began devouring the latest modern literature. Fleeing occasionally to the more cosmopolitan New Orleans, he was taken up by a set of bohemian artists and intellectuals. He published a volume of poems, The Marble Faun (1924), imitative of the French Symbolists; contributed prose sketches and reviews to The Double-Dealer, an avant garde journal; and completed his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay (1926), the story of a wounded pilot who returns from the war unfit to resume life in his Southern home town. Donald Mahon is literally blinded to the revolution in social, especially sexual, mores overtaking provincial America. Soldiers’ Pay resembles other novels of postwar anxiety like Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), as it also shows off modernist narrative techniques indebted to Joyce.
Strong reviews encouraged the first-time novelist, and by 1927 he had published Mosquitoes. Aboard a yacht, writers, artists, patrons, and aspirants talk endlessly about art, while visions of sex romp through their heads. Faulkner modeled characters on the novelist Sherwood Anderson and an assortment of other French Quarter acquaintances – including a “funny little dark man” named “Faulkner,” a beachcomber obsessed with female anatomy. The mood of the book is caricature, self- and otherwise. It clears space for the swerve in Faulkner’s career that created Faulkner: a return to Mississippi – both literal and imaginative – where he would lead the rest of his life. Anderson had advised the aspiring writer to concentrate on the material he knew best – what Faulkner later called “his little postage-stamp of native soil.” In his next book, Faulkner embraced the region in what he understood as its entirety – its rambunctious history as well as its stressful modernization. He sent the manuscript, entitled Flags in the Dust, to his cutting-edge publisher, Horace Liveright, who had welcomed Faulkner’s first two novels. Flags sought to tell the sprawling, intertwined stories of an elite planter community – too many stories, Liveright decided. He returned the manuscript to the shocked author, recommending sizable cuts. Pared down, the novel was published as Sartoris (1928). (The original manuscript was discovered after Faulkner’s death and printed in 1975 as Flags in the Dust.) After the bitter experience of rejection, Faulkner claimed, he wrote his next book, the uncompromising The Sound and the Fury, for his own pleasure. The Sound and the Fury remains preoccupied with the plantation gentry, even as it develops an artistic method that distances the author from stories too close to his own family’s. The Falkners (so spelled before William added the “u”) counted among its legends the Civil War hero, lawyer, and sometime author William Cuthbert Falkner, as well as his son, Faulkner’s paternal grandfather, also a lawyer, and founder of Oxford’s first bank. Sartoris mocks Southern plantocracy while lamenting its passing; The Sound and the Fury sees more deeply into the region’s tragic past and accepts its demise as just. Faulkner had now located the topics that would engage him over the next decade: the ruinous consequences of the South’s foundation as a
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slaveholding plantation economy. The original crime: the seizure of lives and land, perpetrated as the outrages of Indian extermination and chattel slavery; its collateral damage: the physical, emotional, and moral integrity of all it touched, from mangled victims to corrupted beneficiaries. In his next novel, Sanctuary (1929), Faulkner confronts the monster not quite head-on. The story centers on a horrific episode in the life of a young woman, Temple Drake, the daughter of a prominent judge. With her well-born but feckless escort, she abandons a college outing and the two of them end up trapped in a bootleggers’ camp at the so-called old Frenchman’s Place, an abandoned plantation mansion where Popeye bases his operations. Temple is assaulted by Popeye, who, since he is impotent, uses a corn cob to defile her. Compelled by a related sympathy for Caddy Compson, who turns fugitive from the velvet-gloved misogyny of racial and sexual untouchability, Faulkner conjures the nightmare of rampant Southern paternalism: a beast that thinks it is entitled to everything it touches – all black people, white women, the land – under the guise of protecting them for their own good. Faulkner had himself been prevented from marrying his young sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, by her father, a judge. (When Estelle eventually divorced her first husband, she and Faulkner wed – but disastrously, with finances, alcohol, and infidelity destroying, without ending, their marriage.) Faulkner extends his survey of outworn Southern ways in a novel that turns to the plight of poor white farmers in the 1920s, As I Lay Dying (1930). The Bundren family suffers a blow when Addie, wife of Anse and mother to a brood, dies after a short illness. The family nearly spirals out of control as they execute Addie’s last wish: to be buried in her home town of Jefferson, a 40-mile trip to be undertaken despite a flood that immobilizes the whole county. The crisis engulfing the family feels like a fable of Southern modernization, the maternal relation to the land failing, agricultural workers forced toward wage labor and commodity consumption, migration toward towns precipitated, social life reordered by modern state imperatives like public education, women’s political and professional enfranchisement, and military conscription. The novel explores such upheaval as a series of interior
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monologues, each character idiosyncratically processing the shock of the new. Faulkner’s determination to write about the failings of Southern society organized his output during the 1930s and early 1940s. In one half of its bicameral plot, Light in August (1932) takes up a character who could belong to the Bundren family: Lena Grove, an orphan, gotten pregnant as a teenager, and abandoned to the open road when her “fiance” deserts her. Faulkner crosses the wayward white girl with another fugitive: a misfit named Joe Christmas, raised as white but plagued by a suspicion that he has black ancestry. The novel charts the combustible mixture of uncertain race and unpoliced female desire. The resulting explosion pits the mad, violent enforcement of discredited beliefs about racial and sexual difference against an embryonic tolerance toward new “composite” forms of family, race, and sexuality. The shadow of the South’s plantation history will persist long into the future, the narrator of Light in August prophesies, as the memory of racial violence and guilt. Faulkner does not let the subject go either, returning to the curse of slavery behind modern white supremacy and segregation, economic inequity, desecration of the land, and the violation of marriage and family. Faulkner next searches out the origins of Yoknapatawpha. In Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Faulkner reconstructs the story of the South in epitome through the career of Thomas Sutpen, the county’s foremost antebellum planter. Descending as a child with his family from Virginia’s mountains to a Tidewater plantation, where he suffers a traumatic insult that teaches him his place as a “brute” laborer, Sutpen determines to rise to a position of domination himself. He launches his “design” in Haiti as overseer of a sugar plantation, sustains a temporary setback when a first marriage produces a child of apparent mixed race, then attains mastership in Mississippi – even turning away the repudiated son who threatens to undo the work of decades by seeking his daughter’s (and the suitor’s half-sister’s) hand in marriage. Faulkner draws on all his experiments with narrative form in this vastly plotted and elaborately structured novel; a handful of narrators take responsibility for relaying the story, each working complex purposes to shape their versions to the needs of both teller and auditor. The principal
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narrators of Sutpen’s story turn out to be Quentin Compson and his father Jason, who struggle to place their cynicism and despair, respectively, in the context of regional flaw rather than simple personal failure. Faulkner’s huge sentences arc and revolve around the realities that no participant – actor or teller – wants to confront, the story told and retold without resolution. Faulkner’s plantation project continues into The Unvanquished (1938), a volume of related short stories set around the Civil War in which Faulkner explores the rejection of ideals that once supported the antebellum regime. Notions like the violent defense of honor, or the gentility of gender roles, get exposed as elements of an ideology safeguarding planter interests, and readily swept away when economic and social conditions change after the war. In Go Down, Moses (1942), another cycle of short stories, Faulkner probes even more deeply to imagine the unspeakable sins at the core of the plantation system. Those are figured here as the conjoined crimes of miscegenation and incest, old Carothers McCaslin taking a slave woman as a concubine, then eventually fathering a child by the daughter of that union. That the origin of Southern ideals was pollution of the foulest kind provokes Faulkner’s severest condemnation of his region’s hubris, self-delusion, and heartless rapacity. Faulkner nowhere renders the violence of slavery as its victims experienced it, as Toni Morrison does, for example, but his imagining of moral turpitude so utter renders a judgment against its perpetrators as unforgivable. Go Down, Moses is remarkable in the Faulkner canon, however, for noticing the variety of ways black people tried to resist their white oppressors. Such habits of non-compliance carried into the post-Emancipation era, as growing self-assertion and acts of courageous defiance. To challenge racial mistreatment, Lucas Beauchamp, a descendant of those slave women and old Carothers McCaslin, ironically claims the authority of his white ancestor. In Go Down, Moses he is one of the few persons, black or white, who gets his way; in Intruder in the Dust (1948), which focuses on Lucas’s frame-up for the murder of a white man, he is that rarest of Negroes in the modern South, one who is exonerated and released after a false arrest. Faulkner struggles in this novel to engage the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South; here he sympathizes with victims of
racial injustice, sees the bankruptcy of gradualist rhetoric about desegregation, yet cannot imagine what social equality would look like. A film version of Intruder, shot in Oxford with Faulkner as advisor, appeared a year later, and was taken to represent growing support for desegregation among educated white Southerners. A town middle class that begins to separate from those stuck in tenancy and menial wage labor interests Faulkner in another major work: the trilogy devoted to the rise and abrupt end of Flem Snopes, The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959). The Snopes saga was key to Faulkner’s conception of Yoknapatawpha from the outset; there’s a first try at telling the clan’s story dating from the mid-1920s, in which the Snopeses’ preoccupation with making money as merchants epitomizes the force revolutionizing the plantation-centric South. Over the course of the three novels, Flem follows an arc of inexorable success: he first apprentices himself to Will Varner, a farm credit and supply merchant who takes to speculating in land. Beating his competitors routinely, often underhandedly, Flem goes on to amass interests that eventually deliver him the presidency of a bank in Jefferson. His chief antagonist, V. K. Ratliff, an itinerant sewing-machine salesman who represents a strain of ethical capitalism, discovers that resistance is futile. In the 1950s, the two later novels of the trilogy put Snopes-style materialism in the context of the postwar American Way, contextualizing the brutal free marketry on display among numerous Snopeses as a sobering qualification of the defense of American “freedom” and democracy. Displaced poor whites had appeared in other novels by Faulkner during the 1930s. Pylon (1935) portrays the exotic lives of barnstorming aviators. Narrated by a repressed newspaperman, who grows fascinated by a menage of participants in a New Orleans air show, Pylon entertains modes of modern living unimaginable on the ground. The pilot, his stuntman, a mechanic, their moreor-less shared wife, and the child they’ve borne would outrage the decent folks of the towns where they alight and make a buck – if they stayed long enough. Like the reporter, Faulkner is entranced by individuals who seem to do what they want to, but, unlike the narrator, Faulkner doesn’t romanticize their condition. Beneath the barnstormers’ nomadic thrill-seeking remains the grind of
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poverty and constant insecurity. Faulkner measures similar gaps between proletarian nomadism and bourgeois restlessness in The Wild Palms (1939). After a decade of working on and off for Hollywood studios, Faulkner conceived a novel that would put the kind of cultural fantasy confected by the movies into conflict with the harsh realities of Depression-era America. The Wild Palms is a double narrative, one strand set in 1927 during the Great Flood of the Mississippi River, the other set 10 years later. The novel’s narrative oscillates between a plot in which a young couple runs off together in defiance of middle-class conventions (the woman abandons her husband and children), and a counterplot in which a furloughed convict works to rescue flood victims. Faulkner probes the recesses of self-deception and selfishness structuring modern consumer America, while he also touches on the pitiful condition of workers during the 1930s. Outrage at modern materialism fuels Faulkner’s unusual Requiem for a Nun (1950), a play hybridized by long prose histories fronting each of the three acts. Here, on the threshold of the Cold War, Faulkner resituates the story of the South within the larger story of nation and continent. Horrified at the possibility that the superpowers might trigger mutual nuclear destruction, Faulkner yields to jeremiad. Like the Mississippi frontier that was once its advance edge, the nation has been conceived in greed, established through colonial conquest, and perfected in a union devoted to acquisition. The dramatic sections counterpoint the resumed story of Temple Drake, joined here by a black servant woman who has murdered Temple and her husband’s infant child in a misguided attempt to keep the couple from separating. Neither the historical panorama of national injustice nor the staging of individual remorse leads to any catharsis; bereavement remains unappeased, guilt unredeemed. Faulkner’s concentration on his own region – however much he was depicting universal truths about human nature by writing about a particular place – continues to produce powerful effects in two late works: a massive meditation on global empire called A Fable (1954), and a minor last novel about the persistence of American innocence, The Reivers, published in 1962, the year of his death. That book has struck many readers as a congenial valedictory – with a Huck Finn-like
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protagonist embroiled in a plot to steal a race horse. The story is a bit more complicated, though, because the child-narrator ends up seeing beneath the high jinx to a stratum of human suffering, much of it the surprising survival of traditional Southern abuses of the weak. Still, the novel does feel like a quiet afterthought given the magnitude of A Fable. Faulkner considered A Fable one of his greatest achievements, a verdict few readers have endorsed. Battling poor health, desperate finances, a ruined marriage, and artistic doubts, Faulkner took 10 years to write the book. Its kernel is a fictionalized version of a famous Christmas truce observed on both sides of the trenches on the European front during World War I. The prose style and narrative structure are hugely ambitious. Sentences come dense in the usual Faulknerian manner, though less with the onrush of psychological association found in earlier works than with the patient description of vast interconnectivity: between industrial, financial, and military elites fashioning a new transnational power structure; between the US South and other postcolonial places; and between groups of resisters mobilizing to prevent the installation of modern empire as an outgrowth of earlier European American colonialisms. Faulkner organized the book around an act of such resistance: the messianic mission of a young soldier who brings the war to a halt momentarily. The sections of the novel hang on the scaffolding of the Holy Week calendar leading up to Easter: hence the fable. The novel Faulkner considered his magnum opus won the National Book Award and Pulitzer, recognitions accorded by the US cultural establishment once Faulkner had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950. Faulkner’s reputation enjoyed a global dimension nearly from the beginning, with enthusiastic reception by French intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1930s. His writing has been widely influential all over the world, distinctively on Latin American novelists of the “Boom” generation like Gabriel Garcıa Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, but also on writers of the Caribbean, Africa, China, and the Middle East. Faulkner was an accomplished writer of short stories, too, many of which have become global landmarks of the genre: “A Rose for Emily,” “That Evening Sun,” “The Bear,” “Dry September,” “Barn Burning,” and numerous others. Faulkner’s achievement,
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however, rests on the bedrock of major novels like The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! which should remain permanently among the nation’s most significant fiction. SEE ALSO: Anderson, Sherwood (AF); Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Morrison, Toni (AF); The Southern Novel (AF)
Minter, D. L. (1980). William Faulkner: His Life and Work. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Schwartz, L. (1988). Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Sundquist, E. (1983). Faulkner: The House Divided. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Weinstein, P. (1992). Faulkner’s Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns. New York: Cambridge University Press. Williamson, J. (1993). William Faulkner and Southern History. New York: Oxford University Press.
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Aboul-Ela, H. (2007). Other South: Globalization, Faulkner, and the Mariategui Tradition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Bleikasten, A. (1990). The Ink of Melancholy: Faulkner’s Novels from “The Sound and the Fury” to “Light in August.” Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Blotner, J. (1984). Faulkner: A Biography. New York: Random House. Faulkner, W. (1950). Collected Stories of William Faulkner. New York: Random House. Faulkner, W. (1979). Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (ed. J. Blotner). New York: Random House. Faulkner, W. (1985). Novels 1930–1935. New York: Library of America. Faulkner, W. (1990). Novels 1936–1940. New York: Library of America. Faulkner, W. (1994). Novels 1942–1954. New York: Library of America. Faulkner, W. (1999). Novels 1957–1962. New York: Library of America. Faulkner, W. (2006). Novels 1926–1929. New York: Library of America. Glissant, E. (1999). Faulkner, Mississippi (trans. B. Lewis & T. C. Spear). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Godden, R. L. (1997). Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South’s Long Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gray, R. J. (1994). The Life of William Faulkner: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell. Irwin, J. T. (1975). Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ladd, B. (1996). Nationalism and the Color Line in George W. Cable, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Matthews, J. T. (2009). William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South. Oxford: Blackwell. Millgate, M. (1968). The Achievement of William Faulkner. New York: Random House.
Fauset, Jessie Redmon SUSAN TOMLINSON
Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882–1961) was a novelist, essayist, andpoetwho, as literary editor ofThe Crisis magazine, helped shape the Harlem Renaissance. Fauset was born in Camden County, New Jersey, a descendant of free eighteenth-century African American Philadelphians. She finished the Philadelphia High School for Girls, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell in 1905, and completed an MA at the University of Pennsylvania in 1919. She also took postgraduate courses at the Sorbonne. While teaching classics at M Street High School (later renamed Dunbar High School) in Washington, DC, Fauset began writing short fiction, poetry, and essays for The Crisis, the magazine published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and edited by Fauset’s mentor, W. E. B. Du Bois. As the magazine’s literary editor (1919–26), Fauset advised and promoted emerging younger authors like Jean Toomer and Langston Hughes, whose earliest published poems appeared in The Brownies’ Book, the NAACP children’s magazine Fauset founded in January 1920 and edited until it folded in December 1921. Her editorial choices for The Brownies’ Book and her non-fiction contributions to The Crisis reflect Fauset’s interest in the African diaspora, and in 1921 she served as a delegate to the Second PanAfrican Congress. After resigning from The Crisis, Fauset taught French and Latin at DeWitt Clinton High School in New York until her retirement in 1944. She died of heart failure in Philadelphia in 1961.
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In a 1932 interview, Fauset admitted to studying magazines like the Saturday Evening Post to “analyze and isolate the germ of popular writing.” Her four novels use accessible plot devices to explore challenging themes like racism and gender politics. Critically dismissed for decades as genteel, melodramatic idealizations of the black bourgeoisie, Fauset’s novels are now recognized as formally and thematically innovative interrogations of social respectability, sexual double standards, and the impact of mass-produced culture on identity, agency, and desire. Her characters’ affluence often protects them from the more brutal consequences of white supremacy; nevertheless, they must negotiate the legacy of slavery and the subtler psychological assaults of internalized racism and class and color hierarchies. Fauset’s first novel, There Is Confusion (1924), whose launch party was described by historian David Levering Lewis as a dress rehearsal for the Harlem Renaissance, depicts a group of African American New Yorkers who come of age on both the Broadway stage and the frontlines of World War I. Its protagonist’s dancing career serves as a paradigm for the novel’s exploration of gender and class performance and its integration of classical form with modernist improvisation. Plum Bun (1929), Fauset’s critically and commercially most successful work, depicts Angela Murray, a light-skinned artist who passes for white in Greenwich Village bohemia in hopes of finding social fulfillment and economic security. Written at the height of both the New Negro and New Woman artistic and political movements, Plum Bun explores both movements’ conflicts and limitations. After an unhappy sexual relationship with a bigoted aristocrat, Angela finds in her work the authority that enables her to come out as a black woman and to give artistic voice to that experience. Like Fauset’s earlier novels, The Chinaberry Tree (1995 [1931]) depicts the romantic, familial, and professional struggles facing a black woman artist, in this case a successful dressmaker whose fashion designs refashion femininity itself. Its protagonist’s design innovations mirror not only her negotiations of respectability and taste but also Fauset’s own efforts to maintain her artistic and political integrity in an increasingly conservative literary marketplace. In her fourth and final
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novel, Comedy: American Style (1995 [1933]), the intricacy and intimacy of family dynamics offer an allegory of public and political silence and complicity by depicting well-intentioned, even sympathetic characters whose refusal to confront a mother’s race hatred results in a rejected son’s suicide. Beyond its critique of color privilege and its satire of the black bourgeoisie, Comedy: American Style explores the public, potentially murderous consequences of personal indifference and inaction. SEE ALSO: Du Bois, W. E. B. (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); The Harlem Renaissance (AF); Hughes, Langston (AF); Hurston, Zora Neale (AF); Larsen, Nella (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Toomer, Jean (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Carby, H. V. (1987). Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press. Christian, B. (1980). Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1882–1976. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Cullen, C. (ed.) (1993). Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets [1927]. New York: Citadel. duCille, A. (1993) The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press. Fauset, J. R. (1989). There Is Confusion [1924]. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Fauset, J. R. (1990). Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral [1929]. Boston: Beacon. Fauset, J. R. (1995). The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life [1931]. New York: G. K. Hall. Fauset, J. R. (1995). Comedy: American Style [1933]. New York: G. K. Hall. Harker, J. (2007). America the Middlebrow: Women’s Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship between the Wars. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Knopf, M. (ed.) (1993). The Sleeper Wakes: Harlem Renaissance Stories by Women. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kuenz, J. (1999). The Face of America: Performing Race and Nation in Jessie Fauset’s There Is Confusion. Yale Journal of Criticism, 12, 89–111. Lewis, D. L. (1981). When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Oxford University Press. McDowell, D. E. (1985). The Neglected Dimension of Jessie Redmon Fauset. In M. Pryse & H. J. Spillers
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(eds.), Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. McDowell, D. E. (1995). “The Changing Same”: Black Women’s Literature, Criticism, and Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. McLendon, J. Y. (1995). The Politics of Color in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Sherrard-Johnson, C. (2007). Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Starkey, M. L. (1932). Jessie Fauset. Southern Workman, 61, 217–20. Sylvander, C. W. (1981). Jessie Redmon Fauset: Black American Writer. Troy, NY: Whitson. Tomlinson, S. (2003). “An Unwonted Coquetry”: The Commercial Seductions of Jessie Fauset’s The Chinaberry Tree. In L. Botshon & M. Goldsmith (eds.), Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s. Boston: Northeastern University Press, pp. 227–43. Wall, C. A. (2001). Histories and Heresies: Engendering the Harlem Renaissance. Meridians, 2(1), 59–76.
Ferber, Edna WILLIAM GLEASON
One of the most popular writers of the first half of the twentieth century, Edna Ferber succeeded in multiple genres, including the short story, the novel, and drama. Her fictions, which typically feature strong, hardworking female characters and are often set within vibrant American regional landscapes, were also frequently adapted to stage and screen, giving her a cultural presence like few writers of her era. Edna Jessica Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1885, daughter of a Jewish Hungarian immigrant father and an American-born mother. After several short-term moves, the family lived in Ottumwa, Iowa for seven years, until the town’s relentless anti-Semitism drove them to resettle in Appleton, Wisconsin when Ferber was 12. After high school Ferber worked as a journalist before her health gave out, but during her convalescence she began writing fiction, leading eventually to her first published story in 1910. Over the next 53 years Ferber would publish a dozen novels, another dozen
collections of short stories, 10 plays, and two memoirs, making her not only one of the most popular American writers but also one of the most prolific. After publishing her first novel, Dawn O’Hara: The Girl Who Laughed (1911), and first short story collection, Buttered Side Down (1912), Ferber found her first major success with a series of stories about an enterprising businesswoman named Emma McChesney, one of the first of her type in American fiction. Republished in book form in three volumes (Roast Beef Medium in 1913, Personality Plus in 1914, and Emma McChesney & Co. in 1915), the McChesney stories could have become Ferber’s lifelong bread and butter; but Ferber decided to retire McChesney rather than become straitjacketed by the demands of a serial character. Over the next decade her fictions explored new territory while revisiting certain familiar themes. In 1917, for example, Ferber published Fanny Herself, a semiautobiographical novel about a Jewish businesswoman who struggles to reconcile her financial ambition with her religious soul. With The Girls (1921) Ferber tried the type of multigenerational novel that she would later find conducive to the often sprawling historical sagas she took great pleasure in researching and writing, such as Cimarron (1930), a tale of the Oklahoma Territory; Great Son (1945) on the Seattle frontier; Giant (1952), set in larger-than-life Texas; and Ice Palace (1958), about Alaska. Ferber crossed from popular success to critically acclaimed author with the publication of So Big (1924), a story of the clash between artistic and commercial values set in and around turn-of-thetwentieth-century Chicago, which won Ferber the 1925 Pulitzer Prize. She followed this achievement with a novel about the Mississippi River that would become perhaps her best-known story – Show Boat (1926) – albeit primarily through its adaptation as a Broadway musical the following year. Ferber would actually have two stories on the stage in 1927, as her own co-written drama, The Royal Family, her second collaboration with playwright George S. Kaufman (with whom she would eventually write half a dozen plays, including Dinner at Eight in 1932 and Stage Door in 1936), also debuted on Broadway. Along with Kaufman and other writers such as Dorothy Parker, Ferber also became a member of the famously acerbic 1920s New York literary circle,
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the Algonquin Round Table. Ferber’s cultural reputation (and celebrity) was only heightened by the frequent translation of her writings to the silver screen. By the 1930s it must have seemed as though there were a new film – or two – based on Ferber’s work released every year. Between 1928 and 1939, 14 motion picture adaptations of Ferber’s writing were produced, including two versions of Show Boat. In 1939 Ferber published the first of two memoirs, A Peculiar Treasure, which she would reissue in a revised edition in 1960, just three years before releasing a second autobiography, A Kind of Magic (1963). Although her critical reputation declined late in her career, as critics faulted her work for being too melodramatic, she remains for many readers an inspiring and enduring chronicler of the lives of strong women and a champion of the underdog. She died of stomach cancer in New York City in 1968 at age 83. SEE ALSO: Modern Fiction in Hollywood (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Parker, Dorothy (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Campbell, D. (2003). “Written With a Hard and Ruthless Purpose”: Rose Wilder Lane, Edna Ferber, and Middlebrow Regional Fiction. In L. Botshon & M. Goldsmith (eds.), Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Writers of the 1920s. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Ferber, E. (1911). Dawn O’Hara: The Girl Who Laughed. New York: Stokes. Ferber, E. (1912). Buttered Side Down. New York: Stokes. Ferber, E. (1913). Roast Beef Medium. New York: Stokes. Ferber, E. (1914). Personality Plus. New York: Stokes. Ferber, E. (1915). Emma McChesney & Co. New York: Stokes. Ferber, E. (1917). Fanny Herself. New York: Stokes. Ferber, E. (1921). The Girls. New York: Doubleday. Ferber, E. (1924). So Big. New York: Doubleday. Ferber, E. (1926). Show Boat. New York: Doubleday. Ferber, E. (1930). Cimarron. New York: Doubleday. Ferber, E. (1931). American Beauty. New York: Doubleday. Ferber, E. (1935). Come and Get It. New York: Doubleday.
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Ferber, E. (1941). Saratoga Trunk. New York: Doubleday. Ferber, E. (1945). Great Son. New York: Doubleday. Ferber, E. (1952). Giant. New York: Doubleday. Ferber, E. (1958). Ice Palace: New York: Doubleday. Ferber, E. (1960). A Peculiar Treasure [1939]. New York: Doubleday. Ferber, E. (1963). A Kind of Magic. New York: Doubleday. Ferber, E. with Kaufman, G. S. (1927). The Royal Family. New York: Doubleday, Doran. Ferber, E. with Kaufman, G. S. (1932). Dinner at Eight. New York: Samuel French. Ferber, E. with Kaufman, G. S. (1936). Stage Door. New York: Doubleday, Doran. Gilbert, J. G. (1978). Ferber: A Biography. New York: Doubleday. Gleason, W. (1996). “Find Their Place and Fall in Line”: The Revisioning of Women’s Work in Herland and Emma McChesney & Co. Prospects, 21, 39–87. Shapiro, A. R. (2002). Edna Ferber, Jewish American Feminist. Shofar, 20(2), 52–60. Shaughnessy, M. R. (1977). Women and Success in American Society in the Works of Edna Ferber. New York: Garden Press. Sol, A. (2003). Art, Ethnicity, and the New Woman in Edna Ferber’s Fanny Herself. Studies in American Jewish Literature, 22, 120–8.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott KIRK CURNUTT
Best known for The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934) – two keystones of modernist fiction – Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was the poet laureate of the “jazz age,” a term he popularized to convey the postWorld War I era’s newfound prosperity, consumerism, and shifting sexual mores. Fitzgerald first rose to fame at 23 by chronicling those changes in This Side of Paradise (1920b). Before the age of 30 he published his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, but his artistic maturity was stymied for a decade by alcoholism, financial problems, and the mental illness of his wife, Zelda Sayre (1900–48). By the time he completed Tender Is the Night, the Depression had rendered the Roaring Twenties irrelevant, and Fitzgerald was considered a has-been. A half-decade later, he died in semiobscurity, considered a failure, despite publishing 160 short stories in his 20-year career. Only posthumously would critics appreciate his merits,
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although understanding of his talent would compete with popular interest in his life and marriage. Fitzgerald’s main themes are ambition and loss, discipline versus self-indulgence, love and romance, and money and class. Much like Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, his work is instantly recognizable due to its distinctive prose style. Whereas Hemingway’s is sparse and Faulkner’s veers toward psychological abstraction, Fitzgerald’s is intensely poetic to the point of rhapsodic, elevating his laments into veritable threnodies for the sureties and stable values that he felt modernity superannuated. Born September 24, 1896, Fitzgerald suffered from a lifelong inferiority complex that he later claimed distinguished him from Hemingway, his chief rival. “I talk with the authority of failure,” he insisted; “Ernest with the authority of success” (1979, 318). His sense of defeat was the product of several formative setbacks that became the building blocks of his fiction. The son of an unsuccessful businessman who had to rely upon his wife’s inheritance to support his children, Fitzgerald was sensitive to his family’s outsider status among the monied elite of his native St. Paul, Minnesota. An indifferent student, he found his craving for recognition hampered by poor grades that interfered with his extracurricular pursuits of popularity, especially after he flunked out of Princeton University in 1917. Nor were his aspirations for military heroism any more successful. Although commissioned as a second lieutenant during the Great War, he described himself as the “army’s worst aide-de-camp” (1945, 85) – largely because he preferred writing his first novel to tactics and training. As his 1936 story “I Didn’t Get Over” suggests, the fact that he never saw combat – the Armistice arrived as his infantry regiment was preparing to ship abroad – was an additional lifelong regret. Of even greater influence were his early romantic disappointments. Fitzgerald’s desire for acceptance in the haute monde led him to court debutantes from whose circles he was doomed to be rejected. At 19, while dating Ginevra King, the daughter of a wealthy Illinois banker, he overheard a family member of hers (accounts differ as to whom) remark, “Poor boys shouldn’t think of marrying rich girls” (1973b, 17). Two years later, while he was stationed at Camp Sheridan in Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda Sayre declined his
initial marriage proposal because of his poor career prospects. These snubs combined to become his most characteristic plotline, which typically revolves around the efforts of young men of humble backgrounds to prove themselves worthy of the daughters of a wealthier class. That Fitzgerald explored this theme both farcically (“The Offshore Pirate” [1920a]) as well as tragically (“Winter Dreams” [1922b], and The Great Gatsby) is indicative of how thoroughly his perceived unworthiness stamped him. Because Fitzgerald promoted his fiction as autobiographical, early critics tended to dismiss him as a “facile” writer. Yet he never would have attracted the wide audience he did during his peak years of popularity (1920–5) had he not possessed a talent for presenting personal milestones as representative of his peers’ collective experience. This Side of Paradise sold upwards of 50,000 copies because protagonist Amory Blaine’s thwarted ambitions are depicted as generational dilemmas: his failures in love and college are attributed not simply to personal shortcomings but also to the sweeping changes of modern life, which caused young people to grow up “to discover all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths shaken” (1920b, 260). With its unflattering portraits of adults and unrepentant vignettes of teenage initiation rituals – drinking and petting, most notoriously – Paradise gave voice to postwar youth by offering a realistic treatment of adolescent disaffection. In doing so, the book established the template for such twentieth-century coming-of-age novels as J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) – works that, like Paradise, resist the traditional Bildungsroman model by declining to conclude with their heroes entering adulthood. More immediately, both the novel and Fitzgerald’s earliest short stories – most published in the Saturday Evening Post – popularized a character type with which he remains inexorably associated: the flapper. With their bobbed hair, knee-baring skirts, and unapologetic coquetry, heroines such as Paradise’s Rosalind Connage, Marcia Meadow in “Head and Shoulders,” Ardita Farnam in “The Offshore Pirate,” and Sally Carrol Happer in “The Ice Palace” (all 1920a) modeled for female readers a self-consciously rebellious subcultural identity that freed them from the strictures of Victorian femininity. Nowhere is
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that freedom more obvious than when a character invokes Louisa May Alcott in “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” (also 1920a): “Oh, please don’t quote Little Women!” Marjorie Harvey responds: “What modern girl could live like those inane females?” (33). Fitzgerald capitalized upon adult worries over “flaming youth” by entitling his first story collection Flappers and Philosophers (1920a), and his second Tales of the Jazz Age (1922b), and by opining on adolescent mores in interviews and articles. Even after the vogue for flappers faded, he remained fascinated with youth. Between 1927 and 1931, he wrote a series of 13 “juveniles” for the Post that follow Basil Duke Lee and Josephine Perry through their late teens. Although nowhere near as well known as Gatsby or Tender, these pieces, posthumously collected as The Basil and Josephine Stories (1973a), offer as nuanced a portrait of the paysage moralise as one will find on any shortlist of “young-adult” classics. Despite his fixation with youth, Fitzgerald knew that to be regarded as more than a “flapper novelist,” he must reach beyond his immediate generational focus to address broader cultural concerns. One interest that allowed him to do this was money. Keenly aware of the expanding consumer market, he examined the ways in which the Victorian values of hard work and frugality were losing their moral valence to a new mindset of abundance and leisure-time indulgence. At times, he parodied the previously unimaginable wealth amassed by barons such as John D. Rockefeller. “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922b) tells the fantastical story of the world’s richest man, who lives on a mountain-sized diamond in the Montana Rockies. The irony is that Braddock Washington’s net worth is far from stable, for his diamond is so large that “if it were offered for sale not only would the bottom fall out of the market, but also, if the value should vary . . . there would not be enough gold in the world to buy a tenth of it” (1920a, 193). Washington must thus keep the diamond’s existence secret, which in turn requires him to either imprison or kill anyone who trespasses upon his Xanadu-like estate – a commentary on not only the cutthroat extremes to which men like Rockefeller were said to go to protect their fortunes from the volatility of commodity markets, but also the increasingly abstract and transitory nature of monetary values themselves.
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In other cases, Fitzgerald preferred to moralize rather than satirize. His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922a), traces the decay of an upper-class New York couple, Anthony and Gloria Patch, as they await an inheritance from Anthony’s wealthy grandfather. Without any guiding motivation in life, Anthony and Gloria succumb to drink, concupiscence, and adultery, their degeneration only accelerating after they discover themselves excluded from their patriarch’s will. Heavily influenced by naturalist fiction, The Beautiful and Damned is marred by didactic authorial intrusions and a confusing ending whose irony escaped many contemporary readers. (The Patches win a legal battle that recovers their lost fortune, but only after a breakdown that renders Anthony an invalid.) Yet, despite its flaws, the novel captures the fear that prosperity encouraged laxity and dissipation. Fitzgerald would explore this theme more successfully in his most anthologized short story, “Babylon Revisited” (1931). Charles Wales is a more sympathetic character than Anthony Patch because he recognizes how the extravagance afforded by the bull market cost him his family and landed him in a sanitarium. Even if his nostalgia for reckless living undermines his insistence that he has regained his moorings, his regret inspires incisive criticism of how affluence distorted his sense of reality: “The snow of twenty-nine wasn’t real snow,” Charlie concludes. “If you didn’t want it to be snow, you just paid some money” (1920a, 633). In still other efforts, Fitzgerald trumpeted the Protestant work ethic as intently as any Babbittesque Rotarian that Sinclair Lewis might skewer. One of his most widely read stories during his lifetime, “George Jackson’s Arcady” (1924), concerns a disillusioned businessman who discovers how many lives he has benefited by epitomizing the virtues of honorable effort and civic giving. Although virtually forgotten today, this proto-It’s a Wonderful Life tale was deemed so inspirational that in 1928 it was republished in pamphlet form as part of a series promoting public readings of motivational texts. One reason that Fitzgerald’s critiques of Roaring Twenties mores continue to resonate has to do with what critics call his “dual perspective” or “double vision.” His work does not merely sermonize against easy money and irrational exuberance. Instead, it acknowledges their appeal
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with great empathy, allowing readers to experience their allure rather than condemning them from a distance. The result, as Malcolm Cowley observed, is a mixture of a “maximum of immersion” combined with a “maximum of critical attachment” that creates a beguiling aura of ambiguity (9). The pinnacle of this trait is The Great Gatsby, in which narrator Nick Carraway stands both inside and outside of the action, at once enabling the enigmatic, nouveau riche Jay Gatsby in his quest to win back lost love Daisy Fay Buchanan with a fortune built from bootlegging and shady bonds while recognizing the unlikelihood of its success. Whether attending Gatsby’s lavish Long Island parties, traveling into New York City with Daisy’s philandering husband, Tom, or lending Gatsby his cottage for a rendezvous with Daisy, Nick is implicated in the intrigue in ways he cannot admit, especially when he is prone to make statements such as “[e]very one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known” (1925, 59). Whether such comments are meant sincerely or ironically is impossible to determine, suggesting that the dramatis personae are so caught in the flux of uncertainty that pragmatism and willful blindness have become their survival mechanism. In the end, The Great Gatsby conveys a world so prone to cynical expedience and plausible deniability that the optimism of its titular hero can only seem tragically naive. The Great Gatsby is considered Fitzgerald’s crowning achievement because of its stylistic and structural concision. Both This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned suffer from episodic forms that dilute their drama, while characterization is frequently conveyed through omniscient exposition rather than organic development. By narrowing the temporal scope of his timeline (the story occurs over the summer of 1922) and employing Nick Carraway as an observer-narrator, Fitzgerald was able to both intensify and internalize the tensions surrounding Gatsby’s pursuit of Daisy. At once imagistic, dream-like, and profoundly sad, the novel contains several of the most evocative symbols in all of American literature, including the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, the valley of ashes that separates Long Island from New York City, and the disembodied eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg that
peer out from an abandoned billboard. The plot, moreover, asks to be read on different thematic levels: ostensibly a love story, Gatsby explores the limits of self-making, the delusions of materialism, and the intangibility of aspiration in a supposedly classless society. In the final paragraphs – Fitzgerald’s most cited passage – Gatsby’s ambition is even elegized as an expression of the American Dream: Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.. . . And one fine morning – So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (1925, 189) Fitzgerald’s other major novel, Tender Is the Night, is the obverse of Gatsby in almost every imaginable way. Written over the course of a tempestuous nine-year period that saw the author handicapped by alcoholism and Zelda’s descent into mental illness, the book is chaotic, nonchronological, and fraught with “ruminations” and rhetorical “sideshows” that expound upon the historical, cultural, and philosophical import of its action (1994, 467). Nevertheless, the story of the degeneration of a promising psychologist, Dr. Dick Diver, and his unstable wife, Nicole Warren, explores how the ruptures of modernity render past ideals of character obsolete. On one level, the book refutes the “Great Man” theory of historical progressivism, showing how the moral fiber of Romantic destiny in which Fitzgerald wanted to believe had given way to fashionable decadence and self-destruction. It also captures the peculiar placelessness of the 1920s’ globalization, depicting the drift of privileged Americans who expatriated to Europe (much as Fitzgerald and Zelda did throughout the second half of the decade). Although Tender was at best a middling success when first published, its stature has grown over the years, with critics looking to its tangled subplots to appreciate how diverse phenomena shaped the era’s sense of fragmentation. Based closely on Zelda’s hospitalization in various Swiss sanitariums, Nicole’s treatment for schizophrenia invites exploration of the psychoanalytic concepts of transference and countertransference in her and her husband-doctor’s mutual dependency.
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Dick Diver’s infatuation with ingenue actress Rosemary Hoyt, meanwhile, illustrates the role of the cinema in fostering the unreality of modern life. Even the leitmotif of romantic warfare is illustrative, suggesting how the Great War militarized everyday interaction – including the battle between the sexes. After Tender, Fitzgerald only attempted one more novel. The Last Tycoon remained unfinished at the time of his December 21, 1940 death, however. Posthumously published a year later, it is notable for its treatment of the Hollywood studio system in which the author had intermittently toiled since the mid-1920s. As such, it is the culmination of several notable stories that explore his ambivalence toward both the industry and the medium, including “Jacob’s Ladder” (1927), “Magnetism” (1928), and a series of 1939–40 tales featuring failed public relations flak Pat Hobby. Fitzgerald’s non-fiction is also considered a major part of his oeuvre, in particular the Esquire triptych “The Crack-Up,” which ignited controversy in 1936 for its beguiling confessions of squandered talent. His more commercial short stories – once derided as distractions from his “serious” work – are increasingly recognized for their craft and wit. Although Fitzgerald will remain best known for the elegiac melancholy of The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, his short fiction reveals that he was as adept at comedy and fantasy as at tragedy – a testament to the breadth and range of his talent. SEE ALSO: Expatriate Fiction (AF); Faulkner, William (AF); Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Modern Fiction in Hollywood (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Berman, R. (1994). “The Great Gatsby” and Modern Times. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Blazek, W., & Rattray, L. (2007). Twenty-First Century Readings of “Tender Is the Night.” Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Bruccoli, M. J. (2002). Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, 2nd rev. edn. New York: Carroll and Graf. Bryer, J. R., Prigozy, R., & Stern, M. R. (2003). F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Twenty-First Century. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
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Curnutt, K. (ed.) (2004). An Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Oxford University Press. Curnutt, K. (2007). The Cambridge Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Cambridge University Press. Cowley, M. (1951). The Double Man. Saturday Review of Literature, 34, 9–10, 42–4. Donaldson, S. (1983). Fool for Love. New York: Congdon and Weed. Fitzgerald, F. S. (1920a). Flappers and Philosophers. New York: Scribner’s. Fitzgerald, F. S. (1920b). This Side of Paradise. New York: Scribner’s. Fitzgerald, F. S. (1922a). The Beautiful and Damned. New York: Scribner’s. Fitzgerald, F. S. (1922b). Tales of the Jazz Age. New York: Scribner’s. Fitzgerald, F. S. (1923). The Vegetable. New York: Scribner’s. Fitzgerald, F. S. (1925). The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner’s. Fitzgerald, F. S. (1926). All the Sad Young Men. New York: Scribner’s. Fitzgerald, F. S. (1934). Tender Is the Night. New York: Scribner’s. Fitzgerald, F. S. (1935). Taps at Reveille. New York: Scribner’s. Fitzgerald, F. S. (1941). The Last Tycoon. New York: Scribner’s. Fitzgerald, F. S. (1945). The Crack-Up (ed. E. Wilson). New York: New Directions. Fitzgerald, F. S. (1962). The Pat Hobby Stories (ed. A. Gingrich). New York: Scribner’s. Fitzgerald, F. S. (1973a). The Basil and Josephine Stories (ed. J. R. Bryer & J. Kuehl). New York: Scribner’s. Fitzgerald, F. S. (1973b). F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Ledger: A Facsimile (intro. M. J. Bruccoli). Washington, DC: NCR Microcard/Bruccoli Clark. Fitzgerald, F. S. (1979). The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald (ed. M. J. Bruccoli). New York: Harcourt Brace. Fitzgerald, F. S. (1989). The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection (ed. M. J. Bruccoli). New York: Scribner’s. Fitzgerald, F. S. (1994). F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters (ed. M. J. Bruccoli). New York: Scribner’s. Fitzgerald, F. S. (2002). Dear Scott/Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (ed. J. R. Bryer & C. W. Barks). New York: Scribner’s. Mangum, B. (1991). “A Fortune Yet”: Money in the Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Stories. New York: Garland. Mizener, A. (1951). The Far Side of Paradise. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
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Nowlin, M. (2007). F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Petry, A. H. (1991). Fitzgerald’s Craft of Short Fiction: The Collected Stories, 1920–1935. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Prigozy, R. (ed.) (2002). The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Oxford University Press.
Foer, Jonathan Safran ALIKI VARVOGLI
Jonathan Safran Foer is a young Jewish American novelist who is already establishing himself as an important voice in American letters. His first novel, Everything Is Illuminated (2002), was published to critical acclaim when he was only 25, and five years later he was selected as one of Granta magazine’s “Best of Young American Novelists.” In addition to his two novels to date, he has also published numerous stories as well as edited anthologies of new writing and introduced reissues of classic works of literature. Foer was born in Washington, DC in 1977. He attended Princeton University, where he studied with Joyce Carol Oates, who has been one of his many high-profile champions. In 1999 he traveled to Ukraine to research his grandparents’ history during World War II, hoping to write a nonfictional account of his experience. As he later admitted, the trip was ill planned and did not provide him with any answers. It did, however, give him the idea for the book that finally became Everything Is Illuminated. The novel won critical acclaim, and Foer was hailed as one of the most significant authors to emerge in the beginning of the twenty-first century. The book won the National Jewish Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was later made into a film directed by Liev Schreiber and starring Elijah Wood. Everything Is Illuminated tells the story of a character called Jonathan Safran Foer who travels to Ukraine in order to meet the woman who, according to his family, had saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Foer’s is one of the first American novels written by the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, and his contribution is significant because each generation has to face the task of
finding new ways of writing about a subject that has long been deemed unrepresentable, but has nevertheless been treated by many Jewish American authors. Foer has approached the subject using innovative textual strategies, as well as weaving other significant themes into the novel. The book consists of three parts: one narrated by Jonathan’s Ukrainian guide and translator, Alex Perchov; another consisting of Alex’s letters to Jonathan; and a third strand comprising Jonathan’s fictional account of the history of the shtetl of Trachimbrod. The structural complexity of the novel reinforces the theme of intercultural communication in the era of globalization. Alex’s idiosyncratic use of English is very funny, but more seriously it emphasizes the work of translation and interpretation that the reader also has to engage with in order to appreciate the novel. It is also significant that Jonathan, the supposed protagonist in the novel, is actually absent from the text: we catch glimpses of him through Alex’s account, and we read his Trachimbrod book as he sends the chapters to Alex. More generally, the novel can be placed within the tradition of the postmodernist American novel. The author uses familiar novelistic tropes and motifs such as the hero’s quest journey, the buddy road trip, the epistolary novel, and magic realism, and by blending these ingredients he draws attention to continuity and innovation in novel writing. The book’s copyright page also contains a twist on the familiar disclaimer, explaining how the author uses historical events fictitiously, thus aligning himself with historiographic metafiction, which is also employed in his next novel. Foer clearly doesn’t shy away from big, difficult themes, and his second novel deals with the events of September 11, 2001. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) tells the story of Oskar Schell, a precocious 9-year-old whose father died in the World Trade Center. Like its predecessor, the book relies on a series of narrative and structural innovations, which can be read as the author’s attempt to find new modes of expression suitable for new realities. The choice of the name Oskar brings to mind one of the most memorable narrator-characters in world literature, G€ unter Grass’s Oskar Matzerath from The Tin Drum (1959). Once again, then, the book foregrounds its own “literariness” and its indebtedness to previous novels, not only through this example
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of intertextuality, but also through its innovative use of photographs, illustrations, and typographic experiments. Though inevitably some critics will condemn these devices as gimmicks, it should be noted that the predominantly visual nature of the World Trade Center attacks has necessitated new modes of novelistic expression, and therefore Foer’s contribution can be seen as important in that respect. Foer has published stories in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. He has also edited a collection of new writing called A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell (2001). He is married to novelist Nicole Krauss, and he continues to write. SEE ALSO: Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Minimalist/Maximalist Fiction (AF); Oates, Joyce Carol (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Feuer, M. (2007). Almost Friends: Post-Holocaust Comedy, Tragedy, and Friendship in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated. Shofar, 25(2), 24–48. Foer, J. S. (2001). A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell. New York: Distributed Art. Foer, J. S. (2002). Everything Is Illuminated. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Foer, J. S. (2005). Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Mason, W. (2005). Like Beavers. London Review of Books (June 2). At www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n11/wyattmason/like-beavers, accessed Jan. 19, 2010. Varvogli, A. (2006). “Underwhelmed to the Maximum”: American Travellers in Dave Eggers’s You Shall Know Our Velocity and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. Atlantic Studies, 3(1), 83–95.
Ford, Richard HUEY GUAGLIARDO
Richard Ford ranks as a major figure among American writers of the post-World War II generation. Ford’s works of fiction repeatedly explore issues of human loneliness, isolation, and despair; and his characters, typically caught up in the
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absurd violence and randomness of existence in the postmodern world, experience dislocation and marginalization as they struggle to forge connections with other human beings on the lonely edge of life. Ford’s project, thus, clearly places him in the tradition of the existential literature of alienation. As astute observations of contemporary society and its peculiar afflictions, his narratives of alienation also invite examination in a cultural context. Born in Jackson, Mississippi on February 16, 1944, Ford learned at an early age to accommodate displacement and uncertainty. When he was 8 years old, his father suffered a heart attack, and the family moved from its home in Jackson into a hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas run by Ford’s grandfather. Life in the hotel, with its permanence amid transience, provided an important formative experience for Ford, who would later become somewhat notorious for his restless nature. Days after Ford’s sixteenth birthday his traveling salesman father suffered a fatal heart attack, and just two years later Ford began his own peripatetic adult life by traveling to Michigan, where he enrolled at Michigan State University, majoring in hotel management. He later changed his major to English, graduated, and joined the US Marine Corps (from which he was discharged after contracting hepatitis). After a brief stint working in New York for American Druggist as assistant science editor and attending Washington University Law School in St. Louis, Missouri for one semester, Ford married his college sweetheart, Kristina Hensley. Unemployed and without serious prospects, he decided to pursue a career as a writer by enrolling in the University of California, Irvine’s MFA program. He was awarded the degree in 1970, having studied with Oakley Hall and E. L. Doctorow. Unsuccessful in his attempts to publish his short fiction, Ford began work on a novel. A Piece of My Heart (1976) received a nomination for the Ernest Hemingway Award for Best First Novel, but its rural Mississippi/Arkansas setting and eccentric characters led some critics to describe it as a poor imitation of William Faulkner. Ford decided at that point never again to write another novel set in his native South, and has resisted the “Southern writer” label ever since. As if to escape the comparisons to Faulkner, Ford chose Mexico as the setting for his second novel, The Ultimate Good Luck (1981). The story
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concerns Harry Quinn, an emotionally disabled Vietnam veteran trying to free his ex-girlfriend’s cocaine-smuggling brother from prison. Although neither of Ford’s first two novels was commercially successful, they received many favorable reviews, and they introduced themes and concerns that the author would explore throughout his career. Following the publication of The Ultimate Good Luck, Ford, disappointed by his inability to find a significant readership and despondent over his mother’s death, decided to quit writing fiction and to begin a career as a sports journalist for a New York magazine called Inside Sports. When the magazine folded in 1982, he began working on The Sportswriter, the novel that introduced his best-known character, suburban Everyman Frank Bascombe, and provided the breakthrough Ford needed to finally establish his reputation as a serious writer. The Sportswriter (1986) was followed by Rock Springs (1987), a critically acclaimed volume of short stories, and Wildlife (1990), a short coming-of-age novel in which Ford used the stark landscape of Montana to develop his existentialist themes. The story of Frank Bascombe continued with Independence Day, which in 1995 became the first book to win both the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award. Women with Men (1997), a collection of three novellas, and A Multitude of Sins (2002), a volume of short fiction, are works that deal with one of Ford’s recurring subjects, the isolation and loneliness resulting from dissolving relationships. With the publication of his third Frank Bascombe book, The Lay of the Land (2006), Ford completed a trilogy of novels offering the most extensive and penetrating commentary on contemporary American culture since John Updike chronicled the life of “Rabbit” Angstrom in a four-book sequence spanning several decades. Like Updike’s “Rabbit” series, Ford’s Bascombe novels were published at roughly 10-year intervals. While the introspective and somewhat solipsistic Frank serves as narrator-protagonist for all three novels, it is clear that Ford has his eye not only on Frank’s inner landscape, but also on the American landscape, with the suburban, middle-class culture of New Jersey serving as a microcosm. The major literary influences upon Ford include fellow Mississippian Faulkner, and two
members of Gertrude Stein’s “Lost Generation,” Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald – as well as the French Existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and practitioners of the novel of alienation such as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Frederick Exley, Joseph Heller, and Walker Percy. SEE ALSO: Faulkner, William (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); The Southern Novel (AF); Updike, John (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Duffy, B. (2008). Morality, Identity and Narrative in the Fiction of Richard Ford. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Ford, R. (1976). A Piece of My Heart. New York: Harper and Row. Ford, R. (1981). The Ultimate Good Luck. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Ford, R. (1986). The Sportswriter. New York: Knopf. Ford, R. (1987). Rock Springs. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Ford, R. (1990). Wildlife. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Ford, R. (1995). Independence Day. New York: Knopf. Ford, R. (1997). Women with Men. New York: Knopf. Ford, R. (2002). A Multitude of Sins. New York: Knopf. Ford, R. (2004). Vintage Ford. New York: Vintage. Ford, R. (2006). The Lay of the Land. New York: Knopf. Guagliardo, H. (ed.) (2000). Perspectives on Richard Ford. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Guagliardo, H. (ed.) (2001). Conversations with Richard Ford. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Lee, D. (1996). About Richard Ford. Ploughshares, 22(2–3), 226–35. Walker, E. A. (2000). Richard Ford. New York: Twayne.
Frank, Waldo KATHLEEN PFEIFFER
As novelist, playwright, cultural critic, social commentator, editor, and mentor to younger writers, Waldo Frank sought to influence the development of a more organic, democratic American literature in the twentieth century. Though he longed for recognition as a novelist, particularly in relation to his pioneering efforts to develop the “lyric novel” in his early fiction, Frank will probably best be remembered for the clarity and insight of his critical writing about American
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culture and for his passionate advocacy of Latin American writers to US audiences. Waldo David Frank, named after Emerson and Thoreau, was born into a non-observant Jewish family in 1889 in Long Branch, New Jersey. A precocious student, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale in 1911, earning a simultaneous BA and MA in three years. He helped found the Seven Arts little magazine in 1916, where as literary editor, he discovered Claude McKay and Sherwood Anderson. Frank’s first novel, a lengthy semiautobiographical Bildingsroman titled The Unwelcome Man (1917), was among the first to employ Freudian psychology deliberately to inform the protagonist’s interior monologue. The Dark Mother (1920) also experimented with psychological concepts, offering a nuanced and mystical account of male friendship that has often been cited as an early example of homosexual literature. Frank experimented with non-linear narrative form in two structurally innovative and thematically related works, Rahab (1922b) and City Block (1922a). Each of these novels deviated dramatically from traditional narrative, juxtaposing story lines and characters against each other and against classical literary traditions. Both also examined sexuality, with Rahab focusing on a procuress and the prostitutes she attends, and City Block examining, among other things, the sexual infidelity of a married couple and the sexual activity of a priest. Because both Frank and his publisher Horace Liveright feared prosecution from the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice, City Block was published privately. Frank also wrote the psychological thriller Chalk Face (1924a), a murder mystery that also manipulated Freudian tropes. Holiday (1923), his evocative story of a Southern lynching, is probably the most important and best remembered from this period, not only because of its significance to the Harlem Renaissance, but also because he wrote it during his friendship with Jean Toomer, whom he mentored and advised while Toomer wrote Cane. Viewed by Frank and Toomer as “companion pieces,” Holiday and Cane were published on the same day, both by Boni and Liveright. Frank published novels throughout his life, including The Death and Birth of David Markand (1934), a sequel to The Dark Mother; The Bride-
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groom Cometh (1938), which traces the maturation of protagonist Mary Donald with marked New Testament imagery; Summer Never Ends (1941), a love story between a middle-aged man and a much younger woman; Island in the Atlantic (1946), an examination of Jewish identity in America that also fictionalized his own father’s life; The Invaders (1948), which fictionally imagines the import of the atom bomb on individual identity through a series of interpersonal “invasions”; and Not Heaven (1953), a collection of short stories that are unified only in their theme of examining some aspect of hell on earth. All of these works represent Frank’s attempts to develop what he called the “lyric novel,” a direct expression of subjectivity that employs modernist literary techniques; Frank’s fiction generally experiments with form and often evokes some mystical vision. His novels received mixed reviews from critics who struggled with Frank’s mysticism and his disjointed, elliptical style. Frank’s critical writing proved more culturally influential than his fiction, particularly works like Our America (1919) and The Rediscovery of America (1929b), both of which called for an organic American art form. Always politically active, Frank also lectured extensively prior to his death in 1967. His writings on Cuba have proven prophetic and his advocacy of Latin American writers makes him a formidable critical presence in Latin America even today. In all of his life’s writing and work, Frank embraced Walt Whitman’s vision of the artist as American culture’s priest, and he saw creativity and writing as revolutionary activities that had the potential to reinvigorate American democracy. SEE ALSO: Anderson, Sherwood (AF); The Harlem Renaissance (AF); McKay, Claude (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Queer Modernism (AF); Toomer, Jean (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bittner, W. (1958). The Novels of Waldo Frank. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Carter, P. J. (1967). Waldo Frank. New York: Twayne. Frank, W. (1917). The Unwelcome Man. Boston: Little, Brown.
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Frank, W. (1919). Our America. New York: Boni and Liveright. Frank, W. (1920). The Dark Mother. New York: Boni and Liveright. Frank, W. (1922a). City Block. Darien, CT: privately printed. Frank, W. (1922b). Rahab. New York: Boni and Liveright. Frank, W. (1923). Holiday. New York: Boni and Liveright. Frank, W. (1924a). Chalk Face. New York: Boni and Liveright. Frank, W. (1924b). Salvos: An Informal Book about Books and Plays. New York: Boni and Liveright. Frank, W. (1926a). Time Exposures, by Search-Light. New York: Boni and Liveright. Frank, W. (1926b). Virgin Spain. New York: Boni and Liveright. Frank, W. (1929a). New Year’s Eve: A Play. New York: Scribner’s. Frank, W. (1929b). The Rediscovery of America. New York: Scribner’s. Frank, W. (1931). America Hispana. New York: Scribner’s. Frank, W. (1932). Dawn in Russia. New York: Scribner’s. Frank, W. (1934). The Death and Birth of David Markand. New York: Scribner’s. Frank, W. (1937). In the American Jungle. New York: Farrar and Rinehart. Frank, W. (1938). The Bridegroom Cometh. London: Gollancz. Frank, W. (1940). Chart for Rough Water. New York: Doubleday. Frank, W. (1941). Summer Never Ends. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce. Frank, W. (1943). South American Journey. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce. Frank, W. (1944). The Jew in Our Day. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce. Frank, W. (1946). Island in the Atlantic. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce. Frank, W. (1948). The Invaders. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce. Frank, W. (1951). Birth of a World: Bolivar in Terms of His Peoples. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Frank, W. (1953). Not Heaven. New York: Hermitage House. Frank, W. (1957). Bridgehead: The Drama of Israel. New York: Braziller. Frank, W. (1958). The Rediscovery of Man. New York: Braziller. Frank, W. (1961). Cuba: Prophetic Island. New York: Marzani and Munsell. Terris, D. (2003). Waldo Frank, Jean Toomer, and the Critique of Racial Voyeurism. In H. Hathaway,
J. Jarab, & J. Melnick (eds.), Race and the Modern Artist. New York: Oxford, pp. 92–114. Trachtenberg, A. (ed.) (1973). Memoirs of Waldo Frank. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Franzen, Jonathan KEITH WILHITE
Named one of “Twenty Writers for the 21st Century” by the New Yorker, Jonathan Franzen has published critically acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction since his debut novel, The Twenty Seventh City (1988), earned the Whiting Writer’s Award. His non-fiction essays effectively unite the genres of memoire and cultural critique, while his fiction, though decidedly postmodern in influence and ambition, draws on longstanding traditions of narrative realism and naturalism. To date, he has published three novels and two collections of non-fiction. Franzen was born in Western Springs, Illinois on August 17, 1959 and raised in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. He graduated from Swarthmore College and studied in Berlin as a Fulbright Scholar. To fund his early writing efforts, Franzen worked in the seismology department at Harvard University, an experience he would draw on for his second novel, Strong Motion (1992). The acclaim for his first two novels was surpassed by the popular and critical success of The Corrections (2001). His third novel won the National Book Award and brought Franzen some unwanted notoriety for his part in the now-infamous Oprah Book Club “scandal.” His disparaging remarks concerning Oprah Winfrey’s selection of The Corrections for her televised reading group caused a minor tempest in the media. Responses ranged from ad hominem attacks against Franzen to more thoughtful reflections on popular culture, female readership, and literary value (Chronicle 2001). Franzen’s first two novels utilize the presence of pervasive conspiracy networks to intertwine the personal and political strands of his fiction. The Twenty-Seventh City is set in a fictionalized version of St. Louis, and the metropolitan area is under siege by terrorists. The mastermind behind the terror campaign is the new police chief,
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S. Jammu. Her public support for a contentious city–county reunification plan disguises a clandestine real estate scheme to garner wealth and political power. Martin Probst, a contractor famous for building the Gateway Arch, heads the opposition to the proposed plan and stands in as the imperfect but stalwart opponent of unchecked greed in the novel. Franzen’s detailed, wide-angle depictions of St. Louis level a compelling critique against contemporary urban planning and civic apathy. The conspiracy in Strong Motion is orchestrated by a chemical company whose toxic waste-dumping practices trigger a string of earthquakes in the Boston area. The relationship between the two central figures, Louis Holland and Renee Seitchek, allows Franzen to explore a range of fraught topics: gender roles, abortion rights, religious fanaticism, greed, consumerism, and the possibility for redemption in an era of generalized guilt and malaise. “Strong motion” refers to the shaking near the epicenter of an earthquake, motion that is easy to record but reveals little about the quake itself. This phenomenon serves as the novel’s controlling metaphor: the characters can register the symptoms of their strained relations and always partial contentment but fail to fathom the vague desires and fears that underlie them. In 1996, Franzen published “Perchance to Dream,” an essay that has shaded responses to all his subsequent work. Later collected as “Why Bother?” in How to Be Alone (2003), the essay descries the decline of the “social novel” and laments the diminished capacity of serious writing to engage serious readers. The piece has been cited as evidence of Franzen’s elitism and criticized for its narrow definition of literary value (Marcus 2005), but the essay thoughtfully examines the possibility of “preserving a community of readers and writers” in an era of “atomized privacy” (Franzen 2003, 90, 70). Toward the end of the piece, Franzen cites his correspondence with Don DeLillo to reassure himself that serious writing still matters, but the conclusion also recapitulates a more fundamental tension in Franzen’s work between the novel as art and the novel as social commentary (Wood 2004). This tension drives The Corrections, an ambitious, sharply written novel, equally committed to human drama and cultural critique. The plot revolves around the Lambert family and
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the increasingly scattered lives of its respective members. Enid Lambert desperately wants her children to return to St. Jude for “one last Christmas” before their father, Alfred, succumbs to Parkinson’s disease. Her children, though, will do almost anything to avoid their parents and the Midwestern suburb of their youth. The “corrections” of the title is the novel’s leitmotif. Gary, Chip, and Denise Lambert envision their respective lives as “corrections” to those of their parents, but they unavoidably end up as nuanced repetitions. Enid wants her children to be “corrections,” to accomplish things she could not, but she cannot overcome her disappointment in their choices. And, finally, “correction” as the country’s prevailing ethos provides material for the novel’s askance look at capitalism, antidepressants, and biotechnology (Wood 202–4). Since 2001, Franzen has primarily published non-fiction. How to Be Alone brings together essays on a wide range of topics: his father’s Alzheimer’s, privacy, prison, reading habits, urbanism, suburban sprawl, and the Oprah Book Club. The Discomfort Zone (2006) collects some of his more recent non-fiction pieces from the New Yorker, including reflections on selling his mother’s house, his adolescence in the Midwest, and the dissolution of his first marriage in an essay about bird watching. In both his fiction and non-fiction, Franzen develops incisive portraits of contemporary American consciousness: experiences of loss, isolation, and redemption; the inescapable bonds of family; rampant materialism and corporate greed; and detailed portraits of homes, cities, and metro regions in various degrees of decline. He continues to write for the New Yorker while working on his next novel. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); DeLillo, Don (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Annesley, J. (2006). Market Corrections: Jonathan Franzen and the “Novel of Globalization.”Journal of Modern Literature, 29(2), 111–28. Chronicle of Higher Education (2001). Deconstruct This: Jonathan Franzen and Oprah, a Novelist, a
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Talk-Show Host, and Literature High and Low, p. B4 (Nov. 30). Franzen, J. (1988). The Twenty-Seventh City. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Franzen, J. (1992). Strong Motion. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Franzen, J. (2001). The Corrections. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Franzen, J. (2003). How to Be Alone: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Picador. Franzen, J. (2006). The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Marcus, B. (2005). Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing: Jonathan Franzen,
and Life as We Know It: A Correction. Harper’s, pp. 39–52 (Oct.). Rebein, R. (2007). Turncoat: Why Jonathan Franzen Finally Said “No” to Po-Mo. In N. Brooks & J. Toth (eds.), The Mourning After: Attending the Wake of Postmodernism. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 201–22. Rohr, S. (2004). “The Tyranny of the Probable”: Crackpot Realism and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Amerikastudien/American Studies, 49(1), 91–105. Wood, J. (2004). Jonathan Franzen and the “Social Novel.” In The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, pp. 195–209.
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G Gaddis, William JOSEPH P. TABBI
An encyclopedia entry on William Gaddis, himself a foremost “encyclopedic” author (Burn 2007), had better begin by narrowing the range. The field Gaddis set out to explore at length, in The Recognitions (1955), can be said to have been roughly congruent with the contemporary “wasteland” delineated a generation earlier in poetry by T. S. Eliot, namely, the entire heritage of literary, visual, musical, and religious arts that were being reconsidered, reformed, and to some extent used to “shore up the ruins” of postwar society. What was formulated for the first time, by Eliot and his modernist compeers, became redoubled, and partly parodied, in The Recognitions, which became a reference point for a post-World War II generation of US writers and an important precursor to an emerging, postmodernist aesthetic in literature. By the time, 20 years later, that Gaddis published his next novel, the National Book Awardwinning JR (1975), the arts have disappeared as a subject of encyclopedic, essayistic reflection. The party talk, office talk, and street talk that, in the first novel, served as a counterpoint to the narrative become the narrative in JR. And the arts, rather than something to be practiced, reproduced, revered, or reviled, become mere topics of conversation even among the artists, musicians, and authors who are the main characters. Eliot’s project of literary modernization, by now, has been completed. The fragmented condition of the literary and aesthetic “tradition,” however,
has made the arts suitable for colonization by another, equally important force in Gaddis’s works: namely, the rise of corporate capital and its expansion worldwide. But not only the “rise”: that story was being told already by John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and the entire line of American naturalist writing. It would be revisited by Robert Coover in John’s Wife (1996), Don DeLillo in Cosmopolis (2003), Richard Powers in Gain (1998), and Thomas Pynchon in Against the Day (2006) – among many other authors a generation or two after Gaddis, whose work they acknowledge and develop. What distinguishes Gaddis from his peers and precursors, however, is the insight that corporate capital, today as never before, has become uniquely, deviously personalized. The granting to corporations of rights normally given to individuals, and the American love of innovation and belief in progress, could be replicated in narrative fiction by attributing to a single person the entire force and direction of modern capital. Mark Twain had already given the spirit of accumulation and entrepreneurship to his adolescent hero, Tom Sawyer. Gaddis would succeed in attributing the entire system of corporate capital to a fatherless eighth grader from Long Island, the irrepressible J. R. Vansant, an “unkempt 11 year old whose penny stock and defaulted bond operations [blossom] into a vast and perilous financial empire” (“JR Up to Date,” in Gaddis 2002b). William Gaddis was born in Long Island to Edith and William Gaddis Sr. on December 29, 1922. Like his character J.R., like Otto in The Recognitions (“Auto”), like the artist turned art
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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forger Wyatt Gwyon (another W.G.), and like the jack-of-all-trades Jack Gibbs, Gaddis grew up not knowing his father, and he commuted to boarding schools in Connecticut. He attended Harvard University, was dismissed in 1945, and then, against the explicit advice of his Harvard professors to avoid journalism, worked a stint at the New Yorker, traveled, and then settled in his mother’s carriage house to draft The Recognitions. The novel was read with excitement by a circle of contemporaries (first among them Alan Ansen, who gave Gaddis use of his New York apartment in the fall of 1953 and, on returning from Europe, read the 1,000-plus-page manuscript straight through in a day and a half). The book was widely if unevenly reviewed, a fate anticipated by Gaddis in the novel, where one critic is seen carrying a heavy volume through the streets of Greenwich Village. When asked if he’s really reading the book, the critic answers, “Hell no, I’m just reviewing it.” The novel’s commercial failure compelled Gaddis, now married and a father, to take up a career in corporate writing. That self-same carriage house in Long Island would be one of the settings in JR, where the youthful Edward Bast composes, and fails to complete, a grand opera – which diminishes, in time, to a cantata, then a small piece for an orchestra, and finally a composition for an unaccompanied cello: a small voice against the din. Though some critics have read this progression as a valiant persistence on the part of Bast, and by extension on Gaddis’s part, JR’s distinctly multivoiced, dialogical, formally compact, but streaming narrative tells a different story of the relations between creativity and capital, money and text, “The Literary Imagination and the Imagination of the State” (one of Gaddis’s occasional essays published posthumously; 2002b). JR appeared at the end of a period of vast, postwar economic expansion, the era of Keynesian economics. Of course the novel reenacts the rapid growth and satirizes the excess of an era, but in its form and content JR remains wholly, unrelentingly within the constraints of the postwar economy, insinuating its collapse and to an extent, arguably, anticipating the next, neoliberal phase where the entire world becomes militarized and growth is an end in itself. Already in JR, in 1973, a novel that aspires to epical, encyclopedic scope no longer needs to reference a world outside power
and money, not when military and government organizations, motivated by interests of security and power, have themselves extended to all forms of daily life in all developed cities of the world. At the end of The Recognitions, a repentant Wyatt could exclaim, “Thank God there was the gold to forge,” when he is reassured that the Hieronymous Bosch painting in his childhood home was authentic. The distinction between originality and fakery, however tilted toward the latter in The Recognitions, is still upheld. So is the “gold standard” in the world economy, up to the supercession of the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1973, two years before the appearance of JR. As paper money no longer required any grounding representation in convertible gold, money could more easily breed money, and this free-floating, interchangeable, and worldspanning realm of signification is captured not only by what happens and what is said in Gaddis’s novel about money. The novel’s form, a continuing stream of text spoken by multiple voices through every available medium, is suited to the hypermobility and literally endless accumulation of transnational capital. Another innovation that occurred in the year of JR’s appearance (1975) was the “publication by Bill Gates and Paul Allen of a version of the computer language BASIC” for the Altair and for Microsoft. There was, of course, nothing new or revolutionary about this from a scientific or technological perspective. The innovation was entirely in the financial realm: by charging money for the software, Gates “in effect. . . invents closed source” (Pease, in press). In this way, code itself, what otherwise attaches to real, observable operations, could be hidden – and so technology itself could move into the same privatized sphere as finance, generating its own demands, its own economy, and objects meant to be experienced not actively, in their creation, but as self-breeding sources of entertainment and instruction (and a peculiar sort of instruction, not about the world but increasingly about the objects, instruments, and devices themselves). The cybernetic metaphor, already familiar in the early novels of Thomas Pynchon, becomes something more than a metaphor in Gaddis’s later work. The entire infrastructure of communication and transportation technologies becomes a set of
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channels through which language courses – the author’s own language, in bridge passages that take the reader from scene to scene, as well as the dialogue of characters. Language itself in this way becomes not just communicative but also operational in ways that are developed further in the firebrand religion of Carpenters Gothic (1985) and the legal language in A Frolic of His Own, which netted Gaddis his second National Book Award in 1994. And not only religious and legal language, but also the language of “every profession,” which Harry, the corporate lawyer in Frolic, calls “a conspiracy against the public, every profession protects itself with a language of its own.” In Gaddis’s late work, there are no longer any children among the characters – they exist outside the narrative action, playing hockey, for example, with a fallen pigeon at the start of Carpenters Gothic. Nature exists, tooth-in-claw, for Gaddis, though for the most part it’s conveyed through programs running through the night on the Nature Channel, which Gaddis presents in Frolic alongside quotations from Longfellow’s Hiawatha (“By the shores of Gitche Gumee . . .”). There is, in the late work, nobody around to hear the poet who, as late as Gaddis’s own childhood, might have appeared (with the essays of Emerson) in leather-bound, mass-produced volumes even in rural households, like the one depicted in the opening chapter of The Recognitions. There are no town carpenters in Gaddis’s America of the late twentieth century, nobody like the grandfather who tells stories to Wyatt in his Connecticut boyhood, or the distracted father, Reverend Gwyon, who seeds his sermons with philosophical, mystical, and anthropological heresies. No children, and no invented fathers, appear after The Recognitions and JR to fill the lack in Gaddis’s own upbringing. By the time of his final, posthumously published work of fiction, Agape Agape (2002a), Gaddis regards the age’s ideal child, “every four year old with a computer, everybody his own artist.” In an age of semi-autonomous technology and self-breeding money, the arts can be reduced to varieties of self-expression, modes of possessive individualism. But Gaddis resisted that capitulation, in writing, until the time when he could say, and do, nothing more.
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SEE ALSO: Coover, Robert (AF); DeLillo, Don (AF); Dos Passos, John (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Powers, Richard (AF); Pynchon, Thomas (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Abadi-Nagy, Z. (1987). The Art of Fiction: An Interview With William Gaddis. Paris Review, 105, 55–89. Brunel, J.-L., & Gresset, M. (eds.) (1994). William Gaddis, Profils Americaines, no. 6. Montpellier, France: Press Universite Paul-Valery. Burn, S. (2007). The Collapse of Everything: William Gaddis and the Encyclopedic Novel. In J. Tabbi & R. Shavers (eds.), Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, pp. 46–62. Commes, G. (1994). The Ethics of Indeterminacy in the Novels of William Gaddis. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Gaddis, W. (1955). The Recognitions. New York: Harcourt Brace. Gaddis, W. (1975). JR. New York: Knopf. Gaddis, W. (1985). Carpenters Gothic. New York: Viking. Gaddis, W. (1994). A Frolic of His Own. New York: Poseidon. Gaddis, W. (2002a). Agape Agape. New York: Viking. Gaddis, W. (2002b). The Rush for Second Place: Occasional Essays. New York: Penguin. Johnston, J. (1990). Carnival of Repetition: Gaddis’s “The Recognitions” and Postmodern Theory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Knight, C. J. (1997). Hints and Guesses: William Gaddis’s Fiction of Longing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Kuehl, J., & Moore, S. (eds.) (1984). In Recognition of William Gaddis. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. LeClair, T. (1989). The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Moore, S. (1982). A Reader’s Guide to William Gaddis’s “The Recognitions.” Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Moody, R. (ed.) (2003). William Gaddis: A Portfolio [special issue]. Conjunctions, 41. Moore, S. (1989). William Gaddis. Boston: G. K. Hall. O’Donnell, P. J. (1992). His Master’s Voice: On William Gaddis’s JR. Postmodern Culture, 1, 2 (online). (Also in Echo Chambers: Figuring Voice in Modern Narrative. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992.)
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Pease, A. (in press). Time Is Money, Money Is Text. PhD diss., University of Florida. Tabbi, J. (1995). The Technology of Quotation: William Gaddis’s JR and Contemporary Media. Mosaic, 28(4), 143–64. Tabbi, J., & Shavers, R. (eds.) (2007). Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Weisenburger, S. (1995). Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel 1930–1980. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Woolf, P. (1997). A Vision of His Own: The Mind and Art of William Gaddis. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Gaines, Ernest J. MARIA HEBERT-LEITER
With his attention to storytelling techniques and the verisimilitude of his characters’ voices, Ernest J. Gaines has effectively captured the realities of rural African American life in his fiction. Through his use of regional dialect and tragicomedy, he offers insight into the world of a twentiethcentury American South still in need of change and African American men still in search of pride and justice. Born in Oscar, Louisiana on January 15, 1933, Ernest J. Gaines lived his first 15 years with his aunt Miss Augusteen Jefferson, who did not have the use of her legs and so moved by way of her powerful arms, an example of the strength of African American women that would become a core component in such characters as Miss Jane Pittman. He lived in the River Lake Plantation quarters where he witnessed the racial and social structure unique to Louisiana, and he listened to the stories of the older residents, which later became inspiration for his fiction and influenced his characteristic use of first-person narration. At 15, Gaines moved to California to live with his mother and stepfather and benefit educationally. Here he took advantage of the public library and discovered the writers who would greatly influence his work, such as John Steinbeck, Willa Cather, Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and James Joyce, among others, which he has revised to address African American life in the South, particularly in Louisiana. Gaines attended junior college and served in the Army for two years before complet-
ing his education at San Francisco State College. After winning a writing fellowship to Stanford University, he completed his graduate work with classmates such as Wendell Berry, Ken Kesey, and Tillie Olsen. Gaines returns to the Louisiana of his past by setting his work in fictional Bayonne, St. Raphael Parish, and has remarked that he began writing so that the voices of his aunt and the people of the quarters could be heard. Not only does he capture these voices, but also he records the ethnic mix of Louisiana – Creoles, Creoles of Color, Cajuns, African Americans, and other communities – and the social structure from this interethnic situation. Such interconnections are illustrated through Gaines’s use of 15 narrators of various ages and ethnicities to relate the story of a Cajun’s murder and of decades-old injustices in A Gathering of Old Men (1983). Through such characters, he captures the complexity of humanity and the history of race relations in the South. Similarly in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971a), the title character not only relates one hundred years of Southern racial history, but also presents an oral history of how a former slave lived to join the Civil Rights Movement. In recognition of his contribution to twentiethcentury American literature, Gaines was offered the position of writer-in-residence at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in 1983. He has also been recognized nationally and internationally as a MacArthur Fellow (1993), Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (in France, 1996), and Louisiana Writer of the Year (2000). Additionally, he has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1967), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1971), and a National Humanities Medal (2000). While these awards honor Gaines’s achievement, works such as Catherine Carmier (1964), Of Love and Dust (1967), Bloodline (1968), A Long Day in November (1971b), and In My Father’s House (1978) provide readers with a compelling message about the interwoven reality of humanity. In particular, A Lesson Before Dying (1993), which received the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award, relates the story of two African American men and the development of their relationship, as college-educated Grant Wiggins teaches Jefferson how to become a man while Jefferson awaits execution for a murder he did not
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commit. As with all of Gaines’s work, an involved story of mutual education unfolds, as both characters learn the meaning of being a man in the 1940s South. While Gaines has downplayed African American literary influences, scholars have studied A Lesson Before Dying as engaging Richard Wright’s Native Son in a rural Louisiana context, furthering Gaines’s significant contribution to modern literature. In October 1997, this novel was chosen as a selection of Oprah’s Book Club, demonstrating the wide appeal of his fiction. SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); The Southern Novel (AF); Wright, Richard (AF)
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Gaines, E. J. (1993). A Lesson Before Dying. New York: Knopf. Gaudet, M., & Wooton, C. (1990). Porch Talk with Ernest Gaines: Conversations on the Writer’s Craft. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Gaudet, M., & Young, R., (eds.) (2005). Mozart and Leadbelly: Stories and Essays. New York: Knopf. Hebert-Leiter, M. (2006). A Breed Between: Racial Mediation in the Fiction of Ernest Gaines. MELUS, 31(2), 95–118. Lowe, J., (ed.) (1995). Conversations with Ernest Gaines. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Gardner, John ROBERT MORACE
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Babb, V. M. (1991). Ernest Gaines. Boston: Twayne. Beavers, H. (1995). Wrestling Angels Into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Byerman, K. (2005). Bearing Witness: The Recent Fiction of Ernest Gaines. In Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 38–53. Carmean, K. (1998). Ernest J. Gaines: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Clark, K. (2002). Reimagining Richard: Ernest J. Gaines and the Neo-Masculinist Literary Imagination. In Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, and August Wilson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 65–93. Doyle, M. E. (2002). Voices From the Quarters: The Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Estes, D. (ed.) (1994). Critical Reflections on the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Gaines, E. J. (1964). Catherine Carmier. New York: Atheneum. Gaines, E. J. (1967). Of Love and Dust. New York: Dial Press. Gaines, E. J. (1968). Bloodline. New York: Dial Press. Gaines, E. J. (1971a). The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. New York: Dial Press. Gaines, E. J. (1971b). A Long Day in November. Random House. Gaines, E. J. (1978). In My Father’s House. New York: Knopf. Gaines, E. J. (1983). A Gathering of Old Men. New York: Knopf.
During a career that spanned over a dozen years, John Gardner went from being one of the most versatile and highly regarded “new fictionists” of the early 1970s to one of the most controversial and reviled by decade’s end. As protean as he was prolific, “the Lon Cheney of contemporary fiction” became a John the Baptist railing against the decadent literature of his time while zealously advocating the straight and narrow road of “moral fiction,” based on heroic action and eternal verities. Gardner was born in 1933 and raised on a dairy farm near Batavia in western New York. The death of his younger brother, Gilbert, in 1945 in a farming accident profoundly affected Gardner, who held himself responsible and believed he could have saved his brother. Following his own death in a motorcycle accident in 1982, Gardner’s mother speculated that Gardner wrote so much because he was in effect writing for two, himself and Gilbert. Gardner not only wrote enough for two people (novels, short fiction, poetry, libretti, plays, children’s literature, translations, and academic criticism) but also wrote as two, and the Jekyll and Hyde aspect of his personality manifests itself in the trajectory of his overall career and forms the basic structure of his fiction, starting with his first published novel. In Resurrection (1966), James Chandler, a philosophy professor dying of leukemia, returns from the West Coast to his home town, Batavia, struggling physically and mentally against the disease that will kill him and professionally
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GARDNER, JOHN
against fashionable existentialism and positivism. Although set in ancient Sparta, The Wreckage of Agathon (1970) attracted greater attention because of its apparent relevance to America during the Vietnam War. The philosopher Agathon rails against the draconian Spartan leader, Lykourgos, but struggles as well with his own many failures in a novel in which the cynical antihero’s narrative alternates with chapters written by his naive and still idealistic disciple, Demodokus. Grendel (1971), a retelling of Beowulf from the monster’s point of view, put Gardner on the literary map and fit perfectly the spirit of the postmodern times – times which included decidedly contemporary reworkings of familiar stories: myths (John Barth), fairy tales (Robert Coover and Angela Carter), and Bible stories (Ted Hughes). Excluded from the human community, Grendel is drawn to the Shaper’s art and the hero Beowulf on one hand and to the Dragon and his existential worldview on the other. Much the same conflict appears in The Sunlight Dialogues (1972), Gardner’s longest, most intricate, and most interesting work, a philosophical cops and robbers story cum family saga set again in Batavia, pitting the glum and rather dim police chief, the novel’s unlikely hero, against the brilliant but destructive Sunlight Man, a local boy gone bad, an idealist-turned-cynic. Where the Sunlight Man failed to save his sons from fire and his wife from madness, Fred Clumly strives to save his community (he fails) and to solve the mystery that the Sunlight Man represents. Jason and Medeia (1973a), another retelling again focusing on personal failings and betrayals, written in verse; Nickel Mountain (1973b), “a pastoral novel” set in upstate New York and filled (as Gardner’s fiction often is) with grotesques; and The King’s Indian (1974), a collection of parodies and pastiches, underscore Gardner’s immense range. With the publication of October Light (1976), the play of contending forces becomes more narrowly focused and less ambiguously (and therefore more didactically) presented. The spat between an elderly brother and sister mirrors the conservative and liberal (Republican and Democratic) strains in America as well as in Gardner and the divide (as Gardner sees it) between moral fiction and its opposite: the novel October Light and the trash novel within it that the sister reads after being locked in her room
by her cantankerous and emotionally and physically constipated brother. For all its comedy, October Light is, as its title suggests, deeply elegiac, not least in an old man’s coming to terms with his many failings and skeletons in the family closet. The conservatism evident in October Light becomes more pronounced in Gardner’s “tablethumping” polemic, On Moral Fiction (1978), parts of which began appearing the same year and much of which was either written or revised as his marriage crumbled, his troubles with the Internal Revenue Service began, and he recovered from colon cancer surgery. Flailing at fellow writers as different as John Barth and Saul Bellow, the messianic Gardner sloppily argues that art is “a tragic-comic holding action against entropy,” should “grope” for meaning, and should present “valid models for imitation, eternal verities worth keeping in mind, and a benevolent vision of the possible which can inspire and incite human beings toward life affirmation as opposed to destruction or indifference.” Gardner’s manifesto, or jeremiad, was a shot fired from the conservative side early in the culture wars, one from which his writing and his reputation have never recovered. Freddy’s Book (1980), The Art of Living (1981, mainly of interest for the story “Resurrection,” about Gilbert’s death), and Mickelsson’s Ghosts (1982) all reflect the influence of his moral fiction thesis. Even the many critical studies that appeared after his death have stressed the moral side of Gardner’s work and thus downplayed the more dialogical and conflicted quality of his best work. SEE ALSO: Barth, John (AF); Bellow, Saul (AF); Carter, Angela (BIF); Carver, Raymond (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Chavkin, A. (ed.) (1990). Conversations with John Gardner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Ekelund, B. G. (1995). In the Pathless Forest: John Gardner’s Literary Project. Uppsala: University of Uppsala Press. Gardner, J. (1966). The Resurrection. New York: New American Library. Gardner, J. (1970). The Wreckage of Agathon. New York: Harper and Row. Gardner, J. (1971). Grendel. New York: Knopf.
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GASS, WILLIAM H.
Gardner, J. (1972). The Sunlight Dialogues. New York: Knopf. Gardner, J. (1973a). Jason and Medeia. New York: Knopf. Gardner, J. (1973b). Nickel Mountain: A Pastoral Novel. New York: Knopf. Gardner, J. (1974). The King’s Indian: Stories and Tales. New York: Knopf. Gardner, J. (1976). October Light. New York: Knopf. Gardner, J. (1978). On Moral Fiction. New York: Basic Books. Gardner, J. (1980). Freddy’s Book. New York: Knopf. Gardner, J. (1981). The Art of Living and Other Stories. New York: Knopf. Gardner, J. (1982). Mickelsson’s Ghosts. New York: Knopf. Gardner, J. (1983). On Becoming a Novelist. New York: Harper and Row. Gardner, J. (1984). The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers. New York: Knopf. Gardner, J. (1986). Stillness and Shadows (ed. N. Delbanco). New York: Knopf. Howell, J. M. (1993). Understanding John Gardner. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Morace, R. A. (1984). John Gardner: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography. New York: Garland. Silesky, B. (2004). John Gardner: Literary Outlaw. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin.
Gass, William H. HEIDE ZIEGLER
William H. Gass is an acclaimed essayist, novelist, and short fiction writer. His writing ideal – “Write so as to become primary” – denotes the special quality of all of his texts (2006, 33). His work can superficially be classified according to the categories mentioned above, but they tacitly erode all genres from within. Unremittingly following Ezra Pound’s modernist philosophical rule to “make it new,” Gass describes himself as a late modernist; founded upon a radical formalist aesthetic, his work contests much in the postmodern worldview, including many of its anti-formal assumptions. Based on a lifelong endeavor to understand the structure and function of metaphor – he earned his PhD in philosophy from Cornell University in 1954 with a dissertation titled “A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor” – Gass employs selfreflexive imagery to substantiate all his writings. This imagery creates a thing-like, self-sufficient
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quality for his art. In this, Gass’s work extends what Rainer Maria Rilke termed Ding-Gedichte, or “thing poetry.” Gass proclaims himself a “Rilke junkie,” and Rilke’s Duino Elegies, the only texts he has ever tried seriously to translate, have given him his “innermost thoughts.” In 1999 he published Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. Gass does not believe in the roll call of the canonical Great Books, although he believes in great books, most of them of European origin. Indeed, he claims to believe in very little else – “some music, some paintings, a few buildings, perhaps” (2006, 36) – yet he is a very astute observer of his own American culture, and he faithfully translates, edits, and interprets the texts he has read and absorbed from other cultures for his American audience. Gass has a genius for reading comparable to Virginia Woolf’s (one of his three literary heroines, alongside with Gertrude Stein and Colette), and a genius for dialogue that can almost be called Socratic. William Howard Gass was born in Fargo, North Dakota in July 1924. He taught philosophy at Purdue University before moving to Washington University in St. Louis, where he became a professor of philosophy (1969–78) and the David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities (1979–99). He also founded and directed the university’s International Writers Center (1990–2000). Gass retired in 2000, and in November 2006 a chair was established in his name in the Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. Gass has received many honorary degrees and literary awards, including being named Doctor of Humane Letters at Kenyon College and Washington University, among several others. His awards extend from the Longview Foundation Prize for Fiction in 1959 to the O. Henry Award for short stories in 2007. He won the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism for Habitations of the Word (1984), Finding a Form (1996), and Tests of Time (2002), and the American Book Award for The Tunnel (1995). In 1982, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1983 to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1997, he received a Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, and in the following year his star was placed on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.
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GASS, WILLIAM H.
Gass has always valued character over plot, not as an adherent of psychological realism, but in the sense of creating self-sufficient sensibilities on the page. In his first novel, Omensetter’s Luck (1966), the charismatic protagonist, Brackett Omensetter, so wins over the hearts and minds of the three narrators Israbestis Tott, Henry Pimber, and Jethro Furber that, despite their radically different worldviews, they become but the mouthpieces for Omensetter’s luck and his divine simplicity. In Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968b), this concept is taken further: the main character of the title, the source of physical and spiritual inspiration to her husband, who is named William, thus echoing the prenomens of Shakespeare, Wilhelm Meister (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s fictional alter ego), and, ultimately, Gass himself, is muse to and partner in her husband’s struggles with a long literary, valuesetting tradition. Here, the three masters are joined by others over the centuries, all of them male and overbearing, before Willie Masters’s promiscuous wife makes her twentieth-century appearance in the form of a triumphant democratic language, an American amalgam of the voices of a new Cassandra and a new Messalina. In 1995, Gass published his long-awaited novel, The Tunnel, on which he had been working for 26 years, and which he subsequently recorded as an audio book (2005). It is a novel about the “fascism of the heart,” a monologue of 650 pages rendered by the middle-aged, Midwestern American historian William Frederick Kohler, who recreates, in an ironically perverted recollection in tranquility, the events in Hitler’s Germany which he has witnessed as a student and later as a member of the American occupational army. The tunnel which he digs from his house while he is writing the “introduction” to his book, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany, leads nowhere, and Gass denies that there is light at the end of it, since fascism needs but the right historical, political, and cultural conditions in order to erupt anywhere in the world. Yet Kohler is not simply the hero or antihero of his tale, but its narrator as well, and the local soil which he digs from his own tunnel becomes the stunning words of his multilayered narration, his narration itself an excavation site of the (literary) history of mankind and a mirror of our present-day condition humaine.
The two short fiction collections, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968a) and Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas (1998), demonstrate how Gass’s concept of metaphor has developed over three decades. Whereas metaphor in the first collection retains the mystery inherent in the strictly visual, it becomes rhythm in the second, musical language within a sonata-like structure. The enumeration of facts and the lists of visual details in the celebrated title story of In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, with their slight modifications when the protagonist’s angle of vision changes, serve to both hide and reveal the mystery and despair of the human heart; the jargon of the real estate dealer in “Icicles” becomes ineffectual before his obsession with the perfect image of the icicles hanging from the roof of his house, which he will lose while they melt away. The dichotomy between mind and body, which Descartes introduced into philosophy, becomes orchestrated in Cartesian Sonata. In one of the novellas, “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s,” Emma’s infatuation with the great American poet causes her body to become ever more transparent until she can become the receptacle of a poetic language that leaves individuality and its vicissitudes behind; she becomes self-sufficient, like music. Interestingly, Gass’s novel-in-progress is called Middle C. Gass has revived the tradition of the literary or philosophical essay of the eighteenth century, only to transform it into something radically new. His six collections of essays together with his long essay called On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (1976) have, in their collective impact, created a new genre. The six essay collections so far, Fiction and the Figures of Life (1971), The World Within the Word (1978), Habitations of the Word, Finding a Form, Tests of Time, and A Temple of Texts (2006), all concentrate, as the titles indicate, on the role of language in our life. In each essay, the language takes its cue from the subject that is being treated, and it re-creates that subject within the confines of language. Gass’s essays can be crudely subdivided into three main categories: the metafictional essays, highly philosophical in that they also reflect upon the language they employ; the cultural-historicalpolitical essays that best exhibit his interests as a contemporary American; and the review essays,
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GASS, WILLIAM H.
which usually strive to ground those American interests in a European tradition. Gass’s metafictional essays often are also his most personal ones. Essays like “The Ontology of the Sentence, or How to Make a World of Words” (in 1978); “The Soul Inside the Sentence” (in 1985); the title essay of Finding a Form; and “The Nature of Narrative and Its Philosophical Implications” (in 2002) seem to bespeak their own epistemological topics. The theses Gass expounds in these essays, however, are anchored very soundly in Gass’s own experiences as a writer, for writers to him, though as various as books themselves, are all “obsessed,” as he says in “The Soul Inside the Sentence”: “incorruptible and patient, too, with a passion for perfection – as far as their work is concerned – vain as flowers” (1985, 117). And in “Finding a Form,” although conceding that all the world may be a stage “for those who can act in it,” he tells the reader that for him the “world became a page” (1996 33) early on, and since we contemplate what we cannot control, he contemplates the world through words. This Lockean attitude, rigorously subjecting the content of his most lofty theses to the unpretentious control of his own experience, turns these essays into some of the most convincing written in the English language today. Gass’s cultural-historical-political essays are his most controversial. Called forth by the social and political plight of the writer in our contemporary world, “they may be overly fulminacious in consequence” (2002, 127) – as Gass is ready to admit. But essays like “Pulitzer: The People’s Prize,” where Gass contends that the Pulitzer Prize in fiction takes “dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses” (1996, 3); or “The Writer and Politics. A Litany” (in 2002), where Gass names the historical forces which have been arrayed against writers so far, demonstrate that Gass is indeed, for all his European leanings and enthusiasms, a full-blooded American, suffering from the influence of accidents based on birth, blood, and color; from the ignorance and fear expressed in superstitions, gossip, bigotry, and parochialism; and from faith in money and inexhaustible greed. A prominent group within Gass’s essays is his review essays, which have often appeared in Harper’s. Gass tends to review monographs on or biographies of literary personages whom he
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admires enough to have raised one or more pillars for them in “A Temple of Texts: Fifty Literary Pillars” (1991). And he reaffirms his choices by redoubling reviews, thereby enhancing the authors’ fame over the years. Thus, the views he has expounded on Henry James in “In the Cage” and “The High Brutality of Good Intentions” (in 1971) are taken up again and perfected in a review essay, which Gass wrote for Harper’s in August 2008 on a new James biography by Sheldon Novick. Gass’s literary life has thus become a history of the development of his own imagination – the sequence of his review essays comparable to the series of Prefaces James wrote for the New York edition of his works. Other examples of his observations about the flowering of literary excellence are his essays on, amongst many others, Gertrude Stein, Colette, Katherine Anne Porter, Malcolm Lowry, and Franz Kafka. SEE ALSO: James, Henry (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Stein, Gertrude (AF); Woolf, Virginia (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Gass, W. H. (1966). Omensetter’s Luck. New York: New American Library. Gass, W. H. (1968a). In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. New York: Harper and Row. Gass, W. H. (1968b). Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. New York: Knopf. Gass, W. H. (1971). Fiction and the Figures of Life. New York: Knopf. Gass, W. H. (1976). On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry. Boston: Godine. Gass, W. H. (1978). The World Within the Word. New York. Knopf. Gass, W. H. (1985). Habitations of the Word: Essays. New York: Simon and Schuster. Gass, W. H. (1995). The Tunnel. New York: Knopf. Gass, W. H. (1996). Finding a Form. New York: Knopf. Gass, W. H. (1998). Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas. New York: Knopf. Gass, W. H. (1999). Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. New York: Knopf. Gass, W. H. (2002). Tests of Time. New York: Knopf. Gass, W. H. (2006). A Temple of Texts. New York: Knopf. Gass, W. H. (2008). The Master’s Voice: Henry James’s Curriculum Vitae. Harper’s, pp. 75–82 (July). Holloway, W. L. (1990). William Gass. Boston: Twayne.
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Kellman, S. G., & Malin, I. (eds.) (1998). Into “The Tunnel.” Newark: University of Delaware Press. McCaffery, L. (1982). The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Gass. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Salzman, A. M. (1986). The Fiction of William Gass: The Consolation of Language. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Ziegler, H., & Ball, S. (eds.) (2004). William H. Gass [special issue]. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 24(3).
Gender and the Novel DEBORAH CLARKE
It is hard to say anything about the twentiethcentury American novel without talking about gender. Whether one is looking at the alleged machismo of Ernest Hemingway or Norman Mailer; at Edith Wharton, purported to have welcomed the label of a “self-made man”; at William Faulkner’s deft maneuvering between male and female and black and white; at Toni Morrison’s rewriting of Ralph Ellison; or at Jane Smiley’s revision of King Lear, it becomes clear that the twentieth-century American novel is shaped by gender. It’s not surprising, given the tumultuous battles of the sexes that raged throughout the century, to see sexual tension dominate the literary landscape. But twentiethcentury American fiction is marked by more than sexual tension; it is engaged with nothing less than the redefinition of how gender is constructed and what it means. This struggle is energized by the increasing number of increasingly respected women writers who emerge onto the scene. The “damned mob of scribbling women” who showed up Hawthorne’s limited marketability evolve into the formidable talent – and popularity – of a Wharton or a Cather. Once American women writers break into the ranks of the elite, the novel will never be the same again. And the explosion of non-white writers, particularly in the latter part of the century, reminds us that gender is also always raced. One of the first things to note is that the imposition of categories that are both chronological and ideological has often skewed our understanding of the material itself. Modernism and
postmodernism, while very useful concepts, tend to define the century in terms that privilege masculinity and male writers, thus intertwining a kind of macho ethos into the twentieth-century novel and doing a disservice to our understanding of the fiction. The era is not so easily categorized or labeled. As Henry Adams noted in 1903, “The child born in 1900 would, then, be born into a new world which would not be a unity but a multiple” (Adams, 300). One could hardly find a more prescient comment regarding the multiplicities of gender developed by the novelists of the ensuing century. The novelists of the first half of the century ceaselessly explore gender as a series of performances, questioning its definition, its role, and its very existence. When Hemingway’s Frederick Henry likens soldiers carrying ammunition to pregnant women in A Farewell to Arms (1929), and Faulkner’s Joe Christmas of Light in August (1932) realizes that he feels “even within him” the voices of African American women, any notion of stable gender identity vanishes. Such instability is anticipated at the start of the century. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) make clear that the old rules of what it means to be a woman no longer apply. Chopin’s Edna Pontellier not only repudiates marriage, declining to be one of her husband’s “possessions,” but also resists maternity, refusing to become one of the “mother-women” whose lives are defined by their children: “The children appeared before her like antagonists who sought to drag her into the soul’s slavery for the rest of her days. But she knew a way to elude them” (Chopin, 300). To identify maternity as slavery and to posit suicide as an alternative to motherhood constitute a momentous shift in one of the most powerfully held assumptions about female identity, opening up the possibility of defining gender as a cultural rather than biological construct. Yet this possibility is as yet unfulfilled; if it takes death to escape maternity, gender roles are still as powerful as ever. Theodore Dreiser extends the challenge, defying maternity and sexual morality. By twisting the classic fallen woman tale into a rags-to-riches success story for the woman while the man falls into disgrace and death, he further questions assumptions about gender identity. Sister Carrie in the novel of that title, despite living with two different men, somehow avoids pregnancy and finds fame and fortune
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on the stage, and it is Hurstwood who pays the price for the sexual fall. Dreiser may go on to deeper explorations of fallen women and sexual morality in his later work, culminating in An American Tragedy (1925), but his characters, from Carrie to Clyde Griffiths, all reflect the ways that changing gender expectations open up new social possibilities. As Edith Wharton’s work also makes clear, underestimating the impact of changing times on both male and female identity leads to trouble; in The House of Mirth (1905), Lily Bart finds her idealized vision of female morality increasingly untenable in a highly competitive marketplace. The age of innocence, if it ever did exist, has passed. This questioning of gender helps to launch the modern novel, with Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson embedding instability into the narrative structure itself. Stein’s Three Lives (1909), with its focus on three women both coopted by and resistant to gender roles, can be seen as an inaugural text of the modern American novel. The disjunctive form underscores the lack of grounding in time, space, and identity. Thus despite its association with male writers, modernist fiction offers a choice venue in which experimentation with gender can play out. Modern fiction’s frequent emphasis on tormented individualism highlights the ways that gender contributes to modernist angst; if gender is under question, then, as Yeats puts it, “things fall apart.” Hemingway’s often cited hypermasculinity reveals the uneasiness of masculine identity as his male protagonists try to chart a course in a culture in which manhood is imperiled not only by war but also by social change. In Faulkner’s work, masculinity – and gender – is even more fragile; Quentin Compson kills himself in The Sound and the Fury (1929) at least in part because he cannot accept a world in which his sister’s sexuality highlights his own impotence, and Joe Christmas of Light in August is castrated in an attempt to redraw both racial and sexual boundaries in the town of Jefferson. Faulkner’s women characters prove just as interesting and unstable; indeed, Christmas is profoundly troubled by Joanna Burden because it seems like “I was the woman and she was the man.” Eula Varner of The Hamlet (1940) embodies femininity to the extent that it becomes ludicrous, a kind of playing with mimesis, to echo Luce Irigaray’s words. If “perfect” womanhood is
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monstrous, then gender undoes identity as much as it defines it. One only needs to look to Willa Cather to appreciate the instability of not just masculinity and femininity, but also gender itself. Homosocial relations in her fiction tend to bear far greater weight than the heterosexual romance. Replete with problematic visions of heterosexuality, from stories of brides thrown to wolves in My Antonia (1918) to Godfrey St. Peter’s emotional retreat to “live without delight” at the end of The Professor’s House (1925), Cather’s work opens up the possibility of a third space, a way of defining the self beyond the standard gender dichotomy. We see similar interests in Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), where the relationship between Clare and Irene is far more powerful and passionate than either’s largely companionate marriage. Indeed, one of the most fascinating elements of gender in early-twentieth-century fiction is its intersection with race. James Weldon Johnson’s ex-colored man (The Autobiography of an ExColored Man, 1912) equates his racial awareness with his beauty, aligning femininity with blackness. This reflects a bitter racial reality, in which African American men were constructed either as emasculated or as hypermasculine beasts (a threat fulfilled in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940)), while women were jezebels or mammies. Just as Johnson interrogates this assumption, so Larsen’s portrayal of veiled lesbian desire opens up a different form of African American femininity. While Helga Crane, protagonist of Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), fears – and is ultimately doomed by – sexual desire, Zora Neale Hurston celebrates both the black female body and female desire in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Faulkner probably offers the most tormented view of the connection between race and gender in Joe Christmas, who identifies his possible blackness with femininity, and Charles Bon, presented as a cultured yet effeminate man. In both cases, the hint of “blackness” reveals the fragility of a masculinity culturally defined as white. More than any other factor, race problematizes gender. If gender is destabilized in the first half of the century, it becomes both reified and unhinged toward the latter part. In Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1962), the primary focus is on male or female bonding rather than relations between the sexes.
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While Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty is rarely without a woman, the relationship between Sal and Dean, rather than any of the multiple heterosexual affairs, constitutes the heart of the novel. There is little hint of homoeroticism, but there is a clear sense that men define themselves via other men, as a rugged masculinity returns in these immediate postwar years, though, unlike in Hemingway, it is manifested not so much in the manly endeavors of war or bullfighting but first in rebellion and then, increasingly, in suburbia. The issue of what it means to be a man in postwar America comes under scrutiny as the nation attempted to construct a vision of family and gender largely based on a nostalgic vision of “the way we never were,” as Stephanie Coontz puts it. Kerouac’s rebels give way to Philip Roth’s tortured protagonists looking to negotiate Jewish masculinity and eventually to Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995), where Doc Hata finds himself tormented by the memories of Korean sex slaves during his time as a Korean health aide for the Japanese army, an experience that suggests that to be a man is to be a rapist – or, at least, tacitly to condone it. By empathizing with the Korean women victims, Hata constructs a pseudo-feminine identity, but even that proves difficult as his adopted daughter flaunts her sexuality and body, reminding him that gender means more than empathy. It is shaped by ethnicity and history, grounded in the body. In Independence Day (1995), Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe, the sports writer turned realtor, embodies a kind of gender transformation, from the masculinity of sports to the increasingly pinkcollar field of real estate. Now houses rather than physical prowess become the arena in which masculinity plays out, a marked transformation from nineteenth-century associations of women with the home; the reconfiguration of gender reflects a re-gendering of American culture. Just as race problematized gender in the early twentieth century, the increased visibility of nonwhite writers furthers that process as the century progresses and gender becomes a complex set of negotiations between culture and the body. Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison redefine gender in a way that reflects the oppression that white culture has imposed upon African American identity. Ellison’s invisible man (Invisible Man, 1952) becomes a trickster, recognizing that his survival depends on invisibility rather than a fully
embodied black manhood. To be an African American man means being able to negotiate through multiple roles and masks, as performance trumps any sense of an essential self. Morrison responds to Ellison’s exploration of the trials of black manhood in her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), both rewriting the Jim Trueblood incest scene from the perspective of the daughter, and laying out the ways that femininity is shaped by Shirley Temple and white baby dolls. Pecola Breedlove may be destroyed by the valuation of whiteness but the narrator, Claudia, survives, possibly due to her desire to destroy white baby dolls rather than to become them. As mass media and popular culture play an increasing role in defining gender, Morrison reveals the damage done by such categorization, reminding us that there is no such thing as a standard definition. Where Kate Chopin destabilized gender by suggesting that not all mothers are “mother-women,” Morrison’s Beloved (1987) completely reconfigures what it means to be a mother; “motherlove” may be fierce and instinctual, but it is also shaped by circumstance and history. For an affluent white woman to see maternity as slavery reflects a very different experience of womanhood than that of the slave herself. As Morrison so astutely puts it, “Unless carefree, motherlove was a killer.” From Chopin to Morrison, there can be no such thing as an essential stable gendered identity. Other non-white writers also remind us that gender is both embodied and culturally constructed. Native American writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko and Louise Erdrich point out that gender categories set down by Anglo culture do not apply to indigenous peoples in a world created not by God the Father but by Thought Woman, a world often populated by strong women and nurturing men. Silko’s Ts’eh in Ceremony (1977), both woman and sacred mountain, redefines gender as a mixture of body and spirit. Maxine Hong Kingston notes the confusing and complex negotiations among Chinese, American, and Chinese American meanings of both masculinity and femininity in Woman Warrior (1976) and China Men (1980). Latino/a writers also reflect how American cultural pressures attempt to enforce stereotypical gender codes, illustrated in Christina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992), where the characters attempt to determine how gender shapes one’s ethnic identity and how
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GENDER AND THE NOVEL
nationality shapes gender. In this novel, the intersection of politics and gender reminds us of the power – and limitations – of American hegemony in defining men and women. Contemporary culture may open up new opportunities, but it does not eradicate oppression based on gender. The ultimate refiguring of gender is found in Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (1993) and Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex (2002). Feinberg’s exploration of the transgendered Jess, who defines herself as a “he-she,” explodes not so much gender as gender dichotomy. The twentieth century may have expanded the realms of masculinity and femininity, but Feinberg suggests that the categories themselves have lost any grounded meaning. With medical technology that now enables sex change, gender becomes a kind of floating signifier, something one practices, as Judith Butler famously proclaimed in Gender Trouble (1990). While Eugenides’s Cal reminds us that the body still determines gender, that body may also reflect the collapse of gendered (and sexed) difference. Eugenides bases a narrative of family and immigration around Cal/Callie, a biological hermaphrodite, making clear that regardless of how it is defined and constructed, gender is still embedded at the heart of twentieth-century American fiction. So much has been written on gender and twentieth-century fiction that it is impossible to give a complete overview. Some of the most interesting work is likely found in studies of individual authors; virtually every “major” author, both male and female, has been examined through a gendered perspective. In 1983 Paul Lauter’s Reconstructing American Literature (1983) helped to open up new texts to consider. Generally, by the 1980s, a growing output of feminist criticism and theory had begun analyzing women writers, women characters, and, following Helene Cixous’s “Laugh of the Medusa,” (1981) l’ecriture feminine, a female voice, regardless of the sex of the writer. Some groundbreaking studies and anthologies, not necessarily confined to American fiction, such as Barbara Christian’s Black Feminist Criticism (1985), Gloria Anzald ua’s Making Face, Making Soul (1990), and Paula Gunn Allen’s Spiderwoman’s Granddaughters (1989), brought literature by women of color into play, reminding white feminists that gender could not be considered separately from race and ethnicity. Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men (1985),
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though it focused on British literature, helped to launch queer studies and reopened the field of masculinity, furthered by her next book, Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Rita Felski’s The Gender of Modernity (1995), building on Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide (1986), examined the ways that modernity itself was gendered, with mass culture associated with the feminine and high art with the masculine. Susan Jeffords’s The Remasculinization of America (1989) argued that in the aftermath of the Vietnam War masculinity was reinscribed, reversing a move toward the feminizing of American culture. As scholars became increasingly cognizant of the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and culture, a wide range of multifaceted approaches emerged, such as Siohban Somerville’s Queering the Colorline (2000) or Lauren Berlant’s The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (1997). Indeed, it is a rare piece of criticism or theory that does not acknowledge the impossibility of considering the twentieth-century American novel without taking into account the all-pervasive influence of a multiplicity of gendered identities. SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Queer Modernism (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Adams, H. (1961). The Education of Henry Adams. [1918]. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Aldama, F. L. (2005). Brown on Brown: Chicano/a Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity. Austin: University of Texas Press. Allen, P. G. (ed.) (1989). Spiderwoman’s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women. Boston: Beacon. Anzald ua, G. (1990). Making Face, Making Soul ¼ Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. Balsamo, A. (1996). Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Berlant, L. (1997). The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bow, L. (2001). Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women’s Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Carby, H. V. (1998). Race Men. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chopin, K. (1899). The Awakening. New York: Herbert S. Stone. Christian, B. (1985). Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamon. Cixous, H. (1981). The Laugh of the Medusa. In E. Marks & I. de Courtivron (eds.), New French Feminisms. New York: Schocken. Coontz, S. (1992). The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books. de Lauretis, T. (1987). Technologies of Gender. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Felski, R. (1995). The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Harvey, D. (1990). The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Huyssen, A. (1986). After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jacobs, S.-E., Thomas, W., & Lang, S. (eds.) (1997). Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Jardine, A., & Smith, P. (eds.) (1987). Men in Feminism. New York: Routledge. Jeffords, S. (1989). The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kimmel, M. (1996). Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: Free Press. Lauter, P. (ed.) (1983). Reconstructing American Literature: Courses, Syllabi, Issues. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press. McDowell, D. (1995). “The Changing Same”: Black Women’s Literature, Criticism, and Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Murray, R. (2007). Our Living Manhood: Literature, Black Power, and Masculine Ideology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Rubenstein, R. (1987). Boundaries of the Self: Gender, Culture, Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Saldıvar-Hull, S. (2000). Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sedgwick, E. K. (1985). Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press. Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Showalter, E. (1991). Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing. Oxford: Clarendon. Somerville, S. B. (2000). Queering the Colorline: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Trask, M. (2003). Cruising Modernism: Class and Sexuality in American Literature and Social Thought. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins JANE F. THRAILKILL
Despite a life span (1860–1935) roughly coinciding with that of Sigmund Freud, the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s abiding interest was in the physiology of everyday life – the impingements of work and play on human nerves, muscles, and brain. Her focus on the body makes Gilman’s work startlingly apt in a twenty-firstcentury culture more congenial to neuroscience than psychoanalysis. A poet, writer, activist, publisher, and major figure on the lecture circuit during the Progressive era, Gilman advocated a practical feminism (she called it humanism) that stitched together domestic theory, socialist economics, and the new evolutionary biology. In her fiction as well as her social philosophy, she turned a naturalist’s eye to the paradoxes of modern life: pampered children sickened by a “civilized” diet of unwholesome food, refined men and women whose “stone age” domestic arrangements left them exhausted and depleted, and upstanding husbands whose unpaid wives and mothers were locked in a “sexuo-economic” relation in which they bartered human affection for financial support (1998 [1898], 142). As did her literary contemporaries Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Edith Wharton, Gilman anatomized the forces that battered human beings and sculpted their fates. Unlike other writers of naturalist fiction, however, Gilman focused on the environmental forces close to – indeed, in – the home that took their toll on the human organism. Her social philosophy and literary practice were tempered by an unshakable conviction that human beings had the power to modify and improve upon what she called “our androcentric culture.” Gilman’s faith in the efficacy of reform had deep hereditary roots. Baptized Charlotte Anna
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Perkins (Gilman was the name of her second husband, who was also her first cousin), she was descended from the Beechers, a family of influential ministers, educators, writers, abolitionists, and women’s rights advocates in antebellum America, including Harriet Beecher Stowe. Gilman, who came of age in a rapidly industrializing US, was also influenced by the sociology of Thorstein Veblen and Frank Lester Ward and the evolutionary theories of Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. These thinkers supported her sense that generations of stultifying gender roles had artificially shaped not just social practices but also the female body itself. Socialist in program and utopian in spirit, Gilman’s goal was nothing less than the reconstruction of the human body and the body politic in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America. Of her first published book, a collection of poems entitled In This Our World (1974 [1893]), Gilman wrote, “I don’t call it a book of poems. I call it a tool box. It was written to drive nails with” (Scharnhorst 40). Though inspired by Walt Whitman’s democratic, body-oriented poetics, Gilman’s verse displayed none of his formal innovation, tending instead toward ballad meter and traditional rhyme schemes, conventional imagery, and quotidian domestic topics. Gilman, however, gives these elements a subversive twist, as when she exposes the scullery reality of married life in “To the Young Wife”: “To be a kitchenmaid, be called a queen – / Queen of a cook-stove throne?” The belief that there is a malleable, reciprocal, and potentially perfectible relationship between a person and her cultural milieu is at the conceptual core of Gilman’s wide-ranging, women-centered writings. Her renowned gothic short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1998 [1892]) traces the effects of oppressive domestic routines on the body and mind of a young housewife. Gilman’s other gothic tales, including “The Giant Wisteria” (1891), “The Rocking Chair” (1893), and “The Unwatched Door” (1894; all in Gilman 1995), center on physical structures – strangling vines, heavy furniture, airless rooms – that don’t merely symbolize but also actively engender women’s domestic suffocation. “The Yellow Wallpaper,” however, stands out in Gilman’s oeuvre for its narrative conceit and aesthetic power. The story is cast as a series of first-person journal entries that
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give the reader access to the unnamed woman’s unhinging mind as she lies exhausted in a prisonlike room, observing the sulfurous wallpaper’s incoherent pattern that “lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes [that] stare at you upside down” (1998, 7). The narrative ends abruptly in a surreal scene that fractures the realist conceit of the retrospective journal entry, as the maddened wife (believing herself to be freeing a shadowy woman locked behind the wallpaper’s design) creeps over the prostrate body of her swooning husband. Some contemporary critics have read the tale’s denouement as a woman’s victory over patriarchy, but Gilman herself saw it as a portrait of “utter mental ruin,” a cautionary rather than triumphant tale (1968, 4(10): 271). By contrast, most of Gilman’s other short stories present fictional case studies that sketch a domestic problem – a musical wife dispirited by child rearing (“Making a Change”), a listless woman disabled by chronic nerves (“Dr. Clair’s Place”) – and depict the practical changes necessary to bring about health and happiness. (These, like many of Gilman’s stories, were first published in The Forerunner, the magazine that she wrote, edited, and published herself from 1909 to 1916; see Gilman 1968.) Whereas writers like Sarah Orne Jewett and Kate Chopin isolate their central characters to explore the new psychological terrain of female desire, Gilman’s social realism explores the practical world of apartment buildings, bustling boarding houses, artist colonies, and places of business. Her stories frequently involve a twist that reveals the “twisted” logic underpinning normal social behavior. In “The Cottagette,” for instance, an artist’s dutiful housekeeping has the ironic effect of estranging her fiance, who finally begs her to let him cook and clean so she can return instead to her “lovely work” – and a happy marriage to him (1995, 137). In this and other tales, Gilman seems to rewrite her own youthful first marriage to fellow artist Walter Stetson, whom she left – along with their young child, Katherine – after suffering a postpartum nervous breakdown and the Weir Mitchell “rest cure,” like the protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The didactic impulse in Gilman’s fictional writing takes full-blown form in her utopian novels, which are written in the first person from
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the point of view of an initially skeptical man who slowly realizes the wisdom of sweeping social changes catalyzed by innovative women. Moving the Mountain (1999 [1911]) portrays the return of a man lost for 30 years in the Himalayas to the now-socialist, feminist United States of 1940, where there is “[no] poverty, no labor problem, no color problem, no sex problem, almost no disease, very little accident, practically no fires” (54). Herland (1999 [1915]) goes a step further, literally dropping (by airplane) three male explorers into a society of physically robust women benignly managed by Over-Mothers, a place where children are raised collectively and reproduction (girl children only) is achieved by parthenogenesis. The narrator, Vandyck Jennings, eventually marries a Herlander named Ellador; the dystopian novel With Her in Ourland (1999 [1916]) narrates their return to a US rife with war fever, profanity, and religious intolerance. Explicitly committed to edifying readers and short on dramatic propulsion, these works nonetheless encapsulate social philosophy in the interchange of dialogue, underscoring Gilman’s belief in the power of collective wisdom and communal action in helping to imagine, design, and create a humane and livable world. Gilman’s thinking (including her lapses into xenophobia and even racism) is rooted in the optimistic materialism of the late nineteenth century. Women, she argued in her groundbreaking work Women and Economics (1998 [1898]), had been historically relegated to a place of subservience to men, diminishing their powers of selfdetermination and natural inclination to work, enfeebling their bodies, and narrowing their minds. Employing the language of horticulture and evolutionary biology, Gilman proposed that the female sex, once freed from stultifying traditional roles through the socialization of housework, could actively engage in what she called “humaniculture” (1968, 1:8). What Diantha Did (2005 [1912]), a short novel serialized in The Forerunner (1968), casts these insights into fictional form. Defying her husband, a melancholic young housewife trains herself in domestic management and runs a successful housekeeping company – and manages to win back her husband in the end. Gilman often treated fiction as the handmaid of sociology, using her stories as a call to arms or to
picture what miniature domestic revolutions might look like. She also recognized that social reform would itself engender “fresh fields of fiction,” new plots centering on young women balancing work and family, mothers’ lifelong relationships with their children, women who love women, and middle-aged women with a passion for their careers. The story Gilman was not able to tell – the one adumbrated by Kate Chopin, dominated by Freud, and given rich expression by writers like Zora Neale Hurston and H.D. – was the still inchoate tale of women’s sexual pleasure and desire. As she describes in her autobiography The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935), she had no patience for depth psychology or theories of the unconscious. Her short novel The Crux (2003 [1911]), Gilman’s most explicit literary treatment of physical passion, centers on the diseased aspects of human sexuality, representing an innocent woman who barely eludes the embrace of a syphilitic man. Gilman gave expression to women’s fervor for self-expression, professional work, civic duty, and even motherhood; her social vision did not, however, encompass what the modernist writer D. H. Lawrence called the “dark forest” of the human soul, its irrational passions and wild longings. For this, twentieth-century readers would need to turn to other sources. SEE ALSO: Gender and the Novel (AF); Hurston, Zora Neale (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bauer, D. M. (ed.) (1998). Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Yellow Wallpaper. Boston: Bedford. Davis, C. J. & Knight, D. D. (eds.) (2004). Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries: Literary and Intellectual Contexts. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Gilman, C. P. (1904). Human Work. New York: McClure, Phillips. Gilman, C. P. (1911a). Our Man-Made World, or, Our Androcentric Culture. New York: Charlton. Gilman, C. P. (1911b). Three Women: A One-Act Play. Forerunner, 2, 115–123, 134. Gilman, C. P. (1968). The Forerunner, vols. 1.1–7.12 (Nov. 1909–Dec. 1916). New York: Greenwood.
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Gilman, C. P. (1972). The Home: Its Work and Influence [1903]. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Gilman, C. P. (1974). In This Our World [1893]. New York: Arno. Gilman, C. P. (1976). His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers [1923]. Westport, CT: Hyperion. Gilman, C. P. (1990). The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography [1935] (intro. Ann Lane). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1990. Gilman, C. P. (1991). Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Nonfiction Reader (ed. L. Ceplair). New York: Columbia University Press. Gilman, C. P. (1994a). Benigna Machiavelli. Santa Barbara, CA: Bandanna. Gilman, C. P. (1994b). The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (ed. D. D. Knight). Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Gilman, C. P. (1995). The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories (ed. R. Shulman). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gilman, C. P. (1996). The Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (ed. D. D. Knight). Newark: University of Delaware Press. Gilman, C. P. (1997). Unpunished: A Mystery (ed. C. J. Golden & D. D. Knight). New York: Feminist Press. Gilman, C. P. (1998). Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution [1898]. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gilman, C. P. (1999). Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Utopian Novels: Moving the Mountain [1911], Herland [1915], and With Her in Ourland [1916] (ed. M. Doskow). Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Gilman, C. P. (2003). Concerning Children [1900]. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira. Gilman, C. P. (2003). The Crux [1911] (ed. D. Seitler). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gilman, C. P. (2005). What Diantha Did [1912]. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Karpinski, J. B. (ed.) (1992). Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman. New York: G. K. Hall. Lane, A. (1990). To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. New York: Pantheon. Lawrence, D. H. (2003). Studies in Classic American Literature [1923] (ed. E. Greenspan, L. Vasey, & J. Worthen). New York: Cambridge University Press. Scharnhorst, G. (1985). Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Boston: Twayne.
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Wells, K. (1999). A Guide to Research Materials: Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Domestic Goddesses (Aug. 23). At www.womenwriters.net/ domesticgoddess/CPGguide.html, accessed Sept 16, 2008.
Glasgow, Ellen PAMELA R. MATTHEWS
Although Ellen Glasgow had her quarrels with the twentieth century, her long and productive career in American letters contributed to defining its literary and social character by attending to literary form and to issues such as regionalism and nationalism, gender and feminism, and class and race. Glasgow’s published work spans the decades from the end of the nineteenth century’s realism and naturalism through high modernism to the complexities of post-World War II prosperity in the US. Beginning with her first story to appear in print (1895) and ending with posthumous publications, her work includes 20 novels, more than a dozen short stories, poems, essays on her own novels, an autobiography, and many newspaper and magazine articles. Glasgow collected several prestigious awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for In This Our Life (1941) in 1942. Twice, her novels appeared in collected editions. Despite her common lament that her work was never adequately valued, in fact, Glasgow was a staple of twentieth-century American literature by the late 1920s. Ellen Anderson Glasgow – or Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow, as she later referred to herself in honor of her mother’s family name – was born on April 22, 1873 in Richmond, Virginia, where she died in 1945 in the house at One West Main Street she inhabited for nearly 60 years. Growing up female in a traditional Southern household, she was largely self-taught, and was proud of her eclectic reading in literature, philosophy, and economics. The influences of some of her favorites – the Stoic philosophers, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Hardy, for example – can be seen especially in her early work. She never married, loved dogs, and traveled extensively. By her account, she began writing at age 7, and extant childhood manuscripts attest to her early dedication to her craft. She shares with many of her contemporaries
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self-consciousness about writing and the labor required to perfect it. Glasgow escapes some of the categories she seems most obviously to fit. A Southern writer, she nonetheless rebelled against what she saw as the South’s anti-intellectualism, its ability to ignore realities (which she termed “evasive idealism”), and its backward-looking tendency. A homebody, she also traveled widely, finding New York and London especially congenial. A fictional realist, Glasgow yet could not accept the stark depictions of life in some contemporary novels, which she thought merely vulgar. She exposed class inequities that benefited her and condemned racial distinctions that formed her daily context. Insofar as contradictory impulses can be said to characterize literary modernism in the twentieth century, the difficulty of neatly categorizing Glasgow defines her as one kind of modernist. Current assessments often address Glasgow’s work in the context of feminism, of revaluations of regionalism, or of Southern literature or popular fiction. Rarely have scholars addressed Glasgow as a modernist, a consideration that might yield fruitful insights for both Glasgow and modernist studies. Especially in early novels such as The Descendant (1897) and The Wheel of Life (1906), characters struggle to succeed in inhospitable environments. Several novels, such as The Voice of the People (1900) and The Romance of a Plain Man (1909), focus on life in the South after the Civil War. In other works, women seek personal fulfillment, often amidst relationships with men who lack understanding. Among these last are some of Glasgow’s best novels, including Virginia (1913), Barren Ground (1925), The Romantic Comedians (1926), They Stooped to Folly (1929), and The Sheltered Life (1937). In A Certain Measure, Glasgow’s 1943 collection of essays on her novels, she grouped her work into Novels of the Commonwealth, Novels of the Country, and Novels of the City. Although her earlier division of six novels into the Novel of Character and the Tragicomedy of Manners might seem very different, together these categories reveal Glasgow’s fictional commitment to exploring the effects of place and the meaning of character, both within the context of the manners that always fascinated her. Her enduring themes – class and status, persecution and social justice, triumph over adversity, humor, and feminism –
are treated in the context of a belief in fate powerfully shaped by place and character. SEE ALSO: Gender and the Novel (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); The Southern Novel (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Glasgow, E. G. (1897). The Descendant. New York: Harper. Glasgow, E. G. (1898). Phases of an Inferior Planet. New York: Harper. Glasgow, E. G. (1900). The Voice of the People. New York: Doubleday. Glasgow, E. G. (1902a). The Battle-Ground. New York: Doubleday. Glasgow, E. G. (1902b). The Freeman and Other Poems. New York: Doubleday. Glasgow, E. G. (1904). The Deliverance. New York: Doubleday. Glasgow, E. G. (1906). The Wheel of Life. New York: Doubleday. Glasgow, E. G. (1908). The Ancient Law. New York: Doubleday. Glasgow, E. G. (1909). The Romance of a Plain Man. New York: Macmillan. Glasgow, E. G. (1911). The Miller of Old Church. New York: Doubleday. Glasgow, E. G. (1913). Virginia. New York: Doubleday. Glasgow, E. G. (1916). Life and Gabriella. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Glasgow, E. G. (1919). The Builders. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Glasgow, E. G. (1922). One Man in His Time. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Glasgow, E. G. (1923). The Shadowy Third and Other Stories. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Glasgow, E. G. (1925). Barren Ground. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Glasgow, E. G. (1926). The Romantic Comedians. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Glasgow, E. G. (1929). They Stooped to Folly. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Glasgow, E. G. (1932). The Sheltered Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Glasgow, E. G. (1935). Vein of Iron. New York: Harcourt Brace. Glasgow, E. G. (1941). In This Our Life. New York: Harcourt Brace. Glasgow, E. G. (1943). A Certain Measure: An Interpretation of Prose Fiction. New York: Harcourt Brace. Glasgow, E. G. (1954). The Woman Within. New York: Harcourt Brace.
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GOLD, MIKE
Glasgow, E. G. (1958). Letters of Ellen Glasgow (ed. B. Rouse). New York: Harcourt Brace. Glasgow, E. G. (1963). The Collected Stories of Ellen Glasgow (ed. R. K. Meeker). Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Glasgow, E. G. (1966). Beyond Defeat: An Epilogue to an Era (ed. L. Y. Gore). Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Glasgow, E. G. (1988). Ellen Glasgow’s Reasonable Doubts: A Collection of Her Writings (ed. J. R. Raper). Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Glasgow, E. G. (2005). Perfect Companionship: Ellen Glasgow’s Selected Correspondence With Women (ed. P. R. Matthews). Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Godbold, E. Stanly Jr. (1972). Ellen Glasgow and the Woman Within. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Goodman, S. (1998). Ellen Glasgow: A Biography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Pess.
Gold, Mike DAVID ROESSEL
In his essay “Toward Proletarian Literature,” Mike Gold declared, “I am not an individual; I am all that the tenement group poured into me during those early years of my spiritual travail” (Folsom 65). The claim summarizes Gold’s own artistic approach and the critical stance he would adopt toward the writing of others. In his view, the new socialist and revolutionary author spoke not as an intellectual, but for the collective. Art was a weapon to be used in the class struggle, and while skill was indeed important, artistic excellence without a commitment to communal values was simply introspective navel-gazing. Some have taken Gold as an unreflective voice of the Communist Party line. But Gold gravitated to socialism and then communism because of their similarity to the shared life of the tenement that was in his blood. Mike Gold was born Itzok Isaac Granich in the Jewish East Side of New York in 1893. Although he had a tendency in his later years to exaggerate his family’s situation and his lack of educational training, the family certainly struggled financially when Gold was in his teens. Gold’s literary apprenticeship was with Greenwich Village radical institutions, especially the magazine The Masses
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and the theater group the Provincetown Players. Indeed, Gold spent much of the 1920s trying to recreate the atmosphere of these institutions through their new, more proletarian versions – the New Masses magazine and the New Playwrights’ Theatre. In 1920, having embraced communism, he took the name of Mike Gold. While his stated reason for the name change was to avoid the draft by going to Mexico in the last year of World War I, the switch also exemplified his new, revolutionary approach to literature and politics. In 1930, Gold published the book that made his literary reputation, Jews Without Money. In this novel, as in much of his fiction, Gold conveys the reality and resilience of the New York tenement of his early life without making an overt political message until the very end. The book has become part of the Gold conundrum, for although it is fiction, it has gained a reputation as memoir. Some critics have tried to psychoanalyze Gold through factual discrepancies of the book – for example, he erases a brother and invents a sister. Such speculation is legitimate as long as the liberties of a novelist are taken into account. While Gold explores the realities of tenement life, he has a tendency to romanticize the world of poverty in a way that other proletarian realists of the 1930s, like James T. Farrell, John Steinbeck, and Richard Wright, would avoid. Jews Without Money is read now more as an account of the lost world of the Jewish East Side than as a protest novel. Gold’s literary influence, however, extended far beyond the praise he received for Jews Without Money, especially in the early 1930s. As an editor and contributor to the New Masses magazine and a columnist for the Daily Worker, Gold strove to become the Mencken of the Left – a critic whose biting perspective would help shape the direction of American literature. But his seemingly inflexible politics caused him to be viewed by some as simply a Soviet mouthpiece. So, while he published several books based upon his articles and columns – including Change the World! (c.1937) and The Hollow Men (1941) – only Jews Without Money has remained in print. Gold’s influence waned during World War II, and all but disappeared afterward. During the McCarthyism of the late 1940s, he took his family to live in France. He returned to New York in
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1950, and moved to San Francisco in 1955. He died there in 1967, never having completed the second novel to follow Jews Without Money. Measuring Gold’s achievement through his one published novel misconstrues his output, as his newspapers columns alone run in the thousands of pages. Literary criticism has forgiven many a writer for fascist sympathies, but to a large degree it still marginalizes Gold for his communist convictions. At the end of his life, Gold was neither bitter nor despondent about his personal situation or the state of the world. This may seem surprising, as at the end of Jews Without Money he speaks to a revolution that “will destroy the East Side when you come, and build a garden of the human spirit” (316). And yet for Gold it was the Jewish East Side itself that was the garden of the human spirit, and “he must stay in the tenement and make a new and truer [art] there.” Here was the central dilemma for Gold: the success of revolution he so desired would destroy the world that made him who he was. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Farrell, James T. (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); WPA and Popular Front Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Aaron, D. (1961). Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism. New York: Harcourt Brace. Bloom, J. (1992). Left Letters: The Culture Wars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman. New York: Columbia University Press. Folsom, M. (1972). Introduction. In M. Gold, Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology (ed. M. Folsom). New York: International. Gold, M. (c.1929). 120 Million. New York: International. Gold, M. (1930). Jews Without Money. New York: International. Gold, M. (c.1937). Change the World! New York: International. Gold, M. (with Blankfort, M.) (1936). Battle Hymn. New York: Samuel French. Gold, M. (1941). The Hollow Men. New York: International. Gold, M. (1954). The Mike Gold Reader. New York: International.
Gold, M. (1972). Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology (ed. M. Folsom). New York: International. Wald, A. (2002). Exiles From a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Gordon, Mary DAVID W. MADDEN
With the publication of her first novel, Mary Gordon emerged as a serious, confident, outspoken voice in contemporary American fiction. An impeccable stylist, she explores the twisted coils of familial and domestic experience. Although she shuns the attention, she is one of the most incisive writers of Catholic life in America, as well as being an important feminist voice. Mary Gordon was born on December 8, 1949 on Long Island, New York. The only child of David and Anna Gordon, she grew up in a devout Catholic family and attended Barnard College and Syracuse University. She married anthropologist James Brian and, after that marriage ended, married Arthur Cash, with whom she has had two children. She held a number of temporary teaching positions before being named the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard. Final Payments (1979), her first novel, presents Isabel Moore, a 30-year-old woman who has devoted her life to an ailing father who dies and leaves his daughter adrift in the world. Isabel enters two ill-fated relationships, and out of a sense of penance for the failure of those liaisons, she once again relinquishes her freedom to an older person who cannot appreciate her. The Company of Women (1980) examines some of the same issues and reveals the quintessential Gordon themes of self-sacrifice, devotion, and claustrophobia. Developing a more complex narrative structure of multiple points of view, Gordon follows the maturation of Felicitas Taylor and the intimate circle of adult women who nurture and encourage her independence. Like Isabel Moore, Felicitas submits herself to an exploitative partner and suffers ostracism when she becomes pregnant. Once again, obedience to church and men and a desperate attempt to escape confinement define her character.
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GORDON, MARY
Men and Angels (1985) represents a departure from an overt Catholic perspective, yet Gordon’s concern with the Christian obligation to love others, even the seemingly unlovable, prevails. This novel is built on a complex series of parallels and oppositions of characterizations, structure, and themes. In the figures of Anne Foster and Laura Post, Gordon pits maternity against religiosity, devotion against rejection, and independence against subjugation. The experiment with multiple points of view is taken further as the novel revolves around ruminations, journals, letters, and accounts of the lives of the principal and secondary characters. The Other Side (1989) and Pearl (2005) offer intricate examinations of Irish American experience. The first is Gordon’s most complicated work, a chronicle of five generations of a family involving 20 characters and stretching from Ireland to New York. The central characters – Vincent and Ellen Costelloe MacNamara – are emigres from an Ireland that had grown inhospitable. Whereas Vincent is a kind, forgiving, and patient man, his wife is bitter and intolerant, damaged by a feckless father and a hostile homeland. They present unsentimental reactions to the myth of cheerful Irish who assimilated easily into the American mainstream, and their uneasy legacy is traced through three generations. Pearl centers on Pearl Meyers, a foreign exchange student in Ireland who chains herself to an embassy flagpole and is dying of a hunger strike; her mother, Maria, who tries to save her; and a surrogate father, Joseph, who seeks to aid them both. Once again the themes of self-sacrifice and maternal devotion are carefully developed, as is a modern parable of the Holy Family (note the names) and the act of martyrdom. Intense subjectivity further defines the characters and the narrator, the latter a foregrounded voice that assumes various postures and often addresses the audience directly. Spending (1998) is an audacious examination of gender roles and individual freedom. Monica Szabo, a moderately successful painter, meets “B,” a wealthy commodities broker who admires her work and submits himself as a patron who wishes to advance her career and financially support her. B also becomes both muse and model for a series of paintings based on Renaissance depictions of
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the dead Christ, though these are postcoitally recumbent figures. The paintings launch her visibility and draw the ire of religious rightwingers. Except for these references to religion, issues of faith and devotion give way to pure physical pleasures and Gordon’s most sustained piece of erotica. Along with two collections of short fiction, she has also written three important works of non-fiction: Good Boys and Dead Girls: And Other Essays (1992), which collects 28 essays on a variety of subjects; and a pair of memoirs – The Shadow Man (1996) and Circling My Mother (2007) – that explore the known and the less well-known aspects of each of her parents’ lives. Besides three honorary doctorates, Gordon has earned a number of awards, including the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize (1979 and 1981), the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award (1992), the O. Henry Award (1983, 1997, 1999), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1993), and the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit (2008–10). SEE ALSO: Gender and the Novel (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bennett, A. (1996). Mary Gordon. New York: Twayne. Bennett, A. (2002). Conversations with Mary Gordon. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Durso, P. K. (2002). Bringing Whiteness “Home”: Exploring the Social Geography of Race in Mary Gordon’s The Other Side. Modern Language Studies, 32(1), 85–102. Gordon, M. (1978). Final Payments. New York: Random House. Gordon, M. (1981). The Company of Women. New York: Random House. Gordon, M. (1985). Men and Angels. New York: Random House. Gordon, M. (1987). Temporary Shelter. New York: Random House. Gordon, M. (1989). The Other Side. New York: Viking. Gordon, M. (1992). Good Boys and Dead Girls: And Other Essays. New York: Viking. Gordon, M. (1993). The Rest of Life: Three Novellas. New York: Viking. Gordon, M. (1996). The Shadow Man. New York: Random House.
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Gordon, M. (1998). Spending: A Utopian Divertimento. New York: Scribner’s. Gordon, M. (2005). Pearl. New York: Pantheon. Gordon, M. (2007). Circling My Mother. New York: Pantheon. Labrie, R. (1996). Women and the Catholic Church in the Fiction of Mary Gordon. English Studies in Canada, 22(2), 167–79.
Peterson, J. S. (2007). What to Do About Motherhood: Feminist Theory and Feminist Fiction Negotiate Motherhood’s Dilemmas. In S. C. Staub (ed.), The Literary Mother: Essays on Representations of Maternity and Child Care. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, pp. 224–44. Sheldon, B. H. (1997). Daughters and Fathers in Feminist Novels. New York: Peter Lang.
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H H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) ANNETTE DEBO
Widely known for her poetry, H.D. also wrote an impressive body of fiction, demonstrating her virtuosity in multiple genres, including memoirs, non-fiction essays, and translations. Her fiction, or prose poems as H.D. sometimes called them, echo autobiographically and are preoccupied with narrative experimentation, applying modernist techniques like stream of consciousness, montage, repetition, and fragmentation. Born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania on September 10, 1886, H.D. grew up in a scientific household, the only girl among five boys. She escaped her family’s middle-class gendered expectations of her by traveling to Europe in 1911 and remaining there, making her home primarily in England and Switzerland. She creatively constructed her family through her daughter Perdita, her lifelong companion Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), and a variety of other lovers. While she always felt herself to be American, H.D. remained in England during both World Wars, a generative experience that both shattered her sense of self and produced some of her very best writing. She died in 1961 in Switzerland, and her ashes were placed in Nisky Graveyard in Bethlehem. The most critically celebrated of her early novels, HERmione (1981) is a Bildungsroman about Hermione Gart, who has failed at Bryn Mawr and has yet to find her place in the world. In lieu of college, she becomes engaged to George Lowndes, a match her family initially resists until they discover George’s well-dressed and impeccably
mannered family, who, to add to their charms, own a house on the Riviera. Their growing approval and the demands of an imminent wedding weigh heavily upon Hermione, who escapes her mother’s conventional life through a relationship with an entirely unsuitable girl, Fayne Rabb. Fayne’s family, which includes only her mother and herself, lives in a working-class neighborhood, and the erotic tensions between the two girls, while unarticulated, are not lost upon Hermione’s mother. Hermione finally breaks off her engagement, determines to travel to Europe using money her grandmother left for her trousseau, and chooses Fayne over George. She also gradually identifies her talent for writing, an avenue of possible achievement far removed from her family’s scientific orientation. Sharing this focus on the development of the female artist are Asphodel, which chronicles Hermione’s personal and artistic development in Europe, and Paint It Today (1992) particularly valued as the most explicitly lesbian of H.D.’s novels. Also set in the 1910s, Bid Me to Live (A Madrigal) (1960) offers a portrait of the civilian response to war in the chaos of World War I, and again explores the development of the female artist. Julia Ashton, the protagonist, suffers a procession of losses: her husband’s repeated departures to fight at the front in France, the dissolution of Julia’s marriage brought about by her spouse’s infidelities, and the stillbirth of their child. The novel’s pages are filled with the demands of blackouts (no light must show or else one will be fined), little in the way of food (eggs are saved for breakfast, and only tea is offered to
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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visitors), bombings (the streets rock and everyone heads for shelters), and the ubiquitous soldiers (movie theaters hold a sea of khaki uniforms adorned with khaki bandages). As she struggles to continue her career as a writer, Julia’s life unravels with the world around her. Often read as a roman-a-clef, this novel is rooted in war but speaks to the female quest for self-fulfillment, which Julia finds not in the men in her life but in her creative writing. H.D. wrote a series of late novels concerned with the wars, the future, and possible religious and mythical solutions, the best-known of which is The Gift (1998). This non-linear text combines childhood memories with her research on her family and its Moravian roots, as well as her experiences in World War II. H.D. often uses the metaphor of the nautilus shell to represent her understanding of life’s progression; patterns repeat but in new ways as one progresses upward along a spiral path. Thus, the bombing of London not only resurrects past terrors (her father’s concussion, her childhood move to Philadelphia), but also offers the possibility that she inherited her family’s artistic gift in her writing. Less than half of H.D.’s fiction was published during her lifetime, but posthumous publication has made almost all of her work accessible. She wrote a number of short stories, the three published as Palimpsest (1968) receiving the most attention because of their availability and Egyptian setting; the rest can be located through Michael Boughn’s H.D. A Bibliography (1993). Critical interest in her late novels continues to grow as they are published – Majic Ring, The Mystery, and Magic Mirror appeared in print for the first time in 2009 from the University Press of Florida. SEE ALSO: The Avant Garde Novel (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Queer Modernism (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Boughn, M. (1993). H.D. A Bibliography, 1905–1990. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Friedman, S. S. (1990). Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, and H.D.’s Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. H.D. (1934). The Usual Star. Dijon: Darantiere.
H.D. (1968). Palimpsest [1926]. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. H.D. (1980). Hedylus [1928]. Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan. H.D. (1981). HERmione. New York: New Directions. H.D. (1983). Bid Me to Live (A Madrigal) [1960]. Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan. H.D. (1986). Nights [1935]. New York: New Directions. H.D. (1988). The Hedgehog [1936]. New York: New Directions. H.D. (1992). Asphodel (ed. R. Spoo). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. H.D. (1992). Paint It Today (ed. C. Laity). New York: New York University Press. H.D. (1993). Within the Walls. Iowa City: Windhover. H.D. (1996). Kora and Ka [1934]. New York: New Directions. H.D. (1998). The Gift: The Complete Text (ed. J. Augustine). Gainesville: University Press of Florida. H.D. (2000). Pilate’s Wife (ed. J. A. Burke). New York: New Directions. H. D. (as Alton, Delia). (2007). The Sword Went Out to Sea: (Synthesis of a Dream) (ed. C. Hogue & J. Vandivere). Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Hagedorn, Jessica JEFFREY SANTA ANA
Jessica Hagedorn is a Philippine-born American novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, screenwriter, and editor. She is best-known for writing fiction and poetry depicting the consequences of Spanish and US colonialisms in the Philippines and among Philippine immigrants. Major themes in her work include the hybrid culture and “colonial mentality” of Philippine people, blurring the lines between fact and fiction, Hollywood fantasies and Third World realities, political corruption and class society, colonialism and Catholicism, and the innocence and exploitation of the poor. Hagedorn’s best-known works include Dangerous Music (1975), a volume of stories and poems about her youth in the Philippines and life as an immigrant in America; Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions (1981), a collection of vignettes and poems that won the American Book Award; Dogeaters (1990), her debut novel nominated for the National Book Award about social
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disorder and corruption in modern Philippine society; Danger and Beauty (1993), a volume that combines the poetry and prose from her two previous collections; The Gangster of Love (1996), a narrative about a Philippine immigrant struggling to succeed as a rock ’n’ roll musician; and Dream Jungle (2003a), a novel that associates the discovery of a lost tribe of natives in Mindanao with the filming of a Hollywood Vietnam War movie in the Philippines. Hagedorn was born on May 29, 1949 in Manila, Philippines. As a teenager in the 1960s, she immigrated to the US with her mother and siblings. She grew up in the aftermath of US colonialism in the Philippines. After nearly 50 years of US rule beginning with the Philippine-American War in 1898, the Philippines was granted independence in 1946. Hagedorn’s work mirrors the impact of US colonialism through the influence of American popular culture, particularly Hollywood film and radio, which dominated Philippine life as an effect of Western cultural imperialism (Lawsin 180). In Dogeaters, Hollywood film and radio represent Western media blending with Philippine tradition to produce hybrid cultural forms. The prevalence of Hollywood movies in the narrative depicts every Philippine person as affected and implicated in colonial hybridity instantiated by US cultural domination. The novel is a collage of stories and dreamlike episodes satirizing Philippine society amid the reign of Ferdinand Marcos (president of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986). The title of the novel is a racial insult used by American soldiers for Philippine people during the early 1900s, referring both to the elites who tyrannize the poor and to the poor themselves “who have no recourse but to eat dog, considered a poor man’s meal” (Balce 55). Hagedorn followed Dogeaters with The Gangster of Love, a tragicomic novel of a young Philippine immigrant named Raquel “Rocky” Rivera who leaves the Philippines for the US with her mother and brother in 1970. In America, Rocky strives to become a rock ’n’ roll star in her eponymous rock band, The Gangster of Love. Yet her career as a musician is a constant effort to make enough money to keep her band together. In the highly competitive music business, her band struggles to survive, and Rocky, in order to make a living for herself when not performing, works in various menial and exploitative jobs.
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The Gangster of Love is a semiautobiographical work because it reflects Hagedorn’s own experience as an artist struggling to maintain creative integrity while under the industry’s pressure to commercialize and sell out for financial gain. In Dream Jungle, Hagedorn’s most recent novel, the imperialist footprint the US has left in the Philippines continues as an important critical issue. The novel is a fictional account of the Tasaday tribe hoax interwoven with an illusory narrative about the filming of Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now (1979). In Dream Jungle, an affluent Philippine named Zamora Lopez de Legazpi is a “notorious mestizo trickster” of Spanish and Philippine native origins (2003a, 306–7). Legazpi claims to discover the Taobo, a lost tribe of natives living peacefully alone free from the exploitative contact of Western civilization and modern Philippine society. The narrative, like in Dogeaters, is told from the perspective of various characters. This effect of multiple points of view reflects the hybrid effects of Western influence on Philippine culture and language. As the narrative shifts and tumbles, it suggests that everybody in the Philippines has been affected by the imperial reach of popular media and Hollywood film. Jessica Hagedorn has emerged as one of the most important authors in contemporary Asian American literature. She is internationally respected for writings that depict the complexity of contemporary Philippine society and the experience of Philippine immigrants. Claiming a global readership, Hagedorn’s work inscribes and revives the cultural memory of Philippine people in the diaspora and throughout the world. SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Postcolonialism And Fiction (WF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Balce, N. S. (2001). Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn. In S.-L. C. Wong, & S. H. Sumida, (eds.), A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature. New York: Modern Language Association of America, pp. 54–65. Hagedorn, J. (1975). Dangerous Music. San Francisco: Momo’s. Hagedorn, J. (1981). Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions. San Francisco: Momo’s. Hagedorn, J. (1990). Dogeaters. New York: Penguin.
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Hagedorn, J. (ed.) (1993). Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction [1975]. New York: Penguin. Hagedorn, J. (1993). Danger and Beauty. New York: Penguin. Hagedorn, J. (1994). The Exile Within/The Question of Identity [1975]. In K. Aguilar-San Juan (ed.), The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s. Boston: South End, pp. 173–82. Hagedorn, J. (1996). The Gangster of Love. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Hagedorn, J. (1999). Burning Heart: A Portrait of the Philippines. New York: Rizzoli. Hagedorn, J. (2003a). Dream Jungle. New York: Viking. Hagedorn, J. (2003b). Ghost Town. Time, 162(7), 34–39. Hagedorn, J. (2004a). Holy Food [1988]. Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street. Hagedorn, J. (2004b). Mango Tango [1977]. Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street. Hagedorn, J. (2004c). Tenement Lover: No Palm Trees/ In New York City [1981]. Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street. Hagedorn, J., & Kim, E. (eds.) (2004). Charlie Chan Is Dead II: At Home in the World: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction [1975]. New York: Penguin. Lawsin, E. P. (2000). Interview: Jessica Hagedorn. In K.-K. Cheung (ed.), Words Matter: Conversations With Asian American Writers. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 21–39.
Hammett, Dashiell DAVID W. MADDEN
Dashiell Hammett is often considered the creator of the hard-boiled detective story, which featured a distinctive style and a depiction of the detective as strict professional with a private code of ethics that is uncompromisable. He de-emphasized the intricate puzzle construction of classical detective fictions for stories built on careful character development, distinctive narration, and gritty realism. He was born May 27, 1894 as Samuel Dashiell Hammett in St. Mary’s County, Maryland to Richard and Annie Bond Hammett. The family eventually settled in Baltimore, where Hammett attended school but left at age 13. In 1915 he joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency but resigned in 1918 to join the Army. After service he returned to the Pinkertons but again retired in
1920 when diagnosed with tuberculosis. During his convalescence he began writing short stories, the most important of which were published in Black Mask magazine, where his first four novels also appeared in serial form. Hammett created a fictional world that emerged from his detective experiences and from the social unease of the 1920s. His America is a chaotic, amoral place, where miscreants, criminals, and gangs run rampant. Set against them are the detectives, but rather than operating as heroes dedicated to creating order or dispensing justice, they are often as amoral in their methods as those they oppose. The detectives’ redeeming feature is their code, a personal sense of ethics that is part professional, part personal. In these ways, Hammett reminds readers of Ernest Hemingway and is a forerunner to the existentialist writing after World War II. After publishing over 40 stories and various articles, he published his first novel, Red Harvest (1929b). Here Hammett extends the development of his serial detective, the Continental Op, a fairly nondescript figure known simply by his title, an operative with the Continental detective agency. Hammett disdained the conventions of the classical detective novels that often featured suave, dashing protagonists. The Op is middle-aged, short, overweight, and utterly unprepossessing aside from his crafty street smarts and cynicism. He is called to a Montana mining town by a newspaper editor who is dead by the time of the Op’s arrival and is hired by the man’s father to clean up the town. The place is thoroughly corrupt, and the Op sets one criminal gang against the other, provoking a bloodbath and eventually leaving with no assurance that order will prevail. His second novel, The Dain Curse (1929a), also features the Continental Op and is a loosely arranged collection of four stories. The work is a decidedly slighter effort, revolving around drugs, diamonds, blackmail, and a family curse. The Maltese Falcon (1930) is Hammett’s masterpiece for its tight construction, crisp dialogue, and artful character development. The plot involves a cast of dissemblers who change identities but share an avaricious interest in a supposedly priceless statue. The narration is detached and unemotional, and psychology is revealed through actions rather than the introspection of monologues. Sam Spade, the protagonist, is morally
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dubious, willing to use women as sex objects and manipulate acquaintances to achieve his ends. The major female character has seduced and lied to Spade but never deceived him; he willingly sells her out to maintain his rigidly professional code. The mystery of the lost statue pales against the mystery of who Spade is and how he can survive in a world of violence and deception. Spade, who appears only in this novel and a few stories, became Hammett’s best-known character thanks to a radio show and successful film. The Glass Key (1931) marks another departure by presenting no detective; instead, Ned Beaumont, a gambler and mob adviser, enters a murder case for private reasons and finds more than he bargained for. Hammett again explores the violence of opposing gangs, sexual dishonesty, and duplicity in high places. The plot is byzantine as the protagonist seeks first to recover money he is owed and then the identity of a killer, who he fears may be his associate. Beaumont is another of Hammett’s independent heroes, a person of flinty individualism who operates by private standards. The Thin Man (1934) was Hammett’s final novel and became another overwhelming Hollywood success. It features Nick and Nora Charles (fictional versions of the author and his lover, Lillian Hellman), a sophisticated couple who lead, by social standards of the time, an eccentric life. Nick has retired from detecting, lives off Nora’s inheritance, and continues to chase other women. Action rotates between speakeasies and aristocratic salons, outbursts of gunplay and brittle, wry conversation. The tone is often witty and comic, and again Hammett chooses a first-person narrator to convey the story. For the next 28 years he published no fiction, the reasons for which are mysterious. Some conjecture it was his drinking, his generous royalties, or his career in screenwriting. His association with the Communist Party and refusal to answer questions before a US District Court landed him six months in a federal prison in 1951 and troubles with the IRS. Although he died in obscurity, colleagues such as Raymond Chandler and Andre Gide regarded him as an incontestably important figure in modern fiction. SEE ALSO: Chandler, Raymond (AF); Detective/ Crime Fiction (WF); Hemingway, Ernest (AF);
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Modern Fiction in Hollywood (AF); Noir Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Dooley, D. (1984). Dashiell Hammett. New York: Ungar. Gregory, S. (1984). Private Investigations: The Novels of Dashiell Hammett. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Hammett, D. (1929a). The Dain Curse. New York: Knopf. Hammett, D. (1929b). Red Harvest. New York: Knopf. Hammett, D. (1930). The Maltese Falcon. New York: Knopf. Hammett, D. (1931). The Glass Key. New York: Knopf. Hammett, D. (1934). The Thin Man. New York: Knopf. Hammett, D. (1966). The Big Knockover (ed. L. Hellman). New York: Random House. Hammett, D. (1974). The Continental Op (ed. S. Marcus). New York: Random House. Johnson, D. (1983). Dashiell Hammett: A Life. New York: Random House. Layman, R. (2000). Dashiell Hammett. Detroit: Gale. Layman, R., & Rivett, J. M. (eds.) (2001). Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett. Oxford: Counterpoint, 2001. Marling, W. (1983). Dashiell Hammett. Boston: Twayne. Metress, C. (ed.) (1994). The Critical Response to Dashiell Hammett. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Nolan, W.F. (1969). Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook. Santa Barbara, CA: McNally and Loftin. Symons, J. (1985). Dashiell Hammett. San Diego: Harcourt Brace. Wolfe, P. (1980). Beams Falling: The Art of Dashiell Hammett. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
The Harlem Renaissance DAYLANNE K. ENGLISH
The Harlem Renaissance was a 1920s flourishing of African American arts and letters centered in the Harlem section of New York City. Literature has long been considered the heart of the movement, with writers such as Countee Cullen, Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman, and Jean Toomer among its major figures. The writers of the New Negro Movement, the period’s more common nomenclature for the
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Renaissance, were consciously representing black people in new ways. They sought to counter received, racist, and stereotypical images of African Americans and to forge, through art, new versions of black identity. Howard philosophy professor and Harlem Renaissance proponent Alain Locke produced what comes closest to being a manifesto for the movement, a 1925 essay entitled “The New Negro” that appeared in the Survey Graphic, a progressive journal of social analysis. Locke sounded the death knell for “the Old Negro,” a “stock figure” that “had long become more of a myth than a man.” Locke argued for “a new psychology” among younger black Americans, who possessed, he said, “renewed selfrespect and self-dependence.” Locke associated the New Negro with “creative expression” in the belief that “cultural recognition” would lead to improved social and political conditions for black people. Well before the 1920s, several key texts helped set the stage for the New Negro movement. W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1899 urban study, The Philadelphia Negro, along with his landmark 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk, had helped establish the legitimacy of academic study of African American culture and experience. In 1912, Fisk literature professor, diplomat, and writer James Weldon Johnson anonymously published his novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; it was reissued in 1927, at the peak of the Renaissance, this time with the author’s identity revealed. The novel’s unnamed narrator, a “mulatto” man who can pass for white, is a gifted, classically trained pianist. Upon learning late in his childhood of his racial identity, he decides to embrace his blackness. He becomes a successful ragtime piano player and embarks on a project to blend European classical with African American folk musical forms. But after witnessing the lynching of a black man in Georgia, the narrator abruptly abandons his project, deciding instead to pass as white for the rest of his life. He becomes a successful businessman and marries a white woman. At the end of the novel, he concludes that he has “sold [his] birthright for a mess of pottage.” The novel’s intertwining of racial identity, cultural production, and commerce – and its representation of the terroristic power of lynching – anticipated many aesthetic and political preoccupations of
the Harlem Renaissance. Likewise, anti-lynching writings of the 1910s, especially the journalism of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the plays of Angelina Weld Grimke, offered a strong precedent for the movement’s tenet of political activism through writing. A number of historical developments also helped make the Harlem Renaissance possible. In the late nineteenth century, New York became an economic and cultural magnet for hundreds of thousands of African American migrants and many Caribbean immigrants. Between 1890 and 1920, the “Great Migration” brought 1.2 million African Americans from the South to Northern and Western US cities, with at least 300,000 migrating in a single decade, 1910–20. They sought escape from the South’s hardships, from recession to lynching; and they had high hopes for their opportunities in cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and, above all, New York. There, thanks in part to entrepreneur Phillip A. Payton and his Afro-American Realty Company, Harlem and its strong housing stock – once home to European, especially Dutch, immigrants – emerged as a destination for black people of all sorts. Nearly all the major Harlem Renaissance figures lived, or at least spent a great deal of time, in Harlem during the 1920s; and the period’s most influential race journals, including the NAACP’s Crisis, the Urban League’s Opportunity, and A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen’s leftist Messenger, all had offices in Harlem. Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association and its journal Negro World were located there as well. As James Weldon Johnson put it in Black Manhattan, his 1930 history of the neighborhood, Harlem in the 1920s was “the intellectual and artistic capital of the Negro World.” Jean Toomer’s 1923 book Cane, among the most innovative and lauded texts of the Renaissance, is very much about the Great Migration, its costs as well as its benefits. In three sections consisting of brief poems and prose fiction, Cane traces the lives of its largely African American characters. The first section takes place in a romanticized yet also dangerous and violent rural South; the second section considers the potentially stultifying conditions of a postmigration urban North; and the third follows an African American male protagonist, Kabnis, an intellectual Northerner often read as a Toomer-like character, who
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returns South and finds life there compelling yet also difficult to navigate and comprehend. Ultimately, the book sounds a mournful note about the passing of rural Southern black culture while it reinforces the idea that the center of gravity for black identity and community had shifted to Northern US cities. No work of fiction reflects that shift in all its complexity more vividly than Home to Harlem, a 1928 novel by Claude McKay and the first bestselling book by a black American. McKay himself was part of the migration to New York. In 1912, he arrived in the United States from his native Jamaica and about two years later made his way to Harlem, where he emerged as one of the New Negro movement’s foremost writers. Home to Harlem portrays not only the Great Migration but also other major historical contexts and causes of the Harlem Renaissance, including the end of World War I and the enactment of Prohibition. At the beginning of the novel, we meet the first of its two protagonists, the working-class American Jake, an Army soldier gone AWOL from his tour of duty in Europe to return “home” to Harlem. The novel thus begins with what many historians of the movement consider one of its principal psychological causes: the 1919 return to the US of black veterans, who, having experienced a quite different racial reality abroad, readily evinced the sort of “new psychology” Locke had in mind regarding race relations and black identity. Harlem photographer James VanDerZee’s well-known 1919 photo of the all-black 369th Regiment parading on New York’s Fifth Avenue likewise represents this return “home,” though in a more uncomplicatedly proud fashion than the version we see in Home to Harlem. Unlike VanDerZee’s positive, sometimes even airbrushed, photographs, Home to Harlem represented a more inclusive, if less optimistic, picture. The novel’s second protagonist, Ray, is the primary vehicle for this alternative picture. A disaffected intellectual from Haiti, Ray also lives, though not as contentedly as Jake, in Harlem. He is frustrated by its close quarters, where black people arrive in such great numbers only partly by choice, given the larger context of a Jim Crow city and nation. Ray longs to escape from Harlem and his girlfriend Agatha. Home to Harlem thus shows the tensions as well as the vitality brought about by Harlem’s mixture of African Americans and
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West Indians, men and women, light-skinned people and dark-skinned people, gay people and straight people. It shows the street life, the jazz, and the speakeasies of Prohibition-era Harlem, along with the more highbrow lifestyle of its literati. Prostitutes and nightclub singers, veterans and longshoremen, jazz musicians and numbers runners, writers and Pullman porters – all inhabit its pages. Just as in McKay’s novel, everyone in the 1920s, it seemed, wanted to go “uptown.” In fact, Prohibition and jazz must be considered causes of the Renaissance simply because they brought so many diverse, enlivening presences to Harlem. The performances of Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Eubie Blake, Bert Williams, Florence Mills, and many others – although not strictly speaking part of the more literary and middle-class Harlem Renaissance – lent the era vitality and drew people to Harlem; so, too, did the liquor that was available uptown. And it was not only black people partaking of Harlem nightlife. So many whites went to Harlem for adventure, jazz, and booze that they were regularly satirized in Harlem Renaissance writings, as in Rudolph Fisher’s essay “The Caucasian Storms Harlem” and Wallace Thurman’s satiric 1932 novel about the movement, Infants of the Spring. Despite the often humorous tone of such satire, white presence within Harlem and the Harlem Renaissance was troubling to the writers and artists of the movement. Racially exclusive nightclubs even in Harlem, where black people could play in the band but not be part of the audience, were an obvious source of injustice and outrage. The existence of white patrons of black art, with Carl Van Vechten the most visible among them, was perhaps less public but no less problematic. Hughes and Hurston at one point even shared a patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason, who used her considerable wealth to support “primitive” arts and artists. Hughes ultimately split with Mason in 1930, and then with Hurston in 1931, in part over the issue of patronage. Like any major cultural movement, the Harlem Renaissance had its own internal sources of tension, with white patronage just one among them. A perhaps more fundamental controversy emerged from the fact that not all Harlem Renaissance figures appreciated portraits of Harlem, like McKay’s, that represented mixtures not only of
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races but also of colors, classes, sexes, and sexualities. In a review of Home to Harlem in Crisis, Du Bois declared that, after reading it, he felt “distinctly like taking a bath.” He preferred the novels of Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), with their tasteful, light-skinned, and well-dressed heroines inhabiting Harlem parlors. Du Bois apparently overlooked the social commentary in Larsen’s writings, in which repressed middle-class protagonists chafed against the class, gender, sexual, race, and color strictures of their day and social stratum every bit as much as did McKay’s Ray. The question of how to represent the New Negro was regularly, and hotly, debated. Du Bois asked that question explicitly in a February 1926 Crisis questionnaire, part of a “symposium” titled “The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed?” Disagreement immediately erupted along generational lines. Du Bois, Locke, and Johnson argued for portraying positive images of black people, meaning standard-Englishspeaking, college-educated members of the African American middle class. Younger writers like McKay, Hurston, and Hughes argued for portraying the “common” folk and their ways of living and speaking. In a 1926 Nation essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes responded by lambasting “the Nordicized Negro intelligentsia” and holding up “the low-down folks, the so-called common element,” as the only viable sources for authentic Negro art. In his own work, Hughes said, he sought to “grasp and hold some of the meanings and rhythms of jazz,” which he termed the “child” of the “common people.” Taking their cue from Hughes, many scholars of the Harlem Renaissance consider Hughes’s jazz poetry to be its quintessential literary expression, but Larsen’s acidly satiric parlor novels should be considered equally so. The generational struggle over how to represent the Negro in art found definitive expression in Fire!! a one-time-only 1926 publication of a literary journal originally intended to be a quarterly “devoted to the Younger Negro Artists,” as the subtitle put it. A shortage of funds ultimately did in Fire!! whose contributors included Wallace Thurman, promoter and editor of the journal; Hughes; Gwendolyn Bennett; Richard Bruce (Nugent); Hurston; John Davis; and Aaron Douglas. But even the single issue managed to
achieve one thing its contributors wanted – namely, to put the older generation on notice that they would not be held to its standards of propriety. Hurston’s short story, “Sweat,” focuses on domestic violence and working-class, vernacular-speaking characters. The title character in Thurman’s short story, “Cordelia the Crude,” becomes a prostitute. Richard Bruce’s brief experimental prose piece, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” is clearly homoerotic. Despite the discomfort – one might call it denial – of the older Harlem Renaissance figures, there can be no question that sexuality, especially gay and lesbian sexualities and, more broadly, queer sensibilities, helped shape much of the literature, the music, and indeed the overall atmosphere of the Renaissance. Many of the major writers and performers of the period were gay, lesbian, or bisexual – including writers Locke, Countee Cullen, Harold Jackman, Nugent, and Thurman; blues singers Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey; and the popular cross-dressing nightclub performer Gladys Bentley. Analysis of the role that sexuality played in the Harlem Renaissance is among a number of recent scholarly trends. Scholars have also started to highlight locations other than Harlem as significant sites of modern black cultural production. A focus on the movement’s visual art is yet another recent development; critics are now seeing just how central VanDerZee’s photographs, Oscar Micheaux’s films, and Aaron Douglas’s illustrations – among many other visual artworks – were to the project of representing a “New Negro.” Of growing interest, too, is the relationship between the Harlem Renaissance and other – especially interracial, queer, transnational, and diasporic – modernisms and identities. Scholars are also beginning to challenge the rhetoric of failure long associated with the movement. In his 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea, Langston Hughes spoke sardonically of “When the Negro Was in Vogue,” declaring that “ordinary Negroes hadn’t heard of the Harlem Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn’t raised their wages any” (228). Scholars ever since, including Nathan Huggins and David Levering Lewis, have echoed Hughes’s assessment that the movement failed because it did not result in palpable gains for African American people. Locke’s manifesto had certainly set up the movement to be viewed in just this way.
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But if we look not for immediate political effects but to the movement’s artistic output, even simply to a list of its fiction, it is hard to view the Harlem Renaissance as having been anything but a success. The Harlem Renaissance may or may not have failed, but it certainly ended. When it ended is, likewise, subject to debate. Some scholars say it lasted until 1940, in part because several important novels by Harlem Renaissance figures appeared in the 1930s, including Thurman’s roman-a-clef, Infants of the Spring (1932); Rudolph Fisher’s detective novel, The Conjure Man Dies (1932); and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). An equally likely end date would be in the early 1930s, since the Great Depression and the repeal of Prohibition meant hard times for Harlem’s speakeasies and also for its writers, who were dependent upon patron dollars and on the financial well-being of publishing houses and little magazines. Moreover, even the post-1930 novels may in some ways lie outside the central concerns of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston’s is set in the rural South, Fisher’s is as much a Depression novel as it is a Harlem one, and Thurman’s reads rather like an epitaph for the movement. At the end of Infants, a Thurman-like character covers his bathroom floor with handwritten pages from a novel he had been writing. He then climbs into the bathtub and slits his wrists; blood and water overflow, soaking the pages and rendering them illegible. Only the dedication – to Huysmans’s Des Esseintes and Oscar Wilde – can still be read. Thurman himself died two years later, in 1934, of tuberculosis complicated by alcoholism; Fisher died the same year. Such narratives, both fictional and biographical, seem to confirm that the Harlem Renaissance was a tragic failure based upon a “crumbling foundation,” to quote from the last page of Infants. And yet, Thurman’s novels, along with so many other extraordinary writings from the New Negro movement, do live on, continuing to shape our understanding and appreciation of the rich cultural record of the Harlem Renaissance. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Baker, H. (1987). Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Blair, S. (2007). Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1926). The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed? – A Symposium. Crisis, 31 (4), 219–20. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1928). Two Novels. Crisis, 35, 202, 211. Edwards, B. H. (2003). The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. English, D. (1999). Selecting the Harlem Renaissance. Critical Inquiry, 25 (4), 807–21. Fisher, R. (1927). The Caucasian Storms Harlem American Mercury, 11 (44), 393–98. Fisher, R. (1992). The Conjure Man Dies [1932]. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Garber, E. (1989). A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem. In M. Duberman, M. Vicinus, & G. Chauncey, Jr. (eds.), Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past. New York: New American Library, pp. 318–31. Gates, H. L., Jr. (1997). Harlem on Our Minds. Critical Inquiry, 24 (1), 1–12. Huggins, N. (1971). Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press. Hughes, L. (1926). The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain. The Nation, pp. 692–94 (June 23). Hughes, L. (1940). The Big Sea. New York: Knopf. Hurston, Z. N. (2006). Their Eyes Were Watching God [1937]. New York: HarperCollins. Hutchinson, G. (1995). The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Johnson, J. W. (1927). The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. New York: Knopf. Johnson, J. W. (1930). Black Manhattan. New York: Knopf. Larsen, N. (1986). Quicksand and Passing [1928, 1929]. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Lewis, D. L. (1997). When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Penguin. Locke, A. (ed.) (1992). The New Negro [1925]. New York: Atheneum. McKay, C. (1928). Home to Harlem. New York: Harper. Thurman, W. (ed.) (1926). Fire!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists, 1(1). Thurman, W. (1992). Infants of the Spring [1932]. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Toomer, Jean. (1923). Cane. New York: Boni and Liveright.
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HARRISON, JIM
Harrison, Jim NANCY BUNGE
Jim Harrison believes that the artist should fully explore his or her consciousness; while attempting to meet this standard, Harrison has produced 10 poetry collections, nine novels, five novella trilogies, a memoir, a children’s book, and many essays on a variety of subjects, especially food, hunting, fishing, and literature. Born James Thomas Harrison in Grayling, Michigan on December 11, 1937 to Winfield Sprague and Norma Olivia (Wahlgren) Harrison, he grew up in Reed City, Michigan. Spending his youth in the country gave Harrison a connection with nature and a penchant for hunting and fishing which persistently comfort him and many of his characters. The adolescent Harrison read so widely that when he was 18, his favorite authors included only two Americans, William Faulkner and Henry Miller, along with Dylan Thomas, Rimbaud, James Joyce, and Dostoyevsky. Harrison’s reading grew even more exotic when he studied comparative literature at Michigan State University, where Harrison would reflect on esoteric texts while working at the university’s farms. This combination of sophistication and earthiness persists throughout Harrison’s work and helps explain how he repeatedly achieves a blending of elegance and simplicity that pleases both critics and readers. Harrison points out that, like many fiction writers, he began as a poet. In his case, all those years concentrating on language help explain why even though reviewers sometimes criticize themes they identify in Harrison’s work, they persistently exclaim over the lucidity, power, and grace of his writing. His first books of fiction, Wolf (1971), A Good Day to Die (1973), Farmer (1976), Legends of the Fall (1978), and Warlock (1981), focused on men whom some critics found violent; as a result, Harrison found himself accused of male chauvinism. Harrison rejects any characterizations of his books as “macho” and suggests that the charge comes from a failure to understand hunting’s role in the Midwest. On the other hand, Harrison grew tired of writing about males who reminded him of himself. So, he found it rewarding to lose himself in someone unlike himself while producing Sundog
(1984). The novel’s structure reflects Harrison’s attempt to connect with a different kind of character. The narrator interviews Robert Corvus Strang, the protagonist, whom Harrison characterizes as a quintessential man of action. Strang, who has built dams in South America and Africa, has settled in northern Michigan after severely injuring himself in a fall. Listening intently to Strang’s life story allows the narrator (and Harrison) to participate in his worldly life and share his exotic travels. Harrison appropriately uses his writing cabin in northern Michigan as the setting for Strang’s narration. In his next book, Harrison made an even more extensive imaginative journey. He became absorbed by Dalva, a female character who came to him in a series of dreams and whose name became the title of the novel Dalva (1988). Harrison says that seeing the world through her eyes had a deep impact on him, altering his writing methods and confirming his sense that writers are androgynous. He also gave Dalva the quality he considers essential to living a full life: curiosity, a trait Harrison also shares. That he learned so much from resting in Dalva’s perspective helps explain why the title novellas of Harrison’s next two collections, The Woman Lit by Fireflies (1990) and Julip (1994), also focused on women. Dalva especially fascinated Harrison, so he went on to tell her family history in The Road Home (1998a), but rather than simply losing himself in her point of view, he further expanded his imagination by writing the book not only from Dalva’s perspective, but also from the points of view of her family members, ranging from her grandfather John Northridge to her son, Nelse. This forced Harrison not only to deal imaginatively with both genders, but also to understand and portray the impact of past generations on their descendants. Harrison apparently enjoyed this challenge, for he decided to take an even more extensive imaginative odyssey in writing his next two books. In True North (2004) and Returning to Earth (2007), Harrison presents the saga of another family from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, assuming one character’s perspective after another, this time entering into the points of view of characters who are both male and female and native and white and even entering into the
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musings of someone facing death in Returning to Earth. While Harrison’s novels have broadened to accommodate an expanding range of characters and sensibilities, his poetry has deepened, allowing it to render nature’s transcendent dimensions with increasing power. This radiant view of the natural world surfaces in all his work, but particularly in Harrison’s later novels. As a result, in Returning to Earth, he achieves a perfect synthesis of realism and myth. The pleasure Harrison takes in extending his awareness has led him to produce fiction that steadily grows in depth, breadth, complexity, and beauty. SEE ALSO: Faulkner, William (AF); Joyce, James (BIF); Miller, Henry (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Demott, R. (ed.) (2002). Conversations With Jim Harrison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Harrison, J. (1971). Wolf. New York: Simon and Schuster. Harrison, J. (1973). A Good Day to Die. New York: Simon and Schuster. Harrison, J. (1976). Farmer. New York: Viking. Harrison, J. (1978). Legends of the Fall. New York: Delacorte. Harrison, J. (1981). Warlock. New York: Delacorte. Harrison, J. (1984). Sundog. New York: E. P. Dutton. Harrison, J. (1988). Dalva. New York: E. P. Dutton. Harrison, J. (1990). The Woman Lit by Fireflies. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Harrison, J. (1994). Julip. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Harrison, J. (1998a). The Road Home. New York: Atlantic Monthly. Harrison, J. (1998b). The Shape of the Journey. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon. Harrison, J. (2000). The Beast God Forgot to Invent. New York: Atlantic Monthly. Harrison, J. (2004). True North. New York: Grove. Harrison, J. (2005). The Summer He Didn’t Die. New York: Atlantic Monthly. Harrison, J. (2007). Returning to Earth. New York: Grove. Reilly, E. C. (1996). Jim Harrison. New York: Twayne. Smith, P. A. (2002). “The True Bones of My Life”: Essays on the Fiction of Jim Harrison. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
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Hawkes, John PATRICK O’DONNELL
A writer of remarkable stylistic gifts who offers alternately comic and nightmarish portrayals of psychic life, John Hawkes famously said in an interview, “I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme” (Enck 141). In the same interview, he noted that his literary ancestry runs from “Quevado, the Spanish picaresque writer, and Thomas Nashe, at the beginnings of the English novel, down through Lautreamont, Celine, Nathanael West, Flannery O’Connor, James Purdy, Joseph Heller” (Enck 143). During his lifetime, Hawkes published 14 novels, several novellas and short stories, and a collection of plays. Born in 1925, Hawkes spent his childhood in Connecticut, Alaska, and New York; after graduating from high school, he served for a year as an American Field Service ambulance driver in Germany and Italy in the final months of World War II. Following the war, he married Sophie Goode Tazewell and entered Harvard University, where he studied creative writing with Albert Guerard. Hawkes taught creative writing at Harvard and Brown (where he spent the bulk of his career), with visiting stints at Stanford, MIT, and the City College of CUNY. The winner of Guggenheim, Ford Foundation, and Rockefeller fellowships, he died in Providence, Rhode Island in 1998. Hawkes’s first novel, The Cannibal, clearly based on Hawkes’s wartime experiences, is a torturous narrative of fascism and violence set in the American zone of postwar Germany. The Beetle Leg (1951) followed, a mock western that features the mystery of a body buried in a dam (Hawkes worked at the Fort Peck Irrigation Dam in Montana in 1947). After the publication of two novellas in 1954 – The Owl and The Goose on the Grave – it was several years before Hawkes published one of his signature novels, The Lime Twig (1961), a surreal, noir-like mystery set amidst the English horseracing scene. What many consider to be Hawkes’s finest novel, Second Skin (1964), about the adventures of a protagonist named “Skipper” who is both deeply narcissistic and
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self-sacrificial, was nominated for a National Book Award; the novel portrays the complex paternal relationship Skipper has with his daughter, Cassandra, one in a series of Hawkes’s depictions of the intensive kinship between parent and child. Following the publication of a collection of stories and novellas in Lunar Landscapes (1969), Hawkes published The Blood Oranges (1971), the first of several novels set in the Mediterranean, about two married couples whose erotic relationship leads to isolation and suicide. Hawkes’s fascination with the relation between death and eroticism intensifies as his writing develops: Death, Sleep and the Traveler (1974) is a dream journey of a man involved in two sexual triangles and murder as he searches for the roots of his own identity; Travesty (1976) records the final hours of a man who is driving toward a stone wall, and self-extinction, at a deadly speed; and The Passion Artist (1979) features yet another male protagonist who is obsessed with the threat of female sexuality and his own failed attempts to control women. The protagonist becomes female in Virginie: Her Two Lives (1982), the parallel, mock-pornographic stories of the maturation of an 11-year-old girl living in the eighteenth century as a servant and companion to a Sadean aristocrat, and in the twentieth century as the sister of a pimp to the aristocracy. Hawkes attempted something of a more traditional narrative in Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade (1985), in which a daughter comes to terms with the frontier legacy of her larger-thanlife father, whose escapes and mysterious death in the Yukon are legendary. In Whistlejacket (1988), Hawkes takes up once more his lifelong fascination with horses in a dream-narrative of a cursed family estate and its mysteries as unraveled by a fashion photographer and huntsman. In Sweet William (1993), the narrator is a horse – one who tells the story of his tumultuous life as he approaches his final days. Hawkes’s last two novels – The Frog (1996) and An Irish Eye (1998) – are two coming-of-age fables that underscore Hawkes’s long fascination with the relation between childhood, innocence, and corruption. While Hawkes’s intense narratives make strong demands upon the reader, the reward is inevitably
a complex, often unsettling new vision of the human capacity for passion and violence, sacrifice and catharsis.
SEE ALSO: Heller, Joseph (AF); O’Connor, Flannery (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Purdy, James (AF); West, Nathanael (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGSTED READINGS Enck, J. (1964). John Hawkes: An Interview. Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 6, 141–55. Ferrari, R. (1996). Innocence, Power, and the Novels of John Hawkes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Greiner, D. (1978). Comic Terror: The Novels of John Hawkes. Memphis: Memphis State University Press. Hawkes, J. (1949). The Cannibal. New York: New Directions. Hawkes, J. (1951). The Beetle Leg. New York: New Directions. Hawkes, J. (1961). The Lime Twig. New York: New Directions. Hawkes, J. (1964). Second Skin. New York: New Directions. Hawkes, J. (1969). Lunar Landscapes: Stories and Short Novels 1948–1963. New York: New Directions. Hawkes, J. (1971). The Blood Oranges. New York: New Directions. Hawkes, J. (1974). Death, Sleep & the Traveler. New York: New Directions. Hawkes, J. (1976). Travesty. New York: New Directions. Hawkes, J. (1979). The Passion Artist. New York: Harper and Row. Hawkes, J. (1982). Virginie: Her Two Lives. New York: Harper and Row. Hawkes, J. (1985). Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade. New York: Simon and Schuster. Hawkes, J. (1988). Whistlejacket. New York: Collier. Hawkes, J. (1993). Sweet William: A Memoir of Old Horse. New York: Simon and Schuster. Hawkes, J. (1996). The Frog. New York: Viking. Hawkes, J. (1998). An Irish Eye. New York: Penguin. Kuehl, J. (1975). John Hawkes and the Craft of Conflict. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Marx, L. (1997). Crystals out of Chaos: John Hawkes and the Shapes of Apocalypse. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. O’Donnell, P. (1982). John Hawkes. New York: Twayne.
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HELLER, JOSEPH
Heller, Joseph DAVID BUEHRER
Joseph Heller was one of post-World War II’s most popular and critically acclaimed writers, whose first and best-known novel, Catch-22 (1961), became a counterculture classic. His career spanned some 40 years and included seven novels, three dramas, two memoirs, and a posthumously published collection of short fiction. He is best known for his black humor and scathing satire to critique those bureaucratic forces of modern society determined to defeat the individual and undermine humanistic values. Heller was born to Russian Jewish immigrant parents in Brooklyn, New York on May 1, 1923; attended public schools; and in 1942 enlisted in the US Army’s 12th Air Force Division. His experiences as a wing bombardier flying combat missions over Italy and France greatly affected Heller and inspired many of the characters he fictionalizes in Catch-22. After the war, he received a BA and MA in English at New York and Columbia universities. Following short stints working in academia and the advertising industry, Heller began writing full-time after the commercial success of Catch-22, occasionally teaching creative writing at various universities. In 1981, he was stricken with Guillain–Barre syndrome, a debilitating neurological disorder that left him nearly paralyzed, and chronicles, with his usual acerbic wit, his recovery in No Laughing Matter (1986, with Speed Vogel). He died of a heart attack in New York on December 12, 1999. In Catch-22, Heller presents his first postmodern antihero, John Yossarian, a bombardier stationed in Italy during World War II who fights to survive and withstand a military establishment hell-bent on precipitating his demise. The main theme of Heller’s first novel (and many subsequent ones) is death and his protagonist’s determination to cheat it and revolt against the irrational conformity of contemporary society. Through comic dislocations and gallows humor, parodic manipulations of language, and a labyrinthine plot structure, Heller presents a moral satire on an increasingly deterministic and systematized state and the individual’s often absurd efforts to confront or escape it. The novel was
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also forward-looking, as many soldiers during the Vietnam War identified with Yossarian’s plight. Heller exploited his success by publishing three dramatic versions of the book, finally returning to fiction with Something Happened (1974). Here, he employs a first-person narrator, Bob Slocum, a middle-aged “company man,” to show the dehumanizing weight of the business world and the emotional bankruptcy of bourgeois American experience. Slocum’s dull, spiritless monotone suggests a psychological and moral paralysis in an entropic contemporary America. Missing the vaudevillian antics of Catch-22, Something Happened warns against the loss of identity or assimilation of the self by the deadening homogenization of a corporate environment. With 1979’s Good as Gold, Heller for the first time explores Jewish themes and motifs. Its protagonist, Bruce Gold, a disgruntled New York college professor who harbors political aspirations, tries to come to terms with his Jewish heritage and family life (a subject common to the novels of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth) and at the same time join a farcical government bureaucracy in Washington, DC that is exclusively WASPish. The novel shifts from realism to parody to depict Gold and the ironic, doublebind situations in which he is caught. During the 1980s, Heller published God Knows (1984), which treats the biblical figure of King David in mockcomic fashion, and Picture This (1988), which considers the artist Rembrandt and his paintings. Both novels foreground the unreliability of history and the absurdities of its written record, with Heller meditating satirically on religion, aesthetics, money, war, and politics. In Closing Time (1994), dubbed a “sequel” to Catch-22, Heller reprises Yossarian and some other peripheral characters from that earlier novel as old men possessing little of the vitriol or slapstick humor displayed previously. Yossarian and his friends, winding down their days against the backdrop of a New York City in decay, evidence a resigned disgust toward their lives, and Heller expresses anguish for his characters in their battles with modernity and pessimism about their ability to overcome the apocalyptic forces out to destroy them. His second autobiography, Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here (1998), examines his coming of
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age in Brooklyn, and his posthumous last novel, Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man (2000), a selfreflexive metafiction, concerns an aging writer, Eugene Pota, trying to generate material for a final book before time and mortality catch up with him. Joseph Heller was a major voice in post-1950 American fiction, and Catch-22 alone (which has been translated into more than a dozen languages) assures him a place in the canon of twentieth-century letters. Consistent in many of his works, however, is the theme of the individual in conflict with monolithic systems and institutions and one’s quest to make sense out of the chaos and absurdity of contemporary existence. SEE ALSO: Bellow, Saul (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Jewish Fiction (BIF); The Novel and War (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Roth, Philip (AF)
REFERENCES AND SELECTED READINGS Craig, D. (1997). Tilting at Mortality: Narrative Strategies in Joseph Heller’s Fiction. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Heller, J. (1961). Catch-22. New York: Simon and Schuster. Heller, J. (1968). We Bombed in New Haven. New York: Knopf. Heller, J. (1971). Catch-22: A Dramatization. New York: Samuel French. Heller, J. (1973). Clevinger’s Trial. New York: Samuel French. Heller, J. (1974). Something Happened. New York: Knopf. Heller, J. (1979). Good as Gold. New York: Simon and Schuster. Heller, J. (1984). God Knows. New York: Knopf. Heller, J. (with Vogel, S.) (1986). No Laughing Matter. New York: Putnam’s. Heller, J. (1989). Picture This. New York: Putnam’s. Heller, J. (1994). Closing Time. New York: Simon and Schuster. Heller, J. (1998). Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here. New York: Simon and Schuster. Heller, J. (2000). Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man. New York: Simon and Schuster. Heller, J. (2003). Catch as Catch Can: The Collected Stories and Other Writings (ed. M. J. Bruccoli, & P. Bucker). New York: Simon and Schuster. Merrill, R. (1987). Joseph Heller. Boston: Twayne.
Nagel, J. (ed.) (1984). Critical Essays on Joseph Heller. Boston: G. K. Hall. Pinkster, S. (1991). Understanding Joseph Heller. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Potts, S. W. (1982). From Here to Absurdity: The Moral Battlefields of Joseph Heller. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo. Seed, D. (1989). The Fiction of Joseph Heller: Against the Grain. New York: St. Martin’s. Sorkin, A.J. (ed.) (1993). Conversations with Joseph Heller. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Hemingway, Ernest THOMAS STRYCHACZ
No writer of the twentieth century can match Ernest Hemingway’s charisma. War hero, war reporter, big-game hunter, bullfighting aficionado, celebrity expatriate, bestselling author, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 – for 30 years, “Papa” Hemingway found ways to place a series of iconic roles and images before the American public. But few writers can match Hemingway’s impressive range of literary accomplishments either. The Nobel Prize committee, in its remarks, celebrated him for the “influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.” The committee was correct. He was a key figure in the development of American literary modernism, creator of a terse, minimalist style virtually synonymous with his name. He fathered a distinctively American school of “hard-boiled” fiction, whose practitioners, from Dashiell Hammett to Elmore Leonard, feature tough prose and tight-lipped men. Perhaps most remarkably, half a century after his death Hemingway’s posthumously published writing has provoked new appraisals of what had long seemed the obvious interpretation of his work: that it was mostly engaged with men and their tough, lonely pursuit of manhood. Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 and committed suicide on July 2, 1961 after a long period of depression. Growing up in Oak Park, Illinois, a well-to-do suburb of Chicago, Hemingway came to deride his mother’s conformity and religious narrowness and ultimately – though he inherited his father’s love of hunting and fishing – to scorn his father for bowing to his mother’s authority. After a short stint as a
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reporter for the Kansas City Star, Hemingway, eager to see action in World War I, undertook to drive ambulances on the Italian front. There, in July 1918, he was seriously injured by an exploding shell. That wounding, according to many scholars, was the seminal event of his life. Physically wounded and mentally traumatized male characters haunt his fiction, from Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises (1926), suffering from some serious though unspecified wound to his genitals, to a shell-shocked Nick Adams in “A Way You’ll Never Be,” to a plethora of gored bullfighters. For Hemingway, it seems, the existential condition of men in the early twentieth century is to be wounded. Scholars generally agree on two corollaries. First, those male characters who rise bravely to the challenge of that wounding by exhibiting what Hemingway called “grace under pressure” define true manhood. Second, displaying grace under pressure typically means observing a rigorous code of conduct, which allows one to impose a ritualistic control over chaos and pain, and which stands in lieu of a fading belief in a divinely ordained cosmos. Pedro Romero in The Sun Also Rises might be said to exemplify that code when he performs magisterially in the ring, bringing under the control of his perfect maneuvers the bull and his own pain (for he has been beaten). Philip Young (1952) importantly extended the idea of the code to Hemingway’s early writing style, arguing that its famous economy dramatized in linguistic terms the control men sought to exercise over themselves. But the first two great works of Hemingway’s career, In Our Time (1925) and The Sun Also Rises, cannot be explained only in terms of his wounding. By 1922 Hemingway was living and working in Paris, a hotbed of literary and artistic modernist practices. There he was inspired by novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and the modernist poet Ezra Pound, whose call to express emotion and meaning in poetry by way of compressed, concrete images found a counterpart in Hemingway’s famous description of his style, set forth in Death in the Afternoon, to “put down what really happened in action.” There he met James Joyce and admired his paradigmatic modernist novel, Ulysses (1922); and there he met the avant-garde writer Gertrude Stein, whose linguistic experiments were a particular influence on Hemingway’s early style.
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Through her he was introduced to the work of post-impressionist painters such as Matisse, Picasso, and Cezanne, whose techniques of fragmentation and juxtaposition resonate throughout In Our Time – a work about which Hemingway claimed that he was “trying to do the country like Cezanne.” The posthumous A Moveable Feast (1964) gives a moving, often scurrilous, sometimes hilarious, but always fascinating account of those Paris years. Both In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises portray a postwar world of angst, anomie, disillusion, casual violence, and ruptured relationships amid a pervading sense that all traditional structures of value – spiritual, social, and ethical – are being swept away or shifting in unpredictable ways. In Our Time, a collection of short stories thematically related to even shorter interspersed vignettes, concerns conflict in a variety of ways: cultural and racial tensions between European Americans and Native Americans in the early stories, for example, are interwoven with laconically delineated flashes of horror from World War I battlefields. Another source of conflict emerges in stories such as “The End of Something,” “Cat in the Rain,” and “Out of Season,” which anatomize gender relations between men and women in terms of power plays. The postwar stories in particular depict (to employ a term Hemingway popularized when he used it as the epigraph to Sun) a “lost generation” of men and women who wander, irresolute and broken, searching for spiritual or emotional sustenance. In fragile response, a few moments of courage and harmony stand out: Villalta, in chapter 10, comports himself valiantly and well in his duel with the bull; and in “Big Two-Hearted River,” the famous final story of the collection, Nick Adams undertakes a pilgrimage from trauma (the story begins in a burned-over land) to potential healing and redemption as he slowly immerses himself in the restorative powers of nature. Here (as in Jake Barnes’s trip to the Irati River in Sun), a sense of mythic patterning asserts itself: the story elaborates a hero’s journey with the goal of setting himself and elemental forces in equilibrium. Like other famous modernist works such as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), In Our Time develops aesthetically in concert with a wide-
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spread sense in the early twentieth century that traditional frameworks of Western society were fast eroding. In Our Time reads a little like a truncated novel – a novel in search of its traditional coherence, perhaps – insofar as many of the stories follow in roughly chronological order the early years of Nick Adams (a character to whom Hemingway returns in subsequent short stories, notably “The Killers”). Stylistically, the predominant tone of cool restraint sometimes veers toward febrile repetition, as in “Soldier’s Home” and “Mr. and Mrs. Elliott,” but always implies the imminence of disruption. In stories such as “On the Quai at Smyrna” (first published in the 1930 edition) and “Out of Season,” and in many of the vignettes, laconic understatement barely holds together scenes of terror and frightening disorientation. In The Sun Also Rises, as in In Our Time, Hemingway situates his characters in a terrain of conflict. Jake’s war wound takes its toll on the intense and (because it cannot be consummated) intensely frustrating relationship between him and Brett Ashley. That frustration spills over into Jake’s jealous rivalry with Robert Cohn and makes its way via a series of displacements and compensations not only into bouts of heavy drinking but also into Jake’s admiration for Pedro Romero, the up-and-coming bullfighter whose prowess in the ring, self-control, and respect for bullfighting traditions, and perhaps his ability to bed Brett Ashley, stand for all that Jake feels he has lost. Jake, like all of the centerless wanderers in this expatriate wasteland, has a fragile purchase on any source of hope. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?,” the famous final words of the novel as Jake replies to Brett’s fantasy of what might have been between them, strikes a mordant, and common, tone of disillusioned irony. Loss is also the keynote of A Farewell to Arms (1929), the novel that made Hemingway wealthy and famous. Based on Hemingway’s actual love affair with nurse Agnes von Kurowsky during his convalescence from his war injury, the novel intertwines two sorts of farewells: Frederic Henry’s desertion from the Italian army after the disastrous retreat at Caporetto, and his loss of the “arms” of his beloved Catherine Barkley after her death in childbirth – the event that concludes the novel and that governs the elegiac tone of Henry’s retrospective narration. Catherine
Barkley has often focused discontent with Hemingway’s female characters. Judith Fetterley (1978), for example, criticizes the pliancy of a character who seems to give herself over entirely to Henry, and who is in a sense punished for being female by dying in childbirth. From this perspective, Hemingway’s works are not merely about men and men’s experience but also insidiously misogynist – they register an animus against women that also appears, for example, in the representation of Brett Ashley as a femme fatale. Other scholars, however, have argued that Hemingway’s female characters are more complex than these accusations make them appear (Kert 1999; Broer & Holland 2002). Many scholars consider that Hemingway’s work from the early 1930s on suffers an aesthetic decline, relieved by For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and The Old Man and the Sea (1952), as the cumulative effect of his alcoholism and his devotion to his “Papa Hemingway” persona began to take its toll on his writing. Intellectuals of the 1930s, predisposed in the wake of the Great Depression to favor works written from a socially committed perspective, were certainly contemptuous of Green Hills of Africa (1935), Hemingway’s account of his safari in Africa, starring himself, and of Death in the Afternoon (1932), his long, arcane, treatise on bullfighting in Spain – and were only marginally swayed by the fragmentary To Have and Have Not (1937), with its final lament for the perils of being a man cut off from community. From a more charitable perspective, one can see Hemingway developing in new ways the ideas that had already occupied him for a decade. Death shifts Hemingway’s style from the laconic to the labyrinthine. The book is a self-reflexive meditation on style: the art of bullfighting doubles for the art of writing. And both, arguably, represent the art of styling oneself as a man, as if manhood were a performance to be maintained rather than an essence to be acquired. Hemingway’s self-promotion in Green Hills might then be read as a reflection on the stratagems men devise to construct a sense of manhood. This period also witnessed the publication of three more collections of short stories – a form that many scholars believe to have encouraged his best work. Men Without Women (1927) was followed by Winner Take Nothing (1933), and a few
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years later The Fifth Column and the First FortyNine Stories (1938) included all his short stories from previous collections plus two of his most famous: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” These latter two stories feature some of Hemingway’s lifelong concerns. “Snows,” one of several Hemingway stories portraying artists and writers – David Bourne in The Garden of Eden (1986), and Thomas Hudson in Islands in the Stream (1970) are two others – recounts the thoughts of a dying writer lamenting the fact that he has sold out his talent. “Short Happy Life,” a tense, provocative look at gender politics, charts Francis Macomber’s rise from cowardice to brief selfconfident manhood, whereupon he is killed by a bullet from the gun of his wife Margot. Yet the easy assumption, which many readers have made, that the story sets up a battle of the sexes terminated by Margot when her husband appears ready to assert his newfound authority, is hardly sustained by the story, which leaves open the question of Margot’s guilt. Hemingway’s sensitivity toward gender issues has been the focus of much attention in the last 20 years, particularly after the publication of The Garden of Eden, a truncated version of a sprawling manuscript Hemingway had worked on for years, whose reprise of a “lost generation” landscape of psychically disintegrating wanderers features a remarkable interest in switching gender and sexual roles. One consequence has been to send scholars back to the work Hemingway published in his lifetime to attack the supposition that he was mostly concerned with men attaining manhood, and show instead that Hemingway was compelled by “gender trouble” (Kennedy 1991) and fascinated by the transformative possibilities of gender roles, polymorphous sexual experiences, lesbianism, and homosexuality (Comley & Scholes 1994), or by the self-dramatizations men undertake (Strychacz 2003). Others have explored his career in terms of a fluctuating relationship between masculine and feminine elements of his psyche (Spilka 1990) or investigated the importance of fetishes, such as his fascination with cutting and coloring hair, to his constructions of identity (Eby 1998). These ideas occur even in what appears the unlikely venue of Hemingway’s epic novel of the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls,
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which places Robert Jordan as an American sent to aid a Loyalist (Republican) guerilla group in their effort to blow up a strategic bridge. The novel gives Hemingway his most thorough opportunity to explore the psyches of men at war at a pivotal historical moment – the imminent victory of the fascists in Spain foreshadowing the rise of fascism elsewhere in Europe. But it also allows him to create one of his more complex and evocative female characters in the figure of Pilar, who supplants her husband’s leadership of the guerillas and plays a tough counterpoint to Maria, whose rape before the novel opens represents in human terms what is at stake in this conflict, and whose experience of love with Jordan offers partial redemption. Hemingway’s account of the war itself turns out to be surprisingly complex. The blowing-up of the bridge appears to be strategically unimportant. And, in one of the more memorable set-piece sequences of the novel, Pilar’s description of the grisly retribution meted out to fascists in a hilltop village at the hands of Republicans – led here by her husband – provides an unsettling glimpse into the horrors of total war. Even the ending, in which Jordan prepares to hold off the pursuing fascist forces long enough to allow the guerrilla band (including Maria) to escape, has an ironic resonance: Jordan’s act of lonely heroism does underscore the value of self-sacrifice. But it is a choice determined in the first place by the fact that he has incurred an injury serious enough to prevent his escape. Over a decade later, many critics greeted the novella The Old Man and the Sea as a sign of Hemingway’s literary resurrection, and it was in large measure responsible for his winning the Nobel Prize in 1954. Certainly this tale of a Cuban fisherman in his battle to capture the biggest marlin he or anyone else has ever heard of seems in many ways a miniature gloss on ideas long held to be the quintessence of Hemingway’s aesthetic and philosophy. The tale pits Santiago, a man off alone, against gigantic natural forces – the sea, the marlin, sharks – that he seeks to overcome by strength and enduring courage. He is guided by a simple code of ethics that has him respecting the great adversary he must kill. His failure – his failure, that is, to return the marlin intact after sharks attack – accentuates the grandeur of his accomplishment. Since the marlin no longer
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possesses economic worth, its value has to be reckoned instead in mythic terms: as an epic battle between human and nature, between a man’s frail body and his indomitable will, in which Santiago, that most humble of fishermen, takes his place among David, Hercules, Beowulf, Captain Ahab, and many more in an ancient tradition of giantslayers. In some respects, this trim novella plays an odd role in Hemingway’s career. Its laconic understatement and “winner-take-nothing” attitude return us to his early work, but the mythic resonances of the story make Santiago a more complete and confident hero than traumatized characters such as Nick Adams, Jake Barnes, and Frederic Henry. Yet the flood of posthumous work in the next 40 years – Islands, Garden, and True at First Light (1999), among others – showed that Hemingway’s attention never shifted from representing a cultural landscape not only of traumatic disorientation, but also of the myriad new possibilities for human expression it liberated. SEE ALSO: Expatriate Fiction (AF); Fitzgerald, F. Scott (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Joyce, James (BIF); Modernist Fiction (AF); The Novel and War (AF); Stein, Gertrude (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Baker, C. (1952). Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Broer, L., & Holland, G. (2002). Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Comley, J., & Scholes, R. (1994). Hemingway’s Genders: Rereading the Hemingway Text. New Haven: Yale University Press. Eby, C. (1999). Hemingway’s Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood. Albany: SUNY Press. Fetterley, J. (1978). The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hemingway, E. (1925). In Our Time. New York: Boni and Liveright. Hemingway, E. (1926). The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner’s. Hemingway, E. (1927). Men Without Women. New York: Scribner’s.
Hemingway, E. (1929). A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner’s. Hemingway, E. (1932). Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribner’s. Hemingway, E. (1933). Winner Take Nothing. New York: Scribner’s. Hemingway, E. (1935). Green Hills of Africa. New York: Scribner’s. Hemingway, E. (1937). To Have and Have Not. New York: Scribner’s. Hemingway, E. (1938). The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. New York: Scribner’s. Hemingway, E. (1940). For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Scribner’s. Hemingway, E. (1952). The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner’s. Hemingway, E. (1964). A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner’s. Hemingway, E. (1986). The Garden of Eden. New York: Scribner’s. Hemingway, E. (1999). True at First Light. New York: Simon and Schuster. Kennedy, J. G. (1991). Hemingway’s Gender Trouble. American Literature, 63(2), 187–207. Kert, B. (1999). The Hemingway Women. New York: Norton. Raeburn, J. (1984). Fame Became of Him: Hemingway as Public Writer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rovit, E., & Brenner, G. (1986). Ernest Hemingway. Boston: Twayne. Spilka, M. (1990). Hemingway’s Quarrel with Androgyny. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Strychacz, T. (2003). Hemingway’s Theaters of Masculinity. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Young, P. (1952). Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration. New York: Rinehart.
Herbst, Josephine JULIA EHRHARDT
Josephine Herbst (1892–1969) was a novelist, journalist, and memoirist best known for the radical fiction she composed during the 1930s. Her literary reputation declined in subsequent decades, but the resurgence of academic interest in the literature of the American Left along with the rise of feminist literary criticism have revitalized interest in her work. Herbst resisted categorization as a proletarian novelist – the default classification assigned to
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writers in her circle – because she found the term too limiting as a description of her fiction. As opposed to most male radical novelists who focused exclusively on how capitalism exploited working-class men, Herbst’s writings emphasized how sexist social ideologies together with the injustices of capitalism oppressed women and adversely affected relationships between the sexes. Born in Sioux City, Iowa, Herbst aspired to be a writer from girlhood, but her family’s precarious financial circumstances delayed her efforts to embark on a literary career. She attended Morningside College, the University of Iowa, and the University of Washington before graduating from the University of California, Berkeley in 1918. In 1919, she moved to New York City, where she joined a thriving group of literary radicals including Genevieve Taggard, Mike Gold, and Floyd Dell. She published several stories under the pseudonym Carlotta Greet, but her career was curtailed after she embarked on an affair with the married playwright Maxwell Anderson and became pregnant. She had an abortion at Anderson’s insistence and then plunged into a deep depression; her grief was compounded when her sister Helen died from an illegal abortion. Unable to write in America, Herbst traveled to Europe in 1922, and during a three-year sojourn memorialized her sister’s death in her unpublished first novel, “Following the Circle.” This manuscript reflects Herbst’s practice of basing her fiction on tragic events that had befallen her family, using their personal experiences to illumine larger social problems. While in Paris in 1924, Herbst met the writer John Herrmann. The couple returned to America in 1925 and married in 1926. In 1929, Herbst published two novels: Nothing Is Sacred and Money for Love. In 1930, while in Russia attending a conference on radical literature, Herbst experienced an artistic epiphany that would inspire her most acclaimed literary undertaking: a trilogy of novels that documented the misfortunes of a fictional American family doomed by the vagaries of capitalism. Recognizing that her own family’s history served as a microcosm of the Marxist theory of class, Herbst’s Pity Is Not Enough (1933), The Executioner Waits (1934), and Rope of Gold (1939) depict the multigenerational struggles of the fictional Trexler–Wendel clan to enter the middle class. Though the family valiantly
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attempts to get ahead through both legitimate labor and illegal schemes, the historical cataclysms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thwart them. The older generations blame themselves for their failure to achieve prosperity, but the two youngest daughters, Victoria and Rosamond Wendel, slowly come to realize that the family’s welfare depends largely on forces beyond individual control. Both sisters become radicalized, and after the pregnant Rosamond dies in a car accident, Herbst’s fictional alter ego Victoria becomes a freelance journalist determined to publicize the struggles of people fighting for a better world. Herbst based her trilogy on her maternal family history, frequently quoting from her ancestors’ letters and diaries. Like John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, Herbst’s novels incorporate newspaper articles and third-person commentary on contemporary wars, strikes, and grassroots political movements. In addition to narrating the events in the chapters from a variety of perspectives, Herbst (like John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath [1939]) uses interchapters to provide a panoramic backdrop for her characters, demonstrating how the struggles of Midwestern farmers, Cuban sugarcane workers, and Detroit labor organizers were all interrelated. An equally important symbolic element in the trilogy is the large number of female characters who get sick, die young, or are left to do domestic work while their male partners join social movements; Victoria herself endures stillbirth and divorce as she pursues her writing career. By emphasizing the unrealized potential of her female characters, Hurst critiques the sexism that precluded women’s full participation in revolutionary politics. In addition to her trilogy, in the 1930s Herbst reported on a variety of topics including farm strikes in the United States, the Cuban general strike, the Spanish Civil War, and German resistance to the Nazi regime. She was divorced from Herrmann in 1935. In the 1940s, Herbst wrote two novels, Satan’s Sergeants (1941) and Somewhere the Tempest Fell (1947), but neither received the attention her trilogy had garnered. In 1954 she composed “Hunter of Doves,” a novella about American novelist Nathanael West, as well as New Green World, a biography of American naturalists William and John Bartram. In the 1960s, Herbst
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wrote her memoirs. Published posthumously in 1991, they are regarded as some of the finest assessments of the 1930s literary Left. Herbst died of cancer in 1969. SEE ALSO: Dos Passos, John (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Steinbeck, John (AF); West, Nathanael (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bevilacqua, W.F. (1985). Josephine Herbst. Boston: Twayne. Browder, L. (1998). Rousing the Nation. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Ehrhardt, J. (2004). Writers of Conviction. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Hapke, L. (1995). Daughters of the Great Depression. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Herbst, J. (1929a). Money for Love. New York: Coward-McCann. Herbst, J. (1929b). Nothing Is Sacred. New York: Coward-McCann. Herbst, J. (1933). Pity Is Not Enough. New York: Harcourt Brace. Herbst, J. (1934). The Executioner Waits. New York: Harcourt Brace. Herbst, J. (1939). Rope of Gold. New York: Harcourt Brace. Herbst, J. (1941). Satan’s Sergeants. New York: Scribner’s. Herbst, J. (1947). Somewhere the Tempest Fell. New York: Scribner’s. Herbst, J. (1954a). Hunter of Doves. Botteghe Oscure, 3, 310–44. Herbst, J. (1954b). New Green World. New York: Hastings House. Herbst, J. (1991). The Starched Blue Sky of Spain and Other Memoirs. New York: Harper. Langer, E. (1994). Josephine Herbst. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Rabinowitz, P. (1991). Labor and Desire. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Shulman, R. (2000). The Power of Political Art. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Highsmith, Patricia JUSTUS NIELAND
A poet of disquiet and obsessive desire, Patricia Highsmith (1921–95) specialized in psychological
thrillers staged in an amoral, irrational, Cold War universe. Her best-known literary creation is Tom Ripley, the cheery, charismatic psychopath and consummate performance artist who debuted in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), the first in a series of five Ripley novels (the Ripleiad) that spanned Highsmith’s career. Highsmith’s literary output was prodigious: 22 novels, seven short story collections, and a meditation on her generic breadand-butter, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1966). Her first published novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), was quickly adapted in Alfred Hitchcock’s famous 1952 film, and Highsmith’s cold and fascinating fictional world has spawned a host of cinematic adaptations by prestigious European auteurs like Claude Chabrol, Rene Clement, and Wim Wenders. Recently, Highsmith has been rediscovered not just as a quintessential noir novelist but also as a shrewd analyst of “perverse” desire and its Cold War production, and an unsparing explorer of the fluidity of modern identity at mid-century. Born Mary Patricia Plangman in Fort Worth, Texas, Highsmith took the name of her stepfather, Stanley Highsmith, who, like her mother, Mary Coates, was a commercial artist. Raised largely by her grandmother, Highsmith moved often between Texas and New York City during her childhood, eventually enrolling in Barnard College in 1938. At Barnard, Highsmith studied English literature, Greek, and Latin; published short fiction in the Barnard Quarterly; discovered her lesbianism; and became increasingly convinced of the centrality of “abnormal” or “deviant” psychology to the modern condition. Graduating in 1942, Highsmith made her living for the next six years grinding out copy for comic books. She sold her first story, “Heroine,” to Harper’s Bazaar in 1945, and three years later, with the help of her friend Truman Capote, she was accepted into the artist’s colony Yaddo, where she wrote Strangers on a Train. Highsmith’s first three, pre-Ripley novels are among her best. Strangers inaugurates Highsmith’s preoccupation with the power of an obsessive, destructive bond between two people – ostensibly dissimilar, but actually strange doubles in their darker psychic recesses. Successful architect Guy Haines finds himself sharing a train car with Charles Anthony Bruno, a spoiled young psychopath. From this utterly contingent
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encounter, Guy finds himself embroiled in Bruno’s plan to exchange murders, a plan that binds him fatally to Bruno, who at once disgusts him and stands for his “cast-off self, what he thought he hated but perhaps in reality loved” (1950, 180). Highsmith’s landmark lesbian novel, The Price of Salt (1952), published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, concerns the romance between Therese Belivet, an aspiring stage designer, and the lovely, unhappily married suburban housewife Carol Aird. A trenchant parable of homosexual repression and paranoia in McCarthyite America, The Price of Salt refuses to punish homosexual desire, and offers, in its final reunion of Therese and Carol, an affirmative love story, unusual both for the period and within Highsmith’s own career. With The Blunderer (1954), Highsmith returns to her interest in the deathly reality of fantasy. Unhappily married Walter Stackhouse finds his darkest dreams realized when his neurotic wife Clara kills herself, but in a fashion reminiscent of the death of Helen Kimmel, recently murdered by her own husband, Melchior. Eventually, Walter’s perverse curiosity about Melchior’s violence, a displaced version of his own deadly capacity, leads the police investigators back to Melchior, who eventually kills his blundering double, Walter. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) is Highsmith’s greatest meditation on the lure of fantasy, and its power to fashion realities and selves better aligned with the powerful vagaries of human desire. The novel concerns Tom Ripley, a loner, orphan, and petty New York criminal who, in Highsmith’s explicit homage to Henry James’s The Ambassadors, is sent by shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf to Mongibello, Italy to bring home his wastrel son Dickie, who spends his days soaking up the Mediterranean sun and dabbling in bad surrealist paintings. Tom befriends Dickie, and becomes attracted not so much to Dickie himself as to the idea of being Dickie. Perversely, Tom realizes this sympathetic identification by killing Dickie and then assuming his personal effects and his general bearing of privilege and confidence. The personal is only an effect in Highsmith, and Tom proves a better Dickie than the original. Tom, then, is the book’s real artist, and his medium is the malleable substance of human personality itself. The next two novels in the series, Ripley Under Ground (1970) and Ripley’s Game (1974), expand
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the first novel’s meditations on authenticity and morality by embroiling Tom – now a gourmand and art collector ensconced in a lovely villa outside of Paris – in a series of scams involving forged paintings by a dead modern master named Derwatt. The series’ final two entries, The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980) and Ripley Under Water (1991), are the weaker of the lot: the former makes the homosexual subtext of much of the earlier novels explicit in the new role of lover and protector that Tom plays for a guilt-ridden 16-yearold boy; and in the latter, Tom is tormented by David Pritchard, who threatens to dredge up Dickie Greenleaf’s murder. Pritchard thus embodies everything that uncannily haunts Tom’s future-oriented, improvisational path – the weight of the past, the stubborn materiality of the body, and the vulgarity of the real. Highsmith’s achievement extends beyond her early work and the Ripley novels. Also fine are This Sweet Sickness (1960), the story of an engineer who, dumped by his girlfriend, re-creates an alternate domestic life with her in fantasy, supplemented by the prop of an actual suburban home; Those Who Walk Away (1967), a crime novel whose only murders are imaginary; and The Tremor of Forgery (1969), an investigation of cultural and moral relativism set in Tunis during the Arab–Israeli Six Day War of 1967, and focused through the dawning anxiety of an American writer who kills an Arab with his typewriter. In Europe, where Highsmith lived most of her adult life, the author was lionized early on as an American existentialist, one whose picture of the modern psyche and detached, ironic style were indebted to the writers she most admired – Dostoevsky, Conrad, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Camus, and Gide. While her critical reputation is soaring today in the US, and secured by handsome Library of America and Norton editions, during her lifetime Highsmith’s fiction never sold well in the United States. Her work received mixed critical reviews and, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, was critiqued for its remorseless, unsentimental view of humanity. This optic is especially evident in her superb late short fiction collection The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder (1975a), which assumes the point of view of animals – an elephant, a truffle-hunting pig, and a Venetian rat – who revolt against an abusive
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and exploitative human world. For her part, Highsmith had little truck with demands that her fictions be more human or more just: “I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial, for neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not” (Wilson 223). SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (AF); Noir Fiction (AF); Queer Modernism (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Cassuto, L. (2008). Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories. New York: Columbia University Press. Harrison, R. (1997). Patricia Highsmith. New York: Twayne. Highsmith, P. (1950). Strangers on a Train. New York: Harper. Highsmith, P. (as Morgan, C.) (1952). The Price of Salt. Tallahassee, FL: Naiad. Highsmith, P. (1954). The Blunderer. New York: Coward-McCann. Highsmith, P. (1955). The Talented Mr. Ripley. New York: Coward-McCann. Highsmith, P. (1960). This Sweet Sickness. New York: Harper and Brothers. Highsmith, P. (1966). Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction. Boston: The Writer Inc. Highsmith, P. (1967). Those Who Walk Away. London: Heinemann. Highsmith, P. (1969). The Tremor of Forgery. London: Heinemann. Highsmith, P. (1970). Ripley Under Ground. New York: Doubleday. Highsmith, P. (1974). Ripley’s Game. New York: Knopf. Highsmith, P. (1975a). The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder. London: Heinemann. Highsmith, P. (1975b). Little Tales of Misogyny. Zurich: Diogenes Verlag. Highsmith, P. (1980). The Boy Who Followed Ripley. London: Heinemann. Highsmith, P. (1991). Ripley Under Water. New York: Knopf. Schenkar, J. (2009). The Talented Mrs. Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith. New York: St. Martin’s. Seltzer, M. (2007). True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. London: Routledge. Wilson, A. (2003). Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith. New York: Bloomsbury. Zizek, S. (2003). Not a Desire to Have Him, but to Be Like Him. London Review of Books (Aug. 21).
Himes, Chester CHRISTOPHER T. RACZKOWSKI
Chester Bomar Himes’s extraordinary life and writing resist categorization. Born in Jefferson City, Missouri in 1909 to a black bourgeois family one generation removed from slavery, Himes attended the Ohio State University in 1926 with the intention of studying medicine. Instead, he received his first education in institutionalized racism from the university’s Jim Crow student facilities and was expelled two semesters later. Within a year, Himes had reinvented himself as a minor figure in Cleveland’s black underworld and was arrested for armed robbery in 1928. As prisoner 59623 at the Ohio State Penitentiary, Himes began his unlikely literary career. His first stories, mainly about crime and prison life, appeared in 1931 in the black periodical Abbot’s Monthly. By 1934, he began landing pieces in the more lucrative Esquire. In “To What Red Hell” and “Crazy in the Stir” (both 1934) – later revised as episodes in his prison novel Yesterday Will Make You Cry (1998 [1952]) – Himes’s commitment to an aesthetics of absurdity emerges. His acute visual attention to the grotesque and his thematic interest in the violence and irrationality of modern America would become central features of his subsequent writing. Following his release in 1936, Himes cast about for employment, worked for the Federal Writers Project, got involved with industrial unionism, and published fiction and editorials in Crisis, Opportunity, and Old Left literary magazines like Crossroads. Living and writing at the intersections of the Harlem Renaissance and the Popular Front – Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Carl Van Vechten were critical early influences and supporters – Himes became increasingly concerned with radical social and political change. Himes’s first novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), weaves together the violent racial and sexual fantasies of his protagonist’s dream life with realist accounts of his work as a black leaderman in the racially polarized shipyards of wartime Los Angeles. Here and in Lonely Crusade (1947), Himes revised the proletarian novel by joining documentary elements of social realism with modernist narrative experiments in perspective and the representation of extreme psychological
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states. Together, the novels provide important critiques of Popular Front racial politics and contribute to a – largely untold – cultural history of California’s integrated war industries. Despairing of American political and literary culture in the 1950s, Himes permanently departed for Europe and joined Richard Wright and a growing community of expatriate black artists and intellectuals in Paris. With no means of supporting himself, Himes welcomed French surrealist Marcel Duhamel’s suggestion that he contribute a hard-boiled detective novel for his Serie Noire label. The first novel, For Love of Imabelle (1958), won Himes the Grand Prix de Litterateur Policiere and made him an instant celebrity in France – Himes would eventually complete nine novels for Duhamel, collectively known as the Harlem Domestic Cycle. In the early installments of the cycle – The Crazy Kill (1959a), The Big Gold Dream (1960b), and All Shot Up (1960a) – Himes’s pair of black, antiheroic police detectives, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones, stride through Harlem like capricious gods, outsized Harlem folk heroes who sow havoc and reap awe and ambiguous justice from white and black populations alike. As Rudolph Fisher did before him, Himes rewired a genre implicated in the racist policing of black bodies by disrupting its overly rationalist vision, and insisting upon its blindness; forensic evidence yields no solutions here to crimes that spread out across a social order. In the final installments of the cycle, the growing structural and thematic marginalization of his detectives reflects the intensification of race conflict in 1960s America. In Blind Man With a Pistol (1969), which ends elliptically with Harlem’s violent uprising against the city’s white police and demolition crews, Coffin Ed and Digger are often absent from the narrative. When present, they appear as anachronistic “ghosts” to a Harlem mobilized by Black Power and Civil Rights movements. Their former structural centrality as folk heroes to Himes’s Harlem is replaced by multiple, splintered points of view and textual fragments that seem to elicit black Harlem as the collective subject and object of its own – potentially apocalyptic – story in the making. With his health declining in the 1970s, Himes completed his second volume of autobiography, My Life of Absurdity (1976), but little else. Himes ranked the Harlem Cycle as his most important
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literary achievement and critics have tended to agree, viewing them as major landmarks in black crime fiction. Largely neglected in America during his lifetime, Himes has gained much attention since his death in 1984. His strange, profoundly violent, genre-imploding novels have animated a generation of scholars trained in poststructuralist and neo-Marxist cultural theory. Meanwhile, his aesthetic influence remains palpable everywhere from Ishmael Reed and Clarence Major to Walter Mosley and Quentin Tarantino. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); The Harlem Renaissance (AF); Noir Fiction (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); WPA and Popular Front Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Breu, C. (2005). Hardboiled Masculinities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Eburne, J. P. (2005). The Transatlantic Mysteries of Paris: Chester Himes, Surrealism and the Serie Noire. PMLA, 120(3), 806–21. Himes, C. (1934a). Crazy in the Stir. Esquire (Aug.). Himes, C. (1934b). To What Red Hell. Esquire (Oct.). Himes, C. (1945). If He Hollers Let Him Go. New York: Doubleday. Himes, C. (1947). Lonely Crusade. New York: Knopf. Himes, C. (1956). The Primitive. New York: New American Library. Himes, C. (1957). For Love of Imabelle. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Himes, C. (1959a). The Crazy Kill. New York: Avon. Himes, C. (1959b). The Real Cool Killers. New York: Avon. Himes, C. (1960a). All Shot Up. New York: Avon. Himes, C. (1960b). The Big Gold Dream. New York: Avon. Himes, C. (1965). Cotton Comes to Harlem. New York: Putnam’s. Himes, C. (1966). The Heats On. New York: Putnam’s. Himes, C. (1970). Blind Man With a Pistol. New York: Dell. Himes, C. (1972). The Quality of Hurt. New York: Doubleday. Himes, C. (1976). My Life of Absurdity. New York: Doubleday. Himes, C. (1998). Yesterday Will Make You Cry [originally published as Cast the First Stone, 1952]. New York: Norton.
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Margolies, E., & Fabre, M. (1997). The Several Lives of Chester Himes. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Nieland, J. (2000). “Enough to Make a Body Riot”: Pansies and Protestors in Himes’s Harlem. Arizona Quarterly, 56(1), 105–133. Soitos, S. (1996). The Blues Detective. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Historiographic Metafiction MICHAEL BUTTER
The term “historiographic metafiction” was coined by Linda Hutcheon in her essay “Beginning to Theorize the Postmodern” in 1987 and then further developed in her seminal study A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) to describe “those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages.” According to Hutcheon, novels such as E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975) or William Kennedy’s Legs (1975) display “a theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs (historiographic metafiction) [that] is made the grounds for [a] rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past” (1988 5). Historiographic metafiction thus constitutes a specific form of metafiction, which Patricia Waugh, in an equally influential study, has defined as “fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (1984 2). However, historiographic metafiction adds a further dimension to such reflections: texts that can be subsumed under the heading not only explore the workings of literature and lay bare its ontological status as fiction. They additionally engage and unveil the parallels between writing literature and historiography – the practice of writing history – suggesting that both are acts of construction that do not reflect or naively represent reality or the past, but (re)invent and shape them from necessarily subjective and ideologically laden perspectives. In order to project this notion, historiographic metafiction makes use of a broad variety of the-
matic and formal means. Plots usually revolve around characters openly concerned with making sense of the past, figures such as historians, detectives, or archivists who study documents, data, and testimonies to arrive at an understanding of what has happened. As a consequence, the action of most historiographic metafictions takes place on two different levels; the texts are almost always characterized by a dual time frame. They are set in a fictional present where one or more characters – often first-person narrators who address specific narratees – undertake explorations of the past and frequently reflect on their activities and the epistemological problems they face. Simultaneously, however, the novels are set in a fictional past where the events took place that these (amateur or professional) historians are interested in. Sometimes the version of the past presented in the novel is quite obviously a (re)construction by one or several of the investigators in the fictional present, sometimes novels incorporate various conflicting versions about what has happened that stem from one or more of these investigator figures, and sometimes the story of the investigator figure simply exists alongside the historical narrative with both being related by a more or less covert narrator. Invariably, however, such a juxtaposition of past and present “problematizes the very possibility of historical knowledge” (Hutcheon 1988, 106). Accordingly, historiographic metafiction implies that the past remains ultimately inaccessible, that historical narration is necessarily an act of the imagination, and that historiography, therefore, is not a neutral account of what happened but rather a biased story determined by the needs and convictions of those who tell it. In Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988), for example, a novel about Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, scenes dedicated to Oswald’s personal development and his involvement with an unfolding conspiracy to kill the president alternate with scenes describing how Nicolas Branch, a retired CIA analyst, attempts to write “the secret history of the assassination” (1988, 15). Twenty-five years after Kennedy’s death, however, and after 15 years of work, Branch has not yet written anything, as he is completely overwhelmed by the quantity of documents and possible evidence available to him: “He is in too deep to be selective” (59). His inability to structure
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the material and produce even a single line severely undermines the historical narration that the other parts of the novel deliver, marking its account of what allegedly happened as clearly fictional and suggesting that “all efforts to discover order in [history] can only produce fictions of coherence” (Ickstadt 1994, 310). Branch fails in his work because he is unwilling to make the selections necessary to fabricate such a fiction; he is unable to “stop assembling data” (DeLillo 1988, 59). Although his office is already a “book-filled room” (14), he continues to collect and study “[b]aptismal records, report cards, postcards, divorce petitions, canceled checks, daily timesheets, tax returns, property lists, postoperative x-rays,” and other similar items (181). His obsessive collecting, though, not only reveals his failure to structure and organize his material. It also hints at another dimension of writing history that all historiographic metafiction invariably highlights: “We cannot know the past except through its texts: its documents, its evidence, even its eye-witness accounts are texts. Even the institutions of the past, its social structures and practices, could be seen, in one sense, as social text” (Hutcheon 1988 16). Historiographic metafiction lays bare this inevitable textuality of history through its own excessive intertextuality. In Libra, for instance, Don DeLillo quotes extensively from Oswald’s diary and the 26 volumes of testimonies and depositions that the Warren Commission published along with its official report. Other novels shift the focus considerably from factual to fictional intertexts to reveal that the distinction between fact and fiction (or, for that matter, historiography and literature) is not an ontological one but is determined by habit and convention – a fact also often discussed at length by the novels’ narrators. Through a broad variety of devices such as interventions by narrator figures or the disturbance of a coherent image of the past by the interpolation of scenes dedicated to those exploring the past, then, historiographic metafiction destroys the illusionism that more realist historical novels seek to achieve. However, in order to deconstruct the idea that fiction can adequately represent or even mirror reality, the novels first need to build up such illusions themselves. Next to metafictional devices that lay bare their own fictionality, they therefore also deploy the strate-
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gies of mimetic realism and oftentimes offer large passages of rather traditional narration. This explains why Hutcheon can refer to the novels she has in mind as “popular and well-known.” Unlike modernist texts, which only found a rather small readership, many novels that can be called historiographic metafiction – and this goes in particular for British texts such as Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) or Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) – have indeed been bestsellers. Their combination of historical narration and metahistoriographic and metafictional commentary obviously appealed to a broad audience. As is apparent from the examples drawn on so far, historiographic metafiction is a predominantly postmodern phenomenon. As a form of metafiction, it was a welcome venue for artists struggling at least during the 1960s and 1970s with what John Barth has famously called “the usedupness of certain forms or exhaustion of certain possibilities” after high modernism (1976, 29). More importantly, though, historiographic metafiction has thrived under the cultural and epistemological conditions of postmodernity that are characterized by a radical questioning of the very possibility of identity, secure knowledge, and any kind of representation. In the field of history, the epistemological skepticism of the past decades has led various theorists to arrive at the same conclusions that historiographic metafiction reaches by fictional means. Thus, scholars like Hayden White (1973, 1978) and Dominick LaCapra (1985) have also pointed out that historians do not simply describe the past but also create stories about it. Furthermore, White, LaCapra, and others have emphasized the crucial role that ideology and the narrative templates available to the historian play in this process. Moreover, similar to theorists arguing from a more explicitly poststructuralist position than White and LaCapra do, historiographic metafiction has also challenged the humanist notion of the homogeneous subject and worked to question and complicate essentialist and fixed notions of identity. Just like metafiction in general, however, historiographic metafiction is not an exclusively postmodern phenomenon but has a longer history. As, among others, Julika Griem (1994) and Kurt M€ uller (1994) have shown, Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams (published
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posthumously in 1918) in many ways anticipates the larger number of postmodernist texts by “dramatizing both a continuous search for conceptual order and a consciousness that this search will finally be frustrated” (M€ uller 1994, 40) and revealing “the process of making sense in historical discourse to be temporary and unstable” (Griem 1994, 108). And both John Dos Passos’s trilogy U.S.A. (1930–6) and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) can be seen as continuing this project, as they combine “an element of metafictional self-reflection [with] an awareness of the problematic nature of historiographic reconstruction” (M€ uller 1994, 41). Yet, as M€ uller also stresses, “the historical novel remained a more or less marginal genre within the movement of modernism” (42). It was only with the advent of postmodernism in the 1960s that the issues that concerned Adams, Dos Passos, and Faulkner moved to the center of artistic attention. In fact, for Linda Hutcheon, historiographic metafiction is the postmodernist way of writing as such. Since she sees postmodernist art as continuing modernist self-reflexivity and introspection, but paradoxically re-engaging history at the same time, she has repeatedly argued that historiographic metafiction is “what would characterize postmodernism in fiction” (1988, ix). This claim, however, seems exaggerated, especially from today’s position, as such a wholesale classification would neglect the aesthetic and stylistic differences between various forms of postmodernist fiction that have developed over the last 50 years. Neither do all postmodernist novels turn back to history, nor do all novels that do so combine this return with metahistorical reflections. It is therefore advisable to regard historiographic metafiction, as Ansgar N€ unning (1995) has proposed in his comprehensive study of latetwentieth-century fiction with a historical bent, as one subgenre of the postmodernist historical novel, a subgenre that coexists with various other forms of postmodernist historical and non-historical fiction. The term “historiographic metafiction” thus designates a group of texts that Elisabeth Wesseling refers to as “self-reflexive historical fiction” (1991, 83). What comes into focus when the concept is narrowed down in this fashion is that, in the United States, historiographic metafiction has
been particularly prominent among proponents of what Andreas Huyssen (1984) has labeled “affirmative postmodernism” (16), that is, among white male writers of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s like John Barth, Robert Coover, or E. L. Doctorow. Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), a novel that reinvents the history of colonial America in order to expose the blanks and distortions in traditional accounts; Coover’s The Public Burning (1977), which, narrated by Richard Nixon, capitalizes on the metaphor of the witch-hunt to cast the trial and execution of the Rosenbergs during the early 1950s as another instance of a collective paranoia that can be traced back to the Puritans; and Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel (1971), which re-engages the same historical case, albeit through the eyes of the Rosenbergs’ fictitious son, all wholeheartedly embrace the notion of a playful, chaotic, and destabilizing aesthetics in their novels. These texts thus differ markedly from those by female and ethnic writers who Hans Bertens (2002) sees as promoting a “postmodernism of difference” (11). Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972); Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976); Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987); Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991); and Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus (1991), for example, also perform a postmodernist turn back to history, but they do so in different fashion and for dissimilar ends. Although they challenge established narratives just as historiographic metafiction does, the agenda of these texts is more explicitly political and revisionist. Rather than being interested in negotiating the limits and pitfalls of historiography, they rewrite history from a Native American, African American, or Asian American vantage point in order to do justice to minorities whose experiences had been silenced by dominant discourses in the past. Accordingly, just as revisionist approaches to historiography have demanded and provided attention to those ethnicities, genders, and classes that are marginalized or even excluded in traditional accounts, such revisionist historical novels, as N€ unning (1995) labels them, tell the stories of the suppressed and give them a voice, for example, by relating events from their point of view or even employing them as narrators.
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HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION
The concept of historiographic metafiction also does not adequately describe the complex workings of recent novels such as Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) or Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2002), for which Katrin Amian (2008) has recently suggested the term “post-postmodern” in order to acknowledge their “attempt to push beyond the all-too-familiar schemes of postmodern textual critique” (159). Similar to Beloved insofar as it also negotiates issues related to traumatic memory, Foer’s novel, for instance, pays tribute to the fact that the insights of affirmative postmodernist historiographic metafiction have become rather commonplace in the twenty-first century. Everything Is Illuminated, for instance, is therefore no longer interested in destabilizing historical accounts and unveiling them as subjective constructions. Taking this notion for granted, the novel instead explores ways of establishing and stabilizing an intersubjective version of the history of the small Ukrainian shtetl Trachimbrod after all – an attempt Amian calls the novel’s “will to believe anyway” (191). In an essay entitled “Postmodern Afterthoughts,” Linda Hutcheon (2002) has acknowledged that the fiction of today differs considerably from the texts she labeled historiographic metafiction during the 1980s. In this piece, Hutcheon treats postmodernism “as a thing of the past” and defines it as “a twentieth-century phenomenon” (2002, 5). Yet, regardless of the question whether or not literary historians of the future will follow Hutcheon in this periodization, contemporary novels such as Everything Is Illuminated can only be understood as responses to historiographic metafiction. They may explore new ways of writing, but in doing so they remain intimately indebted to the insights of earlier postmodernist fiction. As a consequence, the concept of historiographic metafiction remains an indispensable and powerful tool in any attempt to describe and analyze postmodernist fiction. It is best understood, however, as referring to a postmodernist subgenre of the historical novel that had its heyday during the 1970s and 1980s and that continues to influence novels of the early twenty-first century. SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (AF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Adams, H. (1918). The Education of Henry Adams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Amian, K. (2008) Rethinking Postmodernism(s): Charles S. Peirce and the Pragmatist Negotiations of Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Jonathan Safran Foer. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Barnes, J. (1984). Flaubert’s Parrot. London: Jonathan Cape. Barth, J. (1960). The Sot-Weed Factor. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Barth, J. (1967). The Literature of Exhaustion. Atlantic Monthly, 8, 29–34. Coover, R. (1977). The Public Burning. New York: Viking. Danielewski, M. (2000). House of Leaves. New York: Pantheon. DeLillo, D. (1988). Libra. New York: Viking. Doctorow, E. L. (1971). The Book of Daniel. New York: Random House. Doctorow, E. L. (1975). Ragtime. New York: Random House. Dos Passos, J. (1946). U.S.A. 3 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Engler, B., & M€ uller, K. (eds.) (1994). Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature. Paderborn: Sch€ oningh. Faulkner, W. (1936). Absalom, Absalom! New York: Random House. Foer, J. S. (2002). Everything Is Illuminated. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Griem, J. (1994). A Lesson for Henry Adams: The Failure of Teaching History to Clio’s American Daughters. In B. Engler & K. M€ uller (eds.), Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature. Paderborn: Sch€ oningh, pp. 103–26. Hutcheon, L. (1987). Beginning to Theorize Postmodernism. Textual Practice, 1, 10–31. Hutcheon, L. (1988). A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge. Hutcheon, L. (2002). Postmodern Afterthoughts. Wascana Review, 37(1), 5–12. Huyssen, A. (1984). Mapping the Postmodern. New German Critique, 33, 5–52. Ickstadt, H. (1994). Loose Ends and Patterns of Coincidence in Don DeLillo’s Libra. In B. Engler & K. M€ uller (eds.), Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature. Paderborn: Sch€ oningh, pp. 299–312. Kennedy, W. (1975). Legs. New York: CowardMcCann. Kingston, M. H. (1976). The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Knopf.
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LaCapra, D. (1985). History and Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. McHale, B. (1987). Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen. Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. New York: Knopf. M€ uller, K. (1994). The Development Towards Historiographic Metafiction in the American Novel. In B. Engler & K. M€ uller (eds.), Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature. Paderborn: Sch€ oningh pp. 35–51. N€ unning, A. (1995). Von historischer Fiktion zu historiographischer Metafiktion [From Historical Fiction to Historiographic Metafiction], 2 vols. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. Reed, I. (1972). Mumbo Jumbo. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Silko, L. M. (1991). Almanac of the Dead. New York: Simon and Schuster. Swift, G. (1983). Waterland. London: Heinemann. Vizenor, G. (1991). The Heirs of Columbus. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Waugh, P. (1984). Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London: Methuen. Wesseling, E. (1991). Writing History as a Prophet: Postmodernist Innovations of the Historical Novel. Amsterdam: Benjamins. White, H. (1973). Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. White, H. (1978). Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Howard, Maureen DAVID W. MADDEN
Maureen Howard is an elegant stylist and incisive social critic. Each of her novels intricately explores post-World War II American life and represents a new fictional departure in terms of technique. Her works abound in various, competing voices with multiple first-person narrators, including the author herself, presenting and representing the narrative. Maureen Kearns Howard was born June 28, 1930 in Bridgeport, Connecticut to William L. and Loretta (Burns) Kearns, and she graduated from Smith College in 1952. She has been married three times and has a daughter, Loretta Howard. In addition to being a novelist and critic, she is a professor of writing at Columbia University in New York.
Howard’s major fictional concern is with the family, not simply the domestic particularities or the chains of heredity but also the thick webs of devotion, obligation, and passion. The relationships between parents and children are fraught with deep love and equally deep dissatisfaction and friction. Not a Word About Nightingales (1961) deals with a family in which the husband rejects his loved ones for a life in Italy; the daughter, sent to retrieve him, becomes distracted with a new life; while the wife, suddenly freed of familial obligations, begins to enjoy her independence. Bridgeport Bus (1966) focuses on the place of the Irish in America, a theme that reoccurs in most of Howard’s other novels. Her Irish are lace-curtain figures, yearning for respectability but forever unsure of their place and alternately proud of and embarrassed by their heritage. Thirty-five-year-old Mary Agnes Keely escapes the stifling confines of her mother and Bridgeport, Connecticut for a life in New York with a troubled room-mate, eccentric friends, and an unwanted pregnancy. The quest for freedom is frustrated by a return home and the likelihood that Agnes will become her mother. Before My Time (1975) explores the unlikely friendship of a relatively content professional woman who takes a troubled teen into her home and finds herself sharing confidences about her life with the young man. In spite of their attempts to either reject or ignore their pasts, personal histories are seen as the warp and woof of identity despite generational differences. Grace Abounding (1982) centers on a young widow and her teenage daughter, each of whom longs for escape and pageantry in her life. Eventually both mother and daughter reinvent their lives, marry, and have successful careers, but beneath the seemingly happy ending are more sorrow and unexpected tragedies. The novel marks Howard’s growing experiments with temporal shifts and narrative dislocations, which continue in Expensive Habits (1986) with a series of flashbacks that underscore the episodic character of an ailing woman’s life. Her loves are catalogued against the major social and political events of the postwar era as the protagonist seeks to control the meaning of her existence. Natural History (1992) is Howard’s most audacious, experimental fiction. Focusing on
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HUGHES, LANGSTON
another family, the Brays, the novel actually presents Howard’s home of Bridgeport as the true protagonist. The city’s most illustrious citizen, P. T. Barnum, acts as a powerful metaphor for a culture constructed on tawdry appearances. With its double-column narrative and collage techniques, the novel is as self-consciously metafictional as any of its era. Beneath the puzzlingly fragmented structure is another family drama, drawn along the lines of Howard’s own, which she detailed unsparingly in her autobiography, Facts of Life (1978). In Natural History, memory and history become so entangled that truth remains elusive, as a daughter struggles to discover her father’s complicity in a crime. With A Lover’s Almanac (1998), Howard inaugurated a planned tetralogy based on the seasons of the year. This work opens in winter, with the dawn of the new millennium, and follows two sets of lovers. The younger ones fret and fight, and separate and unite, while the elders, one of whom is the grandfather of the younger male lover, reunite in old age after years apart. Constructed as sections of an almanac, the novel follows the stars in charting lives. Big as Life: Three Tales for Spring (2001) presents three novellas, in one of which the younger lovers reappear, a child in tow, still struggling with their relationship. In another James Audubon, another of Howard’s studies in celebrity, is revealed to be less than honorable. The Silver Screen (2004) concentrates on a former silent screen starlet who rejected celebrity for domesticity, yet for all her seeming fulfillment creative urges are left unsatisfied. Again a son and daughter must struggle with personal and familial legacies. In addition to various fellowships, among them a Guggenheim, Howard received a National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction in 1980 and American Book Award nomination for autobiography/biography in 1981 for Facts of Life, and PEN/ FaulknerAwardnominationsforGraceAbounding, Expensive Habits, and Natural History. She has also been honored with a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1988) and a Literary Lion Award, New York Public Library (1993), and is a recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. SEE ALSO: Gender and the Novel (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ahearn, K. (1984). Pursuing the Self: Maureen Howard’s Facts of Life and Before My Time. Critique, 25(4), 171–9. Howard, M. (1961). Not a Word About Nightingales. New York: Atheneum. Howard, M. (1966). Bridgeport Bus. New York: Harcourt. Howard, M. (1975). Before My Time. Boston: Little, Brown. Howard, M. (1978). Facts of Life. Boston: Little, Brown. Howard, M. (1982). Grace Abounding. Boston: Little, Brown. Howard, M. (1986). Expensive Habits. New York: Summit. Howard, M. (1992). Natural History. New York: Norton. Howard, M. (1998). A Lover’s Almanac. New York: Viking. Howard, M. (2001). Big As Life: Three Tales for Spring. New York: Viking. Howard, M. (2004). The Silver Screen. New York: Viking. O’Brien, G. (1993). Assimilation Blues: Maureen Howard’s Facts of Life. MELUS, 18(1), 95–102. Scott, J. (1998). Maureen Howard. BOMB, 63, 74–9. Ward, C. (1991). Wake Homes: Four Modern Novels of the Irish-American Family. Eire-Ireland, 26(2), 78–91.
Hughes, Langston MATTHEW HOFER
A populist and extraordinarily popular African American author, Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri in 1902 and died in New York City in 1967. His very first published poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” printed in the leading black journal The Crisis in 1921, helped to position him as a pivotal figure of the New Negro Renaissance of the later 1920s. Fueled by the prevalence of racial and class inequities in the US, Hughes’s revolutionary tendencies intensified during the Depression, resulting in his persecution as a fellow traveler of the Communist Party by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953. However, despite any apparent inconsistencies in his beliefs or values, Hughes was a lifelong supporter of the ideals of American
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democracy, even when those ideals were being shamefully neglected in practical terms. Throughout his prolific and sometimes controversial career, his contributions to American literature – in addition to the poems that justly made him famous – extend to novels, short stories, biographies, translations, plays, and even musical scores, including a libretto. His texts commonly examine relations between privileged and disenfranchised people in twentieth-century America, emphasizing what it means to be human in difficult if not exceptional circumstances. Following two major books of blues poems that elicited hotly mixed reviews from the African American establishment for their realistic attention to “low” material and use of “racial” dialect, Hughes turned his attention to prose for the first time. Fiction held special appeal for the writer whenever poetry became, for personal or political reasons, temporarily untenable. His first novel, Not Without Laughter (1930), is a simple, realistic tale of three generations of a black family from Stanton, Kansas. The rural Midwestern setting is remarkable for its break with the then-dominant traditions of the urban ghetto and Southern plantation novels. Near the MasonDixon Line, the family matriarch, a former slave who is known as “Aunt” Hager Williams, advocates for interracial harmony and dedicates her life to uplift via the education of her Hughes-like grandson, “Sandy” Rodgers. The middle generation, composed of Hager’s three daughters, represents broadly the three possibilities Hughes recognizes for racial accommodation in modern America (slavish emulation, uncomplaining acceptance, and proud independence). This novel is driven by the ambitions and interactions of its characters rather than a strict plot, and is underwritten by attention to descriptive adjectives, jazz rhythms, and local dialect. Not Without Laughter is a social document as well as an aesthetic one, and the same is true of Hughes’s later fiction. The ambivalence between “propaganda” and literature may even help explain why the best of Hughes’s prose is not just compelling but also enduring. Moreover, the stylistic strengths of the 14 stories collected as The Ways of White Folk (1934) amplify and extend those of his novel: verisimilitude, lyricism, and an earnest examination of love and hatred from the Deep South to the Midwest, and
from Harlem to Paris. Even so, there is a shift in tone in these variously arch, cynical, and radical stories from that of the hopeful novel: there is more bitterness here, and less laughter, however qualified. Yet the finest of them, “Cora Unashamed” and “Home,” are haunting expressions of conflicted attachment. This tonal shift is again reversed in Hughes’s second and final novel, Tambourines to Glory (1958), a comparatively slight and episodic satire on the abuse of religion in the vein of Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry (1927). In 1943 Hughes began to publish the franchise known as the “Simple” stories in the weekly Chicago Defender, which had a circulation of 200,000 predominantly black readers, and more occasionally in Phylon and the New Republic. Selections from these casually sensationalistic narratives, which record the uninhibited, often extremist, typically one-sided fictional dialogues between Harlem’s voluble Jesse B. Semple (thus “Simple”) and a Hughes-like straight man, were later reshaped and published as a series of books (Simple Speaks His Mind [1950], Simple Takes a Wife [1953], Simple Stakes a Claim [1957], and Simple’s Uncle Sam [1965]). Perhaps closest in form and motivation to Finley Peter Dunne’s “Mr. Dooley” monologues from the close of the nineteenth century, Hughes’s serialized Simple stories – which do risk redundancy when read in succession – are a rare and fine example of a black author writing expressly for a black audience. However, the caustic wisdom and humorous insight of the “Simple” stories succeed best as literature when the educated narrator deigns to challenge Simple’s opinions and to engage him in real conversation. In general, this assortment of protest narratives, satires of self-correction, and genre pieces gives the impression of accurate eavesdropping – but Simple generally has something to say that’s worth hearing, or overhearing. Ultimately, a reliance on accurate conversation is what distinguishes the poet’s fiction in virtually every instance, as his prose from the 1930s to the 1960s consistently depends upon dialogue among a range of black voices to achieve its authenticity and energy. SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); The Harlem Renaissance (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF)
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HURSTON, ZORA NEALE
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Dace, T. (ed.) (1997). Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews. New York: Cambridge University Press. Harper, D. S. (1995). Not So Simple: The “Simple” Stories by Langston Hughes. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Hughes, L. (1930). Not Without Laughter. New York: Knopf. Hughes, L. (1934). The Ways of White Folks. New York: Knopf. Hughes, L. (1950). Simple Speaks His Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster. Hughes, L. (1953). Simple Takes a Wife. New York: Simon and Schuster. Hughes, L. (1957). Simple Stakes a Claim. New York: Rinehart. Hughes, L. (1958). Tambourines to Glory. New York: John Day. Hughes, L. (1963). Something in Common and Other Stories. New York: Hill and Wang. Hughes, L. (1965). Simple’s Uncle Sam. New York: Hill and Wang. Ostram, H. A. (1993). Langston Hughes: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne. Rampersad, A. (1986–8). The Life of Langston Hughes, 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press. Tidwell, J. E., & Ragar, C. R. (eds.) (2007). Montage of a Dream: The Life and Art of Langston Hughes. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Tracy, S. C. (ed.) (2004). A Historical Guide to Langston Hughes. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hurston, Zora Neale DAPHNE LAMOTHE
Folklorist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama in 1891, but she claimed to be born 10 years earlier in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated black community in America. In fact, her family moved to Eatonville when she was a toddler. Her upbringing there would play a formative role in Hurston’s fiction because she sought to capture its vital culture in her writing. Hurston remembered her childhood as idyllic until her mother died in 1904. Lucy Ann Hurston encouraged her children to “jump at de sun,” and follow their dreams. After her mother’s death, however, her father remarried to a woman with
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whom Hurston experienced years of tension and conflict. She finally left home to join a traveling theater troupe, and then surfaced in 1917 at Morgan Academy in Baltimore, where she finished high school at the age of 26. From there, she went to Howard University in Washington, DC, where she studied until 1924. While at Howard, she published “John Redding Goes to Sea,” which drew on her memories of Eatonville. She also attended Georgia Douglass Johnson’s literary salon off campus, and had two poems published in the Universal Negro Improvement Association’s newspaper, Negro World. After Opportunity published her story, “Drenched in Light,” in 1924, she was inspired to move to New York. When Hurston arrived in New York City in 1925, she had won second prize in an Opportunity fiction contest, but otherwise, she had little money, and few connections to the city’s cultural and artistic scene. Eventually, she became acquainted with Harlem Renaissance notables such as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Carl Van Vechten; and enrolled at Barnard College, where she studied anthropology with Franz Boas. Over time, she gained credentials as a folklorist and anthropologist, while also becoming a vital member of Harlem’s social and literary scene. One of the participants in the Renaissance who did not come from a privileged background, Hurston worked at menial jobs and also became adept at finding patrons to fund her writing and fieldwork. The compromises that patronage imposed on her made her subject to accusations of pandering to their demands for stereotypical depictions of Negro life. Charlotte Osgood Mason is perhaps the best-known benefactor to associate herself with Hurston. Franz Boas, who pioneered the discipline of anthropology in the United States, would prove to be another highly influential person in Hurston’s career. Boas headed the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University at the time that Hurston was enrolled at Barnard, its sister institution. She took classes in anthropology and phrenology with Boas, who encouraged her work as a folklorist. “Papa Franz,” as she called Boas, wrote a laudatory introduction to Hurston’s first publication of folklore, Mules and Men (1935). In it, he praised Hurston for her ability to provide an insider’s view into the lives of a population,
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the Southern rural Negro, thought to be inscrutable to outsiders. With Boas’s guidance and Mason’s financing, Hurston went back to Eatonville in 1927 to collect Southern songs, folktales, sermons, work songs, blues, hoodoo, and games. This was followed by a second trip in 1934, funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship. Intent on documenting the contributions of Southern blacks to American society, Hurston looked to Eatonville and other black communities in the American South as the source of much of the folklore that she collected. Such communities were the inspiration for most, if not all, of her short stories and novels. For her fieldwork, she worked her way through turpentine and lumber camps in Florida and Alabama, and studied and practiced under a hoodoo doctor in Louisiana. Hurston aimed to represent black cultures for a popular audience, so she did not limit herself to writing solely for scholarly publications. In addition to staging concerts, such as The Great Day, that showcased the songs and lore she collected during her folklore-collecting trips in Florida, she also included in her ethnographies contextual details about social dynamics among her informants, and between herself and her informants, that were designed to capture the interest of the non-academic reader. In a letter dated August 20, 1934 in which she asked Franz Boas to write the introduction to Mules and Men, Hurston wrote, “So I hope that the unscientific matter that must be there for the sake of the average reader will not keep you from writing the introduction. It so happens that the conversations and incidents are true. But of course I never would have set them down for scientists to read. I know that the learned societies are interested in the story in many ways that would never interest the average mind. He needs no stimulations. But the man in the street is different” (cited in Hemingway 163–4). Mules and Men is full of details of Floridian black life, providing a complex analysis of the social dynamics within each of those communities while also preserving a rich trove of oral culture. Hurston’s second ethnography, Tell My Horse (1938), was less successful than its predecessor. Based on fieldwork that she conducted in Haiti, Jamaica, and Martinique while on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1936, it included political and social commentaries on Jamaican and Haitian societies
that are marred by her biased tone. The text’s weaknesses are only partially alleviated by her more respectful and complex treatment of Jamaican Obeah and Haitian Vodou as organized religions with sophisticated social networks and worldviews. Despite its unevenness, throughout the narrative Hurston implies a relationship between the anthropological project and imperialist ideology that, combined with its detailed representation of Haitian religious ritual and culture, continues to make the book an object of critical interest. Hurston represented the folklore she collected not only in ethnographies but also in novels. Her first, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), gave a glimpse of the creative genius that would come into full bloom when she published Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Jonah’s Gourd Vine, loosely based on her parents’ lives, tells the tale of John Pearson, a gifted orator and minister, who eventually brings on his own downfall because he cannot resist temptations of the flesh. John’s ability to connect with and speak directly to his congregation in their own language endows him with power in the pulpit. The novel reaches its pinnacle at the point that John delivers a sermon that Hurston first recorded during her fieldwork. Hurston implicitly contrasts John’s social stature with his wife Lucy’s comparative lack of status and power. Lucy’s moral and intellectual superiority to John do little to help her challenge his abuse of patriarchal authority within their home. Hurston shifts the focus more fully to female voice and empowerment in her next novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, which follows the development of its protagonist, Janie Crawford. Hurston wrote Their Eyes in a seven-week burst of inspiration while in Haiti conducting fieldwork, and the novel’s symbolism shows evidence of its Caribbean origins. A Bildungsroman, the novel depicts Janie’s struggle for self-definition as she matures into womanhood. Janie must reject racist and sexist definitions of herself in order to fulfill her multifaceted quest for romantic and self-love. In a novel rich with the stories and poetry of Southern life, Janie’s quest for autonomy and voice becomes increasingly attainable the more she immerses herself in her Southern culture. At the same time, Janie’s physical attributes bear a striking resemblance to the Haitian
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HURSTON, ZORA NEALE
“goddess of love,” Ezili. The character’s journey deeper south into the “muck” of the Everglades, and, symbolically, into the Caribbean, functions as a metaphor for the kind of cultural immersion that Hurston celebrated as an essential journey for African Americans. At a time when most of her Harlem Renaissance peers focused on African Americans’ turn to modernity in the urban North, Hurston went against the grain, moving Janie deeper south and at the same time recognizing that these cultures allowed her to explore the same questions of race and class divisions and social change that concerned her urban and Northernoriented peers. Hurston’s use of folk culture is not only nostalgic but also the vehicle for comprehending history and social change. Reviews in the mainstream press of Their Eyes Were Watching God were positive, but African American critics were more critical, especially for what they perceived as the novel’s lack of political commentary. Both Alain Locke and Richard Wright wrote reviews of the novel that panned it for catering to white society’s taste for minstrelsy. Locke’s critique was rooted in the Harlem Renaissance’s understanding that literature should work to improve dominant society’s perception of African Americans through the construction of positive images of urbane and sophisticated black folk. Hurston’s use of dialect and humor rubbed against the grain of this philosophy. Moreover, her focus on women’s lives and communal dynamics was also at odds with the more militant protest literature of the 1930s, dominated by Richard Wright. In contrast to the characteristically overt challenges to white supremacy and racism that characterized that period, Hurston represented black women’s struggle for self-realization within patriarchal communities, communal rituals of love and humor, and the coded ways that black folks signified on historical struggles in a racist society through their folktales, songs, and humor. In Hurston’s fiction, resistance against racism and sexism takes place in mundane interactions and in the author’s insistence on the humanity of her characters. After the success of Their Eyes, Hurston published two other novels, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), and a memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). The
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later novels never matched the lyrical mastery and narrative consistency of Hurston’s earlier works. In Moses Hurston attempted to retell the Moses myth by bringing together biblical, African oral, and African American slave traditions, yet she failed to realize her ambitions. Seraph was even less readable, with its melodramatic presentation of whites in Florida who, perplexingly, spoke in a “black” vernacular. Hurston published prolifically throughout the 1930s and 1940s, but as time passed the quality of her work diminished. Her last book was published just as she was falsely accused of molesting a 10-year-old boy. The accusation and ensuing press attention devastated Hurston, who never fully recovered from the blow even after she produced documents proving that she was out of the country at the time of the alleged incident. Even as Hurston fell out of the spotlight, she continued to write and publish. In 1954 she covered the murder trial of Ruby McCollum for the Pittsburgh Courier, and she also worked as a freelance writer for newspapers and magazines. Her political views grew increasingly reactionary, and she argued against integration on the premise that it was based on the assumption of African Americans’ inferiority. The last years of her life were marked by financial difficulties and illness. Hurston worked in a library, as a substitute teacher, and even as a maid in Fort Pierce, Florida. She died in the Fort Lucie County Welfare Home in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave, a far cry from the public acclaim she enjoyed in the 1920s and 1930s. Hurston’s many contributions to American folklore and literature might have been lost forever if not for the publication of Alice Walker’s tribute to her in a 1975 essay. In it, Walker, pretending to be Hurston’s niece and retracing her steps through Florida, commemorates Hurston’s importance as a literary ancestor for contemporary black women writers. Her tribute to Hurston’s legacy lifted the author from years of obscurity and commenced a flood of scholarship on Hurston’s influence as a folklorist and author. Hurston is now firmly entrenched within the canons of African American, women’s, and mainstream American literatures, and her writing is fittingly celebrated for its lyricism, humor, and drama.
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SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF); The Harlem Renaissance (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); The Southern Novel (AF); Walker, Alice (AF); Wright, Richard (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Hemenway, R. (1980). Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hurston, Z. N. (1934). Jonah’s Gourd Vine. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Hurston, Z. N. (1935). Mules and Men. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Hurston, Z. N. (1937). Their Eyes Were Watching God. Philadelphia: Lippincott.
Hurston, Z. N. (1938). Tell My Horse. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Hurston, Z. N. (1939). Moses, Man of the Mountain. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Hurston, Z. N. (1942). Dust Tracks on a Road. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Hurston, Z. N. (1948). Seraph on the Suwanee. New York: Scribner’s. Kaplan, C. (2002). Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. New York: Anchor. Lamothe, D. (2008). Inventing the New Negro: Narrative, Culture, Ethnography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Walker, A. (1983). In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt. Wall, C. (1996). Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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I Irving, John KATHARINE NICHOLSON INGS
If a novel incorporates into its plot a trained bear or two, cleverly named characters, single mothers, prep school culture, and wrestling, chances are it is written by John Irving. Often compared to Charles Dickens for his storytelling skills, Irving writes darkly comic coming-of-age novels set in New England in which boys and men search for meaning in a dysfunctional society. Born John Wallace Blunt, Jr. on March 2, 1942, Irving grew up as a self-described “faculty brat” at the elite prep school Phillips Exeter. There he learned to wrestle, a sport he continued throughout his college education at Pittsburgh, at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (where he studied with Kurt Vonnegut), and during his teaching career at Windham, Iowa and Mount Holyoke. Irving published three moderately received novels – Setting Free the Bears (1968), The Water-Method Man (1972), and The 158-Pound Marriage (1974) – before becoming an internationally bestselling author with The World According to Garp (1978). This book engages Irving’s dominant theme: a boy trying to find his personal and sexual identity while surrounded by strong, sometimes threatening women. Readers responded to Garp’s outrageously imaginative turns of plot, and critics lauded its use of metanarrative: Irving interweaves lengthy excerpts from Garp’s own novel, The World According to Bensenhauser, with Garp’s personal story. Indeed, Garp is a meditation on the writerly voice – Garp’s girlfriend will not marry him until he publishes, his mother composes a feminist memoir which is
taken up by a feminist society protesting violence against women, and Garp’s novel not only competes with his mother’s book, which easily outsells his, but also is denounced by feminists for its sexual violence. Following this success, Irving cemented his place as an author of multilayered, carnivalesque, popular fiction, with The Hotel New Hampshire (1981) and The Cider House Rules (1985). In these works, he grapples with psychological issues ranging from a Freudian treatment of incest (Freud turns up as a postmodern Viennese hotelier who also owns a bear) to the ethics of being an abortionist in an orphanage. A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), his most religiously and visually challenging work, presents a diminutive title character, an “instrument of God” destined for heroism, who speaks in FULL CAPS throughout. A Son of the Circus (1995) and The Fourth Hand (2001) represent a geographical departure for Irving, for both have connections to India. Circus, Irving’s most complicated and ambitious work, depicts an American physician and screenwriter of Indian descent who returns to that country in search of identity, but finds an imagined reality to be more generous. The Fourth Hand’s relationship to India is more tangential: a self-assured American television reporter in India has his hand bitten off by a tiger live on TV. Following Irving’s consistently wry yet grim humor, the reporter receives a hand transplant from a dead man whose widow wants visiting rights with the appendage. Here Irving creates a character rare for him: a ladies’ man who, after being taken advantage of sexually by the widow, desperately longs to become a father to the child he sires with her.
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Indeed, Irving explores men’s sexual awakening and reckoning throughout his novels. In A Widow for One Year (1998), an Exeter schoolboy takes a summer job as a famous author’s assistant only to lose his virginity to the author’s wife, and in Irving’s most recent book, Until I Find You (2005), numerous older girls and women prey on a boy at boarding school. The female predator resonates particularly aggressively in this latter novel, and in a New York Times interview (June 28, 2005), Irving revealed it was autobiographical. He further disclosed that the theme of the absent father, which also permeates his work, came from his personal history as well, and in Until I Find You, the hero finally locates his father, just as Irving was newly spending time with his biological father. In addition to his 11 novels, Irving has published three other works: My Movie Business (1999), which discusses his bringing The Cider House Rules to film; a children’s book, A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound (2004), which was part of the novel A Widow for One Year; and a collection of fiction and non-fiction, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (1996), which includes a memoir, six short stories, and three essays – two on Charles Dickens and one on Gunter Grass. Irving has received numerous awards: he was both a finalist for the American Book Award (1985) and winner of the National Book Foundation Award (1986) for Garp; he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1992); and in 2000 he won an Academy Award for the best adapted screenplay for Cider House. He entered the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma in 2001. Irving has three sons, and he and his wife, the literary agent Janet Turnbull, divide their time between Toronto and Vermont. SEE ALSO: Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Vonnegut, Kurt (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bloom, H.(ed.) (2001). John Irving: Modern Critical Views. Philadelphia: Chelsea House. Davis, T. F. & Womack, K. (eds.) (2004). The Critical Response to John Irving. Westport, CT: Praeger. Epstein, J. (1982). Why Is John Irving So Popular? Commentary, 73(6), 59–63. Irving, J. (1968). Setting Free the Bears. New York: Random House. Irving, J. (1972). The Water-Method Man. New York: Random House. Irving, J. (1974). The 158-Pound Marriage. New York: Random House. Irving, J. (1978). The World According to Garp. New York: E. P. Dutton. Irving, J. (1981). The Hotel New Hampshire. New York: E. P. Dutton. Irving, J. (1985). The Cider House Rules. New York: Morrow. Irving, J. (1989). A Prayer for Owen Meany. New York: Morrow. Irving, J. (1995). A Son of the Circus. New York: Random House. Irving, J. (1996). Trying to Save Piggy Sneed [includes “The Imaginary Girlfriend”]. New York: Arcade. Irving, J. (1998). A Widow for One Year. New York: Random House. Irving, J. (1999). My Movie Business: A Memoir. New York: Random House. Irving, J. (2001). The Fourth Hand. New York: Random House. Irving, J. (2004). A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound. New York: Doubleday. Irving, J. (2005). Until I Find You. New York: Random House. Reilly, E. C. (1991). Understanding John Irving. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Rickyard, J. (1977). Wrestling With the Text: The World According to John Irving. Meanjin, 56, 714–22. Shostak, D. (1994). The Family Romances of John Irving. Essays in Literature, 21(1), 129–45.
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J James, Henry KEVIN OHI
American by birth, educated in the US and Europe, a British citizen at his death, and immersed in not only the American but also the English and European worlds of arts and letters, Henry James is a curiously unassimilable presence in the various traditions – American, Victorian, novelistic, critical, aestheticist, modernist, and queer – to which he both does and does not belong. His early masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady (1881) initiates a career that culminates in the three great novels of the turn of the century: The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1909). One of the greatest novelists in English, he is, like Johnson, Dryden, and Coleridge, the rare writer who is perhaps equally important for his critical writings: essays such as “The Art of Fiction” and “The Future of the Novel”; a vast range of critical writings on French, English, American, and other writers; and, most importantly, the prefaces to The New York Edition form an influential body of literary criticism. He is also one of the masters of the short story and novella (he wrote nearly 100 short stories), and his late (quasi-)autobiographical texts – A Small Boy and Others (1913), Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), and The Middle Years (1917) (left unfinished at his death, and named after one of his own short stories) – are among the most important instances of the genre in English. In their stylistic and formal complexity, as in some of their central concerns, they look forward to Proust, whose Recherche offers one of the few analogous literary experiences. James was also a prolific letter writer,
and only a fraction of his more than 10,000 extant letters have been published (though publication is underway). Living most of his life as an expatriate, a late tour of America produced the extraordinary American Scene (1907), an unclassifiable work of cultural criticism that offers one of the most fascinating accounts of turn-ofthe-century American culture, manners, and architecture. Born April 15, 1843, the second-oldest child (his older brother was the philosopher William James) of an extraordinary family intimate with many of the most important writers and artists of the day, James received his highly unorthodox education in a range of schools in America and Europe, and briefly attended Harvard Law School. Influenced by, perhaps most notably, Hawthorne, George Eliot, Turgenev, and Balzac, his first published novel was Watch and Ward (1871) (subsequently disavowed); his first great commercial success came with Daisy Miller (1878). Between 1871 and 1911, when appeared The Outcry, his last finished novel (The Sense of the Past and The Ivory Tower were published posthumously as fragments in 1917), James published 20 novels whose evolution marks crucial shifts, not just for his career but also for the form of the European novel. His contribution has traditionally been understood as a refinement of realism, extending the depiction of reality to the increasingly exhaustive, increasingly refined exploration of psychology. Perhaps more satisfying as an account of the early fiction’s departure from its precursors, even there it does not do justice to the strangeness of the writing. One thinks of the famous passages in
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The Portrait of a Lady that seem to offer characterization by describing houses: Isabel Archer’s house in Albany, a disorientingly double structure whose curiously equivocal commerce with its outside – with two entrances, only one functional, and with an elaborate passageway connecting the two halves – represents Isabel’s double, ambivalent thirst for “life”; Gardencourt, Ralph Touchett’s house, whose furniture, erupting onto the lawn, seems to connote an “outside” so thoroughly domesticated that it is in fact an “inside,” a privacy that extends to the garden that surrounds it; and the Italian home of Gilbert Osmond, a house facing backward described as a mask whose orientation and blankness render the personality of the duplicitous man Isabel makes the disastrous decision to marry. In each case, at stake seems to be less characterization than a disorienting externalization of character. Psychology and motivation are crucial concerns in the early texts, and Isabel Archer, for example, is one of the great characters in the English novel. In the late fiction, character is so thoroughly submitted to the surface of the writing that it is often a question whether one is dealing with characters or psychologies at all. As recent critics – most notably, Leo Bersani and Sharon Cameron – have shown, James’s innovation is perhaps best understood in anti-psychological terms. In the late writing, consciousness, Cameron notes, is located “between” rather than “within” people. James’s famous figure of the “house of fiction” (in his preface to The Portrait of a Lady), whatever its other claims for the shaping powers of art, points to ways that consciousness in James is subordinated to a deindividualized, depsychologized perspective. Likewise, it is evident as early as his 1884 essay “The Art of Fiction” that, if James casts his novelistic project in the language of realist fiction, his is a realism that is not to be understood in terms of mimetic representation. These anti-mimetic, anti-psychological strands are best seen in James’s style, which, far more than any thematic preoccupation, is where the true interest of James’s writing lies. Increasingly, in the course of his career, his language comes to take the place of theme and plot. Indeed, it is the style – the dauntingly recondite syntax, the complications on the level of the sentence that proliferate as plots and characters recede – that makes James’s writing unmistakable among others in the English and
American traditions (if also the object of countless parodies). The anti-mimetic effect of James’s writing does not simply lie in the difficulty of deciphering what is happening; it also lies in the fact that what happens is simply the syntax itself. Concomitant to that recursive turn, late Jamesian fiction habitually suspends certainty not just about what takes place, but also about the diegetic reality of described events and speech. As Leo Bersani suggests (1976), the hypothetical status of novelistic events consigns them to the virtual space of the fictional; all that can truly be said to “take place” in the fiction is the fiction itself. Likewise, attention to the famously complex characters of the late fiction reveals (as David Kurnick points out) the rather startling fact that they all talk alike, and like a Jamesian narrator. James is famous for the unprecedented psychological depth of his characters less because they are differentiated as voices or psyches than because those characters come into contact with the style and its seemingly infinitely elastic powers of differentiation. That perceived psychological depth is in effect, then, an anti-psychological practice that everywhere subordinates psychology, individuality, and consciousness to style. The late style comes into its own in what has been called “the major phase,” and the transition is especially evident in 1897 and 1898, when James published The Spoils of Poynton (1897), What Maisie Knew (1897), and The Turn of the Screw (1898). (These texts follow a series of important stories from the 1880s and 1890s – including “The Aspern Papers” (1888), “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896), “The Lesson of the Master” (1897), and “The Death of a Lion” (1894) – about literary life, literary discipleship, and the vagaries of interpretation.) There are a number of probable descriptions of the transition; perhaps most evident is the increasing syntactical complexity of the style. A brief consideration of What Maisie Knew’s relation to the Bildungsroman can bring into view some of the innovations of late Jamesian style. An experiment in point of view, the novel, famously, limits its depictions to what Maisie perceives without limiting them to what she can understand. That difference – between perceptions and conceptions or terms – allows the novel, in the progressive shifts in that ratio, to be one of the great representations of mental development. At the same time, the novel is governed by an
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JAMES, HENRY
entirely other logic: what develops is not a consciousness but a system of exchange, one that is at once the result of the contentious divorce proceedings that, opening the novel, give birth to the sordid arrangements that shift Maisie among a series of more or less culpable adults in more or less recondite relations, and the linguistic system that is the novel itself. The implication of the novel in the parents’ treatment of Maisie is one effect; the incompatibility of the narrative of development with the development it depicts is another. Likewise, The Spoils of Poynton is governed by two competing systems that are both fully articulated without being hierarchically ordered or mutually governed by any other unifying principle: a perfectly compelling account of psychological motivations of desire and a fully developed, though largely unrelated, aesthetic logic of the novel’s eponymous “spoils” – one that looks, as it were, parapsychological to the extent that one takes at face value James’s claim that the furniture is the main character of the novel, and what is most accorded consciousness and volition. One then notes these larger structures of Spoils and Maisie enact a typical rhetorical figure in James’s late writing: syllepsis or double governance. The late fiction is everywhere marked by unresolved yokings of figural and literal registers such that the depicted “events” of the novels become indistinguishable from the movements of the language that ostensibly render it; the competing systems of these texts enact a crossing typical of a sentence in late James. It would misrepresent the complexity of that writing, however, to say that such rhetorical patterns “enact” or “represent” larger thematic or aesthetic structures. Indeed, part of the difficulty of the late fiction – especially The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl – is the way their various complexities of theme, plot, character, and moral seem to be generated by the syntax of their sentences. Each of these novels has its own highly individualized syntax; a detailed reading of the sentences of these texts could be shown to produce an account of their respective innovations to the form of the novel. Criticism of James has often returned to a few major themes: the confrontation between Europe and America, for example, or the depredations of innocence by experience. As thematic renderings of James’s texts, such accounts are accurate; there
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is a certain uniformity of theme across the entire corpus. But, insofar as they are thematic, they miss what is most interesting about James. Of the celebrated “themes,” the confrontation of innocence and experience is perhaps the most promising, but not because of any moralized account of the fiction it might produce. Striking in the texts about childhood and initiation is the tendency for any moralized account to disappear into the unfathomable nature of initiation itself. James’s autobiographies present analogous initiations, where the ostensible “object” of inquiry becomes only more elusive in the account of development that is meant to explain it. (Perhaps like any great autobiography of a writer, they throw in question teleologies of aesthetic development.) One can read such concerns as “themes” only to the extent that one presupposes that there are psychologies “in” the texts to undergo them. To dwell on such complications is not to say that the texts are “removed” from the world. Not the least consequential of the effects of the depsychologizing of consciousness in relation to the theme of innocence, for example, is a radical intervention in a sexual ideology – the ideology, precisely, of a childhood sexual innocence that, articulated in the Victorian period, has been roiled to a fever pitch of eroticism today. James’s career-long interest in children ought to be read in relation to the innovations of his style. After the publication of the late novels, James turned his attention to the revision of his works for The New York Edition, the monumental reissue, between 1906 and 1910, of selected novels and tales. Each volume was accompanied by a photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn and a preface by James. These prefaces, later collected by R. P. Blackmur as The Art of the Novel (1934), are – oblique, playful, and often opaque – among the most important works of criticism of the novel. Often framed as accounts of the genesis of the texts they preface, they present an aesthetic system whose unity is to be found perhaps less in any overarching theoretical articulations (where, indeed, James can be bafflingly, if fascinatingly, contradictory) than in the movements of these contradictions, and in the particular opacities and shifting intensities of his style. (Notably, the best recent reading of these texts – by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick – traces the movements of various groups of invested terms and syllables.) In the
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years before his death, James completed a series of texts – The American Scene, the first two volumes of the autobiography, and a series of essays that contemplate the war, the literary life, and the reach of literary language – that are now considered by many to form a fourth period after the socalled major phase. James became a British citizen in 1915 and died on February 28, 1916. From early encounters (memorably detailed in the autobiography) with figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Thackeray, and (somewhat later) George Eliot and Henry Lewes to his important friendships with, among many others, Edmund Gosse, William Dean Howells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Edith Wharton, James’s life intersects the lives of some of the most important literary figures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Somewhat strangely, this most prolific and most fully realized of literary lives has often been read as an instance of a thwarted existence – for earlier critics because he never married, and for later ones because of a sense that his same-sex desires were left unfulfilled. Assertions by his later biographers that he did have sex with particular men have been controversial; recent scholarship, however, and the publication of several collections of his letters to young men, have made those same-sex desires, and a richly articulated relation to them, a matter, simply, of public record. Following the groundbreaking work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, sexuality and particularly same-sex desire are now ineffaceable aspects of any serious criticism of his life and work. Perhaps the most salutary effects of this shift has been the ways that by liberating criticism from the need to prove the relevance of homosexuality, it has also decentered sexually oriented criticism, allowing it to perceive intensities of desire and sociality not governed by the monolithic opposition between hetero- and homosexuality, and that by freeing critics from homophobic assumptions about the writer’s life, it has allowed criticism to turn away from a biography that, however fascinating in its own terms, can, as the presumed reference for the texts’ exploration of sexuality, only obscure the more important sexual resonances of James’s style. Influential biographies of James have been written by Leon Edel, Sheldon Novick, Fred Kaplan, and (of the entire James family) R. W. B. Lewis.
James’s texts pose certain editorial dilemmas because they were often published in serial form, in (sometimes conflicting, sometimes even multiple) English and American book versions, and, in the case of many of the major novels and tales, in the fully revised versions of The New York Edition. The differences among these texts are often considerable, and modern editors have to decide, on inevitably partial theoretical grounds, which to follow. SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (AF); Queer Modernism (AF); Wharton, Edith (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bersani, L. (2008). The It in the I. In L. Bersani & A. Philips, Intimacies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1–30. Bersani, L. (1976). The Jamesian Lie. In A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature. Boston: Little, Brown, pp. 128–55. Cameron, S. (1989). Thinking in Henry James. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edel, L. (1953–72). Henry James, 5 vols. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Holland, L. (1972). The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry James. Princeton: Princeton University Press. James, H. (1875). Roderick Hudson. Boston: Osgood. James, H. (1879). Hawthorne. London: Macmillan. James, H. (1881). The Portrait of a Lady. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. James, H. (1886a). The Bostonians. London: Macmillan. James, H. (1886b). The Princess Casamassima. New York: Macmillan. James, H. (1890). The Tragic Muse. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. James, H. (1897a). The Spoils of Poynton. London: Heinemann. James, H. (1897b). What Maisie Knew. Chicago: Herbert Stone. James, H. (1899). The Awkward Age. London: Heinemann. James, H. (1902). The Wings of the Dove. New York: Scribner’s. James, H. (1903a). The Ambassadors. New York: Harper. James, H. (1904). The Golden Bowl. New York: Scribner’s. James, H. (1907). The American Scene. London: Chapman and Hall. James, H. (1913). A Small Boy and Others. New York: Scribner’s.
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James, H. (1914). Notes of a Son and Brother. New York: Scribner’s. James, H. (1934). The Art of the Novel (intro. R. P. Blackmur). New York: Scribner’s. James, H. (1999). Complete Short Fiction vols. 1–5. New York: Library of America. Kaplan, F. (1992). Henry James: The Imagination of Genius. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Kurnick, D. (2005). “Horrible Impossible”: Henry James’s Awkward Stage. Henry James Review, 26, 109–29. Lewis, R. W. B. (1991). The Jameses: A Family Narrative. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. McWhirter, D. (ed.) (1995). Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Novick, S. (2007). Henry James: The Mature Master. New York: Random House. Ohi, K. (2004). Narrating the Child’s Queerness in What Maisie Knew. In S. Bruhm & N. Hurley (eds.), Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 81–106. Ohi, K. (in press). Henry James and the Queerness of Style. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic. In Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 182–212. Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel. In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 35–65. Teahan, S. (1995). The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Walker, P. A. (ed.) (1999). Henry James on Culture: Collected Essays on Politics and the American Social Scene. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Walker, P. A., & Zacharias, G. W. (eds.) (2006). The Complete Letters of Henry James. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Yeazell, R. B. (1976). Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Johnson, Charles GARY STORHOFF
Charles Johnson is one of the most innovative, profound, and challenging writers in contemporary America. The author of four novels and three volumes of short stories, Johnson combines Western and Eastern philosophy and religion, revises African American and canonical American
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literary texts, and fuses magic realism with American history – a creation he calls a “philosophical black fiction.” Johnson was born on April 23, 1948 in Evanston, Illinois and graduated from Southern Illinois University. He earned his PhD in philosophy from Stony Brook University, State University of New York, and became the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollack Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Washington. Besides numerous awards and fellowships, he received the MacArthur Fellowship (the Genius Grant) in 1998. Faith and the Good Thing (1974) demonstrates Johnson’s brilliantly eclectic style and his exceptional philosophical range. Johnson merges the naturalist style of Richard Wright with the magic realism of Jorge Borges in a philosophical investigation of the contemporary African American experience. The eponymous protagonist, Faith Cross, searches throughout her life for the “Good Thing,” only to discover it in a Buddhist relinquishing of the self in favor of an embeddedness in an infinitely interconnected universe – the Buddhist concept of Emptiness. Buddhist themes also proliferate in his collection of short stories, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Tales and Conjurations (1986), yet Johnson also deftly integrates Western philosophy in these comic stories. In the “Foreword,” Johnson refers to his second novel, Oxherding Tale (1982), as his “platform novel,” an allusion to the Sixth Patriarch of Zen Buddhism, Hui Neng. Johnson imaginatively revises the traditional slave narrative in the story of Andrew Hawkins’s escape not only from slavery, but also from his own Westernized conception of an integrated and permanent Self. As with Faith Cross, Andrew discovers the nature of his spiritual connection to the cosmos. The nexus of slavery and personal identity, then, is brilliantly exploded. Besides using these Buddhist themes as organizing principles, Johnson also interrogates the Western philosophies of Aristotle, Jeremy Bentham, and Karl Marx. In his 1990 National Book Award winner Middle Passage, Johnson again revises African American literary traditions by focusing on the Middle Passage, the shipment of slaves from their capture in Africa to their enslavement in America. The novel’s plot centers on an onboard slave revolt by the Allmuseri, Johnson’s imagined
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African tribe. Before their capture, the Allmuseri represented an “uninterrupted sense of Being,” but when they revolt against the slavers, they understandably adopt many of their captors’ brutal tactics – even as the whites slowly begin to absorb Allmuseri’s pristine cultural values. In this way, Johnson dramatizes his theme that the self is not permanent and even racial identity is an illusion. Rutherford Calhoun, like Johnson’s earlier protagonists, struggles to achieve a fixed sense of identity, only to discover the illusory nature of the self. Calhoun’s personal quest is played out against the backdrop of America’s own struggle to define itself. To what extent, Johnson asks, should America find its identity in its shameful record of enslaving Africans? Perhaps Johnson’s most deeply moving novel is Dreamer (1998) about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s civil rights campaign in Chicago, Illinois. The novel’s protagonist, Matthew Bishop, is anxious for King’s safety in the racially charged city, and so enlists the help of Chaym Smith (an ex-con and a practicing Buddhist) to act as King’s double in some public appearances. Although Chaym never does stand in for King, he becomes slowly transformed morally by being exposed to King’s understanding of the world’s interdependence. Matthew resembles Johnson’s other protagonists because like them, he is a troubled person in search of an identity, having no father and having recently lost his mother. Yet in the novel he is also a foil for King, who is also deeply disturbed about the apparent failure of his quest for a “beloved community.” Johnson does not depict King as a heroic cultural icon; instead, he is profoundly tormented on many levels – physically uncomfortable in Chicago and missing his family and spiritually adrift because his Chicago campaign seems futile. Chicago represents, in Johnson’s novel, King’s Gethsemane moment. In contrast, Chaym, beset with envy and desire, tries desperately to reform in King’s shadow. Each of these characters takes refuge in Johnson’s syncretistic merging of Judeo-Christian and Buddhist values. Johnson returns to the short story form in Soulcatcher (2000), which consists of stories written to accompany the PBS series Africans in America. Dr. King’s Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories (2005) was partly written for Humanities Washington, where Seattle writers composed stories on the theme of “bedtime reading.” He also
wrote Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing (2002), a collection of philosophical essays. Consistent with his revolutionary approach, Johnson recently called for a revision of the black literary tradition in The American Scholar. SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Wright, Richard (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Conner, M. C., & Nash, W. R. (eds.) (2007). Charles Johnson: The Novelist as Philosopher. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Johnson, C. (1974). Faith and the Good Thing. New York: Viking. Johnson, C. (1982). Oxherding Tale. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Johnson, C. (1986). The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Tales and Conjurations. New York: Penguin. Johnson, C. (1988). Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Johnson, C. (1990). Middle Passage. New York: Atheneum. Johnson, C. (1998). Dreamer: A Novel. New York: Scribner’s. Johnson, C. (2000). King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (photos by B. Adelman). New York: Viking. Johnson, C. (2001). Soulcatcher and Other Stories. New York: Harcourt. Johnson, C. (2003). Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing. New York: Scribner’s. Johnson, C. (2005). Dr. King’s Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories. New York: Scribner’s. Johnson, C. (2008). The End of the Black American Narrative. American Scholar, 77(3), 32–42. Little, J. (1997). Charles Johnson’s Spiritual Imagination. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. McWilliams, J. (ed.) (2005). Passing the Three Gates: Interviews with Charles Johnson. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Nash, W. R. (2003). Charles Johnson’s Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Storhoff, G. (2004). Understanding Charles Johnson. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
Johnson, Denis SCOTT J. JUENGEL
Alternately blessed and burdened by the sobriquet of “a writer’s writer,” Denis Johnson is a
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contemporary novelist, poet, and playwright of astonishing imaginative range and nearly Kierkegaardian vision. While his early stories of addicts and drifters, and con men and raconteurs, garnered Johnson a cultish following among those looking for the heir to Burroughs and Bukowski, his work has also subtly explored the spoils and savagery of the American empire. With Tree of Smoke, which won the 2007 National Book Award, the worlds of the confidence game and military intelligence were shown to overlap in the tragedy of the Vietnam War. The son of a State Department official with the US Information Agency, Johnson was born in Munich in 1949 and raised in Tokyo, Manila, and the northern Virginia suburbs. He entered the renowned Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and under the tutelage of Raymond Carver published his first book of poems and nurtured his descent into alcoholism, eventually bottoming out in heroin addiction and homelessness. Many of these latter experiences are distilled in Jesus’ Son (1992), a slim collection of stories that established Johnson’s reputation as a contemporary minimalist of the highest order: purportedly assembled to stave off debt to the IRS and the cost of a second divorce, the 11 interwoven stories follow a genial addict known only as “Fuckhead” through an America recognizable by its bus depots, emergency rooms, drunk tanks, and taverns. In addition to his critically admired fiction, poetry, and playwriting, Johnson has made an ancillary career out of taking journalistic sorties to write about the civil wars in Liberia and Somalia, US occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, right-wing militias in Montana, and the domestic terrorist Eric Rudolph holed up in the caves of North Carolina. When he is not venturing after stories of rogue faith and violence, Johnson lives a relatively reclusive life in northern Idaho with his third wife, Cindy. Johnson’s novelistic career generally moves between long, increasingly baroque plots – such as Angels (1983); Already Dead: A California Gothic (1998); and Tree of Smoke (2007) – and a series of shorter experiments in genre. For example, Fiskadoro (1985) is postapocalyptic science fiction; The Stars at Noon (1986), a cynical American’s abroad exercise set in Nicaragua; The Name of the World (2000), a moody take on the “campus novel”; and the recent Nobody Move
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(2009), a talky, pulpy noir originally serialized in Playboy. Despite such stylistic variety, the publication of Tree of Smoke demonstrated how Johnson’s oeuvre draws often from an unusually integrated fictional universe, as many characters from his previous novels reappear, woven into the sprawling plot of Johnson’s Vietnam tour de force. So where his first novel, Angels, ends grimly with its protagonist, Bill Houston, in the gas chamber, Tree of Smoke returns to Houston’s nightmarish tour of duty alongside his brother, granting the reader access to what was psychologically and narratively repressed in the earlier novel. Similarly, one of Tree of Smoke’s Vietnamese characters, Nguyen Minh, appears in Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (1991) and may be the Captain Minh whose helicopter crash into the China Sea becomes the persistent and searing memory of the 100-year-old Grandma Wright in Fiskadoro. Given Johnson’s persistent excavation of faith and doubt in the context of secular America, it is not surprising that the nightmare of Vietnam would prove to be the historical center of his moral universe. Johnson’s is often a world of purgatorial drifters, men and women who know they are guilty but have yet to meet their fates. The unnamed and nihilistic narrator of The Stars at Noon travels to Managua to learn “the exact dimensions of Hell” and finds herself involved in black markets, industrial espionage, and prostitution. As their titles intimate, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man and Already Dead have failed suicides as central characters, while other novels involve men pursued by hit men (Already Dead and Nobody Move), widowers so numb with sudden grief that they have become ghostly themselves (The Name of the World and Tree of Smoke), and myriad variations on the living dead. But life suspended does not preclude the desire for grace, and Johnson the recovering addict has more than once dedicated a novel “To H.P.,” that Higher Power that promises meaning at the far side of doubt. Johnson’s fictions typically end gesturing toward some future salvation, even if, as Bill Houston’s lawyer muses at the end of Angels, “that was just a story, something that people will tell themselves, something to pass the time it takes for the violence inside a man to wear him away, or to be consumed itself.” The fate of this consuming
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violence structures Tree of Smoke, which turns the Vietnam War into a tangle of alibis and intelligences, all competing to impose certainty, quite literally at any cost. Where Jesus’ Son offered luminous and incantatory tales of America’s lost and yet unfound, who collectively cope with what its narrator calls “that helpless, destined feeling,” Tree of Smoke demonstrates how such a feeling can become the stuff of national export and the dangerous principle of godforsaken history. SEE ALSO: Carver, Raymond (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF); The Novel and War (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Champion, J. (2000). Denis Johnson’s Strange Light. In S. VanZanten Gallagher & M. D. Wallhout (eds.), Literature and the Renewal of the Public Sphere. New York: St. Martin’s. Connors, P. (2008). Denis Johnson’s Higher Power. Virginia Quarterly Review, 84(1), 251–7. Johnson, D. (1982). The Incognito Lounge, and Other Poems. New York: Random House. Johnson, D. (1983). Angels. New York: Knopf. Johnson, D. (1985). Fiskadoro. New York: Knopf. Johnson, D. (1986). The Stars at Noon. New York: Knopf. Johnson, D. (1987). The Veil. New York: Knopf. Johnson, D. (1991). Resuscitation of a Hanged Man. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Johnson, D. (1992). Jesus’ Son: Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Johnson, D. (1995). The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New. New York: Harper Perennial. Johnson, D. (1998). Already Dead: A California Gothic. New York: Harper Perennial. Johnson, D. (2000). The Name of the World: A Novel. New York: Methuen. Johnson, D. (2001). Seek: Reports from the Edges of America and Beyond. New York: HarperCollins. Johnson, D. (2002). Shoppers: Two Plays. New York: Harper Perennial. Johnson, D. (2007). Tree of Smoke. New York: Picador. Johnson, D. (2009). Nobody Move: A Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Parrish, T. L. (2001). Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son: To Kingdom Come. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 43(1), 17–29.
Reitenbach, G. (1991). Foreign Exchange in Denis Johnson’s The Stars at Noon. Arizona Quarterly, 47(4), 27–47.
Jones, Edward P. JAMES ROBERT SAUNDERS
Edward P. Jones creates fiction that focuses on the circumstances of the most underprivileged in society, particularly poor blacks in the Washington, DC area, a group to which he belonged for a significant period of his own life. His two short story collections – Lost in the City (2003b) and All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006) – fit into this vein, recapitulating the lives of inner-city DC blacks. His one novel, The Known World (2003a), does not venture far from that city, set as it is in the fictional Manchester County, Virginia, where the underprivileged this time are black slaves, especially intriguing because their owners also are black. Wherever he might have traveled in his life, the author always returns to this general venue, providing, when his work is taken as a whole, a penetrating look at this geographical and emotional landscape. The author was born in Washington, DC on October 5, 1950 and understands this city so well in large part due to having moved so much from one place to another while his mother struggled to raise him and her two other children on a restaurant dishwasher’s salary. All of Jones’s books are dedicated to that mother. “If I write more,” he declares, “I will dedicate them to her as well. It is a small, small thing to do for one’s creator” (2005, 142). The short stories themselves are laced with her presence, particularly ones such as “The First Day” from Lost and “Spanish in the Morning” from Hagar’s. In both of those stories, readers witness the arbitrariness of education as family elders are embattled with the dilemma of what quality of school an offspring will be able to attend. There is a certain irony involved in all that because Jones’s mother, who died when he was 24 years old, was illiterate. She had desperately sought to enroll her son in Catholic school but was unable to afford it. So, from the first grade through the twelfth, Jones attended DC public schools and, as if through an act of divine intervention, won a scholarship, in the late 1960s, to
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attend the College of the Holy Cross, and then, in the late 1970s, he won a fellowship to do graduate work at the University of Virginia. In talking about the Virginia educational experience, Jones has said, “I tended to get more out of the literature courses. One in particular was The Bible and Literature, where for the first time I read the entire Bible” (2000, 96). That Virginia experience, combined with his own upbringing, has evolved into a great deal of religious ambiguity in the author’s fiction. It is, for example, curious that Jones would, in “His Mother’s House,” give a murderous drug dealer the name Santiago Moses. In Known, a slave named Moses is ready and willing to send his wife and son away so that he can have a chance to marry the new head of the plantation, whose husband has recently died. “Lord, Moses,” his helpless wife moans, “why you throwin us away like this?” (2003a, 296). It is almost as if, in order to understand it all, one has to be as wise as Laverne Shepherd’s grandmothers in “The Devil Swims Across the Anacostia River,” women who “had come to know the Devil so well that he, in all his guises, called them always by their childhood nicknames” (2006, 272). These and the other black people who inhabit Jones’s fiction might be said to be “all Aunt Hagar’s children,” evolving from their tragic origins in search of a better world. They came from Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and other Southern states, traveling to places like DC, their journey being part and parcel of the black migration that began just after the Civil War and lasted, with great fervor, well into the 1960s. What Jones chronicles in his fiction is a certain loss that occurred in that century-long migration process. Critics J. Gerald Kennedy and Robert Beuka contend that “the black denizens of Jones’s capital seem as estranged from each other as they are from the nation and its narrative” (16). In other words, for many black Americans, DC did not turn out to be anything near the Promised Land espoused in either the stories that they had heard back home or the idealistic credos that they had recited in their schoolroom devotions. As imperiled as the black community might in some respects be, Jones does not indicate that, without a doubt, all is lost. In one story from Lost, “The Store,” the author has a mother-like storeowner adopt the community, giving credit to those who need it, and finally transferring own-
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ership over to a young man who will more than likely continue her altruism. Another story, “Common Law” from Hagar’s, has residents in a neighborhood join together to run off the abusive boyfriend of Georgia Evans. The community literally chases him until “he got to 4th Street and turned the corner and the children and the grown-ups stopped following him but continued to shout ‘Boo’s and each one rained down upon him” (2006, 235). Jones has won accolades such as the PEN/ Hemingway Award as well as grants from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts for Lost. Subsequently, he has won the Pulitzer Prize, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship, all for Known. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Jackson, L. P. (2000). An Interview with Edward P. Jones. African American Review, 34(1), 95–103. Jones, E. P. (2003a). The Known World. New York: Amistad. Jones, E. P. (2003b). Lost in the City. New York: Amistad. Jones, E. P. (2005). In the Name of the Mother. Essence, 36(8), 140, 142. Jones, E. P. (2006). All Aunt Hagar’s Children. New York: Amistad. Kennedy, J. G., & Beuka, R. (2001). Imperiled Communities in Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City and Dagoberto Gilb’s The Magic of Blood. Yearbook of English Studies, 31, 10–23. Packer, Z. Z. (2001). Z. Z. Packer Talks With Edward P. Jones. In V. Vida (ed.), The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers. San Francisco: Believer, pp. 133–57. Saunders, J. R. (2007). A World of Irony in the Fiction of Edward P. Jones. Hollins Critic, 44(3), 1–10.
Jones, Gayl DEBORAH M. MIX
Gayl Jones has written in a variety of genres, but she is best known for her novels, most notably her first, Corrigedora (1975). Jones’s work insists on the significance of the past – in both its painful
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and celebratory manifestations – to the present, especially for black women. Textual experimentation, particularly the use of the conventions of African American oral narrative and music, is central to Jones’s aesthetic. Her work also reflects her interest in both North and South American history; in a 1982 interview, she discussed her interest in Brazilian history, which informs several of her works, asserting that “the Brazilian experience (purely literary and imaginative since I’ve never been there) helped to give perspective on the American one” (Rowell 41). Jones was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1949, and grew up surrounded by women who were writers. She attended Connecticut College and Brown University, where she earned graduate degrees and found guidance in poet Michael Harper, who was instrumental in getting Corrigedora published. After a short but impressive period teaching at Wellesley College and the University of Michigan, Jones and her husband immigrated to Germany for a few years during the 1980s. They returned to Lexington in 1988; an altercation between her husband and the police led to his suicide and her temporary institutionalization in 1998. Since the late 1990s, Jones has lived and continued to write in Lexington. With Corrigedora, Jones established herself as an important literary talent and won glowing reviews. The novel’s protagonist, Ursa Corrigedora, is a blues singer who seeks to pass on her family’s history – particularly its matrilineal history of slavery and abuse at the hands of a cruel nineteenth-century Brazilian plantation owner named Corrigedora – through song. In doing so, Ursa, like Jones herself, weaves together oral and written narrative techniques to plumb the complicated legacies of this history. Jones returns repeatedly to the subjects of slavery and race relations in the Americas throughout her literary career. Her next novel, Eva’s Man (1976), was the subject of some controversy, with reviewers raising concern that its protagonist, who is institutionalized after murdering and then castrating her abuser, fed into stereotypes of vindictive black women. However, others have asserted that the novel interrogates those stereotypes to plumb the vexed intersections of black female sexuality and agency. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Jones continued to publish prolifically: a collection of short stories, White Rat (1977); another novel
published only in Germany, Die Volgelfaengerin (The Birdwatcher, 1985); and three volumes of poetry, Songs for Anninho (1981), The HermitWoman (1983), and Xarque and Other Poems (1985), all appeared within a span of eight years. Clabough (2006) and other critics have noted Jones’s use of the grotesque in her work, arguing that its aesthetic allows Jones to dramatize the competing forces of oppression and liberation. In general, however, the works between Corrigedora and her late-1990s novelshave received littlecritical attention, and her poetry has received almost none. In 1991, Jones published a book-length work of criticism, Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature, in which she considers the work of a variety of African American authors from Paul Dunbar and Langston Hughes to Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, considering the ways both spoken and musical orality inflect their work. These authors, she argues, must balance between the demand to reflect traditional forms and the drive to invent new ways of responding to the contemporary, a balancing act that is likewise part of Jones’s aesthetic. Jones’s most recent novels, The Healing (1998) and Mosquito (1999), received positive notices, but their publication – and the fact that The Healing was a finalist for the National Book Award – was little remarked due to the tragic events in Jones’s personal life. Taken together, these books suggest an optimistic turn in Jones’s work. The Healing is the story of an itinerant faith healer, Harlan Jane Eagleton, whose first patient is herself: “when you discover you can heal yourself, that you simply put your hand to a wound and it heals, you soon discover that you can heal others” (281). Her story is bound throughout the novel to the Brazilian myth of Jaboti, the trickster turtlewoman. Mosquito’s titular protagonist is a truck driver who, among other things, transports illegal immigrants from Mexico into the US. Building on Jones’s other work, Mosquito articulates a hemispheric, internationalist vision of “America,” one that values ethnically diverse feminist perspectives. In doing so, Jones delivers on the vision she offered in 1982 and offers a crucial example of what she describes in a 1994 essay written in the voice of an African American novel: “I am a multicultural, Afro-centric Afro-eccentric novel. I am as ancient as storytelling itself and as human as storytelling” (510).
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SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Morrison, Toni (AF); Walker, Alice (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Callaloo. (1982). Gayl Jones, Poet and Fictionist: A Special Section. Callaloo, 16, 32–111. Clabough, C. (2006). Speaking the Grotesque: The Short Fiction of Gayl Jones. Southern Literary Journal, 38(2), 74–96. Coser, S. (1995). Bridging the Americas: The Literature of Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Jones, G. (1975). Corrigedora. New York: Random House. Jones, G. (1976). Eva’s Man. New York: Random House. Jones, G. (1977). White Rat: Short Stories. New York: Random House.
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Jones, G. (1981). Song for Anninho. Detroit: Lotus. Jones, G. (1983). The Hermit-Woman: Poems. Detroit: Lotus. Jones, G. (1985). Xarque and Other Poems. Detroit: Lotus. Jones, G. (1991). Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jones, G. (1994). From the Quest for Wholeness: Re-Imagining the African-American Novel: An Essay on Third-World Aesthetics. Callaloo, 17, 507–18. Jones, G. (1998). The Healing. Boston: Beacon. Jones, G. (1999). Mosquito. Boston: Beacon. Mills, F. (ed.) (2006). After the Pain: Critical Essays on Gayl Jones. New York: Peter Lang. Robinson, S. (1991). Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Albany: SUNY Press. Rowell, C. H. (1982). An Interview with Gayl Jones. Callaloo, 16, 32–53.
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K Kennedy, William MICHAEL PATRICK GILLESPIE
William Kennedy was born in Albany, New York in 1928. He grew up in a predominately Irish Catholic neighborhood, attended Sienna College, and worked briefly as a sportswriter for the Post Star in Glen Falls, New York. He was drafted into the Army in 1950, where he worked as a journalist in Europe, and after his discharge became a reporter for the Times-Union newspaper in Albany. In 1956 he relocated to Puerto Rico and became managing editor of the San Juan Star in 1959. There he met Saul Bellow, who encouraged his literary aspirations, and Dana Sosa, whom he married and with whom he had three children. In 1961 Kennedy left journalism to devote himself to writing fiction. In 1963 he wrote a series of newspaper profiles of Albany neighborhoods later collected in his non-fiction O Albany! (1983b). This collection and the companion volume, Riding the Yellow Trolley Car (1993), provide an excellent background of the Albany milieu, particularly between World Wars I and II, for any reader seeking a detailed sense of the world from which Kennedy’s fiction emerges. Kennedy’s first novel, The Ink Truck (1969), draws on his own experiences as a journalist and offers a unsparing view of a contemporary newspaper strike in an unnamed city resembling Albany. The central concern of Kennedy’s fiction, comprising a century-long chronicle of the intertwining features of political, criminal, and commercial life in Albany, emerged six years later. In 1975, he published Legs, a fictionalized account set
primarily in Albany of the life and death of the Prohibition gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond. Its gritty exposition and unsentimental humanity set the tone for all his subsequent works. Kennedy followed that with a novel about a Depression-era gambler, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, which appeared in 1978. The tawdriness of Billy’s life would seem unremarkable were it not for Kennedy’s unflinching ability to understand and convey the complex code of honor that governed the lives of Billy and all with whom he associated. In 1983, Kennedy published his most acclaimed work, Ironweed, the account of Billy’s father Francis, a one-time major league baseball player who abandoned his family and became a hobo after the tragic death of his infant son. The novel takes up issues of damnation and redemption without straining for resolution or submitting to sentimentality. Its profound sense of human dignity and human weakness makes it a powerful account of the underside of urban life. Four years later a film version of Ironweed, authored by Kennedy, appeared, and three years earlier, he wrote the script for The Cotton Club with Francis Ford Coppola. These three novels mark the beginning of what has been called “the Albany cycle,” and for over 30 years Kennedy has used his native city, much the way James Joyce used Dublin, as the fertile source of narrative engagement with fundamental human concerns. Kennedy’s next Albany novel, Quinn’s Book (1988), expands the scope outlined in the first three books, moving backward to the pre- and post-Civil War era and providing the biographical background of the Phelans and other families so
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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prominent in the novels set in the twentieth century. Very Old Bones, published in 1992, brings the chronicle of the Phelan family into the 1950s and examines the lives of the generation after Francis in their middle age. The Flaming Corsage (1996a) offers a detailed account of the events spanning the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, and provides readers with a clear sense of the near fatalistic forces set in motion then that continued to influence Kennedy’s central figures over the first half of the twentieth century. Two works – the play Grand View, first produced in 1996, and his novel Roscoe (2002) – cover World War II politics in Albany. They neatly complement one another and give readers a sense of the totems and taboos of the rich social environment that informed Kennedy’s world. Although these works focus on politicians living in a seemingly different world from the working-class figures who populate most of his fiction, their behavior and attitudes present a clear delineation of the forces and beliefs that shape the lives of all of the citizens of Kennedy’s Albany. In 1983 Kennedy received a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award for Ironweed. In the same year, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, and part of that money went to create the New York State Writers Institute. Kennedy is the executive director of the Institute and continues to live and write in Albany with his wife, Dana. SEE ALSO: Bellow, Saul (AF); The City in Fiction (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Giamo, B. F. (1997). The Homeless of Ironweed: Blossoms on the Crag. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Gillespie, M. P. (2001). Reading William Kennedy. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Kennedy, W. (1969). The Ink Truck. New York: Dial. Kennedy, W. (1975). Legs. New York: CowardMcCann. Kennedy, W. (1978). Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game. New York: Viking. Kennedy, W. (1983a). Ironweed. New York: Viking. Kennedy, W. (1983b). O Albany! Improbable City of Political Wizards, Fearless Ethnics, Spectacular
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Aristocrats, Splendid Nobodies, and Underrated Scoundrels. New York: Viking. Kennedy, W. (1987). Ironweed. Los Angeles: Tri-Star. Kennedy, W. (1988). Quinn’s Book. New York: Viking. Kennedy, W. (1992). Very Old Bones. New York: Viking. Kennedy, W. (1993). Riding the Yellow Trolley Car. New York: Viking. Kennedy, W. (1996a). The Flaming Corsage. New York: Viking. Kennedy, W. (1996b). Grand View. Premiered at Capital Repertory Theatre, Albany, NY. Kennedy, W. (2002). Roscoe. New York: Viking. Kennedy, W. (with Coppola, F. F.) (1986). The Cotton Club. New York: St. Martin’s. Lynch, V. V. (1999). Portraits of Artists: Warriors in the Novels of William Kennedy. Bethesda, MD: International Scholars. Marowski, D. G., & Matur, R. (1989). William Kennedy. Contemporary Literary Criticism 53, 189–201. Michener, C. (1998). From Then Into Now: William Kennedy’s Albany Novels. Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press. Reilly, E. C. (1991). William Kennedy. Boston: Twayne. Seshachari, N. C. (ed.) (1997). Conversations With William Kennedy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Van Dover, J. K. (1991). Understanding William Kennedy. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
Kerouac, Jack MATT THEADO
Jack Kerouac was a leading figure among the Beat Generation writers of the 1950s. Over 30 of Kerouac’s works are in print, and he remains one of the most popular American novelists of the twentieth century. His 1957 novel, On the Road, inspired numerous young people to spurn conventional middle-class lives and instead to embark on impulsive adventures and spiritual quests. As a result, Kerouac is sometimes called the daddy of the hippies and the father of the counterculture. He did not relish these titles and wished to be known instead as an innovative writer, yet many of his fans are as interested in his life as in his work; he is the subject of no fewer than 15 biographies. Kerouac saw religious significance in many of the wandering folks he met on the road: hobos, petty criminals, drug addicts, and also, as he wrote in On the Road, “the mad
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ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing” (1957, 8). Kerouac is associated today in the popular culture with such people, and with adventurous travel via such nonconventional means as train-hopping and hitchhiking. Jean Louis Kerouac was born on March 12, 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, the third and last child of Leo and Gabrielle Kerouac, both of French Canadian descent. Kerouac grew up speaking French in the tenement-house neighborhoods of the working-class mill town. A fine high school athlete, Kerouac excelled in track, baseball, and football. Columbia University offered Kerouac a football scholarship upon graduation from high school in 1939, so he traveled to New York, one of the cities with which he would be most associated, and where he would meet other figures who comprised the Beat Generation, including another Columbia student, Allen Ginsberg, as well as William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Gregory Corso. Their artistically formative years were characterized by drugs, personal tragedy, World War II, travel, and, for Ginsberg and Kerouac at least, an all-encompassing devotion to writing. Kerouac himself would label his generation as “Beat,” a term he picked up from a Times Square hustler and yarn-spinner, who used the word to mean beaten, as in a bad deal, or just plain down and out. Kerouac saw religious significance in the term, merging its meanings with the Beatitudes of his Catholic upbringing. In his first novel, The Town and the City (1950), Kerouac applied the lyricism of Thomas Wolfe to the frenetic atmosphere of wartime New York City. As in Wolfe’s novel Look Homeward, Angel, Kerouac’s story initially concerns a large family’s home town, modeled on Lowell, and the family’s various escapades. However, as the title implies, the story moves from the home town to the modern city, and the tone shifts to match the neurotic complexity of the environment. The novel ends with the garrulous, hardworking father’s death, paralleling the circumstances in Kerouac’s family, and with one of the brothers heading out on the road. In Kerouac’s vision, girded by his reading of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, the good-natured simplicity of
the town has given way to the modern urban world of malevolence and complexity. In the ensuing years, Kerouac wrote constantly, although he had no luck finding publishers. There are several reasons for his difficulty. First of all, he changed his approach to writing after his first novel. The Town and the City is a conventional novel, featuring well-drawn characters, established settings, and a prose manner that, while highly lyrical, was also structured along the principles of typical novelistic technique. His next novel, On the Road, represents his break from Wolfe’s influence and a discovery of his own material and style. Working from notes taken during years of traveling, he wrote the novel quickly, in 21 days in April 1951, and the rush of typing allowed him to find his voice in a jazzy, conversational monologue that vacillates between joy and despair. Instead of creating fictional characters and contrived scenes, Kerouac chose his material directly from events in his life, employing first-person narration that slipped from external descriptions to internal monologues. After this breakthrough, Kerouac composed novels that were even more innovative that he referred to as “true-story novels” written in his new style, which he called “spontaneous prose.” These new works baffled publishers, who thought the novels were sketchy, plotless, and artless. When asked to revise them into conventional form, Kerouac refused, earning a reputation as being difficult to work with. Instead of exhibiting a willingness to craft his work to suit the publishers, Kerouac instead put forth a steadfast confidence in his works as he had written them. Finally, thanks to various literary advisors and editors, Viking Press published On the Road, the most accessible of Kerouac’s new work. The book created a sensation in the press and became a bestseller, establishing Kerouac as an important though controversial writer and also as a celebrity. The book’s success opened the doors for his other, more stylistically innovative works. None of them matched the financial success of On the Road, though. His most famous book centers on a basic plot: two buddies hit the road in search of girls, good times, and the joy of escape on America’s highways in the post-World War II era. Along the way, the first-person narrator, identified closely with Kerouac, discovers the downside of purposeless travel, the despondency of endless
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kick-seeking. His finest insights come when he is at his most bleak, when the money is gone and the friends are elsewhere. Ultimately, the novel subjugates the cold austerity of the road to the warm sweetness of home, but most readers prize the exploits along the way and see the attainment of temporary joy as worth the hardships of the road. The Subterraneans (1958b) is an example of his fully developed spontaneous prose style. Written in three days in 1953, the novel relates a recently concluded affair with a young black woman in New York City. This book conveys far fewer pleasant emotional moments than does On the Road. The spontaneous prose style conveys the narrator’s doubts, weaknesses, and second thoughts. Instead of exuberance, his drinking frequently brings on only boorishness. In short, the style and themes are so different from those of On the Road and The Town and the City that one might assume three different writers had produced them. However, these books represent Kerouac’s stylistic development as a writer from the late 1940s into the early 1950s. The publication of other spontaneous prose books followed rapidly: Doctor Sax (1959a), Kerouac’s recounting of adolescence and the 1934 Lowell flood; Maggie Cassidy (1959b), Kerouac’s description of a high school love affair; and Tristessa (1960), his treatment of his relationship with a Mexican junkie. In employing spontaneous prose, Kerouac wrote quickly, digging into his memories and feelings as he crafted long, flowing sentences that are typically separated by dashes rather than periods. He relates ideas from other times in his life, even if these thoughts would not be permissible in traditional narratives. For example, Kerouac sometimes writes of the moment of composition itself, mentioning what music he listens to as he types, thus imbuing the work with freshness and a tight connection between the act of composition and the experience of reading. Kerouac claimed that his technique had many sources, including the stories his mother told when he was young, the letter-writing style of Neal Cassady, and the extemporaneous musical explorations of jazz musicians. His method also parallels the process of psychoanalysis, a popular practice at the time for exploring one’s submerged memories and feelings. Kerouac determined early in the 1950s that his various books would
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ultimately comprise one great work, dubbed “The Duluoz Legend” after his fictive alter ego. Tristessa also features Kerouac’s interest in Buddhism, which is developed as well in Visions of Gerard (1963), Kerouac’s account of the last days of his older brother, Gerard, who died at age 9. Although the story is set in Lowell’s Catholic schools, Kerouac fills the story with his perspective on Buddhist doctrines. Some critics believe the Buddhist influences belie the working-class, Catholic roots of the story, but Kerouac maintained that he was seeing afresh the tragic events of his childhood. His awareness of Buddhism resulted from his self-teaching, and he contended with his friends, some of whom were Buddhists, over the proper approaches and interpretations of Buddhism. Undoubtedly Kerouac helped to popularize the awareness of Buddhism in America, particularly with The Dharma Bums (1958a). This book was not a spontaneous prose work; Kerouac wrote it in a style similar to that of On the Road to satisfy Viking editors, who were eager to repeat their success on the bestseller lists. Like On the Road, The Dharma Bums is essentially a buddy story, only instead of hitting the road, the young men hit the trail to some of the west coast’s highest mountain peaks. Kerouac inspired a spiritually based back-to-nature movement, one that Kerouac himself referred to as a “rucksack revolution.” The book includes a portrayal of the legendary “Six Gallery Poetry Reading” during which Ginsberg first read his long poem “Howl” in public. This event heralded the San Francisco poetry renaissance. Some of Kerouac’s most mature writing appears in Desolation Angels (1965), a book he worked on over several years at different times. Originally conceived as two distinct books, Desolation Angels covers the summer of 1956, when Kerouac worked as a fire lookout high in the Cascade Mountains in the state of Washington, and then his return to his Beat Generation friends in San Francisco. The mountaintop sections feature interior monologues and fine nature writing as well as haiku poems interspersed through the prose. The sections that describe his return to civilization are chronological narratives that portray the day-to-day goings-on among the writers and poets and painters of San Francisco in the mid- to late 1950s.
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Kerouac continued to flesh out the Duluoz Legend with Big Sur (1963), Satori in Paris (1966), and Vanity of Duluoz (1968). These books indicate the kind of confessional, loose narratives that Kerouac might have continued to produce had he lived. He died on October 21, 1969 at the age of 47, of complications arising from alcoholism. His finest prose masterpiece was published after his death in 1972; Visions of Cody is Kerouac’s spontaneous prose retelling of the events of On the Road. Less well-known than its precursor, it is a bold and courageous achievement, the pinnacle of Kerouac’s abilities as a writer. Despite his originality in prose, he probably remains best-known as an American cultural icon of hitchhiking and carefree traveling, rather than as an important prose innovator, as he had dreamed. SEE ALSO: Burroughs, William (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); The Road Novel (AF); Wolfe, Thomas (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Charters, A. (1973). Kerouac: A Biography. New York: St. Martin’s. Hunt, T. (1981). Kerouac’s Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction. Hamden, CT: Archon. Kerouac, J. (1950). The Town and the City. New York: Harcourt Brace. Kerouac, J. (1957). On the Road. New York: Viking. Kerouac, J. (1958a). The Dharma Bums. New York: Viking. Kerouac, J. (1958b). The Subterraneans. New York: Grove. Kerouac, J. (1959a). Doctor Sax: Faust Part Three. New York: Grove. Kerouac, J. (1959b). Maggie Cassidy. New York: Avon. Kerouac, J. (1960). Tristessa. New York: Avon. Kerouac, J. (1962). Big Sur. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. Kerouac, J. (1963). Visions of Gerard. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. Kerouac, J. (1965). Desolation Angels. New York: Coward-McCann. Kerouac, J. (1966). Satori in Paris. New York: Grove. Kerouac, J. (1968). Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education. New York: Coward-McCann. Kerouac, J. (1971). Pic. New York: Grove. Kerouac, J. (1972). Visions of Cody. New York: McGraw-Hill. Kerouac, J. (1995a). Selected Letters, 1940–1956 (ed. A. Charters). New York: Viking.
Kerouac, J. (1995b). Selected Letters, 1957–1969 (ed. A. Charters). New York: Viking. Leland, J. (2007). Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of “On the Road.” New York: Viking. Nicosia, G. (1983). Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: Grove. Theado, M. (2000). Understanding Jack Kerouac. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Weinreich, R. (1987). Kerouac’s Spontaneous Poetics: A Study of the Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Kingston, Maxine Hong DEBORAH M. MIX
Best-known for her first work, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), Maxine Hong Kingston has published seven books in 30 years. In her memoirs as well as in her other works, Kingston enacts a politics of righting wrongs – particularly those produced by racism and sexism – by writing them: “The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar. . . What we have in common are the words at our backs. The idioms for revenge are ‘report a crime’ and ‘report to five families.’ The reporting is the vengeance – not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words” (1976, 62). Her unique genrecrossing aesthetic, blending memoir, myth, and fictional narrative, has made her both a celebrated author and a figure of some controversy. Born in Stockton, California in 1940, she is the eldest of six children of Chinese immigrant parents and grew up speaking a Cantonese dialect at home and working in a family-run laundry. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, earning both a BA and a teaching certificate, and at Berkeley she met and married Earll Kingston, with whom she has one son. The family moved to Hawaii, and Kingston has lived and worked there and in California in subsequent years. The Woman Warrior appeared in 1976 to glowing reviews and quickly became a staple of college curricula; it won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976 and was named one of the top 10 non-fiction works of the decade by Time magazine. It is, as its title suggests, a memoir, one that conceives of its subject as part of a
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community of women – the book’s five chapters depict Maxine wrestling with the presences and absences of a variety of women, including her mother, two aunts, and the Chinese folk hero Fa Mu Lan. Her second book, China Men, published in 1980, was conceived as a companion to The Woman Warrior, and in it Kingston concentrates on elucidating the stories of her male relatives as they intersect with her own and with the broader landscape of American history. These books weave together memory, history, and invention, recreating the “talk stories” that Kingston recalls from her own childhood. They have become the subject of some controversy in part due to Kingston’s enormous popularity. Some critics – most famously Frank Chin – have charged that her impressionistic and idiosyncratic representations of Chinese culture and history are irresponsible and even damaging. However, Kingston has repeatedly asserted that she is trying to represent her own experiences, not provide a primer on Chinese or Chinese American culture. The protagonist of Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989) represents another thematic thread in Kingston’s works: the trickster. Wittman Ah Sing, the central character, is a beatnik playwright living in Berkeley, who must, like Kingston, grapple with the forces of racism and sexism; the novel concludes with his grand production weaving together a panoply of Western European and Asian cultural figures and texts. The novel’s title alludes to the Chinese trickster figure of the monkey, thus continuing Kingston’s interest in bringing together the realist and the mythic in her work. Her most significant recent work is The Fifth Book of Peace (2003), part fiction, part memoir, part history, and of a piece with the work for which she is best known. In the early 1990s, Kingston began work on a sequel to Tripmaster Monkey titled The Fourth Book of Peace, but the manuscript was destroyed in a fire in 1991. In its place, Kingston offers this hybrid work, which includes the elements she intended for the lost Fourth Book of Peace along with the story of the fires that destroyed her home and the manuscript, her experiences in writing workshops she ran for Vietnam veterans and their families (their work is collected in Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace [2006], which Kingston edited), and the death of Kingston’s mother, a figure who looms large in
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The Woman Warrior. It ends with a call for a literature of peace: “Children, everybody, here’s what to do during war: In a time of destruction, create something. A poem. A parade. A community. A school. A vow. A moral principle. One peaceful moment” (2003 402). Kingston’s other recent work, including 11 personal essays in Hawai’i One Summer (1987), the three Harvard lectures collected in To Be the Poet (2002), and the collected work of Vietnam veterans and their families with whom Kingston has worked in various workshops since the early 1990s, has received almost no critical attention. It is, in the end, The Woman Warrior, and to a lesser extent China Men and Tripmaster Monkey, that continue to define her legacy as a writer. SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Cheung, K. K. (1990). Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Chin, F. (1984). The Most Popular Book in China. Quilt, 4, 6–10. Chu, P. P. (2000). Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grice, H. (2006). Maxine Hong Kingston. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kingston, M. H. (1976). The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Knopf. Kingston, M. H. (1980). China Men. New York: Knopf. Kingston, M. H. (1987). Hawai’i One Summer. San Francisco: Meadow. Kingston, M. H. (1988). Conversations With Maxine Hong Kingston (ed. P. Skenazy & T. Martin). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Kingston, M. H. (1989). Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. New York: Knopf. Kingston, M. H. (2002). To Be the Poet. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kingston, M. H. (2003). The Fifth Book of Peace. New York: Knopf. Kingston, M. H. (ed.) (2006). Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. Kihei, HI: Koa. Lim, S. G.-L. (ed.) (1991). Approaches to Teaching Maxine Hong Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior.” New York: MLA.
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Skandera-Trombley, L. E. (ed.) (1998). Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston. New York: G. K. Hall. Smith, J. R. (1997). Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wong, S.-L. C. (1993). Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kosinski, Jerzy LUDMIŁA GRUSZEWSKA BLAIM
For Polish-born novelist Jerzy Kosinski, the thin line separating fact from fiction was never significant. Born of Jewish parents in 1933, Kosinski survived World War II, sheltered by Polish peasants. In 1957, he arrived in the United States, where he published two well-received monographs on communist Russia and his first novel, The Painted Bird (1965), deemed a masterpiece of Holocaust literature. Encouraged by initial success, Kosinski became a recognized writer whose works, praised for evocative representations of totalitarianism, collective mind, and victimization, were listed beside those of Vladimir Nabokov, Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, and Ken Kesey. His glittering career of an “eccentric but important writer-thinker in the existentialist mode of Sartre and Camus” (Sloan 1996) was ruined in 1982, when two reporters from the Village Voice insinuated that his account of himself and his Holocaust experience was based on fiction rather than fact. In the wake of further publications portraying him as an impostor, plagiarist, and pathological liar, Kosinski’s literary status rapidly deteriorated. The aura of scandal, intensified by Kosinski’s suicide in 1991, partly obscures the innovative and experimental aspects of his nine novels. Already The Painted Bird, a modern Bildungsroman focused on a nameless Holocaust child wandering through a wartime and postwar world of Eastern European brutes, situates Kosinski among the literati violating taboo subjects. The novel abounds with scenes of inordinate violence and perversion. Its episodic, tripartite composition, framed by the death–rebirth motif, reflects the stages of the protagonist’s deformed socialization and maturation. The Painted Bird, translated into
all major languages, won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre E tranger in 1966. Steps (1968), composed according to nouveau roman conventions, is a collection of provocative dialogues and vignettes in which unidentified narrative voices depict a carnivalized trap-world. Probing various layers of the narrator’s memory, Kosinski presents gruesome “shots” from different temporal, geographical, and socio-political realities. The novel won the National Book Award in 1969. In the parable-like novelette about a retarded gardener who becomes the US president, Kosinski juxtaposes and simultaneously deconstructs the borderline between two ontologically different realities, empiric and cinematic. Being There (1970), intertwining the dream and Hollywood screenplay conventions, exposes the naivety of contemporary society that tends to invest simulacra with “life.” For the film adaptation of Being There, Kosinski won two Academy Awards for Best Screenplay (1979, 1980). The two versions of The Devil Tree (1973, 1981) fill the stage of theatrum mundi with actors rehearsing for spectacles that either glorify or compromise the American dream. Considering the plurality of masks and the incongruity of parts played by most characters, the novel may be read as a writer’s notebook whose owner purposefully meanders between mutually exclusive story lines and ideologies. Cockpit (1975), in which conventions of the confessional and the spy novel coalesce, introduces a vindictive Homo ludens who plays perverse games with his victims, including a woman addressee doomed to listen to his appalling confessions. As the “confessions” of the former spy and Eastern European emigre frequently allude to Kosinski’s biography and lifestyle, the fictional reality becomes a game in itself, inviting the reader to quest for truth among obscure hints dropped by the author. Though still manipulative and vengeful, the protagonist of Blind Date (1977), Kosinski’s alter ego with an Oedipal past, may easily be reinterpreted as a naive sentimental hero who believes in justice and the essential goodness of Man. By imposing an incongruous sentimental dimension onto the mimetic representation of horrendous reality, Kosinski exposes the mechanism of controlling the reader’s emotional response to “bare facts.”
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KOSINSKI, JERZY
The structure of Passion Play (1979) relies on a broadly conceived romance formula. Playing on chivalric, quixotic, sports, popular, pornographic, and Christian romance conventions, Kosinski prepares a stage for his Janus-faced alter ego. Equipped with Kosinski’s survival and narrative strategies, the protagonist, an aging polo player and writer, “rides through life” assuming the incompatible roles of a knight-errant, a sexual sadist, or a Messiah in a postmodernist passion play. The intertextual and autobiographical trends in Kosinski’s fiction come to the fore in Pinball (1982), a noir detective novel enriched by the K€unstlerroman and apology conventions. The intricate plot of Pinball, involving four musicians and a drama student, contests the allegations of plagiarism made against Kosinski. The novel reveals the complexities of a contemporary artist’s life by exposing the destructive influence of the mass media and art criticism. The Hermit of 69th Street (1988, 1991) is a postmodernist, self-reflective text in statu nascendi playing on the conventions of the thriller, K€unstlerroman, novel of ideas, writer’s notebook, apologia, proofs of the novel, and suicide note. This longest and most complex of Kosinski’s nine works, planned as his magnum opus, has never gained popularity and met with little critical attention. SEE ALSO: The Novel and War (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Television and Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Gruszewska-Blaim, L. (2005). Gra w SS. Poetyka (nie)powiesci Jerzego Kosinskiego [The SS Game:
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The Poetics of Jerzy Kosinski’s (Non)novels]. Lublin, Poland: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej. Hicks, J. (1981). In the Singer’s Temple: Prose Fictions of Barthelme, Gaines, Brautigan, Piercy, Kesey, and Kosinski. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Karl, F. R. (1983). American Fictions 1940–1980. New York: Harper. Kosinski, J. (Novak, J.) (1960). The Future Is Ours, Comrade. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Kosinski, J. (Novak, J.) (1962). No Third Path. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Kosinski, J. (1965). The Painted Bird. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Kosinski, J. (1968). Steps. New York: Random House. Kosinski, J. (1971). Being There. New York: Harcourt Brace. Kosinski, J. (1973). The Devil Tree. New York: Harcourt Brace. (Revised and expanded 1971.) Kosinski, J. (1975). Cockpit. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Kosinski, J. (1977). Blind Date. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Kosinski, J. (1979). Passion Play. New York: St Martin’s. Kosinski, J. (1982). Pinball. New York: Bantam. Kosinski, J. (1988). The Hermit of the 69th Street. New York: Seaver. Kosinski, J. (1992). Passing By: Selected Essays, 1962–1991. New York: Random House. Lupack, B. T. (1988). Plays of Passion, Games of Chance. Bristol, IN: Wyndham Hall. Lupack, B. T. (ed.) (1998). Critical Essays on Jerzy Kosinski. New York: G. K. Hall. Sloan, J. P. (1996). Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography. New York: E. P. Dutton. Stokes, G., & Fremont-Smith, E. (1982). Jerzy Kosinski’s Tainted Words. Village Voice, 1, 41–3 (June 22). Teicholz, T. (ed.) (1993). Conversations With Jerzy Kosinski. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
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L Larsen, Nella MARTYN BONE
In the late 1920s, Nella Larsen emerged as one of the leading literary figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Larsen’s novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) are formally sophisticated and psychologically subtle analyses of US racial ideology that also explore issues of class, gender, and sexuality. As the Renaissance waned in the early 1930s, Larsen withdrew from the literary scene and never published another novel. Her slim body of work largely disappeared from American literary history until the 1970s and 1980s, when it was rediscovered by black feminist critics who claimed Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston as literary foremothers for a new wave of African American women writers. Nella Larsen – or Nellie Walker, as she was named on her birth certificate – was born in Chicago in April 1891 to immigrant parents: Mary Hansen, a dressmaker from Denmark, and Peter Walker, a black man from the Danish West Indies. Larsen’s biographer George Hutchinson (2006) notes that, as Danish-speaking immigrants, Nellie’s parents may not have fully understood the power of the taboo against miscegenation in the United States. When Walker died during Nellie’s infancy, Hansen married a fellow Danish immigrant called Peter Larsen. However, Nellie’s presence in the Larsen household was a hindrance to the family’s chances of assimilating into mainstream society, and in 1907 she was sent to the all-black Fisk Normal School in Nashville. These traumatic events would inform the semi-
autobiographical Quicksand, in which the biracial protagonist, Helga Crane, is rejected by her white stepfamily and sent to a “school for Negroes” in the South – the start of Helga’s lifelong and peripatetic struggle with US racial classifications. Throughout her literary career, Larsen repeatedly stated that from about the age of 16, she spent three or four years living in Denmark. Though earlier biographers cast doubt on these claims, Hutchinson (2006) has provided conclusive evidence that Larsen visited Denmark at least twice in her childhood: in 1898 and again in 1909, shortly after she was expelled from Fisk. The likelihood that Larsen lived in Denmark for some time between 1908 and 1912 helps explain the remarkable veracity of Quicksand’s portrait of Copenhagen after Helga Crane escapes US racial ideology by visiting her mother’s family in Denmark. In 1912, Larsen began training as a nurse in New York. In 1915, she had a fraught spell as head nurse at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. This experience too informed Quicksand, which opens with a biting portrait of Helga’s experiences of teaching at “Naxos,” a thinly disguised fictional double of Tuskegee. In 1920, Larsen published her first pieces of writing in the NAACP’s Brownies’ Book: both “Three Scandinavian Games” and “Danish Fun” drew on her Danish cultural heritage. As the Harlem Renaissance gathered steam, Larsen began to play a minor role through her new job as a librarian at Harlem’s 135th Street branch. In 1925, Larsen became friends with Carl Van Vechten, the celebrated white writer who in 1926 published the hugely controversial Nigger Heaven
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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LEE, CHANG-RAE
(one of that novel’s central characters, Mary Love, is a librarian at Harlem’s 135th Street branch). Van Vechten helped Larsen place Quicksand with Alfred Knopf, who published the novel in March 1928. Though some reviewers worried that Helga Crane was an unsuitable representation of black womanhood, others expressed a moral preference for Quicksand over Home to Harlem (1928), Claude McKay’s recent and sensational novel about lower-class black life. W. E. B. Du Bois declared that Quicksand was the best African American novel since the heyday of Charles Chesnutt. Larsen’s second novel, Passing, opens with a surprise reunion between Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, two old friends who are “passing” as white: Irene only occasionally, Clare more completely as the wife of a white (and racist) businessman. Yet neither woman is identified as “black” until some way into the second chapter of Passing. This daring deferral of revelation challenges readers to consider the role of racial classifications in American society. Throughout Passing, Larsen mediates the reader’s perception of events through the unreliable perspective of Irene Redfield. Irene’s view of and relationship with Clare become increasingly unstable, eventually leading to a dramatic but ambiguous denouement in which Clare dies – probably by Irene’s hand. If Passing examines the anxieties and absurdities of racial identity, it also explores class tension and sexuality. Irene is a member of Harlem’s burgeoning black middle class, and is primly offended by Clare’s transformation from the daughter of a poor mixed-race janitor to the flamboyant and flirtatious wife of a wealthy white man. However, as Deborah McDowell (1986) has observed, there is also a barely repressed sexual attraction between Irene and Clare. In early 1930, Larsen’s flourishing reputation was damaged when she was accused of plagiarizing the British writer Sheila Kaye-Smith in a short story called “Sanctuary.” Though some scholars have argued that the plagiarism scandal destroyed Larsen’s confidence and career, she continued to work on a third novel, and in March 1930 won a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to Europe. More damaging was Larsen’s 1933 divorce from physicist Elmer Imes (Elmer had been having an affair with a white woman). By 1937, Larsen had cut off contact with literary friends like Van
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Vechten; she never published again. In 1944, Larsen returned to nursing, working in two New York hospitals until she retired in 1963. She died in her apartment in March 1964. Since the 1970s, Quicksand and Passing have reached a much wider audience than in Larsen’s lifetime. Larsen is now widely regarded as not only the premier novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, but also an important figure in American modernism, and a pioneer analyst of biracial identity across what Du Bois termed “the color line.” SEE ALSO: Du Bois, W. E. B. (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); The Harlem Renaissance (AF); Hurston, Zora Neale (AF); McKay, Claude (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF); Van Vechten, Carl (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Larsen, N. (1928). Quicksand. New York: Knopf. Larsen, N. (1929). Passing. New York: Knopf. Larsen, N. (2001). The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: “Passing,” “Quicksand,” and the Stories (ed. C. Larson). New York: Anchor. Hutchinson, G. (2006). In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. McDowell, D. (1986). Introduction. In N. Larsen, “Quicksand” and “Passing.” New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. xxiii–xxx.
Lee, Chang-rae MARK C. JERNG
Chang-rae Lee has emerged as one of the most important voices in contemporary ethnic American literatures. His three critically acclaimed novels are marked by his distinctive voice; his subtle use of language, tone, and lyricism; and his emotionally embattled narrator-protagonists. Often mixing and casting anew the conventions of immigrant fiction, detective stories, and the suburban novel through the lens of language, Lee’s fiction highlights the varied and often conflicting uses of language in the process of telling one’s story. From this engagement with how we tell stories, Lee perceptively attends to the difficulties of belonging and assimilation; the formations
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of community, family, nation, and race; and the intersection of private choices and collective histories. Lee picks up his characters’ lives in the midst of settling down after a tragic death, a traumatic memory, or even a deceptively comfortable existence. Born in Seoul, South Korea in 1965, Lee immigrated to the United States in 1968 with his parents and sister. First living in New York’s Upper West Side, and then in Westchester County, Lee uses the urban and suburban settings as crucial locales for his fiction. Bursting onto the literary scene with Native Speaker in 1995, Lee was quickly hailed as the first major Korean American novelist. After appointments at the University of Oregon and Hunter College, Lee is now professor and director of the creative writing program at Princeton University. Lee has won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award for Native Speaker, the Anisfield-Wolf Prize for A Gesture Life, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among others. Native Speaker (1995) introduces the careful, highly wrought, lyrical narrative voice that has become one of Chang-rae Lee’s authorial signatures. Set in New York City, it focuses on Henry Park, a second-generation Korean American who struggles with personal tragedy (the deaths of his son and father and estrangement from his wife) and is a spy who has infiltrated the political organization of a local Korean American politician. Juxtaposing the private and the public, Lee examines how the difficulties of assimilation and political representation are simultaneously a passage through language. Often addressing the reader, Park’s narrative voice (often compared to the narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man) is an experiment of sorts in forming, resisting, and augmenting the possibilities of identification with the reader and an American and immigrant community. Lee’s second novel, A Gesture Life (1999), augments this interest in language and telling a story of how language is used to omit and displace as much as to tell. Again juxtaposing and blurring the boundaries of the public and the private, Lee focuses on Doc Hata, an elderly man ensconced in a suburban life whose attempts to belong are interrupted by his memories as a medic during the Japanese occupation of Korea. Hata’s language echoes these thematics in the erasures,
disavowals, and silences in his speech, a voice that is extremely careful and self-censoring. Taking up the historical and ethical dilemmas of comfort women in Korea (the use of Korean women as prostitutes for the Japanese army) in a language of repression and erasure, Lee engages the problems of assimilation from a unique angle and mode. Aloft, Lee’s most recent novel (published in 2004), can be similarly characterized in terms of voice, this time the blustery, even overconfident voice of someone too comfortable in his milieu, a semi-retired white man named Jerry Battle born and raised in the suburbs of Long Island. Like the two previous novels, this novel contains a litany of personal tragedies: the suicide of Battle’s Korean wife, his son’s bankruptcy, and his daughter’s pregnancy and battle with cancer, all of which highlight a changing landscape of multiculturalism and the exigencies of economic reproduction. Lee again brilliantly explores conventions – in this case, the novel of suburbia most famously utilized by Updike and Cheever – in order to think about the fissures of family and locale. In this novel, he continues his obsessions with language, first-person narration, and the relationship between identity and context. As opposed to contextualizing his own work within the questions of ethnic identity per se, Lee prefers to use the language of context, belonging, and projection: how characters struggle with “who we are in a place,” and how they reckon with the modalities of belonging. His writing more largely is characterized by this sensitivity to language, voice, and mode that has made Lee a powerful writer of the affective lives of both individuals and collective groups. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Ellison, Ralph (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Carroll, H. (2005). Traumatic Patriarchy: Reading Gendered Nationalisms in Chang-Rae Lee’s A Gesture Life. MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 51(3), 592–616. Chen, T. (2002). Impersonation and Other Disappearing Acts in Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee. MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 48(3), 637–67.
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LE GUIN, URSULA K.
Cheng, A. (2005). Passing, Natural Selection, and Love’s Failure: Ethics of Survival from Chang-rae Lee to Jacques Lacan. American Literary History, 17(3), 553–74. Corley, L. (2004). “Just Another Ethnic Pol”: Literary Citizenship in Chang Rae-Lee’s Native Speaker. Studies in the Literary Imagination, 37(1), 61–81. Chuh, K. (2003). Discomforting Knowledge: Or, Korean “Comfort Women” and Asian Americanist Critical Practice. Journal of Asian American Studies, 6(1), 5–23. Jerng, M. (2006). Recognizing the Transracial Adoptee: Adoption Life Stories and Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life. MELUS, 31(2), 41–67. Kim, D. (2003). Do I, Too, Sing America? Vernacular Representations and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker. Journal of Asian American Studies, 6(3), 231–60. Lee, C.-R. (1995). Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead. Lee, C.-R. (1999). A Gesture Life. New York: Riverhead. Lee, C.-R. (2001). Aloft. New York: Riverhead. Lee, J. K (2002). Where the Talented Tenth Meets the Model Minority: The Price of Privilege in Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire and Lee’s Native Speaker. Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 35(2–3), 231–57. Quan, K. (2004). Interview With Chang-rae Lee. Asia Pacific Arts. At www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/article.asp? parentid¼11432, accessed July 2, 2008. Song, M. H. (2001). A Diasporic Future? Native Speaker and Historical Trauma. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 12(1), 79–98.
Le Guin, Ursula K. WARREN G. ROCHELLE
Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the most critically acclaimed and influential writers of the twentieth century. Her prolific career includes utopian and feminist science fiction, fantasy, poetry, criticism, and mainstream fiction. She has produced 23 novels, 10 short story collections, 11 volumes of poetry, four translations, four works of criticism, 12 children’s books, one screenplay, and three prose chapbooks, and has edited or coedited four anthologies. Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California on October 21, 1929; earned a BA at Radcliffe College and an MA at Columbia University; and has lived in Portland, Oregon since 1958. Emerging as a writer of speculative fiction in the early 1960s, her first major successes came in 1968, A Wizard of Earthsea, and in 1969, The Left Hand of Darkness. Wizard established her
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as a serious writer of fantasy who used traditional mythic themes and motifs, while also calling them into question. Left Hand is a groundbreaking novel in its treatment of gender as a social construct. Wizard introduces her primary fantasy universe, Earthsea; Left Hand, her science fiction universe, Hain. In the early 1970s, she continued her exploration of both fictional locales and added a third, the US west coast, with her 1971 novel, Lathe of Heaven, which examines the nature of reality. With the publication of The Dispossessed (1974), set in her Hainish universe, Le Guin continued her investigation of gender, feminism, and social commentary on power, freedom, the environment, and individual responsibility. In this utopian novel she juxtaposes two contrasting societies seen from the perspective of a physicist doing his life’s work and renewing his society’s experiment in anarchism. Eye of the Heron (1978), which uses the same structure of contrasting societies, is again a polemic on human freedom. Always Coming Home (1985), a return to the utopian questions of The Dispossessed, marks Le Guin’s maturity as a feminist. The novel, an experiment in narrative structure, is a fictional ethnography, exploring a future culture, loosely based on that of Native Americans. Le Guin uses a familiar protagonist: the outsider observer, again drawing on the influences of her anthropologist father and her mother, a writer who was involved with her husband’s work. Le Guin’s use of societal conflict allows for social commentary while paying attention to the quotidian of human life, love, family, marriage, and the struggle to be human in the face of overwhelming opposition. In her poetry Le Guin considers the same issues and questions, with much the same evolving answers, as she becomes more political and polemical and feminist and global, and yet local, with her examination of family and of the mysterious and spiritual. These ideas and connections between speculative fiction and myth, thoughts on language and gender, feminism and power, are further explored in her three essay collections. Le Guin’s interest in Taoism is exemplified in her translation of Lao-Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (1997). Taoist notions of duality and unity and the balance are prominent in her fantasy fiction. Her fiction of the 1990s and early 2000s, with works set in both the fantasy world of Earthsea and the
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science fictional universe of Hain, including A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (story collection, 1994), Four Ways to Forgiveness (four interconnected novellas, 1994), The Telling (2001), and The Other Wind (2001), considers familiar themes and demonstrates her continued growth and evolution. The subject motifs are familiar, as is the overarching concern for the protection and nurturing of human freedom and the need to create a truly human community. Le Guin is not exclusively a writer of speculative fiction, as her 1996 short story collection, Unlocking the Air, attests, featuring both mainstream and magic realism. Changing Planes (2003), another collection, contains both magic realism and fantasy, sharpened by her sense of satire, social commentary, and whimsy. Her young adult fantasy series, the Western Shore trilogy – Gifts (2004), Voices (2006), and Powers (2007) – deals with coming of age and the abuse and use of power and family, found and given, and love and the magical. Lavinia (2008) is both historical fiction and fantasy, and in true feminist fashion, voice is given to the voiceless. Lavinia, whose hand is won by Aeneas in The Aeneid, tells her story. A master work of style and grace from a mature stylist, the rich language makes visible a distant world both magical and real. Among her many awards, Le Guin has received the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for gender in speculative fiction (1994, 1996, 1997); the World Fantasy Award (1988); the Nebula and Hugo Awards, which are among science fiction and fantasy’s highest honors (1969, 1973–5, 1988, 1990, 1995); and the National Book Award for Children’s Books (1972). SEE ALSO: Gender and the Novel (AF); Speculative Fiction (AF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bittner, J. (1984). Approaches to the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Bloom, H. (ed.) (1987). Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Left Hand of Darkness.” New York: Chelsea House. Cadden, M. (2005). Ursula K. Le Guin Beyond Genre: Fiction for Children and Adults. New York: Routledge.
Cummins, E. (1990). Understanding Ursula K. Le Guin. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Le Guin, U. (1968). A Wizard of Earthsea. New York: Bantam. Le Guin, U. (1969). The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Walker. Le Guin, U. (1971). The Lathe of Heaven. New York: Scribner’s. Le Guin, U. (1974). The Dispossessed. New York: Harper and Row. Le Guin, U. (1978). The Eye of the Heron. New York: Harper and Row. Le Guin, U. (1990). Tehanu. New York: Bantam. Le Guin, U. (1994). A Fisherman of the Inland Sea. New York: HarperPrism. Le Guin, U. (1995). Four Ways to Forgiveness. New York: HarperPrism. Le Guin, U. (1996). Unlocking the Air and Other Stories. New York: HarperCollins. Le Guin, U. (2002a). The Other Wind. New York: Harcourt. Le Guin, U. (2002b). The Telling. New York: Harcourt. Le Guin, U. (2003). Changing Planes. New York: Harcourt. Le Guin, U. (2004). Gifts. New York: Harcourt. Le Guin, U. (2006). Voices. New York: Harcourt. Le Guin, U. (2007). Powers. New York: Harcourt. Rochelle, W G. (2001). Communities of the Heart: The Rhetoric of Myth in the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Selinger, B. (1988). Le Guin and Identity in Contemporary Fiction. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press.
Lethem, Jonathan PATRICK O’DONNELL
The author of an eclectic array of novels that test the boundaries of genre, Jonathan Lethem combines realism, fantasy, and linguistic play in narratives that range from the story of a crime investigated by a protagonist who suffers from Tourette syndrome to a boy raised in tough circumstances whose dreams of being a superhero survive into adulthood. His native Brooklyn is the setting for many of Lethem’s novels, and motherless children are often the protagonists in adventures that alternate between noir and naivety, replete with references to popular culture and urban legend. Jonathan Lethem was born in 1964 in Brooklyn, the son of a contemporary painter. Lethem’s
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mother died of cancer when he was 13, a personal loss that is the source for his fictional interest in motherless children. Following in his father’s footsteps as an artist, he entered the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, and then entered Bennington College in Vermont, but dropped out after two years in order to hitchhike across America and pursue his new vocation as a writer. Taking on a series of temporary and odd jobs for the next several years while living in California, Lethem began to write and published his first novel, Gun With Occasional Music, in 1994. This was followed by Amnesia Moon (1995), As She Climbed Across the Table (1997), and Girl in Landscape (1998), the latter written following his return to Brooklyn. While these early novels – cast in the genres of science fiction or postapocalyptic road novel – brought some success, Lethem became one of the most visible young writers in America with the publication of Motherless Brooklyn in 1999, followed by The Fortress of Solitude in 2003, both bestselling novels; a seventh novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet, appeared in 2007. Lethem has published several collections of short fiction; The Disappointment Artist (2005), a collection of essays; Omega the Unknown (2007), a graphic novel based on the famous Marvel superhero; and a number of miscellaneous pieces, including a 2006 Rolling Stone interview with Bob Dylan. In 2005, Lethem was one of the recipients of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. Characterizing Lethem’s fiction is difficult because, to some degree like Thomas Pynchon, he works in so many styles and has such a finely tuned ear for the myriad rhythms of popular speech that he often seems to be channeling contemporary culture directly through the medium of prose. His most important novel to date, Motherless Brooklyn, is the story of a Brooklyn street kid, Lionel Essrog, who is taken under the wing of a godfather-like figure, Frank Minna, a small-time gangster who owns a detective agency and a limousine service. Lionel grows up, becomes one of “Minna’s men” under Frank’s tutelage, and investigates the murderous attack on his mentor in the novel’s main plot, but the substance of Motherless Brooklyn is the depiction of Lionel’s interiority, expressed through the erratic discourse that results from his disability, Tourette syndrome. The disability turns out to
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be the “special power” that one finds in many of Lethem’s novels – a gift that is also a curse which lends insight and sensitivity, but which causes one to be different, alienated. Certainly this is the case as well in Fortress of Solitude, in which a young white boy raised in a black neighborhood of Brooklyn and abandoned by his mother as a teenager negotiates a violent, alien environment while acquiring a special power (the ability to fly, conferred by a magic ring). While seemingly gimmicky, this device allows Lethem to explore Dylan Ebdus’s growth into adulthood, his career as a rock journalist, and his return to the scenes of childhood solitude with a decision to make about how he will use a power that has signified the limitations of his existence thus far. The rock music world is also at the center of You Don’t Love Me Yet, which portrays the romantic adventures of a twenty-something woman who is a member of a struggling rock band with a day job as a phone-complaint line respondent. Several turns of event lead to the band’s sudden success and a series of comic consequences in which success turns into pratfall. Though not the most substantive of his novels, You Don’t Love Me Yet joins Lethem’s previous work in portraying the reach of ambition and the treacheries of growing up absurd in contemporary America. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Pynchon, Thomas (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Godbey, M. (2008). Gentrification, Authenticity and White Middle-Class Identity in Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude. Arizona Quarterly, 64(1), 131–51. Lethem, J. (1994). Gun, With Occasional Music. New York: TOR. Lethem, J. (1995). Amnesia Moon. New York: TOR. Lethem, J. (1996). The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye. New York: TOR. Lethem, J. (1997). As She Climbed Across the Table. New York: Doubleday. Lethem, J. (1998). Girl in Landscape. New York: Doubleday. Lethem, J. (1999). Motherless Brooklyn. New York: Doubleday. Lethem, J. (2003). The Fortress of Solitude. New York: Doubleday.
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Lethem, J. (2004). Men and Cartoons. New York: Doubleday. Lethem, J. (2005). The Disappointment Artist and Other Essays. New York: Doubleday. Lethem, J. (2007). You Don’t Love Me. New York: Doubleday. Lethem, J. (2008). Omega the Unknown (illus. F. Dalrymple). New York: Marvel. Lethem, J. (ed.) (2000). The Vintage Book of Amnesia. New York: Vintage. Schiff, J. A. (2006). A Conversation With Jonathan Lethem. Missouri Review, 29(1), 116–34. Schleifer, R. (2001). The Poetics of Tourette Syndrome: Language, Neurobiology, and Poetry. New Literary History, 32(3), 563–84.
Lewis, Sinclair JAMES M. HUTCHISSON
In many ways, Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) was the prophet of his generation. In an amazingly productive 10-year period, the 1920s, Lewis produced five classic novels that satirized American society and questioned entrenched American values. He systematically worked his way through the pantheon of American myths, from the piety of the small town to the sanctity of the church, smashing shibboleths left and right and permanently lodging an element of cynicism and doubt in the American imagination. Although Lewis’s star began to fall as literary experimentation started to replace old-fashioned narrative, the topics that he tackled with his blend of realism and satire still resonate today. Indeed, he gave the words “Main Street” and “Babbitt” – the titles of his two most important novels – special meanings which they still possess. He was born Harry Sinclair Lewis in the frontier outpost of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, where his father was a country physician. Lewis got on well with his stepmother (his birth mother had died when he was quite young), but his dreamymindedness and lack of ambition rankled his father, who was something of a conformist. After a lackluster education, Lewis was still bright enough to get into Yale, but he dropped out after one year in order to travel and see the world. For a time, he hooked up with Upton Sinclair and his socialist commune in New Jersey, Helicon Hall; later still, he drifted to Carmel, California, where
a group of writers had clustered around Jack London and other bohemian artists. Lewis eventually returned to Yale and graduated, but he never shook his deep-seated wanderlust. For the rest of his life, he never stayed in one place very long but lived to write and experience the world in all its many aspects. Lewis spent his apprenticeship as a journalist and a publicity agent for New York publishers. By day he cranked out copy, and by night tried his hand at fiction writing. (One early novel, The Trail of the Hawk, he famously wrote standing at the kitchen sink in a cottage on Long Island.) During the 1910s, Lewis produced several novels – Our Mr. Wrenn (1914), The Job (1917b), and Free Air (1919) – that took up social issues of the day, foremost among them the “new woman” and her evolving role in a male-oriented culture. These would turn out to be dry runs for his most famous book, Main Street, published to huge critical and popular acclaim in 1920. The novel crystallized in Lewis’s mind when he returned to Sauk Centre for a visit with his wife, a sophisticated woman with upper-crust tastes who reacted peevishly to the narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy she observed in the so-called wholesome Middle American village in which Lewis had grown up. She (and Lewis’s stepmother, whose attitudes she shared) in part became the model for Carol Kennicott, the idealistic young woman who moves from the city to the country and is stifled by small-town life. In Main Street Lewis permanently altered Americans’ perceptions; the book became a byword for iconoclasm and the questioning of long-held social attitudes, especially about the American Midwest. Main Street was a media sensation. Lewis’s savvy publisher, Alfred Harcourt, shrewdly assessed the market for such a book and ordered a huge first printing, which sold out almost immediately. Main Street became the number-one-selling novel for the entire period from 1920 to 1925. Small towns across the country, including Sauk Centre, wondered aloud whether they were the “real” Gopher Prairie, the fictional village that Lewis mocked in the novel. From there, it was a straight shot upward to literary stardom that Lewis sustained for several years to come. Having taken on the small town in Main Street, Lewis next satirized the elastic ethics of the businessman in Babbitt (1922), the portrait
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of a small-time real estate salesman who worships gizmos and gadgetry but whose inner life is soulless and hollow. In Babbitt, Lewis also proceeded up from the village to describe the medium-sized city, charting out a kind of anatomy of the American landscape. With Babbitt, Lewis also inaugurated what would become his tried-andtrue compositional method. He would visit locales on which he planned to base his setting, interview people who did the kind of work his characters would do, and generally immerse himself in the environment of the novel. Like E´mile Zola on his scouting expeditions through the streets of Paris, Lewis was a tireless and meticulous researcher – one reason his books rang so true to life with contemporary readers. Lewis’s next target was the medical industry. Less satirical than his previous novels, Arrowsmith (1925) follows the career of an idealistic young physician who is seduced by the profits of commercial pharmaceutical companies and is torn between wanting to be a servant to the public good and devoting himself to pure research in the laboratory. Arrowsmith’s conflicts are Herculean, and his ultimate actions painfully heroic, as he ends up losing his wife to a public health epidemic on a Caribbean island but inventing a vaccine that helps to save everyone else. Like Babbitt, Arrowsmith also struck a chord with American readers who, like the characters in the book, were witness to the passing of the art of old-fashioned medicine and its replacement with a quasi-scientific technocracy that increasingly viewed humans not as people but as chemical machines – another iteration of Lewis’s brand of Zolaesque naturalism. Perhaps because he had toned down the harshness of his satire-laden rhetoric in Arrowsmith, in his next novel Lewis went all out, following the advice of his friend and literary confidant, H. L. Mencken, who had been urging him for years to take on what he thought was the most conspicuous type of American fraud ever – the evangelist. In the heyday of Billy Sunday and other tent-revival preachers, Lewis created the unforgettable Elmer Gantry: an audacious, unrepentant womanizer and drunkard who nonetheless is fantastically successful at bilking his followers of their money and, eventually, their self-esteem. Perpetrating one nefarious scheme after another throughout the book, the fictional Gantry became an almost endless target for religious leaders,
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editorial writers, and newspaper columnists, who heaped abuse on Lewis for mocking Christianity. Lewis later defended what he had written, saying that it was nothing more than what he had seen on his trips to places like Kansas City and other cities in the Bible Belt, but that did not stop him from being vilified. Lewis was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Arrowsmith. True to form, Lewis used the occasion to criticize the whole enterprise of literary prizes and other false symbols of “prestige.” He refused to accept the honor. He did, however, in 1930 accept the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first American ever to win the award. Lewis rounded out his remarkable decade with Dodsworth (1929), like Arrowsmith a more introspective novel in which satire is tempered with sympathy for his protagonist. Sam Dodsworth is a purer and more intelligent version of Babbitt, an industrialist who has spent his life making money but in late middle age realizes that he has ignored the higher ideals of education and travel. In the novel, Lewis places his character in the familiar paradigm of the American in Europe, coming to terms with his wins and losses, assessing his life against the backdrop of art and literature, history and philosophy. He succeeds where Babbitt fails. Dodsworth does something to heal his soul before it’s too late. Lewis’s sphere of influence and his skills as a writer began, perhaps justifiably, to wane after becoming America’s first Nobel laureate. The exhaustive research and writing he undertook during the 1920s definitely had tired him, and he could not always sustain the level of impact he had had during the boom years, when America had seemed unthinkingly obsessed with progress. Lewis still took on controversial subjects and he was still both the target and the subject of the media everywhere he went, but his later books were not as finely wrought as novels like Babbitt and Elmer Gantry. In Ann Vickers (1933), Lewis explored penal reform and addressed the daring subject matter of lesbianism. In It Can’t Happen Here (1935), perhaps his most prescient analysis of the American character, he penned a dystopian farce in which fascism took the reins of the federal government (an all-too-real possibility in the era of Hitler and Mussolini). And in Kingsblood Royal (1947), Lewis wrote a fascinating example of the black “passing” novel, accurately predicting the
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political struggles of the near future: African Americans’ demands for civil rights and equal treatment under the law. However, Lewis was no modernist. He paid little heed to developments in rhetoric and style; he eschewed stream-of-consciousness and experimentation with narrative in general. He still wrote novels “about” things – hotels, universities, and the generation gap – and so held less and less appeal to audiences being taught new ways of thinking and seeing by the avant garde techniques of Hemingway, Stein, Dos Passos, and E. E. Cummings. He was, however, the conscience of a whole generation of Americans and one of the most acute analysts of the American character ever to put pen to paper. Babbittry and small-town life are known for what they are today because of the works of Sinclair Lewis. SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Di Renzo, A. (1997). Introduction. In A. Di Renzo (ed.), If I Were Boss: The Early Business Stories of Sinclair Lewis. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Eby, C. V. (1993). Babbitt as Veblenian Critique of Manliness. American Studies, 34(2), 5–23. Hutchisson, J. M. (1996). The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920–1930. University Park: Penn State University Press. Hutchisson, J. M. (ed.) (1997). Sinclair Lewis: New Essays in Criticism. Troy, NY: Whitston. Lewis, S. (1917a). The Innocents. New York: Harper. Lewis, S. (1917b). The Job. New York: Harper. Lewis, S. (1919). Free Air. New York: Harcourt. Lewis, S. (1920). Main Street. New York: Harcourt. Lewis, S. (1922). Babbitt. New York: Harcourt. Lewis, S. (1925). Arrowsmith. New York: Harcourt. Lewis, S. (1926). Mantrap. New York: Harcourt. Lewis, S. (1927). Elmer Gantry. New York: Harcourt. Lewis, S. (1928). The Man Who Knew Coolidge. New York: Harcourt. Lewis, S. (1929). Dodsworth. New York: Harcourt. Lewis, S. (1933). Ann Vickers. New York: Doubleday. Lewis, S. (1934). Work of Art. New York: Doubleday. Lewis, S. (1935). It Can’t Happen Here. New York: Doubleday.
Lewis, S. (1945). Cass Timberlane. New York: Random House. Lewis, S. (1947). Kingsblood Royal. New York: Random House. Lewis, S. (1949). The God-Seeker. New York: Random House. Lewis, S. (1951). World So Wide. New York: Random House. Lewis, S. (1952). From Main Street to Stockholm: Letters of Sinclair Lewis, 1919–1930 (ed. H. Smith). New York: Random House. Lewis, S. (1953). The Man From Main Street: A Sinclair Lewis Reader: Selected Essays and Other Writings 1904–1950 (ed. H. E. Maule & M. H. Cane, asst. P. A. Friedman). New York: Random House. Lewis, S. (2000). Minnesota Diary, 1942–46 (ed. G. Killough). Moscow: University of Idaho Press. Lewis, S. (2005). Go East, Young Man: Sinclair Lewis on Class in America (ed. S. E. Parry). New York: Signet Classics. Lingeman, R. (2002). Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street. New York: Random House. Love, G. A. (1973). New Pioneering on Prairies: Nature, Progress, and the Individual in the Novels of Sinclair Lewis. American Quarterly, 25, 558–77. Martin, E. A. (1984). The Mimic as Artist: Sinclair Lewis. In E. A. Martin, H. L. Mencken and the Debunkers. Athens: University of Georgia Press, pp. 115–38. Parry, S. E. (1989). The Changing Faces of Sinclair Lewis’ Wives. Studies in American Fiction, 17(1), 65–79. Parry, S. E. (1992). Gopher Prairie, Zenith, and the Grand Republic: Nice Places to Visit, but Would Even Sinclair Lewis Want to Live There? Midwestern Miscellany, 20, 15–27. Schorer, M. (1961). Sinclair Lewis: An American Life. New York: McGraw-Hill.
The Little Magazines ADAM MCKIBLE
Modernist fiction developed in tandem with the rise and proliferation of little magazines. These periodicals, which tended to have small circulations, short lifespans, and limited funds, encouraged both established and emerging authors to challenge the traditional forms, themes, and expectations of the short story and the novel;
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indeed, many significant works of fiction were originally published and/or serialized in little magazines. According to Hoffman et al.’s standard history, The Little Magazine: A History and Bibliography, these journals stood “defiantly in the front ranks of the battle for a mature literature,” ultimately publishing “about 80 percent” of what is now canonical modernism (1). Hoffman’s martial metaphor for the conjoined development of modernism and little magazines – a metaphor used throughout The Little Magazine – underscores the often antagonistic relationship between little magazines and their mainstream counterparts, each of which established their identity in contradistinction to the other. The experimentalism and radicalism of the fiction of little magazines, therefore, can be better understood in comparison with contemporaneous commercial fiction. Examples of proto-modernist little magazines can be found in America as early as the 1890s, but scholarly consensus points toward the early 1910s as the moment of critical mass for the development of experimental periodicals in the US. Although little magazines and their contributors were more likely to work from multiple perspectives and engage in often surprising acts of crossfertilization, a provisional schematic of major tendencies has some usefulness. According to Hoffman et al., the renaissance of “the littles” in the US began with the 1911 launch of the Masses (1911–17) in New York and the 1912 publication of Poetry (1912–) in Chicago. W. E. B. Du Bois’s magazine, The Crisis (1910–) – a vital periodical at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance – should be added to the roster of modernism’s originating little magazines. Beginning with these early entrants (there were others, of course, such as the Little Review [1914–29] and Others [1915–19]), little-magazine culture spread rapidly and widely. Hoffman delineates six major trends in little magazines: magazines dedicated primarily to poetry, such as The Fugitive (1922–5) and Palms (1932–40); leftist magazines such as Liberator (1918–24), the Messenger (1917–28), and Partisan Review (1934–2003); regional magazines such as the Midland (1915–33); experimental magazines such as the Double Dealer (1921–6) and The Dial (1920–9); critical magazines such as Hound and Horn (1927–34); and eclectic magazines such as Smart Set (1912–24) and The
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Seven Arts (1916–17). Examples of modernist fiction can be found across this spectrum of magazines in a variety and depth that cannot be adequately developed here (Hoffman 7–10). Little magazines continued to flourish in America well after the initial emergence of modernism (Anderson and Kinzie), and their spirit can still be found in contemporary zines and e-zines. Although there was certainly a spectrum of responses to little magazine fiction published in the early decades of the twentieth century, much of the mainstream press viewed this fiction with skepticism, often characterizing little magazines and their contents as an extension or even excrescence of the free-ranging conversations that characterized many of the modernists themselves. In 1917, when Margaret Anderson launched one of modernism’s most important little magazines, the Little Review, her intention was to fill “it up with the best conversation the world has to offer” (1970, 35). While recent critics have recognized the extraordinary achievements of modernism as a “public discourse” (Morrisson 6) promulgated through “conversational communities” (Stansell 83), Anderson’s mainstream contemporaries were far more skeptical, writing off modernism as mere “talky talky” (Wilson 45) or “Big Talk” (Saturday Evening Post 26). A story from George Horace Lorimer’s Saturday Evening Post, which dominated magazine publishing during the rise of modernism in America, exemplifies the mainstream media’s derision of the people and fiction associated with modernist little magazines. In Nina Wilcox Putnam’s “Seeing’s Believing” (Jan. 3, 1920), the narrator and protagonist, Nellie Kelly, works for a popular magazine called the Record Breaker (an obvious pseudonym for the Post, which was constantly breaking circulation records at this time), but she spends her off-hours with a motley assortment of bohemians affiliated with a little magazine called the Arm of Labor. Nellie’s modernist friends loudly denounce her work for the mainstream press, but they also secretly harbor a desire to publish in her magazine. At the beginning of the story, Nellie is torn between modernism’s faddish talk, flamboyant personalities, and experimental aesthetics and the conventional behaviors, expectations, and measures of success shared by middle America:
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Of course I realize . . . that a subscription list of three or four hundred intellectuals such as the Arm has is worth infinitely more to the country at large. But I confess I am sometimes puzzled why we – that is, the Record Breaker, has so many more readers. It’s queer, don’t you think? (15) As the story continues, Nellie finds herself weeding out unsolicited submissions to her magazine, and she comes across a manuscript from the Arm of Labor’s editor, the erstwhile revolutionary and truth-teller, Fritz West: It was called Love’s Labor Rewarded, and I cast aside all other matters to read it at once, because of course I expected something fearless and strong and radical. Frankly, I did not expect it would be the sort of thing we could publish, and it wasn’t. But not for the reasons I had anticipated. We could not publish it because – I must tell the Truth, painful as it is and was – because it was not good enough. It was – well, mawkish! A love story of the supposedly popular type, but badly done – a mere attempt at potboiling, I suppose. (149) As it turns out, Fritz’s mawkish stab at popular fiction was his twentieth submission to the Record Breaker, and Nellie discovers that all of her little magazine friends regularly submit “perfectly awful stuff” (149) to the larger periodical, all of which gets rejected. The exposure of Greenwich Village modernists as amateurish frauds and poseurs is a typical turn of events for the fiction of the Saturday Evening Post. With mechanical predictability, Nellie’s bohemian friends are revealed as shallow people, rotten parents, hopelessly bad artists, and terrible writers; she ultimately musters the good sense to accept the marriage proposal of her editor, Dick Kellogg, who himself typifies the ideal of American masculinity promoted by both the advertisements and the editorial content of the Post: he smells of “English soap, tobacco and toothpaste” and is “nice to look at in a well-washed, collar advertisement sort of way” (149). Marriage for Nellie will mean a move from Greenwich Village to “a home in the suburbs,” where she will also presumably give up her career. But she’s fine with all of that “as long as we don’t have to eat in a
Soviet house” (157). Thus, “Seeing’s Believing” concludes by demonstrating that there is no place like home, no system like capitalism, no gender structure like patriarchy, and no real art or writing outside of the popular, commercial fiction written by the level-headed, common-sense authors published by respectable periodicals such as the Post. Lorimer’s tenure as editor of the Saturday Evening Post from 1899 to 1937 coincided with the development of modernism and modernist fiction, and his magazine did publish a number of writers now identified as modernists, including William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Dorothy Parker. By and large, however, Lorimer insisted on stories that would “appeal to the wholesome tastes of [the] average American,” and as modernism continued to develop, fiction in the Post remained “safe, it was conventional, and it shunned absolutely situations, characters, or ideas that undermined nineteenth-century American values and sensibilities” (Cohn, 28, 189). Contributors to little magazines understood their own fiction as resisting the values and sensibilities of commercial periodicals such as the Saturday Evening Post. In his autobiography, An American Testament, Joseph Freeman, a regular contributor to small-circulation publications, wryly compares the commercial writer, “the Success” – “who earned large incomes in the employ of popular magazines” and succeeded by “glutting the market with adulterated goods which corrupted the public taste” – to “the Failure” or “True Artist” whose “handmade output . . . was superior to the machine-made output of the Saturday Evening Post – until that day when the handicraftsman of letters himself entered the process of mass production as . . . a popular magazine writer” (267–8). Freeman and Putnam – writing from divergent political and aesthetic sensibilities – make similar points about the relationship between little magazines and the commercial press. On the one hand, contributors to the littles often conceived of their lives and work as resistant to mainstream media (while just as often harboring a desire to break into those arenas); on the other hand, the commercial press cast a scornful but ever-curious eye on the fascinating personalities and experimental products of little magazine culture. Periodicals such as the Saturday Evening Post loved to hate the “Bolshevictorians” (Lowe, 18) and
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THE LITTLE MAGAZINES
“Naughty Boys” (Wilson, 3) associated with little magazines. Little magazines did not merely attract the scorn of other periodicals; they sometimes incurred governmental wrath. A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen’s Harlem Renaissance magazine, the Messenger, was scrutinized by the US Department of Justice and confiscated by the Post Office (McKible 41); The Masses was brought to trial twice for violations of the World War I-era Espionage Act (Eastman); Broom was effectively shut down by the Post Office censor, which found the magazine in violation of “Section 480 of the Postal Laws which prohibited the mailing of contraceptives and obscene matter” (Munson 187); and, perhaps most famously, the Little Review was successfully prosecuted and fined twice (not to mention destroyed), first for publishing Wyndham Lewis’s “Cantleman’s SpringMate,” and then for printing the “Nausicaa” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which the magazine had been running serially (Anderson 1970). Despite the efforts of hostile institutions and a scornful press, little magazines burgeoned in the early decades of the twentieth century. And because they published writers according to the tastes and interests of their editors rather than the dictates of the market, little magazines took chances on unknown authors who experimented with both form and content. Certainly, this experimentalism resulted in the publication of a great deal of immediately forgettable material, but because little magazines were more interested in aesthetic innovation than profits, they also published most of what would now be considered canonical modernism. Jean Toomer’s engagement with little magazines exemplifies the development of fiction in these outlets, and his career also demonstrates a shared project of social and aesthetic experimentation across a wide variety of little magazines. As Darwin T. Turner’s critical edition of Cane makes clear, many of the stories (in addition to the poetry and drama) that were ultimately collected in Toomer’s groundbreaking book were originally published in a number of little magazines. “Karintha,” “Seventh Street,” and sections of “Kabnis” were first published in the dadaist magazine Broom in 1923. “Becky” and “Carma” ran in the Liberator in September and October 1922, when that magazine was moving away from
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an amorphous bohemian radicalism and toward a notably stronger affiliation with orthodox political communism. Toomer first published the story “Fern” in the Little Review, also in late 1922 – long after that magazine had abandoned its earlier bohemian anarchism, embraced aesthetic avant gardism, and was in the process of relocating from New York to Europe. the Little Review printed “Fern” in an issue that also contains contributions by Man Ray, Kenneth Burke, Gertrude Stein, Francis Picabia, and Guillaume Apollinaire. “Esther” first ran in early 1923 in Modern Review, an avant garde periodical published in Winchester, Massachusetts. The Milwaukee, Wisconsin little magazine Prairie, which was largely devoted to Midwestern, regionalist literature, published “Blood-Burning Moon” in 1923. And the Double Dealer, “A National Magazine of the South” that attempted to vitalize “regional Southern literature” (Hoffman 11), published “Calling Jesus” under its original title, “Nora,” in September 1922. Hoffman et al. suggest that Toomer’s first publication was in the Double Dealer, which would mark Toomer primarily as an aesthetic modernist. But the politically radical Liberator ran “Carma” in the same month – and placed the story between Mike Gold’s essay, “The Jesus-Thinkers,” which proclaims Lenin more beautiful than Jesus and resoundingly condemns “churches and a swarm of lying parasite minister dogs” (11), and Ralph Chaplin’s sonnet, “A Sioux Dies in Prison.” George Bornstein’s claim that a text’s meaning can shift dramatically in different contexts (what he calls the text’s “bibliographic codes”) is borne out here. In Cane, “Carma” can be read as a note in Toomer’s “swan song” (Turner in Toomer xxii) for the vanishing black folk life of the South. In the Liberator, however, “Carma” reads primarily as exemplifying some of the consequences of racial oppression and an inadequate class consciousness. Toomer’s ability to place his fiction in a variety of little magazines representing a fairly broad spectrum of aesthetic and political affiliations thus underscores the assertion made (explicitly or implicitly) by little magazines that they were engaged in a shared project of cultural and aesthetic revitalization and revolution. While Toomer’s publication in a variety of little magazines demonstrates how an individual author could find a home for his or her fiction in a
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number of periodicals, the publication of Fire!! A Quarterly Devoted to Younger Negro Artists shows us how the fiction of little magazines represents a conscious break with the “acceptable” literature of the commercial press. Embodying the ephemerality and financial insecurity of little magazines, Fire!! was published only once; its editorial board – which included Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Richard Bruce Nugent, Zora Neale Hurston, and Aaron Douglass – could not procure the funds or support for subsequent issues; and most copies of the magazine were lost, ironically, in a fire. The magazine also demonstrates its affiliation and interconnections with the little magazine community as a whole by running advertisements for the politically radical New Masses and the National Urban League’s Opportunity, a periodical that published many luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance. According to David Levering Lewis, the contents of Fire!! shocked and outraged the established black intelligentsia of Harlem: Benjamin Brawley was disgusted, W. E. B. Du Bois felt offended and personally hurt, and even Paul Robeson gave the contributing editors the cold shoulder when he came across them in public (194). Thurman, the primary force behind Fire!!, had every intention of shocking his readers, and he also succeeded in printing some groundbreaking fiction. In addition to Hurston’s now widely anthologized story, “Sweat,” which ends with the calculated death of a brutally abusive husband, the magazine also includes Bennett’s “Wedding Day,” which portrays an interracial relationship; Thurman’s “Cordelia the Crude,” a story about a short-sighted intellectual and a child prostitute; and Richard Bruce Nugent’s stream-of-consciousness, typographically daring “Smoke, Lilies and Jade.” Nugent’s contribution to the magazine is arguably the first explicit treatment of homosexual desire in African American fiction, and – much to the consternation of older writers such as Du Bois – it concludes with “a montage of pederasty and androgyny” (Lewis 197). Nugent’s story, in other words, ends on a very different note than the ideologically and aesthetically safe fiction of magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, and Fire!! – in all its brief glory – exemplifies how little magazines challenged the expectations of
the mainstream press by providing a venue for experimental fiction, and in the process published most of what is now considered canonical modernist literature. After World War II – an intellectual era that produced a particular, even peculiar, canonical formation (i.e., modernism as autonomous, difficult, putatively apolitical, and largely authored by white men) – modernist fiction was fetishized as a collection of lone masterworks free from the impurities of mass production and mass culture. The study of little magazines reveals the inadequacy of this form of canonization. Indeed, little magazines demonstrate repeatedly that modernist fiction developed through a deep and thorough engagement with the mainstream press, and like their commercial counterparts, these magazines were almost always a heteroglossia of genres, images, and advertisements. Indeed, twentieth-century American fiction was an essential element of the extraordinary conversation little magazines had amongst themselves and with the culture as a whole. SEE ALSO: The Herlem Renaissance (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Anderson, E., & Kinzie, M. (1978). The Little Magazine in America: A Modern Documentary History. Yonkers, NY: Pushcart. Anderson, M. (1970). My Thirty Years War, the Autobiography: Beginnings and Battles to 1930. New York: Horizon. Ardis, A. (2002). Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bornstein, G. (2001). Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Churchill, S., & McKible, A. (eds.) (2007). Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches. Hampshire: Ashgate. Cohn, M. (1989). Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and “The Saturday Evening Post.” Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Dettmar, K. J. H., & Watt, S. (1996). Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, and Rereading. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Eastman, M. (1969). Love and Revolution: My Journey Through an Epoch. New York: Random House. Freeman, J. (1936). An American Testament: A Narrative of Rebels and Romantics. New York: Farrar and Rinehart.
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Gold, M. (1922). The Jesus-Thinkers. Liberator, pp. 10–12 (Sept.). Hoffman, F. J., Allen, C., & Ulrich, C. F. (1946). The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hutchinson, G. (1995). The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Latham, S., & Scholes, R. (2006). The Rise of Periodical Studies. PMLA, 121(1), 517–31. Lewis, D. L. (1981). When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Oxford University Press. Lowe, C. (1919). Alice Through the Working Class. Saturday Evening Post, pp. 18ff. (May 3). Marek, J. (1995). Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines and Literary History. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. McKible, A. (2002). The Space and Place of Modernism: The Russian Revolution, Little Magazines, and New York. New York: Routledge. Morrisson, M. (2001). The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Munson, G. B. (1985). The Awakening Twenties: A Memoir-History of a Literary Period. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Nelson, C. (1989). Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Putnam, N. W. (1920). Seeing’s Believing. Saturday Evening Post, pp. 14ff. (Jan. 3). Saturday Evening Post. (1919). Joyriding and Jaywalking. Saturday Evening Post, pp. 26–7 (Nov. 29). Stansell, C. (2000). American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century. New York: Henry Holt. Toomer, J. (1988). Cane: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticisms (ed. D. T. Turner). New York: Norton. Watson, S. (1991). Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde. New York: Abbeville. Wilson, H. L. (1919). Naughty Boys! Saturday Evening Post, pp. 3ff. (May 3).
London, Jack DONALD E. PEASE
Jack London took up a career in writing at a time when innovative printing technologies made magazines quite inexpensive to publish. Perhaps best known for the trilogy of Wolf books – The
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Call of the Wild (1903), White Fang (1906), and The Sea Wolf (1904) – London was also one of the first Americans to make a lucrative career exclusively from writing. Along with his contemporaries in the newly emergent literary genres of realism and naturalism, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Charles Chesnutt, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris, London freely borrowed from the discourses which described the industrial technologies of Taylorization and scientific engineering, as well as from cultural anthropology and the faits divers of the daily newspaper to endow his literary constructions with the formal authority of literal reality. The shift from romanticism to realism and naturalism was part of a more pervasive social transformation in which innovative industrialization processes had accelerated the profitability of the commercial system. London was born out of wedlock in San Francisco, California on January 12, 1876. His mother, Flora Wellman, was a piano teacher and spiritualist. His father, “Professor” W. H. Chaney, was an astrologer, con artist, and philanderer who abandoned Flora shortly before Jack, who would never lay eyes on him, was born. After she gave birth, Flora turned the baby over to ex-slave Virginia Prentiss. When Jack was eight months old, Flora married John London, a widower and Civil War veteran with a carpenter’s income and two daughters of his own. At 15, London took up the first of a series of legendary careers when he bought the sloop Razzle-Dazzle and became known as the “Prince of the Oyster Pirates” for raiding the oyster beds in the bay off Oakland. Two years later he shipped aboard the Sophia Sutherland. In 1893, he joined Kelly’s Army, the western regiment of Coxey’s March on Washington, to protest the economic depression, then deserted in Hannibal, Missouri on May 25, 1894 to tramp across the country. That adventure ended with his arrest for vagrancy in Niagara, New York and a 30-day sentence in Erie County Penitentiary. Those experiences became the real-life basis for the reminiscences published 13 years later in The Road (1907). Following his 20th birthday, London left Oakland High School without a diploma to start cramming for the University of California entrance examination. At the University of
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California, Berkeley, London joined the Socialist Labor Party and discovered his passionate interest in Marxian socialism. He dropped out of Berkeley, after only one semester, to begin his formal career as a writer. In the 23 years in between the publication of his first story in 1893 and his death from uremic poisoning at the age of 40 on November 22, 1916, London produced nearly 200 short stories, 20 novels, and three full-length plays along with several volumes of lectures and correspondence. London’s more than 400 pieces of non-fiction certainly bear significant witness to his prodigious compulsion to have his say about almost any topic (from animal rights to anthropology, environmentalism, greed, Marxian socialism, Nietzschean supermen, political corruption, primitivism, racial opression, prizefighting, social reform, social Darwinism, war, and xenophobia) likely to incite impassioned debate. Characteristically, London did not formulate a systematic understanding of any of these topics, but approached each as if to stake a claim on the passionate energies these topics aroused. London’s essays are best understood as efforts at consuming these subjects with an appetite that his rational processes could not possibly have satisfied. Three of these topics – Marxian socialism, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the superman, and Social Darwinism – in the contradictory response they consistently evoked, supplied London with a tendentious intellectual orientation. London’s relationship to socialism is indicative of the ways in which he rendered his ambivalence productive. London joined the Socialist Labor Party in April 1896. He ran unsuccessfully as the socialist nominee for mayor of Oakland in 1901 and 1905, crossed the country lecturing on socialism in 1906, and published two collections of essays on the topic. But in his essay “How I Became a Socialist” (1910), London provided a Darwinian explanation for his attraction to Marxian socialism, describing these views as having evolved from his identification with persons at the bottom of the social order. In other essays, London explained his attraction to socialism as a way of gratifying his Nietzschean desire to become the superman at the head of a socialist movement. These vacillations in London’s writerly commitments led some of his contemporaries to poke fun at London’s
identification with the working class as a pose designed to sell books. When he traveled to the Klondike in 1897, London was in search of subject matter that would focus his restless literary imagination. Before the Klondike expedition, London imposed immense demands on creative talents lacking an appropriate subject. By the time he returned to California in 1898, he had discovered his subject matter as well as the figure that would become his totem animal and literary trademark – the Klondike wolf. Throughout the stories collected in The Son of the Wolf (1900), the first volume of the Northland saga, London proposed the Alaskan timberwolf as the representative in nature of contradictions he found socially pervasive. Like Jack London, the Klondike wolf found the Nietzschean loner and the socialist pack animal equivalently attractive social personae. The featured story of the volume contained an account of the elevation of the wolf into the white prospector’s totem animal. In the Northland tales written thereafter, Wolf became known as the tutelary presence under whose aegis the entire white population conducted heterogeneous transactions – ranging from fur trading to interracial marriage – with the indigenous tribes. London correlated biological with literary paternity when he married his former mathematics tutor, Bessie Maddern, on April 7, 1900, the same day that Houghton Mifflin published The Son of the Wolf. Over the next three years he became in rapid succession the father of two daughters, Joan and Bess London; the author of seven additional books; and the lover of Anna Strunsky. Strunsky was a brilliant young social philosopher of Russian Jewish heritage whom London had met at socialist Austin Lewis’s lecture at Stanford in December 1899, and with whom he later collaborated on a book-length dialogue about love, published anonymously as the Kempton– Wace Letters in 1903. In that same marathon year, London initiated another love affair, this time with Charmian Kittredge, the woman London believed was endowed with all the virtues of his “mate-woman.” To mark this turning point in his public life, London published two books, The People of the Abyss (1903), a sociological study of the impossible living conditions in London’s East End, and
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The Call of the Wild, a novel about a dog adapting to the Klondike wilderness. The first tales of the Northland Saga were concerned with white prospectors whose struggles to learn the natives’ ways led to the reciprocal commercial and social exchanges epitomized in interracial marriage. The Call of the Wild replaced these earlier tales of miscegenation with a mixedbreed dog named Buck whose spectacular regression in the Yukon wilderness elevated him into London’s literary trademark. As London’s new means of taking verbal possession of the Klondike, Buck erased offending erotic relations from memory and offered in their place the sentimental education of a noble creature who always remained loyal to his white masters. The totemic system London introduced in Buck’s narrative was symptomatic of the racism that would eventuate in the notorious diatribes that London would later direct against what he called the yellow peril and that required that he place race loyalty above his obligations to international socialism. By 1903, US imperialist ideology had mutated homegrown anti-foreignism into a comparable strain of racism. The extensive relay that Buck traced through the Northland wilds linked Judge Millers Santa Clara estate with John Thornton’s camps, and thereby expanded the circle of his master’s symbolic property to include the entire Klondike region. The eagerness that the mongrel Buck displayed in The Call of the Wild to sacrifice his life in executing John Thornton’s will in Klondike Territory would be acted out on a much larger scale in the US imperial adventures whose dates more or less coincided with Jack London’s personal chronology and whose trajectory – Hawaii, Panama, Cuba, and the Pacific Rim – London’s later tales would retrace. Whereas The Call of the Wild had recorded Buck’s regressive adaptation to the wilderness, White Fang reversed direction and described Wolf ’s transformation from a natural force into a surrogate national agent. White Fang’s progression from Klondike nature to US culture reenacted the nation’s imperial design as its plotline. The reversibility of the two plots mirrored a larger reversal in ideological accounts of imperialism wherein the acquisitive drives of an imperial adventurer were redescribed as defensive reactions directed against what these adventurers described as the senseless aggression of native
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populations. By finding it thoroughly acted out in companion dog stories, London effectively reinscribed the entire circuit of US imperial appropriation – its aggressive policies of colonial annexation followed by the blandishments of acculturation – upon the “white silence of the Klondike.” After delinking White Fang from the network of associations he shared with the Northwest tribal communities, London realigned his interests with the more inclusive project of US imperialism in the South Pacific, in which such later writings as The Cruise of the Snark (1911), South Sea Tales (1911), and the Son of the Sun (1912) would play a significant role. Unlike contemporaries, like William Dean Howells, who tried to free their characters from romantic dependencies, Jack London submitted his protagonists to the complex of confinements and determinations posed by market and biological forces as well as by the mechanisms of the disciplinary society. While American realists continued to correlate their protagonists with the bourgeois subject of aesthetic ideology, in the quasi-autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909), London subordinated the aesthetic sphere to the laws of the market, and he described that sphere’s appeals to a transcendental standpoint and its enforcement of a universal standard of taste as having turned the aesthetic against the social markers of the lower classes. In preparation for writing The People of the Abyss, a sociological study of living conditions in East London, London reenacted Buck’s regressive evolution. In August 1902, he disguised himself as a derelict and then disappeared for six weeks into what were then believed to be the worst slums in the Western hemisphere. With the publication of The Sea Wolf in 1904, London created a narrative that demonstrated uncanny intuition into the change of his reading public’s needs. In The Sea Wolf and People of the Abyss, London relocated Wolf, the totem animal from his literary imagination, in environments – the slums of East London, the open sea – that, while different from the Klondike, nevertheless recalled its demands on the survival instinct. Wolf Larsen, the protagonist of The Sea Wolf, combined Buck’s and White Fang’s courage with the ruthless will to power that constituted the only political order that he acknowledged. Following his marriage to Charmian Kittredge on November 19, 1905, London reversed the habit
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of construing his life as raw material for his writing, and turned his most popular literary formula – combining the themes of survival and sentimental romance – into the basis for their relationship. After they set sail in 1907 for a seven-year around-the-world cruise in Snark, the schooner London had built for $35,000, the theme of survival predominated. During extensive travel throughout the South Seas and Polynesia – from Hawaii to the Marquesas Islands, Tahiti, New Hebrides, Fiji, and the Solomon Islands – Jack and Charmian contracted multiple tropical diseases and returned after only two years to London’s California estate. London’s adaptation of his craft to a quasi-Taylorizedmodeofproductionmadehimquitewealthy, but it also inclined him to create formulaic plots and stereotypical characters. Because he purchased plots and novels from other writers and used incidents from newspaper clippings as writing material, London’s Taylorization of his writing labors rendered him vulnerable to accusations of plagiarism. After 1910, his literary works were dismissed by his critics as potboilers that he wrote to cover the operating costs of Wolf Ranch, the most valuable piece of real estate in Sonoma, California. But London’s work has recently played an important role in the revaluation of literary naturalism. Mark Seltzer has explained the recent spectacular shift in literary attention away from American romanticism to the logics of naturalism as reflective of a more encompassing cultural transition that has supplanted the interpretive attention to the contradictions of market society with analyses of what Michel Foucault called disciplinary society. The negative counterpart of American romanticism, Jack London’s naturalism, has became newly fascinating because his writings were saturated with the disciplinary powers from which the American romance aspired to emancipate itself. SEE ALSO: Naturalist Fiction (AF); Norris, Frank (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Auerbach, J. (1996). Male Call: Becoming Jack London. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Labor, E. (1974). Jack London. New York: Twayne.
London, J. (1900). Son of the Wolf. London: Isbister. London, J. (1902a). Children of the Frost. Chicago: Donohue. London, J. (1902b). A Daughter of the Snows. Philadelphia: Lippincott. London, J. (1903a). The Call of the Wild. New York: Macmillan. London, J. (1903b). The People of the Abyss. London: Macmillan. London, J. (1904). The Sea-Wolf. New York: Macmillan. London, J. (1905). The Game. New York: Macmillan. London, J. (1906a). Tales of the Fish Patrol. New York: Heinemann. London, J. (1906b). White Fang. New York: Macmillan. London, J. (1907a). Before Adam. New York: Macmillan. London, J. (1907b). The Road. New York: Macmillan. London, J. (1908). The Iron Heel. New York: Macmillan. London, J. (1909). Martin Eden. New York: Macmillan. London, J. (1910a). Burning Daylight. New York: Macmillan. London, J. (1910b). Lost Face. New York: Macmillan. London, J. (1910c). Revolution, and Other Essays. New York: Macmillan. London, J. (1911a). Adventure. New York: Macmillan. London, J. (1911b). The Cruise of the Snark. New York: Macmillan. London, J. (1911c). South Sea Tales. New York: Macmillan. London, J. (1912a). The Scarlet Plague. New York: Macmillan. London, J. (1912b). Smoke Bellew. New York: Macmillan. London, J. (1912c). A Son of the Sun. New York: Macmillan. London, J. (1913a). The Abysmal Brute. New York: Macmillan. London, J. (1913b). John Barleycorn. New York: Macmillan. London, J. (1913c). The Valley of the Moon. New York: Macmillan. London, J. (1914). The Mutiny of the Elsinore. New York: Macmillan. London, J. (1915). The Star Rover. New York: Macmillan. London, J. (1916a). The Little Lady of the Big House. New York: Macmillan. London, J. (1916b). The Turtles of Tasman. New York: Macmillan. London, J. (1917a). Jerry of the Islands. New York: Grosset and Dunlap. London, J. (1917b). Michael, Brother of Jerry. New York: Macmillan.
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London, J. (1920). Hearts of Three. New York: Macmillan. London, J., & Strunsky, A. (1903). The Kempton–Wace Letters. New York: Macmillan. Lundquist, J. (1987). Jack London: Adventures, Ideas, and Fiction. New York: Ungar.
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Pease, D. E. (1998). Martin Eden and the Limits of Aesthetic Experience. Boundary 2, 17(1), 139–60. Seltzer, M. (1992). Bodies and Machines. New York: Routledge. Sinclair, A. (1977). Jack: A Biography of Jack London. New York: Harper and Row.
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M Mailer, Norman SHEREE L. MEYER
Norman Mailer was one of the most protean writers of the latter half of the twentieth century. In both his fiction and non-fiction, regardless of its setting or time period, Mailer mapped the conflicts and concerns of contemporary history. Indeed, from his first published novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), to his final novel, The Castle in the Forest (2007), Mailer probes society’s and his characters’ spiritual, psychological, and physical wounds. Norman Kingsley Mailer was born to Fanny (Schneider) Mailer and her husband, Isaac Barnett “Barney” Mailer, on January 31, 1923. His sister, Barbara, was born in April 1927, and both the immediate and extended family, including Norman’s cousin “Cy,” remained unstinting in pursuit of Norman’s excellence; for his part, Mailer remained tightly connected to his family. At age 16 Mailer, who had spent much of his adolescence building model airplanes, attended Harvard to study engineering, but soon found himself attracted to writing, a desire actively supported by his family. Early on in writing, as in life, Mailer discovered one of his many alter egos in the Irish protagonist of James Farrell’s Studs Lonigan novels. And, indeed, his early college writing, such as the never-published No Percentage (1941), was imitative of Farrell, along with Hemingway and Faulkner. Not only did Mailer dive headlong into writing, but he also actively sought the experiences that would give truth and voice to his words. Indeed,
throughout most of his career, it was often difficult to separate the narrative of his life from the narratives he wrote. In particular, his marital history, which he comments upon in Armies of the Night (1968a), was fraught with drama. Mailer married his first wife, Beatrice Silverman, a Boston University student he met when he was a junior at Harvard, shortly before he was drafted in 1944. On November 19, 1960, after a raucous party that concluded with a fight and beating in the street, Mailer quarreled with his second wife, Adele Morales, then stabbed her in the abdomen and back. Mailer was sent to Bellevue, although he maintained all along that he was sane, and when Adele recovered from her wounds, she refused to press charges. While there was an attempt at reconciliation, the couple separated in March 1961. He then married Lady Jeanne Campbell in early 1962. Despite his relative optimism in Armies, published four years after he wed next wife Beverly Bentley, they separated, and Mailer’s mistress, Carol Stevens, moved into the family home. It was not, however, until 1980 when Norris Church was the central woman in Mailer’s life, that Mailer quickly married and divorced Carol Stevens to legitimize their daughter Maggie, and then married Norris, whom he considered his soulmate and with whom he shared a birthday. Despite the volatility of his married life, Mailer remained a central figure in his children’s lives, all nine of them – Susan, Danielle, Betsy Ann, Kate, Michael Burks, Stephen, Maggie, Matthew, and John Buffalo Mailer – with the last of whom Norman collaborated on The Big Empty (2006), a father/ son series of interviews on issues of the time.
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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Not only did his domestic situations provide a symbiotic relationship to his writing, reinforcing his sense of the violence that lurks just below the surface of love, but also other life experiences often crossed the boundaries between his fiction and non-fiction. Beginning with the first-hand military experience in World War II that provided the cynicism and material for The Naked and the Dead, Mailer engaged fully in politics, Hollywood, boxing, and other arenas in which he shaped himself and his fiction and non-fiction. Mailer consistently made history by challenging society’s complacency and too-easily embraced ideologies, arguing in “The White Negro” (1957) that murder is “not altogether cowardly”; battling the feminists of the 1970s in Prisoners of Sex; naively supporting Jack Henry Abbott’s release from prison, helping him publish In the Belly of the Beast (1981), and testifying for Abbott at his trial in 1982 after he was arrested for fatally stabbing a busboy; and inviting Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State George Schulz to the PEN International Congress in 1985. He examined politics from the inside and out: expressing the desire to believe in JFK in “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” (1960), running for mayor of New York as a Left Conservative in 1969, and covering the Democrat and Republican Conventions in Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968b). If the world of American politics provided grist for the Mailer mill, the world of Hollywood gave him the opportunity to examine the “American Character” in its many evolving forms – particularly in his novel, and later the play, The Deer Park (1955), and in his two books on Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn: A Biography (1973) and Of Women and Their Elegance (1980). Then, too, there is the world of boxing and its character as it is reflected in The Fight (1975) as well as Mailer’s own pugilistic efforts. Indeed, throughout his career, it was evident that Mailer, as he admitted in Advertisements for Myself (1959), crafted himself as self-consciously as he crafted his characters. One of the difficulties in evaluating Mailer’s impact on literature is that critical reception has often confused, in both positive and negative ways, the man with the work and has often been radically inconsistent. With the possible exceptions of his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, which was universally heralded as the best war novel of its time, and The Executioner’s Song
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(1979), seen as an antithesis to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), almost every other publication was greeted by equal responses divided between love and hate. From the beginning of his career, Mailer also encountered difficulties with censorship – nearly a fifth of the profanity in Naked had to be removed even after his cousin recommended that he use the word “fug” instead of the more offensive “f” word – yet remained dedicated to making his readers uncomfortable. Ever the iconoclast, Mailer made it clear that his job as a writer was to shake his readers to the core and to challenge the too-easily held beliefs of society. From the beginning, Mailer crafted characters – both fictional and historical – who stood in the midst of existential conflicts. He defined those existential crises as moments when one must choose a direction without knowing the outcome. Indeed, for Mailer heroism is the deliberate act of choice in the face of the unknown, of bravery, however foolhardy, in the face of fear. So, most of Mailer’s novels begin by situating his characters at the edge of the unknown and unknowable. The soldiers at the beginning of The Naked and the Dead know that they will face battle the next day and that they may, of course, face death. The work’s central metaphor is literally played out in the card game with which the book opens. The narrator follows the internal and external dialogues as Wilson, Croft, and Gallagher contemplate both their choices to fold, hold, or raise the stakes and the unknown outcome of the next day’s battle. The protagonist of The Deer Park, Sergius O’Shaughnessy, who does not consider himself a gambler, does make the fateful choice to enter a poker game, and it is that act that brings him to the Desert D’Or retreat with $14,000. While most of these existential moments are acted out in the face of death, either as the potential outcome of an action or as the generative conditions under which one acts, Mailer’s version of death in Ancient Evenings (1983) implies that even the afterworld demands choice, for Menenhetet II, a deceased young nobleman who guides the reader through an ancient Egyptian necropolis, must decide which route to take through the Land of the Dead. Will the newly deceased Egyptian trust his corrupt great-grandfather’s ghost, as repulsive in death as he had been in life, and allow Menenhetet I to guide the younger ghost in
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his journey? Furthermore, humans act without absolute guidelines of right and wrong. For Mailer and his characters, there can be no certainty because the outcome of the battle between God and the Devil has not yet been determined. God is not all-powerful and does not know his destiny but continues to engage in the war between good and evil. Evil itself is an unknown, a mystery, because it is part of this ongoing war. So, God and the Devil are part of an irresolvable dialectic. When Mailer imagines God and the Devil, both sides “have armies, adjutants, aides, little demons, angels”; both “have their department of dirty tricks” (1975). In Armies of the Night, Mailer acknowledges that both “armies” are equally admirable and disgraceful; in Harlot’s Ghost (1991), he directly explores the department of dirty tricks, the CIA, without bringing the plot to full closure, ending as it does “To Be Continued.” In The Gospel According to the Son (1997), Mailer ambitiously imagines Christ’s own uncertain role in the Manichaean battle between his father and Satan. Last, but not least, The Castle in the Forest explicitly sets up the Miltonic structure of the war as demons and angels, without knowing the future, direct Hitler and history. The problem of evil, however, is too complex to trace as a simple causal pattern. Part of the lesson Mailer learned in writing about Gary Gilmore in The Executioner’s Song, which he then applied to writing about Hitler in The Castle in the Forest, is that there is no simple answer to “Why?” While at one point in his career, Mailer thought that the novelist might be able to explain what the psychologist could not, his experience with Gary Gilmore revealed the impossibility of such a task. So, despite the enormous amount of “factual” information and multiple points of view he marshals in The Executioner’s Song or the bibliography, theology, or psychology he cites in Castle, Mailer came to believe that the best the novelist can do is to push the ideas as far as possible and provide the highly detailed materials in which the conflicts play themselves out. Ever anxious about their masculinity, Mailer’s protagonists violently struggle to define their manhood in relation both to other men, particularly father figures, and to women. In bed, as in war or the boxing ring, these men are constantly caught up in webs of power and authority. The Naked and the Dead pits Cummings against
Hearn; Barbary Shore (1951) joins violence and sexuality as Mikey Lovett is embroiled in an Oedipal triangle with his landlady, Guinevere, and her husband, McLeod, who is murdered. In An American Dream (1965), which was published first in serial form in Esquire, Stephen Richards Rojack murders the wife whose power threatens to unman him, and much to the dismay of certain critics, he gets away with it, not unlike the way in which Mailer got away with stabbing Adele. Later in 1984, Mailer published Tough Guys Don’t Dance in which Tim Madden wonders if he is sufficiently the “tough guy” his father expects him to be, even as he is unsure whether or not he has committed murder. Part of Mailer’s fascination with violent characters, particularly Gary Gilmore, is the way in which the barely controlled violence of a sexual relationship can explode in otherwise unmotivated ways. Finally, The Castle in the Forest focuses as much on the father’s powerful sexuality as on the way Hitler’s personality is forged in the heightened crucible of sex and violence. Just as Mailer’s own highly volatile romantic relationships and pugilistic impulses informed his novels and non-fiction, so did his sometimes paradoxically ambivalent politics. Many have argued that one of the weaknesses of Barbary Shore is its overtly political allegory, yet in neither Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) nor Armies of the Night (1968a) – two novels more explicitly engaged in the political question of their day – does Mailer take a position on that central question. The main character in Why Are We in Vietnam?, simply called D.J., is set at the edge of his existential moment, preparing for his departure for Vietnam. Mailer, however, is much more interested in the less-than-harmonious chorus of voices responding to the political choices; D.J. provides narrative access to multiple voices, just as Armies takes its readers to the steps of the Pentagon so that they can eavesdrop on the full panoply of American voices. Similarly, while The Executioner’s Song places the reader in the midst of the cacophony of voices – both those calling for Gilmore’s execution and those against – it is genuinely democratic in its interrogation of the various political and personal motivations of those engaged in the debate. Dialectics and doubling are not simply the content of Mailer’s work but the form as well.
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The Executioner’s Song is divided between “Western Voices” and “Eastern Voices,” while Harlot’s Ghost, which is about double agents, falls between the “Alpha” and “Omega.” These divisions mark stylistic, as well as perspectival, differences. In the middle 1950s, somewhat frustrated by the reception to Barbary Shore and beginning to doubt the conventional form of the novel, Mailer began to explore what came to be known as New Journalism and at one point owned a 30 percent share of the Village Voice. The subtitle of The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History announces the generic oppositions that the book will then call into question, hence challenging literary classifications and categories as well. In fact, the confusion of how to classify Mailer’s work is evident in the two Pulitzer Prizes he won: The Armies of the Night won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, while The Executioner’s Song won the Pulitzer for fiction. Occupying the space between the “facts” of history and the imaginary reconstructions of the novel, Mailer’s books seek to redefine the Great American novel. Just as America is itself too complex to classify, so the forms in which Mailer writes of America avoid neatness and simplicity. In Tough Guys Don’t Dance, Harlot’s Ghost, and The Deer Park, Mailer pushes the generic boundaries of the detective novel, the spy novel, and the Hollywood novel past their limits. Mailer’s efforts to capture the expansiveness of America, its many voices, and its chaotic democracy also set up a tension between the sheer length of his novels (typically over 1,000 pages) and his prose style. While he is certainly capable of Faulknerian sentences that continue at length, many of his sentences are powerfully succinct, almost terse, and they are sometimes delivered at the most intense moments with a flatness of affect that paradoxically intensifies the experience. In addition to the Pulitzer Prizes for The Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song, Norman Mailer received the National Book Award for non-fiction for both Miami and the Siege of Chicago and The Armies of the Night. The Executioner’s Song also received a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, an American Book Award nomination, and a Notable Book citation from the American Library Association. Mailer was also the recipient of the Emerson–Thoreau Medal for lifetime achievement from the
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American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1989 and the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Despite failing health and eyesight, during interviews following the publication of The Castle in the Forest, Mailer expressed his plan for a new novel that would pick up from the digression on Czar Nicholas II in Castle and further explore yet another one of the twentieth century’s enigmatic figures, Rasputin. Normal Mailer died at the age of 84 on November 10, 2007. SEE ALSO: Farrell, James T. (AF); Faulkner, William (AF); Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); The Novel and War (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); Wolfe, Thomas (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Adams, L. (1988). Existential Aesthetics: An Interview With Norman Mailer. In M. J. Lennon (ed.), Conversations With Norman Mailer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 207–27. Bloom, H. (ed.) (1986). Norman Mailer. New York: Chelsea House. Braudy, L. B. (ed.) (1972). Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Ehrlich, R. (1978). Norman Mailer: The Radical as Hipster. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow. Gordon, A. (1980). An American Dreamer: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Fiction of Norman Mailer. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Leigh, N. (1990). Radical Fictions and the Novels of Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin’s. Lennon, J. M. (ed.) (1986). Critical Essays on Norman Mailer. Boston: G. K. Hall. Lennon, J. M. (ed.) (1988). Conversations With Norman Mailer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Lucid, F. R. (ed.) (1971). Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work. Boston: Little, Brown. Mailer, N. (1948). The Naked and the Dead. New York. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Mailer, N. (1951). Barbary Shore. New York: Rinehart. Mailer, N. (1955). The Deer Park. New York: Putnam’s. Mailer, N. (1959). Advertisements for Myself. New York: Putnam’s. Mailer, N. (1965). An American Dream. New York: Dial. Mailer, N. (1967). Why Are We in Vietnam? New York: Putnam’s.
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Mailer, N. (1968a). The Armies of the Night. New York: New American Library. Mailer, N. (1968b). Miami and the Siege of Chicago. New York: New American Library. Mailer, N. (1969). Of a Fire on the Moon. Boston: Little, Brown. Mailer, N. (1971). The Prisoner of Sex. Boston: Little, Brown. Mailer, N. (1975). Existential Aesthetics. Partisan Review, 42, 197–207. Mailer, N. (1979). The Executioner’s Song. New York: Little, Brown. Mailer, N. (1983). Ancient Evenings. New York: Little, Brown. Mailer, N. (1984). Tough Guys Don’t Dance. New York: Random House. Mailer, N. (1991). Harlot’s Ghost. New York: Random House. Mailer, N. (1995). Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery. New York: Random House. Mailer, N. (1997). The Gospel According to the Son. New York: Random House. Mailer, N. (2007). The Castle in the Forest. New York: Random House. Mailer, N., & Mailer, J. B. (2006). The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker and Bad Conscience in America. New York: Nation. Merrill, R. (1992). Norman Mailer Revisited. New York: Twayne. Poirier, R. (1972). Norman Mailer. New York: Viking. Radford, J. (1975). Norman Mailer: A Critical Study. New York: Barnes and Noble.
Major, Clarence NANCY BUNGE
Trusting his artistic inclinations has led Clarence Major not only to write in multiple genres but also to paint. He has published nine novels; one collection of short fiction; 11 volumes of poetry; a memoir; two essay collections, one of them about African American literature; two dictionaries of African American slang; two anthologies of African American poetry; and one anthology of African American fiction. He has also produced hundreds of paintings. He was born on December 31, 1936 in Atlanta, Georgia to Clarence and Inez (Huff) Major. When his parents separated, his mother moved to Chicago, taking her children with her. There, Major saw an exhibition of Van Gogh’s paintings
which began a lifelong fascination with and admiration of another painter who wrote well. He took art lessons from Gus Nall and studied at the Art Institute on a fellowship, but also discovered French symbolist poetry. After joining the army, he admired many authors he found in the base library, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. When discharged in 1957, Major published, exhibited paintings, and created a literary community for himself by editing Coercion Review. In 1967, he moved to New York and taught creative writing between trips to Europe and the Caribbean. He moved on to tenure stream positions at the universities of Washington and Colorado, and in 1989 joined the faculty at the University of California, Davis, from which he retired. During these years, the publications persisted and his travels grew more extensive. Major’s fiction is experimental from the start. All-Night Visitors (1969) deals with sexuality in a way that shocked some audiences (in part because Major’s editor insisted that he cut the book to half its original length with the sexual passages left intact; in 1998, the original version was published). Major wrote NO (1973), his next novel, on a long roll of paper, a compositional method he shared with Jack Kerouac, but in content and technique it extended the experiments of his first novel. NO, like All-Night Visitors, presents a chaotic account focused on sexuality and identity. Major considers the structures of his first two novels traditional compared to those of the three that followed: Reflex and Bone Structure (1975), Emergency Exit (1979), and My Amputations (1986), which also focus on the search for identity; their unruly plot movement conveys a sense of the protagonists’ fragmentation. Free of conventional narrative sequence, these sometimes delightfully playful works reflect Major’s habit of sitting down to compose with only a vague sense of direction so that he can enjoy and learn from the process. Major stresses his belief that imagination inevitably shapes one’s reality by emphasizing the artificial nature of the worlds he renders in these novels: no one would confuse the verbal tennis match in Emergency Exit with a real one. Major also integrates a visual perspective into these works: Emergency Exit includes paintings, and his desire to produce a work composed of large blocks of prose inspired
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My Amputations. Fiction Collective, a press supported by innovative fiction writers, published these three books, certifying their postmodern credentials. Come by Here (2002), Major’s memoir of his mother, suggests that he learned about imagination’s power to transcend limits at a young age. His mother sometimes passed as white in order to secure well-paying jobs; this persuaded her that racial distinctions are arbitrary. Major believes that racism has prevented African American artists from receiving the attention they deserve and has responded by putting together anthologies, dictionaries, and an essay collection celebrating African American writing and speech, but like his mother, he considers race an arbitrary social construct. He also believes men can imagine their way into women’s experiences, as he does in his novel Such Was the Season (1987). Because the book followed a chronological order, some critics felt he was producing a realistic work, but Major considers it at least as experimental as his other work, for an older African American woman provides the novel with a voice that sometimes ascends into poetry. In Painted Turtle: Woman With Guitar (1988), Major dreams his way into Zuni culture and transcends the split between poetry and prose. A musician supplies the voice of Major’s subsequent novel, Dirty Bird Blues (1996), allowing the reader to see the world from the perspective of someone who thinks, feels, and sees with song. One Flesh (2003), Major’s most recent novel, presents the world through the eyes of an African American painter with acute physical senses who constantly responds to the world visually. Although these later novels lack the structural dislocation of Major’s earlier work, he has never stopped experimenting, but has continued to enrich and extend his imagination. SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bell, B. (ed.) (1994). Clarence Major Issue. African American Review, 28, 1–140. Bell, B. (ed.) (2001). Clarence Major and His Art. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
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Bunge, N. (ed.) (2002). Conversations With Clarence Major. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Hogue, W. L. (2002). Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and the African American Narrative: Major’s Reflex Morrison’s Jazz and Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo. Novel, 35(2–3), 169–92. Major, C. (1973). NO. New York: Emerson Hall. Major, C. (1975). Reflex and Bone Structure. New York: Fiction Collective. Major, C. (1979). Emergency Exit. New York: Fiction Collective. Major, C. (1986). My Amputations. New York: Fiction Collective. Major, C. (1987). Such Was the Season. San Francisco: Mercury House. Major, C. (1988). Painted Turtle: Women With Guitar. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon. Major, C. (1990). Fun and Games: Short Fictions. Duluth, MN: Holy Cow! Major, C. (1994). Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of AfricanAmerican Slang. New York: Viking. Major, C. (1996). Dirty Bird Blues. San Francisco: Mercury House. Major, C. (1998a). All-Night Visitors [unexpurgated version; ed. version pub. 1969]. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Major, C. (1998b). Configurations: New and Selected Poems, 1958–1998. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon. Major, C. (2001). Necessary Distance: Essays and Criticism. Minneapolis: Coffee House. Major, C. (2002). Come by Here: My Mother’s Life. New York: Wiley. Major, C. (2003). One Flesh. New York: Kensington. Weixlmann, J. (1991). African American Deconstruction of the Novel in the Work of Ishmael Reed and Clarence Major. MELUS, 17(4), 57–79.
Malamud, Bernard VICTORIA AARONS
Bernard Malamud is a central post-World War II American writer whose novels and short stories capture the texture of life for the Jewish immigrant, the increasing socio-economic pressures of a developing urban milieu, and the ambiguous and precarious conditions faced by a rising middle class in America. Malamud’s expertly crafted fiction is widely applauded for its animated dialogue and vivid, extraordinary characterizations.
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MALAMUD, BERNARD
When Bernard Malamud’s paradigmatic Jewish protagonist, Mendel, in the short story “Idiots First,” utters his plaintive cry in the face of the relentlessly uncompromising figure of death, “Don’t you understand what it means human,” he gives voice to the fundamental thematic concerns in all of his work: the compassionate embrace of suffering and the possibilities for redemption (1963, 14). What it means to be human, in Malamud’s oeuvre, is the unshakable recognition of shared suffering and the redemptive obligation to extend compassion to others. Malamud’s work asserts for an ethic of rachmones, Yiddish for compassion and mercy, a concept as central to Jewish thought as is the covenantal Hebraic Law, whose very structures Malamud reinvents in his fiction in fallible yet indomitable human terms. In a defining moment in The Assistant (1957), a novel of despair and transcendence, one character asks another, “What do the Jews believe in?” The deceptively rote response – “the Torah . . . a Jew must believe in the Law” – opens itself up to the essential principle of Malamud’s work, the intersection of Judaism and basic human morality in the context of twentieth-century America. This central human concern is articulated with clear conviction by Malamud’s usually hesitant protagonist, who, in the face of this deceptively simple creed, expresses Malamud’s unwavering belief in the possibilities for a defining morality and humanity: “to do what is right, to be honest, to be good . . . to other people.. . . This is what a Jew believes” (1957, 150). This simple creed, the belief in the expression of basic human decency, as scholar Daniel Walden suggests, is “what is meant by menschlichkeit” and is at the heart of all of Malamud’s fiction (Walden, 169). It is, in Malamud’s work, the central motivating feature of both plot and character. For Malamud, being human and humane are inseparably and intricately linked, and demanding their consanguinity becomes, in his fiction, a stay against self-deception and despair, the inescapable condition of “human loneliness” (1983, p. xiii). Malamud demands of his characters that they admit their human worth by acknowledging their place in history and their responsibility to others. “Literature,” Malamud contends, “values man by describing him” (1983, p. xiii). As such, plot in Malamud’s fiction gives way to the ethical making
of character. His recognizably Jewish characters, often speaking in the rhythmic cadences of Yiddish-infused English, remind the reader of what it means to be human in a precariously unstable, fallible, and unforgiving world. Born April 26, 1914 in Brooklyn, New York to Max (Mendel) Malamud (b. 1885) and Bertha (Brucha) Fidelman (b. 1888), Malamud drew heavily upon his immigrant parentage in creating his settings and characters. His Russian-born father immigrated to the United States in the early years of the twentieth century, ran a small grocery in Brooklyn, and was the prototype for Morris Bober, the poor, floundering grocer in The Assistant. Malamud’s mother, the daughter of a shochet (ritual slaughterer) and granddaughter of a rabbi, suffered from schizophrenia and died in a mental hospital in 1929. In the early years of his writing, Malamud admits to “thinking about my father’s immigrant life – how he earned his meager living and what he paid for it, and about my mother’s, diminished by fear and suffering – as perhaps matter for my fiction. . . . I had them in mind as I invented the characters who became their fictional counterparts. . . . I thought of [my father] as I began The Assistant and felt I would often be writing about Jews, in celebration and expiation” (1983, pp. viii–ix). Malamud’s fiction bears the imprint of his family’s economic struggle and the mark of their mental anguish – his mother’s suicide attempt when Malamud was a boy, her subsequent hospitalizations, and the condition of his brother, Eugene (b. 1917), who, afflicted similarly by schizophrenia, was hospitalized for much of his adult life and died in 1973 at the age of 55. Much of Malamud’s fiction, especially his early novels and short stories, such as The Natural (1952), The Assistant (1957), “Cost of Living” (1950), “The Mourners” (1955), and “Take Pity” (1957), bear the tenor of a life that admits suffering and tragedy. Although the American Jewish writer Philip Roth has described Malamud as “a man of stern morality,” such moral certitude becomes the source of ironically charged comic realism, a understated humor measured by pathos and through which characters attempt to negotiate both their vulnerability and strength (Roth, 1). Bernard Malamud received his BA from City College in New York in 1936 and his MA from
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MALAMUD, BERNARD
Columbia University in 1942. In the early years of his career, he taught high school while writing short stories as well as an early attempt at a novel that was rejected and ultimately destroyed by Malamud. In 1945 Malamud married Ann de Chiara, with whom he had two children, Paul Malamud in 1947 and Janna Malamud in 1952. His first novel, The Natural (1952), was published during his first university appointment at Oregon State College in Corvallis, where he taught from 1949 to1961, followed by a position at Bennington College in Vermont. During his prolific literary career, Malamud published numerous short stories and eight novels, and was working on a novel, The People (1989), at the time of his death in 1986. The Natural, a story about a rookie baseball player, Roy Hobbs, whose charmed life is upended by his misguided judgment and ill fate, establishes Malamud’s moral project and draws heavily upon elements of the fantastical, a narrative conceit that became a staple in Malamud’s writing. Against the backdrop of a mythic quest for the holy grail, Roy Hobbs emerges from obscurity with a magical bat, and is toppled by a mysterious woman and a silver bullet. Against this mythic backdrop, The Natural particularizes the conditions of triumph and suffering, moral ambiguity and certainty, and realism and fantasy. Malamud’s fiction is typically shaped by enigmatic and mysterious figures who create moments of opportunity for characters: the disincarnated black Jewish angel who appears to the beleaguered Job-like character, Manischevitz, in the short story “Angel Levine”; the embodiment of death who would stand in the way of Isaac’s salvation in “Idiots First”; the diminishing figure of Salzman, the marriage broker, whose mysterious comings and goings haunt the rabbinical student in “The Magic Barrel”; the nagging presence of Schwartz, the scraggly “Jewbird” who, speaking Yiddish and davening with passion, flies through the kitchen window of an anti-Semite in “The Jewbird”; the cryptic Rabbi Lifschitz in “The Silver Crown,” a faith healer, who promises to restore health through the creation of an inexplicably potent silver crown; the Charonesque coxswain of “The Lady of the Lake,” who ferries the anxiously dissembling Henry Levin to his inevitable fate; the curious Abramowitz, quizzically “a man in a horse or a horse that talks like
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a man,” in “Talking Horse” (1983 329); and the fablesque world of the novel God’s Grace (1982), with its chimpanzee upon whom the gift of speech has been bestowed. Such fantastic elements, invested with the triumph of human imperfections and depth of compassion, become believable in the creative spin of Malamud’s imagination and emerge from an honest assessment of both the extraordinary weaknesses and redemptive possibilities that make of his characters “what it means human” (1963, 14). Although best-known as a Jewish writer who re-creates the immigrant experience in America, a writer who brings to life the rich vocalization of Yiddish, and for whom Jewish suffering is a metonymy for universal human suffering, Malamud was also a consummate stylist who was known to write multiple drafts of his work and to have revised his manuscripts extensively. His fiction covers a vast expanse of historical, social, political, cultural, and individualized moments and events. While the novels The Natural, The Assistant, and Dubin’s Lives primarily focus on individual characters who attempt to reinvent themselves, The Fixer (1966) is based on the 1913 blood libel case of a Russian Jew accused of the ritual murder of a Christian child. The Fixer, which received both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and was later adapted to film, suggests Malamud’s preoccupation with anti-Semitism and persecution. Stories such as “The German Refugee” (1963) and “Man in the Drawer” (1968, which received the O. Henry Prize) focus on the tragic consequences of oppression and the absence of autonomous self-expression. Malamud’s fiction freezes in time, defining political and social events in American culture. The 1971 novel The Tenants (adapted to film in 2006) exposes the complexities of black/ white relations through the lens of two phobic writers, and “The Letter” (1972) and “My Son the Murderer” (1968) address the consequences of war and depression as a backdrop for personal despair and fear. The recipient of many prestigious awards and honors, including the Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the National Book Award, a Ford Foundation Grant, the Pulitzer Prize, the O. Henry Prize, the Jewish Heritage Award, and the Premio Mondello Prize in Italy, to name a few, Malamud was elected to
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the American Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Critical reception of Malamud’s work has consistently praised the depth of his vision, the range of narrative voice, and the brilliance of his prose. Cynthia Ozick stated that he “brought into being a new American idiom of his own idiosyncratic invention . . . who had introduced the idea of blessing – a virtue as insight, virtue as crucible – into the literature of a generation mainly sunk in aestheticism or nihilism or solipsism” (26). Considered one of the three most influential post-World War II American Jewish writers, along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud remains a major voice in American literature. SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Jewish Fiction (BIF); Ozick, Cynthia (AF); Roth, Philip (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Aarons, V. (1996). “Believe Me, There Are Jews Everywhere” – Accidental Connections in the Most Unlikely Places: A Reading of Bernard Malamud. In V. Aarons, A Measure of Memory: Storytelling and Identity in American Jewish Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, pp. 92–122. Aarons, V. (2002). The Unfettering of the Law: Rescripting the Word in Bernard Malamud’s Fiction. Modern Jewish Studies, 1–17. Aarons, V. (2005). Biblical Revisions and Interruptions: Bernard Malamud’s Renaming of Law and Covenant. In V. Aarons, What Happened to Abraham? Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction. Newark: University of Delaware Press, pp. 34–63. Avery, E. (ed.) (2001). The Magic Worlds of Bernard Malamud. New York: SUNY Press, pp. 34–63. Cheuse, A., & Delbanco, N. (eds.) (1996). Talking Horse: Bernard Malamud on Life and Work. New York: Columbia University Press. Davis, P. (2007). Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life. New York: Oxford University Press. Lasher, L. M. (ed.) (1991). Conversations With Bernard Malamud. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Malamud, B. (1952). The Natural. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Malamud, B. (1957). The Assistant. New York: Farrar Straus. Malamud, B. (1958). The Magic Barrel. New York: Farrar Straus.
Malamud, B. (1961). A New Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Malamud, B. (1963). Idiots First. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Malamud, B. (1966). The Fixer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Malamud, B. (1969). Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Malamud, B. (1971). The Tenants. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Malamud, B. (1973). Rembrandt’s Hat. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Malamud, B. (1979). Dubin’s Lives. New York: Farrar Straus. Malamud, B. (1982). God’s Grace. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Malamud, B. (1983). The Stories of Bernard Malamud. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux. Malamud, B. (1989a). The Complete Stories (ed. R. Giroux). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Malamud, B. (1989b). The People and Uncollected Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Ozick, C. (2001). Remembrances: Bernard Malamud. In The Magic Worlds of Bernard Malamud (ed. E. Avery). New York: SUNY Press, pp. 25–7. Roth, P. (2001). Pictures of Malamud. In P. Roth, Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, pp. 120–30. Smith, J. M. (2006). My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Walden, D. (2001). Bernard Malamud and His Universal Menschen. In The Magic Worlds of Bernard Malamud (ed. E. Avery). New York: SUNY Press, pp. 167–73.
Markson, David JOSEPH P. TABBI
Author of The Last Novel (2007), David Markson (born in Albany, New York in 1927) might better be thought of as the last modernist author. Even the justifiable claim to have created with this book “his own personal genre” reinforces the modernist compulsion to “make it new” with each and every project. At the same time, Markson in this self-declared “last book” makes a point of including, among the literary and art-historical citations that comprise his late works, a list of plagiarisms, repetitions, direct quotations, and reported misquotations. The “new” appears in a context of rewritings, bowdlerization, anticipation, and recycling throughout the literary canon.
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MARKSON, DAVID
Markson’s life work is partly a preservation and poetic arrangement not of world knowledge but of the sum total of what one individual might know and remember over a dedicated literary lifetime. At the same time, putting these remembered bits on the page is a way of disburdening the self of “The baggage in one’s head,” as the heroine of Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1985) puts it. Before Markson had reduced his persona to the barest identifier, the “Novelist” of the last four books, in Wittgenstein’s Mistress he had conceived a remarkable female character to convey the (living) novelist’s accumulated life knowledge. Kate in Wittgenstein’s Mistress imagines herself to be, literally, the last person on earth – who wanders the world driving abandoned cars until the gas runs out, who camps out in the great museums using picture frames and other “artifacts” for firewood. At one point late in the novel, Markson’s narrator imagines herself to be “the curator of the world,” as if she alone – literally, alone – held possession of all knowledge. Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1985) is surely the height of Markson’s achievement; it was anticipated by an already accomplished body of work – a series of detective novels set in Greenwich Village in the 1960s. Even in these popular productions, Markson squirrels away literary apercus, not least the detective Fannin’s discovery, in a suspect’s typewriter, of a Columbia University essay draft naming The Recognitions by William Gaddis the greatest American novel since Moby Dick. Those attributions mattered, then – and Markson’s may be the first such appreciation of Gaddis in print. A debut “literary” novel, The Ballad of Dingus Magee (2008 [1965]), was made into a movie starring Frank Sinatra, but rather than pursue either the screen or genre writing, Markson remained true to his literary vision, his Columbia University education in world literature, and his important early friendships with Conrad Aiken, Malcolm Lowry, and Dylan Thomas. Going Down, a novel of expatriate life in Mexico, was a journeyman’s attempt to write in the mode of Lowry (who had been the subject of Markson’s Columbia University master’s thesis, published in 1978 as Malcolm Lowry’s Volcano). Dostoevsky is another presence in Going Down, yet the drama and evolving subjectivity of the literary precursors can only be echoed by
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Markson’s postwar literary generation. Already with Lowry, the modernist stance was beginning to lapse into self-consciousness and selfabsorption. To avoid such, Markson took this aesthetic into hitherto unexplored comic and erotic modes in Springer’s Progress (1977). Ultimately, though, the explorations into psychology and subjectivity, typical of Dostoevsky and Lowry, would become the pure subjectivity of Wittgenstein’s Mistress and then, eventually, no subjectivity at all – insofar as its absence can be imagined. Typical of modernist self-awareness, the late work’s aesthetic is stated in the work: “Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An Assemblage.” This line from The Last Novel appears, with slight variations, in the previous three books by Markson, Vanishing Point (2004), This Is Not A Novel (2001), and Reader’s Block (1996). The removal of elements familiar from other genres, especially those associated with print fiction, places Markson, surprisingly, among the forebearers of electronic literature – where precisely those narrative, plot, and character elements have been lost. The attribution would shock Markson, who composed each of his books from note cards transferred to a “typing machine” – in the words of one youthful admirer, who had probably never heard the word “typewriter” (Markson 2005). Each Markson novel that’s not one, though written in the same unvarying mode, features dramatic, and dramatically different, insights and endings. The narrator of Reader’s Block consigns the previous musings to the “wastebasket” – the final word, set on a line of its own at the end of Reader’s Block. The Vanishing Point author figure, lucid throughout, glimpses the start of Alzheimer’s in that book’s final pages. The author figure in The Last Novel, returning to an earlier citation from Jan van Eyck, offers an apologia for the minimal turn in his art: Als ick kan. Which Novelist finds himself several times repeating, even while not even sure in what language – is it six-hundred-year-old Flemish? And uncertain as to why he is caught up by van Eyck’s use of it. That’s it, I can do no more? All I have left? I can go no further? Als ick kan?
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In life, Markson showed no sign of Alzheimer’s. His living memory – in fact, his friendship over half a century with most major writers of his era, and his gifts as a raconteur – remained a rich resource for visitors who were frequently, and courteously, received in his Greenwich Village apartment. The modernist aesthetic, since T. S. Eliot, refuses the personal: the “individual talent” must not get in the way of the art. Markson remained true to the aesthetic, and the tradition. David Markson died on June 4, 2010, at the age of 82. SEE ALSO: Gaddis, William (AF); Lowry, Malcolm (BIF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Dempsey, P. (2005). Novelist of Shreds and Patches: The Fiction of David Markson. Hollins Critic, 42(4), 1–13. Green, D. (2003). Postmodern American Fiction. Antioch Review, 61(4), 729–41. Markson, D. (1970). Going Down. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Markson, D. (1977). Springer’s Progress. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Markson, D. (1978). Malcolm Lowry’s Volcano: Myth, Symbol, Meaning. New York: Times Books. Markson, D. (1988). Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archives. Markson, D. (1993). Collected Poems. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archives. Markson, D. (1996). Reader’s Block. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archives. Markson, D. (2001). This Is Not A Novel. Washington, DC: Counterpoint. Markson, D. (2004). Vanishing Point. Washington, DC: Shoemaker and Hoard. Markson, D. (2005). An Interview With David Markson. Bookslut. At www.bookslut.com/features/ 2005_07_005963.php, accessed Jan. 12, 2010. Markson, D. (2006). Epigraph for a Tramp [1959]. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker and Hoard. Markson, D. (2006). Epigraph for a Dead Beat [1961]. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker and Hoard. Markson, D. (2007). The Last Novel. Washington, DC: Shoemaker and Hoard. Markson, D. (2008). The Ballad of Dingus McGee [1965]. Berkeley: Counterpoint. Tabbi, J. (1990a). David Markson: An Introduction. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 10(2), 91–103.
Tabbi, J. (1990b). An Interview With David Markson. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 10(2), 104–17. Tabbi, J. (1997). Solitary Inventions: David Markson at the End of the Line. Modern Fiction Studies, 43, 745–72.
Marshall, Paule HELLEN LEE-KELLER
Paule Marshall is one of the most important US writers addressing the legacy of the African diaspora in the Americas in the second half of the twentieth century. Spanning nearly 50 years, beginning with the short story “The Valley Between” (1954), Marshall’s works consistently focus on the daily lives of working-class and middle-class minority women, the difficulties facing West Indian immigrants to the United States, and the legacy of the slave trade in the Americas. In addition to five novels, Marshall has published several collections of novellas and short stories, a memoir, and many speeches and lectures. Her short stories are regularly included in literary anthologies. Born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn, New York on April 9, 1929 to Barbadian immigrants Samuel and Ada Burke, Marshall grew up in the aftermath of the stock market crash of 1929 and then during the Great Depression. She graduated from Brooklyn College in 1953 and pursued graduate studies at Hunter College. She married Kenneth Marshall in 1950, and they had one son before divorcing in 1963. Marshall’s major contribution to American letters is that she brings to light the specificities of national, linguistic, and cultural origins of and differences among African Americans in the United States. By focusing on West Indian immigrants, she stresses the limitations of conceiving of African diaspora in the Americas as a monolithic phenomenon. Her attention to the particularities of West Indians as a subgroup of African Americans requires readers to recognize intraracial as well as interracial conflicts. It was only accidentally that, as an adolescent, she stumbled upon the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar in the Macon Street branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, an event which inspired her to
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MARSHALL, PAULE
become a writer. Her first job was as a writer for Our World, a magazine aimed at a black reading audience. Due to the lack of exposure to black writings and literature as a youth, her main influences on writing her first novel were the Bildungsromanen of Thomas Mann. It was only later, through self-education, that she drew upon black writers, such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Ralph Ellison. An important element of Marshall’s fiction is her ability to imagine and dramatize the hardships facing African Caribbean immigrants to the United States. Marshall’s attention to dialogue, character development, and storytelling brings alive unique perspectives from a variety of social, racial, national, and gendered positions. While Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), a coming-of-age story of a young African American woman growing up among a community of Barbadian immigrants in Brooklyn, offered a semiautobiographical perspective, Marshall’s other works clearly illustrate her agility in crafting multiple points of view. For example, while her first short story describes the growing frustration and eventual freedom of a middle-class white woman, her most recent novel, The Fisher King (2000), is a tersely written novel about intergenerational family conflict that takes place in New York and Paris as told from the perspective of an 8-year-old boy. In her epic The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), Marshall delivers a sharp criticism of the economic and political postcolonial strife in the Caribbean nations and of US cultural and economic interference impeding the autonomy of the island nations. Marshall’s other novels are Praisesong for the Widow (1983a), a saga of a middle-class African American widow who takes a Caribbean cruise vacation only to find herself coming into cultural and spiritual awareness in Grenada; and Daughters (1991), a story about a young immigrant woman from the fictional island of Triunion, who must come to terms with the women in her extended family. Among her short stories, “Reena,” “Merle,” “To Da-Duh: In Memoriam,” and “Some Get Wasted” are the most widely anthologized. Marshall has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961, a Ford Foundation Grant in 1963, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 1967, and a MacArthur Founda-
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tion Award in 1992. She won the Rosenthal Foundation Award for the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1962 for Soul Clap Hands and Sing, the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award in 1984 for Praisesong for the Widow, and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature in 1989 for Brown Girl, Brownstones and Praisesong for the Widow. In 1994, she was named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library. Marshall has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University; the University of California, Berkeley; the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; and Yale University. She currently teaches creative writing at New York University and holds the Helen Gould Sheppard Chair of Literature and Culture. SEE ALSO: Ellison, Ralph (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); West Indian Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Coser, S. (1994). Bridging the Americas: The Literature of Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. DeLamotte, E. C. (1998). Places of Silence, Journeys of Freedom. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Denniston, D. (1995). The Fiction of Paule Marshall. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Gikandi, S. (1992). Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hathaway, H. (1999). Caribbean Wave: Relocating Claude McKay and Paule Marshall. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Marshall, P. (1959). Brown Girl, Brownstones. New York: Random House. Marshall, P. (1961). Soul Clap Hands and Sing. New York: Atheneum. Marshall, P. (1969). The Chosen Place, the Timeless People. New York: Vintage. Marshall, P. (1983a). Praisesong for the Widow. New York: Penguin. Marshall, P. (1983b). Reena and Other Stories. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press. Marshall, P. (1985). Merle: A Novella and Other Stories. London: Virago. Marshall, P. (1991). Daughters. New York: Plume.
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Marshall, P. (2000). The Fisher King. New York: Scribner’s. Marshall, P. (2001). From Poets in the Kitchen. Callaloo, 24(2), 627–33. Marshall, P. (2008). Triangular Road: A Memoir. New York: Basic Civitas. Pettis, J. (1991–2). A MELUS Interview: Paule Marshall. MELUS, 17(4), 117–29. Pettis, J. (1995). Toward Wholeness in Paule Marshall’s Fiction. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Maso, Carole ROBIN SILBERGLEID
Carole Maso is widely known as a feminist experimental writer and postmodernist, though her relationship to the publishing industry has been fraught. Her work foregrounds issues of personal and cultural loss and trauma, particularly the Holocaust and the AIDS pandemic. The author of six works of fiction and three works of nonfiction, as well as numerous pieces of short fiction and criticism, Maso is a writer’s writer who takes language itself as a major subject matter. Born March 9, 1956 in Paterson, New Jersey, Maso attended Vassar College and held a series of odd jobs before publishing Ghost Dance in 1986. Much of her work is metafictional, incorporating self-reflexive discussion of the possibilities of writing about loss and desire and questioning the usefulness of traditional narrative forms. Maso’s novels are highly intertextual, whether through subtle allusion or blatant parody, and most of her characters are artists, writers, or professors. Characterizing herself as a “lyric artist who works in prose,” Maso’s fiction fits within the tradition of the lyrical novel or the modernist notion of spatial form. While her work is known for its formal experimentation, each novel takes a different strategy in its critique of narrative and exploration of lyricism. Anti-narrative and lyricism in Maso’s books are connected thematically to loss and grief, on the one hand, and female sexuality and desire on the other. Although she is not a writer of strict historiographic metafiction, her books are nonetheless historically grounded. The personal tragedies of her protagonists are tied to the major traumas of the twentieth century. Ghost Dance (1986), a book in five parts, is organized around
central image patterns, as protagonist Vanessa comes to terms with the unexpected death of her mother in the explosion of a Ford Pinto; it takes its title from Native American mourning rituals. Similarly, The Art Lover (1990) is a multileveled narrative of loss, centered around novelist Caroline, whose work-in-progress forms part of the fiction, and who searches for a way to work through both her friend’s AIDS diagnosis and the recent death of her father. The novel radically breaks from the fiction to incorporate elements of autobiography, as Maso devotes the penultimate section to the AIDS-related death of her friend, artist Gary Falk. Its serious interrogation of the efficacy of art in a time of grief sets up The American Woman in the Chinese Hat (1994), which features a writer visiting France and grieving the break-up of her romantic relationship. American Woman is Maso’s barest narrative, mirroring Catherine’s breakdown and loss of faith in words. AVA (1993) is the most radical of Maso’s novels, virtually devoid of plot; instead, like Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, it is composed as a series of short fragments of Ava Klein’s memory on the last day of her life: snippets of poems she recalls, favorite quotations, images of her husbands and lovers. Haunted by the deaths of Ava’s family members in Treblinka, the book offers an example of post-Holocaust narrative and situates itself consciously against the writing of Anne Frank, Claude Lanzmann, and Paul Celan. Maso’s most intertextual book, AVA features a substantial “sources” section, inviting her readers to gather the books Ava has read. In direct opposition to the open, reader-centered form of AVA, Defiance (1998) offers a fierce parody of narrative convention; its heroine, Bernadette O’Brien, is a professor on death row for murdering two of her students. Forced to write from her cell, she likewise describes plot-driven narrative as a “vise” or “prison.” Not surprisingly, given her characters’ continued interrogation of the possibilities of narrative fiction, Maso’s three most recent book-length works have been pieces of non-fiction that bridge creative and critical writing. In Break Every Rule (2000a), Maso collects pieces that explain her development as a writer and reflect on the state of twentieth-century literary production. The Room Lit by Roses (2000b) tells the story of Maso’s
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MATHEWS, HARRY
pregnancy and the birth of her daughter. Yet rather than a straightforward journalistic account, the book considers questions of narrative form and the fragmented quality of diaries themselves, exploring reproduction as metaphor for narrative, and narrative as metaphor for reproduction. Her book on Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, Beauty Is Convulsive (2002), brings together poetry, diary, and criticism as an homage to Kahlo and consideration of feminist/female artistic production. Influenced by feminist writers and thinkers including Virginia Woolf, Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Nathalie Sarraute, Maso defines one of her major projects as locating a space for female experience in writing. The winner of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for fiction, Maso is currently professor of literary arts at Brown University. She continues to work on the triptych The Bay of Angels, of which AVA is a part. SEE ALSO: Gender and the Novel (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Woolf, Virginia (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Cooley, N. (1995). Carole Maso: An Interview. American Poetry Review, 24(2), 32–5. Harris, V. F. (ed.) (1997). Special Issue on Carole Maso. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 17(3), 104–215. Maso, C. (1986). Ghost Dance. San Francisco: North Point. Maso, C. (1990). The Art Lover. San Francisco: North Point. Maso, C. (1993). AVA. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive. Maso, C. (1994). The American Woman in the Chinese Hat. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive. Maso, C. (1996). Aureole. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco. Maso, C. (1998). Defiance. New York: E. P. Dutton. Maso, C. (2000a). Break Every Rule: Essays on Language, Longing and Moments of Desire. Washington, DC: Counterpoint. Maso, C. (2000b). The Room Lit by Roses: A Journal of Pregnancy and Birth. Washington, DC: Counterpoint. Maso, C. (2002). Beauty Is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo. Washington, DC: Counterpoint. Quinn, R. G. (2001). “We Were Working on an Erotic Song Cycle”: Reading Carole Maso’s AVA as the Poetics of Female Italian-American Cultural and Sexual Identity. MELUS, 26(1), 91–113. Silbergleid, R. (1999). “We Perished, Each Alone”: Loss and Lyricism in Woolf, Maso, and Young. In
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J. McVicker & L. Davis (eds.), Virginia Woolf and Communities: Selected Papers From the Eighth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. St. Louis, MO: Pace University Press, pp. 57–64. Silbergleid, R. (2007). “Treblinka, a Rather Musical Word”: Carole Maso’s Post-Holocaust Narrative. Modern Fiction Studies, 53(1), 1–26. Stirling, G. (1998a). Exhausting Heteronarrative: The American Woman in the Chinese Hat. Modern Fiction Studies, 44(4), 935–58. Stirling, G. (1998b). Mourning and Metafiction: Carole Maso’s The Art Lover. Contemporary Literature, 39(4), 586–613. Worthington, M. (2000). Posthumous Posturing: The Subversive Power of Death in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Studies in the Novel, 32(2), 243–63.
Mathews, Harry DAVID W. MADDEN
Harry Mathews is a remarkably versatile writer in a range of genres – novels, short stories, poetry, essays, translations, and memoir. He has written complex, challenging metafictions, and though he rejects the label, his works have been in the vanguard of American postmodernism. Harry Mathews was born February 14, 1930 in New York City and attended exclusive schools, including Princeton, which he left his sophomore year to join the Navy. He received his BA from Harvard University in 1952 and immigrated to Europe, spending most of his time in Paris, where he joined a number of avant garde writers and became the only American admitted to the French literary society, Oulipo. His first novel, The Conversions (1962), begins with an air of mystery as an unnamed narrator is invited to a wealthy scion’s mansion and challenged to interpret the engravings on an ancient adze, which he wins after a bizarre contest. A day or so later, the scion dies and bequeaths all his estate to the holder of the adze who must solve three riddles. The bulk of the novel is taken up by the narrator’s complicated search for answers and ultimate frustration that the entire enterprise may have been a ruse. More important is the novel’s construction, which relies on metafictional forays through letters, documents, paintings, films, and stories within stories.
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Tlooth (1966) also involves quests and journeys and likewise centers on an ambiguous narrator, who the reader assumes is male but is eventually revealed to be a woman who is incarcerated in a Russian prison and plots the assassination of Evelyn Roak, a surgeon who has mistakenly amputated some of the violinist—narrator’s fingers. After international travels and numerous fictional digressions, the narrator catches up with Roak, discovers she has a fatal disease, and allows fate to take its course. Where the first two novels experimented with the detective and picaresque genres, The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium (1975) is an epistolary exchange between a pair of lovers, Zachary McCaltex and Twang, his Asian wife. Once again a byzantine plot revolves around discovery of a hidden treasure that takes the protagonists around the world and leads to what appears to be the dissolution of their relationship. As in his other novels, this work concludes elliptically. The emphasis in all three novels on puzzles and games is reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov’s elaborate verbal stratagems, and the incorporation of actual and invented history parallels the experiments of Thomas Pynchon. Cigarettes (1988a) revolves around another puzzle as a group of characters move in and out of the life of a woman named Elizabeth, the subject of a destroyed portrait that exists only as a copy. The novel shuttles back and forth between the pre- and postwar years of the wellheeled and unscrupulous in New York. While narrators in the first three novels occupy the center of narrative attention, neither Cigarettes’ narrator, Lewis Lewison, nor any other character can be described as the center or protagonist, thus Mathews challenges a central tenet of most fictions. The novel further extends his use of stories within stories and narrative fragments to decenter the reader and force more active narrative engagement. The Journalist (1994) once more revolves around the writings of a subjective narrator, this time a middle-aged man who keeps a journal in which he ponders questions large and small and gradually becomes so immersed in what he hopes is a comprehensive account that he loses touch with any world outside of words. Mathews foregrounds, perhaps more overtly than in any other novel, metafictional concerns as his protag-
onist obsesses over art, its materials, and its creation. My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973 (2005) is a fictionalized memoir of what became a fairly widespread suspicion that Mathews himself was a CIA agent. S: Semaines du Suzanne (1997 [1991]), originally published in French, is a novella of which Mathews is one of seven contributors that further underscores the writer’s devotion to fragmented fiction and the gamesmanship of narrative composition. Mathews has been something of a cult favorite to a devoted cadre of readers and been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts grant for fiction writing (1982) and a National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Prize for Fiction (1991). He has taught at Bennington and Hamilton Colleges and Columbia University. SEE ALSO: The Avant Garde Novel (AF); Nabokov, Vladimir (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS James, A. (2008). The Maltese and the Mustard Fields: Oulipian Translation. SubStance, 37(1), 134–47. Leamon, W. (1993). Harry Mathews. New York: Twayne. Mathews, H. (1962). The Conversions. New York: Random House. Mathews, H. (1966). Tlooth. New York: Paris Review/ Doubleday. Mathews, H. (1974). The Planisphere. Providence, RI: Burning Deck. Mathews, H. (1975). The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium. New York: Harper. Mathews, H. (1980). Country Cooking and Other Stories. Providence, RI: Burning Deck. Mathews, H. (1987). Armenian Papers. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mathews, H. (1988a). Cigarettes. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Mathews, H. (1988b). The Orchard. Flint, MI: Bamberger. Mathews, H. (1988c). Singular Pleasures. New York: Grenfell. Mathews, H. (1988d). Twenty Lines a Day. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive. Mathews, H. (1991a). The American Experience. London: Atlas.
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Mathews, H. (1991b). Immeasurable Distances. Venice, CA: Lapis. Mathews, H. (1994). The Journalist. Boston: David Godine. Mathews, H. (1997). S: Semaines du Suzane [1991]. Cambridge, MA: Lumen. Mathews, H. (1999). The Way Home: Collected Longer Prose. London: Atlas. Mathews, H. (2002). The Human Country: New and Collected Stories. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Mathews, H. (2005). My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. O’Brien, J. (ed.) (1987). Harry Mathews. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 7(3), 6–227. Stonehill, B. (1982). On Harry Mathews. Chicago Review, 33(2), 107–11.
Maupin, Armistead SAMUEL GAUSTAD
Armistead Maupin, an openly gay writer, focuses on realistic portrayals of marginal characters, including gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, African Americans, and dwarves. He creates unique non-biological family structures and also attacks hypocrisy by dealing with non-mainstream individuals, deftly intertwining their stories within a larger societal framework. Additionally, Maupin includes references to contemporary settings, current political events, and popular fashions, so that fictional time feels like “real” time. Because of this, his works function as a subtle catalogue of political and popular culture. Born in Washington, DC on May 13, 1944, Maupin, the eldest of three children, was raised in Raleigh, North Carolina. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, graduating in 1966. Following service in the US Navy, Maupin worked as a journalist for a brief time in South Carolina before relocating to San Francisco as an agency writer for the Associated Press. Maupin’s acclaimed Tales of the City series was born in San Francisco in 1974, where he lived with his partner and manager, Terry Anderson, for many years, and is currently married to Christopher Turner. Inspired by the serialized fiction of Charles Dickens, Maupin’s first five volumes of the series (Tales of the City (1978), More Tales of the City (1980), Further Tales of the City (1982), Babycakes
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(1984), and Significant Others (1987)) were initially published in the San Francisco Chronicle followed by the San Francisco Examiner. Subsequently, each volume was published as a novel, beginning in 1978. Sure of You, the final volume of the opus, was published as an independent novel in 1989. Set predominantly in San Francisco and functioning as a social history of the city, Tales contains several characters who run throughout the series: Michael Tolliver, Anna Madrigal, Mary Ann Singleton, Brian Hawkins, and Mona Ramsey. Each is representative of a different faction: gay, transsexual, female and male heterosexual, and bisexual. Headed by landlady and matriarch Mrs. Madrigal, these characters form the nonbiological nuclear family of 28 Barbary Lane, the setting for much of the action of the first three volumes. Anna Madrigal functions as the voice of experience and wisdom throughout the series. Maupin uses Michael as his raissoneur, creating a gay Everyman to voice a gay perspective. Of particular importance was Maupin’s inclusion of the AIDS epidemic, beginning with Babycakes; he was one of the first fiction writers to address the topic openly. In treating the subject, however, Maupin never sentimentalizes or allows his characters to become maudlin. Maupin’s attack on Hollywood hypocrisy (forcing gays to stay closeted) is introduced in Babycakes, when Michael becomes intimately involved with a closeted film star, referred to only as ____. This plot turn was based on Maupin’s involvement with the late Rock Hudson. In Maybe the Moon (1992), Maupin again offered a poignant combination of pathos and wit. His protagonist is a Jewish dwarf, Cadence “Cady” Roth (based on Tamara De Treaux, who appeared in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial), who struggles as an actress in Hollywood. Once more, Maupin focuses on various marginalized characters, and a strong surrogate family is created. He uses three gay characters, Jeff, Callum, and Leonard, as foils for one another, contrasting gays’ means of dealing with the heterosexual mainstream. Maupin again highlights Hollywood’s double standards in dealing with those outside the “norm.” Callum, as a young film star, remains closeted, while Cady’s journal, when turned into a film, is completely altered because of Hollywood’s assumption of mainstream audiences’ lack of comfort in dealing with dwarves. The result is an account of
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Cady’s life in which she becomes a non-essential character. In 2000, Maupin published the semiautobiographical and darker The Night Listener, whose central character, loosely based on Maupin, is Gabriel Noone, a National Public Radio star. Gabriel is gay, a resident of San Francisco, and estranged from his partner of 10 years, Jess Carmody. He is befriended by Pete Lomax, a sexually abused 13-year-old who has been adopted by Donna Lomax, a blind doctor. The contact between Gabriel, Donna, and Pete is initially via telephone but, because Pete and Donna are shrouded in such mystery, Gabriel journeys to Wisconsin in an attempt to meet Pete in person, which never happens. Pete and Donna vanish. Once again, Maupin deals with idiosyncratic marginal characters, family constructs, and, to a lesser extent, Hollywood’s refusal to deal with homosexuality honestly. The long-awaited Michael Tolliver Lives (2007) is a coda to the Tales series. The title, which refers to the character’s HIV-positive diagnosis in the fifth volume of Tales, underscores Maupin’s positive outlook in addressing AIDS, offering a protagonist who, surviving for nearly two decades, is happy, healthy, and responsibly sexually active. In this most recent work, Maupin once more addresses marginal characters and hypocrisy, although now the religious hypocrisy of the South. Other original Tales characters return, including the sixtyish Brian, the physically fragile but mentally sharp Mrs. Madrigal, and Mary Ann. Worthy of note are the filmed versions of the first three volumes of the Tales of the City series, produced as a miniseries by PBS and Showtime, and The Night Listener, adapted as a feature film in 2006 with the screenplay by Maupin and Terry Anderson. SEE ALSO: Queer Modernism (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Crawford, S. (1998). No Time to Be Idle: The Serial Novel and Popular Imagination. World and I, 13(11), 323–31. Gale, P. (1999). Armistead Maupin. Bath: Absolute Press.
Gillespie, E. (1990). Armistead Maupin at Tale’s End. San Francisco Review of Books, 14(4), 18–20. Hunt, S. (1992). An Interview With Armistead Maupin. Christopher Street, 14(192) 8–12. Maupin, A. (1978). Tales of the City. New York: HarperCollins. Maupin, A. (1980). More Tales of the City. New York: HarperCollins. Maupin, A. (1982). Further Tales of the City. New York: HarperCollins. Maupin, A. (1984). Babycakes. New York: HarperCollins. Maupin, A. (1987). Significant Others. New York: HarperCollins. Maupin, A. (1989). Sure of You. New York: HarperCollins. Maupin, A. (1992). Maybe the Moon. New York: HarperCollins. Maupin, A. (1995). Foreword. In D. Deitcher (ed.), The Question of Equality: Gay and Lesbian Gay Politics in America Since Stonewall. New York: Scribner’s. Maupin, A. (2000). The Night Listener. New York: HarperCollins. Maupin, A. (2007). Michael Tolliver Lives. New York: HarperCollins. Warhol, R. (1999). Making “Gay” and “Lesbian” into Household Words: How Serial Form Works in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. Contemporary Literature, 40(3), 378–95.
McCarthy, Cormac JAKE MATTOX
Cormac McCarthy is one of the most critically acclaimed and popularly successful writers in modern US fiction over the past 40 years. Most often set within the geographic South and West, his novels usually feature violent plots conveyed through dense prose and intertwined with philosophical and metaphysical investigations. His body of work spans numerous forms and genres, including 10 novels, two plays, and one screenplay, and his works have been adapted to the stage and screen, including No Country for Old Men (2005), which won the Academy Award for Best Film in 2007. Charles Joseph McCarthy, Jr. was born in Providence, Rhode Island on July 20, 1933, and he and his family moved to Tennessee in 1937. He enrolled at the University of Tennessee in
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Knoxville from 1951 to 1952 and again after serving for four years in the US Air Force. He did not graduate, but during his time there he published two stories in The Phoenix, the student literary magazine. He won the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960 and published his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, in 1965. He has been married three times and has two children; he is known for guarding his privacy and avoiding public appearances. His work is often noted for its debts to and intertextual connections with canonical US authors such as William Faulkner and Herman Melville, as well as writers and philosophers from the European tradition. McCarthy’s novels often feature the literal and metaphorical peregrinations of uprooted and alienated young men through an intensely violent and seemingly meaningless world, and they engage with many fundamental issues of Western thought: epistemology, ontology, religion, human agency, the nature of evil, storytelling, and language. Stylistically, much of McCarthy’s fiction features difficult vocabulary, regional and local dialects and idiolects, and episodic story lines rather than fluid narrative. His novels usually leave readers without explicit explanations as to why characters act as they do, or how various plot elements relate to one another in time and space. McCarthy’s characters often seem to lack the ability or desire to reflect upon their own situations, and they struggle to make meaning in a world in which violence is apparently the ultimate arbiter and only constant in human affairs. While McCarthy’s narratives usually refuse to reveal much about the interior consciousnesses of characters, the dense poetics of landscape and place – of the exterior world – often provide a surrogate avenue for knowledge about them. Many critics have viewed McCarthy’s career as dividing into two distinct phases: a “Southern” or “Appalachian” phase associated with his residence in Tennessee and other parts of the South, and a focus on “Western” or “border” narratives, linked to McCarthy’s move to Texas in the late 1970s. McCarthy’s first four novels are set in povertyridden Appalachian locales in and around Tennessee and engage with classic Southern literary themes – identified with writers such as Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner – such as violence, redemption, the relationship between
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the Southern past and present, Christian thematics, and an often dark humor. Clear connections to Faulkner are an authenticating regional dialect, an often abstruse syntax, and a pareddown, minimalist punctuation format. McCarthy’s early novels are narratively complex works with shifting points of view and opaquely linked story lines; they present dislocated, alienated characters in a world often framed by violence and transgressive sexualities. The Orchard Keeper (1965) follows John Wesley Rattner, a young man whose mentor is a bootlegger and whose murdered father’s unidentified body lies in a pit watched over by an old recluse in the East Tennessee mountains. Outer Dark (1968) describes the separate but overlapping wanderings of Culla and Rinthy, incestuous siblings in search of their infant, who Culla had left in the wilderness of rural Tennessee to die. The novel engages with questions of the nature of evil, guilt, and the lack of clear moral structures in the world. Child of God (1973), a fragmented novel that begins with a series of multiple, short accounts told by unnamed community narrators, continues these themes by telling of Lester Ballard, a young man who loses his family farm and slips into insanity, murder, and necrophilia. Suttree (1979), the most dense and ambitious of the first four novels, follows Cornelius Suttree, the self-alienated son of a well-to-do family, who has left his wife and child to live a life of squalor and day-to-day survival in the slums of Knoxville in the early 1950s. Suttree resides on a houseboat and subsists by selling the carp and catfish he occasionally catches in the filthy river. His austere poverty and chosen social network of marginalized slum dwellers suggest a rejection of the confident middle-class narrative stressing industry and order. The novel densely packs in episode after extreme episode of drunken binges, violence, sickness, and other reminders of an intense corporeality amidst deep existential despair. Thematically, it deals with the apparent absence of God in the world and the almost unbearable sense of isolation in human existence, even as it suggests the fundamental responsibilities that humans have toward one another. By the time Suttree was published, McCarthy had relocated to the Southwest, and his fiction likewise shifted in geographic scope. His fifth
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novel, Blood Meridian: or, The Evening Redness in the West (1985), follows a character known only as “the kid,” who runs away from his Tennessee home at age 14 and winds up in the border region just after the US–Mexican War (1846–8). The kid joins a vicious gang contracted by the Mexican government to kill as many Apache Indians as possible and bring their scalps in for reward. Drawing heavily on historical sources, the novel is often praised as McCarthy’s finest work, even while it is seen by many as unreadably violent, disturbing, and nihilistic. Like much of McCarthy’s work, it also lacks any developed or interesting female characters. It features one of McCarthy’s most striking creations: a sevenfoot hairless albino known as “the judge,” an impossibly ubiquitous and seemingly immortal giant of a man unmatched in physical and intellectual prowess, whose violent sexuality and sheer enjoyment of his genocidal project are framed as integral to the US conquest of the West. Through the actions of the gang, the novel interrogates, and often challenges, fundamental mythologies depicting the expansion of the nation as a relatively benign process of settling putatively uninhabited territories. In the 1990s, McCarthy achieved popular success with his bestselling Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998). Pretty Horses, which was made into a film in 2000, establishes a break in style in its more accessible attention to some of the elements of the Western or cowboy romance: a young innocent seeking adventure, traversing beautiful if unforgiving landscape, fighting against threats, avenging injustices, and engaging in a forbidden love affair. The novel can also be seen as a pastoral Bildungsroman, as its protagonist, John Grady Cole, is a young Texas horseman who rides to Mexico in 1949 seeking a way of life that is disappearing in the US Southwest. While the text contains many clear links to McCarthy’s previous works, its language is less complex and challenging even as it broadens to reflect the cultural history of its geography by including some dialogue in Spanish. The Crossing tells a closely related tale that takes place several years prior to Pretty Horses; its three main sections follow the three border crossings of Billy Parham, its 16-year-old protagonist. The novel is marked heavily with dense philosophical
investigations, and many of these are related to the epistemological issues surrounding narration and storytelling; in his travels, Billy hears (as many McCarthy protagonists do) a variety of parables and stories from incidental characters such as a gypsy, a shaman, and a blind Mexican revolutionary. Cities of the Plain unites the first two novels of the trilogy. John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are both working for a ranch outside of El Paso approximately three years after the end of Pretty Horses. On a visit across the border, John Grady falls in love with a prostitute named Magdalena, and the narrative follows his attempts to free her. If Pretty Horses began the trilogy drawing upon more conventional and accessible plot and narration, by the end of Cities the themes of existential despair and violence – so prevalent in McCarthy’s previous works – again are foregrounded. Continuing his focus on the border region, McCarthy published his ninth novel, the bestselling No Country for Old Men, in 2005. The work draws from both the crime fiction and Western genres and tells of Llewellyn Moss, a Vietnam veteran who finds more than $2 million at the scene of a drug deal gone awry and must flee a killer hired to track him down. The work also features italicized monologues from the local sheriff, as he struggles with the possibility that the assumptions upholding the Western way of life associated with his family’s history of law enforcement may no longer be valid or effective. McCarthy released The Road in 2006, a postapocalyptic tale of a man and his son walking hundreds of miles through a ruined landscape following an unspecified disaster; a film adaptation appeared in 2009. Focusing in part on the father’s devoted protection of the child, the story thus complicates the theme of paternal abandonment prevalent in much of McCarthy’s fiction. In 2006, McCarthy also published The Sunset Limited, “a novel in dramatic form,” which was staged in Chicago and New York; his first drama was The Stonemason (1994). Also appearing in between the novels of the Border Trilogy was The Gardener’s Son (1996), a screenplay broadcast on PBS in 1977. McCarthy has received much critical recognition for his work. The Orchard Keeper won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for
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the best first novel by an American, and McCarthy received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981. More recently, he received the National Book Award for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for All the Pretty Horses in 1992, and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Road in 2007. SEE ALSO: Border Fictions (AF); Faulkner, William (AF); O’Connor, Flannery (AF); The Road Novel (AF); The Southern Novel (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Arnold, E. T., & Luce, D. C. (eds.) (1999). Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Bell, V. M. (1988). The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Cant, J. (2008). Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism. New York: Routledge. Cormac McCarthy Society. (2008). Cormac McCarthy: A Biography. At www.cormacmccarthy.com/ Biography.htm, accessed June 3, 2008. Guillemin, G. (2004). The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Hall, W., & Wallach, R. (eds.) (2002a). Sacred Violence, vol. 1: Cormac McCarthy’s Appalachian Works, 2nd edn. El Paso: Texas Western Press. Hall, W., & Wallach, R. (eds.) (2002b). Sacred Violence, vol. 2: Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels, 2nd ed. El Paso: Texas Western Press. Holloway, D. (2002). The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Jarrett, R. L. (1997). Cormac McCarthy. New York: Twayne. Lilley, J. D. (ed.) (2002). Cormac McCarthy: New Directions. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Luce, D. C. (2007). Cormac McCarthy: A Bibliography. At www.cormacmccarthy.com/Resources.htm, accessed June 3, 2008. McCarthy, C. (1965). The Orchard Keeper. New York: Random House. McCarthy, C. (1968). Outer Dark. New York: Random House. McCarthy, C. (1973). Child of God. New York: Random House. McCarthy, C. (1979). Suttree. New York: Random House.
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McCarthy, C. (1985). Blood Meridian: or, The Evening Redness in the West. New York: Random House. McCarthy, C. (1992). All the Pretty Horses. New York: Knopf. McCarthy, C. (1994a). The Crossing. New York: Knopf. McCarthy, C. (1994b). The Stonemason. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco. McCarthy, C. (1996). The Gardener’s Son. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco. McCarthy, C. (1998). Cities of the Plain. New York: Knopf. McCarthy, C. (2005). No Country for Old Men. New York: Knopf. McCarthy, C. (2006a). The Road. New York: Knopf. McCarthy, C. (2006b). The Sunset Limited. New York: Vintage. Wallach, R. (ed.) (2000). Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
McCarthy, Mary BRENDA MURPHY
During her lifetime, Mary McCarthy was known first as a public intellectual, the “First Lady of American Letters” (Newsweek 1963), and second as a novelist. Since her death in 1989, McCarthy’s critical reputation has largely been based on her memoirs, particularly Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), as well as her novel The Group (1963a) and several much-anthologized stories. Mary Therese McCarthy was born on June 21, 1912 in Seattle, Washington. The circumstances of her difficult childhood, recounted in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), Cast a Cold Eye (1950), and How I Grew (1987), include the deaths of both of her beloved and doting parents in the influenza epidemic of 1918 and the placing of Mary and her three brothers into the foster care of a relative and her abusive husband in Minneapolis, who provided no emotional warmth and only the barest of physical necessities to the children. This was her Irish Catholic girlhood. When she was 11, Mary was rescued by her AngloProtestant maternal grandfather and taken to live with him and her Jewish grandmother in Seattle. She completed her education at Vassar. McCarthy wrote about Vassar, and its importance in shaping her intellectually, in her memoirs
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and essays. Most significantly, McCarthy’s bestselling novel, The Group, is based on her experiences and those of some classmates in the Vassar class of 1933. The novel covers eight years, from 1933 to 1941, and its detailed, satiric portrait of this group of privileged female college graduates chronicles what she saw as the failure of the progressive ideology of the New Deal to change the lives of these idealistic but spoiled and naive young liberals in any fundamental way. Several other novels helped to establish McCarthy’s reputation as a brilliant stylist, known for her wit and comedic talents as well as her incisive social commentary. The Company She Keeps (1942), originally published as six short stories which share a protagonist, broke new ground with its episodic but carefully crafted structure and the unflinching honesty with which it treated the social, romantic, and sexual relationships in the young New York intellectual milieu in which McCarthy moved. In The Oasis (1949), she satirized the utopian socialism of her Partisan Review colleagues, and in The Groves of Academe (1952), she produced both a memorable academic novel and a satiric exposure of the cynical manipulation of McCarthyism by both Left and Right. A Charmed Life (1955) took aim at the self-involved and irresponsible lives of artists and intellectuals who believe they are exempt from the morality that applies to those who are less talented than they. Her later novels, Birds of America (1971) and Cannibals and Missionaries (1979), examine the psychology of the younger generation dominated by the Vietnam War and of terrorists who hijacked airplanes during the 1970s. While McCarthy’s sharp critical mind is evident in her fiction, it emerged most tellingly in her literary and cultural criticism and her political writing. A five-part series in The Nation when she was 23, “Our Critics, Right or Wrong” (McCarthy & Marshall 1935), established her credentials as what Life magazine was to call the “Lady With a Switchblade” (Life 1964). At the Partisan Review, she was given the seemingly innocuous assignment of theater reviewer, but her acute and acerbic “theatre chronicles” soon became a major draw for the magazine. Major collections of her wide-ranging cultural criticism include On the Contrary (1961), Mary McCarthy’s Theatre Chronicles, 1937–62 (1963b), and The Writing on
the Wall (1970). Always a passionate political writer, McCarthy became intensely interested in the US involvement in Vietnam in the early 1960s, and traveled there twice to observe the situation first-hand. The result was her books Vietnam (1967), Hanoi (1968), and Medina (1972). During the Watergate scandals, she wrote The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits (1974). Mary McCarthy, who lived in many houses in her lifetime, never really found a home until she and her fourth husband, James West, settled into a life that moved between their apartment in Paris and their house in Castine, Maine. McCarthy loved travel, and throughout her life was never stationary for long. Her peripatetic life fed her fiction as well as her vivid travel writing, most notably in Venice Observed (1956) and The Stones of Florence (1959). SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Abrams, S. F. (2004). Mary McCarthy: Gender, Politics, and the Post-War Intellectual. New York: Peter Lang. Brightman, C. (1992). Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World. New York: Clarkson Potter. Brightman, C. (ed.) (1995). Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949–1975. New York: Harcourt Brace. Gelderman, C. (1988). Mary McCarthy: A Life. New York: St Martin’s. Gelderman, C. W. (1991). Conversations With Mary McCarthy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. McCarthy, M. (1942). The Company She Keeps. New York: Simon and Schuster. McCarthy, M. (1949). The Oasis. New York: Random House. McCarthy, M. (1950). Cast a Cold Eye. New York: Harcourt Brace. McCarthy, M. (1952). The Groves of Academe. New York: Harcourt Brace. McCarthy, M. (1955). A Charmed Life. New York: Harcourt Brace. McCarthy, M. (1956). Venice Observed: Comments on Venetian Civilization. New York: Reynal. McCarthy, M. (1957). Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. New York: Harcourt Brace. McCarthy, M. (1959). The Stones of Florence. New York: Harcourt Brace.
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MCCULLERS, CARSON
McCarthy, M. (1961). On the Contrary. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. McCarthy, M. (1963a). The Group. New York: Harcourt Brace. McCarthy, M. (1963b). Mary McCarthy’s Theatre Chronicles 1937–1962. New York: Farrar, Straus. McCarthy, M. (1967). Vietnam. New York: Harcourt Brace. McCarthy, M. (1968). Hanoi. New York: Harcourt Brace. McCarthy, M. (1970). The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace. McCarthy, M. (1971). Birds of America. New York: Harcourt Brace. McCarthy, M. (1972). Medina. New York: Harcourt Brace. McCarthy, M. (1974). The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits. New York: Harcourt Brace. McCarthy, M. (1979). Cannibals and Missionaries. New York: Harcourt Brace. McCarthy, M. (1987). How I Grew. San Diego: Harcourt Brace. McCarthy, M. (1992). Intellectual Memoirs: New York 1936–1938. New York: Harcourt Brace. McCarthy, M., & Marshall, M. (1935). Our Critics, Right or Wrong. Nation 141(3674), 654. Murphy, B. (ed.) (2004). Mary McCarthy [special issue]. Lit: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, 15(1).
McCullers, Carson SARAH GLEESON-WHITE
Carson McCullers has been described as one of the United States’ greatest living writers (Williams (1986 [1950])) and as “a minor writer” (Fiedler 142). Although her reputation today lies somewhere between these two poles, she remains one of the most significant writers of the Southern Renaissance. McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia on February 19, 1917 to Lamar and Marguerite Smith. In 1930, Lula dropped her first name to become Carson, to better reflect what she believed was her proper boyish identity. Two years later, she developed rheumatic fever; left undiagnosed, it led to the many cerebral strokes she suffered throughout her life, eventually paralyzing one side of her body, and causing her death in Nyack, New York on September 29, 1967. McCullers’s imaginative engagement with untenable gender positions, queer sexualities, and physical “freakishness” in
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her writings was thus rehearsed in her own life. Similarly, her support of the Civil Rights Movement enabled “a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race” (Wright 195). McCullers’s elegant prose and her conviction that “[n]ature is not abnormal, only lifelessness is abnormal” (1971, 282) have ensured that her writing resonates with such force and freshness today. In 1934, McCullers left Georgia to study creative writing at Columbia University and New York University. On a visit home, she met Reeves McCullers, an army corporal. They married in 1937 and moved to New York in 1940. Leaving Reeves that same year, she joined the legendary Brooklyn Heights household that included W. H. Auden and Gypsy Rose Lee. She divorced Reeves in 1941, and they remarried in 1945. Reeves, a frustrated writer and, like McCullers, an alcoholic, committed suicide in November 1953. McCullers returned to Nyack with her mother and sister, where she had been living on and off since 1944, and where she would spend the rest of her life. “Wunderkind,” her first publication, foreshadowed the pared-back style, small Southern towns, tomboy protagonists, and themes – adolescence, belonging and lonesomeness, creativity, displaced sexuality, and gender instability – that would define all her writings. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), McCullers’s first novel, was published to critical acclaim, and is arguably her greatest achievement, its stylistic and thematic sophistication belying her 22 years. While Heart portrays a yearning for connection by a tomboy, a deaf-mute, and other townsfolk, it also engages with class and racial unease, and the changing place of women, in the 1930s. Scholars have, until recently, overlooked the novel’s committed aspect, a characteristic of all her writings. Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) is set on a Southern army base in peacetime and narrates the homoerotic and voyeuristic yearnings of a captain for a young private. Reflections was arguably the first Southern novel to discuss homosexuality openly. The Member of the Wedding (1946) concerns a young tomboy’s desire to join her brother and his fiancee’s “we of me.” McCullers adapted it to the stage, and it won a 1950 New York Drama Critics Circle Award.
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Another play, The Square Root of Wonderful (1958), failed to achieve Member’s warm reception. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951a) imagines another “we of me,” between an Amazonian woman, a hunchback, and an ex-convict. Edward Albee adapted Ballad to the stage in 1963. McCullers’s last novel, Clock Without Hands (1961), which deals openly and urgently with segregation and homosexuality, divided the critics: some were critical of its seeming lack of formal coherence, while others embraced it for its incisive social and political commentary. Between the publication of Clock and her death in 1967, McCullers became increasingly ill; although her great productive period was over, she published several short stories and a book of children’s verse, Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a Pig (1964), and started writing her memoirs. After her death, her sister published The Mortgaged Heart (1971), a collection of short stories, poems, articles, and essays. The collection is central to the McCullers canon for its inclusion of those essays in which she reflects on the writing and creative process, as well as her outline of Heart. Almost all of the novels, and some stories, have been adapted to the screen. McCullers received two Guggenheim Fellowships (1942 and 1946) and the 1966 Henry Bellamann Award for her “outstanding contribution to literature.”
McCullers, C. (1951a). The Ballad of the Sad Cafe: The Novels and Stories of Carson McCullers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. McCullers, C. (1951b). The Member of the Wedding: A Play. New York: New Directions. McCullers, C. (1958). The Square Root of Wonderful: A Play. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. McCullers, C. (1961). Clock Without Hands. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. McCullers, C. (1964). Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a Pig. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. McCullers, C. (1971). The Mortgaged Heart (ed. M. G. Smith). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. McCullers, C. (1987). Collected Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. McCullers, C. (1999). Illuminations and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers (ed. C. Dews). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Savigneau, J. (2001). Carson McCullers: A Life (trans. J. E. Howard). London: Women’s Press. Westling, L. (1985). Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Whitt, J. (ed.) (2007). Reflections in a Critical Eye: Essays on Carson McCullers. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Williams, T. (1986). This Book [1950]. In H. Bloom (ed.), Carson McCullers. New York: Chelsea House. Wright, R. (1940). Inner Landscape. New Republic, p. 195 (Aug. 5).
SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (AF); Queer Modernism (AF); The Southern Novel (AF)
McElroy, Joseph
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Carr, V. S. (1985). The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers. New York: Carrol and Graf. Clark, B. L., & Friedman, M. (eds.) (1996). Critical Essays on Carson McCullers. New York: G. K. Hall. Fiedler, L. (1967). Love and Death in the American Novel. London: Jonathan Cape. Gleeson-White, S. (2003). Strange Bodies: Gender and Identity in the Novels of Carson McCullers. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. McCullers, C. (1940). The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. McCullers, C. (1941). Reflections in a Golden Eye. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. McCullers, C. (1946). The Member of the Wedding. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
JOSEPH DEWEY
The construction of identity centers the narratives of Joseph McElroy. The novels themselves are cutting edge – they confront first-time readers with their rich excess, layerings of associational symbols, improvisational feel, and unapologetic scale; these are novels so imposing that they create their own kind of reading dynamic (much like those of others of his generation, most notably Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, and Don DeLillo). Reading McElroy requires diligence, an intellectual curiosity about a range of disciplines (including economics, mathematics, linguistics, biology, cybernetics, and history), a fascination with the sheer volume of data offered by the material world, and, supremely, a love of word play.
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MCELROY, JOSEPH
Yet for all their arch inventiveness, thematically the novels are remarkably traditional: sensitive isolates construct the self through the exertion of memory and intellect via intricate interior monologues that ultimately confirm a global human community of such isolated bits. That humanist faith in the design of complexity distinguishes McElroy from the apocalyptic pessimism and caustic satires of those other experimental novelists of his generation. McElroy, born August 21, 1930, grew up on the boisterous streets of Depression-era Brooklyn Heights. His father, who died when McElroy was 15, was trained in chemistry and urged his precocious son not to limit his intellectual growth to his evident love of novels but to pursue the sciences with equal curiosity. McElroy completed his BA in 1951 from Williams College, his master’s the following year at Columbia (his thesis centered on women in Kafka), and (after a two-year stint in the Coast Guard) his PhD in 1961, also from Columbia University. A career academic, McElroy taught literature for more than 30 years (1964–95) at New York’s Queens College, all the while quietly writing groundbreaking experimental narratives. For instance, in A Smuggler’s Bible (1966), McElroy’s first novel, a man aboard a transatlantic ship works futilely to bring together eight autobiographical chapters, each told from a different perspective of those – neighbors, teachers, and family – who had touched his life. Over the next decade, McElroy published a kind of trilogy – Hind’s Kidnap: A Pastoral on Familiar Airs (1969), Ancient History: A Paraphrase (1971), and Lookout Cartridge (1974) – in which characters who struggle to solve mysteries ultimately must confront the dilemma of identity. In Hind’s Kidnap, a man attempts to find a boy kidnapped years earlier, an obsession that leads the man himself into a dramatic loss of his own psyche (a kind of metaphoric kidnapping) that leaves only the uneasy reward of his awareness expanded into ambiguity. Ancient History, using the metaphors of anthropology to anatomize the complexity of friendship, the viability of memory, and the construction of responsibility (a man, unable to comprehend a friend’s suicide, types the suicide note his friend should have left). In Lookout Cartridge, a documentary filmmaker tries to account for why one of his experimental films has been destroyed, and his expansive narrative of its
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creation leads the eccentric visionary into a transcontinental pilgrimage that becomes in turn an exploration of his own relationships. McElroy deploys a variety of system metaphors – among them, the body, electricity, and computers – to suggest how the appetitive nature of data acquisition can recover intricate patterns without defining any ultimate answers. In Plus (1977), McElroy, using an audacious science fiction premise, pares the process of selfidentity into the elemental. A young engineer, exposed to radiation, agrees to act as guinea pig in an elaborate experiment: his brain will be excised from his dying body and launched into space, kept alive in a nutrient solution. The excised brain, awakening to its own improbable existence, controls the narrative perspective: we share its grasping momentum toward defining its own identity, relearning its memories, and reinvestigating the logic of language until it must concede to its decaying orbit and incinerates during re-entry – but McElroy hints that the apparent catastrophe promises further awakening beyond the check of science or the reach of the senses. Women and Men (1987), McElroy’s landmark achievement, catapults the struggle to construct identity into a transcendental webbing: McElroy tracks the parallel lives of a journalist and a feminist activist who happen to share an apartment building in contemporary Manhattan. The two never actually meet; rather McElroy charts their histories and in doing so recovers intricate associations – scenes, voices, images, and characters – that, across more than a thousand pages, crystallize into fractal patterns that argue the essential connectedness of the human project. McElroy followed that massive narrative with two far more accessible offerings (one a Bildungsroman, the other a love story) that nevertheless confirm the same breathtaking vision. In The Letter Left to Me (1988), a 15-year-old wrestles with the implications of a letter left to him by his dead father, a conventional wisdom-epistle that advises the boy to appreciate every moment. But as others read the letter – it is copied and disseminated initially to the boy’s family but ultimately to his entire college freshman class – McElroy elaborates that private communication into an accidental conspiracy of readers who draw a range of conclusions about the letter, leaving
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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the man-child both apart and a part, suspended between adolescence and adulthood. In 2003’s Actress in the House, the lives of a Manhattan lawyer and an aspiring actress half his age briefly collide (a one-week affair ignited by the lawyer’s visceral reaction to the actress taking a hard slap during a performance). The narrative discloses how these two lives, each bent on exorcising the pain in their pasts, come nevertheless to defy the centripetal pull of the self and move outward into a dynamic that resonates with global energies. McElroy’s fictions ultimately dismiss the integrity of the self as the hobgoblin of small minds – widen that perspective, they argue, and discover an integrity to facticity. That embracing sensibility permits the dreary world of the immediate to ascend into the transcendent, an un-ironic (even giddy) celebration of order that gives McElroy’s novels, despite their intricate execution and their evident gravitas, a defiant optimism. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); DeLillo, Don (AF); Gaddis, William (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Pynchon, Thomas (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Hantke, S. (1994). Conspiracy and Paranoia in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Don DeLillo and Joseph McElroy. New York: Peter Lang. Karl, F. (1983). American Fictions – 1940–1980: A Comprehensive History and Critical Evaluation. New York: Harper and Row, pp. 370–83. LeClair, T. (1983). An Interview With Joseph McElroy. In T. LeClair, with L. McCaffrey, (eds.), Anything Can Happen: Interviews With Contemporary American Novelists. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 235–51. LeClair, T. (1989). The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 131–74. McElroy, J. (1966). A Smuggler’s Bible. New York: Harcourt. McElroy, J. (1969). Hind’s Kidnap: A Pastoral on Familiar Airs. New York: Harper and Row. McElroy, J. (1971). Ancient History: A Paraphrase. New York: Knopf. McElroy, J. (1974). Lookout Cartridge. New York: Knopf.
McElroy, J. (1977). Plus. New York: Knopf. McElroy, J. (1987). Women and Men. New York: Knopf. McElroy, J. (1988). The Letter Left to Me. New York: Knopf. McElroy, J. (2004). Actress in the House. New York: Knopf. Porush, D. (1985). The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction. New York: Methuen. Review of Contemporary Fiction. (1990). Joseph McElroy [special issue]. 10(1). Tanner, T. (1976). Toward an Ultimate Topography: The Work of Joseph McElroy. TriQuarterly, 36, 214–52.
McKay, Claude LEAH READE ROSENBERG
A poet, novelist, journalist, and political radical, Claude Festus McKay made profound contributions to the formation of the Caribbean, Harlem Renaissance, modernist, Negritude, and queer literary traditions. He belongs to the tradition of black Atlantic public intellectuals, such as C. L. R. James, who brought a Marxist critique to the politics of race and art and challenged dominant conceptions of modernity by placing the black proletariat and peasantry at its center. McKay was born on September 15, 1889 to prosperous farmers in Clarendon Parish, Jamaica and received an intellectually open education. In 1912, he immigrated to the United States, and with his famous sonnet “If we must die” (1919) established himself as the leading black poet in the United States, a position reinforced with Harlem Shadows (1922), a founding text of the Harlem Renaissance. He soon gained a reputation as a prominent political radical, and in 1919 traveled to London, where he published a volume of poetry, Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (1920). After returning to the States, he traveled to Moscow in 1922 for the Fourth Congress of the Third International, but because of his association with communism, was barred re-entry into the United States, and Britain banned him from its colonial territories. Between 1923 and 1934 he lived in France and Morocco and traveled to other countries, and wrote three novels and a collection of short stories published in New York as part of the Harlem Renaissance.
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MCKAY, CLAUDE
In 1934, McKay was able to return to the United States, where he suffered financial and health problems, converted to Catholicism, and died May 22, 1948. During this period he wrote two memoirs, A Long Way From Home (1937) and My Green Hills of Jamaica (1979a); Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940), an analysis of the history, culture, and politics of Harlem; and a large body of poetry, most notably the “cycle manuscript,” a collection of 54 poems. McKay’s first two books of poetry, Songs of Jamaica (1912) and Constab Ballads (1912), are written in Jamaica Creole and heroic couplets. They reflect both Jamaican peasant culture and his training in British romanticism and German philosophy. Featuring peasant speakers, McKay’s dialect verse portrayed the hardship of peasant labor and the satisfaction Jamaicans took in their work. McKay also celebrated contemporary and historical militancy; for instance, his prize-winning poem, “George William Gordon to the Oppressed Natives,” commemorated the 1865 Morant Bay peasant rebellion. Published in the local press and presented at literary and debating clubs, these poems participated in an emergent cultural nationalism in Jamaica and provoked debate about the legitimacy of “dialect” as a literary language. In a significant break from his dialect verse, McKay established himself as the leading black poet in the United States with the sonnet and other poetic forms. McKay published in the journals such as the Liberator and African American publications such as Alain Locke’s The New Negro anthology (1926). Despite their formal conservatism, McKay’s poems are powerful portrayals of black humanity which condemn lynching, working-class exploitation, and colonialism. “If we must die,” for instance, decries the violence against returning African American servicemen and union workers in the summer of 1919. “Harlem Dancer” and “Harlem Shadows” portray African American prostitutes as complex, alienated human beings, oppressed by poverty and shame. McKay wrote three influential novels: Home to Harlem (1928), regarded as the first bestselling novel by an African American author; Banjo: A Story Without a Plot (1929), which inspired Aime Cesaire and Leopold Senghor in establishing the Negritude movement; and Banana Bottom
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(1933), a foundational Caribbean novel. In these works, McKay returns to the vernacular in diction and in subject. Centered on the relationship between a Haitian poet and working-class Harlemites, Home to Harlem presents Harlem as an international, proletarian, and polymorphously sexual “Negro metropolis” whose soul and power lie in its jazz, brothels, cabarets, and laboring classes. Home to Harlem was strongly criticized by both W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey for pandering to white prurience by focusing on the “underworld.” Banjo is the story of a homosocial and homoerotic international community of black vagabonds in post-World War I Marseilles; it develops the vision of black politics and aesthetics presented in Home to Harlem by addressing the linked development of European and US imperialism and by articulating a theory of black subaltern culture as a unique form of resistance against the oppressive forces of modernity. In contrast, Banana Bottom (1933) returns to the rural Jamaica of McKay’s youth and is the story of a black woman who marries a peasant and settles in rural Jamaica. All three novels, however, critique European colonialism, US imperialism, capitalism, and bourgeois propriety and center on the role of the artist and of art. McKay was honored with the Musgrave Silver Medal from the Institute of Jamaica (1912), the Harmon Gold Award for literature (1929), and the Order of Jamaica (1977). His oeuvre illuminates the profoundly international and political nature of literary movements in the first half of the twentieth century. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); The Harlem Renaissance (AF); James, C. L. R. (WF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Queer Modernism (AF); West Indian Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Cooper, W. (1987). Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Hathaway, H. (1999). Caribbean Waves. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Holcomb, G. E. (2007). Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
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James, W. (2001). A Fierce Hatred of Injustice: Claude McKay’s Jamaica and His Poetry of Rebellion. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Locke, A. (1925). The New Negro: An Interpretation. New York: Boni. McKay, C. (1940). Harlem: Negro Metropolis. New York: E. P. Dutton. McKay, C. (1961). Banana Bottom [1933]. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace. McKay, C. (1970). Banjo [1929]. New York: Harcourt Brace. McKay, C. (1970). A Long Way From Home [1937]. New York: Harcourt Brace. McKay, C. (1973). The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose, 1912–1948 (ed. W. Cooper). New York: Schocken. McKay, C. (1979). My Green Hills of Jamaica (ed. M. Morris). Kingston, Jamaica: Heinemann. McKay, C. (1979). The Negroes in America (trans. R. J. Winter) Port Washington, NY: Kennikat. McKay, C. (1987). Home to Harlem [1928]. Boston: Northeastern University Press. McKay, C. (1990). Harlem Glory. Chicago: Kerr. McKay, C. (2004). Complete Poems (ed. W. Maxwell). Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Miller, Henry JAMES M. DECKER
Henry Miller, infamous for his use of unvarnished sexuality and seamy portraits of city life, combined a variety of modes – ranging from surrealism and romanticism to the jeremiad and the burlesque – as he investigated his life. His major works banned for three decades, Miller wrote prolifically, and versions of his experiences – both verifiable and fantastic – lie at the core of his narratives. While his sexual imagery often distracts his readers, Miller’s importance far surpasses his numerous obscenity trials and extends to both his avant garde narrative style and his rejection of the strangulating values of capitalism. Born on December 26, 1891, Henry Valentine Miller experienced an ambivalent childhood in which he disdained his mother’s bourgeois pretensions yet benefited from his status, particularly in relation to the struggling immigrants who encroached daily on his neighborhood. In Black Spring (1936) and the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy – Sexus (1949), Plexus (1952b), and Nexus (1959) –
Miller, via his eponymous narrator, describes feelings of dislocation and anxiety over the hypocrisy of desires suppressed in pursuit of the almighty dollar. Chastised for giving away some of his many possessions to poor children, the young Miller was laying the mental groundwork to associate sympathetically with an underground intellectual tradition that challenged the all-American values of the work ethic and orthodox Christianity. At a young age, Miller began reading the subversive philosophies of Nietzsche, Max Stirner, and Emma Goldman, whom he met in California, readily lapping up her challenges to capitalist conformity. In The Books in My Life (1952a), he also acknowledges Dostoevsky, Theodore Dreiser, Elie Faure, Marcel Proust, Arthur Rimbaud, and Lao Tzu, among others, as influences. Miller typically admired intellectual rebels who bristled at orthodoxy, literary mentors who eschewed linear narratives, and a personal spiritualism that readers have frequently misread. After a brief 1913 stint as a “cowboy,” Miller initially lived a conventional lifestyle, marrying the first of his five wives, Beatrice Wickens, to avoid the draft during World War I. His job as personnel director for a branch of Western Union changed his life and is immortalized in Tropic of Capricorn (1939b) as the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company. He found in the telegraph company a microcosm of the arbitrariness of American capitalism, and alternatively loathing and relishing his power, Miller jotted down stories about some of the most compelling messengers, whom he often compared to angels. While “Clipped Wings” was a self-proclaimed failure that pathetically echoed Dreiser’s voice, it did reinvigorate his desire to write, a passion that June Mansfield Smith – soon to become his mistress and then his second wife – would ignite. June (Julia Edith Smerth) offered the ostensible subject for several of Miller’s most famous narratives: Tropic of Capricorn, Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus. She would also filter through Tropic of Cancer (1934). Through the decades, Miller would represent June (alternatively as “Mara” and “Mona”) as a Janus-faced figure: part muse, part tormentor. Although she believed in Miller’s ability and encouraged him to quit his high-paying job, he believed her income came from a type of genteel prostitution. Later,
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MILLER, HENRY
June would, according to Miller, have a lesbian relationship with Jean Kronski, a mutual friend, and ultimately the emotional turbulence she provided would fuel Miller’s writing for decades, most notably in the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy. Paris, where Miller would eventually visit in 1928 and live from 1930 to 1939, served as another major inspiration. Arriving alone with 10 dollars, Miller initially found Paris a dispiriting place. However, he eventually met kindred spirits who shared his criticisms of capitalism and his love for art. Often dueling with him in conversation and via letter (Miller would write letters prolifically), new friends such as Michael Fraenkel, Walter Lowenfels, Conrad Moricand, David Edgar, Lawrence Durrell, and Ana€ıs Nin encouraged and inspired Miller. Miller characterized Paris far differently than the expatriates of the 1920s and reveled in squalor, and during this period he dropped the stilted style of his first novel, Moloch (1992 [1927]), and adopted a first-person voice that exploded off the page. While some versions of his second novel, Crazy Cock (1991 [c. 1928–30]), contain flashes of this voice, it is in Tropic of Cancer where it appears consistently. Bombastic and tender, crude and erudite, the style ranges widely in an attempt to capture the honest contradictions of Miller’s life. He distorts his experiences greatly, however, making use of caricature in attempting to depict the emotional core of his experiences. While many early critics marked Miller as a realistic writer or, paradoxically, a purely surrealist one, the current critical consensus is that Miller adopts a mixed mode, one that mingles earthy depictions of sex and grime with ecstatic reveries. In addition, this autobiographical romance (Miller’s term) also contains miniature essays and set pieces on such subjects as Matisse and time. Miller later remarked that his readers generally preferred either the sex (such as the apostrophe to Tania’s vagina or the sexual misadventures of Van Norden) or his spirituality, but he felt that both aspects were of a piece, much as Walt Whitman had adopted the Hindu perspective that ugliness and beauty flow from the same source and thus are inseparable. Drawing from a variety of heterodox traditions, such as theosophy and Gnosticism, Miller discards organized religion in favor of a personalized spirituality. Miller, especially later in life,
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often talked about giving up writing, which represented a struggle, and merely living life to the fullest. Such self-liberation is a constant theme in all his books. Miller did not see “Henry Miller” as a man to be emulated; rather, he saw him as a figure who had not yet attained enlightenment and who pursued indiscriminate sex and sordid diversions as a way of avoiding himself. Only after his “rosy crucifixion,” the despair of June’s abandonment and initial time in Paris, could he cast off his pain-causing desires and pursue the art that would lead to rebirth. By interrogating the past, Miller can free himself for “China,” his term for a nirvana-like realm. Casual readers might wonder at this goal, since “Henry Miller” seems hardly peaceful, a whirl of activity who explodes at the injustices he encounters. Tropic of Capricorn, in particular, targets capitalism and its ideological superstructures (church, school, democracy, etc.) for its wrath. From Fraenkel, among others, Miller acquired the idea that the materialist impulse driving capitalism squelched individuality, and that despite rhetoric that prized the exceptional, capitalist mechanisms destroy identity and demand conformity. The messengers in the book have nearly all been broken by their quest for the American dream, a goal Miller likens to a narcotic for the soul. As in Buddhism, “things” cloud the mind and cause pain. External forms become more important than internal character, and only a Spengler-like destruction can forebode a new order. Sensing this, the narrator seeks to transgress in any way that he can, and sexuality becomes a way of subverting the underpinnings of capitalism, particularly the middle-class family and monogamy. In large swaths of Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, and Sexus, the narrator and his friends pursue one sexual relationship after another, activity that has prompted many feminist critics to label Miller a misogynist. However, other scholars, including some leading feminists, note that none of Miller’s characters (other than the central voice) are particularly well rounded and that most men are mocked. Miller portrays sex not as a sacred activity or as a goal unto itself, but as an enjoyable part of life. Grove Press published the banned works in 1961, and a 1964 Supreme Court decision put an end to the many obscenity trials that ensued.
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MILLER, HENRY
While Miller’s use of sexuality has cemented his reputation as a “realist,” much of his writing consists of fantasy and dreams. He read Freud, Jung, Rank, and others, and he knew and studied many of the European leaders of surrealism and Dada. His lover, Nin, was also instrumental in focusing his attention on dreams and the unconscious. As with the Romantics, Miller infused his writing with both nightmarish and dreamlike passages. Black Spring, for instance, has entire sections based on both Lewis Carroll-like nonsense and Poe-like horrors. Miller’s realism, therefore, extends well beyond the mimesis of the nineteenth-century realists and naturalists, and into the “other” reality of the imagination and unconscious. His work regularly juxtaposes a depiction of “real” events with purely fantastic images. At times Miller will extend dreams over many pages, while at others shifting more rapidly. Quick transitions between modes comprise a hallmark of Miller’s narrative style. He often jumps chronologically and thematically, interrupting the narrative at crucial points. In some cases he begins an anecdote only to rupture the narrative with a catalogue, a dream, a memory, or a delirious, poetically charged discourse on a single word. Sometimes, his departures extend dozens of pages before picking up the anecdote again. Miller called this technique “spiral form,” which allows him the freedom to abandon plot in order to pursue emotionally significant digressions. Earlier critics assumed this style to be formless and sloppy, but recent trends (informed by poststructuralism and other theories) have linked it to an alinear tradition of Rabelais, Petronius, and Whitman. Miller’s contribution to the genre in many ways resembles the “talking cure” championed by the psychoanalysts of his day whereby digression ultimately yields emotional truth. While critics and biographers frequently read Miller’s narratives as transparent renderings of his experience, perceptive readers have noticed that the writer regularly distorted the external facts of his life. Seeking internal truths rather than factual accuracy, Miller often insists on a subjective reality. As such, he is not above changing, deleting, or adding “facts” to better conform to his self-mythology. Miller’s emotional honesty and powerful style influenced a variety of writers,
including Lawrence Durrell, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Pynchon, and Erica Jong. His later work – the Book of Friends trilogy – employs a more sedate, nostalgic voice. Miller died on June 7, 1980. SEE ALSO: The Avant Garde Novel (AF); Dreiser, Theodore (AF); Durrell, Lawrence (BIF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Blinder, C. (2000). A Self-Made Surrealist: Ideology and Aesthetics in the Work of Henry Miller, Rochester, NY: Camden House. Dearborn, M. V. (1991). The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller. New York: Simon and Schuster. Decker, J. M. (2005). Henry Miller and Narrative Form: Constructing the Self, Rejecting Modernity. New York: Routledge. Ferguson, R. (1991). Henry Miller: A Life. New York: Norton. Flaxman, A. M. (2000). New Anatomies: Tracing Emotions in Henry Miller’s Writings. New York: Bern Porter. Gordon, W. A. (1967). The Mind and Art of Henry Miller. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Hassan, I. (1967). The Literature of Silence. New York: Knopf. Jahshan, P. (2001). Henry Miller and the Surrealist Discourse of Excess: A Post-Structuralist Reading. New York: Peter Lang. Jong, E. (1993). The Devil at Large. New York: Turtle Bay. Martin, J. (1978). Always Merry and Bright: The Life of Henry Miller. Santa Barbara, CA: Capra. Miller, H. (1934). Tropic of Cancer. Paris: Obelisk. Miller, H. (1936). Black Spring. Paris: Obelisk. Miller, H. (1939a). The Cosmological Eye. Norfolk, CT: New Directions. Miller, H. (1939b). Tropic of Capricorn. Paris: Obelisk. Miller, H. (1941a). The Colossus of Maroussi. San Francisco: Colt. Miller, H. (1941b). The Wisdom of the Heart. Norfolk, CT: New Directions. Miller, H. (1941c). The World of Sex. New York: J. H. N. [Ben Abramson]. Miller, H. (1945). The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. New York: New Directions. Miller, H. (1949). Sexus. Paris: Obelisk.
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MILLHAUSER, STEVEN
Miller, H. (1952a). The Books in My Life. New York: New Directions. Miller, H. (1952b). Plexus. Paris: Corr^ea. Miller, H. (1957). Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch. New York: New Directions. Miller, H. (1959). Nexus. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzel. Miller, H. (1991). Crazy Cock [c. 1928–30]. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Miller, H. (1992). Moloch; or, This Gentile World [1927]. New York: Grove. Orend, K. (2005). The Brotherhood of Fools and Simpletons: Gods and Devils in Henry Miller’s Utopia. Paris: Alyscamps. Parkin, J. (1990). Henry Miller, the Modern Rabelais. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen. Shifreen, L. J., & Jackson, R. (1993). Henry Miller: A Bibliography of Primary Sources. Ann Arbor: Roger Jackson.
Millhauser, Steven CATHERINE KASPER
Steven Millhauser has been called one of the most original writers to emerge from the 1970s. His novels, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943–1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright (1972), and Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996), are his most lauded books to date. He is also the author of seven collections of short stories and novellas, and several uncollected stories and articles. One of his short stories was adapted for The Illusionist (2006), a major motion picture. Steven (Lewis) Millhauser was born on August 3, 1943 in New York City. He received his BA from Columbia in 1965, and he attended Brown University. His first major success was his highly acclaimed first novel, Edwin Mullhouse (1972). In this mock biography of the “Great American Writer,” the brief life (Mullhouse dies at age 11) of Edwin Abraham Mullhouse, author of a brilliant but misunderstood novel titled Cartoons, is told by his “lifelong” friend, Jeffrey Cartwright. This novel establishes the stylistic concerns that preoccupy much of Millhauser’s future work: postmodernist irony, experimental use of point of view, and metafictional or self-commenting textual narration. His analysis of the borders between fiction and reality, and art and illusion, are critically acclaimed. In capturing those border
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or liminal spaces, Millhauser’s fiction is classified with that of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Gabriel Garcıa Marquez. His stories are praised for their originality and their precise details and descriptions that create inventive and often surreal worlds. From 1972 to 1996, he published The Portrait of a Romantic (1977), In The Penny Arcade (1985), From the Realm of Morpheus (1986), The Barnum Museum (1990), and Little Kingdoms (1993). In these he demonstrated his mastery of the experimental short story, novella, and novel forms, and his ongoing interest in techniques of historiographic metafiction, often utilizing American historical settings and characters in his fictionalized tales. He is lauded for his ability to depict American life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is celebrated, in particular, for his portrait of life in New York in a pre-technological America. His recreation of the evocations of childhood imagination and of the architecture of American east coast towns are unparalleled, as in his most celebrated novel, Martin Dressler: The Tale of An American Dreamer (1996), set in Coney Island, New York at the turn of the nineteenth century. This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel unfolds in highly specific descriptive details that fully recreate Dressler’s real and fantastical world in what is a quintessential story of American ambition and hubris. Following its success, Millhauser concentrated on the novella and short story forms. The Knife Thrower and Other Stories (1998), Enchanted Night (1999), and The King in the Tree (2003) received less attention, as Millhauser continued to explore similar concerns manipulating myths, fairy tales, and fables. In 2006, The Illusionist was released, a major motion picture based on Millhauser’s short story “Eisenheim the Illusionist.” First published in the collection The Barnum Museum, this story was included in the Best American Short Story anthology of 1990. In 2008, his collection Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories was given high praise. While best-known for his award-winning novels, Edwin Mullhouse and Martin Dressler, Millhauser’s notoriety has increased since his connection with the film The Illusionist. His fiction has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, and other languages. He has received numerous awards, including
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a Pulitzer Prize, an O. Henry Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He continues to write and publish. SEE ALSO: Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (AF)
Millhauser, S. (2003). The King in the Tree: Three Novellas. New York: Knopf. Millhauser, S. (2008). Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories. New York: Knopf. Saltzman, A. M. (2001). A Wilderness of Size: Steven Millhauser’s “Martin Dressler.” Contemporary Literature, 42, 589–616. Sheridan, D. (2003). The End of the World: Closure in the Fantasies of Borges, Calvino, and Millhauser. In F. Iftekharrudin, J. Boyden, & M. Rohrberger (eds.), Postmodern Approaches to the Short Story. Westport, CT: Praeger, pp. 9–24.
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Barrineau, N. W. (1999). Theodore Dreiser and Martin Dressler: Tales of American Dreamers. Dreiser Studies, 30, 35–45. Fowler, D. (1996). Steven Millhauser, Miniaturist. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 37, 139–48. Hebel, U. J. (2004). Performing the Spectacle of Technology at the Beginning of the American Century: Steven Millhauser’s Martin Dressler. The Holodeck in the Garden: Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction, 28, 192–211. Herrero-Olaizola, A. (2002). Writing Lives, Writing Lies: The Pursuit of Apocryphal Biographies. Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 35, 73–89. Kasper, C. (2002). Steven Millhauser’s American Gothic. Denver Quarterly, 36, 88–93. Kinzie, M. (1991). Succeeding Borges, Escaping Kafka: On the Fiction of Steven Millhauser. Salmagundi, 92, 115–44. Max, D. T. (2008). The Illusionist: Review of Dangerous Laughter. New York Times, pp. 1–3 (Feb. 24). Millhauser, S. (1972). Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943–1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright. New York: Knopf. Millhauser, S. (1977). Portrait of a Romantic. New York: Knopf. Millhauser, S. (1985). In the Penny Arcade. New York: Knopf. Millhauser, S. (1986). From the Realm of Morpheus. New York: Morrow. Millhauser, S. (1990). The Barnum Museum. New York: Poseidon. Millhauser, S. (1993). Little Kingdoms. New York: Poseidon. Millhauser, S. (1996). Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer. New York: Crown. Millhauser, S. (1998). The Knife Thrower and Other Stories. New York: Crown. Millhauser, S. (1999). Enchanted Night: A Novella. New York: Crown.
Minimalist/Maximalist Fiction ROBERT REBEIN
The terms “minimalist fiction” and “maximalist fiction” began to be used by writers and critics in the late twentieth century to describe opposing impulses or trends within postmodern American fiction. Minimalist fiction, or minimalism, denotes short works of fiction that combine a terse style and deliberate economy of means with ordinary, even mundane subject matter. The short stories of Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Mary Robison, Amy Hempel, Frederick Barthelme, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Richard Ford, among others, have been associated with this style. The term “maximalist fiction,” or maximalism, meanwhile, denotes fictional works, particularly novels, that are unusually long and complex, are digressive in style, and make use of a wide array of literary devices and techniques. Among the novelists associated with this style are David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Richard Powers, Rick Moody, William T. Vollmann, and, from a slightly older generation, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Paul West. In their separate ways, both minimalism and maximalism have been explained as responses to the declining relevance of literary fiction in a cultural landscape dominated by newer media such as television, video games, and the Internet. The heyday of minimalist fiction was the decade of the 1980s. Not coincidentally, this was also the era of the so-called renaissance of the American short story, which saw an outpouring of
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MINIMALIST/MAXIMALIST FICTION
new work in the genre, as well as a period of rapid growth for MFA programs in creative writing, seen by some as little more than “assembly lines” for minimalist stories. Within a few years of each other, several influential story collections were published, among them Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), Bobbie Ann Mason’s Shiloh and Other Stories (1982), Ann Beattie’s The Burning House (1982), Frederick Barthelme’s Moon Deluxe (1983), Amy Hempel’s Reasons to Live (1985), Richard Ford’s Rock Springs (1987), and Mary Robison’s Believe Them (1988). Although the work of these writers varied greatly, it also shared certain fundamental characteristics that led some critics to classify it as belonging to a single school of writing. The prototypical minimalist story takes place in a small domestic space, often a nondescript kitchen or living room, and features a small cast of characters going about their everyday lives amid a profusion of brand names and pop culture references. Whether told in first or third person, the story typically employs a dispassionate narrative voice and is written in a flat, declarative, unadorned style devoid of metaphor, summary exposition, flashbacks in time, or extended representation of consciousness. Dialogue and scene predominate, often to the exclusion of what we normally consider action or plot, and the story’s ending is often muted or “open.” Representative themes include loneliness, alienation, and loss of the ability to connect with others or to find meaning in a fragmented, atomized world. The opening of Bobbie Ann Mason’s story “Shiloh” strikes the typical minimalist pose: “Leroy Moffitt’s wife, Norma Jean, is working on her pectorals. She lifts three-pound dumbbells to warm up, then progresses to a twenty-pound barbell. Standing with her legs apart, she reminds Leroy of Wonder Woman” (1982, 97). The use of present tense is a common feature of minimalist fiction, as is the focus on working-class characters (Leroy is a truck driver, Norma Jean a drugstore clerk) and the reference to popular culture (Wonder Woman) that closes the paragraph. As the story progresses, we are introduced to one more character of note (Norma Jean’s mother, Mabel) and a host of pop culture references (Popsicles, Donahue, Star Trek, Dr. Strangelove, Diet Pepsi, and Lincoln Logs, to name just a few). Aside from a
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trip to the Civil War battleground at Shiloh, all of the story’s important scenes take place inside the Moffitt home, where Leroy is recuperating from a truck accident and simultaneously coming to terms with the extent to which he and Norma Jean have grown apart in the years since their only child died in infancy. At Shiloh, Leroy realizes dimly that “the real inner workings of a marriage, like most of history, have escaped him” (114). The title story from Carver’s collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love covers similar ground, albeit in a darker and more suggestive way. Two married couples, Mel and Terri and Nick and Laura, sit around a kitchen table in Albuquerque, New Mexico drinking gin and talking about the meaning of love in a contemporary world characterized by mobility, rapid change, and divorce. In the course of their conversation, Mel, a cardiologist, tells a story about an elderly couple he treats in the ER after the camper they are riding in is hit on the interstate by a drunk teenager who dies in the accident. The couple, meanwhile, is badly injured, the husband so much he cannot, in Mel’s words, “turn his goddamn head and see his goddamn wife,” a state of affairs that leaves him very depressed. According to Mel, who suffers from a different kind of depression, this is just the sort of story that “ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we talk about when we talk about love.” As Mel recounts the story, a feeling of sadness mixed with confusion descends upon the characters. They polish off the bottle of gin, then lapse into a collective silence as the story closes. Both “Shiloh” and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” highlight the spare, subtle ways in which minimalist fiction portrays contemporary America as a place marked by fragmentation and malaise. However, it was not these traits so much as their multiplication across stories and authors that by the mid-1980s led to a harsh critique of minimalist fiction and its aesthetic underpinnings. Mounted by a diverse group of writers including Madison Smartt Bell, Sven Birkerts, Carol Iannone, John Barth, Paul West, and others, this critique lambasted minimalist fiction for its apparent lack of ambition, its focus on surface details and pop culture references, its unmediated reflection of fragmentation and unease, and its seeming loss of faith in literature’s traditional claim to speak a higher
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and more subtle language than that offered up by the culture at large. This critique was widened a decade later when it was revealed that many of Carver’s most famous stories, including all of those from his breakout 1981 collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, had undergone systematic amputation at the hands of an aggressive, charismatic editor, Gordon Lish, who apparently exerted a similar influence on the careers of several other minimalist authors, most notably Mary Robison and Amy Hempel (who dedicated her collection Reasons to Live to him). In the case of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” Lish cut Carver’s original draft by more than a third and added several key passages – all in pursuit of a quintessentially minimalist style once thought to have originated with Carver himself. Coming as they did after Carver’s death in 1988, these revelations only strengthened the arguments of minimalist fiction’s more virulent detractors, casting the entire movement in a vaguely fraudulent light. However, even as these revelations were emerging, scholars of the short story were already beginning to see past the controversy surrounding Carver’s work to glimpse the ways in which minimalism and the American short story more generally share roots in the aesthetic theories of Poe and Chekhov and the later examples provided by Joyce, Hemingway, and Beckett. According to these scholars, the renaissance of American short fiction in the 1980s was just that – a rebirth or rediscovery of principles (brevity, the single effect, the so-called iceberg theory of strategic omission, etc.) that have been part of the short story form almost since its inception. Like minimalism, maximalism is a term that has been employed by critics far more often than it has been embraced by writers, who tend to view it as reductive and misleading. Be that as it may, the type of fiction maximalism denotes is immediately recognizable and can be defined by reference to a small number of agreed upon characteristics such as length, complexity, and the tendency to foreground ideas and information at the expense of characters. Although it could be argued that maximalist fiction has been around since Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), if not before, or that certain novels from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s like William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955) or Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
exemplify the style, maximalism as it has come to be defined more recently refers to a group of sprawling, post-minimalist works that includes Paul West’s The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests (1988), David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon (1997), Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), Dave Egger’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), William T. Vollmann’s The Royal Family (2000) and Europe Central (2004), Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), all of which employ a dense, digressive style in an attempt to capture or comment on the protean complexity of contemporary American reality. Where these works differ from the literary postmodernism of the 1960s and 1970s (to which they owe an obvious debt) is in their generally unproblematic relationship with realism. For the most part, maximalist novelists of the 1990s and beyond eschew irony and metafictional commentary on the limits of mimesis; rather than mocking realist assumptions about the power of language to fully or accurately represent the world, these writers take these assumptions to their logical extreme. As the critic James Wood has observed, in books like Infinite Jest, Mason and Dixon, and Underworld, the conventions of realism are not being undermined or abolished; rather, they are being exhausted and overworked. Tom LeClair makes a similar point, arguing that writers like Wallace, Powers, and Vollmann have embarked on a strategy of transforming the “synecdochic scale” of realism, purposely overloading it in order to illustrate the extent to which contemporary society has itself been overloaded with technology and information. In doing so, these writers are reacting not only to the perceived lack of ambition in so much minimalist fiction of the 1980s, but also to what they see as the lack of engagement in so many metafictional works of the 1960s and 1970s. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) is perhaps the perfect example of a 1990s-era maximalist novel. Including its “Notes and Errata” section, the book is 1,079 pages long (and was longer before Wallace’s editors at Little, Brown cut nearly 500 pages from the original manuscript). Descriptive detail crowds every page, and digressions shade into further digressions, which themselves refer the reader to lengthy, tightly
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spaced footnotes at the back of the book. Three intertwined character groupings structure the novel, but it would be inaccurate to call these groupings plots or subplots, because for the most part they do not dovetail or come together in a satisfying conclusion. Parts of the book, like those set in a Massachusetts drug rehabilitation center, possess an almost documentary feel that is no doubt the result of Wallace’s voluminous research, while others, like those tracking the machinations of a group of Quebecois separatists, exude a deliberately zany, off-kilter vibe. Layered over this, and contributing its own set of effects, is the fact that the novel is set in an improbable “near-future” in which the United States, Canada, and Mexico have merged to form the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N. (pun intended). Throughout the book, Wallace adopts a strategy of relentless and lengthy digression. For example, no sooner are we introduced to Don Gately, a recovering addict and one of the book’s main characters, than we are told all about Don’s live-in staff job at Ennet House, which involves shopping for a daily communal supper (further details about which appear in a footnote at the back of the book). This leads to a lengthy digression about the kind of car Don drives on errands to buy food for these suppers (a 1964 Ford Aventura, said to be “an antique variant” of the Ford Mustang), which leads to a further digression about the car’s two different alarm systems, which leads to an even longer digression about how Don came to lose his driver’s license “more or less permanently” while using drugs and alcohol years before. Like Infinite Jest as a whole, the passage is an odd mix of fact (1964 Mustangs are real enough), fiction (Aventuras are not), vital information (Don’s status as a recovering addict), and throwaway detail of an almost obsessive kind (the footnote and the lengthy description of the car). No detail is too small to be amplified or appended, for according to the logic ruling this world, trivia is itself a kind of truth. Yet for all the pyrotechnics on display here, Wallace leans far more in the direction of an earnest representation of the world than an ironic one. The author himself has confirmed this in interviews and essays on the topic, insisting repeatedly that his purpose in writing Infinite Jest was nothing more or less than to represent “the
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texture of the world” as he has experienced it. If the book is full of advertisements and pop culture references and conspiracy theories that become ever more complex, that’s because the postmodern world is that way, too. A similar point could be made about other maximalist novels like DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), Vollmann’s The Royal Family (2000) and Europe Central (2004), Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), and Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). While these books often display literary postmodernism’s extensive bag of tricks, they do so for the most part without the self-reflexive irony one typically associates with postmodernism. Why? In his essay on television and contemporary fiction, Wallace argues that the pervasive irony that once stood as postmodern fiction’s answer to the blandness of television has itself been appropriated by television – and by the culture as a whole – leaving fiction writers with few options other than to buck the trend. Vollmann, the most prolific and in some ways the most accomplished of the maximalists, has gone even further, explicitly calling for a literature that transcends both the insularity of minimalism and the gamesmanship of 1960s-era literary postmodernism in order to seek answers to important human problems like poverty, violence, and addiction. Whatever the reason for this shift away from metafiction, it remains ironic that today’s Maximalist authors continue to produce long and difficult works in an age they themselves define by reference to a decline in literacy and growing competition from television, movies, and the Internet. Charles McGrath notes this irony in his review of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, suggesting that for all their “bells and whistles” and “clever textual devices,” maximalist novels like Foer’s are deeply worried about “the ways in which our lives and the printed page fail to match up.” According to McGrath, the length and complexity of maximalist novels are not so much the result of their authors’ audacity as it is of their anxiety – their worry that when it comes to competing for the time and attention of today’s readers, “even too much may not be enough.” SEE ALSO: Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Television and Fiction (AF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Aldridge, A. W. (1992). Talents and Technicians: Literary Chic and the New Assembly-Line Fiction. New York: Scribner’s. Barth, J. (1986). A Few Words About Minimalism. New York Times Book Review, pp. 1–2, 25 (Dec. 28). Barthelme, F. (1983). Moon Deluxe: Stories. New York: Simon and Schuster. Beattie, A. (1982). The Burning House. New York: Random House. Bell, M. S. (1986). Less Is Less: The Dwindling of the American Short Story. Harper’s, pp. 64–69 (April). Birkerts, S. (1986). The School of Lish. New Republic, pp. 28–33 (Oct. 13). Carver, R. (1977). Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? New York: McGraw-Hill. Carver, R. (1981). What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. New York: Knopf. DeLillo, D. (1997). Underworld. New York: Simon and Schuster. Eggers, D. (2000). A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. New York: Simon and Schuster. Foer, J. S. (2005). Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Ford, R. (1987). Rock Springs. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Franzen, J. (2001). The Corrections. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hallett, C. W. (1999). Minimalism and the Short Story: Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, and Mary Robison. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen. Hempel, A. (1985). Reasons to Live. New York: Knopf. Iannone, C. (1987) The Fiction We Deserve. Commentary, 83(6), 60–2. LeClair, T. (1996). The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 38(1), 12–37. Mason, B. A. (1982). Shiloh and Other Stories. New York: Harper and Row. McCaffery, L. (ed.) (1993). Younger Writers Issue: William Vollmann; Susan Daitch; David Foster Wallace. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13(2), 7–67, 127–236. McGrath, C. (2005). The Souped-Up, Knock-Out, Total Fiction Experience. New York Times. At www .nytimes.com/2005/04/17/weekinreview/17mcgrath .html, accessed Jan. 7, 2010. Miller, L. (1996). David Foster Wallace: The Salon Interview. Salon (9), March 9–22. At www.salon .com/09/features/wallace1.html, accessed Jan. 7, 2010. Phillips, J. A. (1979). Black Tickets. New York: Delacorte. Pynchon, T. (1997). Mason and Dixon. New York: Henry Holt.
Robison, M. (1988). Believe Them. New York: Knopf. Vollmann, W. T. (2000). The Royal Family. New York: Viking. Vollmann, W. T. (2004). American Writing Today: Diagnosis of a Disease. In L. McCaffery & M. Hemmingson (eds.), Expelled From Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader. New York: Thunder Mouth, pp. 329–32. Vollmann, W. T. (2005). Europe Central. New York: Viking. Wallace, D. F. (1993). E. Unibus Pluram: Television and U. S. Fiction. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13(2), 151–94. Wallace, D. F. (1996). Infinite Jest. Boston: Little, Brown. West, P. (1987). In Defense of Purple Prose. In Sheer Fiction. New Paltz, NY: McPherson, pp. 46–56. West, P. (1988). The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests. New York: Doubleday. Wolff, T. (1981). In the Garden of the North American Martyrs. New York: Ecco. Wood, J. (2004). Hysterical Realism. In The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pp. 178–94.
Modern Fiction in Hollywood TOM CERASULO
The modern American novel and the Hollywood feature film have historically made for a rocky marriage. Both, at their core, are narrative forms that depict events and characters causally linked to those events, but their respective methods of delivering that narrative to the audience are often colored by different sets of economic, cultural, industrial, and artistic concerns. While the American movie industry has always been attracted to pre-sold properties – commodities with a familiar set of story elements and a built-in potential customer base – the process of adapting modern novels to the screen has often posed technical challenges, raised questions of faithfulness to the source material, and stirred up concerns about mass culture’s threat to elite culture. In general, the realist novel and genre fiction, modes which place a premium on plot and physical description and encourage audience identification, have been better matches for Hollywood than have modernist texts that chart inner states and seek to intellectually challenge the audience.
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MODERN FICTION IN HOLLYWOOD
Where modernist art is rarefied, preoccupied with subjectivity, and prone to abstraction, commercial film is democratic, public, and concrete. Where modernism foregrounds style, Hollywood aims for an invisible style. For these reasons, “art cinema,” especially that of the French New Wave, has often found a more comfortable fit between modernist novelistic experimentation and cinematic form than have mainstream American movies. Critics such as Andre Bazin, David Bordwell, Andras Kovacs, and David Trotter have convincingly argued for the modern novel’s aesthetic centrality in the formation of postwar auteurist filmmaking – from Orson Welles to Jean-Luc Godard, Luchino Visconti and Kenneth Anger – in the US and Europe. With its psychological complexity, loose narrative structures, emphasis on individual experience, and embrace of ambiguity, the art cinema has often reflected the influence of modernist fiction. Recent scholarly work has problematized the supposedly oppositional dynamic between popular culture and high culture, especially the distinction between artistic and commercial agendas. Yet for much of the twentieth century, modernism was seen as mass culture’s purposeful “other.” Modernism’s aesthetic ideologies and its claims to cultural superiority still hold sway over many film adaptation discussions today. Critics often argue that some great Hollywood films, The Good Earth (1937) and Gone With the Wind (1939) most notably, have been made from mediocre modern novels, while also arguing that modernist literary masterpieces seldom make for good motion pictures. This belief may have as much to do with reception as it does with aesthetics. Every adaptation is also an interpretation. This can lead to the sacralization of the original “stable” text, and the resulting misstep of judging an adaptation’s worth in terms of its faithfulness to its source. This fetishization of fidelity, especially in cases where the revered source text places a modernist premium on autonomy and purity, is the basis of the charge that a movie has somehow “dumbed down” the book, a stance which pits the “lowbrow” motion picture in a rigged match-up against the “highbrow” novel by focusing on what is missing from the film rather than what is actually on the screen. These sorts of analyses often fixate on narrative, characters, and dialogue, ignoring matters of visual style – shot selection,
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mise-en-scene, and editing. Some film critics, especially those in the auteurist camp, would even argue that a movie that has its origins in a book, in words, can never be a true, stand-alone cinematic masterpiece. The director John Ford, for instance, who left it to others to call him a singular genius, nonetheless claimed in an interview with George Bluestone (1957) that he had never bothered to read John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) before filming it. Hollywood’s process of translating the language of prose fiction into the visual and aural medium of cinema necessitates medium-specific changes, and financial and sociological factors play a part as well. Compression and scope are vital to adaptations, beginning with the screenplay. Most novels simply contain too many characters and scenes to fit into a feature-length movie; therefore, filmmakers must decide what can be left out while still retaining the essence of the original. Adapting a work of literature often necessitates cutting everything that does not drive the story forward. An early attempt to translate the modern novel to the screen, Erich Von Stroheim’s Greed (1924), a literal adaptation of Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899), famously ran 10 hours long in its first cut. Early film shared with literary naturalism a fascination with the sights and rhythms of modern urban life, and Von Stroheim sought to faithfully match Norris’s level of accumulated and cataloged details, but Irving Thalberg, the head of production at MGM, ordered the studio editors to pare down the movie to two hours, rendering it financially viable but also incomprehensible. In the end, 30 minutes of footage were restored before the film’s release. Today, while Greed is critically regarded as a silent classic, the 10-hour version is still mourned by cinema scholars as a lost masterpiece. During the silent era, when film’s status as a “mere” mechanical recording often disqualified it as art for many critics and theorists, adaptations of novels allowed the emerging medium of cinema to borrow the artistic stature and cultural capital of the established medium of prose fiction. With the standardization of sound in the late 1920s and Hollywood’s continuing pursuit of a middle-class audience, the American film industry developed an even greater hunger for adaptations of modern novels and plays, especially for their dialogue. Authors like Edna Ferber,
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Eugene O’Neill, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald were happy to sell the subsidiary rights to their work, and equally happy to disown what Hollywood had done with it. But a few modern authors were more protective of their literary output. Willa Cather, angry with the adaptation of her novel A Lost Lady (1923), vowed never again to license her work to the movies as long as she lived, and she specified in her will that her executors not do so after her death either. More litigiously, in 1931 Theodore Dreiser, upset by the film that had been made from his novel An American Tragedy (1925), sued Paramount Pictures. The studio, Dreiser believed, had bastardized his work. A psychological study of a man’s decline had been turned into a trite morality tale to placate the Hays Office censors, and Dreiser unsuccessfully tried to block the picture’s release. In a move that reveals how Hollywood imagined its audience to differ from the literary public, Paramount argued that the majority of the ticket holders would be more interested in justice prevailing than in Clyde Griffiths’s complex characterization. However, a second adaptation of An American Tragedy, A Place in the Sun (1951), manages to depict both what happens to Clyde – here renamed George Eastman – as well as why it happens. On the page, Dreiser’s plodding prose style, which always seems to be striving for the right word but missing it, has the perhaps unintended effect of mirroring Clyde’s own class aspirations. The graceful camerawork of A Place in the Sun finds a visual correlative for this yearning by depicting the beauty the character is drawn to and the frustrations standing in his way. The causes and effects of his murderous actions, and their social and psychological ramifications, are all in evidence, and thus the tragedy of An American Tragedy emerges. Conversely, the 1935 film adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s Alice Adams (1921), a novel which explores similarly painful issues facing lovers of different social classes, inserts a romantic, uplifting ending in place of Tarkington’s unsparing critique of upward mobility. In Depression-era film comedies like this, love frequently conquers economics, demonstrating that Hollywood’s adaptations of modern fiction were at once formal and ideological.
Modern authors who came to Hollywood on screenwriting contracts quickly found that Hollywood screenplays accepted by producers favored liberal humanism and stable narrative worlds, tenets much modernist fiction finds suspect. F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Nathanael West all wrote for the movies, at times successfully, but their novels have not translated well into film. Twentieth Century Fox’s 1959 adaptation of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) scraps the psychological complexity of Quentin Compson’s first-person narration and finds no visual correlative for his impaired brother Benjy’s linguistic inner world. Paramount’s 1949 adaptation of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), starring Alan Ladd in the title role, introduces Gatsby too soon and spoils the build-up and mystery. Paramount’s 1974 color version, directed by Jack Clayton, fails to find a narrative answer for Fitzgerald’s celebrated use of Nick Carraway’s point of view. It also suffers from miscasting in the key roles, a cold stiffness in its cinematography, and a script which remains too faithful to the book’s dialogue, lines which sound awkward when spoken aloud. While Hollywood has struggled to adapt the content and form of many modernist novels, some modern novelists have successfully borrowed from Hollywood film. Although Gustave Flaubert was already using the cinematic technique of crosscutting in the county fair scene of Madame Bovary, where three levels of action unfold simultaneously, early silent film’s exploration of temporal, spatial, and causal effects had a great influence on fiction writers of the 1920s and 1930s. Ernest Hemingway’s fixed, objective viewpoint in a short story like “The Killers” owes something to the cinema, as do Faulkner’s experiments in narrative disjunctions. John Dos Passos’s 1930s U.S.A. trilogy and its “newsreel” sections utilize montage and crosscutting to capture the rapid, modern rhythm of socio-economic forces at work, as the narrative point-of-view bounces among perspectives and makes stops along the way to examine the found objects and fragments of America’s media-saturated print and visual culture. Inspired by such literary experiments, contemporary literary critics like Susan McCabe and David Trotter have carefully explored the invention of “cinematic modernism” within the prose and poetry of the period.
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MODERN FICTION IN HOLLYWOOD
Several modern writers, such as West, Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, and Budd Schulberg, used their experience as screenwriters as material for their fiction. Fitzgerald’s study of the American film industry had informed his novels The Beautiful and Damned (1922) and Tender Is the Night (1934); Hollywood played an even bigger role in his Pat Hobby story cycle of the late 1930s and early 1940s and the unfinished manuscript posthumously published as The Last Tycoon (1941). Fitzgerald also made several unsuccessful attempts to sell original scripts and adaptations of his own novels. Like many modern authors who wrote for the movies, Fitzgerald had contempt for Hollywood’s business practices, but he was also fascinated by its creative possibilities and its capacity to reach larger audiences than any book ever could. Hollywood novels like Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, West’s The Day of the Locust (1939), and Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) have often been read as poison pen letters to Los Angeles. But more often than not these books do not come to bury Hollywood; rather, they attempt to understand its inner workings and cultural power. While The Day of the Locust centers on the audience that consumes films, What Makes Sammy Run? and The Last Tycoon concentrate on those who make films. Fitzgerald’s book focuses on a noble movie producer, Monroe Stahr; Schulberg’s book concerns a philistine, Sammy Glick. These novels provide “insider” accounts of Hollywood. Along the way, their examinations of issues like film spectatorship, cinematic grammar, studio hierarchies, and movie authorship also make them prototypical examples of American film theory. Successful Hollywood novels have not always made for successful films, however. During the studio era of the first half of the twentieth century, the movie moguls lived in fear that their empires would be taken away from them by Wall Street, or the US government, or the forces of antiSemitism. This is one reason that self-reflexive “movies about movies” that portrayed Hollywood in anything other than a soft, flattering light were thought by the studios to be selfdestructive. Even today, What Makes Sammy Run? has never made it to the big screen, despite periodic rumblings in Hollywood that one director or another hopes to resuscitate the project. The Day of the Locust’s scenes of attempted
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rape, miscegenation, and child violence would have been virtually unfilmable under the production code of Hollywood’s golden age. John Schlesinger’s 1975 version, made after the studio system had dissolved, captures the novel’s episodic, “cinematic” style, but the pieces never fit together, a criticism also frequently leveled at the source book. The result is a mixed bag. There is no rooting interest in The Day of the Locust. The Ivy League-educated set decorator Tod Hackett, the closest thing the film and novel have to a main character, leaves the action for a long period of time and makes for an unsympathetic hero or even antihero. The film’s coda, where Faye Greener, the teenage actress who teases and toys with Tod throughout the story, suddenly and romantically goes looking for him only to find him gone, betrays the spirit of the novel. At times the film can’t decide if it wants to approximate West’s brand of surrealism or strive for a grittier, more documentary realism. However, the climactic crowd scene, where Hollywood’s “cheated” work themselves into a murderous frenzy, strikes all the right notes of terror and absurdity. On the other hand, the overall tone of Elia Kazan’s 1976 film version of Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon falls flat. Fitzgerald’s novel portrays the romance, vigor, and excitement of studio life, but the adaptation suffers from listless pacing, an aging cast far too old for the roles they play, and a boy-loses-girl story that overwhelms Fitzgerald’s deeper theme of American wonder and disillusionment. Like the Hollywood novel of the 1930s and 1940s, the modern crime novel, exemplified by practitioners like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, and James M. Cain, exhibits a preoccupation with the cityscapes of modernity. Writing in the immediate postwar context in which French film critics reinvented American hard-boiled crime thrillers and melodramas as “film noir,” Claude-Edmonde Magny, for example, argued for the American crime novel’s centrality to the development of the “film aesthetic” of interwar fiction. The genre meshed well with Hollywood cinema, providing an especially graceful partner for the expressionistic films noir of the 1940s and 1950s. These novels shared literary modernism’s pessimism and hints of misogyny, but owing to their crisp dialogue, exciting plots, and streaks of morality and order
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amid a tapestry of sin and chaos, they made for more comfortable stylistic and ideological matches for the American screen. Yet compromises were still necessary. For example, Cain’s novel Double Indemnity (1936) was listed that year by film censor Joseph Breen as a property unfit for family audiences and a poor candidate for adaptation. The book provided a step-by-step account of how to pull off a murder, glorified adultery, and allowed the criminals to die in a suicide pact rather than be punished by the forces of law. But a few years later, in 1944, director Billy Wilder asked Raymond Chandler to take a stab at adapting it. Chandler substituted his own brand of stylized, wise-guy banter for Cain’s laconic exchanges. He punched up the dialogue but toned down the book’s earthy sexuality and amorality, a move almost negated by Barbara Stanwyck’s erotic performance as a merciless femme fatale. Chandler also structured the majority of the film as the narrative flashback of a doomed man, enhancing the fatalistic mood of the story as the events unfold. According to James Naremore (1998), the filmmakers scripted and shot a gas chamber execution scene, so that at least one of the murderers would be brought to justice, but the sequence was, ironically, judged by the Breen office as too gruesome. The punishment was now too severe for the audience to handle. Despite a critical history that occasionally casts them as bitter foes locked into a zero-sum fight for cultural supremacy, Hollywood cinema and the modern American novel are each better for having encountered the other. The movie industry has thrived by making products inspired by literary sources and has returned the favor by opening up new creative possibilities for novelists. SEE ALSO: The Film Industry and Fiction (BIF); Noir Fiction (AF); Television and Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bazin, A. (1971). What Is Cinema? vol. 2. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bluestone, G. (1957). Novels into Film. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bordwell, D., & Thompson, K. (1993). Film Art: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Boyum, J. G. (1985). Double Exposure: Fiction into Film. New York: Mentor. Cohen, K. (1979). Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange. New Haven: Yale University Press. Corrigan, T. (2000). Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Eyman, S. (1997). The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution, 1926–1930. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fine, R. (1993). West of Eden: Writers in Hollywood 1928–1940. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Kovacs, A. (2008). Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema 1950–1980. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levine, L. (1988). Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Magny, C. E. (1972). The Age of the American Novel: The Film Aesthetic of Fiction Between the Two Wars (trans. E. Hochman). New York: Ungar. Mayne, J. (1988). Private Novels, Public Films. Athens: University of Georgia Press. McCabe, S. (2005). Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McFarlane, B. (1996). Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon. Murray, E. (1972). The Cinematic Imagination: Writers and the Motion Pictures. New York: Ungar. Naremore, J. (1998). More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. Berkeley: University of California Press. Orr, J. (1993). Cinema and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Palmer, R. B. (ed.) (2007). Twentieth-Century American Fiction on Screen. New York: Cambridge University Press. Peary, G., & Shatzkin, R. (eds.) (1978). The Modern American Novel and the Movies. New York: Ungar. Spiegel, A. (1976). Fiction and the Camera Eye: Visual Consciousness in Film and the Modern Novel. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Stam, R., & Rengo, A. (eds.) (2005). Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Trotter, D. (2007) Cinema and Modernism. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Wilson, G. M. (1986). Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wilt, D. (1991). Hardboiled in Hollywood: Five Black Mask Writers and the Movies. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
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MODERNIST FICTION
Modernist Fiction JUAN A. SUAREZ
Initially, “modernist fiction” named the experimental narrative of the interwar period, most eminently associated with Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, and, secondarily, with Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, and Willa Cather. Their masterpieces belonged to “the jazz age,” even though Stein started publishing before, Faulkner’s best work appeared during the 1930s, and some of these writers remained active until the early 1960s. Early approaches to this work were formal, influenced by the New Criticism, and when historically minded scholars like Alfred Kazin or Lionel Trilling discussed this literature, they tended to invoke a mixture of biographical and national motifs, such as individual alienation before a mercantilist society indifferent to aesthetic value or the disillusionment of a generation marked by World War I. Such a compact, but narrow, view of the field has been thoroughly modified in recent times. Critics and historians now have a longer and wider view of modernism – a view that includes the committed writing of the 1930s; stretches past mid-century to the novels of Beat authors Jack Kerouac or William Burroughs; and engages peripheral modernities, transnational cultural traffic, and postcoloniality. Additionally, while modernism was once regarded as an exclusively aesthetic phenomenon, it is now customarily connected with a plurality of social forces and identities – gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and class – and placed in conversation with the modern media and the culture industry. These contexts should have been hard to ignore. The early twentieth century was an inaugural moment in anti-colonial and anti-racist militancy, with the creation of the (short-lived) League against Imperialism, the rise of independentist movements in the Caribbean, and the emergence of “the New Negro” in the United States. Women achieved the vote in 1920 with the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, and the popularity of Freud’s ideas, along with the opportunities for association and visibility afforded by urban life, brought sexual minorities into the public eye. These developments had begun to stir in the nineteenth century but
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erupted into view in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the public started to be divided along lines other than the familiar ones of class or national origin. As a result, public life after 1900 appeared more variegated than ever before, and this diversity was heightened – in some ways, induced – by the media, disseminators of new expressive idioms and political agencies. If the social map gained complexity, so did the textures and rhythms of quotidian experience. Telephones and cars promoted speed and (dis)connectedness, and the electronic media – cinema, photography, the gramophone, and the radio – made images and sounds portable, detachable, and manipulable. These inventions made daily experience layered and intricate, shrank time and space, modified habits of perception and thought, and, consequently, radically changed the styles of reading and writing. The revolution in modernist studies has largely consisted in showing the mutually enabling connections between these worldly developments and what was once deemed an elitist, mandarin aesthetic that held itself aloof from modernity. Influenced by cultural studies, Frankfurt School analysis, and feminist and queer critiques, critics and historians began, from the mid-1980s onward, to bring the social and material life of modernity to bear on its literature. As they did so, they were implementing, in the realm of criticism, the cultural logic of modernism itself – a logic that consisted in expanding the range of mimesis by importing into literature and art cultural material previously untouched by aesthetics. Part of this material was the intricacies of sexuality, memory, and perception, now rendered with unprecedented candor; another substantial part of what modernism brought into artistic utterance were the languages and perspectives of marginal subjects who were gradually becoming more visible at the beginning of the century: women, blacks, sexual dissidents, and colonial subjects. This kind of inclusiveness had a direct effect on form but, at its root, it obeyed a political impulse: making the aesthetic sphere more representative of the actual complexity of the social body and more responsive to its dynamism. Feminism was the first critical approach to pick up the political frequency of modernism, prolonging in this way the polemical impulse of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and
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responding as well to the fact that the campaign for a new art and the claims of feminism were tightly intertwined in the early twentieth century. Authors like Gilbert and Gubar (1986), Blau du Plessis (1985), and DeKoven (1991), to name a few, uncovered a feminist tradition in which writing was not simply an aesthetic practice but contained a political wager as well. For many women writers, experimental fiction offered a way to map their embattled location in the social fabric, to oppose oppressive gender arrangements, and to imagine new ones. Theorizing women’s particular modernism went hand in hand with the revision of the historical archive and the retrieval of understudied figures. Perhaps the most prominent rediscoveries have been Djuna Barnes and Harlem Renaissance novelists Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, and Jessie Redmond Fausset (Wall 1995). Part of the archival work has been directed beyond the page, toward uncovering the activities of editors and cultural brokers who played a crucial role in the dissemination of modernism – the cases of Margaret Anderson and jane heap (her spelling), the editors of the Little Review, and Sylvia Beach, owner of the Parisbased bookstore Shakespeare and Co. and occasional editor (most famously, of Joyce’s Ulysses) (Benstock 1986; Scott 1990; Scott 1995). Coming up after feminism, queer studies further helped to expand the picture of modernism. Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler, among the most generative figures of queer discourse, went beyond the gender binarism of earlier feminist analysis to explore sexual heterodoxy and the contingencies of gender – influentially conceived by Butler as a performative surface effect rather than as the expression of a biological essence. Sedgwick’s and Butler’s contributions exceed the field of modernist studies, but they also intervened in it: Sedgwick (1989) analyzed Willa Cather’s novella “Paul’s Case,” and Butler (1993) analyzed Nella Larsen’s Passing. Additionally, cultural historians like Chauncey (1994) have furthered the queering of modernism by documenting the existence of vibrant lesbian and gay communities in metropolitan centers since the turn of the twentieth century, and suggesting the continuity between subcultural street life and queer textuality. Subsequent contributions have unfolded in two interrelated directions: the recovery of a queer streak in experimental writing
(Boone 1997) and the revision of canonical figures from queer perspectives (Haralson 2003). Exemplary of the queer revision of the canon are studies that have brought Willa Cather to a new prominence (Anders 1999; Lindeman 1999; Love 2007). A recent line of queer inquiry has studied the collusion of sexual insubordination with other marks of difference, such as social maladjustment and marginality (Trask 2003) or African American identity (Somerville 2000). A recent offshoot of both feminism and queer critiques, masculinity studies has subjected the traditionally unmarked gender to historical and theoretical scrutiny, and has shown that maleness is contingent and subject to historical variables rather than an unquestionable bedrock of identity. Modernist fiction offers a significant case study in this regard. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and, especially, Hemingway reflected the fluctuations and anxieties brought about by the loss of male privilege at a time of growing female autonomy. Yet recent contributions have shown that male modernists were not always blind defenders of masculine prerogative. Moddelmog (1999) and Strychacz (2003) have shown that Hemingway, eminent exemplar of macho posturing, was a shrewd critic of the rituals of maleness and anticipated some brands of late-twentiethcentury anti-essentialist gender analysis. The gendering and queering of modernism must be placed alongside its racialization – its consideration against the racist backlash of the 1910s and 1920s, the emergence of black (trans) nationalism, and the redrawing of American racial geography caused by the Great Migration. The main site for this approach has been the art and literature of the Harlem Renaissance – studied under a separate entry in this volume – but race also figures prominently in the work of white writers, not only as a topical element but also as a style of discourse and a source of expressiveness. As a topic, race has been examined most frequently in relation to William Faulkner, whose writing encodes a freighted history of ethnic relations in America (Sundquist 1983) and explores race as an effect of linguistic, social, and cultural convention (Wittenberg 1995). By connecting race to broader linguistic and expressive repertoires, critics like North (1994) have shown that modernism drew extensively on racially marked accents and dialects. While white
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modernists (from Stein to Eliot and Pound) gravitated toward racial speech, a symptom of vernacular vitality which they often impersonated with flair, black modernists like Claude McKay and Jean Toomer detached themselves from a dialect tradition that they found constricting; their living between two equally restrictive languages – the high literary standard and ethnically stereotyped speech – prompted a sense of linguistic dispossession that is deeply imprinted in their work and slightly erratic careers. Other writers – Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison are some examples – used their linguistic “in-betweenness” to forge extraordinary styles that combined the best possibilities of both idioms. For many white modernists, the encounter with racial others did not lead to imitation or racial masquerade. The fiction of Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and Hemingway unfolds in a predominantly white world occasionally crossed by ethnic or racialized subjects. Encounters with otherness often bring about anxieties about diminishing white hegemony along with evasions and attempts at containment. At times, their works depict the racial other as an indigestible residue that is discarded in the form of a corpse or consigned to voiceless marginality. Recent modernist criticism has also studied the formative effect of the media on early-twentiethcentury fiction. The main modernist fiction writers were born in the same decade as the cinema; they belonged to the first generation to grow up surrounded by electronically disseminated images and sounds. Many of them worked in journalism, advertising, or radio; saw their works adapted for the screen; and were occasionally employed by the studios during Hollywood’s golden era. This confluence of modernism and the popular media has traditionally been characterized in adversarial terms. In Clement Greenberg’s or Theodor Adorno’s classic formulations, modernism was a hostile reaction against the simplicity of popular texts and the degraded rationality of mass culture. Numerous studies of modernist writers’ encounters with Hollywood have reduced this convergence to the betrayal of complex art by crass commercialism. More recently, however, drawing on both archival evidence and textual interpretation, critics have begun to envision more symbiotic relationships between experimental writing and popular
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forms. According to Dewberry (1996), Hemingway borrowed much more from journalism than his proverbial laconism; he learned to sacrifice absolute objectivity and to stylize anecdotal detail in the production of mood or tonal effect. Lutes (2006) has shown that journalism was a writing school for female modernists, such as Cather or Barnes, and a vehicle for gender and racial concerns, as Ida B. Wells’s and Nellie Bly’s newspaper writings attest. Margolies (2002) has proposed that, contrary to received opinion, Hollywood was salutary to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, at the end of his life, regained his footing as a writer there and nearly completed what might have become his masterpiece, The Love of the Last Tycoon. Matthews (1995) has shown that, in adapting his own work for the screen, Faulkner managed to subvert the conventions of filmic storytelling. Blair (2007) has studied the reciprocal borrowing between post-Harlem Renaissance black modernists and contemporaneous photographers. And Denning (1997) has shown that political modernism spread not only through traditional literary channels but also through fashion writing, pulp fiction, song lyrics, topical journalism, cabaret skits, musical reviews, and even cartoons. Reversing the angle – “high” borrowing from, or projecting itself through, “low” culture – Rabinowitz (2002), Hansen (1999), and Naremore (1998) have fruitfully complicated what was considered “low culture”; they demonstrated that popular narrative formats were permeated by modernist themes and techniques, and were therefore forms of vernacular modernism. Hence, any discussion of modernism that does not take into account its broad dissemination in a diversity of media threatens to remain sorely limited. Most of these approaches take an “external” perspective on the modernism–media convergence; they explore the traffic of strategies, motifs, and iconography between what are essentially fully formed entities. By contrast, recent contributions by North (2005), Suarez (2007), and Trotter (2008) look at this encounter as taking place between evolving media in mutual interaction. Following the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Bela Balasz, as well as those of contemporaries Friedrich Kittler and Fredric Jameson, these critics propose that modernist writing was shaped by – for Trotter, it unfolded in parallel with – the automatic
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receptivity of photography, film, and soundrecording technologies; these qualities were more apparent in these media’s moment of emergence, before their possibilities were streamlined and their oddness tamed. These new technologies mixed signal and noise, captured previously unrecorded perceptions, and delivered an unconscious pulsing in the heart of the everyday. This perceptual unconscious punctuates modernist textuality by means of compulsive repetitions, gaps, or unaccountable moments, which these critics find in an ample swath of texts – little magazines such as Contact or View, narratives by Dos Passos or Fitzgerald, photography, experimental cinema, and commercial films by Griffith or Chaplin. These disruptions signal unresolved collective trauma (North), flag uncontainable contingency (Trotter), or harbor inchoate yet politically transformative energies that, at times, have only been activated in retrospect, as neglected antecedents to contemporary struggles (Suarez). As most of this writing pays attention largely to film and photography – despite occasional incursions into the sound media – more work is needed on the aural ecology of modernity and its effect on textuality. T. S. Eliot’s claim that “contemporary novels obtain what reality they have from an accurate rendering of the noises that human beings currently make in their daily simple needs of communication” could be taken as a premise for further analysis. Modernism, however, is also traversed by non-human noises that exceeded communicative needs, and Paulson (1988), Gitelman (1999), and Campbell (2006) offer productive suggestions in this regard. Noise may be made to resonate productively with many of the social, cultural, and political investments that have shaped modernist studies in recent decades, and may prompt us to relearn the modern in ways that we have not yet plumbed. Equally fruitful may prove recent reflections on eccentric affect, which Nieland (2008) finds intrinsic to modernity, or on modernist material culture (Brown 1999, 2003). What seems clear is that new fields of interest and new concerns will keep reactivating a textual corpus that, nearly a century after its first emergence, still seems inexhaustible because of its cultural density and aesthetic sophistication, and because it remains a crucial antecedent to much that is still vital in our time.
SEE ALSO: The Avant Garde Novel (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Anders, J. (2001). Willa Cather’s Sexual Aesthetics and the Male Homosexual Literary Tradition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Benstock, S. (1986). Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940. Austin: University of Texas Press. Blair, S. (2007). Harlem Crossroads: Harlem Writers and the Photograph in the 20th Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Blau du Plessis, R. (1985) Writing Beyond the Ending. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Boone, J. (1997). Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge. Campbell, T. C. (2006). Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Chauncey, G. (1994). Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World. New York: Basic Books. DeKoven, M. (1991). Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Denning, M. (1997). The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso. Dewberry, E. (1996). Hemingway’s Journalism and the Realistic Dilemma. In S. Donaldson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 16–35. Gilbert, S., & Gubar, S. (eds.) (1986). Female Imagination and the Modernist Aesthetic. New York: Gordon and Breach. Hansen, M. (1999). The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism. Modernism/modernity, 6(2), 59–77. Haralson, E. L. (2003). Henry James and Queer Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lindeman, M. (1999). Willa Cather: Queering America. New York: Columbia University Press. Love, H. (2007). Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lutes, J. M. (2006). Front-Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, 1880–1930. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Margolies, A. (2002). Fitzgerald and Hollywood. In Prigozy, R. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to F.
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Scott Fitzgerald. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 189–208. Matthews, J. (1995). Faulkner and the Culture Industry. In P. M., Weinstein (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 51–74. Moddelmog, D. (1999). Reading Desire: In Pursuit of Ernest Hemingway. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Naremore, J. (1998). More Than Night: Film Noir and Its Contexts. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nieland, J. (2008). Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. North, M. (1994). The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth Century Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. North, M. (2005). Camera Work: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word. New York: Oxford University Press. Paulson, W. (1988). The Noise of Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rabinowitz, P. (2002). Black & White & Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press. Scott, B. K. (ed.) (1990). Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Scott, B. K. (1995). Refiguring Modernism, vol. 1: Women of 1928. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sedgwick, E. K. (1989). Across Genders, Across Sexuality: Willa Cather and Others. South Atlantic Quarterly, 88(1), 53–72. Somerville, S. (2000). Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Strychacz, T. (2003). Hemingway’s Theaters of Masculinity. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Suarez, J. A. (2007). Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Sundquist, E. (1983). Faulkner: The House Divided. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Trask, M. (2003). Cruising Modernism: Class and Sexuality in American Literature and Social Thought. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Trotter, D. (2007). Cinema and Modernism. Oxford: Blackwell. Wall, C. (1995). Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wittenberg, J. B. (1995). Race in Light in August: Wordsymbols and Obverse Reflections. In P. M., Weinstein (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 146–67.
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Momaday, N. Scott CHRISTOPHER DOUGLAS
N. Scott Momaday is one of the most important Native American writers to emerge since the 1960s. His novels, autobiographical writings, and poetry reflect his Kiowa heritage and the geography of the Southwest. Frequently using mixedgenre writing, his work emphasizes the creative power of language, the communal acts of storytelling, and the ongoing search for identity. Navarre Scott Momaday was born in Lawton, Oklahoma on February 27, 1934 to a Kiowa father and a mixed white/Cherokee mother. He grew up on Navajo, Apache, and Jemez Pueblo reservations, where his mother and father had teaching jobs for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He attended the University of New Mexico, briefly enrolled in the University of Virginia Law School, and went on to earn a PhD in English at Stanford University, supervised by Yvor Winters, focusing on the poetry of nineteenth-century American poet Frederick Goddard Tuckerman. Following the completion of his PhD in 1963, Momaday began exploring his Kiowa heritage, viewing the sacred Tai-me medicine bundle of the Kiowa with his father Al and paternal grandmother Aho, and later visiting Aho’s grave on Rainy Mountain in Oklahoma. His creative efforts in the decade began with this search for origins: of both the Kiowa’s historical migration from Yellowstone to the Plains and the cultural and racial heritage of his ancestors. The fruit of this labor in the late 1960s was some of Momaday’s most important work, his The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), illustrated by his father and composed of mixed anthropological, autobiographical, and oral tradition voices. These stories he collected personally from members of the Kiowa community, as they were translated by his father since Momaday does not speak Kiowa. Characterized by a search for ethnic identity, the creative power of language and naming, and the spiritual importance of landscape, The Way to Rainy Mountain set the terms for Momaday’s thematic interests. He had been writing during this same period what is arguably still the most famous Native American novel, House Made of Dawn (1968), about a Jemez Pueblo veteran of World War II
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who returns to the Jemez community but remains disconnected from the geography and culture of his people. Revealing the influence of modernism; Faulkner; Navajo, Kiowa, and Jemez oral traditions and legends; and anthropology, the novel portrayed Abel’s failed confrontation with a Jemez witch and final late reconciliation with his dying grandfather and Jemez communal traditions. House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. The novel has been understood to have begun an outpouring of creative energy among Native American writers like Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, and Gerald Vizenor, who, together with Momaday, comprise what some critics have seen as a “Native American Renaissance.” The Way to Rainy Mountain and House Made of Dawn can be thought of as some of the earliest multicultural literature signaled by an anti-assimilationist ethic and a search for cultural origins. This claiming of Native identities is often developed in Momaday’s work through his oeuvre-wide trope of memory in the blood. While teaching at Berkeley and Stanford, Momaday published two important books of poems, Angle of Geese and Other Poems (1974) and The Gourd Dancer (1976a), and began to work as an artist as well as a writer. His 1976 memoir The Names was more clearly and formally an autobiographical work than The Way to Rainy Mountain, though it too begins with an excavation of family history and Kiowa oral tradition. With more emphasis on childhood reminiscences and genealogical ties, it nonetheless carries on Momaday’s search for personal and tribal identities, a search that is the context for his evolving poetry, storytelling, and drawings. His second novel, The Ancient Child (1989), takes shape around the Kiowa legend of Tsoaitalee (Rock Tree Boy) for whom the infant Momaday was named. An autobiographical novel, it is about a contemporary artist seeking his Indian identity. His old and new poetry was collected in In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems (1992), where it was joined by his painting and drawing in a collection of ancestral voices and personal memories. Like Ancient Child, In the Bear’s House (1999) was a mixture of Momaday’s prose, poems, and paintings, concentrated thematically around the image of the bear, a spiritually significant animal for the Kiowa. Momaday’s most recent published work extends the range of
genres in which he works: Three Plays: The Indolent Boys, Children of the Sun, and The Moon in Two Windows (2007) collects two plays and a screenplay. SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Ortiz, Simon J. (AF); Silko, Leslie Marmon (AF); Vizenor, Gerald (AF); Welch, James (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Allen, C. (1999). Blood (and) Memory. American Literature, 71(1) 93–116. Douglas, C. (2009). A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Momaday, N. S. (1967). The Journey of Tai-me. Santa Barbara: University of California Press. Momaday, N. S. (1968). House Made of Dawn. New York: Harper and Row. Momaday, N. S. (1969). The Way to Rainy Mountain (illus. A. Momaday). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Momaday, N. S. (1973). Colorado: Summer/Fall/ Winter/Spring (illus. and photo. D. Muench). Chicago: Rand McNally. Momaday, N. S. (1974). The Angle of Geese and Other Poems. Boston: Godine. Momaday, N. S. (1976a). The Gourd Dancer. New York: Harper. Momaday, N. S. (1976b). The Names: A Memoir. New York: Harper. Momaday, N. S. (1989). The Ancient Child. New York: Doubleday. Momaday, N. S. (1992). In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, 1961–1991. New York: St. Martin’s. Momaday, N. S. (1997). Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages. New York: St. Martin’s. Momaday, N. S. (1999). In the Bear’s House. New York: St. Martin’s. Momaday, N. S. (2007). Three Plays: The Indolent Boys, Children of the Sun, and The Moon in Two Windows. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Scarberry-Garcıa, S. (1990). Landmarks of Healing: A Study of “House Made of Dawn.” Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Schubnell, M. (1985). N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Schubnell, M., & Momaday, N. S. (1997). Conversations with N. Scott Momaday. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
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Velie, A. R. (1982). Four American Indian Literary Masters: N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald Vizenor. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Woodward, C. L. (1989). Ancestral Voice: Conversations with N. Scott Momaday. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Moore, Lorrie PATRICK O’DONNELL
With just three collections of short stories and three novels to her credit, Lorrie Moore has established herself as one of the premiere American writers of the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. Born in 1957 in the Adirondack town of Glenn Falls, New York, she attended St. Lawrence’s University as an English major, winning her first writing award from Seventeen magazine while an undergraduate. Following graduation, she worked in New York for two years as a paralegal, then entered Cornell University’s MFA program, where she studied with Alison Lurie. She began publishing stories while at Cornell; the first gathering of her work, Self-Help (1985), was published to strong acclaim, and initiated a slow but steady succession of meticulously crafted stories and novels remarkable for their subtle rendering of voices and interiorities. Moore is currently the Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she has spent her teaching career; she has won the O. Henry Award for her story, “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk,” and the Rea Award for the Short Story, and has been elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Moore’s stories tend to focus on the complexities and ironies of interpersonal relationships and everyday domestic life. Self-Help offers a series of lightly parodic takes on the self-help manual with stories such as “How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)” and “How to Become a Writer” – the former revealing the combined fragility, humor, and terror of mother–daughter relations; the latter surreptitiously taking issue with all of those writing manuals that offer easy advice and shortcuts to becoming a successful commercial author
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in phrases that suggest wanting to become a writer is “a lot like having polio.” Moore followed SelfHelp with her first novel, Anagrams (1986), about a thirty-something poetry teacher whose isolation and self-absorption cover over a rich interior life full of fantasy and sardonic observation of the human condition; as she scribbles anagrams (words or sentences made by rearranging the letters of another word or sentence) on napkins and scraps of paper, she attempts to connect the disparities and absurdities of the life she quietly observes around her. This quirky, experimental novel achieved mixed success on its appearance. This was not the case with Like Life (1990) and Birds of America (1998), two short story collections that made Moore, for many, the most significant American short story writer to appear on the scene since Raymond Carver or Grace Paley. Like Life contains one of Moore’s most widely anthologized stories, “You’re Ugly, Too,” told from the perspective of a lonely college professor whose visit to her sister in Manhattan allows her to display her barbed wit on the topics of men and heterosexual relationships. In Birds of America, there appears the award-winning “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” a wrenching story told from the perspective of a mother whose baby is diagnosed with cancer and undergoing surgery; the story is made up of “notes” the mother has made to herself describing conversations with her husband and the doctors as she awaits the outcome of the surgery and attempts to emotionally navigate the crisis. Across the two collections, Moore develops diverse scenarios in which the collision of opposite intentions and mindsets leads to pathos and absurdity: a quiet, repressed librarian having coffee with a brash social activist in “Community Life” (in 1998); a self-alienated man scrutinizing his sleeping wife in “Places to Look for Your Mind” (in 1990); and young upwardly mobile professionals revealing the vacuity of their lives at a New Year’s Eve party in “Beautiful Grade” (in 1998). In Moore’s second novel, the oddly titled Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994), a woman in an unsatisfactory marriage on a trip with her husband to France reflects on her painful adolescence, and particularly on a summer spent working at a storyland amusement park where she formed a fast friendship with a girl who shares
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her maturational miseries and flights into a world of fractured myths and fantasy. The grating relation between fantasy and reality is a constant of Moore’s fiction, and no more so here, where the narrator describes the complicated arrangements she must make for her friend to have an abortion at the same time as she constructs visions of a future that have been thoroughly deflated by the exigencies of “real life” in the novel’s present tense. To some degree, Moore’s most recent novel, A Gate at the Stairs (2009), is, like her second novel, a coming-of-age story, but is narrated under the shadow of 9/11 as the narrator looks back on her childhood on a farm in the Midwest and her undergraduate days as a student at a small liberal arts college. The novel develops a somewhat unlikely plot in which the narrator becomes involved as a nanny with a family who is other than they appear to be; however, the real impact of A Gate at the Stairs, like Moore’s stories, resides not in its plot but in its language as it depicts the inner life of an agile, naive mind encountering the complexities of reality and the subjectivities of others whose intentions are at cross-purposes with her own. SEE ALSO: Carver, Raymond (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Paley, Grace (AF), Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGSTED READINGS Fagan, M. (2006). Choirs and Split Voices: Female Identity Construction in Lorrie Moores’ Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? College Literature, 33, 52–69. Gaffney, E. (2001). Lorrie Moore: The Art of Fiction 167. Paris Review, 43, 57–84. Kelly, A. (2009). Understanding Lorrie Moore. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Moore, L. (1985). Self-Help. New York: Knopf. Moore, L. (1986). Anagrams. New York: Knopf. Moore, L. (1990). Like Life. New York: Knopf. Moore, L. (1994). Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? New York: Knopf. Moore, L. (1998). Birds of America. New York: Knopf. Moore, L. (2008). Collected Stories. New York: Faber and Faber. Moore, L. (2009). A Gate at the Stairs. New York: Knopf. Phelan, J. (1994). Self-Help for Narratee and Narrative Audience: How “I” – and “You”? – Read “How. ” Style, 28(3), 350–65.
Raiffa, J. R. (2006). Lorrie Moore. In B. H. Belfant & L. Graver (eds.), The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth Century American Short Story. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 386.
Morris, Wright LAURA BARRETT
The publication of two novels, My Uncle Dudley (1942) and The Man Who Was There (1945), and two “photo-texts,” The Inhabitants (1972a [1946]) and The Home Place (1968 [1948]), inaugurated Wright Morris’s dual career as a photographer and writer. The hybridity of the “photo-text” illustrated his simultaneous interest in and talent for photography and writing as well as his temporal and stylistic position on the cusp of modernism and postmodernism. A postmodern sense of exhaustion, exacerbated by an inability to represent and, therefore, respond to the real thing, permeates Morris’s fiction. “[O]ur only inexhaustible resource at the moment,” argues Morris, “is the cliche” (1978 [1957], 12). In response to his sharp criticism of nostalgic and derivative fiction, Morris experimented with narrative form and style, often creating a hallucinatory atmosphere in which reality commingles with absurdity, and pseudo-objective narration is juxtaposed with subjective stream of consciousness. Morris’s expansive career includes 19 novels, three memoirs, four collections of essays, dozens of short stories, and multiple photo-texts and photography books. Born in Central City, Nebraska on January 6, 1910 to a father motivated by wanderlust and a mother who died six days after his birth, Morris lived a somewhat itinerant early life, spending a few summers on a farm belonging to his Uncle Harry and Aunt Clara during his father’s absence. In 1940, he embarked on a photographic tour of the US, taking pictures that would later appear alongside text in The Inhabitants, a work that represents the residents of the Great Plains through brief first-person commentaries coupled with narratives in dialect. The images, like so much of his fiction, investigate the influence of environment, and his photographs of Nebraska often convey overwhelming isolation.
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The 1940s also saw the beginning of Morris’s career as a novelist struggling with themes of authenticity and originality. The Man Who Was There chronicles the loss of the real in an age of increasing mediation and reproduction, and The Works of Love (1972b [1952]) offers a character constructed by advertisements and films who requires the artificiality of theater and hotel lobbies, spaces which are “both in . . . and out of this world” (172) to feel alive. That sense of being on the threshold between worlds is a recurring theme in Morris’s fiction. “Nostalgia rules our hearts while a rhetoric of progress rules our words” (1978 [1957], 25). Characters in his novels find themselves looking backward, often in imitation of famous writers, actors, and sports figures. So salient are the footprints of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Greta Garbo, and Charles Lindbergh in The Huge Season (1975 [1954]), a finalist for the National Book Award, that characters cannot fashion original lives for themselves. Authenticity is further hampered by the ubiquity of advertising in twentieth-century America. Morris’s interest in optics continues in his National Book Award-winning novel, The Field of Vision (1974 [1956]), which explores the confrontation between what one sees and what is there. Five characters, witnessing the same bullfight in Mexico, see entirely different events, and while a photograph of the episode provides a certain objective representation, it fails to present the truth: “The camera did not lie. A pity, since the lie mirrored the truth. The camera would report what no pair of eyes present had seen” (154). Many of the characters from Field of Vision reappear in Ceremony in Lone Tree (1960), a novel which chronicles the birthday celebration of a patriarch, an event overshadowed by the murder spree of a young man. A finalist for the National Book Award, the novel, which is told from the point of view of 10 characters, continues Morris’s preoccupations with perspective, memory, and representation. The relationship of the Midwest of the midtwentieth century to its romanticized past is also explored in what is perhaps Morris’s most acclaimed novel and another National Book Award winner, Plains Song: For Female Voices (1991 [1980]). Here, he describes three generations of Midwestern women living in Nebraska
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since the late nineteenth century. In its sparseness and clarity, the novel resembles his photographs: portraits of people – strong, independent, and somewhat unpredictable women – emerge largely through tone and setting. In addition to various honors, including two National Book Awards and multiple Guggenheim Fellowships, Morris received one of the inaugural Whiting Writers Awards in 1985, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts (1986), the Commonwealth Award from the Modern Language Association (1982), the Mark Twain Award (1982), and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize/Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement (1981). Marking the end of a prodigious career that also included 12 years as an English professor at San Francisco State College (1963–75), Wright Morris died in April 1998. SEE ALSO: Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Barrett, L. (1998). “The True Witness of a False Event”: Photography and Wright Morris’s Fiction of the 1950s. Western American Literature, 3(1), 540–57. Bird, R. K. (1985). Wright Morris: Memory and Imagination. New York: Peter Lang. Booth, W. C. (1962). The Shaping of Prophecy: Craft and Idea in the Novels of Wright Morris. American Scholar, 31, 608–26. Crump, G. B. (1978). The Novels of Wright Morris: A Critical Interpretation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Madden, D. (1964). Wright Morris. New York: Twayne. Morris, W. (1942). My Uncle Dudley. New York: Harcourt Brace. Morris, W. (1945). The Man Who Was There. New York: Scribner’s. Morris, W. (1960). Ceremony in Lone Tree. New York: Atheneum. Morris, W. (1968). The Home Place [1948] (illus. W. Morris). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Morris, W. (1972a). The Inhabitants [1946], 2nd edn. New York: Da Capo. Morris, W. (1972b). The Works of Love [1952]. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Morris, W. (1974). The Field of Vision [1956]. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
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Morris, W. (1975). The Huge Season: A Novel [1954]. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Morris, W. (1977). Love Among the Cannibals [1957]. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Morris, W. (1978). The Territory Ahead [1957]. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Morris, W. (1981). Will’s Boy: A Memoir. New York: Harper. Morris, W. (1988). Collected Short Stories, 1948–1986 [1986]. New York: Godine. Morris, W. (1991). Plains Song: For Female Voices [1980]. New York: Godine. Trachtenberg, A. (1962). The Craft of Vision. Critique, 4(3), 41–55. Wydeven, J. J. (1998). Wright Morris Revisited. New York: Twayne.
Morrison, Toni CEDRIC GAEL BRYANT
Is it possible “to get some place where the love is generous?” Toni Morrison inquires in “‘Things We Find in Language’” (Taylor-Guthrie 171). This passionate question is present from the beginning of Morrison’s literary career and thematically informs the fiction and non-fiction she has produced over 40 years of “playing in the dark,” the title of her 1992 collection of essays meditating on race and the American literary imagination. After completing her third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), Morrison expressed the multilayered ways that love and survival form the woof and warp of her writing in this way: “I think that I still write about the same thing, which is how people relate to one another and miss it or hang on to it . . . or are tenacious about love. About love and how to survive – not to make a living – but how to survive whole where we are all of us, in some measure, victims of something” (Taylor-Guthrie 30). Born Chole Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931 in Loraine, Ohio, by the age of 12, “Toni,” the affectionate form of her masculine middle name, had already begun practicing the craft that would help shape American literature in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. Morrison’s fiction, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to A Mercy (2008), is a dramatic conjugation of love’s protean potential to reveal “what moves at the margins” (Morrison 1994, 28) for characters who often are trapped between communal stric-
tures or familial allegiances and an irrepressible will to express the self creatively, if unconventionally. This urge to create or claim the body-as-self, and the contrary desire to claim the other’s body for oneself, all happen in the name of love and desire. Either love or desire can become a monstrous perversion of itself and compel, for example, a neglected black girl to covet the blue eyes and white skin that in the American iconography of race signify happiness (The Bluest Eye), or convince a desperate mother to help her heroin-addicted son act like a “man” by burning him to death (Sula), or persuade a fugitive slave mother to put her children in a “safe” place by killing (murdering?) them rather than surrender them to the unspeakable, “peculiar” institution of slavery (Beloved). From 1965 until 1983, when Toni Morrison resigned her post as senior book editor at Random House, finding practicable ways to do “intimate things in place” as she negotiated single-parenting two sons, writing, and teaching was an imperative, as Morrison has said, “comparable to nothing” (Denard, 2008a). After 18 years as senior editor and the publication of three very successful novels (Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1978), Morrison was named Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at the State University of New York at Albany. She was named to the Robert Goheen Chair at Princeton in 1989, a position she held until her retirement in 2006. The recipient of prestigious national and international awards in the arts and humanities, Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 and the French Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Toni Morrison’s metaphor, “intimate things in place,” signifies the multidimensional shape of the writer’s life and the diversity of the writer’s work; however, this trope is also inextricably concerned with the power language has, paradoxically, to recuperate and erase history and to make and unmake the self. Without memory, or the ability to conjure or catalyze it, the communities and individuals in such complex novels as Love, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and Paradise stand little chance of challenging evil or truly understanding themselves. “Ourself behind ourself, concealed – / Should startle most – / Assassin hid in our Apartment / Be Horror’s least,” poet Emily Dickinson announces. It is precisely this proposition about
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human nature that produces the “unspeakable” acts that Morrison’s fiction insists must be spoken (1990, 203): the theft of a slave mother’s milk by white boys “with mossy teeth,” or “a red ribbon knotted around a curl of wet wavy wooly hair” stuck to the side of a flat-bottom boat (1987, 181); or, the demonizing of gendered difference and xenophobia that compel black men to kill “convent” women – “they shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time” – in order to purge themselves of an evil that is, in fact, “concealed” in themselves (1997b, 3). The corpus of Toni Morrison’s work is a play on the “body” in several significant ways, beginning with the synthesis of African, ancient Greek and Roman, and Latin American cultural traditions that inform Morrison’s narrative practice. Early in her career, this global body of literary influences included the work of magic-realist writers, especially Gabriel Garcıa Marquez’s fiction and Jorge Luis Borges’s poetry. The nine novels, short story (“Recitatif”), collection of essays and lectures on race in American literary criticism (1992b), and two edited books Morrison has thus far produced constitute an ongoing dialogue with romance and gothic traditions traceable to American roots in the nineteenth century, particularly the work of Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe. Moreover, much recent scholarship has explored Morrison’s ties to an expanding number of canonical American and European authors, including Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and William Faulkner. Woolf and Faulkner have been tempting pairings with Morrison, partly because both were the subjects of Morrison’s 1955 master’s thesis (“The Treatment of the Alienated in Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner”) from Cornell University. With the exception of The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1973), Morrison has published a novel every four or five years; the longest gestation period between major publications occurred in the 1980s between the release of Tar Baby in 1981 and the arrival of Morrison’s most successful novel to date, Beloved, in 1987. This was an extremely fertile period for experimentation, research, and discovery that resulted in Morrison’s only published short story, “Recitatif ” (1983), and an unpublished play, “Dreaming Emmett,” about the murder of Emmett Till and its significance to social reality and the American
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imagination. Most notably, during this time Morrison researched the material that would become the basis for Beloved in her investigation of the American slave narrative tradition, specifically Samuel J. May’s historical account of Margaret Garner, a slave woman in Cincinnati, Ohio who in January 1856 was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for the murder of her children who she claimed, in her defense, were hers and not her master’s property. Narrated from multiple, interdependent points of view, which demonstrate the constitutive nature of consciousness and the “universal particular” of human experience, Beloved, thematically, is a dramatic conjugation of love, memory, and possession of the body. Against the hegemonic authority of slavery to commodify the black body – to possess, repossess, dispossess, dismember, and remember it – a fugitive slave mother named Sethe struggles for the power, if not the legal right, to “love your heart. For this is the prize.” As Michael Awkward suggests, within the tradition of African American writing, black women writers have created a “textual system” defined aesthetically by “inspiriting influences” (8), and the black female body is their central subject matter. This doubling as producers and subjects is richly manifest in the concerns Toni Morrison shares with sister writers, including Gayl Jones, poet Lucille Clifton, Margaret Walker, Octavia E. Butler, Alice Walker, and Sherley Anne Williams. In diversely inspiriting genres, as poets, novelists, and science fiction writers, the reconstruction of slavery through the literary imagination is the shared subject that has informed, at one time or another, their narrative strategies and themes. In protean texts such as Morrison’s Beloved, Williams’s Dessa Rose, Butler’s Kindred, and Walker’s Jubilee, the scarred, mutilated black body becomes a semiotic sign of a pernicious ideology that commodifies and subjugates black bodies on the basis of gendered and racial otherness. The scars “speak the unspeakable” and make plain the physical and emotional brutality that within this literary tradition always threatens to make marginalized people perpetual victims but, remarkably, often catalyzes their self-empowerment and transcendence. When love fails to find its “generous,” lifeaffirming balance, as in the novel Jazz (1992a), it can take the grotesque form of the beloved dead
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body. Joe Trace’s all-consuming love for Dorcas, the beautiful girl he kills, leaves so little affection for his wife, Violet, that she, driven by her own unmanageable need to be loved, slashes the dead girl’s face during the open-casket viewing. What should be a respectful, public ritual of mourning is transformed into grotesque parody by what the narrator calls “those deep down, spooky loves” (3) that cause one thrown-away lover to kill his beloved and the jealous wife to desecrate the dead girl’s body and memory. Jazz and these events take place during the 1920s during the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance and the jazz age. This is the second novel of a “triology” that begins with Beloved, which takes place between the 1850s and the end of Reconstruction; and Paradise, which chronicles the 1930s through the late Civil Rights period. By contrast, the narrative events of A Mercy (2008) take place in the 1690s, the earliest historical time of Morrison’s novels. Visible and invisible scarring, the struggle for self-empowerment, and transcendence have been central subjects in Toni Morrison’s fiction from the beginning. The Bluest Eye (1970), Morrison’s first novel, develops the tragic story of Pecola Breedlove, a young, unloved black girl doubly brutalized by a systemic racial ideology that privileges whiteness and denigrates blackness, and by her father, Cholly, who in a perverted and sad effort to express affection rapes her. Anathematized and abandoned by both her family and the larger black community, Pecola is befriended only by the novel’s two adolescent narrators, Claudia and Frieda MacTeer. Told retrospectively from the vantage point of adulthood looking back to a moment of crisis that shapes all three characters, the narrators’ sense of loss and regret is palpable. However, there are lessons learned about the paradoxically corrupting and saving grace of community, the fragility of identity, and the power of ideology. And there is an ironic victory for Pecola herself, who ultimately finds an escape from self-loathing and incest in madness, where she can possess perfectly the blue eyes and white skin she covets and retreat from a brutally indifferent world. The Bluest Eye and Morrison’s second novel, Sula (1973), chart the development of adolescent black girls transitioning to mature womanhood in the first half of the twentieth century, between the
Great Depression and the Civil Rights Movement. In Sula, Morrison broadens her concern with the “damaging internalization of assumptions of immutable inferiority originating in an outsider gaze” (1973, 210) to include the complex relation between radical individualism and communalism, and explores the inextricably intertwined nature of good and evil. Questions about love, its generous possibilities and its corrosive kinds of narcissism, are also central in Sula and throughout Morrison’s novels. The narrative time frame in Sula moves from 1919 to 1965, the year that Nel Greene finally comes to terms with a remembrance of things past, which includes revelations about the permanence and fragility of the relationship with her childhood best friend, Sula Peace, and the meaning of life and death in a world that includes the collapse of a tunnel filled with people and the misplaced feelings of loneliness for the husband, Jude, who abandoned her. Two sides of the same personality, divided between self and other, Nel and Sula move through girlhood to womanhood under the glaring gaze of the “Bottom,” an all-black community whose moral standards, customs, and consensus about evil problematically both protect and pervert, and nurture and punish, deviance or compliance, accordingly, with its strictures. (Morrison would again explore the subject of social control in an all-black community in her seventh novel, Paradise.) Because Sula is marked by difference – symbolized by a Rorschach-like birthmark that, like Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter “A” in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, morphs into what the viewer projects onto it: a serpent, a rose, or a tadpole – her black female body becomes a semiotic sign and her eccentricities are viewed as evidence of the evil from which the community believes it must protect itself. “Such evil,” the collective voice of the community announces, “must be avoided . . . and precautions must naturally be taken to protect themselves from it” (89). Sula violates the community’s most cherished values by putting her grandmother, Eva, in a facility for convalescents, rather than caring for her at home; committing adultery with Nel’s husband, Jude; watching her own mother burn to death because she was “interested”; and allegedly fornicating with white men, a cardinal sin that irretrievably anathematizes her. Marginalized by
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his own species of difference, only “crazy” Shadrack and ultimately Nel herself seem to understand what Sula says on her deathbed: “‘maybe it was me’” who was “good” (146). Because Sula’s deviance has exposed the community’s moral contradictions and, concomitantly, engendered an ironically orderly response to the disorder that she represents, the community may come to “love” her, as she predicts. Thematically, the community, through the forms of ideological and social control it wields, will always need the kind of check on its potential abuses of power that radical individualism provokes. Song of Solomon (1977) marks a narrative shift from a female- to male-centered point of view that, however, remains concerned with the emergent self struggling at the conjunction of familial and political responsibility, history and loss, and the possibility of recovery through the primacy of language. This thematic trajectory in Toni Morrison’s first three novels is also the narrative foundation for her fiction generally. However, her eighth novel, Love (2003), links up with the corpus through the resilient question Morrison has posed in diverse ways over time about struggling to reach the place “where the love is generous.” The narrative shape of Love resembles “the way crystal forms,” Morrison says in an interview: “you have a small piece and then it expands to another. And another layer comes on in a different shape. . . . And when you get finished it’s different facets, different light looking at one simple thing,” which is, of course, love (Denard 2008a, 216). The “different facets” of conflict and theme in this novel center on Bill Cosey, owner of Cosey’s Hotel and Resort, whose charm, wealth, and aloofness attract the women – Heed (his second wife), May (his daughter), L (hotel chef), Junior (mysterious stranger), Christine (his granddaughter), and Vida (faithful employee) – who collectively and diversely reflect the novel’s title. With the possible exception of L, these women have failed, or never learned, to love themselves first and, consequently, like moths drawn dangerously and irresistibly to an open flame, seek this lack or absence in the protean presence of Bill Cosey. The prismatic effect refracted by Cosey’s light exposes the internecine kinds of rivalries – between friends, husbands and
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wives, strangers, and daughters and stepmothers – and the volcanic emotions – jealousy, insecurity, deceit, hate, and distrust – that can destroy families and whole communities. What trumps both narcissism and the kind of altruism that deifies the “other,” the novel implies, is self-authentication, which makes generous expressions of mutual love and friendship possible. This is what Heed and Christine, whose lives have been shaped most by Cosey’s life and perverted most by his death, ultimately realize sitting on the floor, in each other’s arms, in Cosey’s empty hotel. In the dust and exhausted aftermath of their best effort to physically hurt one another, Heed and Christine rediscover what is true about their relationship: “Pretty. So so pretty. / Love. I really do” (194). The parable Toni Morrison relates in her Nobel Prize Lecture, about an old, blind woman who is asked by “young visitors” to say whether a bird one of them is holding is alive or dead, expresses essential truths about “paradigms of power,” the “systematic looting of language,” and our collective responsibility to prevent them. The old, blind woman, who is also wise, believes that when language dies “out of carelessness, disuse, indifference, and absence of esteem, or [is] killed by fiat, not only she herself but all users and makers are accountable for its demise” (1994, 14–15). This responsibility for language, Morrison notes in the William E. Massey Sr. lectures that form the essays in Playing in the Dark, touches all aspects of life, the speakable and unspeakable, and extends to both white and black, male and female American writers for whom “there is no escape from racially inflected language” (1992b, 13). Throughout Morrison’s remarkable fiction and non-fiction, what she says about language and writers generally, like the parable about the bird and the old woman, is there to be seen and felt, so long as there are listeners and players in the darkness: “the work writers do to unhobble the imagination from the demands of . . . language is complicated, interesting, and definitive” (1992b, 13). SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Faulkner, William (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF); Woolf, Virginia (BIF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Awkward, M. (1989). Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women’s Novels. New York: Columbia University Press. Bryant, C. G. (2005). “The Soul Has Bandaged Moments”: Reading the African American Gothic Tradition in Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home,” Morrison’s Beloved, and Gomez’s Gilda. African American Review, 39, 541–53. Conner, M. C. (2000). The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Denard, C. C. (ed.) (2008a). Toni Morrison: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Denard, C. C. (ed.) (2008b). Toni Morrison: What Moves at the Margin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Mayberry, S. N. (2008). Can’t I Love What I Criticize: The Masculine and Morrison. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Morrison, T. (1970). The Bluest Eye. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Morrison, T. (1973). Sula. New York: Knopf. Morrison, T. (1977). Song of Solomon. New York: Knopf. Morrison, T. (1981). Tar Baby. New York: Knopf. Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. New York: Knopf. Morrison, T. (1990). Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature. In H. Bloom, (ed.), Toni Morrison. New York: Chelsea House.
Morrison, T. (1992a). Jazz. New York: Knopf. Morrison, T. (1992b). Playing in the Dark. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Morrison, T. (ed.) (1992c). Race-ing Justice, Engendering Power. New York: Pantheon. Morrison, T. (1994). The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1993. New York: Knopf. Morrison, T. (1997b). Paradise. New York: Knopf. Morrison, T. (2003). Love. New York: Knopf. Morrison, T. (2004). Remember: The Journey to School Integration. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Morrison, T. (2008). A Mercy. New York: Knopf. Morrison, T., & Claudia Brodsky Lacour (eds.)(1997a). Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson Case. New York: Pantheon. Page, P. (1995). Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison’s Novels. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Peterson, N. J. (ed.) (1997). Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Taylor-Guthrie, D. (ed.) (1994). Conversations With Toni Morrison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Toni Morrison: Uncensored. (1990). [Video interview]. Films for the Humanities and Sciences. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Wall, C.A. (2005). Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
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N Nabokov, Vladimir LELAND DE LA DURANTAYE
Vladimir Nabokov is one of the most brilliant, original, and complex writers of the twentieth century. Though best known for his novels, he is the author of works in a variety of genres, ranging from verse to memoir, biography to translation. No writer of the last half century has had so broad or so decisive an influence on American – as well as non-American – fiction, from his student Thomas Pynchon to his early advocate John Updike, from Martin Amis to W. G. Sebald, Aleksandar Hemon to Jhumpa Lahiri, Don DeLillo to Jeffrey Eugenides, Zadie Smith to Michael Chabon. Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born into a family of great wealth and influence in St. Petersburg on April 22, 1899. He was the eldest of five children and the son of a renowned jurist and liberal politician. The family, a member of the untitled nobility, spent their summers on family estates in the Russian countryside, and the rest of the year in St. Petersburg – a rhythm recounted in his Speak, Memory (1966). Also related therein is that Nabokov’s exceptionally happy childhood was also a trilingual one. Alongside his native Russian, the rules of fashionable society demanded a thorough knowledge of French. He first learned the language in which he would become most famous from his English governess. Inheriting an independent fortune from an uncle at the age of 17, Nabokov used a small part of his briefly held riches to publish a collection of his Russian verse. With the rise to power
of the Bolsheviks in 1917 his family fled St. Petersburg for the Crimea, remaining there for 18 months before leaving Russia in 1919, never to return. Nabokov and his brother Sergei were sent to study at Cambridge University, while his parents (stripped of their considerable wealth) and younger siblings settled in Berlin, then the center of Russian emigre society. At Trinity College Nabokov studied Russian and French literature. In 1922 his father was murdered by Russian monarchists in Berlin (he was not the target of the attack but was killed while trying to hinder the assassins). The following year Nabokov met his future wife, Vera, whom he married in 1925. Their only child, Dmitri, was born in 1934. In response to the mounting danger posed by the National Socialist government, made particularly acute by the fact that Vera was Jewish, the couple and their young son left Berlin for Paris in 1937. Under renewed pressure from the Nazis, they sailed from Paris for New York in 1940. During the years between the end of his university studies and his fleeing Europe, Nabokov wrote eight novels in Russian, culminating in his masterful The Gift (1938). Alongside these he wrote a large body of verse and short fiction (including two novellas). Despite the critical success with which both his poetry and fiction were met, the exigencies of the emigre market made it impossible for him to earn a living from writing. To supplement his income, he composed chess problems and crossword puzzles for newspapers, as well as gave lessons in French, English, Russian, tennis, and boxing.
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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By the late 1930s it became clear to Nabokov that if he was to have any hope of supporting his family through literature, he would need to remake himself as either a French or an English writer. His first forays into the French literary world were successful, but the political situation there soon led him to set his sights on the Anglophone world. While he had actually learned to read English before Russian (much to his parents’ surprise), and attended an English university, his first creative writing in English – what was to become The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – dates from 1938, when Nabokov was 39 years old. It is for this reason all the more remarkable that the literary language he developed in that and later works is neither simplified nor stiff. As his readers soon remarked, it abounds in both stylistic refinement and colloquial flavor (an important early critic of his work, Alfred Appel, Jr., notably dubbed it “colloquial baroque”). At many points it displays a foreigner’s heightened sensitivity to the neglected resources of a language. The striking felicity of much of his writing is inflected by echoes of other languages and is strongly marked by what George Steiner called its “extraterritoriality.” Upon arriving in New York in 1940, Nabokov found himself in the same narrow financial straits he had known in Europe. He took a curatorial job in the entomology department of New York’s Museum of Natural History, which was later supplanted by a similar post at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Alongside this scientific work, Nabokov taught Russian and comparative literature at Wellesley College, stealing time for creative writing where he could. During these years he found a publisher for his first novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), and wrote and published his second one, Bend Sinister (1947). Nabokov at last found a full-time teaching post at Cornell University in 1948, where he remained until the proceeds from Lolita (1955) would allow him to retire permanently from teaching 10 years later. After completing another novel, Pnin (1957), and writing a screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s film version of Lolita, Nabokov left America for Switzerland in 1960, where he spent the last 17 years of his life in peaceful seclusion, and during which he wrote and published Pale Fire (1962); Ada, or Ardor (1969); Transparent Things
(1972); and Look at the Harlequins! (1974). Despite his injunction against posthumous publication, since his death Lectures on Literature (1980), Lectures on Russian Literature (1981), and Lectures on Don Quixote (1983) have appeared. At the time of his death, Nabokov was at work on a novel entitled The Original of Laura (2009). He had instructed that it was to be burnt in the event he died before being able to complete it. After long years of uncertainty, and an intense flurry of media attention, his son and literary executor, Dmitri, agreed to its publication. Just as Nabokov’s exceptional talent did not limit itself to a single language, it did not limit itself to a single genre. While indeed best-known for his novels, he also wrote verse, short fiction, a richly evocative memoir, a biography, two stage plays, a screenplay, scientific papers treating the taxonomy and behavior of butterflies and moths, and one of the most extensively annotated translations of a poem ever produced. And yet this translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1975) – for which Nabokov thought he would be, along with Lolita, best remembered – only represented a modest part of the total translating he did during his life. In addition to early translations such as one from English to Russian of Alice in Wonderland and later ones from Russian to English such as that of the twelfth-century epic The Song of Igor’s Campaign, Nabokov either himself translated, or had a significant hand in the translations of, all his earlier Russian works, as well as translated Lolita into Russian. Nabokov’s energetic movement between genres is also clearly reflected within his preferred genre, the novel. Ever impatient with generic constraints, each of Nabokov’s English novels presents some significant formal or thematic innovation. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight begins as a fictionalized literary biography and ends as a riddle of authority and identification. The dystopian Bend Sinister oscillates between the political and the private, between a reflection on totalitarianism and one on suffering and loss, and closes with the curious intervention of a figure Nabokov described as “an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me.” Pnin is a touching, tender, and often melancholy story of emigration and academia which, however, does not fail to raise many of the same questions of authority as had Nabokov’s first English novel. As its subtitle indicates, Ada,
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or Ardor is a “family chronicle” but one where familial resemblances, history, and even the passage of time are subject to highly specialized rules of engagement. Fittingly enough, Nabokov’s final completed novel, Look at the Harlequins!, at once reflects and mocks the genre of the literary autobiography. The most striking instance of Nabokov’s formal innovation is offered, however, by Pale Fire. The novel takes the form of a 999-line poem written by a (fictional) poet accompanied by the preface and annotations of a (fictional) critic who, as becomes ever more apparent to the reader, is either a monomaniacal monarch in exile or a madman – or both. Still other possibilities, however, are gradually suggested, as certain details of plot and presentation seem to indicate that both poem and commentary were written by the poet himself, while others imply that both were written by the commentator. In an important early review, Mary McCarthy described the novel as “a Jack-in-theBox, a Faberge gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers, a cat-and-mouse game, a do-it-yourself novel” (21). Still other elements in the dizzyingly complex construction point to yet another author within the world of the novel (a local professor). Further conjectures have been made, though these might suffice to give a sense of the playful complexity of the novel’s intricate structure (for an overview of the varying possibilities, as well as the impassioned advocacy of a single one of them, see Boyd 1999). Nabokov is, however, best known for his tale of ardent love, aching loss, and cruel mistreatment, Lolita. The novel combines elements of the case history, the confession, the lyric, and the detective novel. Its most unsettling formal characteristic, however, is also its most unsettling moral one, as Lolita is told in the first-person voice of a criminal graced with unsettling eloquence. Humbert is remarkable not only for his wit, imagination, and powers of observation, but also for how little he corresponds to stereotypical images of pedophiles. Lolita has become one of the most famous books of its century, and yet its nature has remained resolutely enigmatic with readers divided as to whether it is a sterile exercise of linguistic virtuosity or a deeply human account of love and loss, whether it is an incitement to vice or an encouragement to virtue, whether it is art for
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nothing but its own sake or a work of rare moral force. While present in all Nabokov’s fiction, this innovative element is not limited to it. Nabokov was fiercely independent in all his activities, from the conventional genre of the biography to the freer one of the novel. Much to his publisher’s chagrin, in writing his biography of Nikolai Gogol he refused to either offer summaries of Gogol’s works or proceed chronologically in the telling of his life. Equally remarkable is that this same principle was followed in Nabokov’s own memoir – published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence, translated into Russian in 1954, and published in expanded and altered form as Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited in 1966. In all its incarnations, this memoir follows thematic rather than chronological strands and accords far greater importance to seemingly minor details and chance recollections than to what are customarily viewed as formative experiences and watershed events. Nabokov’s view of art can be most succinctly described as art for art’s sake. He categorically dismissed the importance or interest –in both his works and those of others – of social, political, or moral questions and displayed a particularly strong antipathy toward writers and critics whom he saw using literature to advocate social or political views. In the introduction to Bend Sinister he stated, “I am not ‘sincere,’ I am not ‘provocative,’ I am not ‘satirical.’ I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer. Politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient, symptoms of ‘thaw’ in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on, leave me supremely indifferent” (xii). Of Dickens’s Bleak House, he claimed that “the sociological side . . . is neither interesting nor important” (1980, 68); and of Madame Bovary, he remarked, “[T]he subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books” (1980, 138). When he addressed the question of audience, it was most often to dismiss it as not worth discussing, and was fond of quoting Pushkin’s dictum, “I write for pleasure and publish for money” (1973, 273). This is not to say, however, that he was indifferent to his audience, and, in private communications, he reacted with pride and pleasure to the reactions of attentive readers.
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What Nabokov most demanded from readers was attention to detail. Both in life and in art, he stressed the need to study even and especially the subtlest details – the finest shades of color and most delicate nuances of meaning. This resulted in a virulent dislike for generalizations, most clearly visible in his repeated attacks on Freud. Freud was not alone, however, in receiving such harsh treatment. In 1973 Nabokov published a collection of interviews, essays, and chess problems entitled Strong Opinions (1973) in which the vehemence of his literary opinions is on prominent display. Both there and elsewhere, his reverence for Tolstoy, Chekhov, Joyce, Kafka, Dickens, Proust, and Bely found its complement in the contempt in which he held a number of celebrated authors from Marx to Dostoevsky, and from Balzac to Thomas Mann. Amongst notable American writers whom Nabokov deemed “mediocrities” are T. S. Eliot, Henry James, Faulkner, and Saul Bellow. In virtually all of Nabokov’s work, early and late, themes of madness, cruelty, and suffering recur frequently. In some cases, they are presented in relatively conventional fashion, albeit with unconventional insight, as in such early works as Laughter in the Dark (1938) and The Defense (1930). In Lolita and Ada, or Ardor, they are filtered through the more or less villainous eyes of the perpetrators. In still other instances, a remarkable figure enters the world of the fiction – that of the work’s creator – as at the end of Bend Sinister and the story “Cloud, Castle, Lake.” Unsurprisingly, the relation of creator to creation and the role of cruelty in that creation have comprised a topic of perennial curiosity – and unease – amongst readers and critics, as has been the theme of emissaries from the beyond. Given the complexity of Nabokov’s works, it should come as no surprise that the question as to what extent his readers are meant to unravel them has also been a recurrent one, as has been the related one of whether singular definitive answers to the riddles posed in works such as The Real Life of Sebastian Knight or Pale Fire are to be had. Arguments for the ultimate impossibility of certainty and determinacy in such matters are to be found expressed with particular clarity in Wood (1994). A spirited defense of determinacy in interpretation – brought to bear on the most
densely and deceptively patterned of Nabokov’s works, Pale Fire – is given by Boyd (1999). In conclusion, for the reader experiencing surprise at finding Nabokov listed as an American author, a few details bear noting. As concerns his own view of the matter, Nabokov exclaimed, “I am as American as April in Arizona” (1973, 98). More precisely, he noted elsewhere, “I am an American writer, born in Russia and educated in England where I studied French literature, before spending fifteen years in Germany” (1973, 26). When asked where in the library classification his works should be placed, his widow remarked that they belonged under American Literature as his best works were written in that language. SEE ALSO: Expatriate Fiction (AF); McCarthy, Mary (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Alexandrov, V. (1991). Nabokov’s Otherworld. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Alexandrov, V. (ed.) (1995). The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Garland. Boyd, B. (1990). Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Boyd, B. (1991). Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Boyd, B. (1999). Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Connolly, J. (ed.) (2005). The Cambridge Companion to Vladimir Nabokov. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de la Durantaye, L. (2007). Style Is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Johnson, D. B. (1985). Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. Ann Arbor: Ardis. Nabokov, V. (1938). Laughter in the Dark. New York: Bobbs-Merrill. Nabokov, V. (1941). The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. New York: New Directions. Nabokov, V. (1947). Bend Sinister. New York: Holt. Nabokov, V. (1955). Lolita. Paris: Olympia Press. Nabokov, V. (1957). Pnin. New York: Doubleday. Nabokov, V. (1959). Invitation to a Beheading [trans. of Priglashenie na kazn’, 1938] (trans. D. Nabokov with V. Nabokov). New York: Putnam’s.
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Nabokov, V. (1961). Nikolai Gogol [1944], corr. ed. New York: New Directions. Nabokov, V. (1962). Pale Fire. New York: Putnam’s. Nabokov, V. (1963). The Gift [trans. of Dar, 1937–38] (trans. M. Scammell with V. Nabokov). New York: Putnam’s. Nabokov, V. (1964). The Defense [Zashchita Luzhina, 1930] (trans. M. Scammell with V. Nabokov). New York: Putnam’s. Nabokov, V. (1965). The Eye [Sogliadatai, 1938] (trans. D. Nabokov with V. Nabokov). New York: Phaedra. Nabokov, V. (1966). Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. New York: Putnam’s. Nabokov, V. (1968). King, Queen, Knave [Korol’, dama, valet, 1928] (trans. D. Nabokov with V. Nabokov). New York: McGraw-Hill. Nabokov, V. (1969). Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. New York: McGraw-Hill. Nabokov, V. (1970). Mary [Mashen’ka, 1926] (trans. M. Glenny with V. Nabokov). New York: McGraw-Hill. Nabokov, V. (1971). Glory [Sovremennye Zapiski] (trans. D. Nabokov with V. Nabokov). New York: McGraw-Hill. Nabokov, V. (1972). Transparent Things. New York: McGraw-Hill. Nabokov, V. (1973). Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw-Hill. Nabokov, V. (1974). Look at the Harlequins! New York: McGraw-Hill. Nabokov, V. (1975). Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin [1964] (trans. and comm. V. Nabokov), rev. ed., 4 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nabokov, V. (1980). Lectures on Literature (ed. F. Bowers). New York: Harcourt, Brace. Nabokov, V. (1981). Lectures on Russian Literature (ed. F. Bowers). New York: Harcourt Brace. Nabokov, V. (1991). The Annotated Lolita [1970] (ed., pref., intro., and notes, A. Appel, Jr.). New York: Vintage. Nabokov, V. (1996). Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Knopf. Page, N. (ed.) (1982). Nabokov: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge. Pifer, E. (1980). Nabokov and the Novel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steiner, G. (1970). Extraterritorial. TriQuarterly, 17, 119–27. Wood, M. (1994). The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. London: Chatto and Windus.
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Naturalist Fiction JOHN DUDLEY
Famously dismissed by Malcolm Cowley and other critics as little more than “pessimistic determinism,” American literary naturalism might more fully be described as an attempt to incorporate the revolutionary scientific ideas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into an American literary tradition already heavily invested in questions of free will and individualism. At its center, naturalist fiction is concerned with understanding the limits placed upon an individual by forces beyond his or her control. While generally viewed as the culmination of the realist turn in American art and literature that began after the US Civil War, the naturalist movement, with its incorporation of scientific discourse, its exploration of individual consciousness, its experimentation with form and technique, and its attention to issues of racial and gendered difference, should also be seen as laying the groundwork for questions of subjectivity, epistemology, and ethics so crucial to modernism and postmodernism. Always engaged with contemporaneous social, political, and intellectual issues, naturalism as a fictional mode continued to evolve in response to, and along with, the myriad cultural changes of the twentieth century. In his 1880 treatise The Experimental Novel, Emile Zola appropriated the language and techniques of medical science in describing the role of the novelist as an objective observer of the ways in which human lives are shaped by a combination of heredity, environment, and chance. Throughout his Rougon-Macquart series of 20 novels, published between 1870 and 1893, Zola demonstrates the application of his theory, offering a sort of “natural history” of two families that encompasses the major political and social events of France’s Second Republic (1851–70) and incorporates such subjects as alcoholism, prostitution, labor unrest, and the effects of urbanization. Zola’s revolutionary approach to literature coincided with the growing impact of Marxist and Darwinian ideas, as well as the rise of the social sciences, all of which contributed to the emergence of American literary naturalism in the 1890s.
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The naturalist fiction produced by American writers has defied easy generalizations or definitions. Critics have largely regarded naturalism as a deterministic descendant of the realist movement, as defined and practiced by Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James. Unlike their realist predecessors, who shared considerable personal and professional ties and who articulated a consistent, if varied, aesthetic program, the first generation of naturalists could hardly be said to form a coherent “school.” With the notable exception of Frank Norris, who made clear his debt to Zola, few American writers used the term “naturalism” to describe their work, and the most celebrated naturalists, including Norris, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser, crossed paths only intermittently during their careers. Indeed, any reader must acknowledge the formal and philosophical diversity among these writers, as well as the profound impact of their work on subsequent American fiction. The various strands of naturalist technique that developed over the subsequent century can be largely traced to the dominant characteristics of these authors’ works: sensational depictions of poverty, degeneration, and urban life (Norris, London, and Crane); overt reference to biological and environmental determinism (Norris, London, and Dreiser); painstaking documentary detail (Dreiser); a detached, acerbic irony (Crane and Wharton), and, to a varying degree in each of these writers, an explicit critique of the excesses and hypocrisies of American culture during the “Progressive era.” In the wake of police reporter Jacob Riis’s sensational and influential analysis of Manhattan’s poor in How the Other Half Lives (1890), fellow journalist Stephen Crane produced Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and published it himself under a pseudonym. The novel’s frank descriptions of inner-city tenement life and sympathetic, yet unsentimental, portrayal of a prostitute found few readers, despite an established middle-class fascination with reformist slum narratives. Indeed, it was as an alternative to the overtly sentimental tradition of popular fiction that the naturalists staked out their territory. For these writers, naturalism, as a literary mode informed by science, journalism, and the Progressive-era emphasis on professionalism, provided a distinctly “masculine” authorial role
that addressed the anxieties surrounding what historian Ann Douglas has referred to as “the feminization of American culture.” At the same time, this gendered stance masked the genre’s affinities with the popular romance, the reform tract, and the sentimental novel. These formal tensions mirror the unsettled thematic structure of naturalist fiction. Impressionistic and darkly ironic, Crane’s portrait of Maggie, the doomed Bowery girl who “blossomed in a mud puddle,” effectively introduces the archetypal conflicts within naturalist fiction between, on one hand, the inchoate aspirations of its characters for aesthetic beauty and spiritual fulfillment, and, on the other, the profound inability of these characters to fully comprehend, let alone escape, the conditions in which they find themselves trapped. Likewise, the novel reflects the unresolved tensions between nature and culture that epitomize naturalist narratives. Crane leaves open the degree to which Maggie’s fate stems from a genetic predisposition to moral weakness, the corrupting influences of her abusive mother and a deceitful suitor, or the larger environmental degradation of the urban underworld that she inhabits. Subsequent paradigmatic examples of naturalism, such as Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Norris’s McTeague (1899), Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), and Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), offer complex, and even contradictory, explorations of what constitutes inherent “human nature” and its interaction with the environmental forces at work in determining an individual’s fate. In a century increasingly committed to the power of cultural construction, naturalist fiction consistently provided an avenue for social critique, and its endlessly adaptable form reflected shifting ideas in evolutionary science and philosophy. For instance, Jack London’s novels and stories incorporate – at times, uneasily – the author’s commitment to socialism, a utopian belief in progress, Nietzsche’s radical individualism, and the era’s poisonous attitudes toward racial inequality. In The Call of the Wild (1903), London employs the conventions of a boys’ adventure story to construct a parable in which a dog is transformed, through his immersion into the brutal world of the Yukon Gold Rush, from a spoiled house pet to the “dominant primordial beast” lurking within his genetic coding. The capacity of environmental forces to reveal an
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NATURALIST FICTION
individual’s true nature also serves as the focus of London’s The Sea-Wolf (1904), in which an ineffectual poet, shipwrecked and rescued by the cruel captain of a sealing vessel, undergoes a dramatic metamorphosis, surviving the nightmarish torments of the ship to discover a courage and strength that conform with the expectations of a masculinity most prominently defined by Theodore Roosevelt’s notion of “the strenuous life.” London also presents, in such works as The People of the Abyss (1903) and The Iron Heel (1908), a more direct, polemical critique of economic and social inequality, and this trend in naturalist fiction is well represented in the early twentieth century by the so-called muckrakers, including David Graham Phillips, Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Upton Sinclair. Sinclair’s fictional depiction of immigrant workers in Chicago meatpacking plants, The Jungle (1906), exposed both exploitive labor conditions and the shocking hygienic standards of the food industry, and is credited with fomenting popular support for the creation of the US Food and Drug Administration shortly after its publication. Despite the prevailing Progressive-era faith in biological differences of race and gender, as well as the overtly racialist and masculinist ideology apparent in writers such as London and Norris, naturalist fiction depicting the particular struggles of women and people of color not only emerged in response to the larger trend, but also helped to shape the form and content of naturalism. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian novel Herland (1915), for instance, applies a distinctly Larmarckian view of acquired heritability to undermine the more rigid definitions of gender associated with Darwinian evolution. Texts as diverse as Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces (1900), Zitkala-Sa’s “The Soft-Hearted Sioux” (1901), Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods (1902), and Sui Sin Far’s “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” (1912) illustrate naturalist fiction’s flexibility, as well as its power to explore intersecting ideas about biological and cultural difference. In his first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), W. E. B. Du Bois not only appropriates the form of the agrarian reform novel, as defined by Norris’s The Octopus (1901) and Zola’s earlier Germinal (1885), but also employs this form to elucidate his economic analysis of the Jim Crow South. The novel traces the fates of Bles,
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an educated, aspiring member of Du Bois’s “talented tenth” and Zora, an outcast “child of the swamp,” as they struggle between self-interest and a higher duty to improve conditions in the cotton belt of the Deep South. While The Octopus concludes with Presley, the exiled poet, reaching a bittersweet epiphany reflecting the evolutionary positivism of Norris’s Berkeley professor, Joseph LeConte, The Quest of the Silver Fleece unites Zora and Bles in a partnership that reinforces the racial unification called for in Du Bois’s landmark The Souls of Black Folk. If the naturalist movement of the early twentieth century demonstrated the ability to synthesize and critique diverse philosophical and scientific ideas, as well as the potential for direct intervention in contemporary social problems, subsequent trends in naturalism both reinforce these characteristics and establish naturalism as a persistent and powerful strain across American fiction, perhaps better understood as a shifting set of formal and thematic patterns than as a discrete literary genre, in traditional critical terms. Although critics would generally interpret the modernist experimentation of the 1920s in the context of metaphysical and aesthetic terms quite alien to the materialist emphasis of naturalism, the naturalists’ concern with the power of physical and environmental forces upon individual consciousness certainly informs the work of such canonical modernists as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. Among subsequent literary movements, the rise of social protest and proletarian fiction in the 1930s remains the best-known adaptation of naturalistic form and technique in the twentieth century. Novels by John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, John Steinbeck, and Michael Gold reinvigorate the formal innovations of the earlier generation of naturalists within the leftist political atmosphere which arose out of the Great Depression. Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy (1930–6) and Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932–5) match Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series in scale and ambition, and Steinbeck’s most naturalistic novels, including In Dubious Battle (1936) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), combine the muckraker’s spirit of outrage and dissent with a modernist’s suspicion of totalizing philosophies. Gold’s Jews Without Money (1930) revisits the Lower East Side of Manhattan, sketched in
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vivid, if impressionistic, fashion in Crane’s Maggie, through a fictionalized memoir of an immigrant childhood. Drawing upon its readers’ familiarity with the urban milieu of slum fiction, Gold’s novel explicitly links the injustices and indignities of tenement life with the oppressive and exploitive excesses of capitalism. Unlike such racialized caricatures as Norris’s Zerkow in McTeague, here the familiar anti-Semitic motif of the grotesque, rapacious Jew, ill-equipped for the challenges of modernity, is rewritten as a fuller portrait of distinct individuals, shaped not by genetic destiny but by the stifling prison of the urban ghetto. As Gold’s emphasis on environmental forces exemplifies, the twentieth century witnessed the so-called eclipse of Darwinism in its most sweeping and deterministic forms, as well as a concurrent emphasis on cultural, rather than biological, forces. Likewise, while early naturalist texts were infused with biological determinism, naturalism as a form not only accommodated shifting ideas about the fixity of “human nature,” but also in fact facilitated and encouraged such changes, a pattern seen clearly in the work of African Americans and others with a vested interest in questioning, if not demolishing, widespread attitudes about racial and ethnic difference. Within the African American tradition, novels such as Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), Ann Petry’s The Street (1946), and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) deploy familiar naturalistic motifs to explore issues of free will and determinism. The naturalists’ desire to confront the harshest of circumstances resonates powerfully with what Ellison defines, in his homage to Richard Wright, as a crucial element of “the blues”: “an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain” (78). While these works chart an increasing belief in the power of social construction, this attitude is problematized by the persistence of violence, sensationalism, and gendered differences within these texts. In their ambiguous confrontation with essentialism, their incorporation of vernacular forms, and their refusal to find easy or comforting resolutions, such texts help to redefine the scope and urgency of literary naturalism in the later twentieth century.
Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1982) offers a paradigmatic example of both the contours of contemporary naturalism and the ways in which African American writers have reshaped the tradition. In this “novel in seven stories,” Naylor explicitly links the interwoven fates of several female residents of a dead-end street with the economic and sociological forces that dramatically changed the post-World War II urban landscape and the African American community in the United States. “Like an ebony phoenix” (5), each woman’s narrative reflects the crushing challenges facing African Americans in general and black women in particular, as well as the power and resilience needed to achieve even modest victories over circumstance. After Lorraine, an openly lesbian resident shunned by her neighbors, is brutally raped by teenage thugs and left for dead, she rises from her stupor and, in her confusion, smashes the skull of an alcoholic old man. Naylor makes clear that the patriarchal violence that directly and indirectly curtails the lives of the women of Brewster Place lurks like a virus, waiting to destroy the community from the inside out. Unflinching in its portrayal of sexual violence, homophobia, alcohol and drug addiction, and the humiliating consequences of poverty, Naylor’s novel highlights the continued relevance of the naturalist mode as a vehicle for social critique. At the conclusion of a century in which “culture,” in all its manifestations, had assumed an ever larger role in explaining human behavior, naturalist fiction has facilitated a return to the question of “human nature,” albeit a return tempered by a postmodern skepticism about objective truth and constructed within an intellectual climate informed by new ideas in chaos and systems theory, genetics, and evolutionary science. The prolific Joyce Carol Oates, for instance, in a series of dense and ambitious novels that includes them (1969), Bellefleur (1980), We Were the Mulvaneys (1996), and The Falls (2004), among many others, weaves together social and family history, often explicitly situating her fictional narratives alongside factual accounts of topical issues, from the 1967 Detroit riots to the Love Canal environmental disaster of the late 1970s. While not precisely updated versions of the “little soldier of fortune” Carrie Meeber in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Oates’s
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protagonists often prove ill-equipped, by temperament and background, to contend with the formidable forces aligned against them. Likewise, Denis Johnson, in such works as Angels (1983) and Jesus’ Son (1992), both redefines and reinvigorates the naturalist tradition. Johnson’s fiction offers a bleak, drug-fueled portrait of post-industrial America, fusing a stark, poetic minimalism with flashes of the surreal and fantastic in documenting the mixture of pervasive despair and desperate idealism that has always informed literary naturalism. Near the conclusion of Angels, Bill Houston enters the gas chamber to be executed for his role in a botched robbery, and “A truth filled up the chamber: there was nothing left for him now. The door had shut on his life. It said DEATH IS THE MOTHER OF BEAUTY” (206). As he draws his last breath, Houston achieves a partial epiphany consistent with the tensions always central to naturalist fiction: something between acceptance and transcendence, a realization of both the limited autonomy of the individual and the ongoing struggle against this fact. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Noir Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Campbell, D. M. (1997). Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885–1915. Athens: Ohio University Press. Civello, P. (1994). American Literary Naturalism and Its Twentieth-Century Transformations: Frank Norris, Ernest Hemingway, Don DeLillo. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Cowley, M. (1947). “Not Men”: A Natural History of American Naturalism. Kenyon Review, 9(3), 414–35. Crane, S. (1893). Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. New York: Appleton. Den Tandt, C. (1998). The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Dos Passos, J. (1938). U.S.A. New York: Harcourt Brace. Dreiser, T. (1900). Sister Carrie. New York: Doubleday.
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Du Bois, W. E. B. (1911). The Quest of the Silver Fleece. Chicago: McClurg. Dunbar, P. L. (1902). The Sport of the Gods. New York: Dodd, Mead. Ellison, R. (1964). Richard Wright’s Blues. In Shadow and Act. New York: Random House, pp. 77–94. Farrell, J. T. (1935). Studs Lonigan. New York: Vanguard. Fleissner, J. L. (2004). Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Giles, J. R. (1995). The Naturalistic Inner-City Novel in America: Encounters With the Fat Man. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Gold, M. (1930). Jews Without Money. New York: Liveright. Hopkins, P. (1900). Contending Forces. Boston: Colored Cooperative. Howard, J. (1985). Form and History in American Literary Naturalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Johnson, D. (1983). Angels. New York: Knopf. William K. (1983). Ironweed. New York: Viking. Link, E. C. (2004). The Vast and Terrible Drama: American Literary Naturalism in the Late Nineteenth Century. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. London, J. (1903). The Call of the Wild. New York: Macmillan. Mailer, N. (1948). The Naked and the Dead. New York: Rinehart. Michaels, W. B. (1987). The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mitchell, L. C. (1989). Determined Fictions: American Literary Naturalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Naylor, G. (1982). The Women of Brewster Place. New York: Viking. Norris, F. (1899). McTeague. New York: Doubleday. Oates, J. C. (1969). them. New York: Vanguard. Papke, M. E. (ed.) (2003). Twisted From the Ordinary: Essays on American Literary Naturalism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Petry, A. (1946). The Street. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Pizer, D. (1993). Twentieth-Century American Literary Naturalism: An Interpretation. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Steinbeck, J. (1939). The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Viking. Walcutt, C. C. (1956). American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wharton, E. (1905). The House of Mirth. New York: Macmillan. Wright, R. (1940). Native Son. New York: Harper.
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Naylor, Gloria MARGARET EARLEY WHITT
When Alice Walker published The Color Purple (1982), the literary spotlight focused on a writer and novel that won the Pulitzer Prize. That same year Gloria Naylor emerged more quietly with The Women of Brewster Place (1982) and captured the American Book Award for the Best First Novel. With the addition of her next three novels, Naylor found herself a part of a long African American literary tradition. Her discovery of that tradition came when she read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. To date, she has published five novels and one memoir, edited a collection of short stories, and written a variety of pieces for popular magazines, newspapers, and scholarly journals. One of her novels has been produced as a television drama, and another novel was staged as a play. Naylor was born in New York City on January 25, 1950, the oldest of three daughters of former Mississippi sharecroppers, Roosevelt and Alberta McAlpin Naylor, who chose to leave the pre-Civil Rights South for greater educational opportunities for their children. Naylor graduated from high school the spring that Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, and found her response to this event influenced by her mother’s conversion to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. From 1968 to 1975, she served as a missionary in New York, North Carolina, and Florida, and returned to New York to pursue a nursing career, but found herself drawn toward the literary life. She earned her BA in English from Brooklyn College (1981) and her MA in Afro-American studies from Yale in 1983. Naylor’s first four novels form the foundation of her career: Women of Brewster Place is a collection of seven stories held together by a neighborhood, a last-chance gathering place for women down on their luck. Among these characters, though, is one woman who has chosen this housing project, not out of necessity, but because she wants to practice her organizing skills. She hails from wealthy Linden Hills, the neighborhood of Naylor’s second novel of that title. The impression of Linden Hills presented in Brewster Place is contradicted in this novel as Naylor retells the story of Dante’s Inferno. Although Linden Hills is home to the affluent, those who have financially
excelled in America, it is not the desirable place of her first novel, but rather a modern hell. A character accorded only minor mention in Linden Hills (1985) becomes the subject of Naylor’s third novel, Mama Day (1988). From the passing reference to her in the second novel, Mama Day would not seem to be a figure of intriguing possibility. However, Miranda (Mama) Day reigns supreme on Willow Springs, an Edenic island not located on any map. Reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Prospero and his daughter Miranda, those magical powers Mama Day possesses are not like any in a world of recognizable “reality.” Her niece, Ophelia (Cocoa), marries a New York orphan named George, who arrives in Willow Springs and gives his life for Ophelia. George has been damaged by the discovery of his mother’s body that was found off a pier in Harlem near a dilapidated restaurant called Bailey’s Cafe and the knowledge that she may have been a prostitute. This cafe becomes the setting for Naylor’s fourth novel, Bailey’s Cafe (1992), also performed as a play, which is told in the language and history of jazz and various biblical stories, where, once again, Naylor develops a series of stories about seven people whose lives coalesce at the Cafe, a place that evokes magic realism, existing nearly anywhere and for anyone who needs it. Here the reader also discovers what George did not – that his mother was definitely not a whore. For her fifth novel, Naylor returns to Brewster Place with The Men of Brewster Place (1998) and delves deeply into the characters of the men in each woman’s life. Naylor transforms these husbands, fathers, and sons into characters that reshape the reader’s understanding of figures who had been in the shadows of the first novel. When Naylor writes of women, she depicts a community of caring and mutual support that lives and flourishes in the spoken word; however, when the subject is men, she emphasizes their isolation from one another, living in silence as a means of survival. A particularly violent incident in the barber shop where the men gather evokes the graphic nature of William Faulkner’s Light in August. As The Women of Brewster Place begins at dawn and ends at dusk, The Men of Brewster Place opens at dusk and ends at dawn, a choice that suggests an optimistic possibility for the future.
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In 1996, advertised as a “fictional memoir,” Naylor tells her story about government surveillance and mind control during the year 1996. The story begins with a series of strange incidents that happen on an island off the coast of South Carolina and continues once she returns to Brooklyn, and throughout she describes her subject in the third person as “Gloria Naylor.” As editor of Children of the Night (1997), Naylor’s task was to update Langston Hughes’s 1969 classic collection, The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers: An Anthology From 1899 to the Present. Naylor has been a visiting professor at a wide range of universities internationally and is the recipient of numerous prestigious grants, fellowships, and awards. SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Faulkner, William (AF); Hughes, Langston (AF); Morrison, Toni (AF); Walker, Alice (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Fowler, V. C. (1996). Gloria Naylor: In Search of Sanctuary. New York: Twayne. Levy, H. F. (1992). Lead on With Light: Gloria Naylor. In Fiction of the Home Place. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 196–222. Montgomery, M. L. (ed.) (2004). Conversations with Gloria Naylor. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Naylor, G. (1982). The Women of Brewster Place. New York: Viking. Naylor, G. (1985). Linden Hills. New York: Ticknor and Fields. Naylor, G. (1988). Mama Day. New York: Ticknor and Fields. Naylor, G. (1992). Bailey’s Cafe. New York: Harcourt Brace. Naylor, G. (ed.) (1997). Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present. Boston: Little, Brown. Naylor, G. (1998). The Men of Brewster Place. New York: Hyperion. Naylor, G. (2005). 1996. Chicago: Third World Press. Stave, S. (2001). Gloria Naylor: Strategy and Technique, Magic and Myth. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Whitt, M. E. (1999). Understanding Gloria Naylor. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Wilson, C. E. (2001). Gloria Naylor: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
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Noir Fiction JONATHAN P. EBURNE
Noir fiction is a hybrid genre. The coinage of the term film noir to describe US crime films popular in France after the end of World War II gave generic coherence to an otherwise disparate body of American film and fiction. Noir fiction, like noir film, emerged as a label useful for describing works that exploit the conventions of mystery fiction, especially with regard to the genre’s presumptions about social order: that crime can be punished, that justice can be restored, or that there is even such a thing as a social order. Noir fiction, often considered a subset of the hard-boiled detective writing popularized in pulp fiction magazines during the Prohibition era, has in fact a genealogy of its own. Though tied inextricably to writers who began their careers working for the pulps – such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, and David Goodis – noir fiction also describes writing beyond detective fiction. From the 1950s through the twenty-first century, the term “noir” has been used to describe modes of so-called genre fiction that either borrow from the formal innovations of hard-boiled writing (such as action-heavy prose, the deployment of street slang and police jargon, and episodic plotting) or share the pessimistic worldview attributed to film noir and noir fiction alike. Thus the science fiction of Philip K. Dick, as well as the westerns of Cormac McCarthy, the graphic novels of Alan Moore and Frank Miller, and the experimental prose of William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker, might also be described as noir. The “blackness” denoted by the French word noir bears several meanings. First, the roman noir (“black novel”) is the French term for gothic fiction, suggesting a genealogical link between twentieth-century crime fiction and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction by authors such as Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Lewis. But “noir” also bears the French connotations of darkness used to describe periods of historical trauma or portent. Such associations seemed apt for characterizing US detective fiction and film of the interwar and postwar years, which register the political conflicts of the period: from conditions of economic crisis and racial unrest to changing popular ideas about national security,
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international involvement, and domestic values. It was this latter sense of “noir” that informed the Serie Noire, the influential detective fiction series at the Gallimard publishing house in Paris that popularized American (and British) hard-boiled crime writing in France. According to Marcel Duhamel, who founded the Serie Noire in 1946, noir writing offers “a reflection of society” that “reflects its excesses; it only gives a certain image, but it’s an image of society all the same” (Geslen & Rieben 125). In its French incarnation, noir fiction was notable for its ability to represent the phenomenon of lawlessness with a structural and stylistic cohesiveness unavailable to other literary modes, such as social realism or naturalism. In the United States, the postwar equivalent to the French Serie Noire could be found among the numerous popular fiction imprints such as Avon, Ace, Gold Medal, Lion, and Signet, which capitalized on the popularity of crime fiction writing. Featuring writers such as Woolrich, Goodis, Ross McDonald, Dorothy B. Hughes, Jim Thompson, Charles Williams, and Mickey Spillane, these inexpensive paperbacks served the function that pulp magazines and dime novels had served during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: they featured original stories made recognizable by their rapid and often serial commercial production. Though marketed as commodities whose lurid covers seemed virtually interchangeable, the novels could be distinguished by their deviations from – or playful manipulations of – the sensationalistic formulae of the emerging commercial form. Both Hughes’s In a Lonely Place (1947) and Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (1952) are narrated from the point of view of a murderer, a notion made famous by Agatha Christie in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) and rendered commonplace by Edmund Wilson in his 1944 essay “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” Hughes’s novel, however, follows the thought process of a serial killer as he stalks his prey; Thompson’s novel enshrines the killer as its first-person narrator. As in the French context of the Serie Noire, this postwar writing might be characterized by its use of literary formalism to evoke the social dissolution at work in historical reality. In the words of the novelist Barry Gifford, whose Black Lizard Press (1980–5) returned key postwar-era novels
to circulation and did much to consolidate noir fiction as a viable generic form, such books were “psychologically provocative, uniquely on-theedge and – more often than not – over the edge” (Gifford 137). Noir fiction is noteworthy, in other words, for its ability at once to register cultural anxiety (to be “on edge”) as well as to deviate from accepted notions of formal or thematic judgment (to be “over the edge”). Recent critics of film noir have characterized this figuration of anxiety and paranoia largely in psychoanalytic terms (Oliver & Trigno 2002; Copjec 1993); scholars of detective fiction have tended instead to stress the genre’s attention to changing social, commercial, and political relations (see McCann 2000; Cassuto 2009; Smith 2000). For all its sensationalism and heavy-handed stylistics, postwar noir writing was driven by deep sociological concerns; yet the genre rarely distinguished itself as overtly progressive or avant garde in its politics. In fact, the stylized social milieux of the novels often seem to emphasize deeply conservative fears: the threat of sexual, political, and racial disorder, as well as the infectious nature of criminal violence. Writers such as Mickey Spillane and Patricia Highsmith exemplify this tendency. Spillane’s I, The Jury (1947) is a study in vigilante justice, with Spillane’s detective, Mike Hammer, avenging himself – whether in gesture or in action – on women, homosexuals, and criminals; the novel concludes with Hammer finding his own lover guilty of murder and, in spite of her efforts to seduce him, executing her. In Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train (1950), the novel’s protagonist is drawn into a murder plot by a man he meets aboard a train. Reflecting on his motives for the crime he has committed, he remarks that “good and evil live side by side in the human heart, and not merely in differing proportions in one man and the next.” Crime, in Highsmith’s fiction, is not restricted to criminals; it is a capacity within even the most innocent of people. For Spillane, this capacity toward evil demanded a nearly paranoid vigilance in order to stave off the seductions of the wicked and the obscene. Other Cold War-era noir writers were more measured in their explorations of the moral landscape of the postwar United States. Ross MacDonald, for instance, mourns rather than exploits the effects of warfare on postwar
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Americans; in The Moving Target (1949), MacDonald’s detective Lew Archer realizes that the people he trusts have been invisibly yet unmistakably corrupted. Yet he regards these former friends with sympathy, to the point of trusting a murderer to turn himself in. David Goodis similarly depicts corruption as an inevitable rather than evil force; in novels such as Down There (1956; now Shoot the Piano Player) and Black Friday (1954), his protagonists struggle vainly to extricate themselves from irrevocably violent pasts, only to find themselves mired in a tragic fate. For Chester Himes, who began writing detective fiction in France in 1957, this violence characterizes the basic conditions of American racial consciousness; his darkly comic crime novels, set in a baroque and largely nocturnal Harlem, represent the moral landscape of the US as a fundamental absurdity. Indeed, the continued popularity of noir fiction into the twenty-first century can be attributed to its capacity for summoning the historical violence that lingers within American social life not only on the terrain of crime and punishment, but also within the broader sphere of racial and ethnic relations, class and labor conflicts, and sex and gender politics. In spite of such pessimistic meditations on fate, the postwar concentrations of noir fiction in the US and France helped to unify a literary history that was by no means singular. The notion that a mode of crime fiction could be defined in terms of its “blackness” proposes a direct lineage between hard-boiled fiction of the 1920s and 1930s – signaled by the predominance of Black Mask magazine – and, say, the fiction of Cornell Woolrich, which explicitly takes up the theme of blackness in its titles: The Bride Wore Black (1940), The Black Curtain (1941), Black Alibi (1942), The Black Angel (1943), and The Black Path of Fear (1944). Yet in establishing such lineages, this concentration leaves it unclear as to whether the various invocations of “noir” represent a set of generic conventions, a set of commercial expectations, a coherent conceptual “noir universe,” or simply an additive collection of tropes and motifs. The question of whether noir fiction obeys specific laws – whether generic, logical, psychological, or historical – has occupied critics zek 1992 and since the inception of the form (see Zi Copjec 1993; Naremore 1998 and Deleuze 2004). The development of the “hard-boiled school” of fiction writing in the mid-1920s was instru-
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mental in constituting the body of work later known as noir fiction. Hard-boiled writing was largely the product of periodicals like Black Mask, founded in 1920 as a moneymaker for the highbrow Smart Set. In the early 1920s, the magazine began publishing stories by Dashiell Hammett, Carroll John Daly, and Erle Stanley Gardner, who wrote detective stories characterized by sequential action and violence, rather than by the deductive conventions of “classic” detective fiction. When Joseph T. Shaw took over as the magazine’s editor in 1926, he galvanized its identification with this “realist” style of pulp fiction, introducing writers such as Horace McCoy and Raymond Chandler to the literary marketplace; he also encouraged writers like Hammett to use Black Mask as the platform for developing longer, novel-length stories. Hammett was the magazine’s first break-out author, bursting onto the national literary scene with the publication of Red Harvest by Knopf in 1929. In spite of Shaw’s claims of realism, hardboiled detective writing was convincing less for its verisimilitude than for its sensitivity to affect. As Chandler famously described this writing in 1950, “Most of the plots were rather ordinary and most of the characters rather primitive types of people.” What distinguishes the genre is instead “the smell of fear which these stories managed to generate. Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun” (Chandler 1016). Chandler’s assessment of hard-boiled fiction suggests that the writing’s appeal lay as much in its deployment of metaphor as in its sociological insights: Chandler highlights this fiction’s attention not only to the “moronic delight” of a gangster, but also to the synaesthetic experience of “the smell of fear.” In breaking away from “classic” detective fiction, hard-boiled writing self-consciously adapted the experiments in vernacular writing undertaken by literary modernists such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, and Ring Lardner, Jr. In directing this vernacular focus toward crime and detection, however, hard-boiled writers became known for their own mode of literary expression that was, Chandler admitted,
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easy to abuse. In spite of this tendency toward pastiche, the relations between hard-boiled fiction and the modernist literary milieu were no less reciprocal. Beginning in the 1920s, the popularity of pulp fiction magazines like Black Mask and Detective Story, as well as the changes taking place in the fiction of mainstream writers such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, W. R. Burnett, and William Faulkner, demonstrated the genre’s growing interest. Critics likened Faulkner’s Sanctuary (1931) to potboilers of the hardboiled school, a comparison that may have been disparaging but was no less accurate, given that Faulkner had befriended Hammett that same year; Faulkner co-wrote the screenplay for The Maltese Falcon (1941), which was adapted from Hammett’s 1930 novel and is considered to be the first significant film noir. The extent to which noir fiction emerged in literary milieux beyond the pulps remains to be fully explored; in dialogue with hard-boiled writing were leftist writers of the 1930s such as Nathanael West, Kenneth Fearing, Richard Wright, and Chester Himes. Indeed, one of the appeals of the hard-boiled school was its affective distance from the naturalism of older leftist writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair. Noir fiction may have been predominantly conservative in its Cold War incarnations, but it was no less available to the Left. The origins of noir fiction are not restricted to the 1920s; magazines like Black Mask were themselves descended from the dime novels and popular periodicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Police Gazette to the serial fictions of the Street and Smith publishing house. The rise in popularity of sensationalist fiction dates from the antebellum era, inspired by the English translation of Eugene Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris in 1843. Itself sparked by the international appeal of James Fenimore Cooper’s adventure novels, the enormous popularity of Sue’s work quickly elicited imitations – most notably G. M. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London (1844) and George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1844). The detective stories of Edgar Allan Poe, often cited as the first true incarnations of the genre, likewise date from this period. Whereas in France Sue’s writing ushered in the heroic age of literary naturalism, the “city-
mystery” genre’s place in American literary history is more diffuse, conditioned by its marketability (see Denning 1987). The genre became a popular – and profitable – format in the United States: over 50 such novels appeared between 1844 and 1850, concentrating on larger cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, but covering smaller, working-class towns as well. These serial novels were episodic in construction, weaving innumerable characters into plots as intricate as the cities themselves. Recalling the British gothic fiction of Walpole and Radcliffe, the “city-mysteries” genre multiplied the ghostly mansions of its precursors, imagining cities replete with haunts. At stake in such representations of the city was the ability to give physical form to urban anxieties: the dangers of seduction, gambling, and prostitution the novels catalogued, or the antebellum rise in racial and political unrest they channeled affectively. By the late nineteenth century, the “classic” amateur detective had arrived to render legible this sprawling metropolis. Noir fiction, by contrast, returns mystery writing to its nineteenthcentury unease, loosening the detective’s conceptual dominion over public space and subjecting protagonists and readers alike to its dangers. The work of Cornell Woolrich most self-consciously pursues its ties to the vernacular gothic; set in nineteenth-century New Orleans, Waltz Into Darkness (1947) takes up the themes of seduction and corruption around which city mystery plots turned. Other hard-boiled writing, too, gestures toward nineteenth-century sensation fiction: Hammett’s Red Harvest, for instance, is modeled on Allan Pinkerton’s strike-breaking stories from the 1870s. Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress, though set in post-World War II Los Angeles, describes a descent into the political underworld and a secret miscegenation plot reminiscent of earlier novels by William Wells Brown, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and Nella Larsen. Such intersections suggest that the category of noir fiction be broadened to include writing beyond the genealogy of detective fiction. The fiction of Flannery O’Connor, Erskine Caldwell, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and Katherine Anne Porter, for instance, features unsentimental depictions of social crisis that resonate as much with the vernacular gothic of
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the nineteenth century as with the hard-boiled writing of the twentieth century. In Southern gothic writing and neo-noir crime writing alike, the question of noir fiction’s relationship to “blackness” continues to charge this hybrid genre. Beginning with his first Easy Rawlins mystery, Mosley’s fiction inhabits postwar-era Los Angeles as a site for exploring race relations in the US. The work of James Ellroy likewise examines racial tension and racism in its depiction of 1950s law enforcement, albeit with a more cynical eye. In addition to the fiction of numerous other writers working within the detective genre – Elmore Leonard, Ed McBain, Sarah Paretsky, Sue Grafton, and Patricia Cornwell – noir fiction continues to offer a conceptual and stylistic platform for exploring discontinuities within US cultural life. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Detective/Crime Fiction (WF); Modern Fiction in Hollywood (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF)
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Lippard, G. (1995). The Quaker City: or, The Monks of Monk-Hall. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. McCann, S. (2000). Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McDonald, R. (1998). The Moving Target. New York: Vintage. Mosley, W. (1990). Devil in a Blue Dress. New York: Norton. Naremore, J. (1998). More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. Berkeley: University of California Press. Oliver, K., & Trigo, B. (2002). Noir Anxiety. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Smith, E. A. (2000). Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Spillane, M. (2001). The Mike Hammer Collection, vol. 1 New York: North American Library. Thompson, J. (1991). The Killer Inside Me. New York: Vintage. Wilson, E. (2007). Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s and 40s. New York: Library of America. Woolrich, C. (1998). The Cornell Woolrich Omnibus. New York: Penguin. zek, S. (1992). Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Zi Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge.
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Cassuto, L. (2009). Hard-Boiled Sentimentality. New York: Columbia University Press. Chandler, R. (1995). Later Novels and Other Writings. New York: Library of America. Copjec, J. (ed.) (1993). Shades of Noir: A Reader. London: Verso. Deleuze, G. (2004). Desert Island and Other Texts, 1953–1974 (trans. M. Taormina). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Denning, M. (1987). Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class America. London: Verso. Faulkner, W. (1993). Sanctuary. New York: Vintage. Geslin, L., & Rieben, G. (1972). Interview du Mois: Marcel Duhamel. Mystere-Magazine, pp. 125–7 (July). Gifford, B. (2003). The Rooster Trapped in the Reptile Room: A Barry Gifford Reader. New York: Seven Stories. Goodis, D. (1990). Shoot the Piano Player. New York: Vintage. Hammett, D. (1989). Red Harvest. New York: Vintage. Highsmith, P. (2001). Strangers on a Train. New York: Norton. Hughes, D. (2003). In a Lonely Place. New York: Feminist Press.
Norris, Frank CAREY MICKALITES
Alongside Stephen Crane, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris is one of the most important figures in American literary naturalism. Rather neglected today, Norris published six major novels (an important early novel, Vandover and the Brute, was published posthumously in 1914), and regularly contributed short stories and impressionistic journalism to such publications as The Wave, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Occident. A collection of his critical writing, The Responsibilities of the Novelist and Other Literary Essays, was published by Doubleday in 1903, shortly after his tragic early death in 1902. Benjamin Franklin Norris, Jr. was born in 1870 in Chicago, and at the age of 15 his family moved to San Francisco. He studied art briefly at the California School of Design and then at the Academie Julian in Paris before attending the University of California, Berkeley and studying for an additional year at Harvard. As a
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correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle, he witnessed the Jameson Raid in Johannesburg, South Africa. His writing career began in earnest while at Berkeley and Harvard, where he wrote naturalist sketches and the kernels of what became McTeague (1899) and Vandover and the Brute. Like the work of Emile Zola, Norris’s fiction is consistently marked by a bold naturalist treatment of human sexuality and attention to the socio-economically downtrodden. In his critical and fictional writing, Norris defined “naturalism” as a dialectical synthesis of romanticism and realism, balancing the sublime grandiosities of romanticism with the sharp attention to regional and quotidian detail distinctive of nineteenthcentury realism. Vandover and the Brute and McTeague, both set in San Francisco, exemplify Norris’s striking attention to local detail, and their characters and narratives are motivated by instinctive, animalistic, and often violent forces. Vandover, harking back to Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, shows its protagonist’s social devolution under his uncontrollable, animal-like instinctive self, suggesting the strong Darwinian influence in Norris’s naturalism. McTeague explores a similar animal nature lurking in its brutish miner’s son-turned-dentist, but like Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), McTeague’s determinism is tempered by the force of chance – an unforeseen lottery winning sets the course of the narrative events to follow, both comic and tragic. Moreover, the novel establishes an important socio-economic duality between hoarding and wasteful expenditure, a contrast which serves both as an expression of turn-of-the-twentiethcentury American economic life and as the vehicle through which Norris develops a sadomasochistic view of male–female relationships, a theme that recurs in much of his fiction. Moran of the Lady Letty (1898), Blix (1899), and A Man’s Woman (1900) are each conventional romances, yet they display Norris’s influential emphasis on “life” over high literary culture, a cultural positioning he advocates in much of his critical writing. Kipling’s influence is evident in Moran’s deployment of hybrid dialects and its fast-paced sea adventures – Norris transforms a dandyish San Francisco society man into a hypermasculine shark hunter and pirate chaser. Yet, despite its potboiler status, Moran demonstrates Norris’s developing capacity for narratives that
tightly interweave heredity and nature, and environmental forces and radical contingency, as well as his influential rejection of posh society in favor of attention to lives fearlessly lived on the fringes of a merciless natural order. Blix, a sentimental romance and the most morally conventional of Norris’s major work, pits feminine agency against the male vice of gambling; in so doing, the novel both reflects on progressive gender relations in American culture and establishes gambling as a powerful trope for the expansion of financial speculation in the late-nineteenth-century US. A Man’s Woman extends Norris’s fictional representation of women’s agency within American institutional life, even if the novel remains limited by his masculine naturalist vision. The Octopus (1901) and The Pit (1903), together with McTeague considered Norris’s most important works, are the first two of the planned trilogy The Epic of the Wheat. The final novel, The Wolf, was never completed. The trilogy was to have traced the production of wheat in an increasingly global market, focusing on growing in northern California, distribution and price setting in Chicago, and consumption in Europe. Interpersonal, instinctual, and regional forces complicate and lend a dramatic microeconomic dimension to these works’ macroeconomic scope. The Octopus pits growers against railroad magnates in a fictional treatment of the history of US railroad corporations, showing the inhumane dictates of supply and demand and exposing a monopoly capitalism driven by irrational greed. The Pit, a bulls-and-bears drama, incisively portrays an attempt to corner the wheat market in Chicago, and poses an ethical critique of capitalist disregard for laborers and consumers alike. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Dreiser, Theodore (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Ahnebrink, L. (1947). The Influence of Emile Zola on Frank Norris. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Borus, D. H. (1989). Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
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Brown, B. (2003). The Nature of Things. In A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 51–80. Campbell, D. M. (1997). Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885–1915. Athens: Ohio University Press. Horwitz, H. (1982). “To Find the Value of X”: The Pit as a Renunciation of Romance. In E. Sundquist (ed.), American Realism: New Essays. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 215–37. Hussman, L. E. (1999). Harbingers of a Century: The Novels of Frank Norris. New York: Peter Lang. Link, E. C. (2004). The Vast and Terrible Drama: American Literary Naturalism in the Late Nineteenth Century. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. McElrath, J. R., Jr., & Crisler, J. (2006). Frank Norris: A Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Mitchell, L. C. (1989). Determined Fictions: American Literary Naturalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Norris, F. (1928). The Complete Edition of Frank Norris, 10 vols. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Pizer, D. (ed.) (1964). The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris (ed. D. Pizer). Austin: University of Texas Press. Pizer, D. (ed.) (1995). The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zimmerman, D. (2006). Frank Norris and the Mesmeric Sublime. In Panic! Markets, Crises, and Crowds in American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 123–49.
The Novel and War MARGOT NORRIS
The twentieth century saw two World Wars and two other significant Asian conflicts with military participation by the United States. Although none of these wars took place on American soil, they entrained millions of US soldiers in combat. Of these conflicts, World War II, with its 78 million casualties over a four-year period, was the most traumatic. Although the necessity of military conflict to halt German genocidal aggression and brutal Japanese militarism remains relatively uncontroversial, the extent and scope of human and national destruction continue to stagger the imagination. Literature, practiced to represent
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individual trauma and tragedy, remains largely unprepared to address killing and wounding in such large numbers. Holocaust writers have struggled with this difficulty for decades, a challenge that has become more and more acute as recognition of the event’s scope and cruelty has grown and solidified over time. But in spite of the war’s necessity, the excesses, corruptions, and illogicality of militarism often led to cynical accounts that were conveyed through generic subversions and inventions by American novelists. American novels of World War I, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War will here bracket the more extended discussion of American World War II fiction, and will focus largely on novels of combat written by author-veterans. Here, especially, the dark, comic vision of many American war novels manifests an understanding that words were inadequate to World War II unless they were transformed into radically challenging signs and gestures. Because American military participation in World War I spanned less than half of the conflict’s duration, its literary depictions – in both poetry and fiction – were generally overshadowed by British and other European works. One of the conflict’s earliest American novels was John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers (1921), whose bitter rendering of frustration with military regimentation and exploitation made it a precursor to the dark satirical World War II novels produced by American authors later in the century. H. L. Mencken praised the realism of Three Soldiers for its refusal to romanticize combat or to cloak it in patriotic “blather.” Dos Passos, like Hemingway, served in the ambulance corps, but the experience of a veteran with extensive combat experience was required to produce a work with the power of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front: William March’s Company K (1957 [1933]). March enlisted in 1917 and served with distinction in the US Marines, suffering a gas attack and head and shoulder wounds during combat in France. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and the French Croix de Guerre. Bouts of depression following the war delayed his writing, but some of the 123 soldier vignettes of Company K were first serialized in New York Magazine Forum. The decision not to privilege a single protagonist in favor of producing multiple perspectives gives Company K
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a unique collective focus. Like Three Soldiers, March’s work also refuses to exalt the varied and often brutal experiences of soldiers on the ground with patriotic justifications. Arguably, the American World War I novel most firmly embedded in the literary canon is Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929). Hemingway too was wounded while working in northern Italy with the ambulance service, albeit after seeing little combat. His infatuation with a nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky inspired the plot of A Farewell to Arms, published the same year as Remarque’s novel. The romance of Lieutenant Frederic Henry and his British nurse, Catherine Barkley, avoids sentimentalizing the war experience chiefly by virtue of Hemingway’s simple, concrete, understated style of narration: “At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army” (4). But the protagonist’s narration offers a more slyly designed critique of the brutality of war in its curious disavowal of murder, as Henry refuses to acknowledge as an atrocity his unwarranted shooting of a deserting Italian sergeant in the back. “I opened up my holster, took the pistol, aimed at the one who had talked the most, and fired. I missed and they both started to run. I shot three times and dropped one” (204). In his anguished meditation on death at the end of the novel, Henry hypocritically complains of war’s gratuitous killing of others – without acknowledging his own. “That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. . . They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo” (327). After witnessing Italian battle police execute military personnel, Henry himself deserts and reunites with Catherine, who dies in childbirth at the end of the novel. In spite of these ironic twists of plot and narration, A Farewell to Arms – unlike the work of Dos Passos and March – is difficult to construe as an anti-war novel. Hemingway reported on the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance, an experience that inspired his 1940 For Whom the Bell Tolls about American experience in the anti-fascist International Brigades. Three million American soldiers served in the military in World War I; 15 million served in
World War II. But Studs Terkel’s epithet for the Second World War as “the good war” notwithstanding, much of its fiction refuses to support this sense. Film, in contrast, frequently glorified combat, as Janis P. Stout explains: “In the American popular imaginary, World War II has become something like an action movie, a narrative of violent excitement that entailed pain and destruction, yes, but also served as a proving ground for masculinity and a demonstration of national might” (190). Indeed, Norman Mailer writes of a soldier awaiting a Japanese attack in The Naked and the Dead (1976[1948]): “This was like a movie, he thought” (36). American Holocaust novels such as William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice (1979) and, more controversially, Jerzi Kosinsky’s The Painted Bird (1965) at least implicitly support a “good war” reading of World War II, as does Paul West’s account of the failed 1940 Hitler assassination attempt in The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg (1980). But in spite of the defeat of a genocidal regime and dictatorial aggression, few signature postwar American works dwell on glorification. These include the James Jones trilogy (From Here to Eternity [1951], The Thin Red Line [1962], and Whistle [1978]), Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny (1951), Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), and even Irwin Shaw’s somewhat more celebratory The Young Lions (1948). In the experimental novels of Joseph Heller (Catch-22 [1961]), Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five [1969]), and Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow [1973]), a satirical edge sharpens a patent anti-war stance through innovative play with genre and style. Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead was written by a 26-year-old veteran who had served in the 112th Cavalry Division of the US Army in the Philippines from 1944 to 1946. Although Mailer appears not to have seen much combat, the experience of wartime army life allowed him to realistically narrate the exploits of a platoon of riflemen engaging with Japanese troops on a Pacific island. “Nobody could sleep,” the novel opens its first section, called “Wave.” “All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to be dead” (3). Mailer’s spare, realist style recalls both Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers as well as the journalistic clarity of Hemingway. The novel uses detail to produce verisimilitude, show characters
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uncomfortable with ethical choices, measure the effect of class on character, and deploy vernacular speech. When subjected to shelling a soldier empties his bowels in his pants, and corpses are covered with maggots. An officer reflects on the class system in the military – “all the men he had known in prep school were now ensigns or lieutenants. A class of men born to wealth, accustomed to obedience” (76) – and the men dispute racism, anti-Semitism, labor unions, communism, and, of course, women. Mailer’s men speak in a colorful and vulgar vernacular, even though the novel’s publisher had him replace the classic four-letter word with the substitute “fug.” The US military action in the novel ends in a resounding triumph with huge Japanese casualties. Yet the victory is nonetheless hollow, having “been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, [for him] to comprehend” (716). Joseph Heller flew 60 B-25 missions as a bombardier with the 12th Air Force in Italy – although he conceded that most of them were “milk runs.” Catch-22 was published to mixed reviews and sales, although it grew in popularity with growing sentiment against the Vietnam War. Its central conceit of the “catch” points to logical contradictions built into military and other governmental systems that frustrate attempts to resolve impossible or intolerable situations. The bombardier John Yossarian prays to survive his required number of bombing missions only to discover that the limit has increased each time he reaches it. Hoping to escape his dilemma by claiming insanity, he learns that his request to be excused from flying bombing missions is judged rational and therefore proof of sanity rather than insanity. In his determination to survive rather than sacrifice himself, Yossarian escapes classification as a cowardly anti-hero thanks to the corruption of his superiors. Colonel Cathcart risks the lives of his men in overly dangerous missions to improve his chances of promotion, and the mess officer Milo Minderbender has his own squadron bombed as part of a lucrative deal with the Germans. But soldiers die in Catch-22, and the slowly revealed and horrific death of Yossarian’s friend Snowden triggers his desire to escape from his meaningless double-bind by deserting to Sweden. Heller eschews Mailer’s realism in favor of experimental play resonant with the
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conventions of the “theater of the absurd”: rough comedy involving horrific situations; hopeless characters caught in oppressive systems that, like that of Sisyphus, force them to perform repetitive, meaningless actions; and nonsensical dialogue and conversations. Kurt Vonnegut’s World War II experience was far more traumatic than either Norman Mailer’s or Joseph Heller’s, and played a greater and more direct role in the war novel that reflects it. Trained as a mechanical engineer for his military service, Vonnegut was serving as an infantry battalion scout in the 106th Infantry Division when he was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge on December 14, 1944. Transported to the city of Dresden as a prisoner of war, he worked in a vitamin factory with other POWs during the day, while housed in the underground meat locker of a converted slaughterhouse that served as a makeshift prison at night. That arrangement saved his life when Dresden was firebombed by Allied planes on the nights of February 13 and 14, 1945. The attack leveled one of the cultural jewels of Europe, and Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners were obliged to extract corpses from the rubble. They were freed when the Russian army arrived in Dresden and Vonnegut returned to the United States in May 1945. Slaughterhouse-Five was published in 1969, a time when anti-Vietnam War protests were escalating. In a self-reflexive maneuver, this background became part of the novel’s title page, which announces Slaughterhouse-Five or “The Children’s Crusade” as having been written by a “fourth generation GermanAmerican” who witnessed the firebombing of Dresden and lived to tell the tale – albeit in a “telegraphic schizophrenic manner.” The metatextual gesture continues and intensifies in the first chapter, where the “author” – using details from the Vonnegut biography – describes both the difficulties and the process of writing his Dresden book. In this way, Slaughterhouse-Five becomes not only a novel about the Dresden firebombing but also a novel about the impossibility of writing about the experience – and, by extension, of transforming any earth-shattering trauma into literature and narrative. Realism is inadequate for describing this level of horror, and so Vonnegut, like Heller, uses humor, absurdity, surrealism, and word play to signal war’s excesses of pain, violence, and irrationality.
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The novel’s alternate title, “The Children’s Crusade,” refers to the legend of a disastrous 1213 mission by European children to travel to Jerusalem to convert Muslims there to Christianity. Instead, many of the children supposedly died in shipwrecks or were sold into slavery, with only a few returning home. The legend functions as an allegory of the idealism of adolescent soldiers going off to fight, only to end up dead or as prisoners of war, like Vonnegut’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim. The second chapter of the book introduces the notion that Pilgrim, his allegorical name a gloss on the Children’s Crusade, “has become unstuck in time” (23) – a phenomenon that allows him to experience events in his life in random order. “He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1944.” This “spastic” time dislocation allows the narrative to comment on Billy’s experiences through their juxtaposition in a way that illuminates them philosophically as well as psychologically. Although Billy’s capture, forced march, and Dresden incarceration and its aftermath (“Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals,” 178) are told in chronological order, the strange parallels of loss, pain, death, destruction, violence, cruelty, and irony in Billy Pilgrim’s civilian and fantasy life function like objective correlatives to stand in for horrors that cannot be expressed. Thomas Pynchon, born in 1937, was not a World War II veteran. He did, however, serve in the US Navy in the 1950s, and worked as a technical writer for the Boeing Corporation between 1960 to 1962 – a job that informed his interest in the intersection of physics, technology, industry, and the military that plays a considerable role in Gravity’s Rainbow. An exemplary postmodern text, Gravity’s Rainbow is not exactly a World War II novel, either; its status is complicated by its extreme and outrageous experiments with narrative, prose style, and encyclopedic knowledge – subversions of form that make its message with respect to the Second World War difficult to determine. The book’s title refers to the arc of the German V-2 rocket that bombed London in late 1944 and in 1945, its trajectory a lethal rather than a hopeful gloss on the shape of the biblical rainbow marking the survival of Noah’s Ark and God’s covenant to refrain from further annihilation of the earth’s creatures.
This tension between the annihilating aims of twentieth-century military weapons technology and the desire for the spiritual salvation and redemption promised by religion shapes the narrative, structure, allusions, and symbols in the work without clear resolution. The text’s chronology, roughly marking the dark nine months between December 18, 1944 and August 6, 1945, when the Americans dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, is linked to the cycle of the Christian calendar’s natal advent, death of God, resurrection, and transfiguration, but without clarifying whether the parallels offer promise or ironic spiritual betrayal. There are multiple military enterprises and Pavlovian scientific projects in progress in England, where the novel opens, as well as espionage and counterespionage operations designed to monitor them. Characters with problematic identities abound, and plot elements are diffused in the uncertainties, grotesqueries, and exaggerations of a paranoid imagination. A rocket numbered 00000 is being developed even as the function of a rocket’s rising, trajectory, and explosion appears to signify sexual arousal and orgasm as much as military power. This symbolism also marks the peculiarity of the work’s protagonist, US Army Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, whose sexual excitation appears to predict rocket attacks. The novel ends as it began with a German rocket launched and hurtling either into a movie theater whose film has broken and projector bulb burned out – or toward the book’s readers themselves. Although the Korean War inspired a number of works that achieved wide public attention through their film and television adaptations, their impact on American literature was less notable than either the World War II or Vietnam texts that earned critical recognition and important literary awards. Following hard on World War II, the Korean War may have distinguished itself too little in technology or military challenges to inspire the kind of stylistic or narratological innovations that would have given them a distinctive voice and profile. James Michener’s The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1953) was one of the earliest Korean War novels, based in his experiences as a correspondent stationed on two airplane carriers in 1952. The prose of James Salter’s novel The Hunters (1956), describing the experiences of US Air Force fighter pilots in the Korean conflict,
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recalls the style of Ernest Hemingway. Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate (1959), about the manipulation of a soldier brainwashed by the North Koreans, functions less as a Korean War novel than as a Cold War spy thriller. Finally, Richard Hooker’s MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors (1968) brought to the day-to-day experiences of the surgeons and staff in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea some of the absurdist and satirical spirit of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 – as noted by Ring Lardner Jr., who wrote the screenplay for the novel’s 1970 film adaptation. Tim O’Brien emerged as one of the best-known American fiction writers about the Vietnam War in the 1970s, after being drafted and serving in Vietnam between 1968 and 1970. A year prior to O’Brien’s appearance there, his division had participated in the notorious My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians by American soldiers. Although his collection of interlinked stories titled The Things They Carried (1990) is probably his best-known Vietnam work, the novel Going After Cacciato (1978) won the National Book Award for Fiction and established his reputation. Based on numerous personal combat experiences, Going After Cacciato foregrounds the absurdity of military logic, recalling the satiric agenda of such writers as Heller, Vonnegut, and Pynchon, but inflecting its comic edge with mystery, ambiguity, and poignancy. The pursuit of the happy soldier Cacciato, whose name means “hunted” in Italian, and who has gone AWOL and taken off on foot to walk from Vietnam to Paris, immerses the novel’s narrator, Paul Berlin, and his squad in a curious surrealistic dream world resonant of magic realism. O’Brien’s novel, which was published a year before Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s award-winning Vietnam film, shares its quest motif, first introduced in Coppola’s literary source, Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness (1902). At the same time, Cacciato’s desertion harks back to Frederic Henry’s desertion in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. In each work the journey to pursue a fugitive becomes a journey of self-implication and self-discovery, into a darkness whose political revelation is that in pursuing war, as in pursuing colonialism, innocence – both personal and national – is destroyed. Cacciato’s Paris destination reminds us that Vietnam, along
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with parts of Laos and Cambodia, was part of France’s late-nineteenth-century colonial empire, and that the Vietnam War was preceded by the French Indochina War of the postwar 1940s and 1950s. The traumatic memory of Vietnam is very much alive today, charged with a renewed urgency in the post-9/11 context of the US’s ongoing campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the US has recently gambled on a major escalation of forces in Afghanistan – a conflict whose uncertain future is routinely billed as “Obama’s Vietnam” – the “lessons” of that earlier war, and of failed colonial and neocolonial projects of the past century, seem confusingly drawn, if not willfully unlearned. One hopes that the American novels to emerge from the US’s present and future conflicts will rise to the subversive example of the twentieth century’s most irrational, most absurd, and thus most honest fictions of war. SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); World War I in Fiction (BIF); World War II in Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Dos Passos, J. (1921). Three Soldiers. New York: Doran. Heller, J. (1961). Catch-22. New York: Simon and Schuster. Hemingway, E. (1929). A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner’s. Mailer, N. (1976). The Naked and the Dead [1948]. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. March, W. (1957). Company K [1933]. New York: Hill and Wang. Norris, M. (2000). Writing War in the Twentieth Century. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. O’Brien, T. (1978). Going After Cacciato. New York: Delacorte. O’Brien, T. (1990). The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Pynchon, T. (1973). Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking. Stout, J. P (2005). Coming out of War: Poetry, Grieving, and the Culture of the Wars. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Vonnegut, K. (1969). Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Delacorte.
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O Oates, Joyce Carol GAVIN COLOGNE-BROOKES
Joyce Carol Oates is not only the most prolific of contemporary literary writers but also extraordinarily diverse. For Oates, the composing of fiction is an activity integral to human life and so stretches across all genres. Including the sophisticated thrillers published under her (known) pseudonyms, Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly, she is the author of over 50 novels, as well as more than 30 story collections, a dozen volumes of essays, and several collections of poetry and plays. She has also written for young adults and for children, edited numerous anthologies, and been closely involved with the Ontario Review, which ran until the death of her husband, its founder and editor Raymond Smith, in 2008. Oates produced the bulk of this work while also pursuing a career first at the University of Windsor, Ontario, and since 1978 at Princeton. Her literary fiction depicts multiple cross-sections of American culture from the Depression era of her birth into the twenty-first century, with forays into nineteenthand early-twentieth-century culture. Born in 1938 in Lockport in upstate New York (called “Eden County” in some of her fiction) she was educated at Syracuse University and at the University of Wisconsin before abandoning a PhD at Rice to become a writer. At Syracuse she co-won the 1959 Mademoiselle Fiction Prize, followed in 1963 by her first story collection as well as her first novel, With Shuddering Fall. From then on, she would produce the equivalent of more than a book a year for decades to come.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Oates wrote largely in a realist mode but her 1970s fiction became ever more ambitious, leading to her most experimental period in the early 1980s. After this she returned to a postmodernist realism that constitutes her mature artistic voice. Her work throughout her career reveals a core concern with the inner mysteries of personality and identity in interaction with the intricacies of American society. This gives rise to her most common themes, including ambition, power, the fluidity of personae, and illicit or aberrant love. Many of her protagonists strive to escape their blue-collar upbringing and rise through the social strata. They seek to break away from overbearing individuals or hostile environments, and to take control of their lives. Often this involves transcending intense relationships and sometimes experiencing a complete change of identity. But it can also involve the manipulation of others or the prostitution of the protagonist’s original sense of self. Even when apparently triumphant, these journeys usually occur at some cost to all concerned. With Shuddering Fall anticipates several of Oates’s later works in that it involves a claustrophobic relationship between a young girl and an older man beyond whom the girl must move in order to discover the wider world. In A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967; revised and republished in 1983), the daughter of itinerant farm workers seeks a better life through marriage to a wealthy landowner. them (1969), which won the National Book Award, is about a girl who marries her way out of deprivation while her brother, who also
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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OATES, JOYCE CAROL
seeks to “better” himself, ends up participating in the Detroit riots. In the course of the novel, the girl challenges her supposed teacher, Oates, over the relevance of classic literature to working-class life. This is part of a dialogue with past writing that characterizes Oates’s career. Marriages and Infidelities (1972) includes revisions of stories by Chekhov, Kafka, Henry James, and Joyce. A recent collection, Wild Nights! (2008b), revisits the last days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway. Oates’s dialogue with other writers can also be found in many of her essays, most notably in those of the young writer marking her territory in New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature (1974) and the mature writer reflecting on examples of the writing impulse in The Faith of a Writer (2003). Oates’s pivotal early-1970s novel, Wonderland (1971), is about the social rise and emotional alienation of a neurosurgeon, and more generally an exploration of consciousness. Not long after its publication, Oates suffered a mental crisis that produced a sense of the fallacy of the unified self. Out of this came a series of books, including Childwold (1976), in which she sought to rethink the way in which fiction renders selfhood by way of individual characters (see Daly 1996). Such works challenge conventional expectations concerning narrative identity. Narrators switch between firstand third-person, and it is often impossible to ascertain precisely which voice the reader is witnessing, which viewpoint is being expressed, or the actual status – whether “real” or “imagined” within the context of the fictional world – of the events being described. Oates was also producing poetry and plays during this period, as well as a body of significant short fiction including her best-known early story. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is about a teenage girl who accepts a ride from a creepily enigmatic stranger. This much anthologized story features in the most comprehensive collection of short fiction from across her career, High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories 1966–2006 (2006). Oates’s choice from her first four volumes of poetry appears in Invisible Woman: New and Selected Poems, 1970–1982 (1982). Her work in that and other genres is usually seen as subsidiary to her novels and stories but, like her Journal (2007), gives valuable insight into the preoccupations of her major work.
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The early 1980s saw the publication of panoramic explorations of nineteenth-century America, marked by a departure of style, approach, and subject matter. Most extraordinary of these is Bellefleur (1980), an exuberant, surreal history of a dynasty of landowners. Despite its elements of magic realism, it also connects with her earlier writing in its sharp commentary on the energies, inequalities, and injustices of capitalism. Another such novel, Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984), continues Oates’s revisionist explorations of both nineteenth-century patriarchy and literary conventions by offering a labyrinthine, postmodernist take on the detective genre. These books also exemplify the gothic tendencies that are another characteristic of Oates’s output, evident periodically in novels and stories through the course of her career. Returning to depictions of her own twentiethcentury environment, Marya: A Life (1986) closely follows the trajectory of Oates’s career from humble, rural origins into the world of academe. The themes of survival and ambition evident in her early work are now seen from a position of artistic maturity. The protagonist superficially resembles Oates in her rise from poverty to succeed in a male-dominated environment, but Marya’s attitudes toward her past, her colleagues, and herself exact a notable price in terms of her relationships with other people. Thereafter follows a succession of important novels, including two works of gritty realism set in upstate New York exploring respectively the mind-set of the 1950s and the 1960s. You Must Remember This (1987) concerns an incestuous affair between a fading boxer and his niece against the backdrop of McCarthyism. Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990) details a doomed interracial love between a high school basketball star and a white girl in the emerging Civil Rights era. These two are part of a series of Oates novels that meditate on questions of class, race, gender, and power in American culture. John Updike’s influential review of the former (1987) along with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s of the latter in The Nation (republished in Cologne-Brookes 2006) provide two incisive statements about Oates’s work as a whole. While Norman Mailer and Philip Roth are among the few American writers of Oates’s generation whose extensive output bears comparison with hers, Gates notes her reference to Balzac as a role
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model. But Oates has also cited Updike as the closest among her contemporaries to a literary soul-mate. Also worthy of note from this decade are two works of non-fiction. On Boxing (1987), an analysis of masculinity and the pugilistic impulse, can be read as a companion piece to You Must Remember This. (Woman) Writer (1988) contains Oates’s most significant commentary on her artistic vision and on some of her many literary influences. Through the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, Oates’s work continues to explore American culture in its myriad manifestations. A fresh development, however, is Oates’s examination of the cult of celebrity, especially as filtered through news stories involving either established public figures or individuals whose fame is solely the result of the media’s frenzy for tragedy. Novels that refer tangentially to specific examples of American celebrity include Black Water (1992), about the drowning of an intern in a car driven by a man named only as The Senator; Blonde (2000), about the rise and fall of a Hollywood star who marries a playwright and sings for a president; and My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike (2008a), a meditation on the murder of a child beauty pageant winner. Oates’s interest in our relationship with perceived and actual truths about ourselves and others remains central to several of her later novels, including the elegiac ode to family life, We Were the Mulvaneys (1996). In Middle Age: A Romance (2001), a peer group experiences the ongoing influence of a friend after his untimely death. Their memories of Adam Berendt’s Socratic dialogues challenge them to continue to question their lives. As such, he is one of Oates’s many portraits of the author’s role as she sees it. For Oates, we are all creatively involved in shaping our own and others’ lives. Her subsequent novels of the twenty-first century contain, among other things, further diverse meditations on this general, human characteristic. Although Oates’s mature novels are invariably realist, many of her stories remain avowedly experimental even as they anticipate, echo, and further the preoccupations evident in her novels. Her books of essays equally continue to supply insight into her worldview and artistic vision while also testifying to the eclectic breadth of her reading
and interests. An intellectual who wears her learning lightly, she is inclusive rather than exclusive. She remains a popular author both under her own name and as the writer of thrillers under pseudonyms, even as she is the object of academic study. SEE ALSO: Gender and the Novel (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); Updike, John (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bloom, H. (ed.) (1987). Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Chelsea House. Cologne-Brookes, G. (2005). Dark Eyes on America: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Cologne-Brookes, G. (ed.) (2006). Joyce Carol Oates [special issue]. Studies in the Novel, 38(4), 385–574. Daly, B. (1996). Lavish Self-Divisions: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Johnson, G. (1998). Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Dutton. Johnson, G. (2006). Joyce Carol Oates: Conversations 1970–2006. Princeton: Ontario Review Press. Oates, J. C. (1963). With Shuddering Fall. New York: Vanguard. Oates, J. C. (1967). A Garden of Earthly Delights. New York: Vanguard. Oates, J. C. (1969). them. New York: Vanguard. Oates, J. C. (1971). Wonderland. New York: Vanguard. Oates, J. C. (1974). New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature. New York: Vanguard. Oates, J. C. (1976). Childwold. New York: Vanguard. Oates, J. C. (1980). Bellefleur. New York: E. P. Dutton. Oates, J. C. (1982). Invisible Woman: New and Selected Poems, 1970–1982. Princeton: Ontario Review Press. Oates, J. C. (1984). Mysteries of Winterthurn. New York: E. P. Dutton. Oates, J. C. (1986). Marya: A Life. New York: E. P. Dutton. Oates, J. C. (1987). You Must Remember This. New York: E. P. Dutton. Oates, J. C. (1990). Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart. New York: E. P. Dutton. Oates, J. C. (1992). Black Water. New York: E. P. Dutton. Oates, J. C. (1996). We Were the Mulvaneys. New York: E. P. Dutton. Oates, J. C. (2000). Blonde. New York: Ecco. Oates, J. C. (2001). Middle Age: A Romance. New York: Ecco.
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O ’C O N N O R , F L A N N E R Y
Oates, J. C. (2003). The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art. New York: Ecco. Oates, J. C. (2006). High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories 1966–2006. New York: Ecco. Oates, J. C. (2007). The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973–1982. New York: Ecco. Oates, J. C. (2008a). My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike. New York: Ecco. Oates, J. C. (2008b). Wild Nights! Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway. New York: Ecco: Updike, J. (1987). What You Deserve Is What You Get. New Yorker, pp. 119–23 (Dec. 28).
O’Connor, Flannery DEBRA ROMANICK BALDWIN
One of the most important voices in American fiction, Flannery O’Connor’s art combines jarring intensity, stylistic economy, sardonic humor, intellectual richness, and spiritual depth. Her importance is all the more striking in being based on a relatively small number of fictional works: O’Connor completed but two novels and two collections of short stories before lupus erythematosus cut short her life at the age of 39. Yet she also wrote several essays and lectures, many dozens of reviews, and hundreds of letters, all of whose relation to her fiction remains one of the most interesting critical questions about her art. Alternately categorized as a Southern writer and a Catholic writer, her fiction’s aesthetic power and indeterminacy defy easy categorization. Born on March 25, 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, Mary Flannery O’Connor grew up as an only child in an observant Catholic family and attended parochial school, her Catholicism remaining a vital force throughout her life and art. After moves to Atlanta and Milledgeville, Georgia, O’Connor attended Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College and State University), where she contributed stories, poems, essays, and cartoons for the college literary magazine. In 1945, she was accepted for graduate study at the State University of Iowa (now the University of Iowa), having been awarded a journalism scholarship there. Within a semester, she applied to the university’s now prestigious Writers’ Workshop, and worked closely first with Paul Engle, and later with Andrew Lytle. Other writers and critics she encountered in
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the program included Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Austen Warren, and Paul Horgan. She completed her MFA in creative writing in the spring of 1947, her master’s thesis a collection of short stories entitled The Geranium with a title story published the previous year in Accent. At the same time, she won a Rinehart-Iowa Fiction Award for the work she had completed on her first novel. In 1948, she moved to Yaddo, the artist’s colony in Saratoga Springs, where she met Robert Lowell, Edward Maisel, Elizabeth Fenwick, and Elizabeth Hardwick. Following political upheaval at the colony, she moved to New York and met her future editor, Robert Giroux, and also Robert and Sally Fitzgerald – a couple devoutly Catholic and literary, whose habits were more compatible with O’Connor’s than were those of Yaddo, and whose lifelong friendship would extend into literary executorship following her death. For almost two years, she rented the Fitzgeralds’ garage apartment in Connecticut, babysat their children, and shared with them during meals and conversation. At Christmas time 1950, just before returning home to Milledgeville, O’Connor experienced the first symptoms of what she would later learn was lupus, the incurable autoimmune disease that had killed her father nine years before. O’Connor moved back to Milledgeville, to a farm called Andalusia that had been bequeathed to her mother and uncle. She continued working on her novel Wise Blood. It was published in 1952, after significant revisions suggested by the writer Caroline Gordon, who became a close friend and correspondent. Despite an improvement in O’Connor’s health which allowed her to move back with the Fitzgeralds the same year, she soon suffered a relapse of symptoms and returned to Milledgeville, where she was told she had lupus. For the 12 remaining years of her life, O’Connor remained at Andalusia, living quietly and productively, settling into a disciplined routine of writing – cared for by her mother, surrounded by the peacocks that she loved, and occasionally traveling, despite her illness, to visit friends or engage in literary activities. Her first collection of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, was published in 1955, and she continued to write and publish short stories while working on her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, which came out in 1960. She
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continued to produce short stories, essays, and reviews until her death on August 3, 1964. A second collection of short stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge, was issued posthumously in 1965. O’Connor’s works are consistent in style and vision. Their distinctive style is bare and carefully crafted, rejecting a strong authorial voice or commentary in favor of vivid depictions of characters and actions by narrative voices who integrate colloquial slang, biting irony, powerful similes, and subtle shifts in tone. The stories are unsettling, an effect heightened by her use of the grotesque, an aesthetic of distortion and disjunction that we often associate with medieval gargoyles. The grotesque in O’Connor’s art takes the form of characters who are maimed or freakish (such as a man whose fetish is stealing women’s prostheses), similes whose simple disjunction evokes physical discomfort (as in “her eyes fixed like two drills on Mrs. Turpin”), and plots that turn suddenly and intensely violent (as when a comically depicted family outing ends in a mass murder). Early critics used this grotesque element to categorize O’Connor as an example of “Southern Gothic” literature, or of “the school of Southern degeneracy” – a phrase that she poked fun at in her essay, “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction.” O’Connor herself defended these jarring elements as a form of what Nathaniel Hawthorne described as “romance” – that is, fiction that focuses on the unusual and the extreme, that “lean[s] away from typical social patterns, towards mystery and the unexpected” (1969, 40). While the grotesque is a means of jolting readers out of their complacency, for O’Connor, it also contains an essential truth: “It is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature” (1969, 45). O’Connor’s writings about her own art reveal a consistent and complex religious and philosophical vision, although critics remain divided on the extent to which her clear and almost dogmatic pronouncements adequately explain her aesthetic achievement. Yet there is no denying that the Christian notions of sin, grace, and mystery permeate all of her works. And each one of her stories, she says, contains a moment of grace – a moment “in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected, even though the reader may
not recognize this moment” (1969, 118). She offers some examples – in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” when the Grandmother recognizes the Misfit as one of her own children; in “The Artificial Nigger,” when an unexpected encounter with a statue allows Mr. Head and his grandson to reconcile; in “The River,” when a boy is driven to find the Kingdom of Christ and drowns himself. Each of these moments is morally, politically, and humanly problematical and the cumulative effect is not to proselytize, but to shock the reader into contemplation. O’Connor wrote, “The artist has his hands full and does his duty if he attends to his art. He can safely leave evangelizing to the evangelists” (1969, 171). Indeed, she described the novelist most cryptically, as a sort of prophet who “descend[s] through the darkness of the familiar world into a world where, like the blind man cured in the gospels, he sees men as if they were trees, but walking” (1969, 50). O’Connor’s theological taste was extensive and eclectic, embracing classical ecclesiastical figures, as well as modern theologians on the edge of orthodoxy, several of whom she reviewed for the Bulletin, the Catholic diocesan paper for which she wrote dozens of reviews between 1956 and 1963. She spoke enthusiastically about Hans K€ ung, Karl Rahner, Jean Danielou, Fran¸cois Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, about whom she wrote to Fr. J. H. McCowan that he “died in 1955 and so far escaped the Index, although a monition has been issued on him. If they are good, they are dangerous” (1979, 571). She wrote that she “cut [her] aesthetic teeth on” Jacques Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism, which taught her the Thomistic phrase she applied to her own activity: “the habit of art” (1979, 216). Of the Church Fathers, St. Thomas was her foremost theological influence; O’Connor repeatedly called herself a Thomist – albeit “a hillbilly Thomist” (1979 81) and she admitted to her friend, Betty Hester, that she read Thomas’s Summa Theologica “for about twenty minutes every night before I go to bed” (1979, 93). But some critics argue that she owes an equal aesthetic debt to St. Augustine, whose account of intellectual pride and command of jarring imagery echo the themes and spirit of her own art (see Giannone 12; Asals 229; Baldwin). O’Connor’s literary influences were varied and extensive. In addition to admiring Nathaniel
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Hawthorne, as mentioned above, she stated that her foremost literary influence, “the largest thing that looms up,” was Edgar Allan Poe (1979 99). She also called herself “a great admirer of Conrad,” whose artistic vision, combining fidelity to concrete particularity with openness to mystery, reflected her own convictions. She read the Catholic novelists Fran¸cois Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, Leon Bloy, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh. She also read and admired Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, Honore de Balzac, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, and Nikolai Gogol. Of the Southern writers, she appreciated Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor, and William Faulkner – although she wrote of the latter, “Probably the reason I don’t read him is because he makes me feel that with my one-cylinder syntax I should quit writing and raise chickens altogether” (1979, 292). O’Connor’s works won several awards during her writer’s life, including a Rinehart-Iowa Fiction Award for first novel (1947); a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant (1957); an honorary doctorate of letters from Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame (1962); and three first prize O. Henry Awards (1956, 1962, 1964). Her work also received two posthumous awards: her Complete Stories won the National Book Award in 1972, and her letters, edited by Sally Fitzgerald under the name The Habit of Being, received a National Book Critics Circle Special Award for 1979. SEE ALSO: The Southern Novel (AF); Welty, Eudora (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Asals, F. (1982). Flannery O’Connor: The Imagination of Extremity. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Bacon, J. L. (1993). Flannery O’Connor and Cold War Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press. Baldwin, D. R. (2006). Augustinian Physicality and the Rhetoric of the Grotesque in the Art of Flannery O’Connor. In R. P. Kennedy, K. Paffenroth, & J. Doody (eds.), Augustine and Literature. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 301–26.
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Brinkmeyer, R. (1989). The Art and Vision of Flannery O’Connor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Cash, C. (2002). Flannery O’Connor: A Life. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Coles, R. (1980). Flannery O’Connor’s South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. DiRenzo, A. (1993). American Gargoyles: Flannery O’Connor and the Medieval Grotesque. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Giannone, R. (2000). Flannery O’Connor: Hermit Novelist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Gordon, S. (2000). Flannery O’Connor: The Obedient Imagination. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Hendin, J. (1970). The World of Flannery O’Connor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kirk, C. A. (2008). A Critical Companion to Flannery O’Connor. New York: Facts on File. O’Connor, F. (1952). Wise Blood. New York: Harcourt Brace. O’Connor, F. (1955). A. Good Man Is Hard to Find. New York: Harcourt, Brace. O’Connor, F. (1960). The Violent Bear It Away. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. O’Connor, F. (1965). Everything That Rises Must Converge. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. O’Connor, F. (1969). Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (ed. S. Fitzgerald, & R. Fitzgerald). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. O’Connor, F. (1979a). The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. O’Connor, F. (1979b). The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor (ed. and intro. S. Fitzgerald). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. O’Connor, F. (1983). The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews (comp. L. J. Zuber, ed. and intro. C. W. Martin). Athens: University of Georgia Press. O’Connor, F. (1987). Conversations With Flannery O’Connor (ed. R. M. Magee). Literary Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Orvell, M. (1972). Invisible Parade: The Fiction of Flannery O’Connor. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Scott, R. N. (2002). Flannery O’Connor: An Annotated Reference Guide to Criticism. Milledgeville, GA: Timberlane. Shloss, C. (1989). Flannery O’Connor’s Dark Comedies: The Limits of Inference. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Stephens, M. (1973). The Question of Flannery O’Connor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press.
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Olsen, Tillie JUSTUS NIELAND
The life and work of Tillie Olsen speak to the discontinuities of literary history, an enterprise shaped, as Olsen experienced first-hand, by patriarchy and political repression, the crushing realities of poverty, and underclass voices silenced by the lack of time or resources to write. Olsen’s literary output was slight: Yonnondio: From the Thirties, an unfinished novel published in 1974, but begun in 1933; Tell Me a Riddle (1962), a short-story collection; Silences (1978), a nonfictional meditation on the obstacles to female authorship; and Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother (1984), an edited collection of exchanges between women writers and their daughters. Yet Olsen’s unsentimental, morally unsparing depictions of the dehumanizing effects of class and gender oppression in America, like her penetrating analysis of the exclusion of women and the poor from literary careers, exerted a powerful influence on second-wave feminists and scholars of working-class and Depression-era literatures in the US. Olsen’s contribution to the politicized literary culture of the 1930s has also proven crucial to the important critical revaluation of period over the last decade. Her deft use of modernist technique (influenced by early reading of Stevens, Eliot, Yeats, Dos Passos, and Joyce) in the service of radical, feminist social critique challenges old-fashioned distinctions between apolitical formalism and committed realism. The daughter of Samuel and Ida Lerner, socialist Jews and dissidents who left tsarist Russia following the failed 1905 revolution, Tillie Lerner was born on a farm outside Omaha, Nebraska in 1912, and raised by her politically active parents in North Omaha, where the city’s Jews and blacks were concentrated. A strong student, Olsen nonetheless dropped out of high school to join the Young Communist League, and shortly left Omaha for Kansas City, where she worked in a factory and participated in Communist Party activities. Jailed for posting party leaflets at a packing house, Olsen return to Omaha briefly, participating in strikes and union drives before moving to Faribault, Minnesota in 1933, where she became pregnant with her first child and
began to draft Yonnondio. In 1934, she moved to San Francisco, meeting and marrying Jack Olsen, a printer and fellow Party activist. There, she began reporting on labor battles and, in the inaugural issue of Partisan Review, published “The Strike,” an arresting, experimental piece of proletarian reportage about the massive longshoreman strikes and their violent repression by the police, and “Thousand Dollar Vagrant,” about her ensuing arrest. Also in 1934, she published poems about sweatshop exploitation in the garment industry and fascist massacres in Austria, and, in Partisan Review, the first chapter of Yonnondio. Like “The Strike,” Yonnondio deployed modernist collage and parataxis to document the hallucinatory incoherence of political rhetoric and reality. Olsen earned a book contract from Random House, but Yonnondio would never be finished – the demands of motherhood intervened. Olsen lived the rest of her life in San Francisco, working a variety of jobs while raising four daughters. Yonnondio, the surviving portions of which Olsen wrote between 1933 and 1936, is a striking work of documentary surrealism. The story follows the migrations of the working-class Holbrook family, who move from the misery of a Wyoming mining town, to a failed pastoral farm life, to brutal, smelly poverty in a Midwestern meatpacking city much like Olsen’s Omaha. But Olsen’s Holbrooks are not Steinbeck’s Joads, and her stunning technique everywhere refuses sentimentality. Olsen opts instead to combine modernist stream-of-consciousness narration – mostly focalized through the sensitive perspective of the Holbrook’s 10-year-old-daughter, Mazie – and grotesque, quasi-fantastic depictions of capitalist industry and laboring bodies. Yonnondio’s vital modernism, what one recent critic has dubbed “sensational,” provides a radical anatomy of the psychic and bodily toll of economic injustice on the impoverished. Olsen is especially sensitive to capital’s systemic destruction or deformation of human dignity and creativity, showing how the abusive working conditions that plague Jim, the Holbrook’s uneducated patriarch, infiltrate and warp the rhythms of domestic life: in one haunting scene, he rapes his sick wife, Anna, within earshot of a shocked, barely comprehending Mazie, whose confused perceptions Olsen handles skillfully. Like the novel’s other
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children, who use movies or the recycled detritus of a local garbage dump to dream of better futures that never arrive, Mazie is an unromanticized victim of a system that exceeds her, but she also possesses insurgent capacities for imagination, sensation, and beauty. Olsen’s lyrical treatment of Mazie sharpens the pathos of the book, but is never condescending, tempered instead by overt, Brechtian challenges to her reader’s temptation to consume suffering at a distance in the tired form of sentimental pity. After her own youngest daughter enrolled in school, Olsen revivified her writing career in the 1950s, taking creative writing classes at San Francisco State University. On the merits of two stories she drafted there (“I Stand Here Ironing” and “Hey Sailor, What Ship?”), she received Wallace Stegner and Ford Foundation fellowships. The support led to the publication of her widely anthologized short story collection, Tell Me a Riddle. The collection’s titular story, about the pressures of gender differences and poverty on a four-decade-long marriage, and the memory of a revolutionary past by a woman dying of cancer, was adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 1981. The collection typifies Olsen’s interest in the demands and sacrifices of maternity, the complexities and unsentimental truths of mother–daughter relationships, and the often unheard voices of America’s underclass and immigrant populations. The collection’s critical acclaim paved the way for the eventual publication of Yonnondio, the unfinished drafts of which Olsen discovered in 1972. Olsen chose to not rewrite or fill the gaps, leaving literary critics with an aptly fragmentary product of a gifted young writer and activist who lived and wrote urgently, but whose life of writing would suffer repeated interruptions. It was the nature of these kinds of literary silences or apparent failures of energy – both her own and those of writers like Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Rebecca Harding Davis, whose Life in the Iron Mills first convinced a 15-year-old Olsen that literature could come from working-class lives – that Olsen sought to account for in Silences. Full-functioning creativity, Olsen explained, required “wholly surrendered and dedicated lives; time as needed for the work; totality of self.” Such were luxuries that women like Olsen could rarely afford. Tillie Olsen died in 2007.
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SEE ALSO: Gender in the Novel (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); Working-Class Fiction (BIF); WPA and Popular Front Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Coiner, C. (1995). Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edmunds, S. (2008). Grotesque Relations: Modernist Domestic Fiction and the U.S. Welfare State. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Entin, J. (2007). Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Faulkner, M. (1993). Protest and Possibility in the Writing of Tillie Olsen. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Olsen, T. (1934). The Strike. Partisan Review, 1, 5. Olsen, T. (1962). Tell Me A Riddle: A Collection. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Olsen, T. (1974). Yonnondio: From the Thirties. New York: Delacorte. Olsen, T. (1978). Silences. New York: Dell. Rabinowitz, P. (1991). Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Rosenfelt, D. (1981). From the Thirties: Tillie Olsen and the Radical Tradition. Feminist Studies, 7(3), 370–406.
Ortiz, Simon J. P. JANE HAFEN
Simon J. Ortiz, a member of the Acoma Pueblo, comes from a legacy of indigenous people who have lived in the same place since their sense of the beginning of time. His genre-crossing writings reflect the heritage of location, community, and language. Ortiz was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1941. He was reared in the village of McCartys, where his family spoke their native Keres language. After working in a uranium mine and a stint in the military, Ortiz attended school at Ft. Lewis, Colorado and the University of New Mexico. As a student at the MFA workshop at the University of Iowa, Ortiz joined the rank of university-trained American Indian writers like N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), James Welch (Black-
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feet), and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo). Although sometimes categorized as a writer of the Native American Renaissance, Ortiz’s awardwinning writing reveals a timeless heritage that ties back to place, language, and sovereignty. An early essay (1981) asserts tribal sovereignty. “Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism” delineates how individual tribes each have their own literatures. By relying on the specific tribal stories of his Acoma heritage, Ortiz establishes a pattern that will be consistent throughout his work. He relates in English and Keres, through poetry and narrative, varied experiences of resistance and identity familiar to contemporary Indians throughout the western hemisphere. These experiences, though common, inevitably lead back to his particular place, Acoma Pueblo. From this early essay to a more recent work, Out There Somewhere (2002), that is set in multiple locations, Ortiz consistently returns to his center of inspiration. Additionally, Ortiz’s writing acknowledges indigenous history by situating events in the context of multiple generations, telling stories of his ancestors and family. Even his publishing history acknowledges that sense of context. After a period of personal struggles, the early 1990s began a resurgence of publications beginning with Woven Stone (1992). An omnibus of previously published works, Ortiz introduces the volume with reflective and interpretive essays. Ortiz also updates his work to expose the environmental racism that exists on native lands. Aware of the need to properly educate children about American Indians and culture contexts, Ortiz has published two children’s books, The People Shall Continue (1977b) and The Good Rainbow Road (2004). He has generously collaborated with other scholars by editing anthologies, writing forewords, working with younger Native writers, and cooperating with literary critics. Perhaps Ortiz’s best-known work is the powerful and widely anthologized From Sand Creek (2000 [1981]). Recounting the 1864 massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians in Colorado, Ortiz expands resistance and survival to all indigenous peoples while personalizing his own struggles. While this volume recounts indescribably horrific deaths and mutilations, it also points to reconciliation and hope:
This America has been a burden of steel and mad death, but, look now, there are flowers and new grass and a spring wind rising from Sand Creek.
Now an elder statesmen in the field of Native letters, Ortiz continues to write, speak, and teach. Modern technologies and the Internet have made hearing his reading and singing of his own work essential in learning the oral nature and the power of his language. He has had teaching appointments at the University of New Mexico, Sinte Gleska Tribal College, the University of Arizona, the University of Toronto, Kenyon College, and, as of this writing, Arizona State University. SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Momaday, N. Scott (AF); Silko, Leslie (AF); Welch, James (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Brill de Ramirez, S. (ed.) (2004). Simon Ortiz [special issue]. Studies in American Indian Literatures, ser. 2, 16(4). Fast, R. R. (1999). Telling Stories. In The Heart as a Drum: Continuance and Resistance in American Indian Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 163–82. Kroeber, K. (ed.) (1984). Simon Ortiz [special issue]. Studies in American Indian Literature, 8(3–4). Lucero, E. Z., & Brill de Ramirez, S. (eds.) (2009). Simon J. Ortiz: A Poetic Legacy of Indigenous Continuance. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Ortiz, S. (1976). Going for the Rain. New York: Harper and Row. Ortiz, S. (1977a). A Good Journey. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Ortiz, S. (1977b). The People Shall Continue (Fifth World Tales). San Francisco: Children’s Book Press. Ortiz, S. (1980). Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, for the Sake of the Land (illus. M. Chino). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Ortiz, S. (1981). Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism. MELUS 8(2), 7–12.
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Ortiz, S. (1988). Earth Power Coming: Short Fiction in Native American Literature. Tsaile, AZ: Navajo Community College Press. Ortiz, S. (1992). Woven Stone. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Ortiz, S. (1994). After and Before the Lightening. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Ortiz, S. (1997). Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Ortiz, S. (1999). Men on the Moon: Collected Short Stories. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Ortiz, S. (2000). From Sand Creek: Rising in This Heart Which Is Our America [1981]. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Ortiz, S. (2002). Out There Somewhere. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Ortiz, S. (2004). The Good Rainbow Road. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Ortiz, S. (2005). Beyond the Reach of Time and Change: Native American Reflections on the Frank A. Rinehart Photograph Collection. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Rader, D. (1997). Luci Tapahonso and Simon Ortiz: Allegory, Symbol, Language, Poetry. Southwestern American Literature, 22(2), 75–92. Smith, P. C. (2005). Simon Ortiz: Writing Home. In J. Porter, & K. M. Roemer (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 221–32. Wiget, A. (1986). Simon Ortiz. Western Writers Series 11. Boise, ID: Boise State University Press.
Ozick, Cynthia JOSEPH ALKANA
Cynthia Ozick is a major voice in contemporary American literature whose short stories, novels, and essays have consistently elicited high critical regard. Her fiction is often considered challenging for raising difficult intellectual matters that frequently are situated in the dynamics of her characters. Ozick’s novels and shorter fiction recall literary and cultural tradition in their attention to moral issues, yet they are also at times stylistically innovative. Her five novels, five volumes of shorter fiction, and five collections of essays have generated many honors, such as a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Strauss Living Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Born in New York City on April 17, 1928 to William and Celia Ozick, immigrant owners of a small drugstore in the Bronx, Cynthia Ozick’s
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autobiographical essays “A Drugstore in Winter” (in 1983a) and “A Drugstore Eden” (in 2000) tell of her early immersion in literature as well as her Jewish background. She attended New York University and Ohio State University, where in 1950 she wrote her MA thesis on Henry James. The importance of James to her conception of literature has been evident throughout her career, yet, despite the ways she has positioned her work within the contexts of both Jewish and nonJewish cultures, Ozick’s fiction and essays on literature often call into question conventional thinking, particularly with regard to ethnicity. In the latter respect, Ozick’s work resembles that of such other important American Jewish writers as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth. Ozick’s best-known work, The Shawl (1989b), a paired short story and novella (each of which won the O. Henry Award for short stories the different years they were first published), displays a willingness to experiment with unconventional narrative form. The Shawl conveys its protagonist’s Holocaust experiences and then jumps ahead several decades to her life in Miami Beach, depicted in the distinctly unsentimental and at times darkly comic manner typical of Ozick. In The Shawl one can discern the tension between mainstream literary culture and Jewish tradition, in its intellectual, religious, and more broadly social dimensions, that some critics regard as a crucial element of Ozick’s fiction. This tension is evident from her first novel, Trust (1966), a narrative of a young woman’s attempts to uncover a past that includes different father figures who have allegiances to Jewish and non-Jewish values. Other important early works include “Usurpation (Other People’s Stories)” (in 1976) and “Envy; or, Yiddish in America” (in 1971), both of which offer serio-comic treatments of Jewish writers and intellectuals. The problem of the Jewish artist in the United States also became the focus of two important essays, “Toward a New Yiddish” (in 1983a) and “Bialik’s Hint” (in 1989a), both of which assert the value of English in place of the more traditional Yiddish to the Jewish writer. The interplay between intellectual or artistic interests and the emotional lives of her characters regularly animates Ozick’s fiction. For example, The Cannibal Galaxy (1983b) tells of a Holocaustera refugee who establishes an American school curriculum divided between traditional Jewish
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and secular education; his story pivots on challenges posed by a student and her mother, both highly intelligent. Although such attention to forceful women is frequent in Ozick’s writings, her treatment of feminist issues, like her treatment of ethnicity, is less programmatic than it is devoted to exploring complexity. As she reflects in “Tradition and (or Versus) the Jewish Writer,” “Writers are responsible only to the comely shape of a sentence, and to the unfettered imagination, which sometimes leads to wild places via wild routes” (2003, 129). Ozick’s varied commitments are revealed in The Puttermesser Papers (1997), which features the imaginative and highly educated Ruth Puttermesser. In one section, Puttermesser unconsciously draws from Jewish tradition to create a golem that helps bring about a transient utopian flowering of New York City. In Heir to the Glimmering World (2004), Ozick again displays her knowledge of Jewish intellectual traditions, this time when presenting the story of a refugee European Jewish scholar and his family, and the effects they have on the youthful narrator who anticipates her own future as a writer. The importance of writers is also dramatized in the title story of Dictation (2008), in which Henry James appears as a character, as well as an earlier novel, The Messiah of Stockholm (1987), which presents a protagonist who believes his father was Bruno Schulz, a Jewish writer and artist murdered by Nazis. Ozick has published numerous essays that reveal penetrating analyses of both well-known and more obscure writers, and she has taken daring stances on a variety of issues. For example, in “Who Owns Anne Frank?” (in 2000), Ozick suggests that this best-known piece of Holocaust literature may, as it is popularly apprehended, do more damage than good. Ozick’s essays are unflinching in their advocacy of a moral perspective, her own unapologetically grounded in her artistic and moral allegiances.
SEE ALSO: Bellow, Saul (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Malamud, Bernard (AF); James, Henry (AF); Jewish Fiction (BIF); Roth, Philip (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bloom, H. (ed.) (1986). Modern Critical Views: Cynthia Ozick. New York: Chelsea House. Kauver, E. M. (1993). Cynthia Ozick’s Fiction: Tradition and Invention. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lowin, J. (1988). Cynthia Ozick. Boston: Twayne. Ozick, C. (1966). Trust. New York: New American Library. Ozick, C. (1971). The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories. New York: Knopf. Ozick, C. (1976). Bloodshed and Three Novellas. New York: Knopf. Ozick, C. (1982). Levitation: Five Fictions. New York: Knopf. Ozick, C. (1983a). Art and Ardor. New York: Knopf. Ozick, C. (1983b). The Cannibal Galaxy. New York: Knopf. Ozick, C. (1987). The Messiah of Stockholm. New York: Knopf. Ozick, C. (1989a). Metaphor and Memory. New York: Knopf. Ozick, C. (1989b). The Shawl. New York: Knopf. Ozick, C. (1996). Fame and Folly. New York: Knopf. Ozick, C. (1997). The Puttermesser Papers. New York: Knopf. Ozick, C. (2000). Quarrel and Quandary. New York: Knopf. Ozick, C. (2003). The Din in the Head: Essays. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Ozick, C. (2004). Heir to the Glimmering World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Ozick, C. (2008). Dictation: A Quartet. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Strandberg, V. (1994). Greek Mind/Jewish Soul: The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
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P Paley, Grace PATRICK O’DONNELL
Revered as one of the most important and widely taught short story writers of the post-World War II era, Grace Paley (1922–2007) published four volumes of short stories in her lifetime, as well as several volumes of poetry and non-fiction; a fervent advocate for the causes of world peace and nuclear disarmament, Paley was equally well known as a political activist beginning with her involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement. Paley’s stories are meticulously crafted portraits of the middle-class inhabitants of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Greenwich Village, often focusing on the lives, trials, and conversations of women concerned about families, relationships, and an environment that poses various threats to human well-being. The ironic tone, dialogism, and metafictional strategies to be found in many of Paley’s stories are captured in the title of her first collection of stories, The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), as well as in the titles of the stories themselves: “In Time Which Made a Monkey of Us All,” a satire on adolescent inventiveness and human evolution; or “The Loudest Voice,” about a young girl with a loud voice who insists on her Jewish identity. Along with Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, John Updike, and Bernard Malamud, Paley is considered as one of the leading architects of the contemporary short story. Paley was born in the Bronx and lived in New York City for much of her life; her parents were Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, and many of her stories reflect her Jewish heritage. Paley studied at
Hunter College, New York University, and the New School for Social Research, but never completed a formal degree. She married and raised two children before beginning her career as a writer and teacher in the mid-1950s. Following 27 years of marriage, she divorced her first husband and subsequently married the writer and landscape architect Robert Nichols. She taught at Sarah Lawrence College for 23 years beginning in 1966, with briefer teaching appointments at the City College of New York, Syracuse University, and Columbia University. Following The Little Disturbances of Man, a second short story collection, Enormous Changes of the Last Minute, was published in 1974 after a false start at a novel. A third volume, Later the Same Day, was published in 1985, and Paley’s stories were gathered in a collected volume in 1994, which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. In between the publication of her story collections, Paley published Leaning Forward (1985b), a volume of poetry, and New and Collected Poems (1992); Begin Again: Collected Poems was published in 2000, and Just as I Thought, a collection of essays and reviews, was published in 1998. Paley’s political activism led to her participation in a peace group that visited Hanoi in 1969, during the height of the Vietnam War, seeking the release of prisoners of war; she was also part of a peace delegation to Moscow in 1974. She was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and was elected to the National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1989. Fidelity, a gathering of her late poems, was published posthumously in 2008.
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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One of the characters who recurs in many of Paley’s stories is Faith Darwin; a writer herself, Faith may stand as Paley’s shadow or alter ego. In one of the stories of Enormous Changes of the Last Minute, “A Conversation With My Father,” Faith has a conversation with her dying father in which he asks her to tell him a story. Like all of Paley’s own stories, the story Faith tells is one that both confronts and sublimates personal experience: she tells her father the unlikely story of a woman who becomes a user of heroin in order to become closer to her son, who is a drug addict. The story goes through several permutations as Faith’s father expresses dissatisfaction with various elements of the invention, while Faith insists on leaving the narrative open to further developments and interpretation. The story combines realistic attention to a contemporary social issue with an interior reflection on how stories are made and remade, all within a conversation between a father and daughter that reveals the complexity of parent–child relationships and how time – one of Paley’s persistent concerns – “makes monkeys of us all” when we confront fate and mortality. Indeed, many of the stories in Enormous Changes of the Last Minute and throughout Paley’s opus portray the time of childhood as fraught with possibility and danger as, in life, irrevocable choices are made that, in narrative, can be reflected upon or even reversed. Ultimately, Paley can be considered a realist with a finely tuned ear for conversation and speech, yet one who brings to bear upon her stories of ordinary lives in extraordinary circumstances a postmodern sensibility for the paradoxical frailty and power of narratives that contend with and mediate reality. Her stories will continue to be read both as chronicles of domestic life after midcentury, and as tales that illuminate what is at stake in the relation between talk and invention. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Jewish Fiction (BIF); Malamud, Bernard (AF); O’Connor, Flannery (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); Updike, John (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Arcana, J. (1993). Grace Paley’s Life Stories: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Isaacs, N. D. (1990). Grace Paley: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne. Paley, G. (1959). The Little Disturbances of Man. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Paley, G. (1974). Enormous Changes of the Last Minute: New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Paley, G. (1985a). Later the Same Day. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Paley, G. (1985b). Leaning Forward. Penobscot, ME: Granite. Paley, G. (1991). Long Walks and Intimate Talks: Poems and Stories by Grace Paley. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York. Paley, G. (1992). New and Collected Poems. Gardiner, ME: Tilbury House. Paley, G. (1994). The Collected Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Paley, G. (1997). Conversations With Grace Paley (ed. G. Bach & B. H. Hall). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Paley, G. (1998). Just As I Thought. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Paley, G. (2000). Begin Again: Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Taylor, J. (1990). Grace Paley: Illuminating the Dark Lives. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Parker, Dorothy RHONDA S. PETTIT
Dorothy Parker wrote and published short fiction from 1922 to 1958, and she was perhaps best known as a humorous voice of the Roaring Twenties. Parker’s intimate examination of human motivation and behavior transcends the early twentieth century. Formally, her stories combine the linearity of traditional fiction with modernist and even postmodernist prose techniques: irony, satire, stream-of-consciousness narration, imagistic concision, and minimal authorial presence. Her characters tend to be alienated, intellectually shallow, or dishonest individuals who lack self-awareness and therefore wreak havoc on their own or other’s lives. Her themes include sexual dynamics; critiques of domesticity; social, racial, and economic justice; and war. Parker’s themes were influenced by the early death of her mother and her unhappy childhood, while her penchant for abbreviated forms was shaped by her work as a magazine writer. She
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was born to J. Henry and Eliza Annie Rothschild on August 22, 1893 in West End, New Jersey and raised in New York City. Parker attended schools in Manhattan and Morristown, New Jersey, but suggested that she was largely selftaught through her own reading. After her father died in 1913, Parker wrote for Vogue. In 1917 she moved to Vanity Fair, eventually becoming its theater critic, and married Edwin Pond Parker II, whose name she kept in spite of their divorce and her two marriages to Alan Campbell (1933 and 1950). During and following her first marriage, Parker became associated with the Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers and actors who met daily for lunch at New York’s Algonquin Hotel. This association, and the fact that most of Parker’s work – fiction, poetry, and criticism – appeared in popular magazines as opposed to smaller literary journals, meant that Parker would be among the twentieth century’s first literary celebrities. Her satiric barbs, whether written or oral, were often the quotations to know among New York’s social circles, and she would become a character in numerous novels, plays, and films by or about the era. Before establishing herself as a fiction writer, Parker was a well-known poet, and the concise imagery found in her best poems can be found in her fiction as well. Much of her fiction first appeared in the New Yorker, and was later collected in Laments for the Living (1930) and After Such Pleasures (1933). Parker used three forms for her fiction: monologues, dialogues, and narrated stories. Her most acclaimed and frequently anthologized monologue is “The Waltz,” in which the bulk of the story is conveyed through the narrator’s stream-of-consciousness thoughts about her imperfect dance partner whom she can’t refuse. Other monologues range in theme from desperation and deceit to abortion, and are delivered through the voice of a female narrator. In a departure from traditional fiction, Parker offers interior portraits of her characters, leaving the exterior portrait to the reader’s imagination. Parker deploys both male and female voices in her dialogues, but their minimal narration gives one the sense of overhearing a private conversation rather than merely reading a story about one. Their settings range from public spaces (restau-
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rants, speakeasies, and parties) to more private ones (train compartments, telephone booths, and apartments). Stories such as “New York to Detroit,” “The Sexes,” “The Mantle of Whistler,” “You Were Perfectly Fine,” “Arrangement in Black and White,” and “A Young Woman in Green Lace” do more than chronicle humorous miscommunication between the sexes; they also reveal the subtext of the 1920s cultural narrative: in an era of prohibition, alcohol is abundant; in an era of “free love,” women confront the sexual double standard; in an era of the tough modern woman, naivety coupled with a longing for permanent attachment put women in jeopardy, or make them viciously manipulative; in the era of the Harlem Renaissance, racial bias and stereotypes simmer beneath the social veneer of white culture. In stories using third-person narration, Parker tends to address broader issues or intersections of issues: domesticity’s limitations (“Such a Pretty Little Picture,” “Mr. Durant,” and “The Wonderful Old Gentleman”); class, race, and gender (“Horsie,” “Clothe the Naked”); ideals of feminine beauty and dissolution (“Big Blonde”); and war (“Soldiers of the Republic,” “Who Might Be Interested,” “Song of the Shirt,” and “The Lovely Leave”). “Big Blonde” won the O. Henry Award in 1929 as the year’s best story, and offers an interesting counterpoint to Anita Loos’s comedic novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1926). Parker also wrote plays and screenplays, worked as a political activist, and served as a book critic for Esquire before she died in 1967. Her fiction was critically well received in the 1920s and early 1930s, often compared favorably with that of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but by midcentury it was labeled sentimental, slight, merely humorous, or dated. Nevertheless, her work never went out of print, and feminist literary critics of the late 1970s became the first among many to re-evaluate her work as the concept of literary modernism became more inclusive. Her monologues might be considered important generic precursors of the recent development of shortshort fiction. SEE ALSO: Gender and the Novel (AF); The Little Magazines (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Calhoun, R. (1993). Dorothy Parker: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Capron, M. (1958). Dorothy Parker. In M. Cowley (ed.), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. New York: Viking, pp. 72–87. Gaines, J. R. (1977). Wit’s End: Days and Nights of the Algonquin Round Table. New York: Harcourt Brace. Kinney, A. F. (1998). Dorothy Parker, Revised. New York: Twayne. Meade, M. (1987). Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? New York: Villard. Melzer, S. (1997). The Rhetoric of Rage: Dorothy Parker’s Women. New York: Peter Lang. Parker, D. (2002). Complete Stories (ed. C. Breese) New York: Penguin. Parker, D. (2003). Complete Poems. Sydney: Penguin. Parker, D. (2006). The Portable Dorothy Parker (ed. M. Meade). New York: Penguin. Pettit, R. S. (ed.) (2005). The Critical Waltz: Essays on the Work of Dorothy Parker. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Pettit, R. S. (2000). A Gendered Collision: Sentimentalism and Modernism in Dorothy Parker’s Poetry and Fiction. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Silverstein, S. Y. (2001). Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker. New York: Scribner’s. Toth, E. (1977–8). Dorothy Parker, Erica Jong, and New Feminist Humor. Regionalism and the Female Imagination, 3, 70–85. Treichler, P. (1980). Verbal Subversions in Dorothy Parker: “Trapped Like a Trap in a Trap.” Language and Style, 13, 46–61.
Percy, Walker DOUGLAS L. MITCHELL
Walker Percy was a novelist, physician, and semiotician from the American South. Born on May 28, 1916 in Birmingham, Alabama, he was orphaned at an early age and adopted by a patrician uncle. Percy attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and later graduated from Columbia University’s medical school. A bout of tuberculosis ended his medical internship. His career derailed, Percy immersed himself in the works of Søren Kierkegaard and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Concerned with the problems of self and identity in the modern age, Percy also read Albert
Camus and Gabriel Marcel, who shaped in him an existentialist vision neither despairing nor nihilistic, providing the ground for a reformulation of meaning in a nihilist age and a path to recovery. This philosophical search encouraged him to write fictions that explore the predicament of individual selfhood, searching (with varying degrees of success) for clues to meaning. The novelist could raise and provide dramatic answers to questions inaccessible to science. After abandoning a first novel, Percy published The Moviegoer (1961), a landmark of post-World War II American fiction that won him the National Book Award and a wide audience. The protagonist, Binx Bolling, epitomizes the quintessential Percian predicament. Despite his financial success, Bolling is regarded as a failure by his aristocratically stoical aunt, and he wrestles with a malaise that seeps into every corner of life and provokes an undefined search. He achieves some temporary success through Kierkegaardian rotations and repetitions, aided by movie-going, but ultimately discovers meaning through intersubjectivity and the unselfish love of another. His second novel, The Last Gentleman (1966), centers on the search of another lost protagonist, Will Barrett, a scientist/technician who suffers from abstraction and an inability to re-enter the world. He follows his coed love, Kitty, and finds clues to his search in Kitty’s embittered physician brother, Vaught, and her sister, a nun ministering to deaf black children. Much of what Barrett finds in Vaught’s writings is a distorted form of Percy’s own analysis of modern culture: the dislocation of the self, the deadness of language, and the twin distortions of angelism and bestialism that reflect the alienation of the self. Once again, the counter to nihilist despair is active love. Barrett resurfaces in Percy’s most hopeful novel, The Second Coming (1980), as a divorced, successful lawyer living the good life, yet filled with despair and haunted by the possibility that his father intended to kill them both when he committed suicide. When in search of a lost golf ball (a metaphor for the answer to his dark question), he discovers a girl escaped from a mental institution and encounters her again after testing God’s existence in a failed suicide attempt. Her language, with its fantastic word play and odd
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honesty, allows the recovery of Barrett’s language and intersubjectivity. Percy’s two dystopian novels, Love in the Ruins (1971) and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987), concern the resistance of an alienated psychologist, Thomas More, to mass behavior modification. In the former, More has created a lapsometer, a device that measures and treats the alienation of the self through stimulation of brain centers. When the device falls into the hands of a banal Dostoevskian devil, social chaos ensues in a manner that mirrors the turbulence of the 1960s and early 1970s. In The Thanatos Syndrome, More notes a strange shift in social behavior, and the decline of various social pathologies, with increasing outbreaks of extreme tendencies. Bestialism and angelism predominate once more, as people mate like baboons and play chess like Kasparov. Underneath the madcap surface of the satire is the darker awareness not only that treatments of alienation might be destructive, but also that the suppression of meaningful selfhood might serve the interests of those interested in collective progress. Percy’s darkest novel is Lancelot (1977), in which a deranged Lancelot Lamar tells a priestfriend, Percival, what led him to murder his wife. Lance is the last of the aristocratic Lamars, a drunken wretch who marries a Northerner with aristocratic pretensions. Lance, realizing his daughter is not his own, searches for the truth of his wife’s infidelity. His is a quest for evil by one who has despaired of God, and his compelling narration is an extreme version of modern man: split between his pornographic imaginings and his sentimentalized version of a code of honor and strict division between ladies and whores. The themes of alienation and the failure of signification are also treated in The Message in a Bottle (1975) and Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983). All his works pose a single, crucial question: what does the decay of language have to do with the collapse of meaningful selfhood in the (post)modern age? His answer is always that the human being is Homo viator, man on the way, and to recover this truth is to restore the sense of quest to human life. The clues to this quest are to be found in irreducibly complex signs, which bring with them the hope of a community of shared meaning.
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SEE ALSO: Postmodernist Fiction (AF); The Southern Novel (AF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Coles, R. (1978). Walker Percy: An American Search. Boston: Little, Brown. Desmond, J. F. (2004). Walker Percy’s Search for Community. Athens: University of Georgia Press. O’Gorman, F. (2004). Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Percy, W. (1961). The Moviegoer. New York: Knopf. Percy, W. (1966). The Last Gentleman. New York: Farrar Straus. Percy, W. (1971). Love in the Ruins. New York: Farrar Straus. Percy, W. (1975). The Message in the Bottle. New York: Farrar Straus. Percy, W. (1977). Lancelot. New York: Farrar Straus. Percy, W. (1980). The Second Coming. New York: Farrar Straus. Percy, W. (1983). Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. New York: Farrar Straus. Percy, W. (1987). The Thanatos Syndrome. New York: Farrar Straus. Sykes, J. D. Jr. (2007). Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and the Aesthetic of Revelation. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Tolson, J. (1992). Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Petry, Ann JENNIFER D. WILLIAMS
For her critically acclaimed The Street (1946), Ann Petry became the first African American woman to pen a bestselling novel. Having sold over 2 million copies to date, Petry’s debut novel has also defined somewhat narrowly a writing career that spanned over 40 years and encompassed fiction, short stories, literary criticism, and children’s literature. Petry stated her desire to be remembered for all of her work. Doing so uncovers a writer who strayed from genre conventions while adhering to her conviction in literature’s usefulness as a tool of social criticism.
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Born October 12, 1908 in the middle-class town of Old Saybrook, Connecticut, Ann Lane earned a PhG from the Connecticut College of Pharmacy and managed her family’s drugstore. Her marriage to mystery writer George Petry took her to New York, where she pursued a writing career. While working for the Amsterdam News and the People’s Voice, Ann Petry, under the pseudonym Arnold Petri, published her first short story, “Marie of the Cabin Club” (1939), in the Baltimore Afro-American. The story’s affinities with the typically male crime genre may account for Petry’s nom de plume. The potential gender impropriety associated with crime fiction did not deter Petry from attaching her name to the noirlike “On Saturday, the Siren Sounds at Noon” (1943), her story published in the NAACP’s The Crisis that caught the attention of the publishing world. An editor from Houghton Mifflin suggested Petry apply for their literary fellowship award. That award helped support Petry’s completion of The Street. As naturalistic urban protest fiction, The Street elicits immediate comparisons to Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). Like her contemporary, Petry exposes the harsh consequences of racial segregation and economic disparity on black city dwellers. However, Petry’s unforgettable portrait of a black working-class single mother, struggling to overcome racism, poverty, and sexual violence, not only distinguishes her novel from Wright’s, but also shifts the terrain of black women’s literary discourse. Unlike the protagonists of most early-twentieth-century black women writers, Petry’s heroine is neither middle class nor “mulatta.” Instead, the unflinching Lutie Johnson forecasts the figures that would appear during the black feminist renaissance of the 1970s and persist through the latter part of the century, figures that would ignite a critique of interlocking structures of domination. After The Street’s success, Petry returned with her husband to Old Saybrook, where they settled and had one child. The small, predominately white town inspired the backdrop of Petry’s second novel, Country Place (1947), a so-called raceless novel, centered on white characters and not explicitly concerned with racial subject matter. The hindsight of postructuralism has been instrumental in reframing raceless narratives authored by African American writers as exam-
inations of the social construction of whiteness. Narrated from the perspective of the sagacious town pharmacist Doc Fraser, A Country Place is a parody of white middle-class domesticity and romantic love in post-World War II America’s changing gender climate. Petry sticks to a small-town Connecticut setting in her last novel, The Narrows (1953), but populates the text with an array of black and white characters living in segregated neighborhoods. At the heart of the narrative is an interracial love relationship that meets a predictably tragic end. What is unexpected about the novel is its portrayal of female sexuality. Both the black workingclass former blues singer Mamie Powther and the wealthy white Camilla (“Camilo”) Sheffield Treadway carry on sexual relationships outside of their marriages. Camilo further transgresses the racial and social codes of her elite family by having an illicit affair with a black man. Certainly, if one were to identify a common theme throughout all of Petry’s disparate novels, it would be intimate relationships and the pressures that class, gender, and racial inequities exact on them. With the publication of Miss Muriel and Other Stories (1971), Petry re-established herself as a craftsperson of short fiction. The 13 stories published throughout the long expanse of Petry’s career are set in New York and Connecticut communities similar to the ones the author inhabited. The diverse characters in Miss Muriel match those in her novels. Through their interactions, Petry examines broad-scale social conflicts in intimate spaces like families, neighborhoods, and insular communities. Petry also published a collection of short stories, Legends of the Saints (1970), for young readers as well as a children’s book, The Drugstore Cat (1949), and two historical novels written for young adults, Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad (1955) and Tituba of Salem Village (1964). Even in her books for young audiences, Petry chose as her subjects bold and resistant women. In addition to the Houghton Mifflin award, Petry received the New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year and the ALA Notable Children’s Book Award for Harriet Tubman. The recipient of a number of honorary doctorates and briefly a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii, Petry wrote and lectured until the latter part of her life. She died April 28, 1997 near her home town.
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PHILLIPS, JAYNE ANNE
SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF); Wright, Richard (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Barrett, L. (1998). Blackness and Value: Seeing Double. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ervin, H. A. (1993). Ann Petry: A Bio-Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall. Ervin, H. A. (2005). The Critical Response to Ann Petry. Westport, CT: Praeger. Ervin, H. A., & Holladay, H. (2004). Ann Petry’s Short Fiction: Critical Essays. Westport, CT: Praeger. Lubin, A. (ed.) (2007). Revisiting the Blueprint: Ann Petry and the Literary Left. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Petry, A. (1946). The Street. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Petry, A. (1947). Country Place. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Petry, A. (1949). The Drugstore Cat. Boston: Beacon. Petry, A. (1950). The Novel as Social Criticism. In H. Hull (ed.), The Writer’s Book. New York: Harper, pp. 32–9. Petry, A. (1953). The Narrows. Boston: Beacon. Petry, A. (1955). Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad. New York: Crowell. Petry, A. (1964). Tituba of Salem Village. New York: Crowell. Petry, A. (1970). Legends of the Saints. New York: HarperCollins. Petry, A. (1971). Miss Muriel and Other Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Petry, E. (2005). Can Anything Beat White? A Black Family’s Letters. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Petry, E. (2008). At Home Inside: A Daughter’s Tribute to Ann Petry. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Phillips, Jayne Anne SARAH ROBERTSON
Jayne Anne Phillips has drawn international, critical acclaim since her work first appeared in print in the 1970s. In addition to two major collections of short stories, three novels, critical pieces, and reviews, her fiction regularly appears in a wide range of literary magazines. Her contributions to Granta have partly accounted for the classification of her work as “new realist” or “dirty realist,” situating her alongside writers such as Raymond Carver and Bobbie Ann Mason.
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While in Phillips’s early work, including Black Tickets, her minimal, fragmented style and displaced characters reflect key characteristics of both new and dirty realism, her interest in the ideas of “home” and “family” has shaped her fiction. For Phillips, “we carry home around with us in the way we perceive things, in the way we look at things” (Douglass 186). The haunting quality of her writing, particularly in Machine Dreams (1984) and Shelter (1994), arises out of the pervasive pull of home that carries with it the secrets and burdens of family life. Those burdens are particularly felt by Phillips’s female characters, from Danner Hampson in Machine Dreams and Fast Lanes (1987) to Kate Tateman in MotherKind (2000). Phillips’s belief that the generational inheritance of “unresolved issues and emotional dilemmas . . . becomes the tenor of family life” accounts for her continual return to the past, and for her interest in the ways the past manifests itself in the present (Homes 46). With autobiographical strains running through her work, the past to which Phillips returns is typically one situated in twentieth-century Appalachia. Phillips’s own home place, Buckhannon, West Virginia, where she was born in 1952, heavily influences her fictional Southern communities. Phillips spent her early years in this rapidly modernizing small town, and after graduating from West Virginia University she traveled around the United States gaining in the varied experiences that would influence the stories in Black Tickets (1979). In her post-Black Tickets fiction, Phillips repeatedly returns to her Appalachian heritage, exploring as she does so the modernization and the globalization of the South, family and the nature of inheritance, class and racial dynamics, and the impact and legacy of war. War plays a central role in much of Phillips’s work, most notably in Machine Dreams, which spans World War II and Vietnam. Phillips’s most recent novel, Lark and Termite (2009), sees her return to a dual preoccupation with West Virginia and the Korean War, something she first introduced in Shelter through the violent, traumatized figure of Carmody. Her concern with the impact of war both on veterans and on their families back home allows Phillips to address the wider impact of politics on everyday life in America.
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At a stylistic level, Phillips’s interest in language and the subtle connections between people and objects have defined her work, leading to comparisons with her Southern predecessor William Faulkner. Although Phillips resists being classified as a Southern writer, she acknowledges the influence of Faulkner and Poe on her work. In addition, her interest in the subtleties and secrets of family life echoes those found in Katherine Anne Porter’s Miranda stories. The transgenerational legacy of family secrets is central to Phillips’s first two novels, where the unspoken both permeates the characters’ lives and shapes Phillips’s narrative style. Discussing her literary technique, Phillips claims that she is “much more interested in perception and in dislocations of thought and the simultaneity of time, than in event, getting from A to B” (Homes 48). Subsequently, free-indirect discourse, with the slippages of time and perspective it allows, is a constant feature of Phillips’s writing. Phillips has channeled her preoccupation with the nuances of language into teaching creative writing, and she is currently professor of English and director of the new MFA Program at Rutgers–Newark, the State University of New Jersey. Phillips has also received numerous accolades, including the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Art and Letters for Black Tickets, and an Academy Award in Literature from the same institution for Shelter. SEE ALSO: Faulkner, William (AF); Porter, Katherine Anne (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); The Southern Novel (AF)
Gainey, K. W. (1990). Jayne Anne Phillips’s Machine Dreams: Leo Marx, Technology, and Landscape. Journal of American Studies Association of Texas, 21, 75–84. Glenday, M. K. (2005). The Secret Sharing: Myth and Memory in the Writing of Jayne Anne Phillips. In W. Blazek & M. K. Glenday (eds.), American Mythologies: Essays on Contemporary Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 63–78. Godden, R. (2002). No End to the Work? Jayne Anne Phillips and the Exquisite Corpse of Southern Labor. Journal of American Studies, 36(2), 249–79. Homes, A. M. (1994). Jayne Anne Phillips. BOMB, 49, 46–51. Jarvis, B. (1998). Postmodern Cartographies: The Geographical Imagination in Contemporary American Culture. London: Pluto. Jarvis, B. (2001). How Dirty Is Jayne Anne Phillips? Yearbook of English Studies, 31, 192–204. LeBrun, F. (1993). Women’s Time? A Historical Examination of the Reproduction of Mothering in Machine Dreams. Overhere, 13(1), 95–104. Phillips, J. A. (1979). Black Tickets. New York: Delacorte. Phillips, J. A. (1984). Machine Dreams. New York: E. P. Dutton. Phillips, J. A. (1987). Fast Lanes. New York: E. P. Dutton. Phillips, J. A. (1994). Shelter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Phillips, J. A. (2000). MotherKind. New York: Knopf. Phillips, J. A. (2009). Lark and Termite. New York: Knopf. Price, J. (1993). Remembering Vietnam: Subjectivity and Mourning in American New Realist Writing. Journal of American Studies, 27(2), 173–86. Robertson, S. (2007). The Secret Country: Decoding Jayne Anne Phillips’s Cryptic Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Squier, S. M. (1991). Fetal Voices: Speaking for the Margins Within. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 10(1), 17–30.
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ahokas, P. (2007). “It’s Strange What You Don’t Forget”: Towards a Postmodern White Female Identity in Jayne Anne Phillips’s Machine Dreams. American Studies in Scandinavian, 39(1), 62–83. Bronfen, E. (1988). Between Nostalgia and Disenchantment: The Concept of “Home” in Jayne Anne Phillips’s Novel Machine Dreams. AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 13(1), 17–28. Douglass, T. E. (1994). Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips. Appalachian Journal, 21(2), 182–89.
Piercy, Marge KERSTIN W. SHANDS
Marge Piercy, whose oeuvre includes novels, poetry, essays, short stories, and drama, is increasingly recognized as a prominent writer in the United States. Born on March 31, 1936 in Detroit, Michigan, Piercy comes from a working-class background. Piercy’s poetic roots can be traced back to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Allen Ginsberg had an impact on her writing in
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the 1950s, and in the 1960s Piercy was influenced by black poets. Marge Piercy’s work is worth exploring both for its challenging political perspectives and for its formal and structural aspects. Sometimes compared to the work of Doris Lessing, Piercy’s writings are often feminist, and her poetry often deals with political issues (such as the American occupation of Iraq). Jewish thought is increasingly important in her work. Brimming with a varied and subtly delineated gallery of characters, Piercy’s work has been part of a rite de passage for many readers in their personal and spiritual development. Moving along Dionysian rather than Apollonian lines, Marge Piercy’s work is passionate, witty, and vitally alive. Marge Piercy’s textual universe spans several centuries and presents a wide range of themes where issues of ethnicity, gender, and identity are at the center. Piercy’s first novels describe the problems of racism, urban renewal schemes, and women’s experiences in contemporary social and economic contexts. Braided Lives (1982a), for example, looks back on what it was like to grow up in America during the 1950s. In Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Piercy presents a triptych of American society, showing the present flanked by utopian and dystopian scenarios. Based on extensive research and narrated from 10 points of view, Piercy’s masterpiece, Gone to Soldiers (1987), is a gripping account of World War II, depicting the Jewish Resistance in France, the race riots in Detroit, and the horrors of combat and concentration camps. The dehumanization of the war and the barely survivable conditions on tankers and in armed struggle are depicted, as well as the dark memories of the ideology and methods of Nazism in its unfathomable horror. He, She and It interweaves a historical tale set in Prague in 1600 with a science fiction adventure set in America in 2059. City of Darkness, City of Light (1996) features the French Revolution; while Storm Tide (1998) is a riveting emotional mystery story, Three Women (1999) and The Third Child (2003) delve into stories of love and politics, and Sex Wars (2005), another critically acclaimed historical novel, fictionalizes the lives of Victoria Woodhull, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Cornelius Vanderbilt. In much of Piercy’s fiction, a Puritan ethic is challenged along with the patriarchal values Piercy sees as oppressive, divisive, and destructive,
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while a maternal, healing, and nurturing principle is celebrated through an intricate imagery of birth, water, gardening, and quilting metaphors. The ocean is omnipresent in Piercy’s work and is often linked to a maternal principle that is seen as life-enhancing and even life-saving. These principles are applied not only to relationships but also to American culture and society as a whole. Piercy’s poetry moves toward a balance of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, often symbolized by the cat imagery Piercy frequently employs. Piercy’s predominantly realist, sometimes didactic and explicitly political narrative (in her early fiction, in particular, she tends to be “running around in seven-league boots righting wrongs before breakfast”) is revitalized by a variety of narrative forms such as the utopian, the selfreflexive, and the kaleidoscopically fragmented. While the opposition between creative and destructive principles marks many of her novels, Piercy’s oeuvre as a whole blends and orchestrates a variety of different notes into a chord of empathy and connectedness. SEE ALSO: Gender and the Novel (AF); SocialRealist Fiction (AF); Speculative Fiction (AF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Atwood, M. (1982). Marge Piercy: Woman on the Edge of Time, Living in the Open [1976]. In M. Atwood, Second Words: Selected Critical Prose. Toronto: Anansi, pp. 272–8. Bartkowski, F. (1989). Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. In F. Bartkowski, Feminist Utopias. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 41–80. Marks, P. R. (1990). Re-Writing the Romance Narrative: Gender and Class in the Novels of Marge Piercy. PhD diss., University of Oregon, Eugene. Piercy, M. (1968). Breaking Camp. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Piercy, M. (1969a). Going Down Fast. New York: Trident. Piercy, M. (1969b). Hard Loving. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Piercy, M. (1973a). Small Changes. New York: Doubleday. Piercy, M. (1973b). To Be of Use (illus. L. Vernarelli) Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Piercy, M. (1976). Woman on the Edge of Time. New York: Knopf.
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Piercy, M. (1978). The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing. New York: Knopf. Piercy, M. (1980). The Moon Is Always Female. New York: Knopf. Piercy, M. (1982a). Braided Lives. New York: Summit. Piercy, M. (1982b). Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Piercy, M. (1983). Stone, Paper, Knife. New York: Knopf. Piercy, M. (1985). My Mother’s Body. New York: Knopf. Piercy, M. (1987). Gone to Soldiers. New York: Summit. Piercy, M. (1989). Summer People. New York: Summit. Piercy, M. (1991). He, She and It. New York: Knopf. Piercy, M. (1992). Mars and Her Children. New York: Knopf. Piercy, M. (2002). Sleeping With Cats. New York: Morrow. Piercy, M. (2003). The Third Child. New York: HarperCollins/Morrow. Piercy, M. (2005). Sex Wars. New York: HarperCollins/ Morrow. Piercy, M. (2006). The Crooked Inheritance. New York: Knopf. Shands, K. W. (1994). The Repair of the World: The Novels of Marge Piercy. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Thielmann, P. (1986). Marge Piercy’s Women: Visions Captured and Subdued. Frankfurt: Fischer. Walker, S., & Hamner, E. (eds.) (1991). Ways of Knowing: Essays on Marge Piercy. Mobile, AL: Negative Capability Press.
Porter, Katherine Anne DARLENE HARBOUR UNRUE
Katherine Anne Porter earned distinction among twentieth-century fiction writers with her lambent prose, classical structure, and penetrating analyses of women and men confronting the modern world. With her personal experience lying at the core of each of her fictional pieces, she consistently addressed the effects of betrayal, alienation, and lovelessness on the human spirit and the power of psychological forces within human behavior. Her relatively small literary yield during her lifetime – 28 short stories and short novels, one long novel, a collection of miscellaneous non-fiction, and a body of uncollected pieces of non-fiction – are exemplary in the clarity of both language and vision.
Katherine Anne Porter was born in the frontier community of Indian Creek, Texas on May 15, 1890, the fourth child of Harrison Boone Porter (1857–1942) and (Mary) Alice Jones Porter (1859–1892). Christened Callie Russell Porter, she was known as “Callie” until she was an adolescent. In 1892, after her mother’s death, she moved with her father, sisters, and brother to Kyle, in Hays County, to live under the dominion of her strong-willed, widowed grandmother, Catharine Ann Skaggs Porter, whose Protestantism and Victorian manners she absorbed and whose death in 1901 shattered what childhood stability she had. For the next five years, Callie lived a vagabond life with her two sisters, brother, and father. She attended several convent schools in Texas and Louisiana and in 1904–5 spent a full academic year at The Thomas School in San Antonio, her only formal education. During this period she unofficially changed her name to “Katherine Porter.” Having become very beautiful and revealing a talent for drama and singing, she wanted to become an actress. Instead of pursuing her acting ambition, however, in 1906, at the age of 16, she married 19-year-old John Henry Koontz, son of a prosperous Texas rancher. Although the marriage lasted nine years, during which time Porter converted to her husband’s Roman Catholicism, it was marked by Koontz’s drunkenness, infidelities, and physical abuse of his wife. Porter fled to Chicago in 1914 and worked for a short while in the movies before returning to Texas and divorcing Koontz in 1915, asking in the decree that her name be formally changed from Katherine Koontz to “Katherine Porter.” She soon began calling herself “Katherine Anne Porter,” signaling her identification with her paternal grandmother, whose strength and grace she hoped to match. The years between 1915 and 1920 were a particular struggle for Porter. After a second marriage and quick divorce in 1915, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and during the next three years spent long periods in Texas sanatoria. She married a third time in the winter of 1916–17 and was soon divorced, again. In the spring of 1918 she went to Denver, Colorado, where the mountain air helped strengthen her weak lungs and where she began a journalistic apprenticeship at the Rocky Mountain News. When she left for New York City in the
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autumn of 1919, she was ready to become the important writer she was convinced she could be. In Greenwich Village, Porter supported herself by writing publicity releases for movies and picking up freelance work while trying to find time to devote to what she called her “artist work.” Inspired by the freewheeling social and intellectual life in the village, Porter became friends with political and literary radicals and Mexican expatriate writers who convinced her in 1920 to go to Mexico, where, they told her, an exciting socialist revolution was taking place. In the autumn of 1920, she traveled to Mexico and indeed “ran smack into” the revolution, as she later described her arrival. Between 1920 and 1923 she was in Mexico three times, once at the invitation of the new president of Mexico, Alvaro Obreg on, who asked her to organize an exhibit of Mexican popular arts and crafts for transport to the United States. After 1923 she did not return to Mexico until the spring of 1930, when she began a 15-month sojourn. During Porter’s first extended trip to Mexico in 1920–1, her creative imagination was released, and her first original story, “Marıa Concepci on,” was published in 1922. It was followed in 1923 by “The Martyr” and in 1924 by “Virgin Violeta,” all three stories inspired by events in the Mexican Revolution and dealing broadly with the universal theme of betrayal. In the mid-1920s, she began to look into her Texas experience and soon produced such carefully crafted stories as “He,” focusing on the plight of a poor farm family, and “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” an interior monologue by an aged woman who confronts death. Having mined her personal experiences in such stories as “Rope” (1928), a monologue about love and hate in marriage, and “Theft” (1929), an analysis of personal responsibility for various kinds of loss, in 1930 Porter published “Flowering Judas,” another Mexico-inspired story, which became the title story of her first collection, published the same year and so lavishly praised by critics that her high position among modernist writers was fixed. Living in Europe from September 1931 until the autumn of 1937, and marrying Eugene Dove Pressly in 1933, she continued to publish critically acclaimed stories and to work on a long novel she had conceived in the late 1920s and called “Many Redeemers.” In the latter half of the 1930s, parts of
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“Many Redeemers” spun off as the short novels “Old Mortality” and “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” and the short stories “The Last Leaf,” “The Witness,” “The Circus,” “The Grave,” and “The Old Order” (later retitled “The Journey”), all of which were highly autobiographical and incorporated her family’s legends. In the 1930s she also published the short novel “Noon Wine” (likened by critics to Greek tragedy), the stories “The Cracked Looking-Glass” (inspired by Joyce’s Dubliners stories) and “The Downward Path to Wisdom” (an illustration of the source of hate), and the last of her so-called Mexican stories, “Hacienda” and “That Tree.” She began to develop the remaining fragment of “Many Redeemers” into a novel about “the present day,” that is, the interwar 1930s, when political currents constructed barriers to human love and forgiveness. Between 1940 and 1962, Porter expanded “The Present Day” into a short novel called “Promised Land” and then into a long novel titled first “No Safe Harbor” and finally Ship of Fools by the time it was published in 1962. For 22 years Porter had supported herself with scattered publications (the stories “A Day’s Work,” “The Leaning Tower,” “The Source,” “The Fig Tree,” and “Holiday”; excerpts from her long novel-in-progress; and a variety of non-fiction pieces) and with brief appearances as well as year-long appointments at colleges and universities. After she divorced Pressly in 1938 and married Albert Russel Erskine, whom she divorced in 1942, she depended heavily on the patronage of the artist colony Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York. She spent a year at the Library of Congress as a fellow in Regional American Literature and afterward worked in Hollywood as a scriptwriter. Ship of Fools, published April 1, 1962 to considerable fanfare and enthusiastic critical reception, soon became a bestseller. Although some tepid and negative reviews appeared several months after publication, the novel was generally well received. Mark Schorer in the New York Times rated it one of the best novels in the past 100 years and compared it with George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Those who found fault with it complained of Porter’s dark view of humanity and its episodic structure. The critic Wayne Booth questioned whether it was really a novel. An analysis of the decade of the 1930s in the Western hemisphere, Ship of Fools is structured as
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a voyage on the symbolically named ship the Vera, traveling from Vera Cruz, Mexico to Bremen, Germany, whose passengers and crew comprise the more than 900 characters who represent the various social strata of human life. Because it is a German ship, the captain, the officers, the ship’s physician, and some of the most visible passengers are German. Porter explores, in that context, the seeds of Nazism, the many manifestations of love and lovelessness, and the way that human beings are isolated from one another. A satire in the spirit of Swift and Erasmus, Ship of Fools illustrates the relationship between historical tradition and its modern manifestation. It was not Ship of Fools but rather Porter’s Collected Stories (1965) that brought her the recognition of a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Having already received numerous awards and honorary degrees for the past 30 years, Porter continued to be singled out for the excellence of her prose fiction and her contributions to modern literature. With the publication of Ship of Fools and its adaptation into an award-winning movie with a stellar cast, Porter earned a substantial amount of money that should have set her up for the rest of her life. However, she spent faster than she earned, and only by the careful management of her finances by agents, friends, and her nephew Paul Porter did her money last through her lifetime. After Ship of Fools, she wrote no new fiction. In 1976 a farcical story she had written in the 1920s was published as “The Spivvleton Mystery,” and in 1977 a memoir she had drafted decades earlier about her participation in the protests against the 1927 executions of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti was published as The Never-Ending Wrong. At her death on September 19, 1980, she left unfinished her biography of Cotton Mather and a long story (or short novel) about events surrounding the martyrdom of Joan of Arc. Her ashes were buried in a plot adjacent to her mother’s grave in the cemetery at Indian Creek, Texas. On her tombstone is engraved “IN MY END IS MY BEGINNING.” SEE ALSO: Expatriate Fiction (AF); Joyce, James (BIF); The Little Magazines (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); The Southern Novel (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Austenfeld, T. C. (2001). American Women Writers and the Nazis: Ethics and Politics in Boyle, Porter, Stafford, and Hellman. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Busby, M., & Heaberlin, D. (eds.) (2001). From Texas to the World and Back: Essays on the Journeys of Katherine Ann Porter. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press. DeMouy, J. K. (1983). Katherine Anne Porter’s Women: The Eye of Her Fiction. Austin: University of Texas Press. Givner, J. (1991). Katherine Anne Porter: A Life [1982] Athens: University of Georgia Press. Hendrick, G., & Hendrick, W. (1988). Katherine Anne Porter. Boston: Twayne. Liberman, M. M. (1971). Katherine Anne Porter’s Fiction. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Machann, C., & Clark, W. B. (eds.) (1990). Katherine Anne Porter and Texas: An Uneasy Relationship. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Porter, K. A. (1962). Ship of Fools. Boston: Little, Brown. Porter, K. A. (1965). The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. New York: Harcourt Brace. Porter, K. A. (1970). The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter. New York: Seymour Lawrence. Porter, K. A. (1977). The Never-Ending Wrong. Boston: Little, Brown. Porter, K. A. (1990). Letters of Katherine Anne Porter (ed. I. Bayley). New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Porter, K. A. (1991). “This Strange, Old World” and Other Book Reviews (ed. D. H. Unrue). Athens: University of Georgia Press. Porter, K. A. (1993). Uncollected Early Prose of Katherine Anne Porter (ed. R. M. Alvarez & T. F. Walsh) Austin: University of Texas Press. Porter, K. A. (1996). Katherine Anne Porter’s Poetry (ed. D. H. Unrue). Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Stout, J. (1995). Katherine Anne Porter: A Sense of the Times. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Titus, M. (2005). The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Unrue, D. H. (1985). Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter’s Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Unrue, D. H. (1988). Understanding Katherine Anne Porter. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Unrue, D. H. (ed.) (1997). Critical Essays on Katherine Anne Porter. New York: G. K. Hall.
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Unrue, D. H. (2005). Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Walsh, T. F. (1992). Katherine Anne Porter and Mexico: The Illusion of Eden. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Postmodernist Fiction ANDREW HOBEREK
First invoked in response to the mid-twentiethcentury waning of modernism’s revolutionary energies, postmodernism is among the most slippery and frequently debated terms in literary history. At its most coherent, the term specifies writing that inverts features associated with the modernist literature of the early twentieth century: where modernism promotes depth psychology, postmodernism offers deliberately flat characterization; where modernism upholds the boundary between high and low culture, postmodernism blurs this boundary; where modernism emphasizes control and structure, postmodernism incorporates contingency and play; where the modernist artist strives, in the words of James Joyce, to be “invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” (1999), the postmodernist endlessly intrudes and comments upon the work in progress. Yet to the extent that this account casts postmodernism as the rebellious child of a stern father (with the masculine gender dynamic that this implies), it overstates the differences between modernism and postmodernism and oversimplifies the internal differences within each category. One of the major debates about postmodernism concerns whether it overturns or continues the modernist project. And indeed this is not surprising given that postmodernism arises in response to the midcentury institutionalization of modernism, seeking to overturn its predecessor in the interest of reviving and extending modernism’s own revolt against the canons of proper literary taste (Huyssen 1986). Both modernism and postmodernism, moreover, set themselves against the majority of twentieth-century literature, which remains committed to realism. In this respect we can define postmodernism most simply as the twentieth century’s second great flowering of experimental, anti-realist fiction.
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In practice, however, the term “postmodernism” oscillates between describing a distinct set of aesthetic features and providing a catch-all term for all literature published following World War II. The term’s earliest invocations, by figures like the poet Charles Olson and the critic Irving Howe, are more temporal than descriptive. In an essay bemoaning the rise of so-called mass society and the consequent erasure of the social distinctions against which modernism had rebelled, for instance, Howe (1969) characterized as “postmodern” a number of writers – Bernard Malamud, J. D. Salinger, Saul Bellow – upon whom we would no longer confer this distinction. As Howe realized, however, writers of the 1940s and 1950s strove, in largely unprogrammatic ways, to move beyond modernism’s stylistic prescriptions. Bellow, for instance, opened his first novel, Dangling Man (1944), with an attack on the controlled (and to Bellow’s mind, emotionally inhibited) prose of Hemingway, while the Beats strove in both poetry and prose for a loose, spontaneous-seeming style opposed to the formalist prescriptions of modernism and its offshoot, the New Criticism. In 1967 the novelist John Barth (1984), while not using the term “postmodernism,” called for a new experimental fiction that would replace the now outdated models of Joyce and Franz Kafka. The term itself, meanwhile, came into its own in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when critics began employing it to describe concrete differences between contemporary writing and that of the modernist masters – with Fiedler (1990) stressing postmodernism’s openness to popular forms such as pornography and the western, for instance, and Hassan (1987) offering a still-cited list of distinctions (hierarchy vs. anarchy, art object vs. process, metaphysics vs. irony, and so forth) between modernist and postmodernist fiction. Even as subsequent critics further refined the definition of postmodernist fiction (McHale 1987; Hutcheon 1988), however, other observers offered more expansive definitions driven by the recognition of another key feature of postmodernity: its tendency to blur the lines between discrete areas of cultural endeavor. The 1970s boom in writing about postmodernism was driven not only by the steady appearance of challenging new work by authors like Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, and Robert Coover, but also by the new transdisciplinary prestige of poststructuralist
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philosophy, which shared a number of postmodernist fiction’s presuppositions about the nature of language and reality (Hite 1991). If modernism had been an international movement encompassing various art forms – painting and sculpture, music and poetry – postmodernism seemed like a totalizing logic linking everything, from avantgarde novels and deconstructionist philosophy to architecture, advertising, television shows, and politics. Many of the most compelling accounts of postmodernity have been interdisciplinary, from Lyotard (1979)’s description of the decline of so-called meta-narratives in technocratic society (first prepared as a report on higher education for the Conseil des Universites du Quebec) to Haraway’s (1991) scientifically informed discussion of the cyborg as the preeminent figure of postmodernity. Jameson (1991) has offered arguably the most influential account of postmodernism with his assertion that critics in various disciplines must look beyond merely stylistic definitions to understand it as the totalizing cultural logic of late capitalism. In recent years, frequent announcements of postmodernism’s end have been joined by increasingly retrospective analyses that blend close attention to literary form with a sense of the broader historical frameworks within which postmodernist fiction took shape: the widespread sense of paranoia engendered by the Cold War and the rise of large organizations (Melley 1999; O’Donnell 2000), the transformation of utopian thought in the 1960s (DeKoven 2000), and the rise of university-based creative writing programs (McGurl 2005). In a similar tentatively retrospective spirit, we might divide the history of postmodernist fiction into four overlapping phases: early efforts to move beyond modernist form, the heroic age of postmodernist experimental fiction running through the 1970s, the blending of postmodernism with realism and other modes in the late 1970s and 1980s, and the ongoing resonances of postmodernism in contemporary fiction. While Bellow and the Beats responded to the advent of mass society with neo-Romantic efforts to represent the plenitude of individual personality, other writers responded in ways that more clearly anticipate postmodernism. Flannery O’Connor, for instance, consciously downplayed characters’ motivations in an effort to gesture toward a realm of mystery beyond the constraining
social logic whose proper genres were psychology and sociology. Yet this effort to cultivate an aura of individuality and theological significance by means of what she failed to tell her readers led the devoutly Catholic O’Connor to produce precisely the sorts of flat characterization and banal, massified settings that we associate with postmodern fiction. For this reason, the younger novelist John Hawkes declared that O’Connor was, like Milton, unintentionally of the Devil’s party (1962). If O’Connor crafts her nihilistic landscapes in implicit contrast with the fullness of meaning available to believers, the more secular Hawkes offers similar landscapes as a token of the exhaustion of meaning in human history. Thus in Hawkes’s The Beetle Leg (1951), similarly deindividualized, motiveless characters move around a western setting that has less in common with the mythic American West than with the modernist wastelands of T. S. Eliot and others. Yet unlike Eliot or Joyce, Hawke offers no mythological order beyond the contemporary, shores no fragments against the ruins; indeed, in his novel the modernist evocation of the wasteland seems like just another hollow story, expected and thus unable to shock or move the reader. In this respect, Hawkes’s fiction seems related to the contemporaneous fiction of authors working in popular genres, like Philip K. Dick and Jim Thompson. Both Dick and Thompson are aware of, and frequently cite, Freudian and other deep psychological explanations of their characters’ behavior – indeed, the characters themselves cite these explanations, which thus come to seem less like descriptions of an external reality than like scripts the characters mechanically follow. This concern that people might not be free agents but simply pawns in an unknown game – a clear legacy of Howe’s invocation of mass society – constitutes a major feature of postmodernist fiction (Tanner 1971; Hite 1991; Heise 1997; Osteen 2000). By the mid-1960s, recognizably postmodern fiction was appearing under the banner of the so-called black humor. Bruce Jay Friedman, in the introduction to his 1965 anthology Black Humor – which featured work by Barth, Joseph Heller, and Pynchon, among others – argued that these authors embraced stereotypes and absurdity in a simple effort to keep up with an era of media sensationalism and government propaganda.
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This understanding of postmodernism as a response to an increasingly surreal reality illuminates both the non-fiction experiments of the New Journalism and the postmodernist novel’s persistent attraction to such media spectacles as Watergate and the Vietnam War. The postmodernist fascination with representation as reality finds an apt symbol in the illogical, yet on some level convincing, assertion that Heller’s 1961 Catch-22 is somehow about the yet-to-occur Vietnam War. Certainly Heller’s book anticipates not only the representation of war in books ranging from Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 Slaughterhouse-Five to Michael Herr’s 1985 Dispatches and the novels of Tim O’Brien but also, on some level, the prosecution of the Vietnam War itself. This notion of postmodernism as a form of higher realism belies its distinctly non-realist methods, however, which are often accompanied by a playfulness at odds with both high modernist seriousness and the at times bleak worldview of authors like O’Connor and Hawkes. The narrator of Barth’s 1967 story “Lost in the Funhouse,” for instance, continually interrupts its narrative about an adolescent boy on a World War II-era trip to the Maryland shore with metafictional commentary of the sort one might imagine the story receiving in a creative writing class (such as one Barth himself would then have been teaching at SUNY Buffalo). But the story transcends mere cleverness by making these comments resonate with the pathos of the protagonist, who experiences his emerging vocation as a writer as a paralyzing sense of detachment from other people he presumes are more unselfconsciously able to act rather than think. At the same time, the story’s playfulness about the writing program dicta it interjects establishes a sense of the author’s agency as someone who manipulates, rather than simply being manipulated by, such prescriptions. A similar playfulness inheres in Donald Barthelme’s fiction, which plays upon the fear that human beings have been reduced to cartoonish stereotypes by inserting figures like Snow White and Batman and Robin, to humorous effect, in banal, quotidian situations. And novels like Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977) combine moral and aesthetic seriousness with frequently juvenile, scatological humor, offering a carnivalesque affirmation of human existence amidst the
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deindividualizing imperatives of late-twentiethcentury life. In one of the most coherent accounts of postmodernism’s difference from its predecessor, McHale (1987) argues that whereas modernism’s concerns are fundamentally epistemological (i.e., about the difficulty of knowing about a reality whose ultimate existence nonetheless remains unquestioned), those of postmodernism are ontological (i.e., about the nature of reality or realities as such). If modernism’s favored popular genre was the detective story, McHale argues, then postmodernism’s is science fiction, and indeed another important predecessor of postmodernism is the alternative-reality stories of writers like Dick and Joanna Russ. This fascination with alternative realities manifests itself in Pynchon’s intimation, in Gravity’s Rainbow, of a counterforce of the preterite (a theological term meaning the opposite of elect), who exist outside the notice of the forces that govern society and can thus model an alternative way of life. Likewise Ishmael Reed suggests, in novels such as Mumbo Jumbo (1971), that all of Western history has been a conspiracy against an original heterotopia whose legacy dimly resonates in polytheistic religions such as voodoo, the aesthetics of ragtime and jazz, and the politics of Third World liberation. Just as important as the politics of Reed’s fiction is its form, which expresses its opposition to abstract, monological thinking by violating proper fictional norms (Mumbo Jumbo’s first chapter appears before the title page, for instance) and its liberal use of quotations from other texts and photographic images. As this account suggests, the worldview of high postmodernism derived not only from fears of a deindividualizing mass society but also, more positively, from the hopeful energies unleashed by such phenomena as global decolonization and the transnational counterculture. In the 1980s, following the denouement of the Vietnam War and the rightward turn in American politics, postmodernist fiction becomes at once more mainstream and more constrained. While DeLillo is frequently cited as Pynchon’s successor, for instance, his novels such as The Names (1982), which takes place with the Iranian Revolution as backdrop, and White Noise (1985), which satirizes middle-American consumer culture, are marked not by the search for alternative
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systems but by a paranoid suspicion of systems as such. Indeed, these novels demonstrate a faith in the world of concrete things that has less in common with postmodernism than with the minimalism of authors such as Joan Didion and Raymond Carver. Some authors did continue to write difficult experimental fiction in the 1980s, often in explicit alliance with post-1960s political movements. Kathy Acker’s novels, for instance, deconstruct normative assumptions about sex and gender, while Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller (1981) and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (1982) employ collage-like structures similar to Reed’s – Silko incorporating Native American oral traditions and Cha mimicking multilingual experience through a combination of English, French, and other languages. But DeLillo’s fiction exemplifies what Steiner (1999) has identified as the main trend of late 1970s and 1980s fiction, the blending of postmodernist experimentalism with realism and autobiography. DeLillo and Toni Morrison incorporate postmodernist techniques into realist novels, while Maxine Hong Kingston’s nonfiction works The Woman Warrior (1976) and China Men (1980) blend an autobiographical impulse derived from popular feminism and multiculturalism with formal experimentation similar to that of New Journalists like Norman Mailer and Hunter Thompson. Similarly, postmodernist techniques that had in some cases been drawn from popular science fiction reappear in the new science-fictional subgenre of cyberpunk, where they take on an unexpectedly realist cast as diegetical markers of an imagined virtual world anticipating the Internet. In a further twist, Acker would invoke Gibson’s seminal 1981 Neuromancer in her 1988 Empire of the Senseless (McHale 1992). And all of the trends associated with what we might call late postmodernism – DeLillo’s blend of realism and postmodernism, and his fascination with contemporary technoculture; Morrison’s and Kingston’s adaptations of magic realism; and cyberpunk’s exploration of mass-mediated experience – find expression in Karen Tei Yamashita’s 1997 Tropic of Orange, even as the novel pushes beyond postmodernism into what we might call the fiction of globalization (Adams 2007).
In general, postmodernist fiction has since the mid-1980s become just one part of a diverse landscape of American fictional production. In 1996, the popular and critical success of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest spurred many observers to remark that the era of the big, experimental postmodern novel was back. But if on one level Wallace’s novel seemed like a return to the high-postmodernist heyday of works like Gravity’s Rainbow, on another it was marked by a sentimental approach to the posthuman world of the mass-mediated, late-twentieth-century US very different from the ironic stances of Barthelme, Coover, and DeLillo (Giles 2007). Wallace and other younger authors like Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Lethem, George Saunders, and the members of the McSweeney’s circle employ postmodern techniques but evince an (at times nostalgic) desire for emotional fullness absent from much of the twentieth-century avant garde tradition. In this respect, it is not surprising that a number of these authors express admiration for Vonnegut, the most traditionally humanist of the postmodernists and a figure who has heretofore remained – for this reason as much as his proximity to popular science fiction – on the margins of the canon. As the history of canonization demonstrates, however, writers’ practice retroactively shapes the traditions in which they participate. For this reason we can probably expect future accounts of postmodernism in which Vonnegut will play a larger role than he heretofore has. All of which is to say that the definitive history of postmodernism will remain unwritten for some time still. SEE ALSO: Critical Theory and the Novel (BIF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Speculative Fiction (AF). REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Adams, R. (2007). The Ends of America, the Ends of Postmodernism. Twentieth-Century Literature 53(2) 248–72. Barth, J. (1984). The Literature of Exhaustion [1967]. In The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction. New York: Putnam’s, pp. 62–76. DeKoven, M. (2004). Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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Fiedler, L. (1990). Cross the Border – Close the Gap. In A New Fiedler Reader [1970]. Amherst, MA: Prometheus, pp. 270–94. Friedman, B. J. (ed.) (1965). Black Humor. New York: Bantam. Giles, P. (2007). Sentimental Posthumanism: David Foster Wallace. Twentieth-Century Literature, 53(2), 327–44. Haraway, D. J. (1991). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, pp. 149–81. Hassan, I. (1987). POSTmodernISM: A Paracritical Bibliography [1971]. In The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 25–45. Hawkes, J. (1962). Flannery O’Connor’s Devil. Sewanee Review, 70, 395–407. Heise, U. K. (1997). Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hite, M. (1991). Postmodern Fiction. In E. Elliott (ed.), The Columbia History of the American Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 697–725. Howe, I. (1969). Mass Society and Post-Modern Fiction [1959]. In M. Klein (ed.), The American Novel Since World War II. New York: Fawcett, pp. 124–41. Hutcheon, L. (1988). A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge. Huyssen, A. (1986). After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Joyce, J. (1999). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1916]. New York: Penguin. Lyotard, J.-F. (1979). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (trans. G. Bennington & B. Massumi). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McGurl, M. (2005). The Program Era: Pluralisms of Postwar American Fiction. Critical Inquiry, 32(1), 102–29. McHale, B. (1987). Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen. McHale, B. (1992). Constructing Postmodernism. New York: Routledge. Melley, T. (1999). Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. O’Donnell, P. (2000). Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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Olson, C. (1997). The Materials and Weights of Herman Melville [1952]. In D. Allen & B. Friedlander (eds.), Collected Prose. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 113–19. Osteen, M. (2000). American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue With Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Steiner, W. (1999). Postmodern Fictions, 1970–1990. In S. Berkovitch (ed.), The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 7: Prose Writings, 1940–1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 425–538. Tanner, T. (1971). City of Words: American Fiction 1950–1970. New York: Harper and Row.
Powell, Dawn TIM PAGE
Largely underappreciated during her lifetime, Dawn Powell was a prolific American novelist, playwright, short story writer, and diarist whose life and works were discovered posthumously by an erudite and passionate group of authors, critics, and general readers in the 1980s and 1990s. Powell called herself a “permanent visitor” to New York City, her adopted home for the last 47 years of her life. Throughout all, she retained a certain practicality and common sense often associated with her native Midwest that permitted her to see through the foibles of Manhattan high life and low. Most of her novels are set in either Ohio or New York: the earlier cycle – best represented by Dance Night (1930) and Come Back to Sorrento (1932) – tends to be tender, poignant, and bucolic, while the latter group – of which Turn, Magic Wheel (1936) and A Time to Be Born (1942) are two superior examples – is fast-paced, satirical, and often scathingly funny. She was born in Mt. Gilead, Ohio on November 28, 1896, the daughter of Roy King and Hattie Sherman Powell. After Hattie Powell died from a botched abortion in 1903, the father married a conspicuously cruel woman who tormented her young stepdaughters – a series of events Powell chronicled in her semiautobiographical novel My Home Is Far Away (1944). Powell ran away to live with an aunt, Orpha May Steinbrueck, in Shelby, Ohio and was later accepted as a student by Lake Erie College, where she graduated in 1918.
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Powell moved immediately to New York, where she married Joseph Gousha – then a poet and music critic, and later a successful advertising executive – in 1920. Their only child, Joseph Roebuck Gousha, Jr., was born the following year, and suffered from marked and mysterious mental and emotional difficulties from an early age, now generally attributed to autism, a condition that was not discovered until he was in his twenties. Powell disowned and did her best to destroy all copies she could find of her first published novel, Whither (1925). For the rest of her life, she would always claim that She Walks in Beauty (1928) was her first book. The Bride’s House (1929) – the story of a woman divided between her loyalty to her kind husband and her infatuation with a lover – is probably based on Powell’s clandestine affair with the radical playwright and screenwriter John Howard Lawson. The value Powell placed on Dance Night, the study of a gritty Ohio mill town, cannot be overstated. But after it proved a popular and critical failure, she set to work on Come Back to Sorrento, with the specific idea of creating romantic fiction that might become a bestseller. Her publisher renamed it The Tenth Moon, to Powell’s disgust (it has since been reissued under the original title), but this, too, found little favor. She turned from Ohio to present-day New York with Turn, Magic Wheel, a send-up of New York literary life written in a breathless, exhilarated manner that won her a new audience. She followed this with a series of hard, bright satires – The Happy Island (1938), Angels on Toast (1940), A Time to Be Born (1942), The Locusts Have No King (1948), The Wicked Pavilion (1954), and The Golden Spur (1962). The Wicked Pavilion made it to the bottom of the New York Times bestseller list, the only one of her novels to get there, but it lasted for only a single week. Nor were any of her plays or attempts at screenwriting successful. “True gaiety,” Powell wrote in 1939, “is based on a foundation of realism.” Powell’s hearty, stoical pessimism would be tested in her last years, which were unusually difficult. After her husband was forced into retirement in 1958, the family finances collapsed and the couple was forced to live in a series of seedy residence hotels. Joseph Gousha died of cancer in 1962, and their son was made a ward of New York state. Powell herself
died of intestinal cancer on November 14, 1965 during the week of the first great New York blackout, a coincidence she might have appreciated. She donated her body to science and her remains were buried on Hart Island, New York’s “Potter’s Field,” in 1970. One of Samuel Johnson’s acquaintances made an effort to become a philosopher but gave it up because, he said, “cheerfulness was always breaking in.” Powell, a merciless observer of the human condition who never pretended she was any nobler than the rest of her besotted, scattered, doomed characters – dear and valuable in spite of themselves – would have understood. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Josephson, M. (1973). Dawn Powell: A Woman of Esprit. Southern Review, 9(1), 18–52. Page, T. (1998). Dawn Powell: A Biography. New York: Henry Holt. Powell, D. (1925). Whither. Boston: Small, Maynard. Powell, D. (1928). She Walks in Beauty. New York: Brentano’s. Powell, D. (1929). The Bride’s House. New York: Brentano’s. Powell, D. (1930). Dance Night. New York: Farrar and Rinehart. Powell, D. (1932). The Tenth Moon [originally pub. as ComeBacktoSorrento].NewYork:FarrarandRinehart. Powell, D. (1934). The Story of a Country Boy. New York: Farrar and Rinehart. Powell, D. (1936). Turn, Magic Wheel. New York: Farrar and Rinehart. Powell, D. (1938). The Happy Island. New York: Farrar and Rinehart. Powell, D. (1940). Angels on Toast. New York: Scribner’s. Powell, D. (1942). A Time to Be Born. New York: Scribner’s. Powell, D. (1944). My Home Is Far Away. New York: Scribner’s. Powell, D. (1948). The Locusts Have No King. New York: Scribner’s. Powell, D. (1954). The Wicked Pavilion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Powell, D. (1956). A Man’s Affair [revision of Angels on Toast]. New York: Fawcett. Powell, D. (1957). A Cage for Lovers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
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Powell, D. (1962). The Golden Spur. New York: Viking. Powell, D. (1995). The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931–1965 (ed. T. Page). Hanover, NH: Steerforth. Powell, D. (1998). Sunday, Monday and Always [1952] (ed. and rev. T. Page). Hanover, NH: Steerforth. Powell, D. (1999). Four Plays (ed. T. Page & M. Sexton). Hanover, NH: Steerforth. Powell, D. (1999). Selected Letters of Dawn Powell, 1913–1965 (ed. T. Page). New York: Henry Holt. Rice, M. S. (2000). Dawn Powell. Woodbridge, CT: Twayne. Vidal, G. (1987). Dawn Powell: The American Writer. New York Review of Books (Nov. 5).
Powers, Richard JOSEPH DEWEY
The novels of Richard Powers are dense speculative narratives that set the heartbreaking plotlines of everyday life – stories of obsessive love, dysfunctional families, illness, and death – against a wide-reaching sensibility that invests such ordinary moments with unsuspected (and compassionate) gravitas. To read the novels as a unit (and each successive novel addresses questions raised by the preceding one) is to recover the sheer density of assumptions we routinely make about the world. Born June 18, 1957 in Evanston, Illinois, Powers spent his teenage years in Thailand – his father, a middle school principal, administered an international school in Bangkok. As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, Powers took a degree in physics and rhetoric, finding either discipline by itself unavailable to what he conceived as the aerial view of experience. He completed his master’s in literature (from Illinois in 1979) but left academia, finding literary study too narrow. A self-taught computer programmer (indeed, Powers is an autodidact of heroic dimension), Powers supported himself by freelancing computer work in Boston while he worked on his first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985), an elegant meditation on World War 1 based on an imaginative recreation of the lives of three Westphalian farm boys in an August Sander photograph Powers chanced to see in a Boston museum. Encouraged by the reviews, Powers accepted an appointment at Illinois and there completed his second novel, Prisoner’s
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Dilemma (1988). A much darker meditation on the imagination and war, it juxtaposed the struggles of a close-knit Chicago family to accept the imminent death of its brilliant and eccentric father – he had been exposed to radiation 20 years earlier when he had witnessed the Trinity test site blast – with a fantastical account of a fictitious Walt Disney propaganda film designed to help win World War II. Awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1989, Powers, uneasy with his burgeoning celebrity, moved to southern Holland to finish The Gold Bug Variations (1991). Mining the metaphors of contrapuntal music and genetics, it braided two stories that anatomized the beauty and mayhem of love: one, between a brilliant geneticist and a married colleague who in the late 1950s work to crack the genetic code; the other, set a generation later, between a research librarian and a struggling artist. Returning to Urbana, Powers published Operation Wandering Soul (1993), a far more harrowing account of genetics: a promising surgeon-in-residence in the pediatric ward in an East Los Angeles public hospital suffers a nervous breakdown as he must watch, helpless, while a beautiful, gifted Laotian girl under his care succumbs to a virulent cancer. In turn, the difficult process of reviving a shattered psyche centered Powers’s next work, the metafictional experiment Galatea 2.2 (1995). The protagonist, a novelist named Richard Powers, becomes involved in a cutting-edge university research initiative designed to endow a supercomputer program with the cognitive skills to pass a master’s-level oral exam. Introducing the computer program to the subtleties of language (a la Pygmalion and his sculpture), the character Powers reconnects with his own emotional life, using his long evenings “teaching” the computer to come to terms with a lately shattered relationship. Now holding an endowed chair as a writer-inresidence at Illinois, Powers, himself at midlife, confronted the implications of mortality. Gain (1998) juxtaposed the story of a single mother coming to terms with her approaching death from ovarian cancer with the long history of the chemical conglomerate whose environmental carelessness had most likely caused her cancer. Then, in Plowing the Dark (2000), Powers twined two narratives that tested the viability of the
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imagination in the face of mortality. In one story, a burned-out New York artist helps create a virtual reality program that makes art masterpieces come to life only to learn that the same technology has been co-opted by the Defense Department to develop guidance systems for smart bombs; in the other story, an American English teacher, taken hostage by Muslim terrorists in war-torn Beirut, spends three years blindfolded and shackled to a radiator, and discovers the sustenance of the imagination. But can the individual be separated from the wider forces of history? In The Time of Our Singing (2003), a sweeping family saga, a Jewish physicist, driven from Hitler’s Germany, marries an African American singer from Philadelphia shortly before the start of World War II. Their three children, each gifted musically, struggle heroically (and futilely) to live in a mid-century American culture burdened by its history of racial intolerance. Powers draws on the metaphors of both music and quantum physics as countervisions of complex harmony. Although controversial as Powers used first-person narration to project into the black experience, the novel was shortlisted for the Pulitzer. In The Echo Maker (2006), a National Book Award winner, Powers in turn tests how memory creates history, not vice versa. A car accident leaves a Chicago slaughterhouse worker brain damaged – a victim of Capgras syndrome, a rare condition that makes him suspect that his sister, his only living relative, is an imposter. Desperate, the sister contacts a celebrated New York neurologist intrigued by the brother as a potential case study. Even as the brother recovers his memory, the neurologist, on the downside of his career, undergoes an identity crisis of his own. Like Don DeLillo, to whom he is often compared, Powers informs the novel of ideas with the humanity of mimetic realism and the formal experimentation of postmodernism. Each narrative architecture is a contrapuntal harmonic that brings together two (and in some cases three) narrative braids that would appear incommensurable but that ultimately create a sophisticated dynamic. That structural signature, in turn, suggests Powers’s wider vision, one that challenges borders (much as his fiction juxtaposes fiction and non-fiction as, amid the execution of his plots, he offers poetic essay-like
set pieces on a range of subjects). In effect, Powers argues, the wide sweep of the imagination and the hard scrutiny of the intelligence – the arts and the sciences, the heart and the head – must engage in a dialectic to even begin to appreciate the sheer range of the human project. SEE ALSO: DeLillo, Don (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Berger, K. (2003). The Art of Fiction: Interview With Richard Powers. Paris Review 164, 109–38. Burn, S. J., & Dempsey, P. (eds.) (2008). Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive. Dewey, J. (2002). Understanding Richard Powers. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. LeClair, T. (1996). The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace. Critique, 38, 12–37. Neilson, J. (ed.) (1998). Richard Powers [special issue]. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 18(3). Powers, R. (1985). Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. New York: Beech Tree-Morrow. Powers, R. (1988). Prisoner’s Dilemma. New York: Beech Tree-Morrow. Powers, R. (1991). The Gold Bug Variations. New York: Morrow. Powers, R. (1993). Operation Wandering Soul. New York: Morrow. Powers, R. (1995). Galatea 2.2 New York: Farrar. Powers, R. (1998). Gain. New York: Farrar. Powers, R. (2000). Plowing the Dark. New York: Farrar. Powers, R. (2003). The Time of Our Singing. New York: Farrar. Powers, R. (2006). The Echo Maker. New York: Farrar. Williams, J. (1999). The Last Generalist: An Interview With Richard Powers. Cultural Logic, 2(2). At http://clogic.eserver.org/2-2/williams.html, accessed Jan. 15, 2010.
Price, Reynolds VICTOR STRANDBERG
In 1963 Reynolds Price won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for his first novel, A Long and Happy Life, a book that has now sold over a million copies. From that spectacular beginning, he went on to compose three volumes of short
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stories, 13 novels, six plays, four volumes of poetry, three collections of essays, three memoirs, and enough religious writing to feature him on the cover of Time (Dec. 6, 1999). In addition to such versatility, Price has published countless book reviews and interviews that disclose a vast array of literary interests and relationships. Born February 1, 1933 in Macon, North Carolina, Edward Reynolds Price graduated summa cum laude from Duke University in 1955, spent three years at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and in 1958 became a writer-inresidence and teacher at Duke. A crucial turning point in his life was the discovery, in May 1984, of a malignant tumor on his spine. An operation and radiation treatments slowed the progress of the malignancy, but left him paraplegic and confined to a wheelchair and in a state of “colossal, incessant pain.” The magnificent productivity of his later decades has vindicated his heroic choice to write and endure the pain. A lifelong bachelor, Price has nonetheless taken the dynamics of family life as a central feature of his work, most notably in the two trilogies that comprise his major achievement. The first, A Singular Family: Rosacoke and Her Kin (1999), began with A Long and Happy Life (1962), about a rural girl’s relationship with the boy who impregnated her. A Generous Man (1966) portrayed her brother Milo’s sexual initiation at age 15 as a modern version of Milton’s Fortunate Fall. Decades later, Good Hearts (1988) portrayed Rosacoke and her husband working through a midlife crisis. In 1975 Price launched the other trilogy, A Great Circle, with his most ambitious novel, The Surface of Earth, centering on father–son relationships through three generations of the Mayfield family. Its youngest scion, Hutch Mayfield, reappears as the central character in The Source of Light, bearing a considerable resemblance to his author. The Promise of Rest (1995) ends the cycle with the death, by AIDS, of Hutch’s son, Wade, who extends the Mayfield genealogy by fathering a son by the sister of his black male lover, thereby bridging the gay/straight and black/white rifts in the Great (Mayfield) Circle. Within Price’s other novels, James Schiff discerns two major themes, artists and outlaws. The artist predominates in Love and Work (1968), whose title poses a torturous artistic choice; in
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the short story collection Permanent Errors (1970), a title that prefigures a writer’s strained or ruined relationships; in The Tongues of Angels (1990), about a painter whose landscapes probe the spiritual essence behind the world’s surface; and in The Good Priest’s Son (2005), about an art conservator who, after being nudged out of his artists’ circle in New York by the 9/11 disaster, returns to his North Carolina home to exorcise a father’s malfeasance. The outlaws, some of whom are also artists, mainly perpetrate sexual transgressions, as in Kate Vaiden (1986), when a teenage unwed mother rebels against the traditional gender role by abandoning her son and enjoying a life of promiscuity until she later seeks a reunion before her death. In Blue Calhoun (1992), the first-person narrator tries to expiate the harm he has caused his kinfolk by an adulterous affair with a much younger woman. Roxanna Slade (1998) adds a motif of incest to the theme, and Noble Norfleet (2002) involves a youth’s sexual initiation with his high school teacher, prefiguring other love affairs, including a homosexual tryst that leads to his lover’s suicide. Considerable violence afflicts these minions of Eros, whose family entanglements typically involve murder, suicide, deaths in childbirth, and – by way of emotional violence – deep ruptures between parent and child. Eros in itself, however, usually generates innocent fun, a joyous compensation for suffering that is perfectly compatible with Price’s Christian sensibility, yet a central question in Price’s work is the connection, whether benign or hostile, between erotic and family love. Certainly Price sees marriage, an institution which purports to delimit the boundaries of Eros, as inadequate to that purpose, though it retains central importance in the rearing of children. Consequently, his fiction explores a wide range of alternatives regarding both erotic love and the idea of the family. Largely because of Price’s clear style and aversion to postmodern fashions, his fiction has failed to attract much critical attention. For instance, a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review (June 29, 1975) dismissed The Surface of Earth as “a great lumbering archaic beast,” ruinously out of touch with the postmodernity of Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Joseph Heller. Some excellent criticism does exist, however, by way of
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book reviews, journal essays, and three outstanding books. These commentaries add strong support to Price’s status as a major American author, but for this highly accomplished writer, a major work of criticism remains to be done. SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (AF); SocialRealist Fiction (AF); Southern Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Price, R. (1962). A Long and Happy Life. New York: Atheneum. Price, R. (1966). A Generous Man. New York: Atheneum. Price, R. (1968). Love and Work. New York: Atheneum. Price, R. (1970). Permanent Errors. New York: Atheneum. Price, R. (1975). The Surface of Earth. New York: Atheneum. Price, R. (1981). The Source of Light. New York: Atheneum. Price, R. (1986). Kate Vaiden. New York: Atheneum. Price, R. (1988). Good Heart. New York: Atheneum. Price, R. (1990). The Tongues of Angels. New York: Atheneum. Price, R. (1992). Blue Calhoun. New York: Atheneum. Price, R. (1995). The Promise of Rest. New York: Scribner’s. Price, R. (1998). Roxanna Slade. New York: Scribner’s. Price, R. (1999). A Singular Family: Rosacoke and Her Kin. New York: Scribner’s. Price, R. (2002). Noble Norfleet. New York: Scribner’s. Price, R. (2005). The Good Priest’s Son. New York: Scribner’s. Rooke, C. (1983). Reynolds Price. Boston: Twayne. Schiff, J. A. (1996). Understanding Reynolds Price. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Schiff, J. A. (ed.) (1998). Critical Essays on Reynolds Price. New York: G. K. Hall.
Proulx, Annie ALIKI VARVOGLI
Annie Proulx arrived late on the literary scene but soon caught up with her contemporaries. Since the publication of her first book of stories in 1988, she has produced three further story collections and four novels. Both popular and critically acclaimed, she has been awarded numerous literary prizes: the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (1993) and both the National Book
Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1994). Her work is often associated with regional writing, and most of her books are set away from cities in rural areas underrepresented in American fiction. Proulx dislikes being categorized as a “woman writer,” preferring her work to be read and assessed for literary merit rather than for the author’s gender. Proulx was born in Connecticut on August 22, 1935, the eldest of five daughters, though she often wished for a brother she could join in outdoor pursuits. Her adult life and writing style are associated with qualities usually described as masculine; her main characters are often men, and she writes about farming, hunting, and generally living and working outdoors. After studying history at the University of Vermont and Concordia University, she moved to a rural area on the US–Canada border and wrote journalism and various how-to manuals. Her academic training and her non-fiction writing gave her a taste for meticulous research she employs in her fiction writing. Her books open with long lists of acknowledgments, which reveal the breadth and variety of her research. Although she is happy to show the readers what sources she consulted, she is reluctant to discuss other authors and does not acknowledge any major influences, though she has often been compared to Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Cormac McCarthy. Heart Songs (1988) comprises 11 stories set in rural New England. As in all of her fiction, Proulx does not romanticize her subjects or locations; along with the humor and thoughtful, empathetic descriptions of quiet, hidden lives, there is an awareness of the hardship involved in rural living, and her fiercest criticism is often directed at city folk who come to “consume” the countryside for their vacation. Close Range (1999), Bad Dirt (2004), and Fine Just the Way It Is (2008) are three volumes of western stories she published since moving to Wyoming in 1994; they have been praised for their authenticity. Most involve families with dark secrets and violence lurking beneath the surface. Despite her attention to verisimilitude, she also includes elements of the fantastic, such as a talking tractor in Heart Songs, or the Devil thinking of refurbishing Hell in Fine Just the Way It Is. In the same volume, “Tits-Up in a Ditch” attracted considerable attention and shocked readers with its theme of the Iraq War,
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but perhaps her most celebrated story is “Brokeback Mountain,” which tells of a love affair between two cowboys. It is a moving story that shows Proulx’s considerable gift of imaginative empathy and showcases the literary treatment of her chosen location. The novels Postcards (1992), The Shipping News (1993), Accordion Crimes (1996), and That Old Ace in the Hole (2002) are set in rural areas and deal with characters unlike the author herself. She has acknowledged the influence of landscape on her writing, and she is fascinated with language, collecting dictionaries of dialects and phrases. Postcards tells the story of Loyal Blood, who kills his partner and leaves the family farm to travel across America. As well as a story of family tragedy, the book can be read as a portrait of postwar America. The Shipping News, set in Newfoundland, is the story of a bereaved father who rebuilds his life in a small community after leaving New York. The novel has been praised for its depiction of landscape and weather, but it is equally admirable for its complex narrative structure, which involves tortured personal and familial history, local history, dialect and mores, and fragmented sentences that mirror a pained consciousness. Accordion Crimes combines the author’s interest in both the genres of the story and the novel. It is a collection of self-contained stories held together by the presence of an accordion, brought to the US by a Sicilian and passing through the hands of immigrants from different countries for whom the instrument provides a link to their cultural past as well as a means of survival and assimilation in the New World. That Old Ace in the Hole tells of the struggle between small farming communities and big agricultural business. It is more humorous and light-hearted than the previous books, but it still deals with serious issues such as family relations, the exploitation of the land, and the disappearance of some older ways of life. SEE ALSO: Faulkner, William (AF); Hemingway, Ernest (AF); McCarthy, Cormac (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Flavin, L. (1999). Quoyle’s Quest: Knots and Fragments as Tools of Narration in The Shipping News. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 40(3),239–47.
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Oates, J. C. (2008). In Rough Country. New York Review of Books, pp. 41–5 (Oct. 23). Proulx, A. (1988). Heart Songs and Other Stories. New York: Scribner’s. Proulx, A. (1992). Postcards. New York: Scribner’s. Proulx, A. (1993). The Shipping News. New York: Scribner’s. Proulx, A. (1996). Accordion Crimes. New York: Scribner’s. Proulx, A. (1999). Close Range: Wyoming Stories. New York: Scribner’s. Proulx, A. (2000). Big Skies, Empty Places. New Yorker, p. 139 (Dec. 25). Proulx, A. (2002). That Old Ace in the Hole. New York: Scribner’s. Proulx, A. (2004). Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2. New York: Scribner’s. Proulx, A. (2008). Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3. New York: Scribner’s. Rood, K. L. (2001). Understanding Annie Proulx. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Scanlon, J. (2008). Why Do We Still Want to Believe? The Case of Annie Proulx. Journal of Narrative Theory, 38(1),86–110, 134. Seiffert, R. (2002). Inarticulacy, Identity and Silence: Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News. Textual Practice, 16(3),511–25. Stewart, R. S. (1998). Tayloring the Self: Identity, Articulation, and Community in Proulx’s The Shipping News. Studies in Canadian Literature 23(2) 49–70. Varvogli, A. (2002). Annie Proulx’s “The Shipping News”: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum.
Purdy, James JOSEPH T. SKERRETT JR.
James Purdy has been touted as “a writer’s writer” – that is, someone more respected and admired by his peers than by the common reader and the marketplace. His early stories were praised by British writers like Dame Edith Sitwell, to whom Purdy had sent a copy of a privately printed volume in 1956, as well as George Steiner, Angus Wilson, and John Cowper Powys. His American admirers included Tennessee Williams, Dorothy Parker, Jerome Charyn, Susan Sontag, Edward Albee, and, most recently, Gore Vidal and Jonathan Lethem. He experienced a brief period in the 1970s when his books made it into inexpensive paperback editions fairly regularly, but as time passed these editions vanished
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and were not followed by new editions of the early texts or any paperback editions of many of his later works. His plays – of which there are over a score – have never been collected, and few are published at all. James Otis Purdy was born in Fremont, Ohio, perhaps on July 17, 1923 but most likely earlier, as he graduated from the University of Chicago in 1941. His parents divorced when Purdy was a child, and he grew up in transit, moving frequently between his parents’ separate households and his grandmother’s farm in northeastern Ohio. After college, he served in the Army, then studied Spanish in Chicago and at the University of Puebla in Mexico. He worked as a translator in Spain, France, Cuba, and Mexico in the late 1940s. Between 1949 and 1953, Purdy taught Spanish at Lawrence College in Wisconsin before moving to Brooklyn Heights in New York City, where lived until his death. After launching his career with that privately printed collection of short fiction, Purdy published an expanded edition with New Directions that included the novella 63: Dream Palace (1954). He then landed a contract with a major New York publisher for his first novel, Malcolm (1959). Since then he has published 15 other novels, six collections of short stories, and five volumes of poetry. Classifying Purdy’s prolific output has proven a stumbling block for critics. His novels have been set in locations across the United States, and major character types, male and female, include the very old, the very young, African Americans, the very rich, the starving poor, Native Americans, actors, composers, and, especially, writers of all sorts. His range of subjects is as wide as the range of styles and genres available to his imagination. Many proposed critical boxes – Midwestern realist, postmodern gothic fantasist, gay romancer, and fabulist – seemed increasingly inadequate as the writing continued to unfold. The earliest fictions (63: Dream Palace and Malcolm) focused on the destruction of youthful innocence and the betrayal of love, a theme to which he frequently returned in quite different later works. Malcolm is indeed both typical and atypical of Purdy’s fiction. A picaresque exploration of a “lost boy” in search of his father who is helped, exploited, bedded, and finally debauched by patrons, the novel is surreal in some of its juxtapositions of bizarre characters and com-
monplace situations, and thus unlike its more realistic successors. A set of novels including Jeremy’s Version (1970), The House of the Solitary Maggot (1974), Mourners Below (1981), and On Glory’s Course (1984) is concerned with Midwestern settings and dark themes of small-town life, reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson. Another set, including The Nephew (1960), In a Shallow Grave (1975 arguably his masterpiece), and Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue (1997), comprises versions of romance, in which characters experience rebirth of the heart from the experience of devastating pain and loss. Garnet Montrose, the main character of In a Shallow Grave, is a hideously disfigured war veteran who returns to his Virginia homestead to recover his health and an old, conventional love affair. He learns to accept rejection and the mystery of love where he did not expect it. Eustace Chisholm and the Works (1967) and Narrow Rooms (1978) focus on the destructive effect of resistance to homosexual desire. Eustace Chisholm is a richly inventive work, at the center of which is the terrifying tale of two young men who cannot acknowledge their sexual attraction. Eustace himself is one of Purdy’s most frequently recurring tropes, the failed writer who is unable to encompass the overwhelming nature of human suffering. The final grouping of novels (Cabot Wright Begins (1964), I Am Elijah Thrush (1986), Garments the Living Wear (2001), and Out With the Stars (1994)) might usefully be viewed as dark satires, but nevertheless share with the others – and with his many superb short stories – Purdy’s themes of lost innocence, conflicted love and violent passion, and the search for identity in a “not right” world. The respect for Purdy’s writing is reflected in his receipt of literary awards. He has twice held Guggenheim fellowships (1958, 1962), received a Ford Fellowship for playwriting (1961), and in 1993 was awarded the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award for fiction by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Most recently, Gore Vidal praised Purdy in a New York Times article marking the twenty-first-century reissue of a number of his works, one of which, Eustace Chisholm and the Works, was cited by fellow novelist Jonathan Franzen in awarding Purdy the Mercantile Library’s Clifton Fadiman Medal
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for Excellence in Fiction in 2005. He died on March 13, 2009. SEE ALSO: Franzen, Jonathan (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Queer Modernism (AF); Vidal, Gore (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Adams, S. D. (1976). James Purdy. New York: Harper and Row. Baldanza, F. (1974). James Purdy on the Corruption of Innocents. Contemporary Literature, 15(3), 315–30. Baldanza, F. (1975). Northern Gothic. Southern Review, 10, 566–81. Chupack, H. (1975). James Purdy. Boston: Twayne. Purdy, J. (1956). 63: Dream Palace. New York: William Frederick. Purdy, J. (1959). Malcolm. New York: Farrar, Straus. Purdy, J. (1960). The Nephew. New York: Farrar, Straus. Purdy, J. (1964). Cabot Wright Begins. New York: Farrar, Straus. Purdy, J. (1967). Eustace Chisholm and the Works. New York: Farrar, Straus. Purdy, J. (1970). Jeremy’s Version. New York: Doubleday. Purdy, J. (1974). The House of the Solitary Maggot. New York: Doubleday. Purdy, J. (1975). In a Shallow Grave. New York: Arbor House. Purdy, J. (1978). Narrow Rooms. New York: Arbor House. Purdy, J. (1981). Mourners Below. New York: Viking. Purdy, J. (1984). On Glory’s Course. New York: Viking. Purdy, J. (1988). The Candles of Your Eyes and Thirteen Other Stories. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Purdy, J. (1997). Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue. New York: Morrow. Purdy, J. (2004). Moe’s Villa and Other Stories. New York: Carroll and Graf. Schwarzchild, B. (1968). The Not-Right House: Essays on James Purdy. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Skerrett, J. T. (1969). James Purdy and the Works: Love and Tragedy in Five Novels. Twentieth Century Literature, 15(1), 25–33.
Pynchon, Thomas LUC HERMAN and JOHN M. KRAFFT
On the strength of his first three novels, Thomas Pynchon has become the epitome of American postmodernism. While the label “postmodernist”
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was not attached to him until the 1980s, it does capture the features central to his work. A historical novelist even when his story is set in or near the present, Pynchon renders the past with such great ingenuity, humor, and self-awareness that, along with E. L. Doctorow and Kurt Vonnegut, he provides a main source for the concept of what Linda Hutcheon has called “historiographic metafiction.” Often working against conventional characterization, plotting, and perspective, his challenging yet entertaining novels address such topics as capitalism, paranoia, technology, genocide, slavery, and terrorism without succumbing to pedantry or simple caricature. Pynchon, whose family roots in American history go back to the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, was born on May 8, 1937 in Glen Cove, New York and grew up in nearby East Norwich. At 16, he entered Cornell University as an engineering-physics major but remained in that program for only one year. After his second year at Cornell, he served for two years in the US Navy, then returned to Cornell and graduated with a degree in English in 1959. That year also saw publication of his first two short stories, “The Small Rain” and “Mortality and Mercy in Vienna.” “Low-Lands” and Pynchon’s best-known story, “Entropy,” appeared in 1960; 1961’s “Under the Rose” won an O. Henry Award. From 1960 to 1962, Pynchon worked as a technical writer on the staff of the house organ Bomarc Service News at the Boeing Airplane Co. in Seattle while he completed the novel V. (1963), which received the Faulkner Foundation Award for best first novel of the year. “The Secret Integration,” his last published short story and the one Pynchon himself has said marked his progression from “apprentice” to “journeyman,” appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1964. His second novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), received a Rosenthal Foundation Award. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), widely considered Pynchon’s masterpiece, shared a National Book Award and was nominated for but denied a Pulitzer Prize. Awarded the Howells Medal in 1975 for “the most distinguished work of American fiction of the previous five years,” Pynchon politely refused it. In 1988, however, he accepted a five-year, $310,000 MacArthur Fellowship. Pynchon also published odds and ends of nonfiction over the years, including at least one article
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on missile-handling safety (1960); essays on the Watts riots (1966), Luddism (1984a), and sloth (1993); a book review (1988); introductions to books by Richard Farina (1983), Donald Barthelme (1992), Jim Dodge (1997), and George Orwell (2003); support notices; liner notes; and more. In the interval between Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland (1990), he collected his short stories (except “Mortality and Mercy in Vienna”) into Slow Learner (1984b), adding a reflective introduction. The novel Mason & Dixon appeared in 1997, and Against the Day in 2006. Inherent Vice – part homage to, part parody of, hard-boiled detective fiction and film noir – has just appeared (2009). Since Pynchon has always avoided personal publicity, details of his private life are scarce. Apparently he lived mostly in Mexico from late 1962 until 1964 or 1965, then mostly in various places around California through the 1980s. Since about 1989, he has lived in New York City with his wife, Melanie Jackson, and their son. V. combines a narrative about the amorous endeavors of a group of mostly twenty-somethings in mid-1950s New York with an almost chronological sequence of chapters set in various locations in Europe and Africa between 1898 and 1943. The central characters of the New York plot are the passive-aggressive Benny Profane and his counterpart, Herbert Stencil, whose search for the elusive V. mentioned in his spymaster father’s journal leads him on the imaginative tour of the past that results in the several “Stencilized” historical chapters. These appear to feature the title character, whose probable death on Malta during World War II is narrated in a long letter to Paola Maijstral in New York. Stencil eventually goes to Malta along with Paola and Profane, but his search remains unresolved; and while the historical epilogue, set in Malta in 1919, provides many clues to the connection between Stencil’s father and V., it does not answer all the reader’s questions either. Pynchon endows Stencil with a modernist craving for historical and encompassing explanations, but the character’s frustration is nicely compensated – if not for him, at least for the reader – by the creativity of his historical imagination. The search for a woman at the heart of the novel testifies to the importance for Pynchon, early in his career, of the male attitude toward the female other. However, the diverse
love interests in the New York chapters paint such a varied picture of attitudes toward the Feminine that the survival of the Western worship of Woman as thematized in Stencil’s quest is by no means given priority or offered as a solution to what Pynchon may have seen as the sexual woes of young Americans. Judging by the novel’s typescript and the correspondence between Pynchon and his editor, V. benefited from a major prepublication overhaul, which involved dropping, combining, reordering, and rewriting chapters. Although he seriously addressed his editor’s advice about the typescript’s tendency toward “protest,” its overlong party scenes, and its potentially confusing time shifts, Pynchon also proved himself a masterly self-editor. Unlike V., which depicts an African American saxophone player in terms of an unresolved mixture of Beat-inspired cliches and stereotypical liberal ideology, Pynchon’s subsequent short story, “The Secret Integration,” featuring a group of white boys who imagine a black boy as their friend, takes on the issue of race by focusing on concrete examples of white racism. Pynchon’s earlier “Entropy” and his second novel, The Crying of Lot 49, are his most anthologized texts. They have in common the narrativization of science for which the author has become famous, albeit at the cost of appearing quite forbidding to many readers. In “Entropy,” the tendentious contrast between a chaotic party at Meatball Mulligan’s apartment and the would-be hermetically sealed hothouse on the floor above is somewhat clunkily enhanced by the thematization of communication theory and thermodynamics. In Lot 49, the connection between these two scientific models informs the description of the heroine’s quest, but the fact that the science is perhaps just over Oedipa Maas’s head indicates a shift from sheer weightiness to more complex speculation and even comedy in Pynchon’s use of science. At the beginning of the novel, Oedipa, a restless Californian housewife married to a forlorn disc jockey, learns that she has become the executrix of a wealthy ex-lover’s estate. She duly attempts to “sort it all out,” only to get lost in a maze of historico-political information and conjecture. Part detective novel, part romp, and part philosophical tale, Lot 49 puts its reader in a position similar to Oedipa’s, since no full, coherent explanation of the situation she has found herself in, or imagined, ever emerges.
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History is a reservoir Oedipa readily taps in search of understanding. From the Peter Pinguid Society (named for a Confederate officer who sailed around Cape Horn to open a second front in the Civil War) to the rival postal system Tristero (set up in the late sixteenth century near Brussels by the rebellious cousin of a loyal adherent of William of Orange), factual and counterfactual history from a variety of sources provides Oedipa and the reader with numerous occasions to “bring [her ex-lover’s] estate into pulsing stelliferous Meaning,” (69) but to no avail. Laced with eccentric characters and delightful pastiche (including a Jacobean revenge tragedy and a Hollywood movie about World War I), Lot 49 explores information surplus as a root cause of postmodern identity and its characteristic inability to draw a clear line between fact and fiction. Judging by the cult status Gravity’s Rainbow has enjoyed since publication, as well as by the high regard among scholars it soon began to win, its intellectual and artistic excess (almost as daring as James Joyce’s in Finnegans Wake) provides many readers with the ultimate literary trip. Ostensibly about the end of World War II, the novel is organized around the tribulations of Tyrone Slothrop, an American lieutenant stationed in London. Since his erections during the V-2 Blitz of 1944 seem to predict the sites of rocket strikes, he is first subjected to study in England and then sent to the French Riviera for experimentation. Adopting a variety of identities, Slothrop escapes to “the Zone” (Germany in the immediate aftermath of the war) to search for information and wisdom, eluding pursuers and experiencing adventures that range from the comic (book) to the truly harrowing. His itinerary includes the underground factory near Nordhausen (with the attached slave-labor camp Dora) where V-2s were manufactured, and the rocket development and testing facilities at Peenem€ unde. As Slothrop eventually dissipates as a character, the novel not only follows the rise and fall of a “Counterforce” dedicated in part to rescuing him, but also completes – without necessarily resolving – the narratives of other important characters. At the very end, the novel suddenly jumps from a flashback to the firing of a rocket on the L€ uneburg Heath in Germany in early 1945 to 1970s Los Angeles, where another missile (the Bomb?) is falling on a movie theater in which we readers sit.
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Steeped in the minutiae of mathematics, statistics, chemistry, ballistics, psychology, music, film, astrology, and the Kabbalah (to name only some of its more evident topics), Gravity’s Rainbow encyclopedically investigates war as a high mass of the corporate capitalism that has a stranglehold on the individual and assumes a global role as arbiter of life and death. A text therefore that mirrors the concerns of 1960s counterculture, the novel raises the possibility of subversion only to leave that question in suspense. If its wild counterfactuality is perceived as a liberation from the shackles “They,” the invisible rulers of this world, also put on History by turning it into a simple sequence of cause and effect in which Good and Bad keep going head to head, the act of reading may be invigorating in and by itself, especially if the reader accepts Pynchon’s invitation and indulges in the making of connections among all the elements on offer. If, on the other hand, such “creative paranoia” appears to exemplify the repressive tolerance that is one of “Their” specialties, then Gravity’s Rainbow risks exposure as a hoax for letting its audience mistake intellectual labor for an expression of freedom. However we decide that question, the novel is so masterly in construction, so rich and varied in detail, so lyrical, touching, spectacular, and funny – sometimes all at once (as in Slothrop’s toilet-bowl journey or the story of Byron the Bulb) – that the reader’s pleasure is guaranteed. Partly just because of the long wait for Pynchon’s next novel, Vineland disappointed many reviewers, who thought the author had lost his edge. However, as a meditation on the 1960s set in the ominous 1984, Vineland neatly complements Gravity’s Rainbow and its countercultural aspirations. As aging hippie Zoyd Wheeler struggles to raise his teenage daughter, Prairie, alone, old ghosts from the past prompt Prairie to find out why her mother, one-time radical filmmaker Frenesi Gates, abandoned her. History in Vineland is related largely to the succession of generations in a family, but the time gap between the novel’s Reaganite present and its apparent subject decade allows Pynchon also to narrativize a national turn away from confrontation to placidity, or from commitment to complacency if not complicity. This shift may be understood as the sign of an enduring victory by totalitarian forces, now conspicuous in the character of federal
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prosecutor Brock Vond, but the novel also feelingly celebrates family ties. Problematic enough to avoid sentimentality, the annual reunion of an extended family at the end of the novel evokes the original American community to which the novel’s title alludes. A political and even feminist novel, Vineland, with its undead Thanatoids and its layers of sometimes ontologically uncertain flashbacks, does not actually depart far from the kind of historiographic metafiction in Pynchon’s previous novels, but it may let down readers who crave more of the fancy intellectual and literary footwork displayed earlier in Pynchon’s career. Mason & Dixon is narrated in 1786 by the fictional Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke, who knew the British astronomer Charles Mason and surveyor Jeremiah Dixon, and also has mysterious access to the still extant field journal in which they recorded the drawing of their famous line (1763–8) to settle a border dispute in colonial America. A counterfactual journal of Mason’s is also at hand, which allows Cherrycoke (who is occasionally addressed and commented upon by another, invisible narrator) to add a variety of revelations about the expedition. Peppered with anachronisms and animated by Cherrycoke’s unflagging imagination, rhetorical bravado, and imitation eighteenthcentury English, the novel is a true historical extravaganza that focuses on oppression and degeneration as ironic results of scientific progress and the logic of capitalism as much as it deals with the birth of the United States. At the root of this representation of the Age of Reason and its effect on the New World is a contrast between the ruthless directionality of the Mason–Dixon line and the curliness of the ampersand that connects the two eponymous characters, suggesting the intricacies of their friendship. Vineland’s (extended) family values reappear in Mason & Dixon in the form of a sociability holding firm against the demands of efficiency and order as these result in exploitation, create slavery, and destroy a Native American environment whose magic realism Pynchon executes so beautifully it can be seen as a literary form of resistance against the steamrolling forces of the Enlightenment. Thoroughly researched and yet brisk in its fabulation, Mason & Dixon is perhaps Pynchon’s most eloquent and accessible testimony to the relevance of historical fiction to the investigation of America’s past.
If Pynchon has a penchant for binary structures, it is certainly evident in Against the Day, at once a prequel to Gravity’s Rainbow and an evocation of the author’s entire oeuvre. From a “Negro in a ‘pork-pie’ hat,” echoing the short story “Low-Lands,” to references to “the Mason– Dixon,” a host of earlier elements are incorporated into a blockbuster narrative stretching from the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago to the years just after World War I in Hollywood, with many stops all around the globe – and even a journey through it – in between. The major opposing forces in the novel are corporate capitalism, embodied in the mogul Scarsdale Vibe, and (taking historically appropriate center stage for the first time) anarchism, represented by the Colorado miner Webb Traverse and his family. Their extended confrontation provides the backdrop for a story about scientific discovery, its economic appropriation, and its still undiminished potential to bring magic into the lives of characters who seem to owe their presence in the story world to their affiliation with popular genres such as the western, boys’ adventure fiction, and Wellesian scientific romance that flourished during the time of Pynchon’s plot. The modern scientific theorization of a fourth dimension motivates Pynchon’s adumbration of the multiverse, a literary topology developed by Michael Moorcock and other science fiction and fantasy writers to integrate precisely such genres as those combined in Against the Day. Far from downplaying his wild sense of humor or the emphasis on interpersonal support and affection central to Vineland and Mason & Dixon, Pynchon here frames both in a grandiose effort to conceive, in almost Hegelian fashion, of historical change as it would inexorably lead to World War I. SEE ALSO: Doctorow, E. L. (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Minimalist/Maximalist Fiction (AF); The Novel and War (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Vonnegut, Kurt (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Berube, M. (1992). Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
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Clerc, C. (ed.) (1983). Approaches to “Gravity’s Rainbow.” Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Green, G., Greiner, D., & McCaffery, L. (eds.) (1994). The “Vineland” Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon’s Novel. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive. Herman, L., & Krafft, J. M. (2007). Fast Learner: The Typescript of Pynchon’s V. at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 49(1),1–20. Holton, R. (1988). In the Rathouse of History With Thomas Pynchon: Rereading V. Textual Practice, 2(3), 324–44. Horvath, B., & Malin, I. (eds.) (2000). Pynchon and “Mason & Dixon.” Newark: University of Delaware Press. Hutcheon, L. (1988). A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge. Mead, C. (1989). Thomas Pynchon: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Materials. Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive. O’Donnell, P. (ed.) (1991). New Essays on “The Crying of Lot 49.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pynchon, T. (1959). Mortality and Mercy in Vienna. Epoch, 9(4),195–213. Pynchon, T. (1960). Togetherness. Aerospace Safety, 16(12), 6–8. Pynchon, T. (1963). V. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Pynchon, T. (1966a). The Crying of Lot 49. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Pynchon, T. (1966b). A Journey Into the Mind of Watts. New York Times Magazine, 34–5, 78, 80–2, 84 (June 12). Pynchon, T. (1973). Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking.
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Pynchon, T. (1983). Introduction. In R. Farina, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. v–xiv. Pynchon, T. (1984a). Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite? New York Times Book Review, 1, 40–1 (Oct. 28). Pynchon, T. (1984b). Slow Learner (intro. T. Pynchon). Boston: Little, Brown. (Includes the stories “The Small Rain,” “Low-Lands,” “Entropy,” “Under the Rose,” and “The Secret Integration”.) Pynchon, T. (1988). The Heart’s Eternal Vow. Review of Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcıa Marquez. New York Times Book Review, 1, 47, 49 (Apr. 10). Pynchon, T. (1990). Vineland. Boston: Little, Brown. Pynchon, T. (1992). Introduction. In D. Barthelme, The Teachings of Don B. (ed. K. Herzinger). New York: Turtle Bay, pp. xv–xxii. Pynchon, T. (1993). Nearer, My Couch, to Thee. New York Times Book Review, 3, 57 (June 6). Pynchon, T. (1997). Introduction. In J. Dodge, Stone Junction: An Alchemical Pot-Boiler. Edinburgh: Rebel, pp. vii–xii. Pynchon, T. (1997). Mason & Dixon. New York: Henry Holt. Pynchon, T. (2003). Foreword. In G. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. New York: Plume, pp. vii–xxvi. Pynchon, T. (2006). Against the Day. New York: Penguin. Pynchon, T. (2009). Inherent Vice. New York: Penguin. Pynchon Notes. (1979–). Schaub, T. (ed.) (2008). Approaches to Teaching Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49” and Other Works. New York: Modern Language Association. Weisenburger, S. (2006). A “Gravity’s Rainbow” Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel, 2nd edn. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
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Q Queer Modernism PAUL MORRISON
Modernism has become sexy again. Only yesterday, it seems, we were eager to relegate the likes of Eliot and Pound to the wrong side of a historical divide, the better to establish our postmodernist credentials. Today, however, the prefix is no longer a condition of our intellectual and ideological well-being, and we are again laboring to become Joyce’s contemporary. In a recent contribution to the “Changing Profession” forum in PMLA, Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz characterize this extraordinary transformation as an “expansion,” one that has metamorphosed even the object of study: where “modernism” once was, “modernisms” now are. According to Mao and Walkowitz, three broad areas of inquiry or interest define the newly pluralized field: (1) “The Transnational Turn,” (2) “Media in an Age of Mass Persuasion,” and (3) “Politics as Itself.” This seems broadly compelling, although there is little here that is either new or unique to the study of modernism. The old modernist studies, for instance, owe a great deal to the work of Hugh Kenner, which includes some important pages on “the mechanic muse,” and one might cite the centrality of Marshall McLuhan, himself a distinguished student of modernism, to any discussion of “media in an age of mass persuasion.” I would be hard-pressed, moreover, to name any field of literary or cultural studies that has not taken a “transnational turn” of late. It may be, of course, that the new modernist studies are simply keeping faith with the deepest impulses of
high modernism itself: “to make it new,” in the familiar paradox, is to recover what is very old. Certainly “expansion” is an impulse intrinsic to modernism, which is among the most imperial and imperializing of literary movements. It remains an open question, for instance, if postcolonial literature has escaped the hold of the Euromodernism that it might logically be expected to reject. The fidelity is not, however, absolute. What is resoundingly absent from Mao and Walkowitz’s survey of the new modernist studies is what may well define our modernity: the unprecedented explanatory power attributed to sexuality in general and sexual deviance in particular. The word “sexuality” appears only once in their article, the words “homosexual” and “queer” not at all, and the “Works Cited” is remarkable, at least in part, for what it fails to cite: Scott Herring’s Queering the Underworld (2007); Heather Love’s Feeling Backwards: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (2007); and Michael Trask’s Cruising Modernism (2003), to name but three. Apparently modernism has become sexy again by forgetting about sex. It does so, Eve Sedgwick argues, at its own peril: the “presiding master term of the past century, one that has the same, primary importance for all modern Western identity and social organization (and not merely for homosexual identity and culture),” has been the “chronic modern crisis of homo/heterosexual definition,” which has “affected our culture through its ineffaceable marking particularly of the categories secrecy/ disclosure, knowledge/ignorance, private/public, masculine/feminine, majority/minority” (11). The list might be extended almost indefinitely,
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and Sedgwick’s practical criticism – Epistemology of the Closet includes compelling readings of both proto- and high modernists – bears eloquent testimony to the structuring force of the crisis in modern sexual definition. But at a time when the new modernist studies seem curiously unconcerned with the “merely” sexual, it is the central premise of her book that bears emphasizing: “an understanding of virtually any aspect of Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition” (1). Foucault puts the matter simply: “Sex, the explanation for everything” (78). This does not mean, of course, that we are obliged to accept the specific terms in which our culture advances a hermeneutic of the sexual. Indeed, students of modernism invested in the explanatory power of sexuality can be divided, however provisionally, between those who work within the dominant psychosexual paradigm, if only to undermine it, and those who seek to resist its explanatory power. Joseph Boone’s magisterial Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (1998) is an instance of the former. It is Freud who codifies, if not invents, the overwhelming meaningfulness of the sexual for the modern world, and Boone discerns in Freud’s writing, particularly in “the early, brilliant postulation of the polymorphous perverse” (13), the possibility of both a poetics and politics of deviance. The “official” trajectory of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality clearly privileges heteronormativity – Freud’s highly labyrinthine text has been heralded as the first modernist novel – yet the official trajectory never quite recovers from the polymorphous perversity in which it originates. And so much the better, Boone argues: “a poetics of the perverse” teases out “formations analogous to the polymorphous perverse on the linguistic, stylistic, and structural levels of the text”; “a politics of the perverse,” in turn, construes the polymorphous as a viable model for adult sexuality, and not simply as a superseded stage in normative psychosexual development (13). Modernism itself renders any direct translation of the former into the latter problematic – poetic radicalism and reactionary politics frequently made for strange bedfellows – but the much vaunted “break with tradition” did seem to promise new
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possibilities for sexual expression. Forms of human experience hitherto marginalized or excluded from representation gained a new prominence, and homosexuality was positioned front and center. The nineteenth-century novel is dominated by the marriage plot; it instructs women in how to fall in love with the appropriate man. Its twentieth-century counterpart, however, finds it necessary to school woman in how to love men tout court. Colleen Lamos speaks of “deviant modernism,” but for Lukacs, the adjective is strictly redundant: modernism is by definition deviant, precisely in its elevation of “perversity” and “idiocy” into “types of the condition humaine” (32). Any number of individuals might be blamed for (or credited with) this perverse state of affairs: Baldwin, Barnes, Ginsberg, Crane, Stein, and Whitman, to name only a few. One thing, however, is certain: with the advent of modernism, the love that dare not speak its name can hardly hold its peace. For Boone, sexuality is irretrievably (and gloriously) liminal, contingent, and ambiguous; it always exceeds, both poetically and politically, any narrative that would seek to contain it, any structure that would seek to control it. Freud himself construes homo- and heterosexuality in non-binary terms, and in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, he explicitly opposes any attempt to separate “homosexuals from the rest of mankind as a group of a special character” (145n.1). For Foucault, however, such ambiguity is a functional component of the normalizing paradigm itself, and the modern “crisis” in homo/ heterosexual definition is really no crisis at all. On the contrary. It is the very precariousness of heterosexual identity, as Sedgwick argues in Between Men, that allows for the effective regulation of the many by the specific oppression of the few. Sexual ambiguity (is he or isn’t he?) sustains, rather than subverts, heteronormativity, which is all the more coercive for its strategic instability. Freud remains our culture’s most distinguished (if somewhat unwitting) theoretician of the liberatory potential of human sexuality, and the new science of the soul found a particularly enthusiastic welcome, the predictions of its founding father notwithstanding, in the New World. Even in America, however, psychoanalysis is no longer the only game in town, and Foucault remains deeply suspicious of liberatory claims made in the
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name of the sexual. If anything can be said to characterize the transformation in sexuality studies in the last few decades, it is the growing influence of Foucault, particularly the first volume of The History of Sexuality. Freud is our great theoretician of “the homosexual.” Foucault, as David Halperin suggests, is the patron “saint” of “the queer.” Foucault’s influence is not much in evidence in Mao and Walkowitz’s characterization of recent transformations in the field of modernist studies. I don’t mean to shoot the messengers – to survey the state of modernist studies is not to assume responsibility for it – yet if Foucault were a more central presence, the legitimacy of categories such as “Politics as Itself ” could not be so blithely assumed. This is not to denigrate the “growing interest” (which, again, is not unique to the new modernist studies) in “the conduct of politics in relatively naked rather than veiled forms,” in the actions of governments, “great men,” and the like. Indeed, the return to the concerns of an oldfangled historicism may well be a necessary supplement, as Mao and Walkowitz contend, to “broadly Foucauldian approaches to the subject’s fashioning by putatively apolitical institutions, experts, and norms” (745). But as no such approaches are ever discussed, “Politics-as-Itself ” seems very much like “Politics-as-Usual.” State oppression remains a very real fact and force – this is, after all, the America of the PATRIOT Act – but to think power only with the king or president, only in terms of its most obvious accoutrements and manifestations, is to think power in the very terms power itself would have us think. Modernism has long been associated with what E. M. Forster terms “the secret life, which each of us lives privately, and to which (in his characters) the novelist has access” (113). And nothing, at least to us, seems as deeply private, as completely prepolitical or apolitical, as our sexuality. A broadly Foucauldian approach to the subject’s fashioning openly acknowledges the felt reality of this “secret life,” even as it insists that what is experienced as pure interiority, as the pre- or apolitical, is itself an effect of power, an “implantation” or “inscription” from without that is thereafter experienced as an originating impulse from within. Modernism and homosexuality come into being at roughly the same historical moment (the term “homo-sexuality” made its English-
language debut in 1892; “heterosexuality” followed shortly thereafter), and the early decades of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of various “Homosexual Rights Movements.” To his credit, Freud was committed to the repeal of paragraph 175 of the German penal code, the anti-sodomy statue, and his opposition to “separating off homosexuals as a group of a special character” was clearly principled. Freud, however, no longer exercises a monopoly hold over the field, and here too we have experienced something of a historical divide: “Homosexual Rights Movements” have, for the most part, given way to queer activism. To put the matter (much too) schematically: the Freudian homosexual seeks at least some minimal guarantee of basic civil liberties through recourse to “Politics as Itself ” or “Politics-as-Usual,” which includes “the right to representation.” Foucault, however, focuses on the putatively apolitical construction of identity categories, among which homosexuality occupies a privileged (for want of a better term) position. And homosexual emancipation is to Freud (or neoFreudians in the tradition of Marcuse) as queer activism is to Foucault. The former works within the political sphere narrowly or conventionally defined; the latter resists the normalizing imperatives that are broadly disseminated throughout a variety of cultural practices and suppositions. The turn to Foucault in sexuality studies does not, then, displace the centrality that modernism traditionally affords “the secret life.” It does, however, transform our understanding of its politics. Certainly it is telling – and the politics of “telling” are very much at issue here – that My Secret Life is the title of a late-nineteenth-century sexual memoir, a precursor of our modern literature of the scandalous. Convention, if not common sense, encourages us to celebrate its anonymous author as a fugitive from a repressive Victorianism – D. H. Lawrence in latenineteenth-century drag. Foucault, however, argues otherwise. The “nameless Englishman” is in fact thoroughly modern, and never more so than when he mistakes “the incitement to discourse,” the broad cultural imperative to confess all, for the exercise of freedom (22). The “right” to representation is conventionally held to be a positive good, and modernism is routinely celebrated for its inclusion of the socially marginal and the sexually deviant. But again,
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Foucault questions the conventional wisdom. A disciplinary society requires precisely the unfettered access to the soul that modern literature provides, and it has a particular investment in ferreting out the pervert, actual or potential, lurking within. Mao and Walkowitz note that the new modernist studies approach “works by members of marginalized social groups” with “fresh eyes and ears” (738). To which I would add, somewhat unfairly: a disciplinary society has “eyes and ears” in abundance, which are disproportionately attuned to the sexually deviant. What are termed, appropriately enough, the modern “disciplines” of knowledge – psychology, sociology, pedagogy, and cultural anthropology, among others – are only too eager to position the perverse as the objects of a coercive and normalizing knowledge. Frantz Fanon is rather less pessimistic. Like Mao and Walkowitz, he argues for an “expansion” of a conventional field of inquiry – in this case, psychoanalysis – the better to understand the alienation of the socially marginal: “Reacting against the constitutionalist tendency of the late nineteenth century, Freud insisted that the individual factor be taken into account through psychoanalysis. He substituted for a phylogenetic the ontogenetic perspective. It will be seen that the black man’s alienation is not an individual question. Beside phylogeny and ontogeny stands sociogeny” (11). Point well taken, although it should also be noted that the alienation of gays and lesbians is likewise irreducible to “the individual factor.” Any “expansion” of the field of inquiry beyond “the individual factor” needs to acknowledge, however, that the very category of the “individual” is “always already” an ideological construct. Psychoanalysis is a “sociogeny,” and all the more effectively so for its strategic indifference to social factors not directly bound to the Oedipal family. There is a sense, however, in which all this is purely speculative. We have not in fact “expanded” beyond the explanatory power of the psychosexual, which, despite its apparent marginalization within “the new modernist studies,” is still too much with us. Consider, for instance, “the transnational turn” noted by Mao and Walkowitz, the thoroughly laudable attempt to assimilate the insights and concerns of postcolonial theory. As it turns out, however, there is a pervert around every turn; even here, the explanatory power of (homo)sex-
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uality holds sway. In Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer (1958), for instance, a privileged white body – Sebastian Venable, a paradigmatic homosexual aesthete – travels to a mythical Cabeza de Lobo in order to sample the local rough trade. In effect, colonialism is gay sexual slumming on the down low. (Suddenly, Last Summer is unique only in that what happens in Cabeza de Lobo does not stay in Cabeza de Lobo.) And if homosexuality fuels the colonial project, it is also the disastrous repercussion of it. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon claims that he cannot “establish the overt presence of homosexuality in Martinique”; only Europeanized Martinicans “become homosexuals,” and then always “passive” (180n.44). Had he traveled to Williams’ non-existent Spanish town, he might have established that only Americanized Latinos become homosexual, and then always cannibalistic. The boys of Cabeza de Lobo are “contingent” perverts in Freud’s sense of the term; were it not for the corrupting influence of the gay sexual tourist, they would have continued in the happy, heterosexual life that God and nature intended for them. But such is only half the story: the sexual deviance that America routinely exports to the rest of the world is itself imported into America from abroad. Thus Dr. La Forest Potter, the author of the once popular Strange Loves: A Study in Sexual Abnormalities (1933), claims that he cannot establish the presence, overt or otherwise, of homosexuality in anything indigenously American; sexual deviance is a foreign contamination, a disastrous repercussion of America’s involvement in the Great War. Cold War rhetoric tended to figure homosexuality as a distinctly communist threat, an alien invasion from without; communism, in turn, figured homosexuality as a fascist and/or bourgeois aberration. Logic rebels, but then logic has never been an obstacle to the smooth workings of homophobia, which is only too pleased to grant homosexuality virtually unlimited explanatory power. (In fairness to Williams, I should add that Suddenly, Last Summer seems to me an exploration of this murderous illogic rather than an instance of it.) There is a sense, then, in which Sedgwick’s caution might seem unnecessary: modernism may have become sexy again by forgetting about sex, but there is little danger that any “aspect of Western culture,” including contact with its mythic or demonized
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Other, will not be structured by the homo/hetero divide. Epistemology of the Closet calls, however, for a “critical analysis” of the divide, not simply ritualistic recourse to its explanatory power. This, sadly, may have to await a new new modernist studies. SEE ALSO: Critical Theory and Fiction (WF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Boone, J. A. (1998). Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cole, M. (2003). The Other Orpheus: A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality. New York: Routledge. Fanon, F. (1967). Black Skin, White Masks (trans. Charles Lam Markmann). New York: Grove. Forster, E. M. (1927). Aspects of the Novel. London: Arnold. Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (trans. Robert Hurley). New York: Vintage. Freud, S. (1953–74). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (trans. James Strachey). London: Hogarth. Halperin, D. (1995). Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. New York: Oxford University Press. Hermann, A. C. (2000). Queering the Moderns: Poses/ Portraits/Performances. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Herring, S. (2007). Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kenner, H. (1988). The Mechanic Muse. New York: Oxford University Press. Lamos, C. (1999). Deviant Modernism: Sexual and Textual Errancy in T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levin, J. (1991). The Gay Novel in America. New York: Garland. Love, H. (2007). Feeling Backwards: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lukacs, G. (1964). Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle (trans. J. Mander & N. Mander). New York: Harper and Row. Mao, D., & Walkowitz, R.L. (2008). The New Modernist Studies. PMLA, 123(3), 737–48. Martin, R. K. (1979). The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry. Austin: University of Texas Press. Potter, L. F. (1933). Strange Loves: A Study in Sexual Abnormalities. New York: Dodsley. Savran, D. (2003). A Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextualizing American Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Sedgwick, E. K. (1985). Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press. Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press. Trask, M. (2003). Cruising Modernism: Class and Sexuality in American Literature and Social Thought. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Woods, G. (1987). Articulate Flesh: Male Homoeroticism in Modern Poetry. New Haven: Yale University Press.
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R Rand, Ayn MIMI REISEL GLADSTEIN
Ayn Rand is a novelist and philosopher whose works, though often dismissed by the mainstream critical establishment, continue to sell well more than a generation after her death. Rand wrote romantic fiction that championed individualism, freedom, and laissez-faire capitalism; her philosophy inspired adherents in the political and business worlds. Rand’s abilities as a creative writer are all the more remarkable when one realizes that English was not her native language. Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia on February 2, 1905. She graduated from the University of Leningrad (formerly St. Petersburg) with a degree in history, and then attended the State Institute for Cinematography in Leningrad to learn screenwriting. Always an independent thinker, Rand was fortunate to be able to leave Soviet Russia to visit family in Chicago; she never returned. Unlike some immigrants who retain a nostalgia for their mother countries, Rand abhorred Russia and was a committed US patriot, calling the United States “the noblest country in the history of men” in her breakthrough novel, The Fountainhead (1943, 715). Rand fought all her life against the various collectivist forces that worked to change the individualistic and capitalistic character of the country. Rand’s professional success began with the sale of a film script, Red Pawn, to Universal Studios. Red Pawn is the story of a beautiful woman who becomes the mistress of a prison camp commandant to be near her jailed
husband. This plot pattern is replicated in her first novel, We the Living (1936b), whose heroine becomes the mistress of a communist hero to save her non-communist lover. Publication of The Fountainhead marked the beginning of Rand’s transition from creative writer to leader of the intellectual movement known as “objectivism.” The novel’s plot begins the day the hero, Howard Roark, is expelled from architecture school and ends with his triumph over the forces of conformity and the derivative in architecture as he completes his masterwork, the tallest building in New York City. Readers have noted some resemblances to Frank Lloyd Wright; indeed, after the success of the novel, Wright designed Rand and her husband a home that they never built. Readers of The Fountainhead were drawn to Rand’s strong theme of individualism, of the importance of integrity of both design and spirit. Rand inveighs against parasitism and second-handers. Among fans of The Fountainhead who met with Rand to discuss her ideas as she prepared Atlas Shrugged were those who helped her to spark objectivism. Key among them were Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, who founded an institute in their name that taught Rand’s philosophy, first locally and then nationwide. Perhaps the most internationally famous member of the objectivist group was later Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who credits Rand as a strong influence in his life. After Rand’s 1968 break with the Brandens, Leonard Peikoff became Rand’s heir and founded the Ayn Rand Institute. Atlas Shrugged (1957) is Rand’s final presentation of her philosophy in fiction, and offers her
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climactic vision of the ideal man. Originally titled The Strike, the plot follows a strike of the world’s capable and productive people, who refuse to continue carrying everyone else on their shoulders while they remain unappreciated and often abused. Rand peoples her plot with characters from a great variety of professions, from lobbyists to composers. Detractors have referred to Atlas Shrugged as the “Bible” of objectivism. Certainly, it is a comprehensive analysis of many social ills and a guide to reform. Dagny Taggart is the railroad-running protagonist whose romantic liaisons with Francisco D’Anconia, heir to a mining fortune, and Hank Rearden, inventor of a revolutionary metal, precede her discovery of John Galt, the strike leader and Rand’s ideal man. Many individualist feminists see Dagny as a rarity in American fiction, an assertive, independent, and successful businesswoman. Rand compiled her major philosophical speeches from her fiction into For the New Intellectual (1961), her first non-fiction publication, whose introduction presents an overview of her interpretation of those forces that had historically undermined human happiness: “Attila” and “the witch doctor,” or force and faith. During the 1960s and 1970s, Rand continued to publish non-fiction works, including her last published work, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (1979). Ayn Rand died in 1982. Her legacy is an active intellectual movement that attracts adherents from a diverse range of interests and professions. The Ayn Rand Institute, based in California, and the Atlas Society (formerly the Objectivist Center), based in Washington, DC, promote her influence and ideas. Her theories are taught in business ethics classes, as well as in philosophy, literature, political science, and economics courses. The Cato Institute, a Washington, DC Libertarian think tank, is a key supporter of Rand’s legacy.
Rand, A. (1938). Anthem. London: Cassell. Rand, A. (1943). The Fountainhead. New York: Bobbs-Merrill. Rand, A. (1957). Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House. Rand, A. (1961). For the New Intellectual. New York: Random House. Rand, A. (1964). The Virtue of Selfishness. New York: New American Library. Rand, A. (1966). Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New York: New American Library. Rand, A. (1969). The Romantic Manifesto. New York: World. Rand, A. (1971). The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. New York: New American Library. Rand, A. (1979). Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. New York: New American Library. Rand, A. (1982). Philosophy: Who Needs It. New York: Bobbs-Merrill. Rand, A. (1999). Return of the Primitive: The AntiIndustrial Revolution, exp. edn. (intro. P. Schwartz, New York: Meridian. Branden, B. (1986). The Passion of Ayn Rand. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Branden, B. & Branden, N. (1962). Who Is Ayn Rand? New York: Random House. Branden, N. (1999). My Years With Ayn Rand. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Den Uyl, D., & Rasmussen, D. (eds.) (1984). The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Gladstein, M. R. (1999). The New Ayn Rand Companion, rev. and updated ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Gladstein, M. R., & Sciabarra, C. M. (eds.) (1999). Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand. University Park: Penn State University Press. Machan, T. (1999). Ayn Rand. New York: Peter Lang. Merrill, R. E. (1991). The Ideas of Ayn Rand. La Salle, IL: Open Court. Sciabarra, C. M. (1995). Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. University Park: Penn State University Press. Younkins, E. W. (ed.) (2007). Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”: A Philosophical and Literary Companion. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF)
Rechy, John
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Rand, A. (1936a). Night of January 16th. New York: Longman. Rand, A. (1936b). We the Living. New York: Macmillan.
MICHAEL P. MORENO
A prolific writer from the gay and Chicano communities, John Rechy has redefined the American narrative of the late twentieth century by crossing literary genres and challenging cultural perceptions. His many novels, which often
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blur autobiography with fiction, possess a cinematic quality that reveals the underside of urban spaces and the search for one’s identity. Since the late 1950s, Rechy has actively transformed and articulated the way outsiders, particularly homosexuals, have been perceived throughout the United States. Born in El Paso, Texas on March 10, 1934 to Scottish and Mexican American parents, John Rechy rose to prominence with his first novel, City of Night (1963), which explores the world of young hustlers on urban streets, and its sequel, Numbers (1967), which examines the role of desire and sexuality for the gay male. Drawing from his own experiences in the gay community, Rechy addresses how identities are generated not only by the people one encounters, but also through the alienation of the city itself. The lonely street corners and cold alleyways of the urban landscape reflect the emptiness and desire in so many of Rechy’s characters. This Day’s Dying (1969) further underscores this tension by illustrating how the justice system criminalizes homosexuals and their behavior, while The Coming of the Night (1999) celebrates the final vestiges of sexual promiscuity on the eve of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. Most of Rechy’s writing transpires in Los Angeles and emphasizes the importance this region has in articulating gay culture. With its fragmented neighborhoods, weblike freeways, and body-conscious behavior, Los Angeles is a unique space that constantly challenges and changes identities, and where the gay community is both at home and in exile from mainstream America. Rechy’s ability to recapture the many worlds of the gay community extends into other genres and themes as well. The Vampires (1971) and The Fourth Angel (1972) are rich gothic narratives in which Edgar Allan Poe-like images of beauty and death are at the core of human depravity and victimization. His writing has often been called cinematic, employing film terminology and images from scene to scene. This is evident in works such as his non-fictional piece The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary (1977), which intertwines the homophobia of the legal system with exploits in a sexual underground. Likewise, Rushes (1979) and Bodies and Souls (1983) present an eclectic cast of characters whose choreographed encounters throughout darker regions
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of Los Angeles reveal erotic dimensions to the cityscape. Fascinated by the rituals of Hollywood epics and the role of the fallen woman in Western history, Rechy explores how the search for redemption and empowerment is integral in redefining the postmodernist female in the late twentieth century. In Marilyn’s Daughter (1988), he resurrects the memory of Marilyn Monroe through her fictional daughter who comes to Hollywood to investigate if she is the progeny of this tragic woman and Bobby Kennedy. The Miraculous Day of Amalia G omez (1991) focuses on a Mexican American divorcee whose desire to witness an apparition of the Virgin Mary takes her throughout the film-like spaces of Los Angeles. Hidden from the high, surveilling walls of the nearby Fox Studio and in the shadow of the Hollywood Freeway, Amalia G omez’s noir-like world possesses nothing of the glamour and miraculousness resonate with the legacy of “Tinsel Town.” Continuing with the theme of redemption, Our Lady of Babylon (1996) cross-examines the many tragic women from history, including Medea, Mary Magdalene, and La Malinche, and rewrites their narratives into ones that animate rather than erase the female identity. His most recent works, which include The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens (2003); Beneath the Skin: The Collected Essays of John Rechy (2004); and About My Life and the Kept Women: A Memoir (2008), continue to demonstrate how the richness of criss-crossing genres reveals not only the complexity of the American identity, but also his ability to re-create literary conventions. By generating voices that shift from memoir, to film, to fiction – often within the same narrative – Rechy articulates a language that reflects the continual flux and mobility in his characters’ lives and the places they inhabit. Among the many honors accorded John Rechy over the years are the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997, the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle in 1999, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. He currently lives in Los Angeles and teaches literature and film at the University of Southern California. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Queer Modernism (AF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bredbeck, G.W. (1993). John Rechy. In E. S. Nelson (ed.) Contemporary Gay American Novelists. Westport, CT: Greenwood, pp. 340–51. Canning, R. (2001). Gay Fiction Speaks: Conversations With Gay Novelists. New York: Columbia University Press. Casillo, C. (2002). Outlaw: The Lives and Careers of John Rechy. Los Angeles: Advocate. Christian, K. (1997). Show and Tell: Identity as Performance in U.S. Latina/o Fiction. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Giles, J. (1974). Religious Alienation and “Homosexual Consciousness” in City of Night and Go Tell It on the Mountain. College English, 36(3), 369–80. Rechy, J. (1963). City of Night. New York: Grove. Rechy, J. (1967). Numbers. New York: Grove. Rechy, J. (1969). This Day’s Death. New York: Grove. Rechy, J. (1971). The Vampires. New York: Grove. Rechy, J. (1972). The Fourth Angel. London: Allen. Rechy, J. (1977). The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary. New York: Grove. Rechy, J. (1979). Rushes. New York: Grove. Rechy, J. (1983). Bodies and Souls. New York: Carroll and Graf. Rechy, J. (1988). Marilyn’s Daughter. New York: Carroll and Graf. Rechy, J. (1991). The Miraculous Day of Amalia G omez. New York: Little, Brown. Rechy, J. (1996). Our Lady of Babylon. New York: Arcade. Rechy, J. (1999). The Coming of the Night. New York: Grove Press. Rechy, J. (2003). The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens. New York: Grove. Rechy, J. (2004). Beneath the Skin: The Collected Essays of John Rechy. New York: Carroll and Graf. Rechy, J. (2008). About My Life and the Kept Women: A Memoir. New York: Grove.
Reed, Ishmael ANDREW STROMBECK
An innovative, prolific, and always interesting writer, Ishmael Reed is as famous for his fusions of postmodern metafiction and African American culture as for his clashes with African American feminists over the question of a persecuted African American male. He has been equally influential, though, as a promoter of multicultural literature of all stripes, lending support to younger writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko and Toni Cade Bambara.
Reed is associated with the Black Arts Movement, though his participation is far less singular than that of leaders like Amiri Baraka, and Reed has distanced himself from the movement’s more agitprop strains in works like Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969). Raised in the Buffalo area, Reed attended the University of Buffalo. His penchant for controversy emerged early on; one of Reed’s first jobs was at a Buffalo radio station, where an interview with Malcolm X resulted in his show’s cancellation. Reed moved to New York’s Lower East Side in the early 1960s, where he became associated with the Umbra poetry workshop, a group which shaped the emergence of the Black Arts Movement. The multicultural, community-based Umbra provides a blueprint for the tireless work Reed has done on behalf of younger, and especially minority, writers, through the Before Columbus Foundation and the Yardbird publishing house. While Reed published a stream of poetry during the early 1960s, and has continued to publish poetry since, The Freelance Pallbearers (1967) marked Reed’s emergence onto the national literary scene as a novelist with an original voice. Experimental, satiric, but rooted in African American folk and literary cultures, Reed’s novels evidence equally the trickster tradition of Yoruba religion, Nathaniel West’s absurdism, Chester Himes’s hard-boiled detective fiction, and Ralph Ellison’s modernism. Mumbo Jumbo (1972) has been generally praised as his best work, particularly by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who ended his Signifying Monkey with a chapter which positions Mumbo Jumbo as fulfilling four centuries of African American literary production. Dense with allusions to everything from the Harlem Renaissance to Masonic ritual to Warren Harding’s rumored West Indian lineage, Mumbo Jumbo sets a vibrant Third World culture against a hidebound Western culture; the latter emerges as all-powerful but doomed to fail. His fiction addresses topics from slave narratives (Flight to Canada (1976)) to the selfish public cultures of the Reagan years (The Terrible Twos (1980)) to westerns (Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969)). Critics link Reed’s style with improvisational jazz, but also with African religions and their New World variants, particularly Voodoo, which has played some role in almost all of
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Reed’s fiction. Mumbo Jumbo, in many ways, sets a pattern that holds in Reed’s work: a group of outsiders struggles against a quasi-conspiratorial force, with solving the “mystery” of this conspiracy serving as the plot engine for Reed’s novels. Reed brilliantly draws on the paranoia and eclecticism of conspiracy lore to depict a world in which “Virginia is everywhere,” as a fugitive slave in Flight to Canada puts it, a world in which African Americans, especially males, continually face persecution and death. In postmodern style, Reed deploys anachronism, juxtaposition, allusion, and caricature to capture a shifting post-1960s cultural landscape. In the mid-1980s, Reed clashed with African American feminist Michelle Wallace over what Wallace saw as the misogynistic content of Reed’s 1986 novel Reckless Eyeballing, which positions feminists as a conspiratorial force that stifles African American male creativity. The episode, focused on one of Reed’s minor works, sometimes promotes the impression that Reed is straightforwardly misogynist, a characterization that belies his work’s complicated category challenging and ignores the complex historical relationship between feminism and civil rights. Nevertheless, in repeatedly decrying African American male persecution, often with a personal bent, Reed has provided much fodder for his critics. If at times cantankerous, Reed is a unique figure who emphasizes the multiplicity and hybridity of African American culture. Like his predecessor Himes, and contemporaries Samuel Delaney and Octavia Butler, Reed pushes the boundaries for what is “acceptable” for African American literature, situating African American culture within a wide range of popular, consumer, and literary cultures. His work stands as a key interface between the largely white “metafiction” of Pynchon (who cites Reed in Gravity’s Rainbow), Barthes, and others and post-1960s “identity” literature. Recent work has begun to wrest Reed out of the metafiction/identity literature categories, demonstrating his novels’ relevance to postcolonial and folklorist concerns, especially in terms of Reed’s use of Voodoo. SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Davis, R.M. (1983). Scatting the Myths: Ishmael Reed. Arizona Quarterly. 39(4), 406–20. Dick, B. & Singh, A. (eds.) (1995). Conversations With Ishmael Reed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Ebbesen, J. (2006). Postmodernism and Its Others: The Fiction of Ishmael Reed, Kathy Acker, and Don DeLillo. New York: Routledge. Fox, R. E. (1987). Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany. New York: Greenwood. Gates, H. L. Jr. (1988). The Signifying Monkey. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGee, P. (1997). Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race. New York: St. Martin’s. Reed, I. (1967). The Freelance Pallbearers. New York: Doubleday. Reed, I. (1969). Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. New York: Doubleday. Reed, I. (1972). Mumbo Jumbo. New York: Atheneum. Reed, I. (1974). The Last Days of Louisiana Red. New York: Random House. Reed, I. (1976). Flight to Canada. New York: Random House. Reed, I. (1978). Shrovetide in Old New Orleans. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Reed, I. (1980). The Terrible Twos. New York: St. Martin’s. Reed, I. (1986). Reckless Eyeballing. New York: St. Martin’s. Reed, I. (1988). Writin’ Is Fightin’: Thirty-Seven Years of Boxing on Paper. New York: Atheneum. Reed, I. (1989). The Terrible Threes. New York: Atheneum. Reed, I. (1993). Japanese by Spring. New York: Atheneum. Reed, I. (2008). Mixing It Up: Taking on the Media Bullies and Other Reflections. Philadelphia: Da Capo.
The Road Novel ANDREW S. GROSS
The road novel is the automotive version of the journey narrative, borrowing elements from its two major variants: the romance or noble quest and the picaresque with its chance encounters and roguish characters. American automobilists recall pioneer figures like Leatherstocking and Huck Finn who seek to escape civilization by “lighting out for the Territory”; they also follow
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in the footsteps of the peripatetic speaker in Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road” who finds freedom, companionship, and insight on the highway. Sinclair Lewis’s Free Air (1919), the first road novel, draws on these traditions in establishing the defining theme of the genre: the technologized escape from the constraints of civilization to the freedom of the open road. This flight is also the central paradox of the genre since drivers, in their dependence on automotive technology, bring with them the civilization they flee. The road novel became a popular genre in the 1950s, when growing affluence made it possible for the majority of Americans to own automobiles and President Eisenhower backed the largest freewaybuilding project in history. The most famous example is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), which adapts Huck’s “lighting out” to the Beat philosophy of “dropping out.” Kerouac’s journey inspired road trips by a number of literary dropouts, including Ken Kesey, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Robert Pirsig, and William Least Heat-Moon, most of whom recorded their experiences in non-fiction narratives or travelogues. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) and John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960), both structured around road trips, are the other major statements of the immediate postwar period. More recent examples tend to emphasize the difficulties or dangers of travel in an overtechnologized society rather than the traditional theme of escape. The dominant contemporary image is not the open road but the traffic-clogged interstate system, for instance in Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays (1970) and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003). Stephen King’s Christine (1983) treats this danger as the stuff of horror when an automobile comes to life as an avenging demon. Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road (2006) envisions pedestrian travel along the abandoned highways of a civilization destroyed by its own technology. The earliest automobile narratives were factual accounts of journeys doubling as advertisements. Horatio Nelson Jackson’s From Ocean to Ocean in a Winton (1903), describing the first American transcontinental automobile trip and mentioning the manufacturer’s name in the title, is paradigmatic. Established writers also concentrated on non-fiction narration, which the wondrous new technology seemed to render fantastic enough.
The first sentence of Edith Wharton’s A MotorFlight Through France (1904) sums up the prevalent attitude: “The motor-car has restored the romance of travel” (1). Henry James devotes passages to automobile outings in The American Scene (1907); Theodore Dreiser’s A Hoosier Holiday (1916) documents the author’s journey to his birthplace; and Emily Post, who would later become famous as a writer on etiquette, published a widely read account of a transcontinental trip in By Motor to the Golden Gate (1916). After 1913, when Ford invented the assembly line and planning began for the first transcontinental highway – the famous Lincoln Highway – the number of automobile-related publications, advertisements, and popular songs multiplied. It was in this mass production phase of “America’s love affair with the automobile” that writers turned to romance as a literary convention, and the road novel was born. Free Air is the fictionalized account of Lewis’s 1916 honeymoon trip in a Model T. The novel’s heroine is the eastern socialite Claire Boltwood, who gains her independence as she motors west, ultimately falling in love with a Midwestern mechanic who teaches her how to operate her automobile. The “free air” is advertised by gas stations along the way; however, it is also the substance Claire breathes on what Lewis calls her “voyage into democracy.” The title thus combines commerce (civilization) and freedom in a manner typical for the genre. It is significant that Lewis’s protagonist is a woman; cars helped many wealthier women break out of traditional roles by providing them with the means to escape the constraints of the household. The automobile, however, also poses a threat to freedom – one not immediately evident to drivers excited by the journey. Claire discovers she is on a “voyage into democracy” in Gopher Prairie, the fictional town that would serve as the setting of Lewis’s next novel, Main Street (1920). This is the first anti-road novel, and it demonstrates how automobiles become part of a new consumer culture homogenizing American life so that “Main Street is the continuation of Main Streets everywhere” (n.p.). The tension between the personal freedom promised by the new technology and its social and later ecological impact would preoccupy all subsequent road and antiroad novels.
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Automobiles begin to play a central role in the fiction of the 1920s. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), for instance, driving is an index of personal morality, and a stretch of suburban roadway between the wealthy suburbs and the city is the primary setting of violence and betrayal. The wealthy Tom and Daisy Buchanan are careless people, and the damage they inflict through cars, ruining a poor auto mechanic and running down his wife, is emblematic of the “foul dust” floating in the wake of Gatsby’s dream, which is the American dream. The novels of the Great Depression are less concerned with the moral significance of driving than with its economic impact. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is a road novel with a social conscience, depicting a group of Dust Bowl farmers migrating in old jalopies to the promised land of California. This land is fruitful but unwelcoming, dominated by agro-businesses interested only in exploiting cheap labor. The jalopies that transport the farmers prove in a way to be their undoing, as they are one species of the technology (the other being Caterpillar tractors) rendering rural forms of community obsolete. However, mobility also promises a new form of political mobilization, bringing together disparate people in a common struggle for workers’ rights. John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy (1930, 1932, 1936) presents a more pessimistic view of life on the road. The intersecting stories of the trilogy are framed by the wanderings of Vag (for vagabond), who remains an outcast “beside the speeding traffic” of a society that has no place for him. A form of vagrancy (bus travel) does provide a new vision of solidarity in Nathan Asch’s travelogue The Road: In Search of America (1937). Asch also worked as an editor for the WPA Guidebook to America series, an unprecedented New Deal project putting hundreds of writers to work on guidebooks for every state in the nation. The American Guides represent automobile tourism as a patriotic duty. Henry Miller’s Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945), on the other hand, is a travelogue with a bad conscience, pessimistic about American culture, especially consumer culture, including the automobile that Miller reluctantly drives. Kerouac’s On the Road displays striking similarities to Miller’s travelogue. The protagonist, Sal Paradise, is a fictional version of the author, who criss-crossed the country in the 1940s and 1950s,
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often with or in pursuit of the famous vagabond Neal Cassady, who would later drive a bus for Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. (These journeys are depicted in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test [1968] and Kesey’s The Further Inquiry [1990]). Cassady is the model for Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty, a compulsive vagabond and highly skilled driver who nevertheless drives his cars – as he does his relationships – to pieces. Sal recognizes the dangers of automobile travel and, in contrast to Dean, is a poor driver himself, often opting to hitchhike or take a bus. Safety is less the issue here than the significance of travel in a highly mobile society. The more Sal travels, the more he loses sight of his destination, and his tone becomes melancholic as he laments the country that seems to disappear under his wheels. Early critics of the Beats focused on the ambiguity of their travels, arguing that the primary difference between “dropping out” and tourism is the price of the hotels and the quality of the cars. If the Beats display the contradictions of all subsequent countercultural movements – an uncomfortable intimacy with the culture being criticized – they also articulate what has become the preeminent site and demographic of contemporary rebellion. Since the 1950s, revolutions have moved from the picket lines to the open road, and their protagonists are not the disenfranchised but the young. The road became such a powerful symbol of youth and freedom that even novels concerned with fitting in rather than dropping out turned to it in the negative. John Barth’s The End of the Road (1958) and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road (1961) represent conformity as the opposite of the journey – something ironically signaled in their titles. John Updike’s Rabbit, Run fuses the road and anti-road novel; the main character, who in sequels would become a car dealer, drives away from the responsibilities of marriage and a job only to recognize the futility of flight when he hears the same songs on radio stations everywhere. Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley in Search of America (1960) is a non-fiction elegy for the author’s lost youth and for the solidarity depicted in The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck fears that the freeway system, and all it represents, has sacrificed the old, progressive America to the dictates of efficiency and speed; the mobility that once promised social mobilization now leads to individua-
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tion, which might mean independence for the young but threatens the elderly with isolation. Lolita presents the generational conflicts of the road more lyrically and disturbingly than perhaps any other novel. Humbert Humbert, the firstperson narrator, is a European immigrant obsessed with pre-pubescent girls and as dismissive of American culture as he is impressed with the landscape. He kidnaps the young Lolita and then drives across the country, first in flight from prying eyes and then, when she escapes with another older man, in pursuit. Perversion and tourism intertwine in a journey whose twin topoi are the virgin territory of the fabled American continent and the youth culture of American consumerism. The novel establishes a parallel between the landscape and Lolita’s body, and Humbert’s feverish geographical and sexual explorations inspire him to long lists of place names, intertwined with medical and guidebook descriptions, that surprisingly transform banality and perversion into beauty. The ultimate tone, however, is one of despair, as Humbert defiles Lolita and the continent they have been traversing in his lustful attempts to possess them. Joyce Carol Oates’s story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (1966) approaches the road from a Lolita-like perspective. Dedicated to Bob Dylan, it depicts a girl’s kidnapping by a pair of young rebels who turn out to be older men. Oates makes it clear that her protagonist, Connie, is forcibly “seduced” by an adult-driven youth culture, which (like Humbert) tries to act young in order to exploit the young. However, when Connie drives off with the threatening figures in their jalopy, she also discovers possibilities in “the vast sunlit reaches of the land” (31) opening before her. More recent examples of the road narrative tend to emphasize the dangers over the promise of driving, although John Haskell’s American Purgatorio (2004) and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild (1996; film 2007), the former a novel and the latter a non-fiction book and subsequently a film, do represent a nostalgic (if morbid) return to the romance of dropping out. The film adaptation is significant; in recent years the road genre has become primarily visual; novels have given way to TV shows such as Route 66 and Charles Kuralt’s On the Road series for CBS News, and movies such as Easy Rider, Cannonball Run, Smokey and the
Bandit, Convoy, Kalifornia, Thelma and Louise, Lost Highway, and Smoke Signals. Smoke Signals is based on the short story “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona” (1993) by Sherman Alexie, a Spokane–Coeur d’Alene Indian. However, comparatively few road narratives have been written by Native Americans or people of color, who more often appear as sidekicks or local attractions in books by white authors. This has to do with the differential economics and geographies of automobility. Cars are not available to everyone, not all roads or destinations are accessible to all drivers, and what constitutes a thruway for those with access to transportation is a barrier for those without. African Americans, for instance, could not simply drive anywhere for much of the previous century, as is evidenced by the special travel guides (called Green Books) informing black drivers where it was safe to stop for food, gas, and lodging. The risks for black drivers are depicted in E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975), a novel describing how black jazz musician Coalhouse Walker’s car is destroyed by racists. The differential geographies of driving are also evident in African American travel narratives that just miss being road books. Zora Neale Hurston, whose autobiographical Dust Tracks on the Road (1942) might suggest automobility, depicts the author behind the wheel only when she is chauffeuring her wealthy white patron. Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is also a journey narrative, but one in which selfdiscovery is linked to disappointment and technological regression; the heroine who sets out in love and in a car returns from her travels on foot and alone. There is an analogous trajectory in the writings of Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man (1952) is a picaresque novel, yet when the main character sits behind the wheel, it is to chauffeur a white patron of his college. By the end he goes underground at the same time that his white contemporaries, the Beats, were setting off on journeys. The short story “Cadillac Flambe” (1973), projected to be a part of the second novel Ellison never completed, depicts a jazz musician who is shocked by a broadcast interview in which a US senator calls the kind of Cadillac he has worked hard to afford a “coon cage.” To protest the racist epithet, which imprisons him in the vehicle
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supposed to liberate him, he sets his car on fire on the senator’s front lawn. It is such anti-road narratives, told from the perspective of racial difference or ecological disaster, that reveal those invisible barriers in the landscape – social, political, environmental – repressed by the myth of the open road. Although this myth is perhaps the most popular element of the genre, it is also an artifact of the road book’s early affiliation with advertising. SEE ALSO: Border Fictions (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Noir Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Acosta, O. Z. (1972). The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. San Francisco: Straight Arrow. Alexie, S. (1993). This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona. In The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Asch, N. (1937). The Road: In Search of America. New York: Norton. Barth, J. (1958). The End of the Road. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Bliss, C. S. (1972). Autos Across America: A Bibliography of Transcontinental Automobile Travel: 1903–1940. Los Angeles: Dawson’s Bookshop. DeLillo, D. (2003). Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner’s. Dickstein, M. (1999). On and Off the Road: The Outsider as Young Rebel. In S. Bercovitch (ed.), The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 7. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Didion, J. (1970). Play It as It Lays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Doctorow, E. L. (1975). Ragtime. New York: Random House. Dos Passos, J. (1938). U.S.A. New York: Harcourt Brace. Dreiser, T. (1916). A Hoosier Holiday. New York: Lane. Ellison, R. (1952). Invisible Man. New York: Random House. Ellison, R. (1973). Cadillac Flambe. American Review, 16, 249–69. Fitzgerald, F. S. (1925). The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner’s. Flink, J. J. (1988). The Automobile Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gross, A. S. (2006). The American Guide Series: Patriotism as Brand-Name Identification. Arizona Quarterly, 62(1), 85–112.
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Haskell, John. (2005). American Purgatorio. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hurston, Z. N. (1937). Their Eyes Were Watching God. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Hurston, Z. N. (1942). Dust Tracks on the Road. Philadelphia: Lippincott. [Jackson, H. N.] (1903). From Ocean to Ocean in a Winton. Cleveland: Winton Motor Carriage. James, H. (1907). The American Scene. New York: Harper. Kerouac, J. (1957). On the Road. New York: Viking. Kesey, K. (1990). The Further Inquiry (photos by R. Bevirt). New York: Viking. King, S. (1983). Christine. New York: Viking. Krakauer, J. (1996). Into the Wild. New York: Anchor. Lackey, K. (1997). RoadFrames: The American Highway Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Least Heat-Moon, W. (1982). Blue Highways: A Journey into America. Boston: Little, Brown. Lewis, S. (1919). Free Air. New York: Harcourt Brace. Lewis, S. (1920). Main Street. New York: Harcourt Brace. McCarthy, C. (2006). The Road. New York: Knopf. Miller, H. (1945). The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. New York: New Directions. Nabokov, V. (1955). Lolita. Paris: Olympia. Oates, J. C. (1974). Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? In Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Stories of Young America. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Pirsig, R. (1974). Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values. New York: Bantam. Post, E. (1916). By Motor to the Golden Gate. New York: Appleton. Primeau, R. (1996). Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press. Scharff, V. (1991). Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age. New York: Macmillan. Seiler, C. (2006). “So That We as a Race Might Have Something Authentic to Travel By”: African American Automobility and Cold-War Liberalism. American Quarterly, 58(4), 1091–118. Steinbeck, J. (1939). The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Viking. Steinbeck, J. (1962). Travels with Charley in Search of America. New York: Viking. Thompson, H. S. (1971). Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. New York: Random House. Updike, J. (1960). Rabbit, Run. New York: Knopf. Wharton, E. (1908). A Motor-Flight Through France. New York: Scribner’s.
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Wolfe, T. (1968). The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Yates, R. (1961). Revolutionary Road. Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown.
Robinson, Marilynne LAURA E. TANNER
Born in Sandpoint, Idaho on November 26, 1943, Marilynne Robinson received her BA in American literature from Brown University in 1966 and her PhD in English from the University of Washington in 1977. In 1981, she published her first novel, Housekeeping, which received the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. For more than two decades after the publication of her first novel, Robinson published primarily in the essay form. In 1997, Robinson received the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1990, she received the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award. Her second novel, Gilead, was published in 2004 to great acclaim; it received the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and in 2005 was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In 2008, Robinson published Home, a companion novel to Gilead. She currently teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Regarded by many as one of America’s finest contemporary writers, Marilynne Robinson has produced a body of fiction that explores the construction of subjectivity and the dynamics of human relationship in the context of family, religion, and loss. As they capture the motion of individual consciousness, her novels also bring to life the intensity of human connection, the threat of isolation in the face of mortality, and the textured immediacy of sensory experience. Structured by the rhythms of thought, Robinson’s works often achieve the lyrical beauty and intensity of poetry. Her ability to use words to capture subtle shifts of emotion and to construct images that render the thickness of quotidian experience distinguishes her from even her most talented peers. Robinson’s depth of thought and breadth of reading are apparent not only in her widely acclaimed essay collections but also in works of fiction that contain multiple allusions to history,
the Bible, philosophy, theology, and a tradition of American literature that includes Dickinson, Melville, Emerson, and Thoreau. In lyrical prose, Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping (1980), represents the experience of Ruth Stone, an adolescent protagonist who struggles to define her own identity after her mother commits suicide and she is left in the care of her aunt, a solitary drifter named Sylvie. The novel traces the efforts of Ruth and her sister to come to terms with their aunt’s eccentric habits – including methods of housekeeping which involve moving furniture onto the lawn and inviting the natural world in – and culminates in Ruth’s decision to embrace the philosophy of transience Sylvie embodies. After burning down their house, Sylvie and Ruth escape from the town and the confines (as well as the support) of middle-class domesticity. The novel’s striking portrayal of the landscape of Fingerbone, Idaho, with the lake at its center and images of reflection abounding in the water and sky, renders the geography of Ruth’s world with sensory immediacy. Robinson’s imagistic and sensuous narrative also traces the unspoken shifts of Ruth’s consciousness as she struggles to define herself in a world marked by the seeming inevitability of loss. Driven largely by the rhythms of language and the motion of thought, Housekeeping’s first-person narrative renders the haunting intensity of grief, the fearful isolation of adolescence, and the immaterial intensity of longing with palpable immediacy. Gilead explores the motion of consciousness in the face of loss from a very different perspective. Written in the form of letters from a dying father to his young son, the novel inhabits the imagination of 76-year-old John Ames, a third-generation Congregationalist minister living in the tiny town of Gilead, Iowa. Blessed late in life with marriage and unexpected fatherhood, Ames responds to the imminence of his own death through the lens of a powerful faith that celebrates rather than dismisses the joys of immersion in the quotidian worlds of nature, family, and community. Although the quiet power of Ames’s faith and the depth of his emotional connection to his wife and child contribute to the novel’s understated beauty, Gilead also touches on the tensions of religious belief and the complexities of relationships through its exploration of Ames’s rocky relationship with his godson, Jack Boughton, and
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through its reference to a family history which extends from the Civil War era to the novel’s 1950s present. Robinson endows the setting of Gilead with a textured presence that renders nature a constant companion and situates the reader in the contemplative space of Ames’s understated but intensely experienced life. A stunning meditation on the power and limits of consciousness in the face of mortality, Gilead explores the lived experience of history, religious faith, and human connection through the perspective of a singular character inhabiting the tenuous boundary between life and death. Home functions as a companion piece to Gilead. This parallel novel explores the domestic world of the Boughtons: Ames’s friend, Robert Boughton, who is also elderly and ill; Boughton’s daughter, Glory, who returns home to care for him; and her brother Jack, whose history of misbehavior, crime, and bad judgment was first introduced in Gilead. Most of Home is set in the elder Boughton’s house and yard, where longstanding tensions between Jack and his father erupt against the backdrop of unexamined memory, domestic habit, and unrealized expectation. In this reworking of the prodigal son narrative, Glory functions as both narrator and mediator. Despite her unwavering commitment to protect her father’s health and emotional stability, she finds herself increasingly drawn into a connection with her brother, who acknowledges his own considerable failings with gentle resignation, passivity, and subtle humor. By setting up the inevitability of Jack’s relapse into alcohol and irresponsibility early on, the novel establishes a rhythm of desire and loss that lulls the reader into the expectation of Jack’s failure. When the true tragedies of the novel are finally unveiled, however, they involve not the painful, preordained limits of Jack’s character but the sudden, unwarranted possibilities for joy that the reader glimpses only in the act of marking their disappearance. SEE ALSO: Gender and the Novel (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS King, K. (1996). Resurfacings of the Deeps: Semiotic Balance in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. Studies in the Novel, 28(4), 565–80.
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Ravits, M. (1989). Extending the American Range: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. American Literature, 61(4), 64–6. Robinson, M. (1980). Housekeeping. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Robinson, M. (2004). Gilead. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Robinson, M. (2008). Home. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Schaub, T. (1994). An Interview with Marilynne Robinson. Contemporary Literature, 35(2) 231–51. Tanner, L.E. (2007). “Looking Back from the Grave”: Sensory Perception and the Anticipation of Absence in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. Contemporary Literature, 48(2), 227–52.
Roth, Henry STEVEN G. KELLMAN
Henry Roth was a pioneering figure in American Jewish literature. Despite initial neglect, his first novel, Call it Sleep (1934), was eventually recognized as a classic of immigrant fiction, a brilliant adaptation of Joycean and Freudian techniques to American urban experience, and a harbinger of the flowering of American Jewish culture after World War II. After a legendary hiatus of several decades, Roth recovered his literary ambitions, producing in the final decade of his long life a massive cycle of autobiographical fiction. Two volumes were carved out of it and published before his death at the age of 89, two appeared posthumously, and approximately 1,000 manuscript pages remained unpublished. Roth was born in 1906 in Tysmenitz, a town in Galicia, in what was then part of the AustroHungarian Empire and is now in Ukraine. When he was 18 months old, he and his mother journeyed across the Atlantic to join his father, who had already emigrated to New York City. The family initially settled in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn but in 1910 moved to the Lower East Side, the densely populated immigrant neighborhood in Manhattan. In 1914, they moved to Harlem, settling in a largely Irish and Italian area. While attending City College, Roth became the protege and lover of Eda Lou Walton, a poet and instructor at New York University. While living with Walton in her Greenwich Village apartment, Roth wrote Call It Sleep. It was published in 1934,
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during the depths of the Depression, and, despite enthusiastic reviews, the novel attracted few readers. Roth eventually gave up on the New York literary life, and, after marrying a musician named Muriel Parker, moved to Maine, where he raised ducks and geese. In 1964, Call It Sleep, in a new paperback edition, suddenly became a commercial and critical success, propelling its author out of obscurity and into the esteem enjoyed by younger Jewish novelists Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth. He moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1968 and took up writing again. After several false starts and despite rheumatoid arthritis so severe that lifting a pencil was agony, Roth began tapping out on his computer a vast body of autobiographical fiction that he called Mercy of a Rude Stream. He was intent on baring painful truths that would earn him the death that he longed for and that came on October 13, 1995. Beginning with a prologue recounting the arrival of 2-year-old David Schearl and his mother Genya at Ellis Island in 1907, Call It Sleep focuses on young David’s troubling experiences during the years 1911–13, as a stranger in a strange land. Not the least of his troubles is the enmity of his father, Albert, a surly man who, embittered by disappointment, is one of the most memorable paternal monsters in modern literature. A coming-of-age story about a hypersensitive Jewish boy who is forced to cope alone with the mysteries of sex, religion, and love, the novel consists of four sections, each of which is defined by a different image: “The Cellar,” “The Picture,” “The Coal,” and “The Rail.” Roth uses stream-of-consciousness to intensify the sense of an unformed mind trying to assimilate the varied sensations that assault it. The family apartment on the crowded Lower East Side is a haven for David, as long as his father is not home and his doting mother can lavish her affections on him. Outside, the clamorous streets of New York threaten the boy. He is frightened and confused by sexual advances from a little girl named Annie and, later, by the attempts of an older Christian boy named Leo to use him to gain access to David’s female cousins in order to “play dirty” with them. At the end of a long, disorienting day that concludes the novel, David, like the reader, faces sensory overload and embraces temporary oblivion, calling it sleep.
Roth denied having read Sigmund Freud, but the powerful Oedipal bond between David and his mother as well as the almost patricidal strife between Albert and David suggest parallels if not influences. Roth did acknowledge his debt to James Joyce in his own portrait of the artist as a young Jewish immigrant. A pattern of images of radiance as well as of biblical allusions supports the story of a little boy who manages to transcend the shocks and horrors of everyday life into mystical illumination. However, Call It Sleep is also attentive to physical details of life among the tenements of the Lower East Side, a tumult of conflicting impressions that make it easy for little David to become lost when he wanders just a few blocks away from home and cannot make himself understood to the kindly Irish cop who tries to help him. The book is most memorable as a cacophonous record of culture clash, one that makes its English into a subtle instrument for rendering the collision of languages. What, 30 years after its initial publication, was finally embraced as a neglected masterpiece was a novel that is remarkable for its vivid rendition of a child’seye view, its dramatic exposure of family tensions, and its creation of rich linguistic textures. In 1987, Roth’s friend and Italian translator Mario Materassi gathered a Roth miscellany – short fiction, essays, and journal entries – that he published under the title Shifting Landscape. However, Roth did not publish his second novel, A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, until 1994. The first volume of the tetralogy Mercy of a Rude Stream, it begins in 1914, about a year after the conclusion of Call It Sleep, when Roth’s protagonist and alter ego – now called Ira Stigman – is 8. It follows him into the early 1920s as he grows up, the butt of local antiSemites, in a cold-water flat in Harlem. The work alternates between the experiences of its young protagonist and the rambling commentary, set in different type, by a weary octogenarian Ira. The older Ira lives in Albuquerque and addresses his computer directly, personifying it and naming it Ecclesias. A Diving Rock on the Hudson, the second volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream, was published in 1995, eight months before its author’s death. It, too, alternates between the aged, ailing Ira Stigman speaking to Ecclesias and episodes from his youth more than 70 years earlier. The novel
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begins in 1921, when Ira is just entering Stuyvesant High School, and it concludes in 1925, while he is a student at City College, where he begins to conceive a literary vocation after the campus magazine publishes an essay he produces on assignment. Roth had attributed his long writer’s block – 60 years between Call It Sleep and A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park – both to his flirtation with communism, which demanded an artistic agenda he was temperamentally unsuited for, and to alienation from the Jewish community that he only belatedly recognized as his true source of inspiration. However, a startling development in A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park suggests an additional explanation for his prolonged silence. Though Ira is an only child in the previous volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream, a sister two years his junior named Minnie suddenly and sensationally appears in the second volume – as Ira’s partner in incest. So, too, is his younger cousin Stella. The elder Ira broods over his paralyzing guilt and over his compulsion to exorcise it in a culminating literary confession. Like much of the rest of the tetralogy, A Diving Rock in the Hudson, which derives its title from a moment in which Ira, caught stealing fountain pens, is tempted to drown himself, is a document of self-loathing. Its elderly narrator finds many reasons to despise his awkward, erring younger self and welcomes his own imminent demise. In From Bondage, which was published posthumously in 1996 as the third volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream, ailing, aging Ira reiterates his wish to die and broods over the discontinuities of his life. He attributes his belated recommitment to a literary calling to a renewed commitment to the Jewish community and the embattled state of Israel. Throughout the novel, he recounts his growing intimacy with Edith Welles, the literature instructor and lover of his friend Larry Gordon. And he torments himself by summoning up details of illicit trysts with his cousin Stella. The entanglement with Stella becomes even more troublesome in Requiem for Harlem, which was published in 1998. Writing about his compulsive acts of incest intensifies the laceration that Ira the anguished author inflicts upon himself. Set in 1927, when Ira is a senior at City College, the fourth and final volume of
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Roth’s tetralogy concludes with an act of autoemancipation – 21-year-old Ira’s decision to depart the family apartment in Harlem and make his way down to Greenwich Village, to move in with Edith. He looks forward to fulfillment and redemption in a literary life. In the final pages of Mercy of a Rude Stream, a fascinating document of life in the early twentieth century written at the century’s close, Ira is ready to write a novel very like Call It Sleep, the book that initiated one of the most extraordinary careers in American literature. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Jewish Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Adams, S. J. (1989). “The Noisiest Novel Ever Written”: The Soundscape of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep. Twentieth Century Literature. 35(1), 43–64. Altenbernd, L. (1989). An American Messiah: Myth in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep. Modern Fiction Studies, 35, 673–87. Diamant, N. (1986). Linguistic Universes in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep. Contemporary Literature, 27(3) 336–55. Folks, J. J. (1999). Henry Roth’s National and Personal Narratives of Captivity. Papers on Language and Literature, 35(3), 279–300. Gibbs, A. (2003). Conversation With Robert Weil, March 2002, Henry Roth’s Mercy of a Rude Stream. Studies in American Jewish Literature, 22, 154–62. Journal of the Short Story in English. (2005). Henry Roth [special issue], 44. Kellman, S. G. (2000). “The Midwife of His Rebirth”: Henry Roth and Zion. Judaism, 49(3), 342–51. Kellman, S. G. (2008). Raising Muscovite Ducks and Government Suspicions: Henry Roth and the FBI. In C. Culleton & K. Leick (eds.), Modernism on File: Writers, Artists, and the FBI, 1920–1950. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 39–52. Kellman, S. G. (2005). Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth. New York: Norton. Lyons, B. (1976). Henry Roth: The Man and His Work. New York: Cooper Square. Materassi, M. (2007). On Henry Roth: An Interview with Mario Materassi. Salmagundi, 153–54, 60–77. Roth, H. (1934). Call It Sleep. New York: Robert O. Ballou.
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Roth, H. (1979). Nature’s First Green. New York: William Targ. Roth, H. (1987). Shifting Landscape: A Composite 1925–1987 (ed. and intro. Mario Materassi). Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society. Roth, H. (1994). A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park. New York: St. Martin’s. Roth, H. (1995). A Diving Rock on the Hudson. New York: St. Martin’s. Roth, H. (1996). From Bondage. New York: St. Martin’s. Roth, H. (1998). Requiem for Harlem. New York: St. Martin’s. Roth, H. (2001–2a). Antica Fiamma. Princeton University Library Chronicle, 63(1–2), 282–91. Roth, H. (2001–2b). Excerpt From Journal. Princeton University Library Chronicle, 63(1–2), 292–300. Roth, H. (2006a). Freight. New Yorker, pp. 100–13 (Sept. 25). Roth, H. (2006b). God the Novelist. New Yorker, pp. 72–5 (May 29). Studies in American Jewish Literature. (1979). Henry Roth [special issue], 5(1). Todorova, K. (2006). “Oy, a Good Men!” Urban Voices and Democracy in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 48(3), 250–72. Wirth-Nesher, H. (ed.) (1996). New Essays on Call It Sleep. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Roth, Philip DEREK PARKER ROYAL
Philip Roth is one of the most significant, recognized, and prolific novelists of the post-World War II period. He is the author of over 29 books, and his texts serve as both snapshots and critiques of contemporary culture from World War II to post-9/11 America. It would be difficult, and certainly foolhardy, to pigeonhole Roth in terms of his style, politics, or narrative predilections. At times he has been read as a social realist in the mold of Henry James, at others a mischievous metafictionalist reminiscent of John Barth. Often he is associated with contemporaries such as John Updike and Bernard Malamud, yet for many readers he bears a stylistic kinship with the more recent generation of Jewish American authors. His novels have served as grist for many popular book clubs, yet he stands as one of the most unsettling, and even one of the most offensive,
novelists living today. He has been read as a political radical, an anti-communist, a stand-up (or sit-down) comedian, a misogynist, a liberal apologist, a solipsist, a communitarian, a literary pornographer, a Jewish godfather, and even an anti-Semite. To call him chameleon-like would not be an understatement. Yet his fiction is accessible to a general readership, earning him more literary awards than almost any contemporary American author. Philip Milton Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1933, the son of American-born parents and the grandson of European Jews who were part of the nineteenth-century wave of immigration to the United States. He grew up in the city’s lower-middle-class section of Weequahic and was educated in Newark public schools. In works as generically diverse as The Facts (1988) and The Plot Against America (2004), Roth pulls from his Weequahic experiences in ways that are both evocative and confounding, problematizing distinctions between “fact” and “fiction.” He later enrolled as a pre-law student at Newark College at Rutgers, but eventually transferred to Bucknell College, where he received his BA. He completed his master’s degree at the University of Chicago; afterward he taught creative writing at both Iowa and Princeton, and for many years he taught comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He retired from teaching in 1992. Although publishing several apprentice-quality stories throughout the mid-1950s, Roth first gained critical notice with Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (1959). Composed of previously published stories as well as new short fiction and the title novella, this first book brought quick critical attention to the young writer and made an impact that would resonate throughout his career. Goodbye, Columbus was hailed by such critics as Irving Howe, Leslie Fiedler, and Alfred Kazin; won the 1960 National Book Award; and helped him to secure a Guggenheim Fellowship. Roth’s ironic portrayal of middle-class Jews in postwar America, caught between the anchors of tradition and the temptations of assimilation, earned him the ire of many readers, and several influential rabbis denounced him as a self-hating Jew. This became a critical tendency that would mark the first years of Roth’s career. Careful
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readers of the texts, however, would notice a more complicated or ambivalent relationship between the author and his Jewish roots. Indeed, throughout his oeuvre, Roth has pitted his protagonists’ need for independence and self-discovery against the demands of the (ethnic) community. They rebel against what the narrator of The Human Stain (2000) describes as “the tyranny of the we and its we-talk and everything that the we wants to pile on your head” (108). In terms of his readership, this tyranny played itself out from the very beginning. Many believed that narratives such as “Defender of the Faith” (1959) and the novella Goodbye, Columbus presented Jews in a way that would only fuel the longstanding prejudices against and even hatred of Jews in the United States. Roth spent the next couple of decades writing against such assumptions, even using this resistance as material for his 1979 novel, The Ghost Writer, whose protagonist is accused of airing his family’s, and by association his ethnic community’s dirty laundry. Nonetheless, the two novels that followed Goodbye, Columbus have much less of a “Jewish feel” to them. Both Letting Go (1962) and When She Was Good (1967) are exercises in a more straightforward Jamesian realism – Roth has said that when writing his first novel, he had a copy of Portrait of a Lady beside him, and indeed, the nineteenth-century novel undergirds Roth’s text – and while stylistically similar to Goodbye, Columbus, their manner stands apart from the kind of humor that will largely define the first half of his career. Partly for this reason, they are two of the most underappreciated texts in Roth criticism today. This is unfortunate, since both of these novels were early testing grounds for Roth’s everevolving voice. Of particular note is When She Was Good, the story of a young Midwestern woman trapped by societal restrictions – a la Flaubert’s Madame Bovary – and one of the only narratives in which Roth focalizes through a female perspective. For many readers, Roth is best known for the wildly popular and comedic tour de force Portnoy’s Complaint. It was the New York Times’s bestseller for the entire year of 1969, an unheardof accolade for a “literary” novel, and it became for many readers the defining text of the sexual liberation movement. Perhaps even more significant, it also made a celebrity out of Roth, an
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uncomfortable – yet experientially rich – predicament that he would later use as narrative grist in such novels as Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), and Operation Shylock (1993). Portnoy’s Complaint is the first-person tirade of Alexander Portnoy, whose overprotective mother leaves him with guilt and insecurity that can only be relieved through elaborate masturbation and sex with forbidden Gentile women, or shiksas. The entire novel is Portnoy’s meandering and salacious spiel to his psychiatrist, Dr. Spielvogel, and many have called it the literary equivalent of a Jewish mother joke. But the novel is much more than a vulgar comedy shtick, an accusation leveled by Irving Howe, who had once been one of Roth’s most prominent defenders. It is a highly experimental work whose genesis can be found in four separate projects that Roth had begun and then abandoned throughout the 1960s: a vaudevillian narrative entitled The Jewboy, a dramatic work-in-progress first performed as The Nice Jewish Boy, an outrageous monologue centered around the genitalia and private anatomy of famous individuals, and a highly autobiographical work of fiction whose working title was Portrait of the Artist. Through the synthesis of these unlikely literary trajectories, Roth established the volatile style that would define his writing for the next 40 years. After the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth began a series of experimental comic narratives that, although never living up to the promise set by his bestselling novel, further pushed the boundaries of literary outrageousness. Our Gang (1971) is a Swiftian satire of the Nixon administration whose absurdities uncannily anticipate the revelations of the Watergate trials. Another short novel, The Breast (1972), is a Kafkaesque tale of David Kepesh, Roth’s first professor of desire who literally turns into a female breast. But perhaps the most notable of Roth’s post-Portnoy works is his 1973 baseball narrative, The Great American Novel, a farcical mixture of Frank Norris’s novelistic quest and the great American pastime. With its politically incorrect humor, insouciant handling of literary icons, and attack on every sacred American ideal, the novel gives new meaning to the term “extreme sports.” With My Life as a Man (1974), Roth began focusing on what would become his most enduring, and arguably his best defining, theme: the
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responsibilities of the author and the intersection of text and self. He would describe this in his first book of non-fiction, Reading Myself and Others (1975), as a “preoccupation with the relationship between the written and the unwritten world” (p. xi). My Life as a Man was Roth’s first overt engagement with self-reflective fiction, and it is perhaps the first work in which he could unequivocally be defined as a postmodern writer. It is the story of Peter Tarnopol, a writer who creates a fictional character named Nathan Zuckerman (his first appearance in a Roth novel), and how his narratives become the testing fields of subjectivity. Just over 10 years later, Roth expands upon this theme in his postmodern tour de force, The Counterlife (1986), an ambitious and meticulously crafted novel whose characters constantly negotiate or “rewrite” their selves in ways that are underscored by the novel’s very structure. Each of the book’s five different sections is rewritten by the sections that follow, so that the “facts” that are presented in one chapter appear to be fabrications in another. In essence, the entire novel is an exercise in narrative deconstruction. What many scholars of post-1960 American literature tend to overlook is the fact that Philip Roth is in many ways a postmodern writer. While his narratives may not overtly resemble the metafictional absurdities of a Donald Barthelme or emphasize the cultural frivolousness found in Thomas Pynchon, they nonetheless betray characteristics that are not dissimilar from the work of these authors. If, at the risk of overgeneralizing, postmodern narrative can be defined as problematizing both originality and authenticity, emphasizing indeterminacy and contingency, representing experience as fragmented, subverting distinctions between “high” and “low” culture, and revealing subjectivity as a negotiated construct, then most of Roth’s works could be read within this context. Such is indeed the case with the series of books that make up the Zuckerman Bound collection: the novels The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, and the novella epilogue, The Prague Orgy (1985). The opening K€unstlerroman of the series, The Ghost Writer (1979), stands as a telling example of the postmodern subject. In the novel, the first in which Nathan Zuckerman serves as the central protagonist, the up-and-coming artist appropriates and
rewrites the fate of Anne Frank through the fantasized life of a young student, Amy Bellette. By reimaging Bellette as an older Anne Frank, one who never died in the Holocaust but instead made her way to America, Zuckerman attempts to narrate or “write” himself directly into the literary (and Jewish) community, and by so doing, legitimize his art. In Zuckerman Unbound (1981) and The Anatomy Lesson (1983), Roth directly addresses, via his narrative doppelg€anger Zuckerman, the kinds of criticism leveled at him in being both vulgar and disrespectful of his Jewish heritage. In fact, there is a tendency among Roth’s critics to read him primarily as a great chronicler of contemporary, and assimilated, Jewish life in America. Such prejudices are what Saul Bellow had in mind when he sardonically observed that he, Roth, and Bernard Malamud are often lumped together as the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx of American literature, assuming that just because each came from Jewish backgrounds (just as the famous clothiers), they should be read in light of their ethnicity. However, in 2002, upon winning the National Book Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, Philip Roth said in his acceptance speech that he has always thought of himself as an American writer: “I have never thought of myself for the length of a single sentence as an American Jewish or a Jewish American writer, anymore than I imagine Theodor Dreiser or Ernest Hemingway or John Cheever thought of themselves as American Christian or Christian American writers.” His statements may appear provocative, but this was not the only occasion where Roth expressed uneasiness at being labeled a Jewish writer. Throughout his career he has performed a curious balancing act of inscribing his Jewish roots while at the same time denying the ethnic-specific signifiers that place him in the contemporary American canon. Beginning with The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988), Roth published a tetralogy of works that explored the interplay between “fiction” and “fact” in ways that far surpassed his earlier works. Through his protagonist in these works, a character named Philip Roth, the author questions any static understandings of the autobiographical and fictional genres, and he mischievously encourages the reader to become caught up in this literary game of where one ends and the other begins. The Facts, purportedly
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a work of non-fiction, is framed by letters to and from Roth’s fictional double, Nathan Zuckerman, and the one text specifically billed as a work of fiction, Deception: A Novel (1990), reads more like a dramatic script than it does a novel. The style and plot of Patrimony: A True Story (1991) are novelistic in nature – and it even contains passages reminiscent of Roth’s earlier fiction – and Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993), one of Roth’s most ambitious works, is based on a premise so outlandish that its autobiographic pretense becomes part of the joke. Sabbath’s Theater (1995), considered by many scholars to be Roth’s masterpiece, is a return to the outrageous psychosexual (and tragicomic) form that entertained and outraged so many in Portnoy’s Complaint. Its “hero,” the lewd and arthritic puppeteer Mickey Sabbath, is the very embodiment of transgressive behavior, but one through which his author clearly establishes an “American character.” Indeed, national character is the primary focus of his multiple-award-winning American Trilogy: American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain. Each of these three novels reflects a key moment in late-twentieth-century American experience – in the 1960s, 1950s, and 1990s, respectively – and each is chronicled by an older Nathan Zuckerman, no longer the audacious young writer he once was. In this later trilogy, the aged and reclusive author reveals through his narration a series of memorable individuals who, in many ways, represent the social, political, and psychological conflicts that define postwar America. Roth followed his American Trilogy with still another historically conscious novel, The Plot Against America, his biggest seller since Portnoy’s Complaint. The book is, among other things, a work of speculative fiction, an alternate history where Charles Lindbergh wins the 1940 presidential election; an allegory of the George W. Bush administration and post-9/11 America; and an example of historiographic metafiction, a demonstration of the contingent and constructed nature of both fictional and historic narratives. More recently, Roth has been employing the novella or short novel form with increasing regularity. Perhaps his most ambitious example of this is The Dying Animal (2001a), a first-person confessional on sex and aging, and the third in a trilogy of novels focusing on the protagonist
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David Kepesh – The Breast and The Professor of Desire (1977) being the other two. Roth further explores the travails of aging in Everyman (2006) and Exit Ghost (2007), the latter supposedly being the final Zuckerman installment, and in terms of plot and focalization, it functions as a thematic bookend to The Ghost Writer. By bringing his protagonist full circle, Roth underscores many of the themes that have defined his narrative oeuvre and in doing so paints a vivid – and, at times, frantic – portrait of the artist as an old man. Other late novellas, Indignation (2008) and The Humbling (2009), similarly focus on the dark crossroads of death and desire. In addition to his fiction, Roth has also proven to be an accomplished essayist. In collections such as Reading Myself and Others and Shop Talk (2001b), his focus is on the act of writing, both his own and that of other authors. The lengthy interviews that make up Shop Talk are a testament to Roth’s unwavering and ongoing admiration of some of the most significant writers in the last half of the twentieth century. Until 1989 he was the general editor of the Penguin book series Writers From the Other Europe, which he inaugurated in 1974. The series helped to introduce American audiences to, among others, Milan Kundera, Primo Levi, Aharon Appelfeld, and Ivan Klima. Unlike many prolific novelists, whose productive qualities may wane over time, Roth has demonstrated a unique ability to not only sustain his literary output, but also even surpass the achievements of his previous writings. His latter fiction is arguably his best work, as demonstrated by the succession of awards he received in the 1990s. His many accolades and honors include a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, three PEN/Faulkner Awards, the National Medal of the Arts, the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and the PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime achievement, and he was the very first recipient of the PEN/Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. To call him one of the most accomplished American writers in the past 50 years would be an understatement. SEE ALSO: Bellow, Saul (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Humor and Satire (WF); Jewish Fiction (BIF);
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Malamud, Bernard (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Halio, J. L., & Siegel B. (eds.) (2005). Turning up the Flame: Philip Roth’s Later Novels. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Milbauer, A. Z., & Watson D. G. (eds.) (1988). Reading Philip Roth. New York: St. Martin’s. Parrish, T. (ed.) (2007). The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rodgers, B. F., Jr. (1978). Philip Roth. Boston: Twayne. Roth, P. (1959). Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, P. (1962). Letting Go. New York: Random House. Roth, P. (1967). When She Was Good. New York: Random House. Roth, P. (1969). Portnoy’s Complaint. New York: Random House. Roth, P. (1972). The Breast. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Roth, P. (1973). The Great American Novel. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Roth, P. (1974). My Life as a Man. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Roth, P. (1975). Reading Myself and Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Roth, P. (1977). The Professor of Desire. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Roth, P. (1985). Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Roth, P. (1986). The Counterlife. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Roth, P. (1988). The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Roth, P. (1990). Deception: A Novel. New York: Simon and Schuster. Roth, P. (1991). Patrimony: A True Story. New York: Simon and Schuster. Roth, P. (1993). Operation Shylock: A Confession. New York: Simon and Schuster. Roth, P. (1995). Sabbath’s Theater. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, P. (1997). American Pastoral. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, P. (1998). I Married a Communist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, P. (2000). The Human Stain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, P. (2001a). The Dying Animal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, P. (2001b). Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Roth, P. (2004). The Plot Against America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, P. (2006). Everyman. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, P. (2007). Exit Ghost. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, P. (2008). Indignation. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, P. (2009). The Humbling. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Philip Roth Studies (2004–). D. P. Royal, exec. ed. Royal, D. P. (ed.) (2005). Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author. Westport, CT: Greenwood-Praeger. Safer, E. B. (2006). Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth. Albany: SUNY Press.
Russ, Joanna TATIANA TESLENKO
An internationally acclaimed author, Joanna Russ takes up issues pioneered by feminist theorists in the 1960s and explores them in many genres, from mainstream fiction to fantasy and utopia, offering unique visions of the future and unprecedented activist solutions. Thematically, her fiction focuses on identity, difference, gender roles, power, oppression, and violence. She also writes profound criticism of feminist theory and history. Born in New York in 1937, Russ received her BA in English from Cornell University and her MFA from Yale University. She combined writing with a teaching career that spanned almost three decades, as professor of English at Cornell University, SUNY at Binghamton, the University of Colorado, and the University of Washington. She currently lives in Tucson, Arizona. Her first story, “Nor Custom Stale,” was published in 1959. It was followed by numerous short stories and novels, including And Chaos Died (1970), The Female Man (1975), and The Two of Them (1978). Russ has won many awards, including Nebula Awards (1972, 1983), the O. Henry Award (1977), and the Hugo Award (1983). Russ authored major critical works, such as How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1984); Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts: Feminist Essays (1985); To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism, and Science Fiction (1995); and What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race, Class,
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and the Future of Feminism (1998). Her outspoken and witty criticism has started frequent controversies. From 1966 to 1979, she worked as an occasional book reviewer for Fantasy and Science Fiction, the Washington Post Book World, and the Feminist Review of Books, and as an essayist for Science-Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, and Ms. In 1988 she won the Pilgrim Award for Lifetime Achievement in the field of science fiction scholarship. In her essays, Russ explores patriarchal concepts in mainstream fiction that cast men in significant roles and women in disempowered roles. Her fiction challenges traditional gender roles and explores identity issues. Russ defines feminist utopia as “explicit about economics and politics, sexually permissive, demystifying about biology, emphatic about the necessity for female bonding, concerned with children . . . non-urban, classless, communal, relatively peaceful while allowing room for female rage and female self-defence, and serious about the emotional and physical consequences of violence” (1980, 15). This definition applies to most of her work, especially to her Nebula Award-winning story, “When It Changed” (1972). Set on a future world, Whileaway, in which all males have died of a mysterious, sex-linked plague, it depicts a utopian society created by women. This society has functioned smoothly for many years, successfully educating the young, inculcating values, and producing the goods necessary for survival. The conflict in the story arises with the arrival of men on Whileaway. Whileaway also appears in Russ’s novel The Female Man (1975), which explores the potentialities of the same female self in different social contexts. Russ describes the encounter of four protagonists – Joanna, Jeannine, Janet, and Jael – who have a similar bodily image and share the same genotype, but not the same genealogy and history. “Who am I? I know who I am, but what’s my brand name?” This central question keeps turning up in the novel. Joanna lives here and now (in this case, the United States of the 1960s), while Jeannine lives in a New York where the Great Depression never ended and World War II never happened. Though their oppressive situations are different, Jeannine and Joanna have a similar patriarchal identification of a disempowered woman. All
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that patriarchy taught them is how to despise themselves. Joanna is the primary narrator, shaping the text and pushing the conflict to excess. She describes the worlds of the other Js and monitors the way they respond to their encounter. Janet, a utopian visitor from Whileaway, is associated with strength, intelligence, and adaptability. The fourth J, the super-terrorist and guerilla fighter Jael from the dystopian Womanland, is obsessed with fierce independence, cunning, power, and anger. Exploring the possibilities inherent in their common genotype, Russ probes the way toward uniting patriarchal contrarieties in her “female man,” thus offering a solution for resolving the conflict and eliminating the difference: “to resolve contrarieties, unite them in your own person” (1975, 138). Her separatist trajectories to the assumption of the new identity include the dystopia of Jael’s Womanland and the lesbian utopia of Whileaway. In Womanland, the gender conflict has grown into a war which started 40 years ago and will be fought until the death of the last man on the planet. In contrast to this permanent war, on utopian Whileaway there are no men, and power is used to promote the uniqueness of each woman. Russ’s work is socio-historically contingent and implicated in the politics and polemics of the second-wave feminist movement in the United States. Through paradox, satire, and humor, and by exposing their incongruity and absurdity, Russ makes patriarchal values suspect, eventually helping to change the dominant socio-historical order. SEE ALSO: Delaney, Samuel (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Speculative Fiction (AF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Barr, M. S. (1992). Feminist Fabulation: Space/ Postmodern Fiction. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Bartowski, F. (1989). Feminist Utopias. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Cortiel, J. (1999). Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ, Feminism, Science Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
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Delany, S. (1979). The Order of “Chaos.” Science Fiction Studies, 19(6), pt. 3. Lefanu, S. (1988). In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction. London: Women’s Press. Mendlesohn, F. (ed.) (2009). On Joanna Russ. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Moylan, T. (1986). Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. New York: Methuen. Russ, J. (1968). Picnic on Paradise. New York: Ace. Russ, J. (1970). And Chaos Died. New York: Ace. Russ, J. (1975). The Female Man. New York: Bantam. Russ, J. (1977). We Who Are About To. New York: Dell. Russ, J. (1978). The Two of Them. New York: Putnam’s. Russ, J. (1980). Amor Vincit Foeminam: The Battle of the Sexes in SF. Science Fiction Studies, 7, 2–15. Russ, J. (1983a). The Adventures of Alyx. New York: Pocket.
Russ, J. (1983b). How to Suppress Women’s Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press. Russ, J. (1984). Extra(ordinary) People. New York: St. Martin’s. Russ, J. (1985). Magic Mammas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts: Feminist Essays. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing. Russ, J. (1987). The Hidden Side of the Moon. New York: St. Martin’s. Russ, J. (1995). To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Russ, J. (1998). What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism. New York: St Martin’s. Russ, J. (2007). The Country You Have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
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S Salinger, J. D. JONATHAN L. PRICE
J[erome] D[avid] Salinger is known for fiction concerned primarily with children and adolescents who search for religious fulfillment and moral rigor against a society obsessed with materialism, sentimentalism, and religious hypocrisy or misunderstanding; simultaneously he is the most mysterious figure in American fiction. Author of one of the most famous American novels of mid-century, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), he stopped publishing fiction abruptly in 1967 and has remained largely aloof from public life. Born on January 1, 1919 in New York City, Salinger graduated from Valley Forge Academy in Pennsylvania, then served in World War II. After attending three colleges for short times, he began publishing short stories in magazines. He married Claire Douglas in 1955 and had two children, but they divorced in 1967. He married Colleen O’Neill, and live in Cornish, New Hampshire until his death on January 27, 2010. The Catcher in the Rye (1951) is the story of Holden Caulfield, an adolescent boy of 17 explaining traumatic events of his life that occurred around Christmas in the previous year. Such a pallid description offers little sense of the novel’s insight and power. In its colloquial style and ironic critique of the adult world, it is often compared to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Both writers use the narrator’s viewpoint and colloquial malapropisms to direct irony against the narrator as well as his social milieu. Unlike Huck, Salinger’s Holden is offering his story in
a long conversation with the reader, an analogue of a psychiatric session as well as a plea for help and understanding. Holden’s colloquial style, filled with repetition and vulgarity, is a distinctive feature of the novel. Further unlike Huck, Holden is a product of a mid-twentieth-century upper-middle-class urban environment, and his “madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas” primarily occurs at a posh preparatory school in midtown Manhattan. Holden offers a critique of phoniness – of what he perceives as the artificiality of the adult world with its hypocrisy, materialism, and concern with forms over substance. He discerns the same phoniness among his prep school peers, but the reader notices it in Holden himself. Like Huck, Holden wants to escape his school and social environment for a pastoral utopia. A lover of innocence, he wants to save children from all the corruption of the modern world as well as the confusion of adult sexuality – this is part of his dream of being, as he tells his younger sister Phoebe, a catcher in the rye, a savior of young children. In some ways Holden is a Christ figure, wishing to transform a decadent world, but he is also a confused adolescent in need of coherent guidance. His “catcher in the rye” is based on misunderstanding and, as Phoebe points out, is radically impractical. But this is why the novel is continually addressed to “you,” a modest hope that some readers – presumably adults – will sympathize and perhaps change their behavior. Despite his constant criticism, in the end Holden “miss[es] everybody,” implicitly desiring their company as human beings. The novel thus offers a message of forgiveness and love.
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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None of Salinger’s works have achieved the prominence of Catcher, but each of the other three has remained in print since publication. Nine Stories (1953) collected some of the stories he had published since 1948. These are superior stories, skillfully crafted in terms of point of view, and most play variously on the theme of innocence juxtaposed against modern decadence seen in his earlier novel. “The Laughing Man”; “For Esme – With Love and Squalor”; and “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” are all first-person narratives of trauma and transformation, seen initially through the eyes of a child or adolescent; however, the sophisticated narrator contemplates the experience from the distance of maturity. The superior perception of the central figures and their sensitivity to pain threaten them, often with self-destruction. But in many of the stories, the protagonist is rescued from self-destructive feelings by gestures of love, or recognition of a common humanity, as in the final pages of Catcher. The remaining two books and the rest of Salinger’s creative life have been devoted to members of the fictional Glass family. The central figure, a savior-guru-suicide named Seymour Glass, first appeared in Nine Stories. His name and the family name itself offer various symbolic suggestions: that they see further than others, but may shatter like glass; that they see only reflections of themselves; that they hold a mirror up to readers. These stories bear echoes of patterns first seen in Catcher: Franny Glass in “Franny” (of Franny and Zooey, 1961) is a troubled adolescent on the verge of a breakdown. Her therapist – her brother Zooey, an actor – is more sensitive and versatile than any of Holden’s multiple interlocutors. His final insight is contained in a Zen-like comment, “‘don’t you know who that Fat Lady [the anonymous, unpleasant, but also valuable human member of any audience] is? . . . It’s Christ Himself ’” (1961, 200). Zooey’s offering suggests how Salinger’s fiction mixes West and East, in its search for a spiritual alternative to the multiple failings of a modern, materialist world. The second Glass novel (Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, 1963) details Seymour’s comic non-wedding and also offers a variety of commentaries and memories of Seymour himself. The final published
Glass “story” – “Hapworth 16, 1924,” a letter home from camp by Seymour, a precocious age 7 – was rumored to be republished in book form in the 1990s, but this never occurred. SEE ALSO: Humor and Satire (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Alexander, P. (1999). Salinger: A Biography. Los Angeles: Renaissance. Bloom, H.(ed.) (1987). J. D. Salinger. New York: Chelsea House. French, W. (1988). J. D. Salinger Revisited. Boston: Twayne. Laser, M. & Fruman, N. (eds.) (1963). Studies in J. D. Salinger: Reviews, Essays, and Critiques of “The Catcher in the Rye” and Other Fiction. New York: Odyssey. Lundquist, J. (1979). J. D Salinger. New York: Ungar. Salinger, J. D. (1951). The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown. Salinger, J. D. (1953). Nine Stories. Boston: Little, Brown. Salinger, J. D. (1961). Franny and Zooey. Boston: Little, Brown. Salinger, J. D. (1963). Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. Boston: Little, Brown. Salinger, J. D. (1965). Hapworth 16, 1924. New Yorker (June 19). Salzman, J. (ed.) (1991). New Essays on “The Catcher in the Rye.” New York: Cambridge University Press.
Schuyler, George S. ALEXANDER M. BAIN
George Samuel Schuyler, journalist and novelist, was one of the most widely read African American periodical writers of the 1920s and 1930s. He was born in Providence, Rhode Island on February 25, 1895 (biographer Oscar Williams has noted ambiguities in his birth records); was raised in Syracuse; and lived most of his life in New York City. He worked for, and contributed to, some of the most prominent publications of the century’s first half, including The Messenger, American Mercury (under the patronage of H. L. Mencken), and The Crisis. Between 1924 and 1966 he was a staffer, editor, international correspondent, and
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SCHUYLER, GEORGE S.
columnist at the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the major African American weekly newspapers; his many serialized stories appeared there, sometimes under pseudonyms, between 1933 and 1939. He also published two novels. Schuyler’s deep ambivalence about racial identity as a basis for making claims about political and social equality, along with his embrace of conservatism after the 1930s, made him controversial throughout his career and led to his eventual disavowal by the Courier and the black press in general. His autobiography, Black and Conservative (1966), has influenced recent attempts to establish a tradition of African American conservative thought. He died in New York City on August 31, 1977, having spent his final years writing commentary for such rightwing periodicals as the Manchester Union Leader. Schuyler’s work is usually labeled satire, and is sometimes placed within the Harlem Renaissance, not least because of his 1926 argument with Langston Hughes over the value of a distinctly African American art. His fiction is perhaps best understood as a set of experiments in using pulp genres (e.g., science fiction, the spy/ detective thriller, and melodrama) to explore race relations, political and economic progress, and American identity. In Schuyler’s first and bestknown novel, Black No More (1931), Dr. Junius Crookman markets a chemical process for turning black people into Caucasians. The success of “Black No More, Inc.” produces both the virtual disappearance of the African American population and America’s slide into paranoia once all accepted markers of racial distinction have vanished. Nominally the story of Max Disher, a Harlemite who undergoes the treatment in order to win the affections of a racist socialite, the novel surveys the consequences of Crookman’s invention for political parties, the NAACP, white supremacists, and Harlem. The novel contains enduring depictions of what Schuyler regarded as the hypocrisy and hucksterism that accompanied much American thinking about race: W. E. B. Du Bois, for example, appears as Dr. Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard, the crafty “race leader” terrified that the disappearance of black people means the end of his speaking fees. Schuyler based his second novel, Slaves Today (1931), on the expose he wrote (for the New York Evening Post) of the Liberian government’s
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practice of indenturing its indigenous inhabitants into plantation labor in the Spanish colony of Fernando Po. Slaves Today employs a relatively flat style; while it centers on the story of two village newlyweds who are separated by Liberia’s slave trade – he to endure plantation abuses, she to become the evil district commissioner’s concubine – much of the novel is devoted to reportorial set pieces: a village wedding feast, the agonies of a plantation hospital, and the streets of Liberia’s capital during a rigged election. The book is notable for the links it draws between corrupt business practices in Africa, the broader panorama of Euro-American imperialism, and the question of Africans’ roles in their own political liberation. Until the early 1990s, these novels and some serial stories in the Courier were thought to represent the entirety of Schuyler’s fictional output. This view, and his increasingly strident conservatism, long relegated him to minor status in American literary history, and seemed to suggest that he had little to say about the international responses of black political discourse to fascist aggression. Major reassessments of this judgment followed the discovery and republication of his quartet of Courier serial stories responding to the 1935–6 Italo-Ethiopian War. (While these stories, published between November 1936 and January 1939, represent only a fraction of Schuyler’s total serial-fiction output, only they have been reprinted and thus made generally available.) “The Black Internationale” and “Black Empire” (republished together as Black Empire) combine science fiction and espionage thriller elements in the story of a technocratic liberation front, masterminded by Dr. Henry Belsidus, that retakes Africa from its imperialist controllers and establishes a vaguely fascistic new “civilization.” “The Ethiopian Murder Mystery” and “Revolt in Ethiopia” (republished together as Ethiopian Stories) respond more explicitly to the Italo-Ethiopian crisis. In the former, part detective story and part spy thriller, a series of mysterious deaths in Harlem leads a newspaperman to Ethiopian secret agents attempting to guard the plans for a death ray from traitors and Italian spies; the latter, an anticolonial adventure-romance, concerns a wealthy African American who aids an Ethiopian princess in her quest to recover a secret treasure that can
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finance resistance to the Italians. These four serials comprise a sustained inquiry into ideas about racial solidarity, war, and transnational loyalty which were urgently felt in the 1930s by millions of readers in and beyond the United States. SEE ALSO: Du Bois, W. E. B. (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); The Novel and War (AF); Speculative Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ferguson, J. B. (2005). The Sage of Sugar Hill: George S. Schuyler and the Harlem Renaissance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Leak, J. B. (ed.) (2001). Rac(e)ing to the Right: Selected Essays of George S. Schuyler. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Schuyler, G. (1966). Black and Conservative. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington. Schuyler, G. (1991). Black Empire (ed. R. A. Hill & R. K. Rasmussen). Boston: Northeastern University Press. Schuyler, G. (1989). Black No More [1931]. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Schuyler, G. (1994). Ethiopian Stories (ed. R. A. Hill). Boston: Northeastern University Press. Schuyler, G. (1969). Slaves Today: A Story of Liberia [1931]. College Park, MD: McGrath. Stephens, M. A. (2005). Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thompson, M. C. (2007). Black Fascisms: African American Literature and Culture Between the Wars. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Williams, O. R. (2007). George S. Schuyler: Portrait of a Black Conservative. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Scott, Joanna PATRICK O’DONNELL
Joanna Scott is the author of eight novels and two short story collections that explore in rich detail the interiorities of characters who exist in complex natural and historical environments. A native of Darien, Connecticut, Scott received a BA from Hartford University and an MFA in creative writing at Brown University, where she studied
with John Hawkes. She has taught at the University of Maryland and Princeton University, and is currently the Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of English at the University of Rochester. She is the recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships; her fourth novel, The Manikin (1996), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Scott’s first novel, Fading, My Parmacheene Belle (1987), is a tale of mourning and recovery: an aging fisherman whose wife has died flees into the wilderness, only to encounter a teenage runaway who accompanies him on a psychologically intensive journey across the American landscape. The Closest Possible Union, following but a year later, is ostensibly a historical fiction about the journey of a slave ship (disguised as a whaling vessel) as told through the eyes of the ship’s 14year-old captain’s apprentice. A complex pastiche of tales, dreams, and visions, the novel portrays the narrator’s maturation as he encounters the eccentric, mobile identities that inhabit the ship and contends with his growing awareness of the horrors of slavery during a journey to “the heart of darkness.” In Arrogance (1990), Scott portrays the complex integration of imagination and desire in the life of the Austrian expressionist painter Egon Schiele (1890–1918). The novel takes place during Schiele’s brief imprisonment in a small village jail on charges of immoral conduct issuing from his use of young girls as nude models, an incident that offers the occasion for the interrelated stories of Schiele’s career and relationships, and the portrayal of fin-de-siecle Vienna as perceived through the gaze of the eccentric modernist painter. The Manikin (1996) is, perhaps, Scott’s most accomplished work. Like previous novels, it is set in specific historical circumstances, but of equal importance to history is the location of a habitat where characters interact, recollect, and project: a forest, a ship, a room, and, in this instance, a deteriorating upstate New York estate where the widow of Henry Caxton reigns over an empty mansion and an odd collection of servants. Caxton has made his fortune as a taxidermist who has supplied natural history museums all over the world with the products of his art, and the mansion, named “The Manikin” after the skeletal model over which the taxidermist stretches the skin of an animal, contains an extensive and exotic array of “stuffed” animals and birds. The
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SELBY, HUBERT, JR.
contrast between these mortal remains and the lively, at times rebellious, voices of the servants – the true inhabitants of The Manikin – forms the primary tension in this evocative still life of a novel that captures life in death, and death in life. The Manikin demonstrates Scott’s dramatic interest in natural processes, as does Tourmaline (2002). Told from the perspective of a 50-year-old man who has come to the island of Elba with his father, a precious stone prospector, at the age of 5, the novel involves the mystery of a girl’s disappearance, the natural and political history of the famous island upon which Napoleon was exiled, and the growing isolation of the members of the narrator’s family in this “paradise.” Tourmaline was preceded by Make Believe (2000), a novel in which adult morality and duplicity are portrayed through the eyes of a 4-year-old boy who has survived a car accident in which his mother has died, and who is subjected to a complex custody battle (his father having died before he was born) in which greed and love contend for dominance. Scott’s two most recent novels to date include Liberation (2005) and Follow Me (2009). In the former, Scott returns to the island of Elba and the story of a woman, recollecting her youth from the vantage point of 70: as a child of 10 during World War II, she hid herself on the island in fear for her life from French forces “liberating” the island, and encountered a wounded Senegalese soldier who becomes her first love. Here, as in all of her novels, Scott explores stark contrasts between brutality and care, ugliness and beauty. In Follow Me, a granddaughter reviews and discovers the life of her extraordinary, nomadic grandmother, who has drifted between towns and relationships for her entire adult life following a traumatic episode as a teenager. In addition to the novels, Scott’s published short story collections include Various Antidotes (1994), 11 tales of scientists, doctors and patients, and inhabitants of the world of medicine that explore the relation between science and the imagination; and Everybody Loves Somebody (2006), 10 narratives of romantic and anti-romantic relationships taking place across the twentieth century. A novelist in the vein of William H. Gass and John Hawkes for whom style and form are the primary elements of fiction, across a succession of
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works, Scott depicts the intense relation between identity and place, mind and habitat; she has established herself as one of the premier literary novelists of the post-1980 era. SEE ALSO: Gass, William H. (AF); Hawkes, John (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGSTED READINGS Boyers, R. (2002). Joanna Scott. In A Book of Common Praise. Keene, NY: Ausable, pp. 244–6. Eiben, T. (2006). PW Talks with Joanna Scott. Publishers Weekly, 253(41), 28. Scott, J. (1987). Fading, My Parmacheene Belle. New York: Ticknor and Fields. Scott, J. (1988). The Closest Possible Union. New York: Ticknor and Fields. Scott, J. (1990). Arrogance. New York: Linden. Scott, J. (1994). Various Antidotes. New York: Henry Holt. Scott, J. (1996). The Manikin. New York: Henry Holt. Scott, J. (2000). Make Believe. New York: Little, Brown. Scott, J. (2002). Tourmaline. New York: Little, Brown. Scott, J. (2005). Liberation. New York: Little, Brown. Scott, J. (2006). Everybody Loves Somebody. New York: Little, Brown. Scott, J. (2009). Follow Me. New York: Little, Brown. Shechner, M. (1997). Until the Music Stops: Women Novelists in a Post-Feminist Age. Salmagundi, 113, 220–38.
Selby, Hubert, Jr. JAMES R. GILES
Giving voice to urban rage and alienation, Hubert Selby, Jr.’s fiction satirizes conventional assumptions about American culture, and even about the inherent nature of human beings, in extreme and often obscene language. Especially in his first two novels, Selby demands that his reader hear the rage of the urban dispossessed. What results is a mixture of naturalism and artistic primitivism unlike anything that preceded it in American literature. Selby writes out of a deceptively complex aesthetic in which a discourse of outrage masks an underlying compassion. His fiction is committed to violating traditional taboos in language and subject matter.
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A child of the Great Depression, Selby was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1928 and grew up near 8th Avenue. In 1944, at the age of 15, Selby dropped out of Peter Stuyvesant High School after one year. He then joined the merchant marines and was sent to Europe, where, in 1947, he nearly died of tuberculosis. He spent most of the next three and a half years confined to hospitals undergoing surgeries that removed 10 of his ribs. He has said that his prolonged and almost fatal illness filled him with rage and bitterness (O’Brien 333). This internal rage was initially translated into a number of short stories that subsequently provided the basis for Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964). Selby’s brutally frank style and determination to explore transgressive subject matter prompted a trial for obscenity in Britain and the banning of the novel in Italy. Last Exit is set in the economically depressed Red Hook section of Brooklyn in the 1940s. It is divided into five main sections followed by a “coda” and focuses most memorably on a vulnerable drag queen, a rapacious prostitute, and a factory worker ultimately destroyed by his homosexuality. In one of the most brutally realistic scenes in American literature, Tralala, the prostitute, is gang-raped and murdered on a trash heap. The novel’s fragmented form allows Selby to evoke the cumulative rage-filled voice of an exploited and culturally alienated Brooklyn. Seven years elapsed before Selby’s next novel, The Room (1971), which focuses on a nameless man imprisoned, perhaps falsely, for robbery. Withholding his protagonist’s name, Selby emphasizes the powerlessness and anonymity of his plight. The situation of the imprisoned man is reminiscent of that of familiar characters from existentialist novels, for example Kafka’s The Trial, Camus’s The Stranger, and Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers. Selby’s third novel, The Demon (1976), is more conventional in narrative structure than his earlier novels, and perhaps less successful as a result. Its protagonist, a business executive, surrenders to destructive urges and ultimately descends into a world of violent criminality. Echoing the existentialist overtones of The Room, The Demon climaxes with the executive’s attempt to destroy God in the form of a widely admired Catholic priest. The narrator initially chooses to experi-
ment with petty crime but soon finds himself powerless to control his dangerous anti-social behavior. Selby regained his narrative power with Requiem for a Dream (1978), which examines in grimly realistic detail the destructive effects of addiction on four central characters. Three of the characters are young people involved in urban drug culture. The fourth, Sara Goldfarb, a lonely widow, becomes addicted to diet pills and has to be committed to a treatment facility where she is mentally destroyed. After Requiem for a Dream, Selby published three other books of varying success. Song of the Silent Snow (1986) is a much underrated short story collection. Underlying Song of the Silent Snow is a mood of quiet spiritual peace previously unknown in Selby’s work. This mood is more overtly present in his 1998 novel The Willow Tree, which, because of its artificially structured plot, is Selby’s least satisfying work. In contrast, Waiting Period (2002) recalls The Demon in its evocation of the consciousness of an anonymous narrator who is transformed by frustration and rage into a serial killer. In 2004, Selby died in Los Angeles of chronic pulmonary disease, leaving behind a relatively small but significant body of work. His aesthetic of rage, especially in Last Exit to Brooklyn, The Room, and Requiem for a Dream, revolutionized the American novel. The intense, unmediated anger of his characters constituted a radical departure from the mainstream of American literature as manifested in Whitman’s concept of the divine common man, or Howells’s affirmation of the American middle class, or the crafted narrative distance in the fiction of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. Among that of other contemporary urban novelists, the fiction of Richard Price reveals Selby’s influence. SEE ALSO: The Avant Garde Novel (AF); The City in Fiction (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Giles, J. R. (1995). The Game of Mum as Theme and Narrative Technique in Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. In The Naturalistic Inner-City Novel in
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America. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, pp. 119–38. Giles, J. R. (1998). Hubert Selby Jr. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Henden, J. (1978). Angries: S-M as Literary Style. In Vulnerable People. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 53–71. Hurm, G. (1991). Hubert Selby, Jr. In Fragmented Urban Images: The American City in Modern Fiction From Stephen Crane to Thomas Pynchon. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 273–99. Langenheim, B. (1998). Interview With Hubert Selby Jr. Enclitic, 10, 14–28. O’Brien, J. (1981). Interview With Hubert Selby Jr. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 10, 111–15. Peavy, C. D. (1969a). Hubert Selby and the Tradition of Moral Satire. Satire Newsletter, 6, 35–39. Peavy, C. D. (1969b). The Sin of Pride and Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. Critique, 11, 35–42. Review of Contemporary Fiction. (1981). Hubert Selby, Jr. [special issue]. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1. Selby, H., Jr. (1964). Last Exit to Brooklyn. New York: Grove. Selby, H., Jr. (1971). The Room. New York: Grove. Selby, H., Jr. (1976). The Demon. New York: Playboy. Selby, H., Jr. (1978). Requiem for a Dream. New York: Playboy. Selby, H., Jr. (1986). Song of the Silent Snow. London: Marion Boyars. Selby, H., Jr. (1998). The Willow Tree. New York: Marion Boyars. Selby, H., Jr. (2002). Waiting Period. New York: Marion Boyars. Sorrentino, G. (1964). The Art of Hubert Selby. Kulcher, 13, 27–43. Vorda, A. (1992). Examining the Disease: An Interview With Hubert Selby Jr. Literary Review, 35, 288–302. Wertime, R. (1974). Psychic Vengeance in Last Exit to Brooklyn. Literature and Psychology, 24, 153–88. Wertime, R. (1978). Hubert Selby, Jr. In J. Helterman & R. Layman (eds.), Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 2: American Novelists Since World War II. Detroit: Thompson Gale, pp. 444–6.
Silko, Leslie Marmon JOSHUA J. MASTERS
Leslie Marmon Silko is one of the most important Native American writers to emerge since the 1960s, and her first novel, Ceremony (1977), now a staple in college English classes, has received more critical attention than any other Native American novel. Silko was born on March 5,
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1948 in Albuquerque, New Mexico to Lee Marmon Silko and May Virginia Leslie and raised among her extended family in Laguna, the principal village of the Laguna Pueblo Reservation. A gifted learner, Silko entered the University of New Mexico at age 17. In 1969 she earned her BA, published her first short story, and entered the university’s law school, leaving in 1971. In 1973 she began working on Ceremony, and, bolstered by an NEA fellowship in 1974, became a full-time writer. During the past four decades she has published poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, autobiography, and novels, the genre for which she is best known. Understanding Silko’s work begins with an understanding of her mixed cultural heritage and complex regional identity. Although she was raised on a reservation, the “mixed blood” or “half breed” Marmon families – with white, Mexican, Spanish, and Laguna ancestry – always lived on the outskirts of the community. Significantly, Marmon families resided in homes situated along the San Jose River just below the village, “putting us on the fringe of things.” The image of the river, and related motifs suggesting borders, boundaries, and thresholds, play a foundational role in Silko’s poetics, indicative of her status as both an insider and outsider to her community and suggesting an identity on the borderlands between such categories as nation, race, ethnicity, and class. Silko’s early education further established her liminal position – her status “betwixt and between” categories of identity and geography. She attended two very different grammar schools in which the Laguna’s Keresan language was discouraged or even forbidden, and in her home, her maternal grandmother spoke primarily Keresan, while the majority of her family preferred English. This conflict between two language systems becomes a predominant theme in her work. Growing out of the linguistic tension between English and Keresan is a larger conflict between orally based and written forms of narrative, a conflict Silko simultaneously announces and resolves through her creation of a hybrid literary voice, which recalls oral storytelling conventions while still confined to the pages of a book. Like William Faulkner, a writer Silko much admires, she employs multiple narrators and narrative perspectives in her work, while mixing and juxtaposing different genres. The generically
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unclassifiable Storyteller (1981) epitomizes the hybrid nature of Silko’s work, consisting of 25 poems, eight short stories, 26 black-and-white photographs (17 of which are by her father, a professional photographer), along with a series of autobiographical interludes that recall the stories of her childhood. These narrative blendings among an array of voices, narrative forms, and generic conventions challenge readers to understand how this complex web-work – to borrow another of Silko’s favorite images – is foundational to both the structural integrity and thematic trajectory of her work. For instance, her epic Almanac of the Dead (1991) begins with a six-page table of contents, which immediately indicates the sprawling scope of the novel. Readers then encounter a two-page diagrammatic illustration, entitled “FIVE HUNDRED YEAR MAP,” and its dizzying array of prophetic sentences, character names, places, and pictorial images. Although the map is bifurcated horizontally by the US/Mexican border, dotted lines from all directions converge on Tucson, each bearing markers like “cocaine to finance arms,” and “organized crime family goes west,” suggesting a transnational and transhistorical network of forces, with Tucson as the hub – the center of the spiderweb, and a primary indicator of the novel’s spatial and temporal scope. Silko’s novels are clearly metafictional, much like those of Toni Morrison. Both write about storytelling itself and the power of narrative to construct the world and destroy it. Ceremony, for example, begins with a poem about “ThoughtWoman, the spider,” whose thoughts call the world into being, and the novel is about a mentally and culturally “ill” protagonist, Tayo, struggling to create a ceremony that adapts past rituals to modern circumstances. While one can link Silko’s work to a postmodern, self-referential aesthetic, it remains grounded in issues of place, region, history, and communal culture. Furthermore, her metafictional tendencies are deeply rooted in the mythology and oral storytelling traditions of the Laguna Pueblo. Silko’s hybrid postmodernism is, therefore, uniquely embedded in tradition. Silko has received numerous honors and prizes throughout her career – an NEA writing fellowship (1974), the Pushcart Poetry Prize (1977), a MacArthur Fellowship (1981), and the New
Mexico Endowment for the Humanities “Living Cultural Treasure” Award (1988). In 1994 she received the third Worldcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers Lifetime Achievement Award. SEE ALSO: Border Fictions (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Faulkner, William (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Barnett, L., & Thorson, J. (eds.) (1999). Leslie Marmon Silko: A Collection of Critical Essays. Albuquerque: New Mexico University Press. Chavkin, A. (ed.) (2002). Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony: A Casebook. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fitz, B. (2004). Silko: Writing Storyteller and Medicine Woman. Norman: Oklahoma University Press. Jarman, M. (2006). Exploring the World of the Different in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. MELUS, 31, 147–68. Jaskoski, H. (1998). Leslie Marmon Silko: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne. Nelson, R. M. (2008). Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony: The Recovery of Tradition. New York: Peter Lang. Perez Castillo, S. (1991). Postmodernism, Native American Literature and the Real: The Silko-Erdrich Controversy. Massachusetts Review 32, 285–94. Rand, N. (1999). Silko, Morrison, and Roth: Studies in Survival. New York: Peter Lang. Salyer, G. (1997). Leslie Marmon Silko. New York: Twayne. Silko, L. M. (1974). Laguna Woman: Poems by Leslie Silko. Greenfield Center, NY: Greenfield Review. Silko, L. M. (1977). Ceremony. New York: Viking. Silko, L. M. (1981). Storyteller. New York: Viking. Silko, L. M. (1986). The Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters: Letters Between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright (ed. A. Wright). St. Paul, MN: Graywolf. Silko, L. M. (1991). Almanac of the Dead. New York: Simon and Schuster. Silko, L. M. (1993). Sacred Water: Narratives and Pictures. Tucson, AZ: Flood Plain. Silko, L. M. (1996). Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today. New York: Simon and Schuster. Silko, L. M. (1999). Garden in the Dunes. New York: Simon and Schuster.
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SINCLAIR, UPTON
Sinclair, Upton LAUREN COODLEY
Most Americans know Upton Sinclair simply as the author of The Jungle (1906), the astonishing novel that rocked the beginning of the twentieth century with its expose of poisoned meat. But in Oil! (1927), Sinclair also described the transformation of the California landscape following the building of automobile highways. His play Singing Jailbirds (1924b) drew attention to the plight of striking longshoremen in San Pedro, California. The World’s End (1949) series gained him admirers from Britain to Japan to Germany, who found in it their first taste of what one called “story history.” With this series, Sinclair completed the circle he had begun when he went into the stockyards in 1905 to examine how cattle were slaughtered. Born in 1878 in Baltimore, Upton Sinclair survived his father’s alcoholism and his mother’s poverty. He grabbed what crumbs of education were available to him, and searched for the source of the injustice that doomed his own household and the lives that surrounded it. In the process, he discovered first poetry, then religion, then socialism. Sinclair went to Battle Creek, Michigan, to find health with cereal inventor William Kellogg, where he met and courted Mary Craig, who would remain his wife and best friend until she died in 1961. Along with Jack London, he founded the Intercollegiate Socialist Society in 1905. By 1913 he had discovered the secrets of health, the sanity of monogamy, and the importance of publicity in facing down the industrial giants of twentiethcentury America. He published The Cry for Justice in 1915, the first anthology of protest literature in English, which contained 5,000 years of writings on workers, socialism, religious persecution, and artistic revolt. With Mary Craig he came to California; they settled in the Southland, where he played tennis with Henry Ford, hiked with Charlie Chaplin, performed psychic experiments with Albert Einstein, and corresponded daily with everyone from Margaret Sanger to George Bernard Shaw. Sinclair worked at his life assiduously and ardently, tending his friendships, his roses, and his typewriter in the gardens of
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his homes in Pasadena, Long Beach, and finally Monrovia. Mary Craig owned some property that was leased for oil development in Long Beach, and this experience was the impetus for Sinclair’s most acclaimed novel since The Jungle, Oil! The character “Dad” from Oil! is often cited as one of the most sympathetic portrayals of a businessman in American literature. “Dad” is also a devastating parody of patriarchal authority, and this searing portrait of an “oil man” demonstrated the grace and irony of Sinclair’s writing. Upton Sinclair is not generally seen as an environmentalist, but in fact he was deeply influenced by the natural world and outraged by its impending destruction. Upton Sinclair first discovered the California redwoods in 1935 while traveling to recover debts from his gubernatorial campaign. The Gnomobile (1937) may have been the first children’s story with an environmental message to save the redwoods. Eventually, Sinclair convinced Walt Disney to produce this story as a film for children, in 1962. Like the protagonists of Sinclair’s novel The Wet Parade (1931), Sinclair grew up hating liquor and the destruction it creates. Usually films about alcoholism document the behavior of a fascinating and self-destructive alcoholic. Sinclair chose to construct a different narrative. He wrote The Wet Parade to remind the country about the origins of the Prohibition movement in the tragedies of alcoholic families. Unlike many twentieth-century writers, Sinclair renounced the tendency to abuse alcohol. He was willingly arrested many times to support labor and free speech issues, yet has been often ridiculed since his death for his “bluenose identity.” Recent scholarship on the history of masculinity and the politics of personal life choices could productively revise these judgments. Sinclair’s conviction that the personal was indeed political was derived both from his temperance marches with his mother and from his friendships with powerful women activists throughout his life. Sinclair’s final literary achievement occurred during the 1940s with the World’s End series, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1942. The series profoundly affected the American public’s willingness to join World War II. The series describes the adventures of an American named
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Lanny Budd who sees first-hand the development of fascism in Europe and the need for America to join the Allies to stop it. The first eight novels sold over 1 million copies in the US alone and were translated into 20 languages. Sinclair’s Autobiography was published in 1962; he died in 1968.
Sinclair, U. (1960). My Lifetime in Letters. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Sinclair, U. (1962). The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair. New York: Harcourt Brace. Stone, I. (1947). The Upton Sinclair Anthology. Hollywood, CA: Murray and Gee. Yoder, J. (1975). Upton Sinclair. New York: Ungar.
SEE ALSO: London, Jack (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF); Norris, Frank (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF)
Singer, Isaac Bashevis
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ahouse, J. (1994). Upton Sinclair: A Descriptive, Annotated Bibliography. Los Angeles: Arundel. Arthur, A. (2006). Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair. New York: Random House. Bloodworth, W. (1977). Upton Sinclair. Boston: Twayne. Dell, F. (1927). Upton Sinclair: A Study in Social Protest. New York: Doran. Gottesman, R. (1973). An Annotated Checklist. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Herms, D. (1999). Upton Sinclair: Literature and Social Reform. New York: Peter Lang. Mattson, K. (2006). Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century. New York: Wiley. Mitchell, G. (1992). The Campaign of the Century. New York: Random House. Mookerjee, R. N. (1988). Art for Social Justice: The Major Novels of Upton Sinclair. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow. Nakada, S. (1990). Japanese Empathy for Upton Sinclair. Tokyo: Central Institute. Sinclair, M. C. (1957). Southern Belle. New York: Crown. Sinclair, U. (1906). The Jungle. New York: Doubleday. Sinclair, U. (1915). The Cry for Justice. Philadelphia: Winston. Sinclair, U. (1917). King Coal. New York: Macmillan. Sinclair, U. (1924a). The Millennium 1907. Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius. Sinclair, U. (1924b). The Singing Jailbirds. Long Beach, CA: n.p. Sinclair, U. (1927). Oil! New York: Boni. Sinclair, U. (1931). The Wet Parade. New York: Farrar, Rinehart. Sinclair, U. (1937). The Gnomobile. New York: Farrar, Rinehart. Sinclair, U. (1940–9). World’s End Series. New York: Viking. Sinclair, U. (1950). Another Pamela. New York: Viking.
PETER C. HERMAN
Highly prolific, Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–July 24, 1991) wrote over 16 novels, 12 books of short stories, children’s books, memoirs, and numerous non-fiction essays and more works as yet untranslated. His collected short fiction is available in editions published by the Library of America. Singer came to prominence with the publication of his short story “Gimpel the Fool” in 1953, and by the 1960s he regularly published stories in the New Yorker and mass-circulation magazines. Singer won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. Singer’s father was a Hasidic rabbi and his mother the daughter of a rabbi, who took a more rational, less mystical approach to Judaism. She and a younger brother died after being deported to Kazakhstan in 1939–41. While in Warsaw in 1923, Singer started cobbling together a living through proofreading, translating, and publishing occasional pieces in the New York Yiddish newspaper, the Forward (Forvertz). In 1935, he moved to the United States. Up until 1968, Singer’s translated works focused on the Hasidic world of pre-Holocaust Poland, drawing on the intellectual culture of Talmudic study, the ecstatic religion of Hasidim, and the superstitious folklore that coexisted with it. He departed from the traditions of Yiddish literature by dealing with topics that he believed established Yiddish writers deliberately avoided. Instead he wrote about sex explicitly, the Jewish underworld, and what he called the “great adventures inherent in Jewish history.” Singer’s first novel, Satan in Goray (1933–4, trans. 1955), graphically describes a small town’s adherence to the false messiah and descent into sexual depravity, and The Family Moskat (1943, trans. 1950) features a double adultery on Yom Kippur Eve. Singer wrote, using a female narrator, about lesbianism (“Zeitl and Rickel,” The Seance
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SINGER, ISAAC BASHEVIS
[1968]) and transvestitism (“Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” Short Friday [1964]). A novel about Jewish gangsters, Yarma and Keyle, was serialized between 1956 and 1957 (only one chapter has been translated). Singer’s shtetl fiction features greater psychological and sexual realism in Yiddish literature combined with plots revolving around fantastic and supernatural events. In his most famous short story, “Gimpel the Fool,” the spirit of Gimpel’s departed, adulterous wife returns to prevent her husband from fouling the dough Gimpel uses to bake the town’s bread (1945, trans. 1953). In “The Gentleman From Cracow” (1957), Satan, disguised as a wealthy visitor, nearly destroys a town, and in “Zeidlus the Pope” (1943, trans. 1964), “the Evil One,” as Singer calls him, tempts and destroys a deeply pious man. In “A Crown of Feathers” (trans. 1972), Singer details how the Devil tricks a pious woman into abandoning her fiance and converting to Christianity; years later, she marries the man she abandoned, who subjects her to sadistic punishments. After the Holocaust destroyed Eastern European Jewish culture, Singer’s shtetl fiction was interpreted less in terms of expanding the horizons of Yiddish literature and more about memorializing a lost civilization. In his later, self-reflexive novel, Meshugah (1981–3, trans. 1994), a character exclaims, “A whole world collapsed before my very eyes. But you, my favorite author, are bringing it to life again” (31). Many of his novels, such as The Family Moskat (1950), The Magician of Lublin (1960), The Estate (1969), and The Slave (1962), focus on re-creating the pre-Holocaust Jewish experience. Singer’s most powerful fiction, however, explicitly concerns the problem of post-Holocaust Judaism and the difficulty of belief after Auschwitz. Shadows on the Hudson (1947–8, trans. 1999) explores a variety of responses to the Holocaust through the lives of Boris Makaver and his family. In Enemies: A Love Story (1972), Herman Broder insists upon the impossibility of belief in God after the Holocaust while at the same time believing that the only way to prevent becoming a Nazi is to turn to God. In his acceptance speech for the 1974 National Book Award for Fiction, Singer announced, “I am happy to call myself a Jewish writer, a Yiddish writer, an American writer.” Yet Singer does not fit comfortably into
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any of these categories. While powerfully attracted to traditional Judaism, even in his pre-Holocaust stories, belief in God is fragile. After the Holocaust, Singer became deeply skeptical of a God who would allow the destruction of European Jewry without intervening. A central paradox – that God is necessary for morality, yet after the Holocaust, belief in a merciful, beneficent deity is impossible – animates much of Singer’s fiction. At the same time, Singer considered American culture backward and vulgar. He kept his Englishand Yiddish-speaking audiences separate. On the one hand, he maintained that all translations of his works be based on the English versions, yet the Yiddish versions of his fiction are often quite different from the English ones. While his fiction remains in print, critical interest in Singer has declined since his death on July 24, 1991. Perhaps because he focused on either Eastern Europe or Holocaust survivors, his works have not found an audience beyond Singer’s immediate contemporaries. Singer’s novels and short stories are therefore ripe for rediscovery. SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Expatriate Fiction (AF); Jewish Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Allentuck, M. (1969). The Achievement of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Cohen, J. (1998). “Disgrace of Revelation”: I. B. Singer’s Holocaust Impiety. Textual Practice, 12(3), 443–57. Farrell, G.(ed.) (1996). Critical Essays on Isaac Bashevis Singer. New York: G. K. Hall. Hadda, J. (1997). Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press. Herman, P.C. (2005). Shadows on the Hudson: Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Problem of Post-Holocaust Judaism. Studies in American Jewish Literature, 24, 158–79. Sherman, J. (1988). Author Versus Narrator in The Penitent: Reconsidering Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Tirade. Journal of Narrative Technique, 18(3), 243–57. Singer, I. B. (1950). The Family Moskat. New York: Knopf. Singer, I. B. (1955). Satan in Goray. New York: Noonday. Singer, I. B. (1960a). In My Father’s Court. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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Singer, I. B. (1960b). The Magician of Lublin. New York: Noonday. Singer, I. B. (1972). Enemies: A Love Story. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Singer I. B. (1978). Shosha. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Singer, I. B. (1984). Love and Exile: A Memoir. New York: Doubleday. Singer, I. B. (1992). Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations (ed. G. Farrell) Oxford: University Press of Mississippi. Singer, I. B. (1994). Meshugah: A Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Singer, I. B. (1998). Shadows on the Hudson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Singer, I. B. (2004a). Collected Stories: A Friend of Kafka to Passions. New York: Library of America. Singer, I. B. (2004b). Collected Stories: Gimpel the Fool to The Letter Writer. New York: Library of America. Singer, I. B. (2004c). Collected Stories: One Night in Brazil to The Death of Methuselah. New York: Library of America. Wolitz, S. L. (2001). The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Smiley, Jane NEIL NAKADATE
Jane Smiley is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist; she was awarded the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Acres (1991). Her career reflects an early and ongoing interest in diverse subjects and fictional genres, and her many essays, articles, and reviews cover a wide range of cultural, social, economic, and political issues. Smiley was elected to membership in the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 2001, and in 2006 received the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award. Smiley was born in Los Angeles, California in 1949, but grew up in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. She was surrounded by numerous storytelling members of an extended family, read voraciously, and grew during the seventh grade from average size to six feet and 125 pounds – and from having a conventional girl’s perspective to having an atypical, somewhat androgynous understanding of experience. She graduated from the John Burroughs School in 1967 and Vassar College in 1971; soon after, she enrolled in the doctoral program at the University of Iowa, and
was subsequently accepted into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She received her PhD in 1978, and beginning in 1981 taught literature and creative writing courses at Iowa State University. Her early fiction, reflecting her admiration for British novelists such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, typically involves individuals in relation to families or family-like groupings and is often narrated from the perspective of a sensitive but imperfectly perceptive observer. This is the case in the short story “Lily” (1984), the novella “The Age of Grief” (1987), and A Thousand Acres, among the most widely read and appreciated of her early works. Given its emergence from a torrent of inspiration and its focus on a doomed fourteenth-century colony, The Greenlanders (1988b) is exceptional in Smiley’s oeuvre but not atypical of her imagination; it reflects her extensive study of the Middle Ages at Iowa, her need to understand people in relation to their environments, and her interest in placing private lives within complex social systems. Her examination of human activity in terms of weblike interrelationships is as revealing of the academic community of the comic novel Moo (1995) as it is of the violent 1850s Kansas Territory in The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (1998). In this respect, Smiley is more akin to Don DeLillo than to the writers of domestic realism with whom she is sometimes associated. A Thousand Acres reflects Smiley’s need to analyze and critique American culture and political ideology, especially during the American 1980s, in her view a period of highly problematic political and economic change. It is set at the beginning of the decade, and in presenting a domestic tragedy criticizes patriarchal authority and disruptive changes in the Midwestern and Great Plains landscape during the farm debt crisis. Moo, set in 1989 at a land-grant university similar to the one she taught at, incorporates a diverse roster of characters in a satirical critique of academic-industrial agriculture. Good Faith (2003) is sympathetically satirical regarding its narrator and central character, but sharply critical of conduct in the real estate business and the impact of banking deregulation during the Reagan administration. Smiley left college teaching in 1996 as a Distinguished Professor, moving to northern California, where her production continued apace – not
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only novels but also book reviews and articles on myriad topics such as marriage, travel, and equestrian sports, and a biography of Charles Dickens (2002), long one of her favorite writers and influences. Her later writing generally reflected her preference for the comic vision, which she blended in Horse Heaven (2000a) with romanticism, her intimate knowledge of thoroughbred horse culture, and elements of magic realism. A Year at the Races (2004) provides a personal, non-fictional view of the same subject. Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005) is an outgrowth of Smiley’s decision, following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to read or reread well over 100 key novels; the book articulates her understanding of the novel and the reading of novels, and also her aesthetic convictions as a writer. The novel Ten Days in the Hills (2007) was inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron and is set in the early days of the Iraq War, thus confirming Smiley’s embrace of postmodern reality. SEE ALSO: DeLillo, Don (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
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Smiley, J. (1987). The Age of Grief. New York: Knopf. Smiley, J. (1988a). Catskill Crafts: Artisans of the Catskill Mountains. New York: Crown. Smiley, J. (1988b). The Greenlanders. New York: Knopf. Smiley, J. (1989). Ordinary Love and Good Will. New York: Knopf. Smiley, J. (1991). A Thousand Acres. New York: Knopf. Smiley, J. (1993). Can Mothers Think? In K. Brown (ed.), The True Subject: Writers on Life and Craft. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf. pp. 3–15. Smiley, J. (1995). Moo. New York: Knopf. Smiley, J. (1998). The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton. New York: Knopf. Smiley, J. (1999). Shakespeare in Iceland. In M. Novy (ed.), Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women’s Re-Visions in Literature and Performance. New York: St Martin’s, pp. 159–79. Smiley, J. (2000a). Horse Heaven. New York: Knopf. Smiley, J. (2000b). Why Marriage? Harper’s, 300, 151–59. Smiley, J. (2002). Charles Dickens. New York: Viking. Smiley, J. (2003). Good Faith. New York: Knopf. Smiley, J. (2004). A Year at the Races: Reflections on Horses, Humans, Love, Money, and Luck. New York: Knopf. Smiley, J. (2005). Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. New York: Knopf. Smiley, J. (2007). Ten Days in the Hills. New York: Knopf.
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bacon, K. (1998). The Adventures of Jane Smiley. Atlantic Unbound (May 28). At www.theatlantic. com/unbound/bookauth/ba980528.htm, accessed Jan. 18, 2010. Birnbaum, R. (2003). Jane Smiley: Pulitzer Prize Winner, Author of Good Faith Talks with Robert Birnbaum. Identity Theory (June 18). At www. identitytheory.com/interviews/birnbaum111.php, accessed Jan. 18, 2010. Bonetti, K. (1998). An Interview With Jane Smiley. Missouri Review, 21(3), 89–108. Conroy, T. (2001). Jane Smiley. In P. Meanor & R. E. Lee (eds.), American Short-Story Writers Since World War I, 3rd Series, Detroit: Gale, pp. 272–8. Nakadate, N. (1999). Understanding Jane Smiley. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Smiley, J. (1980a). Barn Blind. New York: Harper and Row. Smiley, J. (1980b). Say It Ain’t So, Huck: Second Thoughts on Mark Twain’s “Masterpiece.” Harper’s, 292, 61–7. Smiley, J. (1981). At Paradise Gate. New York: Simon and Schuster. Smiley, J. (1984). Duplicate Keys. New York: Knopf.
Social-Realist Fiction LEIGH ANNE DUCK
The term “social realism” is typically associated with the art and literature of the 1930s, a time when poverty, unemployment, and exploitative working conditions received unprecedented attention in the United States. Shaped by the circumstances of the Great Depression, these debates nonetheless reflect ongoing concerns about social realism’s task of portraying society in a way that both reveals injustice and stimulates transformative impulses or action. Different literary schools had, after all, been claiming paramount authority in their representation of reality since the late nineteenth century, and their quarrels over method reflect divergent views of social life. William Dean Howells, for example, celebrated how realism, in its representation of “the whole field of human experience,” could “widen the bounds of sympathy,” but he
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argued that social circumstances in the US were so “favorable” that its novelists could focus on “the more smiling aspects of life,” such as “refinements of thought and spirit” (142, 15, 127, 128, 144). A decade later, however, Frank Norris argued that the realism Howells championed was “stultifie[d]” by its focus on “normal” life and “the surface of things”; he advocated that fiction “penetrate deep into the motives and character of type-men,” whether poor or middle-class (27). Though Norris dubbed this literary mode “romance,” it is generally referred to as “naturalism” and differed from Howells’s realism also in its approach to plot: whereas the more overtly bourgeois mode focused on individual agency in the pursuit of personal gain and social progress, naturalism, which sought to understand the “elemental forces” in society and in human character, often suggested that those forces were inherently overwhelming by depicting the decline of characters into inertia or even bestiality (Norris 27). Questions of human “type” and agency have played an important role in European Marxist literary criticism as well. Friedrich Engels urged that realism should provide, “beside truth of detail, the truth in reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances” (269); and Georg Lukacs warned against the bourgeois and nihilistic belief that “the individual . . . must be a helpless victim of historical forces” (Lukacs 91). For the purposes of US literary history, however, it is important to note that, in the works of many writers from the early twentieth century – including Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser – naturalist and realist tendencies appear side by side, as characters strive energetically and often productively against the social forces arrayed against them and yet, at other points in the narrative, revert to “type” or accept, with resignation or torpor, the fate their status allots them. This concern with futurity would become central to debates regarding social realism in the US, for by the onset of the Great Depression, its most vigorous theorists were committed to economic transformation, and thus described their work as proletarian or socialist realism – a set of aesthetic ideals influenced, though not dictated, by the cultural policies of the Soviet Union. Though they convened around clubs and journals, these writers were hardly monolithic in their approach;
they disagreed vehemently over form, content, and perspective, and their alliances and individual opinions shifted over time, particularly as leftists and liberals began to unite later in the decade in a formation known as the Popular Front. Discussions of socialist literature frequently cite Mike Gold’s “Proletarian Realism,” which advocated that writers describe material conditions and labor with concrete detail, terseness, and “revolutionary elan,” rejecting “pessimism” for confidence in workers’ ability to produce transformation (206–8). Though such pronouncements are sometimes taken as communist orthodoxy and were overtly oriented toward global revolution, Gold could sound, during the same period, like a liberal nationalist seeking to articulate an American literary tradition. What is notable here is less inconsistency than a willingness to draw from divergent paradigms if their usage could support the working class in its struggle against capitalism: though Marxism was repeatedly described, at the time, as a science, its aesthetic theory as manifest in the US often emerged from intuitions that were honed through debate. This process led writers to describe proletarian literature in ways that can be misleading in retrospect, particularly regarding the relationship between modernism and social realism. Leftists regularly proclaimed their disdain for fiction that represented the perspective of alienated individuals without more systematically probing the society that caused such feelings of isolation and futility, and these diatribes against “subjectivism” have often been read as attacks on modernism more generally. But critics have recently shown that these literary boundaries were actually quite porous. During the 1930s, for example, leftist writers – including many who had participated in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s – criticized the earlier movement for its decadence and primitivism, tropes associated with bourgeois modernism. One could argue, however, that in portraying African American perspectives on how the boundaries of social status are maintained and experienced, the Harlem writers, like the realists and “local colorists” of other ethnic groups, supplied some of the forms from which proletarian literature drew its energy. Certainly, the two schools shared a concern with how to incorporate folklore into transformative literature, as evidenced by
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Alain Locke’s assessment (1992 [1925]) that it could serve as the basis for racial nationalism, and Richard Wright’s later view, in “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (1937), that it might be used to inculcate socialist values and ideas. Indeed, socialist realism’s vigorous production of manifestos and its effort, in John Dos Passos’s words, “to discover the deep currents of historical change” at a time “when terms are continually turning inside out,” designate it as one form of modernism (quoted in Hart 82, 78). Dos Passos, of course, is a particularly apt figure for demonstrating such continuity, as his U.S.A. trilogy portrays class struggle in ways that negotiated the modernist interest in the complexities of individual subjectivity with the socialist demand for concrete representation of broad socioeconomic trends. In this debate, which was central to European and American discussions of politics and aesthetics, critics on each side noted that modernists’ interior monologues implied a critique of capitalism, but leftists felt that a narrative focused on subjective dynamics must necessarily displace social ones. Dos Passos, in a method praised repeatedly at the leftist American Writers’ Congress in 1935, juxtaposed sections of prose that followed realist formal conventions – chronological descriptions of events situated in an omniscient narrative perspective – with “Newsreel” prose montages that suggest the experience of a sensory assault by news media chronicling daily class conflict, as expressed through strikes, exploitation, and economic corruption. These are further contrasted with impressionistic “Camera Eye” sections that focus tightly on the economic aspects of individual lives while emphasizing the difficulty or estrangement that occurs when an “outsider” attempts to comprehend the lived experience of unfamiliar material circumstances. By 1938, when the last volume of this series was published, Dos Passos’s politics had shifted decidedly to the right. But his efforts to convey how understandings of the real can vary according to classed experience exemplify how such concerns incited modernists’ formal innovations, a process evinced in other literary modes also, such as Muriel Rukeyser’s poetic The Book of the Dead (1938) and James Agee and Walker Evans’s photodocumentary Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Certainly, this question of perspective was central to definitions of proletarian literature. Edwin
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Seaver, for example, claimed it could be defined solely through “the political orientation of the novelist” (quoted in Hart 101), while Joseph Freeman warned that “the worker’s life revolves precisely around those experiences which are alien to the bourgeois aesthete, who loathes them, who cannot believe they are experiences at all” (quoted in Hicks 12). Few leftists denied the possibility that middle-class writers could contribute to the proletarian cause, especially given the fact that the Great Depression had altered the economic status of so many. But these writers were concerned that the difference between classes might render the “reality” of each inaccessible to the other, a possibility explored, for example, in Albert Maltz’s short story “Man on a Road” (1935). Here, the narrator, a member of the petit bourgeoisie, is fascinated by the persistent silence of his hitchhiker, an unemployed miner. What the narrator imagines to be a psychological or even categorical difference – the narrator repeatedly describes the miner as inhuman, ghostly, or corpse-like – turns out to be a direct result of economic status: the miner is suffering from silicosis, which results from the coating of mining dust in his lungs and renders speech difficult. The story, in other words, describes a shift in consciousness on the part of the narrator, requiring him to cease idealizing or even fetishizing material differences. Such questions of how to represent and understand economic diversity were widespread during a decade that was focused on documenting the effects of economic change, but where New Deal agencies and photo magazines tended either to present unemployment as a brief lapse in a heroic national narrative or to commodify the spectacle of poverty; realists in the proletarian movement offered more careful considerations of how the class struggle they sought to represent might be reflected in their artistic choices. Those who sought to articulate working-class perspectives were also confronted with the significance of other social differences. Indeed, literary works and commentaries from this period regularly negotiated how preconceptions regarding race, region, and gender inflect writers’ and readers’ perspectives on reality. Though communists were eager to organize women and African Americans, their vision of the revolutionary class was notably virile, and their understanding of capitalism was one in which certain social forms are
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anachronistic. Accordingly, writers concerned with differences within the proletariat sought ways to articulate their experiences within a proletarian framework. For instance, “The Iron Throat” (1974 [1934]), written by Tillie Lerner (later Olsen), observes how the economic exploitation and uncertainty experienced by a miner’s family are exacerbated by its internal patriarchy, as the plans and opinions of the wife and mother are silenced by her often abusive husband. Though passages in Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) correspond with the Marxist position that the agricultural workers of the Southern “Black Belt” constituted a peasantry – a class whose experiences and values were chronologically misaligned with the idea of proletarian revolution – several of his stories narrate a process of transformation, as characters abandon a passive Christianity for faith in activism and social change. Still, participants in the movement disagreed regarding the realism and the effectiveness of some representations. Though many praised Erskine Caldwell’s representations of Southern poverty, for example, Kenneth Burke described them in 1935 as “distinctly grotesque . . . extravaganzas” less expressive of “social propaganda” than of “balked religiosity” (354, 352). In representations of region, as of class, theorists often suggested that only personal experience and group identification could prevent writers from distorting the circumstances and potential within marginalized populations. Arguing that Midwesterners have experienced a unique intensity of “laissez faire colonization,” for instance, Meridel Le Seuer counseled patience for the region’s realists, who sought to represent a cultural landscape that others might not understand (in Hart 135–8). Though this tradition of social realism did not end with the Depression – shaping African American writing, especially, into the 1950s – it did decline, becoming the subject of aesthetic debate during the second half of the twentieth century. Critics and writers have suggested that concerns over perspective are central to this shift: Gayl Jones, for example, contends that the formal conventions of naturalism and realism “followed the whites’ definition of African American social reality” (33). Arguing that the Black Aesthetic Movement, like the proletarian one, constrained individual voices, she explains that writers from all ethnic positions that “begin in a subordinate
position to another literature or literary heritage” seek to integrate distinct cultural expressions into their fiction (30, 180). The style she advocates, which incorporates forms and narratives from mythic and spiritual traditions into narratives about contemporary life, is antithetical to conventional definitions of realism, which mandate that representation adhere closely to the particularities of material existence. Nonetheless, Jones attributes to such fiction a goal that Howells aligned with nineteenthcentury realism – “grappling with visibility within the democracy” – a similarity that emerges all the more sharply given the number of contemporary writers who eschew sharp distinctions between legend, fantasy, and actuality (178). Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1975) may be the most famous example, as it incorporates myth and speculative history into a genre – autobiography – that would seem to be restricted to realistic representation. Paradoxically criticized as a fake and celebrated for its psychological realism, this experimental narrative exemplifies a contemporary critical predicament: how to classify works that incorporate supernatural effects into otherwise mimetic representation. In keeping with previous discussions of social realism, interpretations of such writing typically consider political motivation and efficacy. Where Jose David Saldivar (90–104) argues that magic realism allows authors to demonstrate how perceptions of reality are shaped and differentiated by oppressive histories and continuing injustice, Fredric Jameson (1988 [1975]) expresses concern that when narrative is “reduced to the telling of the truth of a private situation alone” – one delimited, for example, by concerns related to ethnicity, gender, or locale – it obscures the possibility of political action by emphasizing social incoherence (131–2). Such debates have arguably been superseded, however, by the poststructuralist argument that the realist project is inherently flawed, because texts, whatever their aims, necessarily function more to produce a certain sense of reality than to represent the chaos and contingency of the actual world. In 1989, Tom Wolfe blamed such perceptions for the decline of “big novels . . . that wallow . . . enthusiastically in the dirt of everyday life and the
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dirty secrets of class envy” and are “obviously relished by the mob” (47). Arguing that, in order to portray “the innermost life of the individual,” one must also depict the panorama in which that life takes shape, Wolfe’s fiction incorporates an array of characters in disparate social positions, as shaped by class, race, gender, and geographic locale. Novels like A Man in Full (1998) illuminate how such broad social networks as corporations and media affect seemingly distant lives, aligning with Jameson’s later argument (1992) that contemporary art should facilitate audiences’ “cognitive mapping” of late global capitalism. Wolfe’s tendency toward caricature, however, suggests that the proletarians’ concern with authorial perspective in realistic representation remains trenchant. Scholarship on such questions in contemporary fiction tends not to use the term “social realism,” however, which impedes an understanding of how the debates shaping earlier forms of realism in the United States may be relevant to today’s literature. Given the admirable strides made by recent criticism on proletarian realism as well as that of the late nineteenth century, the stage is well set for work that might provide such diachronic analysis. SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF); Poltics and the Novel (AF); Realism/Magical Realism (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Burke, K. (1973). The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. 3rd edn. Berkeley: University of California Press. Denning, M. (1997). The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso. Engels, F. (1975). Letter to Margaret Harkness [1888]. In D. Craig (ed.), Marxists on Literature: An Anthology. New York: Penguin, pp. 269–71. Foley, B. (1993). Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gold, M. (1972). Proletarian Realism [1930]. In Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology (ed. M. Folsom). New York: International, pp. 203–8. Hart, H. (ed.) (1935). American Writers’ Congress. New York: International.
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Hicks, G. (ed.) (1935). Proletarian Literature in the United States: An Anthology. New York: International. Higadisha, C. (2003). Aunt Sue’s Children: Reviewing the Gender(ed) Politics of Richard Wright’s Radicalism. American Literature 75, 395–425. Howells, W. D. (1892). Criticism and Fiction. New York: Harper. Irr, C. (1998). The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in the United States and Canada during the 1930s. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jameson, F. (1988). Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of Modernism [1975]. In The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986, vol. 2: The Syntax of History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jameson, F. (1992). Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jones, G. (1991). Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kaplan, A. (1988). The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Locke, A. (1992). Foreword [1925]. In The New Negro. New York: Atheneum, pp. xxv–xxvii. Lerner, T. (1935). The Iron Throat In G. Hicks (ed.), Proletarian Literature in the United States: An Anthology. New York: International, pp. 103–10. Lukacs, G. (1971). Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle (trans. J. Mander & N. Mander). New York: Harper and Row. Maltz, A. (1935). Man on a Road. In G. Hicks (ed.), Proletarian Literature in the United States: An Anthology. New York: International, pp. 116–22. Maxwell, W. J. (1999). New Negro, Old Left: African American Writing and Communism Between the Wars. New York: Columbia University Press. Morgan, S. I. (2004). Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature 1930–1953. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Norris, F. (1903). The Responsibilities of the Novelist, and Other Literary Essays, New York: Doubleday. Olsen, T. (1974). The Iron Throat [1934] In Yonnondio: From the Thirties. New York: Delacorte. Rabinowitz, P. (1991). Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Rideout, W. B. (1956). The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900–1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Saldivar, J. D. (1991). The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Schocket, E. (2006). Vanishing Moments: Class and American Literature. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Wolfe, T. (1989). Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel. Harper’s, 279, 45–56. Wolfe, T. (1998). A Man in Full. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wright, R. (1937). Blueprint for Negro Writing. New Challenge, 2, 53–65.
Sontag, Susan SOHNYA SAYRES
Born Susan Rosenblatt in New York City, Susan Sontag spent her childhood in Arizona. Avid and intense, she flew through her high school years in Los Angeles, entering college at age 15 and transferring to the University of Chicago at age 16. A year later she met and married sociologist Philip Rieff, with whom she had a son, David. The couple moved east, where Sontag pursued graduate degrees in philosophy, literature, and religion at Harvard, then at Oxford and the Sorbonne. Subsequently, she divorced Rieff and began her career as an independent writer, dividing her time between Europe and New York. By her early thirties, she established herself as an interpreter of culture at ease with erudition while discussing an array of contemporary topics. By the 1970s, she began to win prestigious awards, including the MacArthur Fellowship (1990–5); her notable courage in the public arena included creating theater for the besieged city of Sarajevo (1993–6). She succumbed to leukemia, an outcome of treatments for cancer that she contracted at 42, just shy of her 72nd birthday. Sontag’s work is compelled by ideas in all of her vehicles, which include fiction, essays, films, criticism, and memoir. As was true of her mentors, Kenneth Burke, Iris Murdoch, and Simone de Beauvoir, the pause between philosophy and criticism and the fictional impulse was not long, and that pause was particularly shortened by Sontag’s focus on aesthetics and intellectual life as intermingled sets of concerns.
Sontag’s early essays, including the famous “Notes on Camp” (1966), take on an eclectic array of topics, including films, dance, happenings, and sensibilities. While she argues for works of art that resist didacticism, she also argues against nihilism and excess for its own sake. In the last collection of essays, one can find her asking, what does it mean to use the writer’s, or the artistic, life as an expression of the radical will? Her answer was truth-seeking, grand vision, and seriousness – the will to create, rescued from the “undertow of inwardness” that many of her figures experienced. Sontag also knew the complexity of taking oppositional political positions while absorbed in the need to understand – her trips to Hanoi and later China read as notes to herself. When she contracted breast cancer, she turned her attention to the cultural perceptions of tuberculosis and cancer, as she did later with AIDS. Her thoughts brought edifying solace to a wide audience. Her two books on photography exemplify the importance to her of ethical questions: how does the ubiquity of images sensitize or inure us to social concerns? Her work in fiction began with a demanding, arch novel, The Benefactor (1963). Situated in Paris, the novel describes the surrealist ideal of descending into one’s own dreams to live as closely as possible by their dictates. The novel’s protagonist acts abruptly, criminally, tormented by an authority figure. He exists as a chilled raconteur who finally reveals the depths of his suffering as the result of shock therapy. Her second novel, Death Kit (1967), is an American parable. Diddy, a young American salesman, experiences his suicide as a train roaring toward Buffalo, then stalled in a tunnel which is also a charnel house. Sontag believed she was writing in a vein similar to that of Norman Mailer’s Why We Are in Vietnam. Like Mailer, she also created another death of a salesman, only to this younger one, the rude, empty landscape of America had exposed an underlying killer instinct. With the short story collection, I etcetera (1978a), Sontag returns to the metier of America. Her formalism lightens into kaleidoscope effects so that she catches hyper-energized, fractious selves thrown into soul searching. The whole collection could be called “The Way We Live Now,” the title of her much appreciated piece
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(1986) based on the voices of friends as they helplessly watch a man dying of AIDS. In middle age, Sontag found keen pleasure in writing a historical novel, The Volcano Lover (1992), her best large work. If its movement is stilted, many of her techniques – catalogues, commentary, letters, monologues, crossed perspectives, blatant alter egos, aphorisms, and reflections on types – are deployed with original effect upon the story of the Napoleonic years in the repulsive court of the Kingdom of Naples. It is here where the English ambassador Hamilton famously loses his wife to Lord Nelson. Sontag was to take up the historical mode again in Alice in Bed (1991), a play about Alice James, dying of cancer at age 42. Imagined figures come to Alice’s tea party to help her argue through her invalidism, both symbolic and real. Here, as throughout Sontag’s work, the life of the mind is elegantly validated. Sontag’s final novel, In America (2000), draws upon the story of a nineteenth-century Polish actress who comes to start a utopian community, a la Brooks Farm, in California. Maryna returns to the stage to swiftly conquer America. Historical riches abound in the novel, but the puzzle of writing a narrative of overcoming difficulties with such ease is not resolved. The underrealized portrait of Maryna may have been Sontag’s intention as a metaphor for America’s power to deracinate. SEE ALSO: Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Mailer, Norman (AF); Murdoch, Iris (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); REFERENCES AND SELECTED READINGS Kennedy, L. (1995). Susan Sontag: The Mind as Passion. New York: St. Martin’s. Rollyson, C., & Paddock, L. (2000). Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon. New York: Norton. Sayres, S. (1990). Susan Sontag: The Elegiac Modernist. New York: Routledge. Seligman, K. (2004). Sontag and Kael. New York: Counterpoint. Sontag, S. (1963). The Benefactor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sontag, S. (1966). Against Interpretation. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sontag, S. (1967). Death Kit. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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Sontag, S. (1968). Trip to Hanoi. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sontag, S. (1969). Styles of Radical Will. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sontag, S. (1977). On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sontag, S. (1978a). I, etcetera. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sontag, S. (1978b). Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sontag, S. (1980). Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sontag, S. (1989). AIDS and Its Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sontag, S. (1991). The Way We Live Now. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sontag, S. (1992). The Volcano Lover. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sontag, S. (2000). In America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sontag, S. (2001). Where the Stress Falls. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sontag, S. (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sontag, S. (2007). At the Same Time. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Sorrentino, Gilbert MARTIN RIKER
One of the great formal innovators of twentiethcentury letters, Gilbert Sorrentino was and remains an unclassifiable writer. Although an accomplished poet and superior critic, he is known primarily for over 20 works of fiction, each of which creates or appropriates its own set of styles, characters, and narrative strategies, the author finding in each new work an opportunity to reinvent his art in startlingly original ways. Born in Brooklyn in 1929, Sorrentino attended public school and later studied English literature and classics at Brooklyn College. In the 1950s, he founded the small magazine Neon, and through Neon worked with such influential writers as William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley, as well as LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), with whom Sorrentino later coedited the magazine Kulchur. He worked as an editor at Grove Press during the 1960s, after which he taught at schools in the New York area, until eventually accepting a position at Stanford University, where he taught for several
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decades. Upon retirement, he returned to Brooklyn, where he died in 2006. Like other innovative writers of the latter half of the twentieth century, Sorrentino drew his aesthetics from various modernist predecessors. Beyond Pound’s dictum to “make it new,” he was perhaps most guided by the violently imaginative, precise language of William Carlos Williams and Arthur Rimbaud, who are also the subjects of Splendide-H^ otel (1973), his aesthetics manifesto composed in alphabetical vignettes. His early novels, The Sky Changes (1966) and Steelwork (1970), show in particular the influence of Williams in their eschewal of grand literary themes in favor of immediate experience. The Sky Changes, an unsentimental chronicle of a cross-country family trip during which the family falls apart, is the only one of Sorrentino’s fictions devoid of satire or farce. Steelwork, which narrates the demise of a Brooklyn neighborhood before and after World War II, is similarly unsentimental in its treatment of human degradation, yet introduces also the scathingly black humor that would mark the rest of the author’s career. His third novel, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971), draws its title from Williams, although the narrative form – a series of satirical portraits of decadent figures in the New York art scene – was suggested by Wyndham Lewis’s Apes of God. It uses a broad range of farcical narrative techniques, including a highly opinionated narrator, contrarian footnotes by fictional critics, and inserted letters, second-rate poems, and self-critique. These techniques and many others found their full expression in Sorrentino’s magnum opus, Mulligan Stew (1979), which tells the story of a second-rate novelist who sets out to write an “experimental” novel but, in his eagerness to comply with whatever literary style is in vogue, manages to switch his novel’s style with every chapter. An encyclopedia of caricatured literary styles and forms, Mulligan Stew is in many ways the comic antithesis of Sorrentino’s own career. After Mulligan Stew, Sorrentino stepped out of the farcical mode with Aberration of Starlight (1980), a novel told through contrasting perspectives on a single set of events. Structurally reminiscent of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Aberration evinces also a Faulknerian precision in
its complex portraits of human anger, ignorance, and pettiness. In the 1980s and 1990s, Sorrentino’s indifference to “content” grew more obvious: he wrote the novels Crystal Vision (1981a) and Blue Pastoral (1983) that retold, in farcical form, his earlier books Steelwork and The Sky Changes; he began composing novels based on compositional constraints, such as the trilogy collected in Pack of Lies (1997); the Raymond Roussel-inspired Under the Shadow (1991); and Gold Fools (2000), a novel based on a boys’ adventure story and composed entirely of questions. The masterpiece of his later years was Little Casino (2002a), an open-form collage-novel that calls to mind, if anything, Williams’s Kora in Hell. After Little Casino, Sorrentino published a collection of his short fiction as well as three novels – Lunar Follies (2005), A Strange Commonplace (2006), and The Abyss of Human Illusion (2009) – that revisit experiences and subjects he had written about throughout his career, each time rendered into new artistic form. Sorrentino received numerous awards throughout his career, including a Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, two PEN/Faulkner nominations, three National Endowment for the Arts grants, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. SEE ALSO: The Avant Garde Novel (AF); Faulkner, William (AF); Lewis, Wyndham (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Andrews, D. (2001). Gilbert Sorrentino. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 21(3), 7–57. Lewis, W. (1930). Apes of God. London: Arthur. McPheron, W. (1991). Gilbert Sorrentino: A Descriptive Bibliography. Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive. O’Brien, J. (ed.) (1980). Gilbert Sorrentino [special issue]. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1(1). Sorrentino, G. (1966). The Sky Changes. New York: Hill and Wang. Sorrentino, G. (1970). Steelwork. New York: Pantheon. Sorrentino, G. (1971). Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. New York: Pantheon. Sorrentino, G. (1973). Splendide-H^ otel. New York: New Directions.
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Sorrentino, G. (1979). Mulligan Stew. New York: Grove. Sorrentino, G. (1980). Aberration of Starlight. New York: Random House. Sorrentino, G. (1981a). Crystal Vision. San Francisco: North Point. Sorrentino, G. (1981b). Selected Poems: 1958–1980. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow. Sorrentino, G. (1983). Blue Pastoral. San Francisco: North Point. Sorrentino, G. (1991). Under the Shadow. Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive. Sorrentino, G. (1995). Red the Fiend. New York: Fromm. Sorrentino, G. (1997). Pack of Lies (omnibus comprising: Odd Number [1985], Rose Theatre [1987], and Misterioso [1989]) Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive. Sorrentino, G. (2000). Gold Fools. Los Angeles: Green Integer. Sorrentino, G. (2002a). Little Casino. Minneapolis: Coffee House. Sorrentino, G. (2002b). Something Said [1984], rev. edn. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive. Sorrentino, G. (2004a). The Moon in Its Flight. Minneapolis: Coffee House. Sorrentino, G. (2004b). New and Selected Poems, 1958–1998. Los Angeles: Green Integer. Sorrentino, G. (2005). Lunar Follies. Minneapolis: Coffee House. Sorrentino, G. (2006). A Strange Commonplace. Minneapolis: Coffee House. Sorrentino, G. (2009). The Abyss of Human Illusion. Minneapolis: Coffee House.
The Southern Novel JOHN T. MATTHEWS AND LISA HINRICHSEN
The US South’s modern literary culture reflects the region’s fitful, often violent struggle to modernize following the Confederacy’s defeat in the Civil War. Loss in 1865 left a devastated country: a generation of white males decimated, slaves having deserted, an agricultural economy in ruins, widespread poverty, physical destruction, and explosive racial rage. The region’s future was difficult to imagine. Former elites bid to regain power, provoking the federal government to take control of ex-Confederate states and enforce Reconstruction. When occupying forces withdrew in the 1870s, the region was left to figure out what a “New South” might look like.
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Between the 1880s and World War I, a generation of visionaries spurred the region toward commercial and industrial renovation. Boosters like Henry Grady, a prominent newspaper editor in Atlanta, envisioned a New South predominated by benevolent factory owners and merchants, contented white workers, deferential free blacks – all sharing racially segregated towns: a modern society, yet distinctively Southern in culture, mores, and customs. Writers like Joel Chandler Harris got to work creating nostalgic fantasies of antebellum plantation life that reassured potential Northern investors about the continuing docility and inexpensiveness of the South’s black workforce, and signaled white Southerners’ determination to reconcile past differences with their Northern brothers. Harris’s volumes of Brer Rabbit tales (beginning with the phenomenally successful Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings [1880]), popularized old-timey slave tales while underscoring the purported harmony of plantation life. Plantation fiction like Thomas Nelson Page’s Marse Chan stories (1884) and his romance Red Rock (1898) more plaintively lamented a lost way of life, but, as C. Vann Woodward observed, the Old South was essentially an invention of the New anyhow – one that enabled individuals to move forward by giving them the imaginative recompense of a beautiful yet irrecoverable past. As blacks began to protest new forms of subjugation – the “Jim Crow” legislation that prohibited racial intermingling in public spaces, the recourse to lynching to terrorize African Americans – plantation fiction grew more desperate and shrill in its insistence on earlier fantasies of order. Thomas Dixon, Jr. fused racial dread and regional pride in a series of repugnant white supremacist novels, including The Leopard’s Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1905). Imagining that black sexual menace demanded vigilante defense of white womanhood, the novels inspired D. W. Griffith’s magisterially innovative film The Birth of a Nation (1915), which enflamed racism throughout the nation. The chimera of white purity continued to inspire plantation narratives as historical needs changed: Stark Young’s bestselling So Red the Rose (1934), for example, portrayed antebellum plantation society as the ideal of cultivated leisure, a lost alternative to the mongrelization and materialism afflicting modern life after World War I. Thomas Wolfe’s debut
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novel, the autobiographical Look Homeward, Angel (1929), unwittingly demonstrated how white supremacy structured identity even in the hamlets of the mountains of North Carolina, while his posthumously published You Can’t Go Home Again (1940) reflected on the pain of telling the truth about Southern clan life. Margaret Mitchell’s spectacularly popular Gone With the Wind (1936) fantasized that a modern young (white) woman might appropriate a tradition of Southern self-making and racial privilege to enfranchise herself in modern entrepreneurial life. Allen Tate’s The Fathers (1938) elegized an Arcadian South, the casualty of fading respect for social and sexual discrimination. Tate and Young belonged to a group of poets and scholars who shared the belief that the Old South, even granted the “blemish” of slavery, constituted an acme of culture, a way of life to be preferred to the materialistic rat race run by industrial capitalism in Northern cities. The most illustrious of these so-called Vanderbilt (University) Agrarians, Robert Penn Warren wrote with greater awareness of the Old South’s flaws, however, and his greatest novel, All the King’s Men (1946), dramatizes the conflict between nostalgia and guilt, recognizing the justness of change without generating any enthusiasm for it. Reverence for the plantation ideal did not go unchallenged. The counter-experiences of African Americans fueled anti-plantation fiction later in the nineteenth century, just as ex-slave narratives before the Civil War had refuted plantation romances. Charles Chesnutt contradicted Joel Chandler Harris’s honeyed tales with The Conjure Woman (1899), a set of stories that insisted on the violence of slavery and confronted white obliviousness. Chesnutt traced the illogic of race and blood in The House Behind the Cedars (1900), depicted the murderous violence unleashed by Jim Crow in The Marrow of Tradition (1901), then, frustrated with national indifference, gave up writing fiction. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) suggests how racial barriers block desire, how racism corrupts all other morals, and how black self-sacrifice might be required for racial redemption. Pauline Hopkins represented the intermingling of races as the inescapable result of plantation life, most powerfully in her novel Contending Forces (1900), a study of the sexual trauma at the heart of racial
exploitation. Even after World War I, Jean Toomer revisited the Georgia plantation past in his modernist work Cane (1923), in part to complicate the simplistic celebration of “primitive” black folk culture under conditions of modern metropolitan alienation, and in part to suggest the neo-plantation stain on contemporary attitudes toward race. White Southerners like Julia Peterkin wrote appreciatively but sentimentally about surviving black folk culture in works like Black April (1927). Zora Neale Hurston pursued such questions even more extensively beginning in the late 1920s, measuring the power of individual imagination to counteract histories of racial exploitation in fiction like Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), the much celebrated Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and numerous short stories, as well as dedicating herself to the professional study of African American and African Caribbean folk culture. Ralph Ellison’s mid-century masterpiece, Invisible Man (1952), preoccupied as it is with the alienation of black Americans from contemporary society after World War II, returns to the premises of plantation history to chart formative attitudes toward black education, leadership, sexuality, and relations to white authority. Kate Chopin suggests the corresponding ways many white women chafed under the demands of Southern paternalism. In her most familiar work of fiction, The Awakening (1899), the broader confinement of women by Victorian mores takes on a Southern tinge, the setting in cosmopolitan New Orleans tempting the protagonist with greater opportunities to fulfill her needs than anywhere else in the provincial Deep South. In her earlier novels, Ellen Glasgow tried to imagine the outgrowth of independent women’s lives from the hearty individualism of small landowning farmers in Virginia; Barren Ground (1925) explores tensions between ethnic immigrant farm culture, modern scientific progress, changing opportunities for women, and the growth of the national state. Later works like The Sheltered Life (1932) test the constraints of town existence on women. More skeptical writers mocked what the traditional South offered women: Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) and Frances Newman’s The Hard-Boiled Virgin (1926) and Dead Lovers Are Faithful Lovers (1928) subject paternalistic (Southern) culture to deliriously mordant wit.
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Eudora Welty’s short stories examine the heavy undergrowth of repression that stunts and saddens women’s lives in the early-twentieth-century South; pieces like “Why I Live at the P.O.,” “The Petrified Man,” “June Recital,” and “Clytie” compose a taxonomy of female suffering, while the larger scale of her major novels, Delta Wedding (1946), Losing Battles (1970), and The Optimist’s Daughter (1972), permits more elaborate efforts to work through losses, particularly in the company of other women. Carson McCullers probes women’s discontentment more soberly in the novels The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1940), The Member of the Wedding (1946), and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951); the second of these is especially remarkable for exploring homoerotic longing frankly – here that of a man – although McCullers herself was sexually attracted to both women and men. The notes of homosexual desire in Welty’s writing about women gain amplification from the boldness of her fellow Southerner McCullers. Welty’s satire tends to the wryly droll; her later contemporary Flannery O’Connor invites broader laughter as she surveys an outlandish, Godforsaken terrain marked by perdition so grotesque as to exceed mere historical transgression and suggesting instead the very corruption of the human soul. Writing in the 1950s and 1960s, O’Connor sought to remind the nation, as it perked along in material prosperity and consumer gratification, the confident antagonist to Cold War communism, that such overvaluation of the carnal smothered the spirit. Like Welty, she perfected her vision in her short stories; the collections A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) are studies in misbelief, while her novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), puzzle over the paradoxical power of religious faith to both redeem and deform human nature. A surprising number of modern American novelists came from the South, and wrote about it. This burst of literary creativity was taken as something of a Southern “Renaissance,” the region’s cultural achievement vaulting over its continued economic and social backwardness. Still, most of this writing, however determined it was to tell about the South from the Southern standpoint, hardly celebrated the region’s pride in its distinctive history and sense of community. The
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freedom associated with the experimental methods of international modernist art coincided with what we have already seen as gathering complaint, criticism, skepticism in the modernizing South. In the years between the two World Wars, the South began to surrender economic and social habits formed a century earlier. Many of the region’s best writers were drawn to describing this upheaval. Faulkner, the South’s consummate novelist of the period, set about excavating the rotten foundations of the plantation system that had defined his Mississippi. His leading novels explore the many facets of the past’s survival in the present: The Sound and the Fury (1929) empathizes with the bereavement suffered by those who lose their privileged status; As I Lay Dying (1930) explores the hard lives of small-time farmers confronting catastrophic failure; Light in August (1932) searches out the contradictions of absolutist racial beliefs; and Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and Go Down, Moses (1942) with its centerpiece, “The Bear,” trace the moral outrages secreted away in the plantation past. Erskine Caldwell, as well thought of in the 1930s as Faulkner, conveys the extremes of Southern deprivation by scandalizing his readers with the depravity that poverty causes. In describing the physical deformities, animalistic sexuality, and numbing lethargy of poor whites in his two best-known novels, Tobacco Road (1932) and God’s Little Acre (1933), Caldwell makes Depression-era audiences voyeuristic accomplices to the abjection of those worse off than themselves. In Strange Fruit (1944), Lillian Smith imagines the personal tragedies of love and family life caused by segregation. Richard Wright, an African American born in Mississippi, brought to national attention the suffering of Southern black people during the 1930s in his powerful collection of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children (1937). It suggests how blacks’ efforts to join radical political movements were frustrated by the persistence of Southern racism. Wright’s major work, the novel Native Son (1940), focuses on the devolution of a young black man who comes to Chicago and encounters racial prejudice subtler but no less toxic than what he has known in his native Mississippi. The “Negro” problem has become the nation’s problem in modern America, as W. E. B. Du Bois predicted in his pronouncement that the question
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of the color line was the question of the twentieth century. Katherine Anne Porter, particularly in her early collection Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1930), reminds readers that the US South extends westward to the areas bordering Mexico. Fiction from such contact zones details the realities of exchange and creolization increasingly operant in US Southern society and culture. The literature of the present-day South continues to engage in evolving debates over the idea of a distinctive Southern identity while dismantling exclusionary mythologies and exhausted tropes of Southern belonging. Literary production in the contemporary South can be characterized by the resurgence of a renewed literary realism (as seen in the fiction of Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, Harry Crews, and Bobbie Ann Mason) and the rise of iconoclastic writing (Cormac McCarthy, Randall Kenan) that functions to undermine past notions of community and tradition. Yet contemporary Southern writing does not fully set itself free of past themes and subject matters: it continues to examine issues of race, gender, class, family, community, and religion, but does so from changed perspectives and from previously marginalized voices. Recent Southern fiction by Ellen Douglas, Walker Percy, James Dickey, Harry Crews, Dorothy Allison, Bobbie Ann Mason, Larry Brown, Kaye Gibbons, Truman Capote, Reynolds Price, Randall Kenan, Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy, Doris Betts, Charles Portis, and Barry Hannah questions and complicates what it means to be “Southern,” stressing the social construction of both communal and individual identity. While these authors derive inspiration from traditional motifs of history, place, race, and community, they also place new emphasis on social class, sexuality, and gender, challenging conservative notions regarding the thematic range of Southern literature. Though they continue high modernism’s concerns with concepts of individual alienation and the loss of communal values, these writers extend its experimentation with new narrative forms and methods, but frequently stop short of the overt postmodern techniques found in other American literatures. Writing from a revitalized realist tradition (frequently termed “dirty realism” or “grit lit”), Mason, Crews, Portis, and Brown reveal the everyday struggles of the world of the perennially poor. The work of
Allison, Betts, Gibbons, Price, Capote, and Kenan, which focuses on gender, race, and sexuality, forms fiction that is at once identifiably “Southern” and yet is also distinctly subversive in its treatment of patriarchy, gender roles, and the coherence of the nuclear family. Whether through Ford’s mass-produced consumer landscape, Hannah’s mingling of the Civil War and the Vietnam War, or the fierce frontier of McCarthy’s Southern novels, these authors revisit, assess, and sometimes assail the cultural foundations from which the Southern Renaissance arose. In deconstructing and decoding ways of being “Southern,” contemporary writers in the South have frequently found themselves reckoning with how the past and the present engage each other in everyday life. The tempestuous violence of the Civil Rights era led Southern writers to revisit in their fiction the racial brutality central to Southern experience: William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), Alex Haley’s Roots (1967), and Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) turn back to the past to probe the origins and consequences of racial violence, while work such as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) investigates the present-day world of racial inequality. African American writers in particular (Randall Kenan, Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Henry Dumas, Margaret Walker, Rita Mae Brown, and Edward P. Jones) reveal the ongoing cultural and psychological costs of the history of slavery and segregation. Yet while these writers illuminate the insidious ways in which racial bias maintains a presence in American culture, their work surmounts a mere recitation of injury and injustice to focus instead on the ways in which individual dignity and self-worth can be achieved and maintained. Investigations of injury are manifest in latetwentieth-century Southern literature, and reveal the continuing power of the mode of the Southern grotesque and the gothic: Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), Lee Smith’s Black Mountain Breakdown (1980), Kaye Gibbons’s Ellen Foster (1987), and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) investigate sexual and social violence within families, while the work of Cormac McCarthy (Child of God [1973], Suttree [1979], and Blood Meridian
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[1985]), William Gay’s Twilight (2006), and Tom Franklin’s Poachers (1999) probes the edges of the Western frontier and the Southern backwoods to reveal an American landscape littered with perversity and violence. Native writers such as Lewis Owens and Diane Glancy speak to the traumatic dislocation of traditional tribal culture within the South. Writers such as Bobbie Ann Mason (In Country, 1985), Jayne Anne Phillips (Machine Dreams, 1984), Barry Hannah (Ray, 1989; Airships, 1978), Clyde Edgerton (The Floatplane Notebooks, 1988), Winston Groom (Forrest Gump, 1986), and Robert Olen Butler (A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain, 1992) grapple with the ramifications of the Vietnam War. Such narratives tend to personalize rather than politicize war, weighing its imprint on individual identity and American domestic life. The 1950s and 1960s brought massive changes to the South: waves of immigration and emigration, greater civil rights for minorities, the waning of traditional patriarchal and aristocratic Southern mores, and further loss of Southern distinctiveness in the face of mass market products and chains. The Southern economic boom of the 1970s reignited old fears about cultural authenticity and “the Americanization of Dixie,” as John Edgerton put it in the title of his popular 1974 book, which charted the myriad ways in which the South now mirrored the rest of the nation. Novels such as James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970) dramatize how this material prosperity, which was concentrated in urban centers, threatened local cultures and created battles over space, place, and cultural power, while Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1961), The Last Gentleman (1966), and Lancelot (1977) reveal psychic struggles with melancholia, madness, and amnesia brought on by contemporary rootlessness and alienation. The rise of consumer culture can be seen in work by Bobbie Ann Mason, whose characters immerse themselves in pop culture and search for meaning on the television screen. Kaye Gibbons (Charms for the Easy Life, 1993) and Jill McCorkle (The Cheerleader, 1984) likewise investigate the fragmentation of the American family within a media-driven world. In direct resistance to the homogenizing impact of mass culture, however, Southern writers such as Ron Rash, Lee Smith, Josephine Humphreys, Fannie Flagg, Wendell
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Berry, and Ellen Gilchrist turn toward oral narratives and folk traditions as means of maintaining a distinctive regional identity. The boisterous, bawdy hold of Southern humor continues in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), Guy Owen’s The Ballad of the Flim-Flam Man (1965), Lewis Nordan’s The All-Girl Football Team (1986), and William Price Fox’s Southern Fried (1962). The changes that global capitalism has created in the South can be seen in the way its newest literature reflects a recent surge of immigrants to the South from Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Mexico. In revealing Southern issues from an outsider’s perspective, these assimilation narratives challenge assumptions that one must be born in the South to understand it, and has led to an outpouring of new novels since the 1990s that help to realign racial conflicts previously thought of in terms of black/white binaries. Work such as Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge (1997), Roberto Fernandez’s Holy Radishes! (1995), and Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student (1998) reconceptualize exclusionary and exceptionalist notions of nation and region by placing the South in transnational perspective. As Southern writers continue to examine issues of region and nation from a global viewpoint, the US South will be understood in solidarity with other “Global Souths”: developing countries with similar economic histories of belated capitalist modernization, slavery, and exploitation of labor and raw materials. SEE ALSO: Border Fictions (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Globalization and the Novel (BIF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bibler, M. (2009). Cotton’s Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936–1968. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Bone, M. (2005). The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Brinkmeyer, R. H., Jr. (2009). The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism,
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1930–1950. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Duck, L. A. (2006). The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Gray, R. J. (1977). The Literature of Memory: Modern Writers of the American South. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Guinn, M. (2000). After Southern Modernism: Fiction of the Contemporary South. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Hobson, F. (1991). The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Jackson, R. (2005). Seeking the Region in American Literature and Culture: Modernity, Dissidence, Innovation. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Jones, A. G. (1981). Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859–1936. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Jones, A. G., & Donaldson, S. V. (eds.) (1997). Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Jones, S. W., & Montieth, S. (eds.) (2002). South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. King, R. H. (1980). A Southern Renaissance: the Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930–1955. New York: Oxford University Press. Kreyling, M. (1988). Inventing Southern Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. McPherson, T. (2003). Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Romine, S. (2008). The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Smith, J., & Cohn, D. (2004). Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yaeger, P. (2000). Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930–1990. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Speculative Fiction GERALD R. LUCAS
Most frequently, “speculative fiction” is a synonym for science fiction. Since its genesis as an adventure narrative, science fiction has always speculated about what is beyond – from across
the sea, space, and time – based on contemporaneous worldviews and technologies. Historically situated, like other incarnations of science fiction, “speculative fiction” was coined in 1948 by Robert Heinlein and represents the concerns of the increasingly fragmented world of high technology evident after World War II. Speculative fiction often poses a “What if?” question that challenges assumptions of empirical experience or reality. Speculative fiction includes all of the characteristics of science fiction, but often has a broader scope, including alternate histories, magic realism, contemporary fantasy, and so on. As part of its more inclusive purview, speculative fiction also breaks with the traditional concerns of a white, male-dominated readership and authorship to include marginalized voices and concerns like those of differing class, race, gender, and sexuality. Speculative fiction grows out of the centurieslong tradition of the “fantastic voyage” in the tradition of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey, and other mythological travelogues like those of Heracles and Jason and the Argonauts. However, speculative fiction has been equally influenced by the utopian tradition dating back to Athens’ Golden Age and Plato’s Republic (fourth century BCE). These two traditions were often fused, with the former acting as a framing device for the latter, in works like Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). This coupling suggests a concern with the progress and extension of human knowledge and its relationship to the benefit or detriment of humanity, producing narratives of monumental travel, like going to the moon or the center of the earth, based on our increasing technological sophistication. Out of the Industrial Revolution came a greater reliance on science and technology in human affairs. This shift had its impact in early speculative fiction with a refocusing of the supernatural elements of the fantastic voyage into a concentration on the products of science and technology, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and several of the works of Edgar Allan Poe. These early tales were often accompanied by the trappings of the gothic tradition, reflecting the sinister and darker aspects of the human psyche made manifest by a person’s often monomaniacal scientific striving.
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SPECULATIVE FICTION
Jules Verne, who disregarded the sinister in favor of careful extrapolations of contemporary science, created imaginary tales of voyages extraordinaires that put locomotion at their center. Verne’s extravagant tales, such as Journey to the Center of the Earth (1863) and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870), became internationally popular, particularly in America, where writers began to out-Verne Verne by constructing a myth of the West where a fantastical future could be located via technological sophistication. In England, a blur of periodicals began publishing Verne-like romances, but it was H. G. Wells who refocused Vernian voyages into tales about the future evolution of humanity and produced the “scientific romance.” In novellas like The Time Machine (1895), Wells used rational inquiry to explore space and time and eschewed the outmoded narrative elements of the fantastic voyage in favor of futures based on contemporary science, like the time machine, to produce stories that seriously speculated about the possible implications – often moral – of these technologies. The early twentieth century saw an explosion of American speculative fiction, whose burgeoning popularity was directly linked with the advent of the pulp magazines that serialized melodramatic extraterrestrial adventures, like Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars series, as well as reprinting Wells’s stories and more serious fabulations from Jack London and Upton Sinclair. Writers like Burroughs were influenced by Wells, but employed pseudo-scientific devices to explore the dream-like realms that populated their exotica. Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories in 1926, beginning the first magazine dedicated to “scientifiction,” while Weird Tales began to publish writers like H. P. Lovecraft, an acolyte of Poe’s, who wrote tales of “cosmic horror,” and Robert E. Howard, who is credited with inventing “sword-and-sorcery” fiction. Both of these traditions have left their mark on speculative fiction and influenced further variations on the genre like C. L. Moore’s “science fantasy.” Gernsback published stories that combined the technological focus of Verne and Wells with that of the romantic melodramas of Burroughs to sell it to pulp audiences – mostly adolescent boys who craved adventure, mystery, and romance. He saw science fiction primarily as a teaching
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tool – a way to promote the future as a utopian world built on science and technology – rather than just an escapist genre. Among his visions of the future, Gernsback advocated atomic energy, television, and radio as technologies that would likely change the world for the better. This approach developed a cult status and began the widespread popularity of science fiction in America. The formula for these early Gernsbackian stories was based more on the adventure romance than any serious speculation about science and technology, like E. E. “Doc” Smith’s space operas in the vein of Flash Gordon. Space operas were very formulaic: equipped with ray guns and various other technological gizmos, the handsome hero pilots his spaceship through unimaginable dangers and interplanetary distances to defeat evil aliens threatening the citizens of Earth and to rescue the buxom heroine. These early stories developed many of the conventions of science fiction – aliens, robots, spaceships, “the future,” gizmos, and extraterrestrial locales – and coupled them with the spectacle of high adventure, including fantastic cover illustrations like those of Frank R. Paul. The pulp movement continued to define American science fiction through the end of the 1930s, even surviving the Great Depression. This new era saw John W. Campbell, Jr. taking the helm at Astounding Science-Fiction and ushering in a “Golden Age.” While Campbell shared Gernsback’s enthusiasm for atomic power and the educational value of the space opera, he emphasized scientific speculation by encouraging reader feedback about science in the pages of Astounding and at fan conventions. Campbell eschewed mysticism, addressed an audience of scientifically knowledgeable fans, and brought fresh writers into the fold, like Lester Del Rey, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Clifford D. Simak, and Theodore Sturgeon, who would change the face of science fiction through the 1940s. Even as Astounding promoted fresh voices in the 1940s, other writers like Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Philip Jose Farmer, and Alfred Bester began to explore more sociological and personal visions that would develop throughout the 1950s and transform science fiction into a more mature, adult genre. The pulps were being replaced by more professional, digest-sized ma-
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gazines like the Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy and Galaxy Science Fiction that featured edgier, urban, and more literary tales that challenged the pulp taboos against sex, religion, and race. Robert Heinlein, in his 1948 essay “On Writing of Speculative Fiction,” coined the term “speculative fiction” and suggested a departure from science fiction, but, as Heinlein would later emphasize, not including fantasy. Later, many proponents of the switch, including Isaac Asimov, suggested that “speculative fiction” maintain the use of “sf,” but eliminate the “science” to allow for a broader scope. During this time, neglected literary works of science fiction from abroad, born out of reactions to the realities of totalitarianism and the two World Wars, began to influence American speculative fiction. With the influx of these novels from abroad and the increasing American taste for grown-up speculative fiction, the era of the magazine came to an end by 1960. The 1960s brought an acceleration of technologies into the everyday: atomic power, television, computers, and space flight suggested that the future postulated in the pages of science fiction stories had become reality. Yet, the promise of a golden tomorrow was overshadowed by the sinister specters of the Cold War and political unrest – like the Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the escalating war in Vietnam – that manifested themselves in the cultural consciousness of the time. Popular culture responded with films depicting aliens who threatened the Earth from space, growing dissent in music and political movements that resisted imposed control and order, New Age reactions against technology and progress with the use of narcotics and hallucinogens, and recurring images of the constant threat of annihilation from a nuclear war that seemed inevitable. Science fiction’s New Wave borrowed its title from the French movement in film that broke with narrative traditions by emphasizing the importance of the image, stylistic experimentation, and plotless digressions. In science fiction, darker and more introspective visions were a reaction against much of the puerile, formulaic, and optimistic writing that had come out of the pulp era. Writers of the sf New Wave, even more than their Golden Age predecessors, sought a transcendence from an imploding reality. This new reality challenged patriarchal views of white, heterosexual
manhood and developed a renewed interest in feminism that allowed for the expression of marginalized voices – including women, homosexuals, and non-whites such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, James Tiptree Jr. (the pseudonym for Alice Sheldon), Marge Piercy, and others. Other American science fiction writers to emerge from the 1960s and 1970s include Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, Frank Herbert, Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, and Poul Anderson. If the sf New Wave was characterized by a writerly revision of the Golden Age, science fiction after 1980 becomes postmodern in its radical questioning of reality, its reaction to a growing emphasis on information, and its focus on cyberspace. By 1980, science fiction was making headway in the academy and had obtained maturity as a genre, and everyday technology began to catch up with science fiction’s visions of “the future.” 1984 had arrived differently from Orwell’s vision, and 2001 was looming in the headlights: speculative fiction became a mature genre in literature and a technologically sophisticated America in reality. The introduction of the Apple Macintosh coincided with the publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer in 1984, ushering in a new era of information and views of the future that were distinctly countercultural: anti-government, fragmented, hybridized, and digitally enhanced. The cyberpunks embraced a punk garage band aesthetic, a love of style, a streetwise edginess, and a respect for the ideas of their progenitors (Sterling x). The works of William Gibson, Vernor Vinge, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, Neil Stephenson, Paul di Filippo, and others are populated with ruptures and dislocations – fragmented societies, racially mixed characters and cyborgs, marginalized figures, sublime technologies, virtual and alternate realities, and a stylistic playfulness – making cyberpunk a postmodern expression that continues to influence science fiction (McCaffery 2). Other voices that define science fiction from the mid-1980s to the present are those that look to the Golden Age and update their “big ideas” into expressions born out of cyberpunk. Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985) seems a combination of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959) and the interior world of cyberpunk. Vernor Vinge expanded his vision from cyberspace in “True
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Names” (1981) to that of the galaxy in his complex revisions of the space opera in A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) and A Deepness in the Sky (1999). Other writers, like Greg Bear, Dan Simmons, and Neal Stephenson, expand their visions into worldwide, historically engaged narratives of revision, environmental concerns, and further implications of the information age. The question remains how speculative fiction can be differentiated from science fiction. If science fiction was born out of a modernist drive to the perfect society, speculative fiction has its genesis in postmodern sensibilities of the contemporary world after World War II. Whereas science fiction typically deals with, refers to, or issues from the perspective of science and technology, speculation fiction is more inclusive, regarding texts from other genres, like fantasy, under it aegis (Le Guin 1997, 23). Science fiction and fantasy both seem to present a world that is not here, but that uses reality as a touchstone. Particularly useful in understanding how speculative fiction differs from science fiction and fantasy is Le Guin’s supposition that science and technology are integral elements of science fiction, while fantasy holds magic at its center; speculative fiction narratives can comfortably accommodate various conventions and subgenres (23–4). Therefore, rather than a specific genre of fiction, speculative fiction often crosses genre lines, like science fantasy, magic realism, and horror, yet not all expressions of these genres can accurately be called speculative. The artifacts of the narrative are not as central to speculative fiction as the presentation of its alternate reality. Speculative fiction consciously explores and questions reality by situating itself in the intersection of the mundane and the not quite right. Speculative fiction positions reality in a way to make its solid surfaces less opaque, its angles not quite so straight. It questions the empirical reality by positing a strange newness, causing a cognitive estrangement in the reader. As Darko Suvin posits, speculative fiction brings the fantastic, the imaginative, and the speculative into the rational discourse of the everyday – be it scientific, political, or historical – to defamiliarize the familiar and provide a critical distance (Gunn and Candelaria 25–7). Therefore, speculative fiction provides a reflection of reality, but this critical distance also allows for reflection on reality.
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Speculative fiction will often answer an implied “What if?” question that posits an alternative reality as its primary narrative drive. The distorted or altered reality explicitly propels the narrative while implicitly challenging quotidian assumptions of reality and those forces that comprise it – history, science, technology, politics, and metaphysics. Speculative fiction presents an existential disruption by showing a reality that does not exist or is not a lived reality; therefore, the dissonance created encourages the reader to interrogate the importance of historical events, technological breakthroughs, and mystical discoveries by their absence in reality. With this disruption, readers question the nature of their own reality. Furthermore, speculative fiction challenges basic assumptions readers hold about themselves and their world, especially how they define “human.” J. G. Ballard, for instance, has characterized his fiction as investigating the “surrealism of everyday life,” and indeed many writers, from Mary Shelley to Octavia Butler, seem to embrace this idea in their literary experiments. Many critics use “speculative fiction” as a replacement for the study of science fiction to create greater academic credibility and further distance it from mainstream “sci-fi.” Increasingly, feminist and African American scholars choose to replace the “science” of science fiction with “speculative” in order both to broaden the scope of texts and voices included under this rubric and to give a critical and deliberate distance to the romantic, pulp-driven, and phallocentric past of science fiction. Perhaps the most enduring quality of speculative fiction is the link between its contemporary expressions and those of the distant past – the enduring quest for something more, something better, something beyond the sunset. Speculative fiction seems to ask, “How would human communities change as a result of . . .?” Finishing this sentence is what speculative fiction does at its core. SEE ALSO: Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Science Fiction (BIF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Asimov, I. (1941). Nightfall. New York: Atlas. Asimov, I. (1950). I, Robot. New York: Gnome.
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Asimov, I. (1951). Foundation. New York: Gnome. Barron, N. (ed.) (2004). Anatomy of Wonder: A Critical Guide to Science Fiction 5th edn. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited. Bear, G. (1985). Blood Music. New York: Arbor House. Bradbury, R. (1953a). Fahrenheit 451. New York: Ballantine. Bradbury, R. (1953b). The Martian Chronicles. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Butler, O. (1979). Kindred. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Butler, O. (1996). Blood Child. In Blood Child and Other Stories. New York: Seven Stories. Campbell, J. W., Jr. (1938). Who Goes There? New York: Atlas. Card, O. S. (1985). Ender’s Game. New York: Doherty. Delany, S. R. (1966). Babel-17. New York: Ace. Delany, S. R. (1968). Nova. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Dick, P. K. (1962). The Man in High Castle. New York: Putnam’s. Dick, P. K. (1968). Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Di Filippo, P. (1996). Ribofunk. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. Ellison, H. (1967). I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. New York: Pyramid. Gibson, W. (1984). Neuromancer. New York: Ace. Gunn, J. & Candelaria, M.(eds.) (2005). Speculation on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow. Heinlein, R. (1961). A Stranger in a Strange Land. New York: Putnam. Herbert, F. (1965). Dune. Philadelphia: Chilton. James, E., & Mendlesohn, F. (eds.) (2003). The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Le Guin, U.K. (1969). The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace. Le Guin, U.K. (1974). The Dispossessed. New York: Harper and Row. Le Guin, U.K. (1997). Introduction: Clearly and Firmly into the Tarpit. In B. Attenbury & U.K. Le Guin (eds). The Norton Book of Science Fiction. pp. 15–34. New York: Norton. Matheson, R. (1970). I Am Legend. New York: Walker. McCaffery, L.(ed.) (1991). Storming the Reality Studio. Durham: Duke University Press. Moore, C. L. (1944). No Woman Born. New York: Atlas. Piercy, M. (1976). Women on the Edge of Time. New York: Knopf. Pringle, D. (1985). Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels. New York: Carroll and Graf. Russ, J. (1975). The Female Man. New York: Bantam. Russ, J. (1984). When It Changed. In Extra(ordinary) People. New York: St Martin’s.
Simmons, D. (2003). Ilium. New York. Stephenson, N. (1992). Snow Crash. New York: Bantam. Sterling, B. (1986). Preface. In Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. New York: Ace, pp. ix–xvi Sheldon, A. [Tiptree, J., Jr.] (1975a). Warm Worlds and Otherwise. New York: Ballantine. Vinge, V. (1999). A Deepness in the Sky. New York: TOR. Vonnegut, K., Jr. (1963). Cat’s Cradle. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Vonnegut, K., Jr. (1969). Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Delacorte.
Spiegelman, Art HILLARY L. CHUTE
Art Spiegelman, a cartoonist, permanently expanded the category of “literature” and public conceptions of comics with his two-volume Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986, 1991), which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. A 13-year project in which Spiegelman recorded his father Vladek’s testimony of surviving the Holocaust, Maus demonstrated that the medium of comics is capable of engendering serious, sophisticated, and intricate work. Spiegelman has altered the critical landscape of contemporary literature by focusing attention on the relationship between form, memory, and history. Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1948. He immigrated with his parents, Polish Jews, to the United States in 1951, and grew up in Rego Park, Queens. Spiegelman published his first drawing in a local paper in 1961, and began working for Topps Chewing Gum in 1965, an association that lasted through 1987. Spiegelman studied art and philosophy at Harpur College (now SUNY Binghamton) and in the late 1960s created experimental comic strips in the magazine Witzend; other projects included distributing surrealistic drawings as free leaflets to passersby. Eventually Spiegelman moved to San Francisco to become part of the burgeoning underground comics movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. Over a series of projects, Spiegelman brought the formal concerns of both visual and literary modernism to the field of comics, experimenting with spatiality and temporality on the page.
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With the publication of Breakdowns: From Maus to Now (1978), a hardcover collection of his underground work (and whose subtitle refers to the three-page prototype for his later, longer text), Spiegelman established himself as one of the major innovators of contemporary art and literature. Breakdowns weaves “high” and “low” cultural registers through the visual-verbal form of comics and marries an interest in genre fiction – the hard-boiled detective narrative – with an exploration of autobiography. Continuing this examination of comics’ properties, Spiegelman co-founded, with his wife Fran¸coise Mouly, the avant garde comics magazine RAW in 1980. Maus was serialized in RAW in chapterlength installments before its publication by Pantheon in two volumes. Maus was born out of a desire to create, as Spiegelman has remarked, a comic that needed a bookmark. It knits together two stories: one from the past – Vladek Spiegelman’s experience before, during, and after World War II, including his residence at the Auschwitz concentration camp – and one from the present – Art Spiegelman’s struggle to elicit his father’s testimony and shape it into a verbal and pictorial narrative. The book is overlayered with a deliberately unstable animal metaphor that resignifies Nazi propaganda, in which Jews are drawn as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs. Maus is a profoundly self-reflexive text, everywhere marking through its visual narrative its own seams and elisions, the struggle to grasp and comprehend history, conveyed in simplified but savvy blackand-white drawings. A central premise is that the past invades the present. In Maus II, the legs of hanged Auschwitz inmates dangle from the top of a comics frame as the Spiegelman family automobile winds its way up a road in 1979. Spiegelman generated a new idiom with Maus, which has been at the center of critical investigations into memory, narrative, and representation. He has also protested the notion that Maus can be considered fiction and wrote a letter to the New York Times asking them to move Maus II from their fiction to non-fiction bestseller list, as per the book’s Library of Congress description. In the first such move in their history, the paper printed his letter and made the switch. Following the success of Maus, Spiegelman concentrated on his role as a staff artist and
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writer at the New Yorker from 1993 to 2003. He has created and edited children’s books, and illustrated the 1928 poem The Wild Party by Joseph Moncure March – in a lush, decorative style. The events of 9/11, which he witnessed first-hand, inspired new comics such as In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), a collection of 10 dense and experimental broadsheet-sized color comics pages that express the disorientation generated from the World Trade Center tragedy. Pantheon republished the influential Breakdowns (2008) with a new work, Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@& !, as an introduction. Portrait’s fragmented structure of short but overlapping episodes replicates the structure of memory itself, and stands as a meta-memoir. Spiegelman’s next work, about making Maus, is titled MetaMaus. He was included in Time magazine’s list of the World’s Most Influential People in 2005. Spiegelman lives in New York City with his wife and two children. SEE ALSO: The Avant Garde Novel (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Chute, H. (2006). “The Shadow of a Past Time”: History and Graphic Representation in Maus. Twentieth-Century Literature, 52(2), 199–230. Geis, D. R.(ed.) (2003). Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman’s “Survivor’s Tale” of the Holocaust. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Hirsch, M. (1992–3). Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Postmemory. Discourse, 15(2), 3–30. Hirsch, M. (2004). Collateral Damage [editor’s column]. PMLA, 119(5), 1209–15. Silverblatt, M. (1995). The Cultural Relief of Art Spiegelman. Tampa Review, 5, 31–6. Spiegelman, A. (1978). Breakdowns: From Maus to Now, an Anthology of Strips. New York: Belier. Spiegelman, A. (1986). Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, vol. 1: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon. Spiegelman, A. (1987). Read Yourself Raw: Pages From the Rare First Three Issues of the Comics Magazine for Damned Intellectuals (ed. A. Spiegelman & F. Mouly). New York: Pantheon. Spiegelman, A. (1991). Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, vol. 2: And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon.
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Spiegelman, A. (1997). Open Me. . . I’m a Dog! New York: Joanna Cotler. Spiegelman, A. (1999). The Wild Party: The Lost Classic by Joseph Moncure March. New York: Pantheon. Spiegelman, A. (2000). Little Lit: Folklore and Fairy Tale Funnies (ed. A. Spiegelman & F. Mouly). New York: HarperCollins. Spiegelman, A. (2004). In the Shadow of No Towers. New York: Pantheon. Spiegelman, A. (2008a). Breakdowns/Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@& ! New York: Pantheon. Spiegelman, A. (2008b). Jack and the Box. New York: Toon. Spiegelman, A. (2010). MetaMaus. New York: Pantheon. Spiegelman, A., & Kidd, C. (2001). Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits. San Francisco: Chronicle. Versluys, K. (2006). Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers: 9/11 and the Representation of Trauma. Modern Fiction Studies, 52(4), 980–1003. White, H. (1992). Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth In S. Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 37–53.
Stegner, Wallace STEVEN HARTMAN
In a career spanning more than half a century Wallace Stegner produced some 30 books, including 15 volumes of fiction. He undertook his literary work with an unyielding belief in the writer’s duty to expose the erasures and distortions of history promoted by an increasingly throwaway popular culture, emerging as the most prominent literary mediator and public intellectual of the American West in his time. Believing that modern transformations of American landscapes, no less than American culture and society, occurred more rapidly and visibly beyond the 100th meridian, Stegner turned to the West of present and past as the setting, inspiration, and site of reflection for his most enduring fiction. Born in Iowa on February 18, 1909, Stegner grew up in various parts of the American West, his early years in the Great Plains and Salt Lake City profoundly influencing his engagement as a writer in the geocultural development of the West. Earning a PhD from the University of Iowa in 1935, Stegner taught at Harvard (1939–45)
before accepting a tenured professorship at Stanford University (1945–71), where he mentored such writers as Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Ernest J. Gaines, Ken Kesey, Thomas McGuane, Larry McMurtry, N. Scott Momaday, Robert Stone, and Tillie Olsen. His most celebrated works as a novelist appeared after his retirement from academia. He died April 13, 1993. Stegner’s literary career can be divided into three phases. In the first of these he produced four short novels, Remembering Laughter (1937), The Potter’s House (1938), On a Darkling Plain (1940), and Fire and Ice (1941), and an expansive family saga, The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), his first major critical success. Partly due to Stegner’s experimentation with diverse subjects and modes of storytelling, these early novels lack the aesthetic, situational, and philosophical coherence of later works. The first and last novels are the standouts, providing an interesting study in contrasts. Modeled on the tragic history of Stegner’s own family, The Big Rock Candy Mountain attempts to revise prevailing myths of the West by portraying the rugged individualist Bo Mason as a gifted loser unable to reconcile his limitless sense of opportunity with the realities of frontier existence. The novel’s patient historical realism, epitomizing Stegner’s best work, contrasts sharply with the restrained psychological realism of Remembering Laughter in its terse, impressionistic portrayal of infidelity in a small family. Stegner’s second phase is noteworthy for the dearth of novels produced over the next 24 years and for his considerable achievements in nonfiction. Major works include a biography of John Wesley Powell, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954); a history of the Mormon Trail, The Gathering of Zion (1964); and Wolf Willow (1962), a masterful mixed-genre work subtitled “a history, a story and a memory of the last plains frontier.” The period’s novels are solid: Second Growth (1947), reprising Bruce Mason from his previous novel; The Preacher and the Slave (1950); and A Shooting Star (1961), the least representative of Stegner’s mature novels. The most accomplished fictions of this phase were Stegner’s short stories, routinely selected for the Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Awards collections. Yet even these works are eclipsed by the period’s non-fiction, in which Stegner developed a holistic
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vision of the land and of culture to which history (geological and human) was essential, a so-called continental vision. An ethic of land stewardship, this vision emphasized the importance of families and communities rooting themselves in a particular place over generations in deliberate, disillusioned cognizance of the physical limitations of land and climate. Such were the lessons, selftaught through painstaking research as he wrote his unromantic histories and biographies on quintessentially Western subjects, that enriched Stegner’s fiction in the final and most fruitful phase of his literary career. Works from this last phase include the first Joe Allston novel All the Little Live Things (1967); the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angle of Repose (1971), widely considered Stegner’s masterpiece; the National Book Award-winning The Spectator Bird (1976), reprising Stegner’s sardonic late-life alter ego Joe Allston; Recapitulation (1979), which offered a final installment in the life of Bruce Mason, Stegner’s earliest fictional alter ego; and his last novel, Crossing to Safety (1987), a masterful work of quiet poignancy. During this phase, Stegner also produced several fine collections of essays on literature, the environment, and the West in the context of American culture and history, including Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (1992), which perfectly complement his novels, making more transparent the synergy and unity of his diverse literary projects. SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (AF); SocialRealist Fiction (AF)
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Stegner, W. (1940). On a Darkling Plain. New York: Harcourt Brace. Stegner, W. (1941). Fire and Ice. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce. Stegner, W. (1943). The Big Rock Candy Mountain. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce. Stegner, W. (1947). Second Growth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Stegner, W. (1954). Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Stegner, W. (1961). A Shooting Star. New York: Viking. Stegner, W. (1962). Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier. New York: Viking. Stegner, W. (1964). The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail. New York: McGraw-Hill. Stegner, W. (1967). All the Little Live Things. New York: Viking. Stegner, W. (1969). Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel. [originally pub. as The Preacher and the Slave, 1950] Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Stegner, W. (1971). Angle of Repose. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Stegner, W. (1976). The Spectator Bird. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Stegner, W. (1979). Recapitulation. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Stegner, W. (1987). Crossing to Safety. New York: Random House. Stegner, W. (1990). Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner. New York: Random House. Stegner, W. (1992). Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West. New York: Random House. Watkins, T. W. (2000). Books by Wallace Stegner: An Annotated Bibliography. Montana State University (June 25). At www.montana.edu/ stegner/Stegner/bib.html, accessed Jan. 19, 2010.
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Benson, J. J. (1998). Wallace Stegner: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne. Fradkin, P. L. (2008). Wallace Stegner and the American West. New York: Knopf. Hartman, S. “Invading Walden,” Part II: The Thoreauvian Dilemmas of Wallace Stegner’s On a Darkling Plain. Thoreau Society Bulletin, 252, 1–7. Meine, C. (ed.) (1997). Wallace Stegner and the Continental Vision: Essays on Literature, History, and Landscape. Washington, DC: Island Press. Stegner, W. (1937). Remembering Laughter. Boston: Little, Brown. Stegner, W. (1938). The Potter’s House. Muscatine, IA: Prairie.
Stein, Gertrude OMRI MOSES
Gertrude Stein, once considered a minor writer because of her extreme and rather forbidding experimental impulses, is now often ranked among the earliest and most important literary modernists. Her fictional writing style is notable for its use of repetition, non-standard grammar and punctuation, narrative digressions and
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disjunctiveness, unsettling narrative tone and authority, and other formal features meant to challenge expectations about the novel as a form, to explore the nature of existential time, and to expand the repertoire of intellectual and emotional effects produced in readers. As a rule, she focuses on humdrum events, including family power struggles and amorous relationships in a domestic context. She also explores how individuals coincide with or deviate from fixed social and racial types. She took her cues from the experimental visual arts – most notably from cubism – as well as from realist and naturalist writers such as Henry James and Gustave Flaubert, in turn influencing numerous younger writers whom she befriended, such as Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, and Thornton Wilder. She has impacted and inspired feminist critics and writers, avant garde poets, and artists of the present moment, including members of the L¼A¼N¼G¼U¼A¼G¼E school. Her allusions in her work to same-sex desires and her nearpublic lesbian relationship with Alice B. Toklas have also been a source of interest to theorists of sexuality. Born on February 3, 1874 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, she spent her early childhood first in Vienna, then in Paris. Her successful German Jewish immigrant family relocated to Oakland, California when she was 6. In her mid-teens, her parents died. Family investments provided her with a small but adequate provision of income. In 1892, Stein departed for Baltimore, and subsequently followed her brother Leo, to whom she was close, to Harvard. There, she enrolled in the Harvard Annex, later called Radcliffe. She studied with several intellectual luminaries, including the psychologist William James, whom she credited with inspiring her lifelong experimental disposition. Later, after abandoning pursuit of a medical degree at Johns Hopkins, she moved to Paris with Leo. The two began collecting avant garde art, in the process establishing a salon where successive generations of the most important artists and writers circulated. A famous conversationalist, she struck up an enduring friendship with Picasso while modeling for him. Later Alice Toklas moved in with her, and became her lifelong domestic companion, acting as homemaker, secretary, and supporter. After falling out with Leo in 1913, the two split their art
collection and never spoke again. During World War I, Stein aided the war effort by driving a supply truck for wounded French soldiers. In the late 1920s, she began collaborative projects with a number of artists, including A Book Concluding With As a Wife Has a Cow, A Love Story, illustrated by Juan Gris; a volume of very free translations of a young French poet, George Hugnet; and one of several opera librettos for Virgil Thompson. She achieved wider literary celebrity in 1933 when she published the first of two autobiographies, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (written from the point of view of her companion), filled with amusing anecdotes about her life as an artist. Stein, always a great self-promoter, parlayed this into a successful American lecture tour in 1934–5. She returned to France and spent World War II – the years of the German occupation – in a small country home sometimes billeted by German soldiers. As an unacknowledged Jew, she was under the precarious protection of important friends in the Vichy government. In 1944, after the end of the occupation, she moved back to Paris. She died of complications from stomach cancer on July 27, 1946. Stein’s difficult writing – perceived by many critics of her generation to be willful, capricious, sloppy, mindlessly repetitive, artless, oblique, and excessively demanding – prevented her from achieving more than skeptical notoriety from many of her readers. She published her first novel, Three Lives (1909), largely at her own expense. Like other expatriate modernists, she relied on avant garde subscription magazines with small circulations to publish her early experimental efforts, including the Transatlantic Review (edited by Ford Madox Ford), where The Making of Americans (1995 [1925]) was first serialized; and The New Criterion (edited by T. S. Eliot) and Camera Work (edited by Alfred Stieglitz), which published her experimental portraits. The literate public was often treated to short excerpts from her writing in the newspapers, quoted along with derisory commentary. Stein, for her part, was amused at the mode of conveyance and suggested that any work of art has a tendency to be “irritating, annoying stimulating” before it is credited as a classic, and enters into a settled-upon regime of literary classification. In 1931, Edmund Wilson famously complained of
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her “soporific rigmaroles, her echolaliac incantations, her half-witted-sounding catalogues on numbers.” He went on to say that “most of us read her less and less. Yet, remembering especially her early work, we are still always aware of her presence in the background of contemporary literature – and we picture her . . . eternally and placidly ruminating the gradual developments of the process of being, registering the vibrations of a psychological country like some august human seismograph whose charts we haven’t the training to read” (Wilson 252). Her influence on more mainstream modernists insured her historical place in the development of modernism, but her fiction was slow to achieve recognition in its own right. Her reputation gained considerably from new methodologies and a wave of feminist and poststructuralist criticism emerging in the 1980s, which helped make sense of characters that deviated from sexual norms, and metafictional writing that referred to its own self-undermining processes of composition. Stein, fond of destabilizing genre categories, has relatively few instances of conventional fiction, chiefly Q.E.D. and Furnhurst, her earliest written and least significant novellas (not published in her lifetime). Of her remaining output, Three Lives (1909) is a transitional work, bearing obvious resemblance to Flaubert’s fictional Trois contes (trans. Three Tales), of which she attempted a translation. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas offers only degrees of difference between fiction and non-fiction. Though Stein refers to The Making of Americans as a novel, it has an almost nonexistent narrative, and consists of a compendium of sensibilities or types set out in a digressive, experimental list structure. She applies confounding labels to her work, such as the “landscape play” A Saint in Seven (1922), in which scenery takes on some of the parts normally assigned to people, and Lucy Church Amiably, a novel in the guise of an engraving. She is interested in the way language structures expectations and orders experience. By abusing linguistic rules, and irreverently crisscrossing incompatible genres, she aims to form new connections between aspects of experience normally separated. She bursts intellectual frameworks in order to draw out what is strange in familiar perceptions and thoughts. In the process, she upsets conceptual hierarchies:
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genres and titles stand in oblique if not misleading relation to the body of work; sentences take on the structural role of paragraphs; adverbs providing logical connection and subordination (e.g., however, but, nonetheless, etc.) are dropped or else exploited without making good on their implied grammatical antithesis. Some of her effects seem calculated and intentional, while others the result of accident or sloppiness. On the most general level, she erodes the difference between rarified aesthetic intention in art and ordinary mistakes and solecisms. Her earliest published volume, Three Lives, presents three portraits, “The Good Anna,” “Melanctha,” and “The Gentle Lena,” each a self-contained story, but together comprising a fabric-of-life novel in a form later adapted by Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Ernest Hemingway in his In Our Time (1925). The narrative arc, which traces each of the titular characters’ lives, comes to an end as their vitality flags and they die, closely resembling the plot trajectory of Theodore Dreiser’s naturalist novel, Sister Carrie. Stein also credits Paul Cezanne’s post-impressionist compositional style – which attempts to give each element in the representational field equal weight – as an important influence. His stylistic lessons pushed her to elevate minor and repetitive events that seem redundant from the point of view of the narrative, but which fill in important transitions between events. Stein’s simplified diction explores the resonating significance of commonly deployed words in a shifting context. She begins a practice of overusing and misusing the present-progressive tense (e.g., “is going,” “am understanding”) in order to accentuate the process unfolding in events over their punctual arrival. In this way, she expresses what in her essay, “Composition as Explanation,” she subsequently labels the “continuous present.” Her reiterating phrases and descriptions underscore how much language depends for its meaning on its evolving context. “The Good Anna” and “The Gentle Lena” are about house servants performing their ordinary domestic duties, and deals with their simple demonstrations of fidelity. Like Flaubert, she focuses on their repeated conditions of life, quotidian relationships, and unselfconscious attitudes, but does without some of the French novelist’s crushing irony. Instead of their deluded
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impotence, Stein emphasizes their assertions of will as a basic feature of their character. The last to be written, and most experimental story, “Melanctha” – about a “mulatta” character’s evolving and fading relationship to various lovers and friends – is one of the earliest sustained fictional efforts to explore African American experience in its relative independence from white experience. The story is based on an earlier autobiographical novella, Q.E.D., which deals with a love triangle between three white women. By representing the complicated same-sex entanglements of Q.E.D. in a mostly heterosexual ethnic context, “Melanctha” relies on what critics have called “racial masquerade” to look at life at the margins of bourgeois morality. The story also ventriloquizes African American dialect patterns with the intention of eroding the privilege of standardized language. The experiments are a jumping-off point for investigating fundamentally non-mimetic speech acts. Though significant African American writers such as Nella Larsen and Richard Wright admired her story, recent critics have sometimes argued that her fictional schemas veer upon racist stereotypes. Even censorious critics, however, acknowledge that the tone and authority of Stein’s narrator are difficult to assess. The elaborate masking techniques, and the shifting registers in which pronouncements and observations are made, sometimes appear simple and na€ıve, and other times exhibit surprising authorial complexity. Stein began The Making of Americans in 1903, though she put the project on hold until after she finished Three Lives in 1906, at which point its formal structure changed substantially. Too eccentric and anomalous to appeal to conventional publishers, and too long (at over 900 pages), the manuscript was not published until 1925, though it was completed in 1911. The book begins as a cross-generational saga, tracing two clans, the Herslands and the Dehnings, as they confederate by bonds of marriage and pursue their intertwined fortunes. Its subject is the evolving formation of individual and national character as ordinary but energetic immigrants establish and integrate themselves in America. It is also about the struggle of successive generations as they resist the authority of their fathers. It retains Stein’s early narrative vignettes, but the plot quickly disappears – leaving the trace of its own
evolving compositional structure as an element of its content. Stein modeled some of her techniques on the dadaist and surrealist practice of automatic writing. But in her case, the effort to avoid self-censorship is a means of displaying habits of thought rather than a way to expose unconscious messages. As something of a constructivist, Stein thought that new ways of producing texts create new kinds of experiences, and therefore new meanings for them. The Making of Americans is structured as a genealogy of psychological types, each based on Stein’s local observations while she was writing. The book ends up being as much a grammatical experiment as a fictional one, considering how specific “instances” of people modify the categories mobilized to define them. It contains a series of abstract, deeply repetitive statements about character. Each time new fictive personages are introduced, the narrative circles back to consider a surplus of details that comprise the “whole” of their character. This process of “beginning again” creates a perpetually wandering or stalling structure that prevents the central narrative trajectory from moving forward. Eventually, Stein begins reflecting on the inevitable failure of any effort to exhibit character in its wholeness. The novel parades an exasperating refusal to convey any new information or to tell a conventional story. After The Making of Americans, Stein’s experimental writing slowly moved away from fiction that made reference to distinct characters. She began A Long Gay Book (1911–13 [1933]) as a sequel to The Making of Americans, this time dealing with personality types as they are defined by pairings and sodalities. However the last third of the volume switches into a series of abstract, fragmentary, highly associative language patterns that elude direct reference, and resemble Stein’s subsequent effort in Tender Buttons (itself modeled on cubist collages). A Novel of Thank You (1925–6), written in murky, challenging prose style, substitutes the story content of a work of fiction with a meditation on the difference between a novel and a story. As Stein said in a letter, it “describes itself.” It has no narrative teleology. Through the 1920s, Stein produced a series of critical pieces that set out to explain her compositional methods and style – while still making use
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of her characteristic indirectness. She produced another anti-realist novel, Lucy Church Amiably (1927), full of images of pastoral landscape. The title character is named after a church in Lucey, a region of Belley. The book may be said to treat language as landscape with fluid structures (like river water), and a profusion of highly variable but harmonious details. Repetitive, modulating phrases flow into each other, producing different syntactical combinations. It attempts to reflect on the meaning of place without simply naming the elements of the scenic backdrop. After writing the first of several successful memoirs in the 1930s, which Stein ranked among her minor works despite their popularity, she returned to novelistic structure in The World Is Round (1939), a children’s book. The narrative, about two children, Rose and Willie, who contemplate their names, and their relation to their identities and sense of themselves, allowed her to explore many of her perennial themes through the prism of childhood experience. The whimsical story loosens the formal rigidity of narrative structure in order to capture less scripted connections between events, and to restore experiences of the world before “adult” logical linkages inhibit the playfulness of language. The narrative fabula (the story events) is often determined by the linguistic surface itself, the singsong rhyming of words, the puns, and linguistic jokes. The episodic structure appears in certain respects disjointed and paratactical, if not outright capricious, because it does not internalize rules about narrative proportionality and plausibility. The children undergo enigmatic experiences, explore the world, and overcome their fears, eventually marrying when they discover that they are not cousins. Ida (1941), Stein’s much labored-over next novel, is, like her children’s book, composed of a series of incidents that do not advance a consistent plot line. “Funny things” happen to Ida before any logical connection is established to them. She lives in the suspended present, constantly resting, failing to react, wandering, marrying, escaping relationships, and observing insignificant details of the world that pointedly do not link up with her life. Ida symbolizes a wholly disengaged individual, achieving improbable freedom by resisting and evading the world’s construction of her identity. She corresponds
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with an imaginary twin, Winnie, from whom she subsequently retreats. Winnie may symbolically represent Ida’s public side. Orphaned early in the novel, Ida betrays Stein’s fantasies of autogenesis. During this period, Stein was obsessed with celebrity culture, and her celebrity in particular, worrying that publicity might be able to overshadow or rewrite identity. Ida’s life is thought to allude to news stories about the then Duchess of Windsor. Donald Sutherland suggests that Ida is a publicity saint, a composite of Helen of Troy, Dulcinea, and Garbo, among others, “who by sheer force of existence in being there holds the public attention and becomes a legend” (Sutherland 154). Stein’s last novels deal with life during wartime. Mrs. Reynolds (1940–2), one of Stein’s longest novels, examines a couple who pass an existence of quiet domesticity in occupied France. It includes characters modeled on the lives of Hitler and Stalin, and dwells on the ordinary underpinnings of evil. It considers the role of prophecy and superstition as cultural practices whose function is to help people prepare for and assimilate unprecedented – and largely alarming – forms of experience. Brewsie and Willie (1946) consists almost entirely of reported conversations of young US soldiers abroad. It has virtually no plot, and aims to present the experience of life as it is registered through the prism of talk. The soldiers discuss their attitudes about race and their sense of gender relations, reflecting on changes effected by wartime experience. Stein presents their colloquial speech patterns as they engage in bluster and casual bantering, though the conversations also partake of the mannered grammatical prose style that marks many of Stein’s experimental writings. The work reflects her affection for American soldiers. Stein’s later fiction has not received the same notice from critics as her early novelistic writing, for which she remains most famous. Her later experimental style remains difficult to assimilate or to appraise according to traditional literary claims of value such as stylistic precision or storytelling capacity. Instead, critics have examined the performative dimensions of her texts, especially the effects created through indeterminate language. Stein’s writing has enjoyed an efflorescence of attention in recent years. Scholars have discussed her relationship to philosophical,
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scientific, and political discourses of her time, paying special attention to her treatment of race, gender, sexuality, and class. SEE ALSO: Anderson, Sherwood (AF); The Avant Garde Novel (AF); Dreiser, Theodore (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Expatriate Fiction (AF); Fitzgerald, F. Scott (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Hemingway, Ernest (AF); James, Henry (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Queer Modernism (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Curnutt, K. (ed.) (2000). The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein. New York: Greenwood. Haas, R. (ed.) (1971). A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow. Stein, G. (1969). Lucy Church Amiably [1927, pub. 1930]. New York: Something Else. Stein, G. (1980). Mrs. Reynolds [1940-2, pub. 1952]. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon. Stein, G. (1993). A Stein Reader (ed. U. E Dydo). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Stein, G. (1994). A Novel of Thank You [1925-6, pub. 1958]. Chicago: Dalkey Archive. Stein, G. (1995). The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress [1925]. Chicago: Dalkey Archive. Stein, G. (1998a). Writings: 1903–1932. New York: Library of America. Stein, G. (1998b). Writings: 1932–1946. New York: Library of America. Sutherland, D. (1971). Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Wilson, E. (1931). Axel’s Castle. New York: Scribner’s.
Steinbeck, John MIMI REISEL GLADSTEIN
John Steinbeck is a major American novelist of the mid twentieth century whose sympathetic portrayals of the plight of migrant workers are enduring classics. Translated worldwide, Steinbeck’s works garnered serious national and international recognition during his lifetime: he received a Drama Critics’ Circle Award for the stage version of his novel Of Mice and Men (1937); the Pulitzer Prize for his epic Dust Bowl exodus, The Grapes of
Wrath (1939); and the United States Medal of Freedom in 1964. Steinbeck’s international status was acknowledged in 1962 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In a writing career characterized by diversity of genre and tone, Steinbeck moved easily from the sweep of the epic and historical novel to light comic satire; playnovelettes, screenplays, and serious studies of marine biology attest to his willingness to experiment with new techniques and subject matters. Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California in 1902, the only son among the four children of Olive and John Steinbeck. The original family name was Grossteinbeck. His mother, Olive Hamilton, a one-time schoolteacher, fostered his early love for literature. A gift of Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur created a lifelong influence. Steinbeck was working on a contemporary English edition of this text when he died at age 67 in his New York home. Salinas was a small rural community in a rich farm valley where local boys like John sometimes worked in the fields during the summers. Through such experiences, Steinbeck became familiar with the circumstances of some of the migrant workers he was to portray in his later works. He also picked up a rudimentary Spanish from them and his friend Max Wagner, whose family had lived in Mexico. Mexico became a favorite destination and the setting and source for some of his significant film, fiction, and nonfiction works. After his graduation from high school in Salinas, Steinbeck became a desultory student at Stanford for five years, leaving without a degree, but trained in two fields of his greatest predilections: writing and marine biology. After college he went briefly to New York City, where he worked as a laborer on the construction of Madison Square Garden and as a reporter. He returned to California, where he married Carol Henning. She provided both financial and editorial support in the early days of his career. His first published novel was Cup of Gold (1929), based loosely on Harry Morgan, the pirate. Neither it nor his next novel, To A God Unknown (1933), garnered much critical attention. However, the 1935 publication of Tortilla Flat brought him a national reading audience and the attention of Hollywood, which adapted the novel in a film starring Spencer Tracy, John Garfield, and Hedy Lamar.
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In the early days of their marriage, John and Carol Steinbeck lived rent-free in a small home in Pacific Grove owned by the elder Steinbecks. During this time, Steinbeck met Ed Ricketts, who was to play a significant role in his life and writing. The men became close friends, business partners, and writing collaborators; in fact, Steinbeck used Ricketts as a model for one of his most famous fictional characters, Doc, in Cannery Row (1945) and Sweet Thursday (1954). Critics generally agree that John Steinbeck’s best and most effective works are set in the land he knew so well, the Salinas Valley and its close environs. The Pastures of Heaven (1932), a group of loosely connected short stories set in a small community, owes much to the form and themes of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Like Anderson, Steinbeck’s collection exploits the ironic distance between the idyllic setting and the inner anguish of its inhabitants. “The Pastures” is a fictionalized Corral de Tierra, a small, enclosed valley off the road between Salinas and Monterey. To the stranger it looks Edenic, but the stories of its inhabitants reveal lives of quiet and not-so-quiet desperation. The introductory chapter reflects Steinbeck at his revisionist best, recounting a non-Eurocentric presentation of the settling of California. Long before various civil rights groups called for it, Steinbeck offered non-chauvinistic interpretations of the West’s settlement, sympathetic portrayals of minority and dispossessed groups, and keen analyses of the psychology of prejudice. During the 1930s, Steinbeck established himself as a key chronicler of the plight of the agricultural migrant worker. Some of the characters and events of In Dubious Battle (1936) are modeled on actual communist organizers and strikes of the period. The main characters are Mac, a seasoned labor organizer, and Jim, a fervent young disciple. Mac teaches Jim that they must use any and all opportunities to further their cause. Doc Burton, who volunteers his medical expertise to help the strikers, is one of the first of many characters modeled on Ed Ricketts. The next year Steinbeck published Of Mice and Men, the story of two migrant workers, one a retarded but powerful man-child. Since Steinbeck had written it as a play-novelette, very little adjustment was needed from novel page to play script. Not only was the work widely praised (even
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First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt called it beautifully written), but it was also a Book of the Month Club selection. The play, starring Broderick Crawford, Wallace Ford, and Clare Luce, was an immediate success and has remained a staple of summer stock and little theater for over 70 years. Its timeless and universal quality has inspired multiracial casts; in one revival, James Earl Jones played Lennie. The story has also generated numerous adaptations, from operas, ballets, and cartoons to two Hollywood adaptations and one television version. Steinbeck claimed his play was about the hopes and dreams of everyone, but his choice to set it in a bunkhouse of migrant workers and his characters’ longing for a place of their own speak to the plight of the itinerant agricultural workers of that time and all times. The Grapes of Wrath, considered to be Steinbeck’s masterpiece, developed from an assignment by a San Francisco newspaper to write a series about the Dust Bowl immigrants that were flooding California in the 1930s. The series was then published as a pamphlet, Their Blood Is Strong, to raise funds and awareness about the migrants’ terrible treatment and labor conditions. On some of his interview forays, Steinbeck was accompanied by Horace Bristol, who took photographs later published in Life magazine. In his novel, Steinbeck created a fictional family, the Joads, to embody the Oklahomans. This novel familiarized the world with the derogatory term “Okie.” Steinbeck’s novel was denounced in the Oklahoma legislature as well as by California agricultural magnates and associations. The novel’s plot follows the Joad family from their repossessed home in Oklahoma across the New Mexico and Arizona deserts on Route 66 and into California, where they search for work, encamping at a number of sites reserved for migrants. The bright spot is a government camp where the people are self-governing, but when work in the area dries up, the family must move on. One by one, members of the family leave or die, culminating in a flood that leaves them destitute and homeless. They take refuge in a barn, where Rose of Sharon offers her breast to a starving man. This final scene, which Steinbeck likened to the Earth Mother feeding her children, shocked many and caused the book to be banned from a number of libraries. Steinbeck
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fought his publishers in order to be allowed to use realistic language and situations. Grapes’ realist presentation of the Joads’ plight is buttressed by several layers of myth, both secular and biblical, as well as penetrating psychological and sociological observations. Steinbeck once remarked about The Grapes of Wrath, “There are five layers in this book, a reader will find as many as he can and he won’t find more than he has in himself ” (1975, 178–9). Steinbeck’s archetypal structure of the immigrant experience creates a resonance between his topical depiction of the actual Dust Bowl migration and subsequent migrant situations, such as the Moroccans in Spain, the Turks in Germany, or the Koreans in Manchuria, thus ensuring the novel’s universal appeal and global influence. Following the public success of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck and his friend Ed Ricketts outfitted a boat and made a scientific collecting trip to the Sea of Cortez, the waterway between Mexico and Baja California. The resultant book, Sea of Cortez (1941) records the flora, fauna, and sea life collected on the expedition and has become a classic in the field of marine biology. Steinbeck’s narrative, called the “log” in the original book, was later published on its own as Log From the Sea of Cortez (1951) after the death of Ed Ricketts and contains an additional laudatory essay titled, “About Ed Ricketts.” The Log is also noteworthy because, in it, Steinbeck articulates ecological and environmental concerns that were far ahead of his time. He was to emphasize these qualms in a number of works, both fiction and non-fiction. America and Americans (1966) offers one of his strongest statements about the negative impact of America’s behavior on the environment. When the United States entered World War II, Steinbeck was quick to offer his service to his country. However, his proletarian novels of the 1930s had branded him as a communist or communist sympathizer in certain parts of the government, and the FBI had a dossier on him that stymied his attempts to join the armed services or cover the war as a reporter. His second attempt at the play-novelette form, The Moon Is Down was not as successful as its predecessor. Although it was condemned by American critics, after the war the king of Norway presented
Steinbeck with the Haakon Cross for his contributions to the war effort, in particular how this novel inspired the resistance. Although couched in generic language, the novel is about the defiance of a conquered people, much like the Norwegians, against an oppressor, much like the Nazis. Cannery Row (1945) is a nostalgic return to the carefree life before fame and the war. An undercurrent of death and loss belies its superficially comic tone. Initially dismissed for its apparent lack of seriousness, today it is newly admired for its ecological perspective. The Red Pony (1945), initially published as four separate short stories, was re-issued as a book and has enjoyed success as a staple for high school reading. The serious themes of the death of old men and horses enrich the surface story of a boy and his pony. After his divorce from Carol Henning, Steinbeck married Gwyn Conger, who was the mother of his two sons, Thom and John IV. That marriage also ended in divorce, and in 1950 Steinbeck married Elaine Scott. East of Eden (1952) chronicles the multigenerational stories of two families: the Hamiltons, his mother’s family; the Trasks, a fictional family. The Cain and Abel myth underlies its theme of the human choice to conquer evil. Elia Kazan directed the awardwinning film version that made James Dean a star. East of Eden was also made into a television mini-series. Steinbeck continued to publish both fiction and non-fiction until the end of his life. Steinbeck’s sense of a deteriorating national moral compass and sham patriotism infuses his last work of fiction, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), the story of Ethan Hawley, descendant of an old New England family. The novel was cited by the Nobel Committee as evidence of a return to the vitality of his best works. They stated their reasons for awarding the prize thusly: “For his realistic as well as imaginative writings, distinguished by a sympathetic humor and a keen social perception.” SEE ALSO: Anderson, Sherwood (AF); Modern Fiction in Hollywood (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF); The Road Novel (AF); SocialRealist Fiction (AF); WPA and Popular Front Fiction (AF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Beegel S., Shillinglaw, S., & Tiffney, W. N., Jr. (eds.) (1997). Steinbeck and the Environment. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Benson, J. J. (1984). The True Adventures of John Steinbeck. Writer. New York: Viking. Parini, J. (1994). John Steinbeck: A Biography. London: Heinemann. Steinbeck, J. (1932). Pastures of Heaven. New York: Covici-Friede. Steinbeck, J. (1935). Tortilla Flat. New York: CoviciFriede. Steinbeck, J. (1936). In Dubious Battle. New York: Covici-Friede. Steinbeck, J. (1937). Of Mice and Men. New York: Viking. Steinbeck, J. (1939). The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Viking. Steinbeck, J. (1942). The Moon Is Down. New York: Viking. Steinbeck, J. (1945). Cannery Row. New York: Viking. Steinbeck, J. (1952). East of Eden. New York: Viking. Steinbeck, J. (1961). The Winter of Our Discontent. New York: Viking. Steinbeck, J. (1975). Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (ed. E. Steinbeck & R. Wallstein). New York: Viking.
Stephenson, Neal JONATHAN P. LEWIS
Neal Town Stephenson’s first two novels, The Big U (1984) and Zodiac (1988), would likely have been forgotten had it not been for the explosive popularity of his breakthrough novel Snow Crash (1992). Combining cyberpunk’s fusion of Japanese anime and Samurai cultures and American noir with the “The Metaverse,” an immersive virtual reality that inspired Second Life and other massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), Snow Crash established Stephenson’s voice in contemporary American literature. The Diamond Age (1995) and Cryptonomicon (1999a) proved that Stephenson sees clearly that the development of new technologies is the driving force in human cultures, but that such innovations can be enslaving and terrorizing while claiming to liberate and entertain. Stephenson has been favorably compared to William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and other “firstgeneration” cyberpunk writers, but since Snow
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Crash, Stephenson has extended the domain of science fiction and erased any remaining sense of science and speculative fiction as non-literary genres. His style is often more humorous and lighter than that of Gibson, Margaret Atwood, or Ursula K. Le Guin, but not as purely comic as that of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. or as inclusive of puns, slapstick, and grotesque humor as that of Thomas Pynchon, authors to whom Stephenson is also compared. Born at Fort Meade, Maryland on Halloween 1959, Stephenson grew up the eldest of three children of academic scientists. Both of his grandfathers were college professors, Edward Beattie Stephenson in physics and Wilbur Gordon Jewsbury in chemistry, respectively, and Stephenson’s father, David Town Stephenson, is emeritus professor of electrical and computer engineering at Iowa State. Stephenson’s mother, Janet Elaine Jewsbury Stephenson, was a researcher in the Biology department at Iowa State for more than 20 years. Stephenson graduated from Boston University with a degree in geography in 1981. After living in Iowa, New Jersey, and Virginia, Stephenson moved to Seattle in 1991, where he lives with his wife, the physician Ellen Lackermann, and family. As a writer, Stephenson creates gripping scenarios involving the creators and users of bleeding-edge technologies. As articulated in Cryptonomicon, the conflicts in Stephenson’s works focus on the pattern of behaviors the ancient Athenians identified with Ares, the god of war – reckless, bloodthirsty, arrogant, tyrannical, and despotic – and with their patron Athena, the goddess of technology, intelligence, and defensive and tactical war. Stephenson’s modern “Athenians” include Hiro in Snow Crash, Nell in The Diamond Age, and the various Waterhouses, Shaftoes, Hacklhebers, and Gotos in Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle (2003–4). The “Aresians” include L. Bob Rife in Snow Crash, bent on world domination, and the duc d’Arcachon, a slaver in The Baroque Cycle. In Anathem (2008), the Athenian pattern is present in such “avout” as Erasmus, Ala, Jaad, and Orolo, but the margins of the Titanomachia are less clear-cut than in his earlier works, perhaps signifying that the Manichaean binaries that exist in Snow Crash are both less realistic and less fruitful for narrative.
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Stephenson’s works display his remarkable ability to incorporate a variety of disciplines, interests, philosophies, vocabularies, and novelistic discourses as he moves from Earth’s past, present, and future to a world with its own long history of cycles of invention and destruction similar to Earth’s. One of America’s finest writers, Stephenson’s career promises continued, relentless challenges to notions of “genre fiction” while aggressively setting real-world intellectual and technological agendas. He won the Hugo Award for best novel in 1996 for The Diamond Age, which was also nominated for the Nebula Award, and was nominated for the Hugo again in 1999 for Cryptonomicon. He has also received the Arthur C. Clarke, Locus, and Prometheus Awards.
Stephenson, N. (1999b). In the Beginning ... Was the Command Line. New York: Avon. Stephenson, N. (2000a). The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer [1995]. New York: Bantam. Stephenson, N. (2000b). Snow Crash [1992]. New York: Bantam Spectra. Stephenson, N. (2001). The Big U [1984]. New York: Perennial. Stephenson, N. (2003). The Baroque Cycle, vol. 1: Quicksilver. New York: Morrow. Stephenson, N. (2004a). The Baroque Cycle, vol. 2: The Confusion. New York: Morrow. Stephenson, N. (2004b). The Baroque Cycle, vol. 3: The System of the World. New York: Morrow. Stephenson, N. (2007). Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller [1988]. New York: Grove. Stephenson, N. (2008). Anathem. New York: Morrow.
SEE ALSO: Gibson, William (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Speculative Fiction (AF)
Stone, Robert
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Baruth, P. E. (1997). The Excesses of Cyberpunk: Why No One Mentions Race in Cyberspace. In E. A. Leonard (ed.), Into Darkness Peering: Race and Color in the Fantastic. Westport, CT: Greenwood, pp. 105–18. Browning, B. (1996). When Snow Isn’t White. Women & Performance, 17(1), 35–53. Clayton, J. (2002). Convergence of the Two Cultures: A Geek’s Guide to Contemporary Literature. American Literature, 74(4), 807–31. Hayles, N. K. (2004). Performative Code and Figurative Language: Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. In P. Freese & C. B. Harris (eds.), The Holodeck in the Garden: Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, pp. 3–27. Johnston, J. (2001). Distributed Information: Complexity Theory in the Novels of Neal Stephenson and Linda Nagata. Science Fiction Studies, 28(2), 223–45. Porush, D. (1996). Hacking the Brainstem: Postmodern Metaphysics and Stephenson’s Snow Crash. In R. Markley (ed.), Virtual Realities and Their Discontents. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 107–141. Stephenson, N. (1999a). Cryptonomicon. New York: Avon.
MARK LEVENE
Despite a small body of work compared to that of Philip Roth and John Updike, Robert Stone remains one of the preeminent writers of post1960s American fiction. Regarded as a supreme prose stylist and celebrated for his courage in anatomizing loss and longing, violence and war, he is rare in submerging his personal ego and history in the demands of character and narrative and in the service of inhabiting the reader’s consciousness for often lacerating shocks of moral recognition. Rarely do reviews avoid invocations of Melville and Conrad, although his preference for big themes and big books does not always travel well, particularly in England, the homeland of Graham Greene, who wrote big themes in smaller books. There Stone is perceived to be addicted to machismo and unsound religious hankerings, an epistemological imperialist; for the less intimidated of Stone’s subjects and the stories in which they unfold are indicative of an incomparable intellectual and narrative strength and independence. Robert Anthony Stone was born in Brooklyn, New York on August 21, 1937, and it was not long before he became an embodiment of William Faulkner’s perception that the human spirit will not simply endure, it will prevail. Periodically separated from his mother when she was institu-
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tionalized for schizophrenia, he was permanently separated from his father, darkly perfect in his absolute absence. Stone intermittently inhabited a New York orphanage he experienced as his first territory of combat; flirted with urban gangdom; preferred telling himself stories; spent three years in the Navy and one at New York University; received a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, where he began his first novel, A Hall of Mirrors (1967); and ran with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. He went to Vietnam as a journalist, and in Dog Soldiers (1974) – for which he received the National Book Award – created one of the quintessential novels of a dope-and dream-driven age. Since then he has published five other predominantly realistic novels; a collection of stories, Bear and His Daughter (1997); a memoir, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (2007); and a number of extraordinary political and literary essays. He has taught at Amherst and Johns Hopkins, among other distinguished schools, and most recently was writer-in-residence at Yale University. A Hall of Mirrors, set in New Orleans on the verge of a right-wing-induced riot, has in Rheinhardt the first and least endearing of Stone’s sociopathic figures whose chief talent is in aggravating the various kinds of loss he experiences and evokes in others. The novel also introduces the core absence in Stone’s fiction, the Gnostic separation from the divine, and a complex, nuanced form of dark comedy. Stylistically more assured and compelling, Dog Soldiers is even bleaker in its conjunction of individual and social turmoil and sealed the identification of Stone with the portrayal of drugs as desire and epistemological catalyst. A Flag for Sunrise (1981) remains his masterwork, locating “a world far from God, a few hours from Miami” in an invented Central American country (analogous to Costaguana in Conrad’s Nostromo) where notions of history, revolution, and religion play out in his most fully realized sequences of terrifying and strangely funny predation. In Sister Justin, one of the rich, subtle women who dominate Stone’s fiction, he invests beauty and terror and makes the horror that shadows her inevitable, even grotesquely natural. In the unfairly beleaguered and underappreciated Children of Light (1986), Stone gravitates to an unusual spareness shaped by dialogue and
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at the same time a metaphoric narrative rooted in literary analogues. The allusions, most of them to As You Like It and King Lear, present readers not with problems of identification, but with integration, how one reads his “translation” of the heath scene and the different shadings (Rosalind, Lear, and Edna in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening) in Lu Anne, a film actor enthralled by her own lovely hallucinatory visions. Outerbridge Reach (1992) is another large book, but different too in that Stone’s cosmic edginess gives way to the compulsions of both loyalty and language. Originating in the 1968 Sunday Times solo transglobal yacht race, the novel details the deepening madness of Owen Browne, based on Donald Crowhurst. Honorable in its research and the majesty of its prose, it encountered a concerted and disgraceful public assault and controversy. Never known for failure of nerve, Stone then, out of considerable turmoil, wrote Damascus Gate (1998), which is steeped in his unique religious learning, the complexities of Jerusalem, and the messianism it fosters. Equally demanding in its intellectual and psychological range, Bay of Souls (2002) is a comparatively brief but almost overwhelmingly intense narrative that concludes in a surrealism similar to that in his first novel. Bear and His Daughter is Stone’s one collection of stories. Uneasy about the form in general, he has in “Helping” and “Miserere” created extraordinary examples of its density and richness. His works have received numerous awards – the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1982) for A Flag for Sunrise (also a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize), the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature (1982), and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship (1983). SEE ALSO: Conrad, Joseph (BIF); Greene, Graham (BIF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Fredrickson, R. S. (1996). Robert Stone’s Decadent Leftists. Papers on Language and Literature, 32(3), 315–34. Levene, M. (1992). Introduction. In K. Lopez & B. Chaney (eds.), Robert Stone: A Bibliography, 19601992. Hadley, MA: Numinous, pp. 13–19.
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Ruas, C. (1984). Robert Stone. Conversations With American Writers. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 265–94. Smith, P. (2003). A Stone Unturned. Nation, pp. 30–4 (Apr. 14). Solotaroff, R. (1994). Robert Stone. New York: Twayne. Stephenson, G. (2002). Understanding Robert Stone. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Stone, R. (1967). A Hall of Mirrors. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Stone, R. (1974). Dog Soldiers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Stone, R. (1981). A Flag for Sunrise. New York: Knopf. Stone, R. (1986). Children of Light. New York: Knopf. Stone, R. (1989). Outerbridge Reach. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Stone, R. (1998). Damascus Gate. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Stone, R. (2003). Bay of Souls. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Stone, R. (2007). Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties. New York: Ecco. Woods, W.C. (2006). Robert Stone [Interview, 1985]. In The Paris Review Interviews, I. New York: Picador, pp. 303–35.
Styron, William GAVIN COLOGNE-BROOKES
William Styron’s literary significance rests on the enduring impact of ambitious, risk-laden novels. His work explores difficult subject matter with an elegant complexity achieved through years of composition. Entwined with this is his experience with clinical depression, about which he writes with characteristic eloquence. His depressive tendency was perhaps partly circumstantial. Born William Clark Styron, Jr. in Newport News, Virginia in 1925, he was 13 when his mother died of cancer. But it may also have been a genetic inheritance from his father, an engineer in shipbuilding. Lost mother-figures and supportive father-figures feature prominently in a body of fiction that is also of epic historical scope. Drawn to writing while at Davidson College, Styron attended Duke University in 1943 and studied under William Blackburn. In 1944 he trained as a marine on Parris Island, where he spent time on a VD ward with trench mouth, misdiagnosed as syphilis – an experience he would
later use for the play In the Clap Shack (1973). But for the dropping of the atomic bomb, Styron would probably have been involved in the invasion of Japan. He returned to Duke in 1946, worked briefly at McGraw-Hill in New York, and enrolled in a writing class run by Hiram Haydn. Fired from McGraw-Hill, he began a novel entitled “Inheritance of Night” that would become Lie Down in Darkness (1951). Published when Styron was 25, Lie Down in Darkness tells the tragedy of the Loftis family. The novel opens with a train ride from New York to Port Warwick, a fictionalized Newport News, where Milton Loftis meets the coffin of teenage daughter Peyton after her suicide. It unfolds as a series of family scenes from her childhood onward and ends with the stream-of-consciousness of her final days. While Lie Down in Darkness is semiautobiographical and mildly derivative, Styron’s influences ensure that, stylistically and structurally, the novel belies its author’s youth. Built very much in the shadow of twentiethcentury Southern literature, as well as modernism, its opening train ride echoes the start of Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men (1946). Several characters resemble members of William Faulkner’s Compson family from The Sound and the Fury (1929), even while Peyton’s monologue also draws on Faulkner’s inspiration for Quentin’s: James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Such ambitiousness set the bar for Styron’s subsequent career. Hiram Haydn managed to have Styron’s recall for the Korean War postponed so that he could complete the novel. His subsequent return to the military was short-lived but shaped The Long March (1956), a novella first serialized as “Long March” in Discovery in 1952. The Long March is a mental tussle between regular officer Colonel Templeton and Captain Al Mannix, as seen by Mannix’s co-reservist, Captain Culver. In the wake of the deaths of eight marines in a mortar accident, Templeton orders a forced march. Mannix determines to obey the order to the letter as an act of perverse defiance akin to an existential rebellion. Culver sees the rebellion as hopeless in the face of Templeton’s indifference, but admires Mannix’s heroic defiance. Styron wrote The Long March while in Europe as winner of the Prix de Rome (1952). During this time he also helped found the Paris Review and
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met Rose Burgunder. They settled in Connecticut in 1954, and lived there and on Martha’s Vineyard until his death in 2006. Styron’s next novel, Set This House on Fire (1960), makes use of his time in Europe. In Part 1, Southern lawyer Peter Leverett, who is involved in the Marshall Plan for postwar European reconstruction, tells of visiting wealthy old school friend Mason Flagg in Italy. On the first night, he witnesses a struggle between Mason and Cass Kinsolving, an alcoholic artist with a wife and children to support. The next morning he learns of the murder of Mason and of a peasant girl, Francesca. In Part 2, Cass’s first-person narrative takes over. Cass reveals the truth about Mason, Francesca, and his own involvement in events. Peter then wraps up the narrative. Modernist influences remain evident. Peter is reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby (1925), while Faulkner’s shadow again looms over the telling of the same story from different perspectives. But the most pertinent aspect of this experimental novel is the dual narration whereby the first-person narrator effectively allows a third-person character to take over. This exploration of viewpoint options would help Styron shape the narrative of his most celebrated novel, Sophie’s Choice (1979). The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) is the bridge between these works. Winner of the 1968 Pulitzer Prize, it presents a first-person rendition of this historical figure describing the slave insurrection he led in Virginia in 1831. Calling his work, in the author’s note, “less an ‘historical novel’ in conventional terms” than “a meditation on history,” Styron drew on available information, including Turner’s confession as recorded by a contemporary lawyer, but also used the “utmost freedom of imagination.” Thus the ideas of intellectuals including Albert Camus, Erik Erikson, and James Baldwin are as important to the novel as the historical sources. With Baldwin especially, Styron had numerous conversations about American history, slavery, and race relations. His aim was to create less a black hero than a complex black character of the kind white American writing had rarely produced. For a twentieth-century white Southerner to depict a black slave in the first person was a brave step when Styron began the novel in 1963 but appeared, to some, provocative and foolhardy by
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the time of its publication. During that time the mood among African American Civil Rights activists had shifted from reconciliation to selfdefinition. The result was a controversy played out in readings, interviews, reviews, essays, and books. Within a year, John Henrik Clarke edited a collection of essays entitled William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (1968). The volume attacked the novel on many, sometimes contradictory, counts, but several contributors accused Styron of ignoring historical references to Turner having a wife. Styron’s portrayal of him as isolated and sexually repressed seemed like a deliberate distortion of the record. Lauded initially by writers and critics both black and white, the novel now seemed to have seriously backfired. The controversy has since come to be seen as a forerunner of late-twentieth- and earlytwenty-first century concerns about writing and censorship as well as a product of the political climate of the 1960s. Albert Stone’s The Return of Nat Turner (1992) treats the novel as a key document of the 1960s, of American history, and of contemporary American culture. It took nearly a decade before Styron produced his final, best-known novel. Set in Brooklyn in 1947, Sophie’s Choice is about a young writer, Stingo, who befriends a Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz and her Jewish boyfriend. Sophie and Nathan are psychologically unstable, and Stingo finds himself caught up in the whirlwind of their abusive, ultimately destructive relationship. Prior to the denouement, Sophie reveals to Stingo the story of her childhood in Cracow with her anti-Semitic father, her deportation to Auschwitz, and the nature of her choice. The novel is also concerned with seeking connections between the Nazi concentration camps and the history of slavery in the American South. Sophie’s Choice won the first National Book Award and received both acclaim and criticism in equal measure. For John Gardner (in Casciato & West 1982), Styron’s novel provided a powerful juxtaposition of good and evil. Others, notably Elie Wiesel (in Sirlin & West 2007), doubted the possibility of anyone beyond survivors having the capacity to depict accurately the Holocaust in art. But for several critics (e.g., Crane 1984; Ruderman 1987; Coale 1991), Sophie’s Choice is about much more than its headline subject matter. As a tapestry of human emotions and
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experiences, it offers affirmations of life even as it portrays personal and collective tragedy. Its audacity as art is most evident in Styron’s successful implementation of the technique of a shared narrative he piloted in Set This House on Fire. Drawing on cinematic convention to cut back and forth between the present moment seen through Stingo’s eyes, and the past seen through Sophie’s and the older narrator’s, Sophie’s Choice unfolds as both a chiaroscuro of the senses and a dialogue between youth and maturity. Sophie’s Choice proved to be the culmination of Styron’s career as a novelist, but he did produce This Quiet Dust and Other Writings (1982, expanded 1993); A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youth (1993); and Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990). The essay collection includes detailed discussion of his motivations and experiences in writing his most enduring novels, The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie’s Choice. The title story of A Tidewater Morning follows a boy on his paper route under the twin shadow of his mother’s imminent death and the declaration of war in Europe. As such it is as direct an account of Styron’s tragic childhood as he would ever write. In “Shadrach,” a former slave returns to the Virginia of his youth. “Love Day” concerns maneuvers in the Pacific in anticipation of the invasion of Japan. The three stories thus reflect Styron’s preoccupations with loss, war, and slavery. Darkness Visible, in turn, draws his work together as a study of the depressive illness that his writing had both staved off and perhaps contributed to. It helps explain his ability to depict not just the clearly autobiographical Stingo, but also the many characters in his novels who are in search of either mother- or father-figures, mentally unstable, alcoholic, suicidal, or a combination of these things. William Styron is a novelist in the tradition of the great nineteenth-century writers who place characters in the stream of history and examine human nature when tested by extreme events. He is also a consummate stylist, a skill not unconnected to his “old-fashioned” mode of composition, which involved longhand in 2B pencil on yellow legal pads, as immortalized in Stingo’s writing habits in Sophie’s Choice. His aim, and achievement, was to produce novels of depth and subtlety that would stand the test
of time. In his last months he worked to bring together a final volume, posthumously published as Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays (2008). SEE ALSO: Faulkner, William (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); The Novel and War (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); The Southern Novel (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Casciato, A. D. & West, J. L. W. III (eds.) (1982). Critical Essays on William Styron. Boston: G. K. Hall. Clarke, J. H. (ed.) (1968). William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. Boston: Beacon. Coale, S. (1991). William Styron Revisited. Boston: Twayne. Cologne-Brookes, G. (1995). The Novels of William Styron: From Harmony to History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Crane, J. K. (1984). The Root of All Evil: The Thematic Unity of William Styron’s Fiction. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Morris, R. K., & Malin, I. (eds.) (1981). The Achievement of William Styron, rev. edn. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Ross, D. W. (ed.) (1995). The Critical Response to William Styron. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Ruderman, J. (1987). William Styron. New York: Ungar. Sirlin, R. (1990). William Styron’s ‘Sophie’s Choice’: Crime and Self-Punishment. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Sirlin, R., & West, J. L. W. III (eds.) (2007). Sophie’s Choice: A Contemporary Casebook. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars. Stone, A. E. (1992). The Return of Nat Turner: History, Literature, and Cultural Politics in Sixties America Athens: University of Georgia Press. Styron, W. (1951). Lie Down in Darkness. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1951. Styron, W. (1956). The Long March. New York: Viking. Styron, W. (1960). Set This House on Fire. New York: Random House. Styron, W. (1967). The Confessions of Nat Turner. New York: Random House. Styron, W. (1973). In the Clap Shack. New York: Random House. Styron, W. (1979). Sophie’s Choice. New York: Random House.
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Styron, W. (1990). Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. New York: Random House, 1990. Styron, W. (1993a). A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youth. New York: Random House. Styron, W. (1993b). This Quiet Dust and Other Writings [1982], expanded edn. New York: Random House.
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Styron, W. (2008). Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays. New York: Random House. West, J. L. W., III (1985). Conversations With William Styron. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. West, J. L. W., III (1998). William Styron: A Life. New York: Random House.
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T Tan, Amy YUAN SHU
Amy Tan enjoys great popularity as a Chinese American fiction writer. Beginning with the success of her first novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), Tan has sought to represent Chinese American women’s life experiences across cultural spaces and historical periods and to explore popular themes such as mother–daughter relationships, generational conflicts, matrilineal inheritance, biculturalism, as well as reconnection with ethnic heritage in American contexts. She has so far produced five novels, two juvenile novels, and one book collection of essays. Born into a Chinese immigrant family in Oakland, California in 1952, Tan grew up under the parental pressure to become a medical professional but defied her parents’ wish by majoring in language studies. She received her BA and MA in English and linguistics at San Jose State University and pursued her PhD in linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Berkeley before she finally left the program in 1976. She worked as a successful technical writer for several years but soon committed herself wholeheartedly to creative writing. The Joy Luck Club, as Tan’s first success, defines a major thematic pattern in her work – the evolving mother–daughter relationship embedded in complex historical and cross-cultural contexts. Structured around 16 interrelated stories of four Chinese immigrant mothers and their four US-born daughters, the novel dramatizes
generational conflict from the perspectives of the Americanized daughters, but complicates the meanings of the conflict by allowing the immigrant mothers to speak in their own voices, thus evoking a cultural logic derived from their life experiences in China. The final reconciliation in this light not only suggests a better understanding between mothers and daughters but also highlights the mothers’ eagerness to share their knowledge of mysterious Chinese cultural traditions and social practices. Tan’s second novel, The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), reinforces the thematic pattern of an evolving mother–daughter relationship and accentuates the mother’s previous experience in China as central to the final reconciliation. In detailing the mother’s struggle in a politically unstable and culturally feudal China, this novel redefines the mother’s experience in terms of survival strategy and unpredictable human nature. As the mother reveals her dark secret of infanticide in the end, reconciliation becomes a matter of forgiveness on the part of the daughter. As both of her two novels received critical attention and achieved commercial successes, Tan started working on juvenile novels and produced The Moon Lady (1992) and Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat (1994), which would address in depth some underexplored themes in her previous work. While the former text is an extended elaboration of a chapter with the same title in The Joy Luck Club, the latter is about a mother cat telling her kittens the story of their ancestor
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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Sagwa of China, and trying to outwit an evil magistrate who gives bad orders in the kingdom of cats. In her third novel, The One Hundred Senses (1995), Tan focuses on a slightly different theme and explores the relationship between two halfsisters, Olivia, born and raised in the United States, and Kwan, born in China but recently arriving in the United States. Through a dramatization of Kwan’s mysterious world of “Yin” and superstitious understanding of reincarnation, Tan exposes the “absurdity” of the old world of China on the one hand, but validates its spiritualism and mysticism on the other. Through her journey to China with her European American husband and Kwan, Olivia as the protagonist finally develops a better sense of her own identity, and appreciates her half sister. The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001) shows Tan’s return to her familiar theme of the mother and daughter relationships and her employment of autobiographical elements in her work. Through the revelation of two packets of documents left behind by the mother, who had Alzheimer’s disease, the daughter, a San Francisco-based ghostwriter for technical books, discovers the extraordinary life that her mother had lived in China and the curse that the family had inherited, and finally makes sense of her mother’s coming to America. This novel is interestingly juxtaposed to her essay collection, The Opposite of Faith (2003), which reflects upon Tan’s personal experiences in relation to her family with implicit references to the novel. Tan’s latest novel, Saving Fish From Drowning (2005), marks her departure from her familiar theme of mother–daughter relationships and her willingness to investigate broader social political issues such as genocide and human rights abuse in Burma, which serves as the setting of the novel. Though told with great humor and sarcasm, this work lacks the kind of critical insight and cultural familiarity manifested in Tan’s other novels. In a sense, Tan is now at a crossroads in her career regarding whether to continue to write on her familiar theme of mother–daughter relationships or to experiment with new subjects, styles, and settings. SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bow, L. (2001). The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. In S.-L. C. Wong & S. Sumida (eds.), A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature. New York: Modern Language Association, pp. 159–71. Ma, S.-M. (2001). “Chinese and Dogs” in Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses: Ethnicizing the Primitive a la New Age. MELUS, 26(1), 29–44. Tan, A. (1989). The Joy Luck Club. New York: Putnam’s. Tan, A. (1991). The Kitchen God’s Wife. New York: Putnam’s. Tan, A. (1992). The Moon Lady. New York: Macmillan. Tan, A. (1994). The Chinese Siamese Cat. New York: Macmillan. Tan, A. (1995). The One Hundred Secret Senses. New York: Putnam’s. Tan, A. (2001). The Bonesetter’s Daughter. New York: Putnam’s. Tan, A. (2003). The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings. New York: Putnam’s. Tan, A. (2005). Saving Fish From Drowning. New York: Putnam. Wong, S.-L.C. (1995). “Sugar Sisterhood”: Situating the Amy Tan Phenomenon. In D. Palumbo-Liu (ed.), The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 174–210. Yuan, Y. (2002). Mothers’ “China Narrative”: Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife. In The Chinese in America: A History From Gold Mountain to the New Millennium. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, pp. 351–64.
Television and Fiction MARC C. OXOBY
Television was initially dismissed by many as a “faddish gimmick,” but it quickly became clear that this was not so. TV was here to stay. Still, in the medium’s early years, the literary world’s reaction remained limited, perhaps because it had already dealt with the perceived similar threat of film. Writers reacted swiftly to the advent of cinema in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whereas the movie industry feared television would drain its audience, writers regarded this as merely more of the same. Ultimately, however, television would prove to have a unique identity, bringing with it new aesthetics and issues to which writers would eventually have to respond. Additionally, the popularization of TV, with its
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own popular narrative component, seen by some as cutting into the market for prose fiction even further than film had, prompted writers and others in the publishing industry to rethink their craft, creatively and commercially. Television, in its earliest form, was pioneered by people like John L. Beard, Charles Francis Jenkins, Philo Farnsworth, and Allen B. DuMont in the 1920s and 1930s as a communications device, much more akin to telephony or radio than to cinema. But by the time of the first commercial broadcasts of 1939, TV had come to be regarded as a medium of entertainment. Initial broadcasts were national and sporting events, and after a wartime slump in programming and production, these were joined by variety shows and the narrative programming of TV dramas and sitcoms. Largely supported by this kind of programming, television sales and audiences boomed during the 1940s and 1950s. Despite its origins, however, many early observers saw TV as little more than movies which could be watched from the comfort of one’s own home. Consequently, with few exceptions, it was some time before psychologists, sociologists, and educators made concentrated studies of the medium’s particular impact. It took even longer for writers of fiction to respond to TV with anything more than off-handed, topical allusion. Indeed, by the time writers of fiction began to critically engage television, the nature of nonfiction writing about TV had already changed direction significantly. Writing about TV, up to and including Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), had largely seen the medium as benign, and in some cases was even celebratory. McLuhan applauded television’s mode of presentation as demanding a level of viewer participation which is “communal rather than private, inclusive rather than exclusive” (189). More typical in the years since Understanding Media, however, was a kind of anti-television tract, presenting arguments which have become part of the popular discourse against TV. Writers like Jerry Mander, Neil Postman, Ron Powers, and Marie Winn attacked TV for reinforcing corporate and political power structures, for promoting an anti-communitarian impulse, for creating unrealistic ideals of appearance and lifestyle, for fomenting cultural homogeneity, for being ill suited to convey messages of any kind
of subtlety, for encouraging physical and social lethargy, and, of course, for diminishing the audience for printed media. Whatever the validity of these claims, it is this attitude that has the greatest thematic influence on the earliest writers to take on TV, and it remains a potent influence on contemporary writers. Although most American fiction of the early years of television skirted discussion of the medium (which is also true of many contemporary works), a growing number of writers have called for more attention to TV’s role in American culture and consequently, to how it has affected the literary landscape. Among these was Kurt Vonnegut, who from early in his career repeatedly commented on television’s power, and in a 1989 interview lamented “all these people who are writing novels about fathers and sons finally making peace, a baby dying, about divorce and all that, and totally ignoring this very powerful character, television” (Abadi-Nagy 29–30). Belying Vonnegut’s concerns, writers like John Updike (Rabbit Run, 1960, and its sequels), Jerzy Kosinski (Being There, 1971), Raymond Carver (Cathedral, 1981), and Bobbie Ann Mason (In Country, 1985) have actively explored television’s role, and particularly the part it plays in fomenting characters’ alienation from each other and their world. As important as these overt themes are, so too is the impact of television on fictional forms. With the advent of cinema, writers sought not only to imitate certain features of this new form but also to distinguish the unique features of printed fiction, those that could not be reproduced in any other narrative form. This tendency continued with the popularization of television, and this can best be seen in the work of those often characterized as postmodernists, such as John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon. Indeed, postmodern fiction is frequently associated with the popularization of television because of their parallel development, and also because of the rather dramatic literary effects that it creates, effects that both employ televisual language and amplify the unique and unfilmable characteristics of the printed word. For instance, critics have often noted the fragmentation of information conveyed via TV. Raymond Williams, for example, noted how 1970s American television not only compartmentalized
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information in half-hour blocks, but also shattered the “flow” of this information with commercials and other breaks in the continuity of programming, marking “the occasional bizarre disparities – a single irresponsible flow of images and feelings” (92). This description well applies to much postmodern fiction. Vonnegut’s work simply looks fragmented on the page, with its quickly sketched scenes and frequent page breaks perhaps most notable in Breakfast of Champions (1973), which is further broken up by crude illustrations, and Hocus Pocus (1990), in which we are told, “The author of this book did not have access to writing paper of uniform size and quality.. . . The unconventional lines separating passages within chapters indicate where one scrap ended and the next began. The shorter the passage, the smaller the scrap” (7). Pynchon’s work, on the other hand, looks more conventional on the page, but it quickly becomes clear that “bizarre disparities” are a defining characteristic of his highly allusive prose, in which he effortlessly mingles discussions of Jacobean revenge dramas, the laws of thermodynamics, and TV’s Perry Mason, as he does in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). And yet these allusions, combined with examples of stream-of-consciousness and historiography, emphasize what visual media typically avoid and perhaps are incapable of. In 1990, an important new statement about television and fiction was published by David Foster Wallace. The essay “E. Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” renews the clarion call to writers to pay closer attention to television’s cultural power, but it sets this call in a new context, observing that many younger writers, including Wallace himself, have never known a world without TV, which no longer feels like an intruder, but has instead become an essential part of American life. As such, Wallace proposes that writers of fiction should treat television as part of their own cultural sphere, rather than as a foreign body within it. Using the term “Image-Fiction,” Wallace explores the use of “transient received myths of popular culture as a world in which to imagine fictions about ‘real,’ albeit pop-mediated, characters” (50). Building upon this, Wallace cites what he sees as an “oddly hollow” example in Mark Leyner (81), but also considers writers such as Robert Coover (“The Babysitter,” 1969), William T. Vollmann (You Bright and Risen
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Angels, 1987), and Don DeLillo, who treat the subject of television and media with appropriate seriousness. For example, in DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), one character remarks, “For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set” (66); but the border between these two places is depicted as being indeterminate and permeable, as when the narrator sees Babette, his wife, on TV and feels himself “being shot through with Babette. Her image was projected on our bodies, swam in us and through us” (105). Ultimately, the narrator must make a special point of reminding himself that this image is not his wife, and this kind of “disquiet” is typical of much “Image-Fiction.” And as several critics have pointed out, the characterizations that Wallace applies to “Image-Fiction” can also certainly be applied to his own fiction. The interactions between American fiction and television have also, of course, taken on a much more overtly commercial dimension, which can be divided into two parts: adaptation and promotion. As with literature’s relationship with cinema, adaptation has played an important role. However, the serial nature of much television programming, as well as its adherence to exacting scheduling and program durations, have naturally given TV’s adaptation of fiction a character distinct from cinematic adaptation. Such adaptation has basically taken three forms: TV movies, miniseries, and continuing series. The earliest movies broadcast on television were originally theatrical releases, and some of these were, naturally, adaptations of popular fiction. But in the mid-1960s, the television industry began producing its own movies. The first movie commissioned for TV was an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers (which, however, was ultimately released first to theaters in 1964). There have, however, been relatively few works of fiction licensed for adaptation to the conventional TV movie form. This results, perhaps, from the fact that cinema has conventionally had greater cachet, and almost certainly from the perception of TV productions as B-movie fare. However, television does have an advantage over cinema in its ability to go beyond the typical two-hour-long guideline of theatrical releases. Consequently, adaptations of novels have thrived in the form of the miniseries, with its greater flexibility with
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length and duration. The first American miniseries was the 1974 adaptation of Leon Uris’s QB VII, significant for a $2.5 million budget, well beyond that of typical TV fare. An adaptation of Irwin Shaw’s Rich Man, Poor Man followed in 1976, and then in 1977 Alex Haley’s Roots was adapted and became the highest-rated TV program up to that time. The 1980s saw a boom in miniseries productions, and many of the highest-profile shows were based on novels, including James Clavell’s Shogun (1980) and Noble House (1988), Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War (1983) and War and Remembrance (1988), and Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (1989). The miniseries has continued to draw from American fiction to the present, including adaptations of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1993), Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon (2001), and Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain (2008). There have also been at least seven miniseries based on the works of Stephen King. Furthermore, there have been a few cases of works of American fiction developed into continuing series. Some of these, like Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man (1957–9) and M A S H (1972–83, from the book by Richard Hooker), built on the success of movie versions. Perhaps the most successful TV series drawn from the printed page was Perry Mason, created by Erle Stanley Gardner in 1933, and previously brought to both film and radio before his 1957 TV debut. One of TV’s longest-running dramatic series, the show ended in 1966 and experienced several revivals into the 1980s. Equally long-lived was Little House on the Prairie (1974–83), based upon the series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Of course, these programs cannot be thought of as strict adaptations. Despite Gardner’s prolific output, for instance, television scheduling outran the number of printed Perry Mason stories, meaning that entirely new stories featuring Mason were written for the small screen. While television has drawn significantly from printed fiction for its material, there has been comparatively little reciprocation. Television has, indeed, provided material for a significant body of printed material, but the creation of novels based on TV programming has been in no way systematic. Few TV shows have been novelized, and most of those have had a particular niche appeal. Far and away the most successful TV-based fiction
has been that developed from fantasy and science fiction programming, with shows like Babylon 5, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Stargate all represented. Direct adaptations constitute part of this output, though most of these novels present new stories set in the universes created by the shows. The output based on the above shows, however, pales in comparison to the show which has inspired the greatest number of novels, adapted and spun off from the series. The various Star Trek programs have inspired hundreds of books, most of which present new stories featuring the popular characters from the original series (1966–9), The Next Generation (1987–94), Deep Space Nine (1993–9), Voyager (1995–2001), and Enterprise (2000–5). The earliest novel of this series was published in 1967, and after the cancellation of the original series, publication continued, tapping into the growing cult fan base for the original series, who, initially at least, had no other avenues by which to catch up with their favorite characters. Although many of these novels were written by relative unknowns, the line did benefit from several significant names in science fiction, including Greg Bear, James Blish, Joe Haldeman, Larry Niven, and Theodore Sturgeon. Often overlooked by cultural critics, and even by some Star Trek aficionados, the proliferation of this line truly makes it a publishing phenomenon. The other part of literature’s commercial relationship with TV, promotion, has taken many forms, from traditional advertising, to talk show interviews with authors, to TV book clubs, none more significant than that started by Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey’s book club was started in September 1996, but this was not her first effort to promote literature on her show. Most of the books using The Oprah Winfrey Show as a platform were self-help books, but Winfrey occasionally showcased the work of poets and novelists, and in July 1993 she hosted a week-long series spotlighting books and their authors, specifically Maya Angelou, Andrew Vachss, Elie Wiesel, M. Scott Peck, and Deepak Chopra. The official book club kicked off with Jacquelyn Mitchard’s debut novel, The Deep End of the Ocean (1996), and in the years that followed, the club also featured work by Ernest J. Gaines, Barbara Kingsolver, Wally Lamb, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Hoffman, and Cormac McCarthy, to name but a few. The book club episodes of her show
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typically featured a gathering of Winfrey, the author, and viewers lucky enough to be invited, based on their letters to the show regarding the book at hand. Though a highly orchestrated affair, the book discussions were presented as part of an elegant dinner party. Winfrey’s involvement with literary promotion has not been without controversy, however. In 2001, Jonathan Franzen, who was to appear on the show to discuss his book club-selected The Corrections, was disinvited when he publicly criticized the book club and some previous selections as “schmaltzy” and “one-dimensional.” The move arguably cost Franzen more, both financially and in terms of reputation, than it cost Winfrey, though the withdrawal of the invitation was seen by some as a retaliatory exercise of power on a comparatively less powerful literary voice. Winfrey also received criticism, which she again effectively diffused, when it was revealed that James Frey’s allegedly autobiographical A Million Little Pieces, featured prominently in 2005, was a dramatically fictionalized account. In 2002, Winfrey discontinued the book club, remarking that it had become too difficult to find books she wished to share with her audience. However, the club was resurrected the next year with a slightly different focus, initially presenting classics by Carson McCullers, William Faulkner, Pearl Buck, John Steinbeck, and others, then opening up to contemporary authors again in 2005. Throughout its history, the club greatly stimulated sales for the selected titles and inspired a number of similar, though less successful, televised book clubs, most notably on Good Morning America and The Today Show. Perhaps writer Kathleen Rooney appropriately subtitled her book Reading With Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America (2005). As television is still a relatively new medium, its relationship with printed fiction is still very much developing, and the complexity of that relationship still largely unexplored. However, this complexity calls the notion that TV is purely a detriment to literature into question. It seems clear that printed fiction will continue to thrive, but that commercially and aesthetically it has not come away from its contact with television unchanged. SEE ALSO: Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Modern Fiction in Hollywood (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Abadi-Nagy, Z. (1996). Serenity, Courage, Wisdom: A Talk With Kurt Vonnegut, 1989. In P. Reed & M. Leeds (eds.), The Vonnegut Chronicles: Interviews and Essays. Westport, CT: Greenwood, pp. 15–34. Barnouw, E. (1975). Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television. New York: Oxford University Press. Birkerts, S. (1994). The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. New York: Fawcett. De Lillo, D. (1985). White Noise. New York: Penguin. Docker, J. (1994). Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mander, J. (1978). Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. New York: Quill. Marc, D. (1995). Bonfire of the Humanities: Television, Subliteracy, and Long-Term Memory Loss. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Signet. Mullen, B. (1988). A Subtle Spectacle: Televisual Culture in the Short Stories of Raymond Carver. Critique, 39(2), 99–114. Murphet, J., & Rainford, L. (2003). Literature and Visual Technologies: Writing After Cinema. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. O’Donnell, J.J. (1998). Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Postman, N. (1986). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin. Powers, R. (1994). The Cruel Radiance: Notes of a Prosewriter in a Visual Age. Hanover, NH: Middlebury College Press. Rooney, K. (2005). Reading With Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. Rowe, J. C. (1994). Spin-Off: The Rhetoric of Television and Postmodern Memory. In J. Carlisle & D. R. Schwarz (eds.), Narrative and Culture. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Simmons, P. E. (1997). Deep Surfaces: Mass Culture & History in Postmodern American Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Vonnegut, K. (1990). Hocus Pocus. New York: Berkeley. Wallace, D. F. (1990). E. Unibus Pluram: Television and U. S. Fiction. In A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Boston: Little, Brown pp. 21–82. Williams, R. (1975). Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken.
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Winn, M. (1977). The Plug-In Drug: Television, Children, and the Family. New York: Penguin.
Thompson, Jim JOSH LUKIN
James Myers Thompson was an Oklahoman novelist, journalist, and screenwriter whose violent and pessimistic work achieved prominence in the noir fiction of the 1950s, sank into obscurity for 20 years thereafter, and was revived to great posthumous acclaim in the mid-1980s. Thompson’s novels reflect his lifelong socialism and alcoholism along with an interest in psychoanalysis and the contrast between Americans’ public personae and their authentic selves. His work is distinguished for its intellectual depth, its suspicion of gender norms, its bleak satirical vision, and its tendency toward experimental narrative. Thompson numbered Faulkner and Dos Passos among his influences as well as more traditional stylists such as Nelson Algren, Richard Wright, and Dorothy Canfield. Born on September 27, 1906, Thompson became a novelist in middle age, writing 30 books and co-authoring two screenplays (The Killing in 1956 and Paths of Glory in 1957) between 1940 and 1972, and killing himself on April 7, 1977. The two literary novels Thompson published before turning to crime fiction already incorporate his works’ major themes. Now and on Earth (1942) is a bleak naturalist tale which depicts the quotidian terrors in the life of an aircraft plant laborer who is ultimately red-hunted out of his job. The protagonist’s growing paranoia as he finds himself barred from the American dream of prosperity, the novel’s meticulous attention to its antihero’s work and his workplace, and the story’s Sophoclean family romance reappear throughout Thompson’s oeuvre. Heed the Thunder (1946) is a panorama of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Nebraska in which abuses on the political, economic, familial, and religious fronts corrupt human potential for productive community and ecological harmony. His first novels having been darkly ironic takes on the worlds of James T. Farrell, Willa Cather, and – in 1949’s Nothing More Than Murder– James M. Cain, Thompson found a less derivative
approach with his first paperback original, 1952’s The Killer Inside Me. This noir Western is told from the point of view of Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford, a sadistic psychopath who attempts to hide his homicidal career behind a slow-witted, folksy, generous fa¸cade. Like many of Thompson’s firstperson narrators, Ford is a wry, witty, and literate man with a clear view of society’s ills and a gift for rationalizing murder. The Killer Inside Me ruthlessly parodies pulp cliches, among them the heroic masculinity of the Western marshal, the homespun simplicity of the populist leader, and the sexual conservatism of the hard-boiled detective. Ford blames his homicidal nature on sexual proclivities that he traces to a childhood trauma, but the story raises the possibility that his murders are completely calculated and selfserving acts of vindictiveness, independent of his sexual outlawry. Versions of Lou Ford reappear in two subsequent Thompson novels, Wild Town (1957) and The Transgressors (1961). Thompson’s other major recurring character is Isidore Kossmeyer, the diminutive, histrionic, and thin-skinned Jewish lawyer who will readily sacrifice ethics in the name of a just outcome, committing bribery, bullying, or burglary to pursue his liberal goal of defending society’s victims. The five novels involving “Kossy” include two, The Criminal (1953a) and The Kill-Off (1957), in which Thompson effectively uses the Faulknerian tactic of presenting a different character’s narration in each chapter to make a novel in which the point-of-view character is an entire community. The Criminal centers upon a suburban rape-murder that is never solved, as each of the members of the community with the potential to address the mystery is revealed to be impotent, indifferent, or malicious. The violent deaths in The Kill-Off are all ultimately explained, but the identities of their perpetrators end up less important than the theme of how people can become what they pretend to be, destroyed by losing control of the personae they have strategically assumed. Other Thompson novels featuring experiments in structure and narrative include Savage Night (1953b) and A Hell of a Woman (1954). A Hell of a Woman is a story of a dim-witted salesman who makes sense of the murders he commits by reimagining himself as a pulp hero, and ends with a
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split first-person narrative in which two different catastrophic denouements compete in alternating lines of prose. Savage Night begins as a conventional gangster story and, as the naturalist form shatters in the face of the horrors of its hero’s life, ends surreally on a New England farm where the sickly, diminutive gangster narrator and his crippled assassin mistress become aphasic and resort to crawling about in a cellar as howling goats stand on their heads outside until she dismembers him with an axe. Thompson’s last major novel, Pop. 1280 (1964), is another tale of a killer sheriff, which in its confrontation of small-town politics, racism, and prudery exhibits more overt social engagement than did The Killer Inside Me. SEE ALSO: Faulkner, William (AF); Noir Fiction (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Cochran, D. (2000). America Noir: Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Forter, G. (2000). Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel. New York: New York University Press. Lukin, J. (1998). Aspects of the Western Hero in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. Paradoxa, 9, 29–41. McCann, S. (2000). Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. O’Brien, G. (1985). Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir, expanded edn. New York: Da Capo. Polito, R. (1995). Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson. New York: Vintage. Thompson, J. (1942). Now and on Earth. New York: Modern Age. Thompson, J. (1946). Heed the Thunder. New York: Greenberg. Thompson, J. (1949). Nothing More than Murder. New York: Harper. Thompson, J. (1952). The Killer Inside Me. New York: Lion. Thompson, J. (1953a). The Criminal. New York: Lion. Thompson, J. (1953b). Savage Night. New York: Lion. Thompson, J. (1954). A Hell of a Woman. New York: Lion. Thompson, J. (1955). After Dark, My Sweet. New York: Popular Library.
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Thompson, J. (1957). The Kill-Off. New York: Lion Library. Thompson, J. (1959). The Getaway. New York: Signet. Thompson, J. (1963). The Grifters. New York: Regency. Thompson, J. (1964). Pop. 1280. Greenwich, CT: Gold Medal.
Toomer, Jean JESSICA S. BALDANZI
Author Jean Toomer is most commonly associated with the Harlem Renaissance, the literary and cultural movement centered in Harlem, New York City, in the 1920s and 1930s. Toomer is seen by most critics past and present to have contributed, with his most famous work Cane (1988 [1923]), the first artistic representation of African American life to what Alain Locke dubbed the “New Negro” movement. However, Toomer himself saw his heritage as a uniquely American mix of races and ethnicities, and resisted his association with the movement, deeming its racial categorizations oversimplified and restrictive to the potential of the human race as a whole. While some of the biographical details of Toomer’s life remain disputed, scholars have reached accord on some basic milestones. Born in Washington, DC in 1894, Nathan Eugene Toomer’s father left only months after his birth. Toomer spent most of his early life in Washington, although his mother moved him to Brooklyn, then New Rochelle, New York, after she remarried in 1907. After her death in 1909, Toomer returned to Washington to live with his maternal grandparents. His grandfather, P. B. S. Pinchback, was an imposing public figure who had built his career in the Reconstruction-era government of Louisiana, and Toomer spent much of his early life circling in Pinchback’s stern orbit, returning to live with his grandparents during breaks in his erratic schooling. Although Toomer never finished a formal degree, he spent time at many colleges, studying agriculture in both Madison, Wisconsin and Massachusetts, then physical education in Chicago. Toomer decided to devote himself to the literary life in 1919, after dropping out of a pre-law program at City College of New York. He took on
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a number of odd jobs from Milwaukee to New Jersey in his attempts to support himself as a writer, but the most defining moment of his literary career was his three-month trip to Sparta, Georgia in 1921 to work as a substitute principal at a vocational school for black students. Despite Toomer’s ambivalence about his black heritage at this stage – he listed himself, for example, as “French Cosmopolitan” on his City College application (O’Daniel 42) – this brief immersion in a rural black community in the South provided him with new material and creative energy. He later made an even briefer trip to South Carolina with the writer Waldo Frank. These short visits became the inspiration for Cane, which is still hailed as Toomer’s greatest work. The complicated form of Cane, a mix of poetry, short fiction, and drama, echoes Toomer’s lifelong attempts to resist easy categorizations of his own identity. Despite the fact that Toomer himself called the work a “swan song” upon the eve of its publication (1988 [1923], 156), and chastised his publisher for the company’s attempts to “feature Negro” in the advertising for the book (1988 [1923], 157), most Harlem Renaissance critics lavished praise upon the work, deeming Toomer “the very first artist of the race” (Locke 44). The first and third sections of the three-part Cane take place in the rural South, while the book’s middle section is explicitly urban, set in Washington, DC and Chicago. Nevertheless, the tone of the work remains predominantly rural, as established by “Karintha,” the brief, impressionistic opening story in which the eponymous character delivers a stillborn infant in the woods. “Karintha” is followed by two poems, then another short story, “Becky”; this alternating structure continues for the rest of section 1. “Becky,” about a white woman with two black sons, represents another emotionally detached woman whose reproductive efforts are fraught or failed, as are those of “Carma,” “Fern,” and “Esther,” the main characters in the short stories that follow. The poems that Toomer intersperses between these stories deploy lyrical images of nature, yet as the section progresses, even the sleepy and soothing pastoral lullabies hover over a metaphorical undercurrent of violent racial tensions. Section 1 ends with a disturbingly explicit description of a lynching – the outcome of a cross-
racial love triangle – at the end of the short story “Blood-Burning Moon.” Whereas the first section of Cane ends with Southern rural tensions between black and white, the second section, set mostly in Washington, DC, explores racial hierarchies within urban African American society. Toomer contrasts Washington’s “mulatto aristocracy” – particularly in the short story “Box Seat” – with the city’s less privileged blacks, as represented by “chorus girls” in stories such as “Theater,” and prostitutes like the protagonist of “Avey.” The urban setting at times cynically recasts the first section’s rural nostalgia. At the end of the short sketch “Rhobert,” for example, the spiritual “Deep River,” invoked as a funereal chant, is clearly superficial and out of place in this setting. Yet the interspersed poems tell another story, employing rural imagery more sincerely and convincingly to represent the Southern heritage of many of Washington’s black urbanites. The final story of section 2, “Bona and Paul,” moves to Chicago and returns to the theme of a cross-racial relationship, this time between two mutually attracted college students, a white Southern woman and a lightskinned man who is attempting to negotiate his identity amidst social pressure to label himself black. Cane’s third section consists of the single piece “Kabnis,” which is usually categorized by scholars as a play, although a number of its extended, lyrical scene descriptions sound more like fictional narration. This final section of Cane represents a return to the South, but features two central characters, Kabnis and Lewis, who hail from Northern cities, thus melding the settings of the first two sections. Many critics see “Kabnis” as the most heavy-handed section of Cane. Yet the play’s direct treatment of the continuing trauma of white oppression and violence in the rural South – particularly its references to a gruesome historically-documented lynching of a pregnant woman and her near-term fetus – provides Cane with a powerful conclusion that maintains the poetic, descriptive vision of the work as a whole. After the critical success of Cane, Toomer published essays, poems, and occasional short fiction sporadically, and with little critical attention. Many biographers attribute this decline in literary output to his move into religious and philosophical circles. Toomer first became a
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follower of the Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff. It was within Gurdjieffian circles that he met both of his wives: author Margery Latimer, who died in childbirth in 1932, then Marjorie Content, whom he married in 1934 and moved with to a Pennsylvania farm. In 1940, Toomer and his wife joined Pennsylvania Quaker society, whose Friends Intelligencer published his final essays through 1950. Toomer’s only other major publications after Cane were Essentials (1991 [1931]), a privately published book of aphorisms, and Toomer’s last literary work, the long poem “The Blue Meridian,” which was published in The New Caravan in 1936. Despite dramatic, and often disappointing, changes in his writing style after Cane, Toomer’s writing – whether his topic is race, ethnicity, nationality, or the spiritual development of the individual as part of the human race – is united by his ceaseless exploration of individual and collective identity. Despite its initial critical acclaim, Cane fell out of print for 40 years. Its first reprinting in 1967, the year of Toomer’s death, was largely spurred by the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s. Although Toomer likely would have resisted his resurrection at the hands of another cultural movement defined by a circumscribed racial heritage, today’s readers are fortunate for Cane’s recovery. Toomer’s iconoclastic creative voice has helped maintain his status among scholars as a subject of both adulation and continuing debate. The struggles of Toomer to define himself, and to represent himself both in his writing and as a public figure, continue to resonate powerfully in a twenty-first-century North American society still grappling with its own questions of race, heritage, and identity. SEE ALSO: The Avant Garde Novel (AF); The City in Fiction (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Frank, Waldo (AF); The Harlem Renaissance (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Baker, H. (1987). Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Baker, H. (1974). Singers of Daybreak: Studies in Black American Literature. Washington, DC: Howard University Press.
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Bone, R. A. (ed.) (1965). The Negro Novel in America. New Haven: Yale University Press. Fabre, G., & Feith, M. (eds.) (2001). Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Favor, J. M. (1999). Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ford, K. J. (2005). Split-Gut Song: Jean Toomer and the Poetics of Modernity. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Gates, H. L., Jr. (1989). Figures in Black and White: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self. New York: Oxford University Press. Hutchinson, G. (1995). The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Jones, R. B. (1993). Jean Toomer and the Prison-House of Thought: A Phenomenology of the Spirit. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Kerman, C. E., & Eldridge, R. (1987). The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Larson, C. R. (1993). Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Locke, A. (ed.) (1992). The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance [1925]. New York: Atheneum. McKay, N. Y. (1984). Jean Toomer: Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work, 1894–1936. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. O’Daniel, T. B. (ed.) (1988). Jean Toomer: A Critical Evaluation. Washington, DC: Howard University Press. Scruggs, C., & VanDemarr, L. (1998). Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Toomer, J. (1980). The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer (ed. D. T. Turner). Washington, DC: Howard University Press. Toomer, J. (1988). Cane [1923] (ed. D. T. Turner). New York: Norton. Toomer, J. (1988). The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer (ed. R. B. Jones & M. T. Latimer). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Toomer, J. (1991). Essentials [1931] (ed. R. P. Byrd). Athens: University of Georgia Press. Toomer, J. (1993). A Jean Toomer Reader: Selected Unpublished Writings (ed. F. L. Rusch). New York: Oxford University Press. Toomer, J. (1996). Jean Toomer: Selected Essays and Literary Criticism (ed. R. B. Jones). Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
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Toomer, J. (2003). The Uncollected Works of American Author Jean Toomer, 1894–1967 (ed. J. C. Griffin). Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen. Toomer, J. (2006). The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919–1924 (ed. M. Whalan). Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Wintz, C. D. (ed.) (1996). The Emergence of the Harlem Renaissance: The Harlem Renaissance 1920–1940, vol. 1. New York: Garland. Woodson, J. (1999). To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Traven, B SCOTT HENKEL
B. Traven is the most common nom de plume for the author who also used the names Ret Marut, Hal Croves, and Traven Torsvan, among others. Traven’s works include The Death Ship (1926), which is rumored to be the book Albert Einstein would have taken to a desert island; the six Jungle Novels (1931–40); and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1927), later adapted into John Huston’s 1948 film starring Humphrey Bogart. Traven’s line, delivered by a Mexican rebel to Bogart’s character, Dobbs, is one of the most famous in American film: “Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges!” Like his rebel character, Traven’s ideas place him in a dissenting literary tradition, and his secrecy makes him an archetype of the reclusive, wandering American author. Scholars assume that Traven was born in Chicago in 1890, immigrated to Germany and participated in the 1918–9 Bavarian revolution, and, after the Bavarian republic was suppressed, escaped from a death sentence for treason. Traven then lived in Mexico until his death in 1969. Traven’s legendary secrecy, however, means that no detail of his biography is beyond debate. As the editor of the German journal Der Ziegelbrenner (The Brick Burner – one who makes material to build a new world), he delivered public readings from behind a darkened lectern. Traven misled journalists and aspiring biographers, and argued that his writing should get attention, not his biography.
Traven wrote 15 novels, many short stories, and one work of nonfiction about Chiapas, Mexico, Land des Fr€ulings (Land of Springtime) (1928). Traven’s first editions appeared in German and have been translated into more than 30 languages. Traven’s content is also international: his characters are American drifters, European workers, and Mexican campesinos. Because so many tattered copies of Traven’s works can be found in Mexico, Rudolfo Anaya writes that “B. Traven is alive and well in Cuernavaca.” German, Mexican, and American scholars all claim Traven for their national literatures. The Death Ship and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre led to Traven’s international popularity and display his recurring themes: a defense of the dispossessed and downtrodden; an antiauthoritarian framework that excoriates the concentrated power of dictators, employers, and bureaucracies; and an anarchist’s hostility to the use of that power. Traven’s writing is intensely political and prone to philosophical digression. Gerard Gales is the main character in The Death Ship; The Cotton Pickers (1926), originally published as Der Wobbly; and The Bridge in the Jungle (1929). As Der Wobbly suggests, Gales shares much in common with the members of the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical labor union whose members were nicknamed “Wobblies.” Gales is not a tubthumper, but, especially in The Cotton Pickers, he leaves a trail of rebellion behind him. Gales is also a testament to the value that Traven places upon the lowest of the low: whether Gales works the worst job aboard ship, under the sun as a picker in the cotton fields, or as a cattle driver negotiating with bandits, Traven insists on the dignity such work deserves. In The Death Ship, Gales is a sailor whose ship has left port without him, but with his papers on board. Without a sailor’s card or a passport, Gales cannot convince the authorities of his personhood, and he is deported by a succession of state bureaucracies. The nation states through which Gales and his fellow workers wander refuse to recognize them without papers, and they must work in deplorable conditions on ships that are to be scuttled for the insurance money. The Jungle Novels – Government, The Carreta, March to the Monterıa, Trozas, The Rebellion of
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the Hanged, and The General from the Jungle – represent Traven’s mature fiction, and they are his strongest case for the right of the wretched of the Earth to rebel. Like Diego Rivera’s murals, these novels show revolt writ large. Traven displays the Mexican Revolution of 1910–17 as an arc of severe repression, cathartic revolt, and ambivalent violence. The campesinos are tricked into debt slavery and are coerced to repay their debts by working in the mahogany lumber camps in Chiapas. This violence compels the campesinos to organize themselves into a rebel army powerful enough to defeat the federal army and the Rurales, the special forces who are trained to repress domestic uprisings and labor strikes. SEE ALSO: Anaya, Rudolfo (AF); Expatriate Fiction (AF); Modern Fiction in Hollywood (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF)
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Traven, B. (1994). The Bridge in the Jungle [1929]. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. Traven, B. (1994). The Carreta [1931]. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. Traven, B. (1994). March to the Monterıa [1933]. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. Traven, B. (1994a). The Rebellion of the Hanged [1936]. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. Traven, B. (1994b). Trozas [1936]. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. Traven, B. (1995). The Cotton Pickers [1926]. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. Traven, B. (1995). General from the Jungle [1940]. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. Traverton, E., (1999). B. Traven: A Bibliography. London: Scarecrow. Zogbaum, H. (1992). B. Traven: A Vision of Mexico. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources.
Tyler, Anne SUSAN ELIZABETH SWEENEY
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Anaya, R. (2006). B. Traven Is Alive and Well in Cuernavaca. In C. Garcıa (ed.), Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature. New York: Vintage. Guthke, K. (1991). B. Traven: The Life Behind the Legends. Chicago: Lawrence Hill. McAleer, S. (2004). The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Environmental Virtue Ethics. Film and Philosophy, 8, 30–41. Mezo, R. (1993). A Study of B. Traven’s Fiction: The Journey to Solipaz. San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press. Pateman, R. (2005). The Man Nobody Knows: The Life and Legacy of B. Traven. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Payne, K. (1991). The Rebellion of the Hanged: B. Traven’s Anti-Fascist Novel of the Mexican Revolution. International Fiction Review, 18(2), 96–107. Stone, J. (1977). The Mystery of B. Traven. Los Altos, CA: Kaufmann. Traven, B. (1938). Land des Fr€ulings [1928]. Z€ urich: B€ uchergilde Guttenberg. Traven, B. (1984). The Treasure of the Sierra Madre [1927]. New York: Hill and Wang. Traven, B. (1991). The Death Ship [1926]. Chicago: Lawrence Hill. Traven, B. (1993). Government [1931]. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.
Anne Tyler’s keen observation, acute sense of comedy and tragedy, and distinctive voice transcend such categories as “Southern literature” or “domestic fiction.” With increasing subtlety, her 17 novels explore how individuals develop relationships with others. Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on October 25, 1941 and raised on Quaker communes in the South and Midwest. Her favorite book as a child was Virginia Lee Burton’s The Little House, whose theme of remaining oneself – despite changes in time and place – resonates throughout Tyler’s fiction. Eventually her family settled in North Carolina, where she entered Duke University at 16. Tyler majored in Russian, studied writing with Reynolds Price, and, after graduate study at Columbia, worked briefly as a Russian bibliographer. Her first novels, If Morning Ever Comes (1964) and The Tin Can Tree (1965), were barely noticed. In 1967, Tyler and her husband – Iranian novelist and psychiatrist Taghi Modaressi – moved to Baltimore, the setting of all her subsequent fiction. Tyler’s next books depict women who quietly rebel by affiliating themselves with more exotic individuals – a rock musician in A SlippingDown Life (1970), and an entire family in The Clock Winder (1972). Celestial Navigation (1975), which portrays a reclusive visual artist, drew
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significant praise from critics for the first time. Searching for Caleb (1976) and Earthly Possessions (1977) both feature adults who run away: a greatuncle who disappeared 60 years earlier, and a woman who leaves her husband, and is taken hostage and befriends her abductors. Morgan’s Passing (1980) offers a similar but more nuanced plot: Morgan Gower keeps escaping from humdrum domesticity, only to end up in the same situation once more. After Morgan’s Passing, which garnered both nominations and awards, Tyler’s next three books revealed new levels of psychological insight, irony, and craft. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), her darkest novel, is considered by many – including Tyler – to be her best. Its thematic and narrative structure recalls William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, although the setting and plot differ. Spanning 60 years and various perspectives, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant shows how Pearl Tull and her three children attain moments of individual happiness despite a history of abandonment, abuse, rivalry, and betrayal. After Pearl dies, her husband, who had walked out on them decades earlier, even marvels that his children seem like a real family. The Accidental Tourist (1985) blends tragedy and comedy to recount how, after his son dies and his wife leaves him, Macon Leary learns to resist his family’s tendency to hide from the world. As the author of guidebooks for reluctant travelers – a business juxtaposing closeness and separation, like the restaurant where Ezra Tull offers comfort food to homesick diners – Macon benefited from the Learys’ suspicion of anything unfamiliar. Now he finds himself drawn to cheerfully adventurous Muriel in a relationship between opposites that Tyler’s fiction often dissects. Breathing Lessons (1988) depicts another mismatched pair: impulsive, bubbly, hopeful Maggie Moran, who always meddles in other people’s lives, and her sardonic husband, Ira. This time, however, in a brilliant tour de force, Tyler captures all the facets of their dynamic complementarity during a long road trip on a single day. Tyler’s next novel, Saint Maybe (1991), is bleaker: Ian Bedloe, whose jealousy and resentment led to his brother’s death, spends the rest of his life making amends. Ladder of Years (1995) features another runaway, a middle-aged woman who abandons her family to attempt a new exis-
tence under a different name. A Patchwork Planet (1998) – the only book Tyler recounts in the first person – is narrated by a young man who, like Ian in Saint Maybe, seeks atonement for his overwhelming sense of guilt and failure. Tyler’s husband died in 1997, and her subsequent novels have explored the aftermath of a long marriage. In Back When We Were Grownups (2001), a widowed grandmother tries out the life she might have had if she never met her husband; in The Amateur Marriage (2004), a mismatched couple divorce after 30 years. Digging to America (2006) recasts Tyler’s recurring issues of identity, difference, and belonging in terms of immigration and adoption. It examines another widowed character – an Iranian grandmother who feels like an outsider in America – and traces the complex interconnections between two families who adopt children from Korea. Tyler belongs to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and has received many honors, including the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Morgan’s Passing (1980), the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Accidental Tourist (1985), and the Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons (1989). Digging to America was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. After an enormously successful 1988 film based on The Accidental Tourist, other novels were adapted for cinema or television. Meanwhile, Tyler still lives in Baltimore, declining book tours and granting few interviews, but writing steadily. SEE ALSO: Faulkner, William (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bail, P. (1998). Anne Tyler: A Critical Companion. New York: Greenwood. Petry, A. H. (ed.) (1992). Critical Essays on Anne Tyler. New York: Macmillan. Salwak, D. (ed.) (1994). Anne Tyler as Novelist. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Stephens, R. C. (ed.) (1990). The Fiction of Anne Tyler. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Tyler, A. (1964). If Morning Ever Comes. New York: Knopf. Tyler, A. (1965). The Tin Can Tree. New York: Knopf. Tyler, A. (1970). A Slipping-Down Life. New York: Knopf.
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Tyler, A. (1972). The Clock Winder. New York: Knopf. Tyler, A. (1974). Celestial Navigation. New York: Knopf. Tyler, A. (1976). Searching for Caleb. New York: Knopf. Tyler, A. (1977). Earthly Possessions. New York: Knopf. Tyler, A. (1980). Morgan’s Passing. New York: Knopf. Tyler, A. (1982). Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. New York: Knopf. Tyler, A. (1985). The Accidental Tourist. New York: Knopf. Tyler, A. (1988). Breathing Lessons. New York: Knopf. Tyler, A. (1991). Saint Maybe. New York: Knopf.
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Tyler, A. (1995). Ladder of Years. New York: Knopf. Tyler, A. (1998). A Patchwork Planet. New York: Knopf. Tyler, A. (2001). Back When We Were Grownups. New York: Knopf. Tyler, A. (2004). The Amateur Marriage. New York: Knopf. Tyler, A. (2006). Digging to America. New York: Knopf. Tyler, A. (2010). Noah’s Compass. New York: Knopf. Voelker, J. C. (1989). Art and the Accidental in Anne Tyler. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
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U Updike, John JONATHAN L. PRICE
John Updike was a tireless novelist, a transcriber of the individual consciousness in contemporary culture as well as history. His protagonists constantly confront in dramatic and explicit ways the topology and emotions of adulterous sexuality – but at the same time are drawn to a dialectical religiosity influenced by the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and the Protestant theologian Karl Barth. Writing until his death at the age of 76, Updike was a former New Yorker staffer who began his literary career with a short story in the early 1950s and continued to produce works in nearly all genres, though focusing on fiction. His oeuvre includes more than 20 novels, 12 collections of short stories, six books of poetry, a memoir, anthologies of prose essays, and a book on golf. Updike was born March 18, 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania, where he lived most of his early life before attending Harvard University, graduating summa cum laude in 1954, and then attending for a year the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford. He served at the New Yorker from 1955 to 1957, and lived after that in Massachusetts. In 1953 he married Mary Pennington, and they had four children. After his divorce in 1977, he married Martha Bernhard, acquiring three stepchildren. He also had three grandchildren. Updike won the Pulitzer Prize twice as well as the National Book Award, and the Howells Medal for the best American novel in the last five years.
Updike’s most remarkable creation is the tetralogy of Rabbit novels, chronicling the evolution of a middle-American male, the near-everyman Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom: Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990). In an interview early in his career Updike acknowledged his subject as “the American small town middle class. I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules” (Howard 1966). Rabbit is such a middle figure, living in a small Pennsylvania town, but eventually also part of the year in Florida; though he begins as a member of the lower middle class, selling a vege-peeler, then becomes a printer, he eventually emerges in the upper middle class, an entrepreneur Toyota dealership owner; for three of the novels, he is middle-aged. His experiences and antenna seem to echo a middle register of the impressions of historical events and cultural patterns from 1959 to 1989, such as moon landings and airplane crashes, pop songs and cocaine abuse. These four novels and a coda (Rabbit Remembered, 2000b), appearing about once a decade, trace the young adulthood and gradual aging of the protagonist. The novels also provide a breathtaking and probing portrait of American culture and the interior experience of it over 30 years and could be seen as Updike’s version of Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy. But whereas Dos Passos chose breadth, fragmentation, and vignettes – portraying some 16 representative fictional Americans between the turn of the century and the Great Depression– Updike chooses depth via the consciousness of a single individual.
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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UPDIKE, JOHN
Rabbit Angstrom is at once the cuddly, animallike, incurably sexual rabbit, yet somehow representative of a broad spectrum of experiences and also a minute victim of vast social forces, an angstrom unit (one-hundred millionth of a centimeter) used in scientific measurement. Though he begins as a social rebel testing moral limits in small-town America by leaving his wife and young child to live with a quasi-prostitute, he is also an icon of the failed American dream, a former high school basketball star who searches for a better life than the one he seems to have found. In Rabbit, Run he leaves his wife in Pennsylvania and drives toward an imagined Florida pastoral, but ironically circles home. This first self-defeating circle marks the broad pattern of the novel and of the novels to come. Rabbit is a runner, a has-been athlete, constantly in motion, searching nostalgically for something better. By Rabbit at Rest, he is in his mid-fifties, and seems successful and admired enough to portray Uncle Sam in the July 4th parade. Underneath, however, he is the same Rabbit, an ambiguous figure still searching emotionally and sexually. Though he appears superficially conventional, he still assaults social-sexual norms, spending an incestuous night with his daughter-in-law and escaping again, this time to his Florida condo. Eventually Rabbit, like America, is vulnerable and moribund, threatened by a poisonous indolence: he overeats, and his son has covertly become a cocaine addict and embezzler. Updike’s fictional method owes a great deal to modernist art, which he frequently acknowledges in many ways – by echoes in character names, by employment of the stream-of-consciousness technique made famous by James Joyce in Ulysses, and by allusion to Joyce and T. S. Eliot. The technique is evident in works as different as Couples (1968) and Bech: A Book (1970). For all his experimentation in style and technique and his familiarity with the great modernists as well as many of his contemporaries, Updike is primarily a realist, who writes about believable characters in well-known milieux living recognizable lives in chronological order. Although minutely attuned to social and artistic trends and aware of postmodernism in criticism and fiction, Updike is essentially a traditionalist. For example, in Memories of the Ford Administration (1992), there is an epigraph from Derrida – the noted deconstructionist – but Updike’s protagonist, an academic
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historian, is antagonistic to deconstructionist theories that view history as merely texts. Updike’s wide-ranging mind has focused on a variety of topics that have worked their way into his novels, including – among others – Jewish writers, terrorists, dystopian communards, religious fanatics, golfers, and staffers in presidential administrations. He has a keen, observant eye for the daily life of American cities and towns as it changes from moment to moment due to the minutiae of culture and technology. Updike’s career is such that many of his works are reinvestigations of previous material. Obviously one of the recurrent figures is Rabbit, while another of a very different type is the protagonist of Updike’s Bech series. In Bech: A Book the character is a Jewish American novelist viewed in mid-life, long past his early success with two novels, Travel Light and Brother Pig. He is a comic figure in a novel verging on parody and satire employed to examine the daily experience of the writer’s life during a prolonged stage of decay and writer’s block. Bech is an alter ego, an artist manque who suffers exaggerated wounds that perhaps every author, including Updike, has feared. His tentative, often imagined affairs serve often as the backdrop for the commentary and analysis of personal frustration and ironic failure. The treatment also serves as a critique of superficial media reception and audience perception of a writer, as seen in his affair with an attractive young British woman that turns out to be merely a device for her to advance her career by writing an expose-diary entry about him in a tabloid. In the final sketch, Bech “enters heaven” by being recognized at a ceremony in uptown Manhattan honoring significant others. These others, revealed through analysis and dialogue, are rather trivial human beings. And, as Bech observes after his induction into the heavenly host, “Now what?” The sketches are ironically framed – with a foreword containing a letter from Bech to Updike himself offering his blessing and commenting on the indignities America offers to its writers, and the multiple appendices purporting to be Bech’s diary, a postcard, and a bibliography with essays by a number of the academy’s wellknown literary critics such as Alfred Kazin and George Steiner. In Bech Is Back (1982) the Jewish writer reembarks on foreign travels only to meet further
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cultural misunderstandings, and in the collection’s final story, “White on White,” experiences familiar inadequacy in comparing himself to the presumed artistic achievements of a pantheon similar to that in his induction into a heavenly group in the first volume. In the last volume in the series, Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel (1998), the author finally receives the Nobel Prize, only to be troubled by gradual recognition that it is the result of political maneuver and compromise. He remains beset by existential panic in a Czech episode echoing Kafka, and throughout by the issues of infidelity and multiple sexual attractions that have led him romantically back and forth between two sisters. Updike even reinvestigates the seemingly fixed characters created by other writers, re-examining classic works by both Shakespeare and Hawthorne. In Gertrude and Claudius (2000a), Updike is sympathetic to Hamlet’s mother and stepfather and portrays Hamlet himself as not only moody but also antagonistic to his own father. Updike emphasizes this process of artistic reworking by organizing his narrative around three different source materials for the Hamlet legend. As the reader moves through the novel’s three parts, Hamlet’s mother changes from the adolescent Gerutha on the verge of marriage – from the historian Saxo Grammaticus – to the adulterous Geruthe of Histoires tragiques, to Shakespeare’s Gertrude in the days before Shakespeare’s play is set. Hamlet’s father, Hamlet Sr. (the ghost in Shakespeare), is a significantly more fleshed-out character in Updike’s novel, at first Horwendil, a conquering hero ominously nicknamed by his brother Feng the “Hammer,” more sexually aggressive and less sympathetic than Shakespeare’s ghostly figure, far more commanding, but also cold and officious. Feng, a promiscuous adventurer and an exciting alternative for an often neglected Geruthe, is the figure who becomes Claudius. These characters are set in a medieval Denmark with an archaic and formal English, but observed in scenes and interior monologues that disclose contemporary needs and attitudes. Updike has similarly reinvented the classic Scarlet Letter in a trilogy: Month of Sundays (1975), Roger’s Version (1986), and S. (1988). Updike comically reconfigures the three primary characters, Dimmesdale, Roger (Chillingworth),
and S., a relative of Hester. The three exist in a modern world of universities, motels, computers, and ashrams that questions the minister’s religious seriousness amid an interest in sexual dalliance, that reworks the scientist prying into the lives of others, and that offers a contemporary feminist who is a rebel and escapist. One of Updike’s primary concerns is the potential for religious transformation as articulated by a serious Christian theology. He writes in a literary era often characterized by critiques of religious orthodoxy that find belief in God absurd, as one can see in Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) and DeLillo’s White Noise (1985). While Heller and DeLillo seem to endorse a comic atheism, many of Updike’s characters are searching for or modeling a path to God. While Rabbit regularly assaults the moral values and mores of his communities, he also seeks for “something that wants me to find it.” Similarly, Piet Hanema in Couples (1968), despite his adulteries, is the only adult member of his family found regularly praying – by himself – in a Catholic church. Updike died of lung cancer on January 27, 2009. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); DeLillo, Don (AF); Heller, Joseph (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bloom, H. (ed.) (1987). John Updike: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House. Boswell, M. (2001). John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Howard, J. (1966). Can a Nice Novelist Finish First? Life, 74 (Nov. 4). Hunt, G. (1980). John Updike and the Three Great Things: Sex, Religion, and Art. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Pritchard, W. H. (2000). Updike: Man of Letters. South Royalton, VT: Steerforth. Ristoff, D. I. (1998). John Updike’s “Rabbit at Rest”: Appropriating History. New York: Peter Lang. Schiff, J. A. (1998). John Updike Revisited. New York: Twayne. Updike, J. (1959). The Poorhouse Fair. New York: Knopf. Updike, J. (1960). Rabbit, Run. New York: Knopf.
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UTOPIAN AND DYSTOPIAN FICTION
Updike, J. (1963). The Centaur. New York: Knopf. Updike, J. (1968). Couples. New York: Knopf. Updike, J. (1970). Bech: A Book. New York: Knopf. Updike, J. (1971). Rabbit Redux. New York: Knopf. Updike, J. (1975). Month of Sundays. New York: Knopf. Updike, J. (1981). Rabbit Is Rich. New York: Knopf. Updike, J. (1982). Bech Is Back. New York: Knopf. Updike, J. (1984). The Witches of Eastwick. New York: Knopf. Updike, J. (1986). Roger’s Version. New York: Knopf. Updike, J. (1988). S. New York: Knopf. Updike, J. (1989). Self-Consciousness. New York: Knopf. Updike, J. (1990). Rabbit at Rest. New York: Knopf. Updike, J. (1992). Memories of the Ford Administration. New York: Knopf. Updike, J. (1996). Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf. New York: Knopf. Updike, J. (1998). Bech at Bay. New York: Knopf. Updike, J. (1999). More Matter. New York: Knopf. Updike, J. (2000a). Gertrude and Claudius. New York: Knopf. Updike, J. (2000b). Rabbit Remembered. New York: Knopf. Updike, J. (2006). Terrorist. New York: Knopf.
Utopian and Dystopian Fiction MARK S. FERRARA
Although the genre of utopian literature in the West begins with Plato’s The Republic (c.375– 70 BC), fictional depictions of better places have grown rapidly since the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). American literary utopias of the twentieth century respond to modernity in surprising ways by taking a diversity of forms (including one populated exclusively by women who reproduce asexually and another that employs behavioral engineering to improve social cohesion). From the nineteenth century onward, American literary depictions of dystopian worlds reflect a century of war and increasing technological and governmental intrusions into social life. Thomas More coined the term “utopia” (meaning “no place” in Greek), although his intentional homophonic pun on “eutopia,” (“good place”) deliberately provides a double meaning. Because contemporary usage of the
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term “utopian” has come to connote an impractical scheme of social regeneration, as something “ideal” or “chimerical,” it has given rise to the literary “dystopia,” meaning a depiction of a “bad place.” Although an ultimate definition of utopia has eluded scholars, a literary text may be said to be utopian when the work portrays a society – earthly or otherworldly – that springs from a radical dissatisfaction with the imperfections of the world, and concomitantly proclaims not the perfection but amelioration of society. Literary utopias emphasize the dialectical tension between the ideal order and status quo. Dystopian (or anti-utopian) fiction relies on a similar opposition between the status quo and a darker social vision, though in this case to reinforce the notion that the current age is itself the best of all possible worlds and to advocate the abandonment of the utopian project as unrealistic. Although the great number and variety of utopian and dystopian literary texts defy easy categorization, both imply reference back to the world of concrete acts and familiar experience that fantasy excludes. Generally speaking, in the nineteenth century the United States witnessed an increase in literary utopianism (as well as intentional or experimental communities such as Oneida in New York and Amana in Iowa) informed by a diversity of communal and socialist principles. The first full American utopia, Equality: or, A History of Lithconia (1802), was published in the Philadelphia weekly the Temple of Reason. In this society, all land is held in common, there is no money, and women have full rights. Furthermore, an ambivalence toward both city and country life results in a preference for an even geographical population distribution with all amenities available locally. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) was one of the most influential utopian texts from American writers who came later. In it the protagonist, Julian West, falls asleep in 1887 and reawakens in the year 2000 to a radically transformed Boston, Massachusetts. Crime, war, class struggle, competition, and other social ills have been eliminated, and the state now guarantees the nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance of every citizen from cradle to grave. Bellamy, drawing heavily from the late-nineteenthcentury nationalist movement in the United States, portrays the beneficial effects of the
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centralization of communication, production, and distribution. In addition to this emphasis on communal living and equitable distribution of resources, itself a critique of the perceived shortcomings of industrialization (such as exploitation of labor and increasing environmental destruction), American utopianists in the twentieth century explored the religious, psychological, scientific, and even sexual dimensions of social reform in their depictions of fictional societies. For instance, in Walter Henry’s Equitania: or, The Land of Equity (1914), four parties consisting of Buddhists, Christians, Jews, and Muslims all land simultaneously on an island. In light of the circumstances, they all agree that religion is a personal matter that should be separated from the joint government they formed. Since they deem abiding happiness the aim of existence, selfishness, which is wholly incompatible with it, must be eliminated and moral virtue cultivated so that one’s desires might be satisfied without hurting others. In this religious utopia, morality is the sum of all individual duties owed to the community and the natural world. Active in the American suffrage movement, Charlotte Perkins Gilman advocated that women work outside of the home as a way to achieve economic independence and freedom from the confines of traditional maternal social roles. In Herland (1915), and to a lesser extent in its sequel With Her in Ourland (1916), Gilman depicts a bucolic world populated by sturdy and highly intelligent women who procreate through virgin-birthing (parthenogenesis) and practice a one-child policy so as not to exhaust their limited natural resources. As in many works of utopian fiction, such as Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), the Herland utopian community is geographically isolated and unknown to the outside world until intrepid adventurers, in this case three men, stumble upon it. Discovery, of course, threatens the very existence of these utopian societies (even merely encountering inhabitants from the outside world is considered potentially contaminating). This is all the more true of the three men who find Herland for they are a sexual, as well as social, threat to the Herland communal way of life and religious worship of the chthonian mother goddess (and its accompanying ethic of love and service).
In Walden Two (1948), B. F. Skinner, a Harvard psychologist, describes a behaviorally engineered utopia that actually inspired a number of communal societies, including Twin Oaks in Virginia and East Wind in Missouri. The fictional Walden Two community contains 1,000 people living together with the stated goals of happiness and an active drive toward the future. T. E. Frazier, the fictional founder of Walden Two, declares that his community will only be satisfied with cultivating a most alert and active group intelligence. To achieve this goal, behavioral engineering is employed to affect a change in human nature through the use of positive reinforcement. This society is governed by a board of planners, who along with managers, workers, and scientists make up the four classes of the Walden Two social structure. Members endeavor to lower consumption and thereby raise the living standard for everyone, and by working together and practicing a code of behavior based on the principles of liberty, equality, and brotherhood, they strive to increase leisure time by distributing social responsibility. By contrast, in Island (1962) Aldous Huxley, who lived in the United States from 1937 until his death in 1963, posits the possibility of a mental utopia, or eupsychia. Pala is a remote paradisal island in isolation from, and in juxtaposition to, the decidedly dystopian outside world characterized by Rendang and ruled by a colonel given to the pleasures of vanity and bullying. Huxley draws from Eastern traditions in formulating the Palanese religion, particularly the Mahayana Buddhism that he embraced in the late 1930s. Palanese Buddhism advocates the development of concentration (dhyana) in order to experience the fundamental unity of subject and object (resulting in prajna, or wisdom). On this unified field of perception, one meets the stranger as “the other half of your own self, and the same as your notself.” This non-dualistic principle informs every aspect of Palanese religion. To speed young inhabitants along in this direct experience of the divine, they ingest moksha medicine once a year to evoke mystical experiences. In this light, the ending of the novel, in which Rendang invades Pala, reinforces the notion that utopia for Huxley is an internal and completely subjective state carried within the enlightened individual regardless of external factors.
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In Always Coming Home (1985), Ursula Le Guin posits a post-apocalyptic society that, like Island, locates the ideal social order among a people, in this case the Kesh, who emphasize oneness with nature and value community over competition. They survive contact with the warlike Condors and their authoritarian, patriarchal, and class-based society. While the Kesh employ inventions of our civilization (such as a massive computer network called City of Mind), they reject government, cities, and human domination of the natural environment. Her other novels – The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), and The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) – further explore the genre’s possibilities. Dystopian (or anti-utopian) fictions, however, rely on an opposition between the status quo and a darker social vision either to critique the excesses of the current age or, more commonly and conversely, to reinforce the notion that the current age is itself the best of all possible worlds. In the case of the latter, the dystopian vision is at war with the utopian impulse for a just and free society (advocating instead the abandonment of the utopian contestation as unrealistic). Common tropes of the dystopian novel help to express dread at the results or implications of the utopian project. For instance, the influential novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by the English writer George Orwell deliberately projects the immediate present into the immediate future in his depiction of an authoritarian surveillance government. Likewise, this dystopia responds to the widespread technological imperative from World War I onward by pointing out its incongruity with moral, social, and political progress. Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano (1952), also takes place in a near-future American society whose increasing mechanization replaces jobs once held by the lower class and creates a class conflict with the engineers and managers who keep it running. Cat’s Cradle (1963) depicts an equally grim future after scientific experimentation and military incompetence render the world unlivable. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) features the development of a society that uses biological and psychological techniques, in conjunction with the drug soma, to satiate its members. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974) by the science fiction novelist Philip K. Dick responds to events in the 1960s and 1970s by
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positing a second American civil war between an increasingly global police state and revolutionary students who live in hedonistic subterranean communes that permit free sex and the use of recreational drugs. The revolutionary students eventually surrender and voluntarily enter forced-labor camps. His Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) also presents a grim future of ecological disaster and technological insanity. Octavia E. Butler sets Parable of the Sower (1993) in a dystopian America beset by disease and madness caused by the ills of global warming and racial tensions. In the Los Angeles area, those still employed wall themselves in their homes to keep out the hordes of unemployed who threaten them. Like other dystopias that resist the characteristic subversion of utopia, in Parable of the Sower the protagonist, Lauren Olamina, suffers from hyper-empathy, a genetic condition that causes her to experience the pain of others as her own, and she dreams of a better place after she is forced from her home by the unemployed hordes. He, She and It (1991) by Marge Piercy also features a female protagonist. Set in the mid twenty-first century when North America has become a toxic wasteland controlled by monolithic corporations that replaced the government and whose workers have become indentured servants, a few free-towns survive that essentially become utopian enclaves. The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy, likewise set in a post-apocalyptic United States, follows the trials of a father and son who traverse a barren landscape scarred by a nuclear cataclysm that burns forests, destroys wildlife, and covers everything in gray ash. Scavenging to subsist, the father struggles to keep his son alive in an unrelentingly bleak world where famine has left most human survivors bereft of morality and their self-centeredness threatens the very existence of the species. The issues of the utopian and dystopian formulae play themselves out in distinctly American ways in terms of the longstanding themes of the American dream and the American nightmare. While not a strictly utopian or dystopian novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s examination of the American dream and nightmare is brilliantly elaborated in The Great Gatsby (1925). In fact, throughout the twentieth century a diverse group of writers has developed these themes through manipulations of the utopian and dystopian conventions. These
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include Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1907), Ayn Rand’s Anthem (1938), Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Thomas Berger’s Regiment of Women (1973), and Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things (1987). Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, a pair of writers working in a popular genre, have also addressed the same themes in their dystopian fictions The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Little Sister (1949). Critical and theoretical approaches to utopian and dystopian literature in the twentieth century were as various as the depictions of other worlds that they seek to critique. The first section of Joyce Hertzler’s book History of Utopian Thought (1923) chronologically treats the ethico-religious dimensions of literary utopias, beginning with the Old Testament prophets, whose messianic vision and ethical demands constitute a utopian vision. Hertzler’s survey ends with utopian fictions from the early twentieth century. In the 1940s, two studies opened new critical horizons. In Paths in Utopia (1949), Martin Buber explores the utopian wish for what should be in the context of the same longing in Hebrew prophetic eschatology for a perfect time and perfect place. Buber locates this desire for “right order” in science as well as in utopian socialism. His messianic eschatology is tied to a belief in the redemption of the world through a leap out of the realm of necessity into that of freedom. In Ideology and Utopia (1946), the sociologist Karl Mannheim identifies four utopian mentalities in social history: the utopian Chiliasm of the Anabaptists, the Liberal Humanitarian utopia, the Conservative utopia, and the SocialistCommunist utopia. Mannheim’s sociological approach became a template for scholars seeking a typological understanding of literary utopianism. Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenological and hermeneutic interpretation, Lectures in Ideology and Utopia (1986), drew on some of Mannheim’s notions. Ernst Bloch’s three-volume study, The Philosophy of Hope (1959), mixes the religiosity of utopia with materialist Marxism. In volume 1, Bloch examines how we learn to hope through our youthful daydreams of beautiful foreign lands and to fantasize about the wonderful adventures the future shall bring. In middle age, our daydreams help ease regrets by depicting what could have
happened had we taken a different path. In our winter years, observes Bloch, we wish for wine and purse, evoke our youth, and hope for physical health into maturity. This anticipatory consciousness may be found in every field of human endeavor from fairy tale to film, and from architecture to technology. Bloch also examines literary utopia from Diogenes to Edward Bellamy in volume 2 of The Philosophy of Hope, and then reflects on the utopian content of various religions. Robert Elliot’s historical study of literary utopia, The Shape of Utopia (1970), traces utopian satire from the ancient Greeks through the twentieth century, while Dorothy Donnelly’s Patterns of Order and Utopia (1998) and Miriam EliavFeldon’s Realistic Utopias (1982) take typological approaches to literary utopianism. The Concept of Utopia (1990) by Ruth Levitas is notable for its acknowledgments of the problematic nature of defining utopia and of the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of utopian studies. Specifically dystopian critiques include Technology and Utopian Thought (1971) by Mulford Sibley, which investigates of the role of technology in literary texts such as Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Moylan’s Scraps of the Untainted Sky (2000), which explores the poetics and politics of dystopian narratives, including the defining characteristics of the new form of the “critical dystopia” of the 1980s and 1990s. In terms of future critical directions, because social, political, scientific, and gender-based approaches to literary utopias and dystopias have received the bulk of recent critical attention, the trend is toward more interdisciplinary studies, specifically those that probe the religious and philosophical dimensions of literary utopias and dystopias. SEE ALSO: Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Speculative Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Baker-Smith, D.(ed.) (1987). Between Dream and Nature: Essays on Utopia and Dystopia. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Bellamy, E. (1996). Looking Backward. New York: Dover. Bloch, E. (1996). The Principle of Hope, 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Buber, M. (1949). Paths in Utopia. Boston: Beacon. Butler, O. E. (2000). Parable of the Sower. New York: Grand Central. Dick, P. K. (1968). Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Dick, P. K. (1993). Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. New York: Vintage. Donnelly, D. (1998). Patterns of Order and Utopia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Eliav-Feldon, M. (1982). Realistic Utopias: The Ideal Imaginary Societies of the Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elliott, R. C. (1970). The Shape of Utopia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Firchow, P. (2001). Brave at Last: Huxley’s Western and Eastern Utopias. Aldous Huxley Annual, 1. Gilman, C. P. (1988). Herland. New York: Dover. Gregory C., & Sargent, L. T. (eds.) (1999). The Utopia Reader. New York: New York University Press. Henry, W. (1971). Equitania: or, The Land of Equity. New York: Arno. Huxley, A. (1946). Brave New World. New York: Harper. Huxley, A. (1962). Island. New York: Perennial. Levitas, R. (1990). The Concept of Utopia. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Le Guin, U. (1985). Always Coming Home. New York: Harper and Row. Mannheim, K. (1936). Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Harcourt.
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More, T. (1999). Utopia. In Three Early Modern Utopias (ed. S. Bruce). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moylan, T. (2000). Scraps of Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder, CO: Westview. Negley, G., & Patrick, J. M. (1952). The Quest for Utopia: An Anthology of Imaginary Societies. New York: Henry Schuman. Patrick, J. M., & Negley, G. R. (1968). A Definition of Utopia. In W. Nelson (ed.), Twentieth Century Interpretations of Utopia. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Piercy, M. (1991). He, She and It. New York: Knopf. Plato. (1945). The Republic of Plato (trans. F. M. Cornford). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1986). Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (ed. G. H. Taylor). New York: Columbia University Press. Sargent, L. T. (1976). Themes in Utopian Fiction in English Before Wells. Science Fiction Studies 3(3), 275–82. Sayer, K., & Moore, J. (eds.) (2000). Science Fiction: Critical Frontiers. New York: St. Martin’s. Sibley, M. (1971). Technology and Utopian Thought. Minneapolis: Burgess. Skinner, B. F. (1969). Walden Two. New York: Macmillan. Vonnegut, K. (1952). Player Piano. New York: Scribner’s.
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V Van Vechten, Carl JUSTIN D. EDWARDS
The American novelist, photographer, journalist, and critic Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964) was an advocate of modernist music, dance, and literature in the early years of the twentieth century. His literary output included several clever and amusing novels about the wealthy and privileged urbanites of the 1920s for which he received critical acclaim. Van Vechten, however, is best known for his promotion and support of the visual artists, dramatic performers, and writers in the cultural movement that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. His financial assistance, critical endorsement, and general enthusiasm helped to publicize the creative production of African Americans throughout the 1920s. Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Van Vechten was educated at the University of Chicago. He then moved to New York City and worked as a theater and music critic for the Broadway Magazine and the New York Times. His critical writings from this period are collected in Red (1925b) and Excavations (1926a). In New York literary circles, he helped rediscover Herman Melville and introduced Ronald Firbank to the United States; he also helped Langston Hughes and Wallace Stevens to publish their first collections of poetry, and was a tireless promoter of Gertrude Stein. Additionally, he assisted in the publishing ventures of countless African American writers (including Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, and Nella Larsen), and made a substantial contribution to the advancement of black scholarship in the
James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts. In 1924, Van Vechten published the comic novel The Tattooed Countess, which depicted life in small-town Iowa. This work continued the satirical style and campy tone he had developed in his first successful novel, Peter Wiffle (1922), which depicts a young man and his adventures in Paris and was based on his own experiences in an era of elegant decadence. It was at this time that he became interested in African American culture, and he began visiting the parties, speakeasies, cabarets, and nightclubs of jazz age Harlem. In 1924, he met the African American novelist and diplomat James Weldon Johnson, and it was through this luminary, one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), that Van Vechten was introduced to many prominent names in the arts who would play important roles in the Harlem Renaissance. It was these uptown journeys that inspired Van Vechten to write Nigger Heaven (1926b), a novel about the so-called authentic black life in Harlem. This text offers a voyeuristic gaze into a culture that was, according to Van Vechten, less restrained by Nordic rationalism. Sexual liaisons take place throughout the novel: white men solicit black prostitutes, while white patrons cruise the nightclubs in search of erotic possibilities. Ostensibly, the novel revolves around a love triangle plot, but really served to offer white readers a glimpse into the political and social life in Harlem’s large black community. Nigger Heaven was a commercial success. But it also received harsh criticism, with some critics
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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referring to it as sensationalist, fatuous, and amoral. Moreover, many African American intellectuals and political leaders (such as W. E. B. Du Bois) condemned the novel as an unjust and unrealistic depiction of black culture. Van Vechten’s other novels depict characters leading decadent and extravagant lifestyles. The Blind Bow-Boy (1923) and Firecrackers (1925a), for instance, represent the sophisticated and artistic set of New York, offering definitive portraits of the excesses and recklessness of the Jazz Age. Spider Boy (1928) is a satirical novel about dissolute Hollywood stardom in the superficial world of the American film industry. Likewise, Parties (1930) is a satirical portrait of wealthy New Yorkers and their endless bouts of drunken parties and utter boredom. These novels are particularly interesting because they utilize and develop an urban and camp sensibility that is often associated with gay culture.
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Van Vechten, C. (1925a). Firecrackers. New York: Knopf. Van Vechten, C. (1925b). Red. New York: Knopf. Van Vechten, C. (1926a). Excavations. New York: Knopf. Van Vechten, C. (1926b). Nigger Heaven. New York: Knopf. Van Vechten, C. (1928). Spider Boy. New York: Knopf. Van Vechten, C. (1930). Parties. New York: Knopf. Van Vechten, C. (1932). Sacred and Profane Memories. New York: Knopf. Van Vechten, C. (1955). Fragments From an Unwritten Autobiography. New Haven: Yale University Library. Van Vechten, C. (1974). The Dance Writings of Carl Van Vechten (ed. P. Padgette). New York: Dance Horizons. Van Vechten, C. (1979). “Keep A-Inchin’ Along”: Selected Writings of Carl Van Vechten About Black Art and Letters (ed. B. Kellner). Westport, CT: Greenwood. Van Vechten, C. (1987). Letters of Carl Van Vechten (ed. B. Kellner). New Haven: Yale University Press.
SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); The Harlem Renaissance (AF); Queer Modernism (AF)
Vidal, Gore REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READING
NIKOLAI ENDRES
Edwards, J. D. (2001). Carl Van Vechten’s Sexual Tourism in Jazz Age Harlem. In Exotic Journeys: Exploring the Erotics of U.S. Travel Literature. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, pp. 142–55. Ikonne, C. (1981). From DuBois to Van Vechten: The Early New Negro Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Kellner, B. (1968). Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Kellner, B. (1989). Carl Van Vechten’s Black Renaissance. In. A. Singh, W. S. Shriver, & S. Brodwin (eds.), Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations. New York: Garland, pp. 23–33. Lueders, E. (1965). Carl Van Vechten. New York: Twayne. Scruggs, C. (1987). Crab Antics and Jacob’s Ladder: Aaron Douglas’s Two Views of Nigger Heaven. In V. A. Kramer (ed.), The Harlem Renaissance Reexamined. New York: AMS, pp. 149–84. Van Vechten, C. (1922). Peter Wiffle. New York: Knopf. Van Vechten, C. (1923). The Blind Bow-Boy. New York: Knopf. Van Vechten, C. (1924). The Tattooed Countess. New York: Knopf.
The prolific Gore Vidal is one of America’s most controversial writers: a political liberal who corresponded with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and was invited to his execution; a critic of “the hacks of academe” about whom he complains they have slighted him; a classicist who claims that the “scandalous” Roman satirists Petronius and Apuleius are his favorite models; and a gay rights pioneer who believes that “homosexual” should be an adjective, not a noun. In 1968, as an ABC commentator at the infamous Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Vidal confronted his political nemesis, William F. Buckley, Jr., insulting him as a “cryptoNazi” (Buckley snapped back with “You queer”). A few years later, on The Dick Cavett Show, Vidal engaged in fistfights with another nemesis, Norman Mailer, whom he implicitly linked to Charles Manson. Born in 1925, Gore Vidal comes from an illustrious family. His grandfather was a senator from Oklahoma, his father an aviation pioneer, and his mother a famous socialite whose lovers included Clark Gable. Vidal attended Phillips
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Exeter Academy and was stationed in the Aleutians during World War II. Twice, Vidal ran (unsuccessfully) for Congress. During his long career, he became friends with Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt, Tennessee Williams, Paul Newman, Ana€ıs Nin, and Jackie Kennedy. Vidal spent half his life abroad in Italy, but when his long-time companion, Howard Austen, died, he returned to Los Angeles. Vidal’s main achievement rests on his American Chronicles: Burr (1973); Lincoln (1984); 1876 (1976); Empire (1987); Hollywood (1990); Washington, D.C. (1967); and The Golden Age (2000), which collectively span two centuries of American history. According to Vidal, we cannot know the present if we ignore the past; otherwise, we live in the United States of Amnesia. Burr views the honored American patriots George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton through the lens of a demonized “traitor.” Lincoln explodes the sentimental myth of “honest Abe” and ends with a Shakespearean tyrant who had sacrificed the Constitution and abused presidential authority by suspending habeas corpus. In 1876, readers find a contested Electoral College, a “stolen” presidency, and the end of Reconstruction. Empire signals Vidal’s conviction that the Founding Fathers’ republican ideals were being betrayed in favor of imperialist ambitions, here embodied by William Randolph Hearst’s media colossus and Teddy Roosevelt’s colonialism. Hollywood centers on the emerging movie industry’s pervasive illusion, where all reality can be invented and all history revised. The Golden Age cements the United States’ transition into empire, through both Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s machinations to involve a reluctant nation in World War II and Harry Truman’s Cold War against the Soviet Union. Vidal has also written “inventions,” wide-ranging avant garde satires that parody academic pretentiousness and postmodernist jargon. Myra Breckinridge (1968), a model text for queer theory, explores fluid sexualities, reveling in a carnivalesque world of high camp. The City and the Pillar (1965 [1948]), on the other hand, depicts the gay protagonist as virtually indistinguishable from straight men; hailed as the first American gay novel, City appeared the same year as the Kinsey Report and created an outrage, leading the
New York Times to refuse to review Vidal’s future books. In the irreverent Live From Golgotha (1992), subtitled The Gospel According to Gore Vidal, religion becomes mere entertainment, and the crucifixion is exposed as a fraud and broadcast retroactively to re-establish the certainty of faith. Hollywood made a deep impression on Vidal, who realized that the novel was on its way out – not because there were no great writers, but because people, ever more stultified, stopped reading. He consequently composed television plays, most notably Visit to a Small Planet (1955) and The Best Man (1960), which satirize the McCarthy witch-hunts and the political jockeying for presidential nominations. Vidal also wrote the screenplays for Ben Hur (1959, with his name missing from the credits), injecting a distinctly homoerotic scene between Ben-Hur and Messala, and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). Moreover, in the 1950s, Vidal, under the pseudonym Edgar Box, produced popular mystery fiction, and in the recent play On the March to the Sea (2004), Vidal condemns the Iraq War as being as unnecessary as the American Civil War. Vidal has consistently practiced the high art of essay writing, with his pieces collected in United States: Essays 1952–1992 (recipient of the National Book Award in 1993) and The Last Empire: Essays 1992–2000. “The Twelve Caesars” (1959), like his novel Julian (1964) about the apostate emperor, reveals his fascination with ancient Rome. “The Holy Family” (1967) takes issue with the glorification of the Kennedy White House as Camelot, and in “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star” (1981), Vidal argues that pro-Israel evangelists have become gay bashers. “Monotheism and Its Discontents” (1992) criticizes the abuse of religion for justifying slavery, the oppression of women, and intolerance toward different denominations. More recently, Vidal has commented on the impeachment of Bill Clinton, the Bush–Cheney “junta,” the loss of civil liberties in the national security state, and drugs, which, Vidal contends, should be legalized and sold at cost, thus eradicating addiction and decreasing crime. SEE ALSO: Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Modern Fiction and Hollywood (AF); Queer Modernism (AF); Television and Fiction (AF)
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V I R A M O N T E S , H E L E N A M A R I´ A
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Altman, D. (2005). Gore Vidal’s America. Cambridge: Polity. Baker, S., & Gibson, C. S. (1997). Gore Vidal: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Endres, N. (2004). Roman Fever: Petronius’ Satyricon and Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar. Ancient Narrative, 4, 99–141. Frank, M. (2005). How to Be an Intellectual in the Age of TV: The Lessons of Gore Vidal. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jshi, S. T. (2007). Gore Vidal: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow. Kaplan, F. (1999). Gore Vidal: A Biography. New York: Doubleday. Parini, J. (ed.) (1992). Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain. New York: Columbia University Press. Vidal, G. (1964). Julian. Boston: Little, Brown. Vidal, G. (1965). The City and the Pillar [1948], rev. edn. New York: E. P. Dutton. Vidal, G. (1967). Washington, D.C. Boston: Little, Brown. Vidal, G. (1968). Myra Breckinridge. Boston: Little, Brown. Vidal, G. (1973). Burr. New York: Random House. Vidal, G. (1976). 1876. New York: Random House. Vidal, G. (1984). Lincoln. New York: Random House. Vidal, G. (1987). Empire. New York: Random House. Vidal, G. (1990). Hollywood. New York: Random House. Vidal, G. (1992). Live From Golgotha. New York: Random House. Vidal, G. (1993). United States: Essays 1952–1992. New York: Random House. Vidal, G. (1995). Palimpsest: A Memoir. New York: Random House. Vidal, G. (2000). The Golden Age. New York: Doubleday. Vidal, G. (2001). The Last Empire: Essays 1992–2000. New York: Doubleday.
Viramontes, Helena Marı´a KATHY JURADO
Chicana writer, community organizer, and academic, Helena Marı´a Viramontes was born on February 26, 1954 in East Los Angeles, California to a working-class family of Mexican descent. With a writing career that spans nearly three decades, Viramontes stands amongst the most celebrated contemporary Chicana/o authors. Her published works consist of a broad spectrum of writings that include coediting (with Maria
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Herrera-Sobek) two prominent works of criticism that are Chicana centered: Chicana Creativity and Criticism (1988) and Chicana (W)rites: On Word and Film (1995). In 1993 she also wrote a screenplay titled Paris Rats in E.L.A. that was produced by the American Film Institute. Viramontes, however, is most widely known for her works of fiction, which include the critically acclaimed collection of short stories, The Moths and Other Stories (1985), and her equally lauded first novel Under the Feet of Jesus (1994). She has recently published her long-awaited second novel, Their Dogs Came With Them (2007), which has received positive praise by reviewers. Growing up during the 1960s in East Los Angeles – one of the epicenters of the Chicano Movement – undoubtedly shaped and informed Viramontes’s personal and professional life. Viramontes attended and graduated from Garfield High School, which was one of the five schools that participated in the Chicano Blowouts of 1968. The Blowouts, which constituted a series of student-organized walkouts that protested against the unequal conditions of East Los Angeles public schools, provided Viramontes with a dynamic introduction to social activism and community organizing that remains evident in her written work and commitment to student mentorship. In 1975 Viramontes earned her BA from Immaculate Heart College in California and shortly thereafter was accepted into the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine. She left the program in 1981, during which time she continued to write and successfully published several short stories in magazines. Viramontes returned several years later to University of California, Irvine and completed her graduate work in the creative writing program, receiving her MFA in 1994. Issues of social justice and the resilience of the Mexican American community in spite of social and economic oppression comprise a prominent focus in her works of fiction. From tough, urban gang bangers to humble migrant workers, Viramontes crafts her characters with depth, complexity, and dignity, managing to avoid any replication of stereotypes. Acting like a recurring character in many of her works is the city of Los Angeles, which is frequently a backdrop that constitutes a significant social and cultural landscape that informs her narratives. In particular,
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Viramontes is concerned with representing a kaleidoscope of everyday experiences and challenges that Chicanas face within both mainstream Anglo society and the Chicano community. Viramontes’s first book of short stories, The Moths and Other Stories, sketches the lives of Chicanas at different ages, within a variety of contexts and circumstances. Within this collection, two stories are most frequently anthologized and the subject of literary criticism: the title story, “The Moths,” and “The Cariboo Cafe.” In “The Moths,” a 14-year-old girl is asked to care for her dying grandmother and lovingly honors her duty even while questioning the oppressive gender roles imposed upon her by an overbearing father. In “Cariboo Cafe,” Viramontes showcases a fragmented narrative that weaves a multiplicity of voices in a story about a Central American woman refugee told from three different perspectives. This narrative sketch of a mother fleeing the death squads from her native El Salvador that have murdered her young son highlights a unique Central American immigrant experience not often addressed by Chicana/o authors. Viramontes’s first novel, Under the Feet of Jesus, leaves the urban setting of Los Angeles and instead offers the vast, rural landscape of the agricultural fields of California. The story of 13-year-old Estrella is the foundation of this Bildungsroman that accounts the experience of a migrating family of farm workers as they follow the harvest circuit. In what has become emblematic of Viramontes’s narrative aesthetic for her two novels, Under the Feet of Jesus is written in a fragmented, non-linear format forming a framework that allows for the past and present to come together, as well as providing a space for multiple voices and perspectives. In her most recent novel, Their Dogs Came With Them, Viramontes returns to Los Angeles during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s when urban renewal and the construction of freeways uprooted entire communities. Once again, women are at the heart of the narrative. Bound together as residents of the same community, Viramontes deftly weaves together the lives of four women who do not know each other, but who inhabit the same space and witness the literal gutting of their neighborhood. Viramontes ascribes the bulldozers with zoomorphic qualities such as having “teeth” and “muzzles,” thus highlighting
the violence of deterritorialization. Stylistically speaking, the novel exemplifies Viramontes’s mastery of her literary craft. Helena Marı´a Viramontes is the recipient of several awards, which include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1989), a Sundance Institute Fellowship (1989), the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature (1996), and the Luis Leal Award (2006). Most recently, Viramontes was named a 2007 USA Ford Fellow by United Artists. Currently, she is a professor in the Department of English at Cornell University, where she teaches courses in creative writing and literature. Viramontes is undoubtedly one of the literary cornerstone authors within Chicana literature and the broader field of US Latina/o literature. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Carbonell, A. M. (1999). From Llorona to Gritona: Coatlicue in Feminist Tales by Viramontes and Cisneros. MELUS, 24(2), 53–74. Shea, A. (2003). “Don’t Let Them Make You Feel You Did a Crime”: Immigration Law, Labor Rights and Farmworker Testimony. MELUS, 28(1), 123–44. Swyt, W. 1998. Hungry Women: Borderlands Mythos in Two Stories by Helena Maria Viramontes. MELUS, 23(2), 189–201. Viramontes, H. M. (1985). The Moths and Other Stories. Houston: Arte Publico. Viramontes, H. M. (1995). Under the Feet of Jesus. New York: Dutton. Viramontes, H. M. (2007). Their Dogs Came With Them. New York: Simon and Schuster. Viramontes, H. M., & Herrera-Sobek, M. (eds.) (1988). Chicana Creativity and Criticism. Houston: Arte Publico. Viramontes, H. M., & Herrera-Sobek, M. (eds.) (1996). Chicana (W)rites: On Word and Film. Berkeley: Third Woman Press.
Vizenor, Gerald BENJAMIN D. CARSON
Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe) is one of the most prolific Native American novelists, poets, essayists, and scholars working today, and his work has had a profound influence on Native American literature and scholarship. Author and editor
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VIZENOR, GERALD
of over 30 works, Vizenor is a unique and at times controversial figure in the world of Native American discourse. Gerald Vizenor, professor emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley and professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico, was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on October 22, 1934 to LaVerne Peterson and Clement Vizenor, a mixed-blood of French and Anishinaabe ancestry. Although Clement Vizenor came from White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, Gerald grew up in Minneapolis and was raised by his paternal grandmother, Alice Beaulieu, and several aunts and uncles after his mother abandoned him and his father was brutally murdered in a Minneapolis alley. Vizenor dropped out of high school shortly before graduation and joined the US Army. On his way to Korea, during the Korean War, Vizenor spent time in Japan and was introduced to Japanese literature, which would have a marked influence on all of his later writings. Vizenor would go on to publish a series of books of original haiku, and Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2003) engages directly the literature and politics of Japan. After teaching in China, in 1983 Vizenor wrote Griever: An American Monkey King in China, which puts the Chinese Monkey King in dialogue with the Anishinaabe trickster, Naanabozho. Throughout his career, Vizenor has worked tirelessly to challenge dominant society’s stereotypical definition of “Indian”; and to indicate that dominant society’s conception of “Indian” is an invention by European American colonizers, Vizenor writes “Indian” in lowercase and italics: indian. The “indian,” Vizenor writes in Manifest Manners (1999), “is an occidental misnomer, an overseas enactment that has no referent to real native cultures or communities” (p. vii). In other words, representations of indians (e.g., as savages, innately spiritual, drunkards, or a relic of the past) have no historical referent but are characterizations used by the colonizers (and social scientists in the academy) to dominate and victimize indigenous peoples. Readers coming to Vizenor for the first time need to be familiar with Vizenor’s specialized vocabulary and style of writing. The central trope in all of Vizenor’s novels is the trickster, a figure that shatters certainties, challenges received ideas, and exposes contradictions. Vizenor writes
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“trickster novels,” and for Vizenor, since the trickster is postmodern, the trickster novel is postmodernist fiction. Stylistically, Vizenor’s novels (written in the oral tradition) are fragmented, disjunctive, and digressive, and play with genre. In Trickster of Liberty (1998b), Vizenor weaves together fiction and theory, breaking off the narrative to quote French theorists, psychoanalysts, and social scientists. Vizenor writes to challenge “manifest manners” (a play on Manifest Destiny), or those dominant racialist notions in discourse that attempt to render “authentic” constructed representations of indians and indian cultures. His narratives of “survivance” – a word of Vizenor’s creation, bringing together survival and resistance – record the active presence of Native cultures (rather than their absence), and repudiate dominance, tragedy, and victimry. They challenge preconceived definitions, or “terminal creeds.” If indians are an invention, “postindians” are those who come after the colonial invention of the indian has been exposed as an invention. Postindians actively create a Native presence, an act of self-fashioning that breaks free from the past simulations of indianness. Vizenor’s genre-busting novels are unique in American literature and deserve widespread readership. They not only challenge readers to rethink everything they think they know about indians, but also invite us to imagine the limitless possibilities of imaginative literature. SEE ALSO: Critical Theory and the Novel (BIF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Blaeser, K. M. (1996). Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Coltelli, L. (1990). Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Lee, A. R. (ed.) (2000). Loosening the Seams: Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Velie, A. R. (1982). Four Indian Literary Masters: N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald Vizenor. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
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Vizenor, G. (1984). The People Named the Chippewa: Narrative Histories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vizenor, G. (1987). Griever: An American Monkey King in China. Normal: Illinois State University Press. Vizenor, G. (1990). Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles [1978]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vizenor, G. (1990). Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vizenor, G. (1991a). The Heirs of Columbus. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Vizenor, G. (1991b). Landfill Meditations: Crossblood Stories. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Vizenor, G. (1992). Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Vizenor, G. (1993a). Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Vizenor, G. (1993b). Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe Lyric Poems and Stories. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Vizenor, G. (1998a). Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Vizenor, G. (1998b). The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vizenor, G. (1999). Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Vizenor, G. (2000). Chancers: A Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Vizenor, G. (2003). Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Vizenor, G. (2006a). Almost Ashore: Selected Poems. Cambridge: Salt. Vizenor, G. (2006b). Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vizenor, G. (2008). Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Vollmann, William T. ROBERT REBEIN
William T. Vollmann is a prolific author of fiction and non-fiction whose sprawling, eclectic works make use of an array of literary techniques to explore themes of violence, poverty, addiction, and the historical tendency of the strong to dominate the weak. Best known for the maximalist length of his work (a typical Vollmann novel runs 700 pages, and one of his books, the seven-volume
Rising Up and Rising Down, exceeds 3,300 pages), Vollmann has received high praise for his preternatural talent and ambition as a writer; however, in-depth critical attention to his work has not always followed, with the result that, 20 years into his remarkable career, William Vollmann finds himself in the paradoxical position of being one of the highest regarded and yet least read authors in contemporary American literature. William Tanner Vollmann was born in Santa Monica, California in 1959. In 1968, when Vollmann was 9 years old, his younger sister Julie drowned in a shallow pond in New Hampshire while he was supposed to be watching her. After a subsequent childhood filled with nightmares and guilt, Vollmann attended Big Springs College and Cornell University, where he studied comparative literature and wrote a thesis treating, among other subjects, Dante, deconstruction, and a group of anti-nuclear protestors whose exploits he observed and reported on in voluminous detail. Thus Vollmann’s twin desires to be both a writer and a witness were established early on. In 1982, Vollmann left Cornell and traveled to Afghanistan in an idealistic attempt to help the Mujahedin in their struggle against the Soviet Union, an experience that provided the material for his first-written book, An Afghanistan Picture Show: or, How I Saved the World (1992a). Back from Afghanistan, Vollmann enrolled in graduate classes at Berkeley before dropping out to take a job as a computer programmer in Silicon Valley. It was here, sleeping in his cubicle between stints at the computer, that Vollmann wrote his first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels (1987), a playful, metafictional satire that inspired immediate comparisons to the novels of Thomas Pynchon among other giants of literary postmodernism. However, the real breakthrough, at least in terms of what we now regard as Vollmann’s signature stance and mode as an author, came two years later with the publication of The Rainbow Stories (1989), a raw, visceral work that combined reportorial and fictional techniques to powerfully depict the lives of prostitutes, drug addicts, and skinheads on the streets of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Subsequent works in this mode – Whores for Gloria (1991b), Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs (1991a), and The Butterfly Stories (1993) – won Vollmann a
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VOLLMANN, WILLIAM T.
sizable cult following, particularly among the young, and inspired magazines such as Spin, Esquire, and the New Yorker to underwrite his further adventures in search of extreme subject matter. Much of this later work is collected in The Atlas (1996), which won the PEN USA West Award, and Rising Up and Rising Down (2003), Vollmann’s long treatise on violence, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In interviews and essays on the subject, Vollmann has explained his penchant for dangerous situations and extreme subject matter by remarking that “frequently the extreme case illustrates the general case – and sometimes it can do this more forcefully and memorably than the ordinary is able to do” (McCaffery 10). This idea, along with the notion that authors have a responsibility to portray important human problems with accuracy and empathy, forms the backbone of Vollmann’s aesthetic as a writer. That aesthetic is on prominent display in Vollmann’s Seven Dreams series of novels, an extended, as yet unfinished work that promises to chronicle the entire “symbolic history” of New World conquest and settlement, from the arrival of the Norse in Greenland in the tenth century to our own century’s battles over land and oil in the western United States. The first volume in the series, The Ice-Shirt, appeared in 1990, followed by Fathers and Crows in 1992, The Rifles in 1994, and Argall in 2001. Three additional volumes, The Poison-Shirt, The Dying Grass, and The CloudShirt, await completion. In these long, complex works, Vollmann vaults back and forth across time, juxtaposing history with myth and fiction with autobiography, buttressing the whole with hundreds of pages of glossaries and source notes. The result is a dense, idiosyncratic work that has been praised for its range and ambition even as it has been derided as jumbled and overblown. A more balanced and complete assessment of the work’s place in the canon of American literature will no doubt commence once the final volume in the series appears. In 2004, Larry McCaffery and Michael Hemmingson published Expelled From Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader, a retrospective anthology featuring some of Vollmann’s most representative and important work to date. In 2005, Vollmann’s Europe Central, a long novel-in-
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stories set in World War II-era Germany and Russia, won the National Book Award for Fiction. Whether these milestones, together with the publication of an abridged version of Rising Up and Rising Down in 2004, represent a turning point in the history of Vollmann’s critical reception remains to be seen. SEE ALSO: Minimalist/Maximalist Fiction (AF); The Novel and War (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Pynchon, Thomas (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS McCaffery, L. (ed.) (1993). Younger Writers Issue: William T. Vollmann, Susan Daitch, David Foster Wallace. Review of Contemporary Fiction 13(1), 9–67. McCaffery, L., & Hemmingson, M. (eds.) (2004). Expelled From Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader. New York: Thunder’s Mouth. Vollman, W. T. (1987). You Bright and Risen Angels. New York: Atheneum. Vollman, W. T. (1989). The Rainbow Stories. New York: Atheneum. Vollman, W. T. (1990). The Ice-Shirt: A Book of North American Landscapes, vol. 1 of Seven Dreams. New York: Viking. Vollman, W. T. (1991a). Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs. New York: Pantheon. Vollman, W. T. (1991b). Whores for Gloria. New York: Pantheon. Vollman, W. T. (1992a). An Afghanistan Picture Show: or, How I Saved the World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Vollman, W. T. (1992b). Fathers and Crows, vol. 2 of Seven Dreams. New York: Viking. Vollman, W. T. (1993). Butterfly Stories: A Novel. New York: Grove. Vollman, W. T. (1994). The Rifles, vol. 6 of Seven Dreams. New York: Viking. Vollman, W. T. (1996). The Atlas. New York: Viking. Vollman, W. T. (2000). The Royal Family. New York: Viking. Vollman, W. T. (2001). Argall, vol. 3 of Seven Dreams. New York: Viking. Vollman, W. T. (2003). Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means, unabridged edn. New York: McSweeney’s. Vollman, W. T. (2004). Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means, abridged edn. New York: Ecco. Vollman, W. T. (2005). Europe Central. New York: Viking.
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Vollman, W. T. (2006). Uncentering the Earth: Copernicus and the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. New York: Norton. Vollman, W. T. (2007). Poor People. New York: Ecco. Vollman, W. T. (2008). Riding Toward Everywhere. New York: Ecco.
Vonnegut, Kurt JAKE MATTOX
Kurt Vonnegut was a prolific, uniquely inventive, and bestselling fiction writer, essayist, humorist, and public presence. His writing combines ironic dark humor, postmodern techniques, and antiestablishment politics to offer an intensely humanist critique of the twentieth century, especially the brutality and destruction of war and the abuses or excesses associated with technological advancement, capitalist individualism, and political and corporate power. His oeuvre includes short stories, drama, drawings, and 14 novels, and his work was frequently transferred into television and film. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born in Indianapolis on November 11, 1922, the youngest of three children. He attended Cornell University to study science, but withdrew and joined the US Army. His experiences in World War II helped form the thematic and moral foundations for much of his work; especially important was his witnessing, as a prisoner of war, the Allied firebombing of the non-military city of Dresden, which killed tens of thousands of German civilians. After the war, Vonnegut worked in journalism and studied anthropology at the University of Chicago; he began selling short stories to popular magazines while working in the public relations department of General Electric. He was married twice and raised seven children, including three adopted nephews after the deaths of his sister and her husband. Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Vonnegut’s most famous novel, appeared during a time of intense public opposition to US military involvement in Vietnam. Its account of the destruction of Dresden and the tragic experiences of the very young men serving as soldiers resonated with arguments against US militarism and war in general. The novel also contains some of the imaginative practices associated with science fiction; for example, the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is
kidnapped by aliens and displayed like a zoo animal on their planet. In addition, Billy periodically becomes “unstuck” in time, and the novel follows his unpredictable movements between disconnected moments in his own life. Billy’s usually undemonstrative reactions to the vastly differing – sometimes tragic, sometimes bitterly comic – experiences of his life are consistent with the understated narrative voice found in the novel and in much of Vonnegut’s work. Other stories and novels by Vonnegut, such as “Unready to Wear” (1953), The Sirens of Titan (1959), Cat’s Cradle (1963), Galapagos (1985), and Timequake (1997), also imagine scenarios in which technological advancements or other radical changes, often of a global scale, leave humans in starkly altered and often exaggeratedly difficult situations. This link to the science fiction genre, along with the fact that his early stories were published in “slick” popular magazines and his early novels only appeared in paperback “pulp” editions, has resulted in much criticism that views Vonnegut’s work as trivial or non-literary. Throughout his career, Vonnegut’s writings spanned multiple genres. For example, Jailbird (1979) and Mother Night (1962) are historically realistic works, and the latter borrows as well from the spy thriller. He also published several collections of speeches, essays, interviews, and reviews, many of which more directly critique or satirize the topics covered in his fiction. The humor of his works, at times dark and satirical, at times light and joyful, has generated comparisons to other great US humorists such as Mark Twain. Vonnegut’s stories also employ techniques often associated with postmodern fiction – fragmented narrative structures, metafictive self-awareness, and a refusal to accept conventional frameworks of understanding the world. Stylistically, Vonnegut’s novels offer a conversational style marked by simple prose, short paragraphs, laconic syntax, and repeated phrases such as “and so it goes.” Many feature his fictional alter ego, the prolific but largely unread short story writer Kilgore Trout, and Vonnegut writes himself into such works as Breakfast of Champions (1973) and Timequake. His work often shifts from farce and irony to sentimentalism and nostalgia; the narratives typically affirm middle-class, Midwestern values and critique corporate power, Christian hypocrisy, and anthropocentrism, the
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VONNEGUT, KURT
idea that humans are the only important actors on Earth and in the universe. Above all, Vonnegut’s writings stress the connectedness of humans to each other and the need for common decency to all. In addition to the stories, novels, and essays Vonnegut wrote over six decades, he taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Harvard, Smith College, and the City University of New York. He received a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Sciences. He believed in the idea of the author as an activist, and he was dedicated to teaching people to refuse to accept social structures and behaviors that devalue human life. He continued delivering public lectures and publishing until his death on April 11, 2007. SEE ALSO: Historiographic Metafiction (AF); The Novel and War (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Speculative Fiction (AF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Davis, T. F. (2006). Kurt Vonnegut’s Crusade. Albany: SUNY Press. Klinkowitz, J. (2004). The Vonnegut Effect. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Marvin, T. F. (2002). Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Morse, D. E. (2003). The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut: Imagining Being American. Westport, CT: Praeger.
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Reed, P. J. (1997). The Short Fiction of Kurt Vonnegut. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Vonnegut, K. (1952). Player Piano. New York: Scribner’s. Vonnegut, K. (1959). The Sirens of Titan. New York: Dell. Vonnegut, K. (1962). Mother Night. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Vonnegut, K. (1963). Cat’s Cradle. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Vonnegut, K. (1965). God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Vonnegut, K. (1968). Welcome to the Monkey House. New York: Delacorte. Vonnegut, K. (1969). Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Delacorte. Vonnegut, K. (1973). Breakfast of Champions. New York: Delacorte. Vonnegut, K. (1976). Slapstick. New York: Delacorte. Vonnegut, K. (1979). Jailbird. New York: Delacorte. Vonnegut, K. (1981). Palm Sunday. New York: Delacorte. Vonnegut, K. (1982). Deadeye Dick. New York: Delacorte. Vonnegut, K. (1985). Galapagos. New York: Delacorte. Vonnegut, K. (1987). Bluebeard. New York: Delacorte. Vonnegut, K. (1990). Hocus Pocus. New York: G. P. Putnam’s. Vonnegut, K. (1997). Timequake. New York: G. P. Putnam’s. Vonnegut, K. (2005). A Man Without a Country. New York: Seven Stories. Vonnegut, K. (2008). Armageddon in Retrospect. New York: Putnam’s.
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W Walker, Alice MARCI R. MCMAHON
Alice Walker is one of the foremost African American female authors of the post-1970s. A prolific short story writer, poet, essayist, novelist, and children’s book author, Walker has profoundly shaped the way audiences think about African American female subjectivity. Walker’s comment that “black women are the most oppressed people in the world” underpins most of her work (quoted in Christian 1994). Born to a rural sharecropping family in Eatonton, Georgia in 1944, Walker showed early promise as a student and was educated on scholarships at Spelman and Sarah Lawrence Colleges. After graduation, she became an active participant in the Civil Rights Movement. Walker cites Harlem Renaissance writers Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, and Langston Hughes as significant literary influences, and like Walker, these authors represent the lives and experiences of the black South. Walker wrote a biography of Hughes’s life for young adult readers in 1974 and edited and published one of the first anthologies of Hurston’s writings in 1979. This dedication to Hurston’s career led Walker to locate Hurston’s unmarked grave in Florida. Walker’s most successful novel, The Color Purple (1983), won the Pulitzer Prize, the first ever awarded to a black woman for fiction. The novel was on the New York Times bestsellers list for over 25 weeks and was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film directed by Steven Spielberg in 1985 and a Broadway musical in
2005. The epistolary format tells the story of Celie, a poor and barely literate woman who escapes the degradation and violent treatment of black men. With the help of a supportive community of women, including her husband’s mistress, Shug Avery, and Celie’s sister, Nettie, Celie gradually frees herself from a history of incest and physical abuse. Walker’s focus on the axes of domination – black male over black female – instead of an exclusive concern with white racism quickly led to charges of “male-bashing” by many critics. Critics often link The Color Purple with Walker’s two subsequent novels: The Temple of My Familiar (1989), which features Celie’s granddaughter Fannie, and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), which portrays Tashi, the African wife of Celie’s son. “Everyday Use,” (1973b) Walker’s most anthologized short story, provides insight into Walker’s validation of black Southern rural traditions and her disdain of black urban identity politics. The story follows Dee, an Afrocentric daughter from the North who has come back to visit her mother and her sister, Maggie, in the rural South. With an idealized vision of identity, Dee views the objects of her family’s Southern culture as fashionable museum pieces to be consumed. The story concludes with the mother refusing to give Dee the family’s heirlooms, and the narrative thereby affirms the value of the mother and her black Southern heritage. Walker’s other novels center the impact of poverty and discrimination on the private sphere. The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) depicts three generations of an agrarian Southern black
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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WALLACE, DAVID FOSTER
family dealing with the debilitating effects of oppression, specifically its impact on male– female relationships. Meridian (1976) foregrounds the role of revolution for a younger generation of black women seeking to become agents of change. Both novels forecast Walker’s theories about black female subjectivity in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983). In response to white feminism’s exclusive focus on gender, Walker has proposed and coined the term “womanism” to address the need for an African American feminism rooted in black women’s creativity and emotional strength. Even though Walker is mostly known for her novels, her first contributions to literature were books of poetry. Her early collections Once (1968) and Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973) focus on the interplay between the public and private spheres. Her later poetry collections Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003) and A Poem Traveled Down My Arm (2005) are spiritual and philosophical in tone. Walker’s essay collections, including the New York Times bestseller Anything We Love Can Be Saved (1997) and We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For (2006), foreground her political convictions about anti-war, anti-nuclear, and environmental movements. Walker has also published four children’s books, including To Hell With Dying (1988), which – as an earlier short story – received praise by Langston Hughes; and Why War Is Never a Good Idea (2007). Walker’s literary and personal archives can be found at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She resides in northern California, where she lives and writes today. SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Hughes, Langston (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); The Southern Novel (AF); Toomer, Jean (AF)
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Gates, H. L., Jr., & Appiah, K. A. (eds.) (1993). Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad. Holt, P. (ed.) (1996). Alice Walker Banned. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. Walker, A. (1968). Once: Poems. New York: Harcourt Brace. Walker, A. (1970). The Third Life of Grange Copeland. New York: Harcourt Brace. Walker, A. (1973). Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems. New York: Harcourt Brace. Walker, A. (1973b). In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. New York: Harcourt Brace. Walker, A. (1974). Langston Hughes, American Poet. New York: Crowell. Walker, A. (1976). Meridian. New York: Harcourt Brace. Walker, A. (1979). I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader. New York: Feminist Press. Walker, A. (1982). The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt Brace. Walker, A. (1983). In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace. Walker, A. (1988). To Hell With Dying. San Diego: Voyager. Walker, A. (1989). The Temple of My Familiar. New York: Pocket. Walker, A. (1992). Possessing the Secret of Joy. New York: Pocket. Walker, A. (1997). Anything We Love Can Be Saved. New York: Ballantine. Walker, A. (2003). Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth. New York: Random House. Walker, A. (2004). Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart. New York: Random House. Walker, A. (2005). A Poem Traveled Down My Arm. New York: Random House. Walker, A. (2006). We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For. New York: New Press. Walker, A. (2007). Why War Is Never a Good Idea. New York: HarperCollins. White, E. C. (2005). Alice Walker: A Life. New York: W. W. Norton.
Wallace, David Foster STEPHEN J. BURN
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bloom, H. (ed.) (1989). Alice Walker: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House. Christian, B. T. (1994). Everyday Use: Women Writers, Texts and Contexts. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
If American literature in the 1980s was dominated by minimalist writers, whose clipped prose and skeletal plots were built upon the belief that less is more, then the publication in 1987 of David Foster Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System, indicated a reaction against the dominant
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aesthetic, recalling instead the deliberately excessive fictions of Pynchon, Gaddis, and DeLillo. Like works by Richard Powers, Jonathan Franzen, and William T. Vollmann – who published first novels in the same decade – Wallace’s book both overlapped with, and subtly diverged from, the practice of older postmodernists. By mixing multiple perspectives and different media, drawing attention to its intertextual allusions and selfreflexive strategies, Wallace’s novel demonstrated in a decade of literary downsizing that sometimes more really was more. The son of a philosophy professor and an English teacher, Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York in 1962, and raised in Illinois. Despite initial promise as a junior tennis player, Wallace’s early achievements were academic, and he was educated at Amherst, the University of Arizona, and Harvard. While he began his student career as a philosophy major with a specialization in math and logic, he traced his decision to become a writer to an encounter with a single story, Donald Barthelme’s “The Balloon.” This funny metafictional story uses the inflation of a massive balloon over Manhattan as the vehicle to parody the consumption of contemporary art by both critics and the general public, and the early influence of such work clearly shaped the evolution of his career, as his writing clearly imitated, and attempted to break free from, the self-reflexivity and irony that he believed characterized and limited much postmodern fiction. Though Wallace’s output is distinguished by its diversity – ranging from a short story that is only 79 words long, to a book about transfinite mathematics – a common thread through much of his work is his emphasis on writing as a symbiotic exchange between reader and writer that attempts to avoid the danger of narcissism that he associates with metafiction. Refusing to return to a na€ıve belief in language as a mirror of reality, Wallace attempted to use metafictional strategies to expose the narcissistic loop of postmodern metafiction in his first novel, and in later stories such as “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” (in 1989) and “Octet” (in 1999). Much of the theorizing that seems to underlie these works is outlined in an important essay about postmodern fiction and television – titled “E. Unibus Pluram” – and collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997).
While Wallace’s essay has been quite influential, his reputation rests largely upon Infinite Jest (1996), an encyclopedic novel whose scale and range of reference provoked comparisons to Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. The narrative energy of Infinite Jest is artfully dispersed and punctuated by endnotes (which are something of a Wallacetrademark), but despitethe novel’s many branching offshoots, its plot is concentrated upon a narrative foundation that recalls James Joyce’s Ulysses, an ancestor text that Wallace’s identified by using the famous Joycean compound “scrotumtightening.” Both texts have one foot in Hamlet, and both are organized around two narrative arcs that set a youthful prodigy, who has problems with his father, next to an older man, who is less educated but more humane than his counterpart. In both works the author begins with the younger talent, but moves toward the older figure as the book approaches its end. In Wallace’s novel, the Leopold Bloom figure is provided by Don Gately, an enormous former burglar who is trying to lead an earnest life and recover from addiction at a halfway house. Balanced against this story is the Stephen Dedalus figure, provided by Hal Incandenza, a teenage lexical and tennis prodigy who is descending into addiction even as Gately makes his escape. Between the cynicism of youth and the developing sincerity of the recovering addict, Wallace attempted to explore what he called “the soul’s core systems,” probing his characters’ sometimes nebulous sense of self. One of the notable features of Wallace’s earlier work is its fascination with younger characters. The Broom of the System is mainly about a 25-year-old telephone operator. Infinite Jest’s twinned protagonists Hal and Don are 17 and 28, respectively. But in the last work of fiction to be published before his suicide in 2008, the short story collection Oblivion (2004), Wallace’s work shifted toward characters who are getting older and watching the promise of their youth dissipate. Though this book extends his earlier investigations into the problems of selfreflexivity, these are mainly stories about aging, as Wallace moved toward explorations of the quiet desperation of adulthood, and the full horror of monotonous working life. SEE ALSO: Barthelme, Donald (AF); Franzen, Jonathan (AF); Minimalist/Maximalist
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WARREN, ROBERT PENN
Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Television and Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Boswell, M. (2003). Understanding David Foster Wallace. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Burn, S. J. (2003). David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum. Burn, S. J. (2004). “The Machine-Language of the Muscles”: Reading, Sport, and the Self in Infinite Jest. In M. Cocchiarale & S. D. Emmert (eds.), Upon Further Review: Essays on American Sports Literature. Westport, CT: Praeger, pp. 41–50. Goodwin, J. (2003). Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Explicator, 61(2), 122–4. Jacobs, T. (2007). The Brothers Incandenza: Translating Ideology in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 49(3), 265–92. LeClair, T. (1996). The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace. Critique, 38, 12–37. Moore, S. (2003). The First Draft Version of Infinite Jest. The Howling Fantods (May 11). At www. thehowlingfantods.com/ij_first.htm, accessed Jan. 18, 2010. Wallace, D. F. (1987). The Broom of the System. New York: Penguin. Wallace, D. F. (1989). Girl With Curious Hair. New York: Norton. Wallace, D. F. (1996). Infinite Jest. Boston: Back Bay. Wallace, D. F. (1997). A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Boston: Back Bay. Wallace, D. F. (1999). Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. Boston: Little, Brown. Wallace, D. F. (2003). Everything and More. New York: Norton. Wallace, D. F. (2004). Oblivion. Boston: Little, Brown. Wallace, D. F. (2005). Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. Boston: Little, Brown.
Warren, Robert Penn PATRICIA L. BRADLEY
Robert Penn Warren’s voice and reputation dominated twentieth-century writing across diverse forms and genres, including poetry, fiction, biography, pedagogy, drama, memoir, literary criticism, and social commentary. Although the
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bulk of Warren’s literary legacy is almost six decades of poetic output, especially the poetry of his later life, the yeomanry of his fiction also reveals a Southerner struggling with dichotomous aspects of his twentieth-century milieu: high and low culture, mythic past and uncertain present, place-boundedness and expatriate yearnings homeward. Born in 1905 in Guthrie, Kentucky to parents who set high standards of achievement and self-sacrifice, Warren enrolled at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University and majored in literature when he was included in the heady camaraderie of the Fugitive Group, which included John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. Both promoted Warren’s early poetry, critiqued his later fiction, and remained his good friends until their deaths. Warren’s relationship with the Fugitives and the Agrarians helped establish him as a poet and academic, yet he also needed to write fiction to establish himself financially. His first novel, Night Rider (1939), exemplified the circumstances that would drive Warren’s writing. Set in the South in his own Kentucky, it drew upon memories of the Tobacco Wars shared with him by his Grandfather Penn while expanding upon the novella “Prime Leaf” (1931), itself written during Warren’s early extended absence not only from Kentucky but also from the South. Warren’s At Heaven’s Gate (1943) followed, reutilizing a thematically useful technique from Night Rider. In both, Warren counterpoints the hollow lives of his upwardly mobile and seemingly enlightened primary characters with those of more humble country folk who have achieved – through their greater understanding of the natural world – a liberating, sometimes frighteningly individualistic, vision of their places in it. Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning blockbuster, All the King’s Men (1946), emerged in part from his productive academic years at Louisiana State University, where as an indirect beneficiary of Huey Long’s gubernatorial largesse he became coeditor of the newly founded Southern Review. Long is often considered a model for Warren’s Willie Stark, and the novel’s two screen versions (in 1949 and 2007) and one literary homage, Joe Klein’s Primary Colors (1996), attest to the renewed timeliness of the story of Stark’s political downfall and Jack Burden’s deadly paralysis in the
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face of “history and the awful responsibility of Time.” Warren’s single volume of short fiction, The Circus in the Attic and Other Stories (1947), soon followed, its title story providing a gloss for the artistic process Warren experienced writing All the King’s Men. The equally notable second story of the collection, “Blackberry Winter,” reveals how Warren’s initially reluctant departure from the South may later have become a conscious choice. Like Seth, the young narrator who follows the mysterious tramp, a dark father surrogate, Warren leaves his home region permanently around this period, subsequently relying upon his memory to accomplish fictional and poetic reworkings of his Southern past. Although none achieved the literary status of All the King’s Men, Warren’s remaining novels spanned two and a half additional decades of his life and explored topics of cultural and historical interest to him. World Enough and Time (1950) fictionalizes historical materials of a scandalous murder in early nineteenth-century Kentucky and questions the reckless idealism of its young protagonist, Jeremiah Beaumont. Band of Angels (1955) tells the story of a Kentucky belle who learns only at her planter father’s death of her mixed parentage. Sold into enslavement, narrator and protagonist Amantha Starr survives the Civil War but yearns for a fixed sense of identity. Warren returns to that time period in Wilderness: A Tale of the Civil War (1961), but with a markedly spare style and focus in the story of Adam Rosenzweig, a Bavarian immigrant whose idealism is tested during his Civil War experiences. Warren returns imaginatively to Tennessee in The Cave (1959) and in Flood: A Romance of Our Time (1964). In the former, the search for lost caver Jasper Harrick forces reconsiderations of personal and communal identity among his friends and family. In the latter, Warren recalls the Nashville and surrounding areas of his Vanderbilt years, creating in the morally adrift Brad Tolliver a character similar to Jack Burden from All the King’s Men. Meet Me in the Green Glen (1971), possibly a homage to Faulkner, dwells upon illicit sexual longings, racial tensions, and a decaying Old South patriarchy. A Place to Come To (1977), Warren’s final novel, gathers many of his past themes and devices – failed fathers and their surrogates, an idealistic protagonist
alternately vulnerable to a harsh world or hidden from it behind hard-boiled cynicism, and the lure of the past and home – to tell the story of Jed Tewksbury, a successful academic and classicist who, much like Warren himself, cannot escape the boy he had been in the Southern backwater of his birth. SEE ALSO: Faulkner, William (AF); Modern Fiction in Hollywood (AF); The Southern Novel (AF); Styron, William (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Blotner, J. (1997). Robert Penn Warren: A Biography. New York: Random House. Bradley, P. (2004). Robert Penn Warren’s Circus Aesthetic and the Southern Renaissance. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Burt, J. (1988). Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Justus, J. (1981). The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Millichap, J. (1992). Robert Penn Warren: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne. Runyon, R. (1990). The Taciturn Text: The Fiction of Robert Penn Warren. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Warren, R. P. (1939). Night Rider. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Warren, R. P. (1943). At Heaven’s Gate. New York: Harcourt Brace. Warren, R. P. (1946). All the King’s Men. Harcourt Brace. Warren, R. P. (1947). The Circus in the Attic and Other Stories. New York: Harcourt Brace. Warren, R. P. (1950). World Enough and Time: A Romantic Novel. New York: Random House. Warren, R. P. (1955). Band of Angels. New York: Random House. Warren, R. P. (1959). The Cave. New York: Random House. Warren, R. P. (1961). Wilderness: A Tale of the Civil War. New York: Random House. Warren, R. P. (1964). Flood: A Romance of Our Time. Random House. Warren, R. P. (1971). Meet Me in the Green Glen. New York: Random House. Warren, R. P. (1977). A Place to Come To. New York: Random House. Warren, R. P. (1998). The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren (ed. J. Burt). Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
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WELCH, JAMES
Welch, James LINDA PALMER
Novelist and poet James Welch (Blackfeet–Gros Ventre) is a major voice of the Native American Literary Renaissance, a movement that began with N. Scott Momaday’s 1969 novel House Made of Dawn and includes notable American writers Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Simon Ortiz, Linda Hogan, Joy Harjo, and Gerald Vizenor. Since 1969, these novelists, poets, memoirists, and critics have added significantly to an understanding of American literature and culture as they portray Native American experience in contemporary society, explore the results of loss of land and culture, and demonstrate the lifesustaining role of native traditions such as storytelling, ceremony, ritual, and myth, as well as revealing the potency of trickster and absurdist humor in the face of cultural destruction. James Welch’s internationally acclaimed literature places him at the heart of the Native American Renaissance and of contemporary American literature. Welch was born November 18, 1940 in Browning, Montana, center of the Blackfeet Reservation, where he grew up immersed in Indian tradition and reservation life and saw first-hand the often tragic results of cultural diaspora. He received his BA from the University of Montana, where he also studied in the MFA program before beginning his writing career and teaching at the University of Washington and the University of Montana. He was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature from the Native Writers’ Circle, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Pacific Northwest Bookseller’s Award, and an Emmy Award for a PBS documentary. In 2000, Welch was knighted by France for his literary contributions. He died August 4, 2003 in Missoula, Montana. Welch’s first published work was a poetry collection, Riding the Earthboy 40 (1971), in which he explores in powerfully spare images issues that would become his major themes: alcoholism (“warriors face down in wine sleep”), hard deaths in hard country, and faltering searches for identity. But, as in the rest of his work, despair is countered by the great buoyancy of traditional myth, ritual, and trickster humor in the narratives
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of his people. Welch continued to publish poetry but increasingly emphasized fiction, writing five novels. He also co-wrote and directed an Emmy Award-winning PBS documentary, Last Stand at Little Bighorn (1992), and a companion revisionist historical study, Killing Custer (1994), which brilliantly questions America’s iconic history of Indian–white encounters. Welch’s novels focus on the Native American individual, culture, and land in the context of dispossession and appropriation of that land and the accompanying loss of individual and cultural identity. While drawing deeply on Native American tradition, Welch’s style is frequently postmodernist, as his characters (often mixed-bloods) struggle (with limited success) for identity in a fractured, disjointed world in which space, time, story, and tradition have been ripped and cultural touchstones essential for identity are unavailable. In his first novel, Winter in the Blood (1974), a nameless 32-year-old narrator stumbles through a life without meaning or ties to his Native heritage. In prose frequently praised for its brilliant imagery and tightness, Welch explores no-name’s shattered attempts to find a self in a fractured landscape of Montana bars, polluted rivers without fish, and graves with Styrofoam crosses and plastic flowers. Welch’s portrayal of the narrator’s emptiness, mirrored in the land’s barrenness, is a masterpiece of black comedy, as old men drop dead in their porridge, elevators do not go up or down, and dialogue collapses into comically unintelligible cross-talk. Still, critic Louis Owens speaks of Welch’s “acts of recovery,” and indeed glimmers of meaning emerge as the narrator accidentally discovers his traditional grandfather and from him begins to recover the cultural story essential to his own identity. The hope offered is small, but perhaps the smallest recovery in a disjointed world where winter reigns in the blood is all to be hoped for in the novel’s bitterly humorous portrayal of the fractured existence of the dislocated Indian in modern America. The Death of Jim Loney (1979) and The Indian Lawyer (1998) both continue Welch’s focus on mixed-bloods trying to connect the disparate parts of their lives, placing his work centrally in the Native American Renaissance interest in the contemporary Indian who has lost culture and identity.
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Welch then departed from his focus on the contemporary Native American with his epic masterpiece, Fools Crow (1990), seemingly a gift to the lost souls of the earlier novels. Welch turns the clock back to a nineteenth-century Blackfeet world intact, whole – but caught in the moment of contact with white America, as the 1869 Transcontinental Railway blasts through Native land and the Blackfeet are being herded onto reservations and decimated by smallpox and white man’s liquor. Welch brilliantly draws the non-Native reader into a Blackfeet world so blessed with tradition, coherence, and placesense that even in the face of potential decimation from white encroachment, the possibility of cultural survival seems possible. The book ends with spring, rain, animals, laughter, and children, and thus with soaring hope that is perhaps Welch’s best gift to American literature and to his people. SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Cotelli, L. (1990). Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press McFarland, R. (2000). Understanding James Welch. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Owens, L. (1992). Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Vangen, K. (1996). James Welch. In A. Wiget (ed.), Handbook of Native American Literature. New York: Garland. Velie, A. (1982). Four American Indian Literary Masters. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Welch, J. (1971). Riding the Earthboy 40. Lewiston, ID: Confluence. Welch, J. (1974). Winter in the Blood. New York: Penguin. Welch, J. (1979). The Death of Jim Loney. New York: Harper and Row. Welch, J. (1990). The Indian Lawyer. New York: Norton. Welch, J. (with Stekler, P.) (1992). Last Stand at Little Bighorn. PBS. Welch, J. (with Stekler, P.) (1994). Killing Custer: The Battle of Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians. New York: Norton. Welch, J. (2000). The Heartsong of Charging Elk. New York: Doubleday.
Welty, Eudora Alice MICHAEL KREYLING
Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi on April 13, 1909 and raised in a household filled with books and reading. She graduated from high school at the age of 16, attended Mississippi State College for women for two years, and finished her BA (English) at the University of Wisconsin– Madison in 1929. In 1930 she went to Columbia University, where she enrolled in an advertising and secretarial program. New York City was a bigger classroom, but Welty’s education outside the South was cut off when her father died in 1931. She would return many times for visits, and even worked at the New York Times Book Review during World War II, but Jackson remained her home and the hub of her writing career for the rest of her life. She died July 23, 2001. As a Southern writer, Welty worked within and often against regional stereotypes and cliches, and when she began to place stories in magazines with regional circulation in the mid-1930s, Southern cliches were strong. Erskine Caldwell’s stories of rural and poverty-depressed Georgia, God’s Little Acre (1933) and Tobacco Road (1932), had lodged the “facts” of Southern poverty, illiteracy, uninhibited sexuality, ignorance, and fundamental resistance to “the progress of civilization” in the popular mind. Stories in Welty’s A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (1941) play changes on these themes. “The Whistle,” for example, concerns a couple who grows tomatoes for the metropolitan market and lives in “poverty which may have bound them like a disaster too great for any discussion” (58). Hearing the packing company whistle warning of freeze, they douse most of what they own with kerosene and burn it to keep the tiny tomato plants alive. Unlike Caldwell’s primitives, Welty’s, particularly the wife, show a capacity for wonder and joy surviving the rigor mortis of poverty and work. “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies” spoofs the Southern stereotype of uninhibited (female) sexuality. “Keela, The Outcast Indian Maiden” takes on race and white guilt. “Death of a Traveling Salesman” analyzes the bias of the civilized against the so-called backwoods primitives to whom they mistakenly condescend. In each story, Welty steps carefully through the minefield of cliche, not so
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much writing in a unique voice as fighting off ventriloquists. A Curtain of Green is a miscellany of all the stories (with the exceptions of “A Worn Path” and “Powerhouse”) she had published by 1941. As an ensemble, they represent the well-written short story of the time, as explicated in the reigning textbook, Understanding Fiction (1943). Not surprisingly, the editors of that textbook, Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, were also the editors of the Southern Review. Warren and Brooks had published a few of Welty’s stories in Southern Review. Perhaps more famously, they had rejected others, like “Petrified Man,” a work in Welty’s comic voice that has since become almost universally popular. The writer who emerges in Welty’s first collection is recognizably Southern, yet stylistically modernist. She does not avoid the topic of race, as stories like “Keela,” “Powerhouse,” and “A Worn Path” attest. But in writing about African Americans she locates the reader directly within the other race and culture, representing the other without making him or her picturesque. At the same time, she avoids Faulkner’s “South,” and the race–sex–memory triad of Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1934). Welty’s next collection, The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943), is a more clearly modernist work in that she consciously seeks literary ways (trope, theme, image) to unify discrete stories into an integral whole. Subject matter gives ground to technique. She chose as the central trope the Natchez Trace, a 400-mile route from Nashville on the Cumberland River to Natchez on the Mississippi. Before white settlers entered the territory, the trace was a game trail used by Native peoples for hunting and migration. In the 1930s, when Welty chose it as a central trope, the Natchez Trace was being graded and paved as a parkway by the Works Progress Administration. Welty used the Trace in all of its incarnations. In the story “First Love,” it is a zone of imagination and contest for the protagonist of the story, a deaf boy who experiences on the Trace both the trauma of an Indian attack in which his parents are killed and a meeting with Aaron Burr who occupies the boy’s imagination as larger than history. In other stories the Trace is a contemporary lover’s lane where rites of sexual initiation are acted out, the aesthetic and ethical space where the artist
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(John James Audubon) works out problems of representation, or the magical zone where mythical creatures make themselves visible. Welty’s first novel, Delta Wedding (1946), began as a long short story with composition problems she could neither resolve nor abandon. Working for the New York Times Book Review in 1944, Welty and Virginia Woolf’s posthumously published A Haunted House and Other Stories (1944) found each other. Woolf’s feminist authorial consciousness and her confident technique of allowing event, plot, and character to follow that centering consciousness (rather than being administered and controlled by a fictional consciousness exterior to the work) enabled Welty to revision the subject matter of Delta Wedding – the family events, moods, and emotions surrounding the wedding of the daughter of a Delta plantation owner to the overseer. The result is a work placed in the Mississippi Delta of the early 1920s, but deliberately free of the historical issues of its time and place. Several reviewers, looking to the Southern writer to protest social and political injustice (segregation, sharecropping, and Huey Long-style demagoguery), found fault with Delta Wedding, preferring a type of fiction Welty would never write. If Welty’s earlier collection, The Wide Net, attempted to unify discrete stories through the power of a physical setting, The Golden Apples (1949) attempts to make the experience of formal unity itself the “place” where the reader’s sense of fiction occurs. Like The Wide Net, The Golden Apples is unified by geographical place – the fictional small town of Morgana, Mississippi – but Welty unifies stories with other recurring motifs. The seven stories are composed self-consciously along musical lines, alternating “short” stories with longer – that is, novella-length – pieces to create concerto-like movements. Characters return from story to story, alternating from background to foreground. Conflict is generated by familial and personal relationships. While mothers and daughters dominate, fathers and sons are also present, as are husbands and wives, lovers (heterosexual and, by means of suggestion, homosexual), brothers, social groups, and races. Several other imagistic patterns circulate through the stories: classical mythology, the poems of W. B. Yeats (still strong from her undergraduate years), elements of contemporary Mississippi
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political and social history, Jungian archetypes, classical and popular music, even haircuts. Any summary relays the impression of the work as a puzzle, but The Golden Apples is an integrated work of modernist literary imagination, running on the rails of story (characters and events in conflict leading to resolution) and of modernist text (changes rung, absences filled, and patterns repeated as variations resolve themselves into the whole). Her next published work is the novella The Ponder Heart (1954), a comic tale that “returns” to the comic voice of early stories such as “Petrified Man” and “Why I Live at the P.O.” The Ponder Heart is told in the voice of the spinster Edna Earle Ponder, who watches her Uncle Daniel lavish the Ponder estate on a series of much younger girlfriends and finally a “trophy wife” whom Uncle Daniel attempts to tickle to death. The story was rewritten as a play for Broadway and enjoyed a modest run in 1956. Less popular were Welty’s concurrent stories, collected in The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories (1955). These seven stories, united by mood and temperament, commonly focus on the central character of a woman seeking a relationship commensurate with her capacity for joy – and usually not finding it with the men whom she meets. Critics and reviewers, with some exceptions, expressed regret at Welty’s “obscurity” in these stories and usually announced a preference for what they remembered as her “Southern” fiction. Fifteen years elapsed before Welty’s next novel was published, Losing Battles (1970). Her return from “oblivion” was not universally celebrated. As some welcomed the writer back among the living, they lamented that her chosen genre was moribund: the big Southern novel. Losing Battles is, indeed, big, the longest of her works in an oeuvre devoted to shorter forms of fiction. Unlike many earlier works, Losing Battles is composed predominantly of voices in dialogue. But like earlier work, the central theme is family and kin surviving against forces of disintegration, both external and internal. A year before Losing Battles, Welty had published a long short story, “The Optimist’s Daughter,” devoted to the theme of family survival. Revised only slightly, The Optimist’s Daughter (1972) won the Pulitzer Prize for
Fiction in 1973. Out of the same family theme Welty wrote her memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings (1984), delivered as the Massey Lectures in American Civilization at Harvard. One Writer’s Beginnings pulls the thread of the coming into being of the writer out of the more tangled skein of family life. Most prominent among all of those threads is that of being a daughter to two quite different parents: her father, who seemed to encourage her risk-taking, and her mother, who strove to keep her daughter close in a world she, the mother, saw as much too full of sorrow, hurt, and disappointment. At her death in 2001, Eudora Welty had lived a life full of literary honors and awards. While earlier in her career her fiction had found a critical home in the New Criticism, the aesthetic formalism that reigned over classroom teaching and academic literary taste from the 1940s into the 1960s, in her later years (and surely at the time of her death) Welty’s work had become a frequent issue in feminist criticism. Her status as a Southern writer, an equal to Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter (an early mentor), and William Faulkner himself, has never been seriously questioned. Close scrutiny of her work, however, may show more traces of the modernist temperament and relocate Welty to the transatlantic modernism of her century. SEE ALSO: Faulkner, William (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); The Southern Novel (AF); Woolf, Virginia (BIF) BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bloom, H. (ed.) (1986). Eudora Welty. New York: Chelsea House. Harrison, S. (1996). Eudora Welty and Virginia Woolf: Gender, Genre, and Influence. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Kreyling, M. (1991). Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Mark, R. (1994). The Dragon’s Blood: Feminist Intertextuality in Eudora Welty’s “The Golden Apples.” Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Marrs, S. (2005). Eudora Welty: A Biography. Orlando, FL: Harcourt. Marrs, S., & Pollock, H. (2001). Eudora Welty and Politics: Did the Writer Crusade? Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
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Prenshaw, P. W. (ed.) (1979). Eudora Welty: Critical Essays. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Prenshaw, P. W. (ed.) (1984). Conversations With Eudora Welty. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Welty, E. (1941). A Curtain of Green and Other Stories. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Welty, E. (1942). The Robber Bridegroom. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Welty, E. (1943). The Wide Net and Other Stories. New York: Harcourt Brace. Welty, E. (1946). Delta Wedding. New York: Harcourt Brace. Welty, E. (1949). The Golden Apples. New York: Harcourt Brace. Welty, E. (1954). The Ponder Heart. New York: Harcourt Brace. Welty, E. (1955). The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories. New York: Harcourt Brace. Welty, E. (1970). Losing Battles. New York: Random House. Welty, E. (1971). One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression. New York: Random House. Welty, E. (1972). The Optimist’s Daughter. New York: Random House. Welty, E. (1978). The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews. New York: Random House. Welty, E. (1980). The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. New York: Harcourt Brace. (Some stories slightly revised by Welty for this edition. See Welty 1998b.) Welty, E. (1984). One Writer’s Beginnings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Welty, E. (1989). Eudora Welty: Photographs. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Welty, E. (1998a). Welty: Complete Novels. New York: Library of America. Welty, E. (1998b). Welty: Stories, Essays & Memoir. New York: Library of America. (Short stories in this edition in first book publication versions.)
West, Nathanael JUSTUS NIELAND
Nathanael West (1903–40), novelist, screenwriter, and one of the funniest and most despairing satirists of the twentieth century, published only two novels and two novellas, yet his critical esteem has risen sharply since his death at the age of 37. In the charged political climate of the 1930s, West’s books, as he put it, seemed to “meet no needs except [his] own.” They were too bleak for leftist radicals, too mired in the world of consumer
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culture for highbrow critics, too crude for the popular press. Today, however, West’s fiction – with its canny attention to the psychological dynamics of mass and consumer culture; its devastating skepticism about American nationalism, nativism, and naive folksiness; its avant garde deployment of nihilistic humor in the service of social critique; and its deft borrowing of the forms, cliches, and idioms of American popular culture – is as fresh and relevant as ever. As a shrewd analyst of the politics of sentiment, as a Hollywood writer, and as a late modernist obsessed with the status of America-as-simulacra, West has also proven a crucial figure in the broad reassessment of literary modernism over the last decade, which has proven more hospitable to “bad” modernisms that challenge the high modernist caricature of aesthetic arch-seriousness. The writer who legally became “Nathanael West” in 1926 was born Nathan Weinstein in New York City, the son of German-speaking Russian Jews whose families had emigrated to the US in the late 1880s as a result of tsarist anti-Semitism. While West’s fiction is obsessed with the inauthenticity of personality and human character, West himself forged a number of identities in his youth. He doctored his public high school transcript to get into Tufts University, where he changed his name to “Nathaniel Weinstein,” participated in Jewish fraternities, skipped class, and earned the failing grades that forced him to withdraw during his first year. Later, he managed to pass off the transcript of another Nathan Weinstein as his own, a stunt that got him into Brown University. There, where his Jewishness excluded him from frat life, West remade himself as a dandy and aesthete named “Nathaniel von Wallenstein Weinstein.” At Brown, he founded an intellectual society called “The Hanseatic League,” went to the movies with his classmate S. J. Perlman, and devoured Wilde and Pater, the French and English symbolists, Greek drama, theories of religious ritual and myth, and modern American writers like Fitzgerald, Crane, and cummings. After “graduating” in 1924, West lived in Paris on his uncle’s dime, met surrealist Max Ernst and American expatriate Henry Miller, and began writing The Dream Life of Balso Snell, his first major work. Eventually published in 1931 by Robert McAlmon’s Contact Editions in Paris (and at the
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recommendation of William Carlos Williams), The Dream Life of Balso Snell is an experimental novella steeped in the anti-bourgeois pranks of the Continental avant gardes. The advertising leaflet West wrote for Balso proclaims his vanguard self-fashioning: “In his use of the violently disassociated, the dehumanized marvelous, the deliberately criminal and imbecilic, he is much like Guillaume Apollinaire, Jarry, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Raymond Roussel, and certain of the surrealists.” Good company, that. The book begins with a series of crass puns and jokes as the titular Balso, a lyric poet inexplicably wandering about Troy, discovers the famed wooden horse and makes a posterior entry (“O Anus Mirabilis!”). West’s opening gag about the sodomitic Greeks begins the text’s cynical challenge to idealisms of all sorts, and its relentless emphasis on the wildness of the human body at its most material and sexual. The structure is episodic, a kind of equine picaresque, and follows Balso’s encounters with a series of bizarre personages: a Catholic mystic writing the biography of St. Puce, a flea in the armpit of Christ; John Raskolnikov Gilson, a psychotic high school student who writes Dostoevskian crime fiction to bed his teacher, Miss McGeeney, a fan of Russian novelists; McGeeney herself, who has embarked on a biography of the biographer of the biographer of the biographer of Boswell, biographer of Samuel Johnson – an attempt to join herself in a “brilliant literary chain” (1931, 30); and a beautiful, disconsolate hunchback, deserted by her artist-lover Beagle Darwin. The poor girl turns out to be a character in Balso’s dream, just as McGeeney impossibly reveals herself as Balso’s erstwhile sweetheart. Reunited in the horse’s belly, Balso and McGeeney have sex, but not before pondering the act in its political, philosophical, aesthetic, and temporal dimensions. The analysis finally ends, the lovers screw, and the book ends in orgasm, as Balso’s body is swarmed by an army of sensations, and a deathly release. A funny, nonsensical, cruel book, Balso establishes a characteristic split in West’s work between the brutal chaos of nature and the body and a world of relentless discursivity. There is no surrealist plumbing of the authentic depths of the unconscious in Balso, but plenty of comic “difficulty in discovering the Real” (1931, 32), inaccessible as it is proven to be through layers of
cliche, representational convention, and poses. Art, Balso argues, is “nature digested,” “sublime excrement,” or a series of highly self-aware performances of feeling designed, usually, as gambits for sexual gratification (1931, 9). As in West’s later work, the frustration of (male) aesthetic ideals and desires leads to grotesque violence and brutality, usually against women, whose bodies are too often interchangeable with the kinds of sentimentalism West attacks. This gendering of feeling, and its relationship to the operations of Depression-era mass culture, are at the cold heart of West’s next, and arguably his finest, book, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933). Inspired in part by West’s introduction to “Susan Chester,” an advice columnist for the Brooklyn Eagle, the novella was first published in Williams’s short-lived little magazine Contact, where West worked as an associate editor. It concerns the tortured relationship between the titular “Miss Lonelyhearts,” a male advice columnist for a newspaper in an unnamed urban wasteland, and his desperate readership – the physically and ideologically deformed “people” that raise collectively the specter of the “mass man” so common in 1930s writing. A devotee of silent comedy and the moribund traditions of vaudeville performance, West stages this relationship – tragic on the face of it – as a grotesque form of slapstick comedy, mixing surrealist black humor with a stark, unsentimental presentation of violence. West’s “folk” suffer obscene forms of abuse and comprise the audience for Miss Lonelyhearts’s rhetorical performances of sympathy. Yet Lonelyheart’s so-called Christ complex, diagnosed and relentlessly mocked by the paper’s nihilistic features editor, Shrike, fails to save anyone or relieve the pervasive misery of modern life. Over the course of the spare plot, Lonelyhearts meets some of his abject readers in the flesh, but his optimistic bromides don’t work, and he ends up sleeping with one female reader just to restore some sensation to his body. Miss Lonelyhearts, like West’s modernity writ large, is numbed beyond belief, and eventually loses faith in any form of escape – religious, aesthetic, pastoral, nativist, or primitivist – from the commodified banality of the modern world. West is a cynic’s cynic, and leaves his readers unsure how exactly to feel about the suffering of his characters. At the same time, Miss Lonelyhearts offers a savage critique of the
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modern reification of human desire – what the novel calls “the business of dreams” – by the machinations of the culture industry, whose promises of a better life are swallowed by his characters, hook, line, and sucker. Ultimately, these promises prove as hollow as Lonelyhearts’s quest to become a secular savior, which leads to the psychosis he experiences at the book’s abrupt end. Blurbed by West’s friends Edmund Wilson, Dashiell Hammett, Erskine Caldwell, and Josephine Herbst, Miss Lonelyhearts sold well enough for West to option the rights to Daryl Zanuck at Fox. The result was the defanged, utterly forgettable adaptation, Advice to the Lovelorn (1933). In July 1933, West accepted a contract from Columbia Pictures and moved to Hollywood to begin a screenwriting career, working alternately for Columbia, RKO, Universal, and Republic over the next seven years, and becoming active in the Screenwriters’ Guild and, later, the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. In Hollywood, West also sold the rights to his novelistic follow-up to Miss Lonelyhearts, A Cool Million (1934). A brutal parody of the Horatio Alger “bootstraps” story, West’s novel, subtitled The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin, recycles, only to demolish, every tired cliche about self-made Americanism, and outs the 1930s obsession with “native” American culture as a species of domestic fascism. When the mortgage of his widowed mother is foreclosed upon, Pitkin, a teenage rube, appeals to the town patriarch, bank owner, and ex-president of the US, Nathan “Shagpoke” Whipple for help, only to be instructed to win his way in “the land of opportunity.” Pitkin’s blind optimism is the obverse of the novel’s unchecked cynicism about the American ideology of honesty and industry. His progress through West’s America is an absurd form of regression that ends in bodily dismemberment, self-commodification, and unwitting participation in a fascist revolution. He is scammed by New York con men, physically beaten, wrongly imprisoned (losing his teeth and catching pneumonia in the process), rewarded for good deeds by the loss of his eye, assailed by a spy for the Third International, pimped out to a maharajah in the same brothel where his hometown sweetheart has ended up, scalped by an Indian chief in an act of revenge for America’s foundational genocide, and finally exhibited by Shagpoke – who is, it turns out, a raving fascist
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and anti-Semite – in a “Chamber of American Horrors.” No horror, in West’s world, is so great as to be unmarketable, and so Pitkin is promoted by Shagpoke as “the last man to have been scalped by the Indians” (1934, 221). Eventually, Pitkin is killed as a soldier in Shagpoke’s National Revolutionary Party, and ironically celebrated as an American martyr in a revolution that delivers the country “from sophistication, Marxism, and International Capitalism,” helping “America become American again” (1934, 238). This devastating anatomy of America’s history – and potential future – of violence in the name of national purity was poorly reviewed, but led West to write a satirical play about World War I (eventually produced as Good Hunting in 1938), and laid the conceptual groundwork for The Day of the Locust (1939), one of the best and darkest Hollywood novels ever written. West’s final novel tells the story of Yale-trained painter Tod Hackett, lured to Hollywood by the promise of a good paycheck as a set designer, and greeted in the land of sunshine, oranges, and dreams by a herd of dislocated Midwesterners like sad-sack Homer Simpson, who have “come to California to die” (1939, 242). West’s Hollywood, like its most famous products, is pervaded by the ersatz and the simulacral, which contaminates everything from the shoddy imitations of its architecture to the feelings of West’s eccentric characters – less human beings than compulsive performers of personality, like the broken-down vaude Harry Greener, befriended by Tod. Most interesting about Harry for Tod is his beguiling daughter, Faye, a soulless aspiring actress who, in West’s hands, comes to embody the mystery of commodity fetishism itself, even as she cements a familiar modernist equation between the feminine and mass culture. Tod’s sexual desire for Faye, set into a competitive dynamic with Homer and any number of other men attracted by Faye, produces rape fantasies, and serves to double the novel’s most pressing concern – Hollywood’s cynical manipulation of mass desire (the novel’s working title was The Cheaters and the Cheated). In the novel’s concluding chapter, this process fuels a riot outside of a movie theater, where a crowd has gathered to see its favorite celebrities and is unreasonably moved to violence when someone
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shouts, “Look, it’s Gary Cooper!” For West, the scene is apocalyptic, and the violence non-cathartic. Tod, contemplating the scene, is first moved to think of his painting, The Burning of Los Angeles, at which he’s been toiling to confer aesthetic order upon his confused experience of the city. But he too is swept up in the crowd, and ends the novel in a police car – not removed from or above the fray, but still somehow in it, laughing and loudly imitating the hysterical siren. Unlike Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, whose “culture industry” thesis West’s final novel anticipates by five years, West finds less hope in modernist art’s capacity to resist reification. His brand of cynicism has proven immensely influential nonetheless, and West’s soaring critical reputation today attests to the power of what he once called his curious kind of joking, which continues to fascinate, unsettle, and provoke. On December 22, 1940, one day after the death of his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, West and his wife Eileen were killed in a car accident while returning from a hunting trip in Mexico. SEE ALSO: The Avant Garde Novel (AF); Modern Fiction in Hollywood (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Barnard, R. (1995). The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance: Kenneth Fearing, Nathanael West, and Mass Culture in the 1930s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martin, J. (1970). Nathanael West: The Art of His Life. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Nieland, J. (2008). Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Solomon, W. (2002). Literature, Amusement, and Technology in the Great Depression. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strychacz, T. (1993). Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Veitch, J. (1997). American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. West, N. (1931). The Dream Life of Balso Snell. New York: Moss and Kamin. West, N. (1933). Miss Lonelyhearts. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
West, N. (1934). A Cool Million. New York: Covici-Friede. West, N. (1939). The Day of the Locust. New York: Random House. West, N. (1997). Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writings (ed. S. Bercovitch). New York: Library of America. Wilson, E. (1941). The Boys in the Back Room: Notes on California Novelists. San Francisco: Colt.
West, Paul DAVID W. MADDEN
Paul West is one of the most prolific and important voices to emerge in post-World War II fiction. His career spans a variety of fictional experiments, but beginning in the early 1980s he has consistently produced challenging postmodern historiographic novels. In addition to 23 novels and a volume of short stories, he has nine memoirs, seven works of criticism, and three collections of poetry. Paul Noden West was born in Derbyshire, England on February 23, 1930; he attended Oxford University, and taught for over 30 years at Pennsylvania State University. His first major success came with a trilogy about his native village – Alley Jaggers (1966), I’m Expecting to Live Quite Soon (1970), and Bela Lugosi’s White Christmas (1972) – that initially established him as one of England’s “angry young men.” In 1971, after becoming an American citizen, West began writing highly experimental novels such as Caliban’s Filibuster, in which the reader is trapped in the mind of a frustrated screenwriter traveling across the Pacific Ocean. With the publication of The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg in 1980, West began fictionally reinventing history to reveal the overlooked corners of human experience that often run contrary to the established historical record. In this novel, he enters the mind of Hitler’s unsuccessful assassin to examine fissures in the granite edifice of Nazism, notions of individual responsibility and heroism, and a postwar conscience that never informs political adventuring. Rat Man of Paris (1986) is one of his most compassionate books and extends some of the issues of Stauffenberg. Lord Byron’s Doctor (1989) concentrates on John Polidori, Byron’s personal
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doctor, who, in West’s hands, develops a destructive personal competition with the poet. The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper (1991), The Tent of Orange Mist (1995b), and OK: The Corral, the Earps and Doc Holliday (2000), while each separate and unique, focus on either well-known public figures or events and in the process redefine the historical record. Sporting With Amaryllis (1997), based on some of John Milton’s Latin lyrics and his brief suspension from Oxford, not only challenges the poet’s position as a serious Puritan writer but also emphasizes West’s longstanding concentration on and dedication to the creative consciousness. Consistently, West’s protagonists are artists or creators of one kind or another, and their adventures, whether private or public, center on the yearning for aesthetic beauty and independence. Identical concerns can be found in The Dry Danube: A Hitler Forgery (2000), in which a frustrated Hitler recounts his student days and exasperation over his abortive painting career. Cheops: A Cupboard for the Sun (2002) presents a hilarious encounter between the pharaoh and one of his staunchest critics, the Greek historian Herodotus. Both figures are artists, creating their own monuments to immortality, yet thoroughly in conflict with one another. West has periodically explored his own life and most intimate relationships, transforming the notion of history into the most personal of realms. In Love’s Mansion (1992), he imagines the courtship of his parents, children of different social classes in their village, who somehow fall in love and marry in spite of overwhelming obstacles. Similarly in Life With Swan (1999), West offers a moving paean to his spouse, the poet Diane Ackerman, and their enduring love affair. He returns to develop portraits of both parents in a pair of loving memoirs – My Mother’s Music (1996) and My Father’s War: A Memoir (2005) – that reinforce West’s passion for personal history and offer new opportunities to explore the mysteries of human personalities. He has also written accounts of his determination to learn to swim in midlife (Out of My Depths: A Swimmer in the Universe, 1983), his recovery from a stroke (A Stroke of Genius: Illness and SelfDiscovery, 1995a), and a reminiscence of his teaching a group of gifted students (Master Class:
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Scenes From a Fiction Workshop, 2001). In these and other memoirs he brings all the inventiveness of the novelist, and in interviews he has confessed that traditional distinctions between the two genres are for him artificial. In addition to various honors, West received a Lannan Literary Award (1993) for Love’s Mansion, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Prize for Fiction (1985), and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government (1996). Despite a second stroke in 2004, West continues to write and publish. SEE ALSO: The Avant Garde Novel (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Minimalist/Maximalist Fiction (AF); The Novel and War (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Madden, D. W. (ed.) (1991). Paul West. Review of Contemporary Fiction, 11(1), 141–308. Madden, D. W. (1993). Understanding Paul West. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Maguire, T. (1998). Paul West. War, Literature, and the Arts, 10(1), 132–86. Morrow, B. (1988). Paul West: An Interview by Bradford Morrow. Conjunctions, 12(4), 141–71. Saltzman, A. M. (1994). Beholding Paul West and The Women of Whitechapel. Twentieth Century Literature, 40(2), 256–71. Tissut, A.-L. (2003). Paul West. Paris: Belin. West, P. (1966). Alley Jaggers. New York: HarperCollins. West, P. (1970). I’m Expecting to Live Quite Soon. New York: HarperCollins. West, P. (1971). Caliban’s Filibuster. New York: Doubleday. West, P. (1972). Bela Lugosi’s White Christmas. New York: HarperCollins. West, P. (1980). The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg. New York: HarperCollins. West, P. (1983). Out of My Depths: A Swimmer in the Universe. New York: Doubleday. West, P. (1989). Lord Byron’s Doctor. New York: Doubleday. West, P. (1991). The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper. New York: Random House. West, P. (1992). Love’s Mansion. New York: Random House. West, P. (1995a). A Stroke of Genius: Illness and SelfDiscovery. New York: Viking.
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West, P. (1995b). The Tent of Orange Mist. New York: Scribner’s. West, P. (1996). My Mother’s Music. New York: Viking. West, P. (1997). Sporting With Amaryllis. New York: Overlook. West, P. (1999). Life With Swan. New York: Scribner’s. West, P. (2000). OK: The Corral, the Earps and Doc Holliday. New York: Scribner’s. West, P. (2001). Master Class: Scenes From a Fiction Workshop. New York: Harcourt. West, P. (2002). Cheops: A Cupboard for the Sun. New York: New Directions. West, P. (2005). My Father’s War: A Memoir. Kingston, NY: McPherson.
Wharton, Edith DONNA M. CAMPBELL
Edith Wharton was a twentieth-century novelist and short story writer whose work ranges far beyond the genre of the novel of manners with which she is often associated. She is best known for her fiction of “Old New York,” which chronicles the clash between traditional upper-class New York society and the brash, moneyed social climbers who invade and destroy it. Writing frequently about divorce and its complications at a time when divorce was socially taboo, Wharton delves beneath the mannerly facades of her well-to-do characters to explore the missed chances, thwarted love affairs, and instances of human cruelty imposed by a restrictive social system and the suffocating levels of hypocrisy needed to keep it in place. Born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862 to an upper-class New York family, Wharton was educated by private tutors and studied philosophy, science, and several languages, lessons reinforced by her family’s frequent trips to France, Italy, and Germany. After her marriage in 1885 to Edward “Teddy” Wharton, she lived the life of a well-to-do society matron, living in New York, spending summers in fashionable Newport, and traveling to Europe every year, yet she continued to write. She had already co-authored a book on interior design, The Decoration of Houses (1897), and published three collections of stories, a novella, and a historical novel by 1905, the year in which she wrote The House of Mirth. From this period until her death she published one or more
books every year, alternating novels with short stories, novellas, essays, and books of travel such as Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904) and A Motor Flight Through France (1908). After moving to Paris in 1911 and divorcing her husband in 1913, Wharton rarely returned to the United States. At the onset of World War I, she turned her considerable energies to organizing relief charities for refugees and the poor while still finding time to travel to the front lines. With The Age of Innocence (1920), a novel of old New York, Wharton became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, an honor matched by that of being the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Yale University, in 1923. Wharton’s other novels of the 1920s were less enthusiastically received, however, and she was criticized as an expatriate out of touch with the jazz age so deftly captured by F. Scott Fitzgerald and younger writers. Wharton died at her home in Hyeres, in the south of France, on August 11, 1937. The first 15 years of Wharton’s career, beginning with five poems that appeared in The Atlantic in 1880 and culminating in the publication of The House of Mirth, show the range of themes that would mark her later work. The three collections Wharton published before The House of Mirth – The Greater Inclination (1899), Crucial Instances (1901), and The Descent of Man and Other Stories (1904) – contain some of her best short fiction. Although several stories in these collections, such as “The Muse’s Tragedy” and “The Rembrandt,” examine Jamesian conflicts between life and art, and between reality and representation, others such as “Souls Belated” and “The Other Two” anticipate Wharton’s later explorations of adultery, divorce, and the inescapable bonds of social convention. In “Souls Belated,” Lydia Tillotson has eloped to Italy with her lover, Ralph Gannett, leaving behind her husband and the stuffy society he represents. Like Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence, Lydia wants to find an ideal place where the lovers can live free from conventional rules, yet as an encounter with a flashy divorcee reminds her, knowledge of her unconventional affair will cause her to be ostracized. She realizes belatedly that convention will always bind her, first to her husband and now to Ralph, in ways that she cannot escape. “The Other Two,” by contrast, presents a comic take on serial divorce in which a refusal to
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acknowledge one’s feelings and a sense of irony become the verbal lubricant that greases the wheels of society. Waythorn, the point-of-view character, consistently indulges in “the joy of possessorship” when looking at his new bride, the twice divorced Alice, but the presence of one or the other of Alice’s two previous husbands, Haskett and Varick, interrupts his idyll each time (1904, 386). As Waythorn grows to know Haskett and Varick, he also grows to know Alice more completely, including the lies she tells to preserve the marital peace, her vulgar interest in money, and the “pliancy” that has rendered her “‘as easy as an old shoe’ – a shoe that too many feet had worn” (393). Waythorn studies the physical attributes of the thin, nondescript Hackett and the ruddy sensualist Varick but cannot bring himself to acknowledge the jealousy that disturbs him in thinking of Alice with either man, any more than he can see the sexual implications of his “easy as an old shoe” simile. Instead, he takes refuge in the modern manners that deny such problems as he cloaks the entire situation in the impersonal language of the stock market: “he held so many shares in her personality and his predecessors were partners in the business” (393). When Alice serves tea to all three, Waythorn takes the third cup “with a laugh” (396), realizing, with a modern sense of irony, that he can never be anything but the third man to share any experience with Alice. The House of Mirth presents a tragic rather than comic perspective on the social rules that govern marriage. Following Henry James’s advice after The Valley of Decision (1902) to “do New York” (Powers 34), Wharton wrote it to show “that a frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys” (1934, 940). What the frivolity of fashionable New York society destroys is Wharton’s heroine, Lily Bart, a 29-year-old woman whose ambivalence about its false values manifests itself in an inability either to commit to the marriage market that is her only chance for survival or to reject it entirely as does her plain, earnest friend Gertie Farish. As Wai-Chee Dimock and others have pointed out, the novel treats the stock market and the marriage market as extensions of one another, with Lily as a commodity whose stock falls with each passing year and each mark upon her reputation. But despite her waning resources, both physical and
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monetary, Lily repeatedly gambles in the marriage marketplace, attracting suitors such as the dull Percy Gryce only to be distracted by the “republic of the spirit” that she shares with the elusive bachelor Lawrence Selden (1905, 108). Unable to commit herself to the necessary closing step of the transactions she begins – selling herself in marriage to a man like Gryce, whom she does not love, or using Selden’s letters to blackmail her enemy, Bertha Dorset, into silence – Lily is a failure of Darwinian adaptation. As the narrator explains near the end of the novel, she was “an organism as helpless out of its narrow range as the sea-anemone torn from the rock” (486), and like all such highly evolved endangered species, she cannot survive in a hostile environment. Whether considered as a naturalistic novel, with its themes of determinism and decline; as a tragedy, which its references to the Oresteia would suggest; or as an indictment of a shallow culture that treats its women as disposable objects, The House of Mirth represents a serious treatment of a culture, New York society, that until Wharton had been primarily the subject only of light, popular novels. Wharton’s fiction from 1907 to 1920 shows her experimentation with various types of novels, including fiction in a Jamesian mode (Madame de Treymes, 1907; The Reef, 1912), the Progressive-era social problem novel (The Fruit of the Tree, 2000 [1907]), and the war novel (The Marne, 1918). This period also includes three works considered to be among her greatest: Ethan Frome (1922 [1911]), The Custom of the Country (1913), and The Age of Innocence. Begun in Paris and written initially in French, Ethan Frome gains much of its tragedy from its intensely American setting, the frozen, isolated spaces of western Massachusetts, and from the long-time residents for whom the determinism of extreme poverty has ordered their lives as surely as a belief in predestination governed that of their Puritan forebears. As Wharton explained in a 1922 preface to the novel, her method of overlapping fragments compiled by a narrator was suggested by Balzac’s La Grande Bret^eche, with each of her first-person narrator’s informants supplying one part of Ethan’s story. Trapped in a loveless marriage to a dour hypochondriac, Zeena, Ethan falls in love with his wife’s cousin, Mattie Silver, but when Zeena tries to send Mattie away, Ethan is powerless to stop the process. When he and Mattie take
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a last sled ride together, they decide to commit suicide but the attempt fails, leaving Ethan disabled and Mattie a helpless invalid. Like her young heroine Charity Royall of Summer (1917), who is trapped by pregnancy and threatened with disgrace in a novel that Wharton called her “hot Ethan” (1989, 389), Ethan, too, is trapped by his body. Caught by physical and psychological circumstances, the infirmity of his body, and the sense of duty with which he tends Zeena and Mattie, Ethan cannot rid himself of the burden of his wife or his now querulous former love, Mattie. By contrast, Undine Spragg of The Custom of the Country discards husbands almost as easily, if not as frequently, as she discards ball dresses. The comically vulgar daughter of a Midwestern couple from Apex City, Undine Spragg comes to New York with two purposes in life: to find out what the best society is, and to be part of it. Undine is the anti-Lily Bart: she sees the world in commercial terms, and instead of a “republic of the spirit,” she consistently longs for a republic of material objects and status always just beyond her reach. Discarding her first husband, Elmer Moffatt, when his schemes for riches have crumbled, Undine captures her genteel second husband, Ralph Marvell, and the old New York society to which he belongs, later discarding him as well in favor of the French aristocracy represented by her third husband, Raymond de Chelles. Her return to the now immensely wealthy Elmer Moffatt finds her once again longing for the one thing she cannot have: as a divorced woman, she cannot be the wife of an ambassador, the “one part she was really made for” (1913, 594). A satiric take on the American culture of consumption and the nouveau riche “Invaders” (78) who lay waste to the values of honor and family tradition that old New York represents, The Custom of the Country asserts that the triumph of materialism and selfishness is part of the modern age, with Undine Spragg as a perfectly adapted specimen of its values. Written after World War I and at the beginning of the jazz age, The Age of Innocence looks back once again to the vanished New York of the 1870s from a perspective at once nostalgic and unsentimental. Wharton again uses the devices of the delayed decision, as in The House of Mirth, and a protagonist who is yoked to a partner that can
neither understand him nor let him go, as in Ethan Frome. Engaged to May Welland, a perfectly blond and perfectly bland woman of his own social set, Newland Archer meets her cousin, Ellen Olenska, after the latter’s failed marriage to a Polish count. Half fascinated by Ellen’s unconventionality and half worried about the opprobrium that her Bohemian ways will inspire, Newland seeks to rescue her but does so in ways that tighten the bonds of convention that bind him to May, such as urging Ellen to see the beauty in self-sacrifice in the name of duty, the uselessness of which is a consistent theme in Wharton’s work. As in The Custom of the Country, the novel’s core issue is the conflict between individualism and social obligation, with divorce the pivot upon which these issues revolve. Wharton takes an anthropological, almost clinical, approach to this study of the bonds with which old New York secures its captives, a perspective that she signals through the visit that Ellen and Newland make to the new Metropolitan Museum of Art, with its objects, “use unknown,” from “forgotten people” whose rituals once seemed as important as those of the “whole tribe” of old New York (2003 [1920], 186, 201). Like that of Ethan Frome, Newland’s tragedy is that he understands that duty, not love, will imprison him in a life that circumstances have made for him and that individual will is nearly powerless when pitted against the will of the “tribe” – and the need of those who, like Newland, ultimately value belonging over individuality. The fiction that Wharton produced from 1921 until her death in 1937 has often, and somewhat unfairly, been dismissed as less accomplished than masterpieces like The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence. Although few would agree with Wharton’s opinion that Hudson River Bracketed (1929) was her “best book” (Lewis 490), recent reassessments have underscored the significance of the novels and stories of the 1920s and 1930s. The earliest of these novels, The Glimpses of the Moon (1922), revisits the plot of The House of Mirth by following an impoverished society couple, Susy Branch and Nick Lansing, who marry instead of parting as Lily Bart and Lawrence Selden do. With the exception of Old New York, a quartet of novellas on nineteenth-century New York, the work of this late period often focuses on satirizing modernity and the jazz age, as in
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Twilight Sleep (1927); on mothers and the varieties of self-sacrificial or neglectful mothering, as in The Mother’s Recompense (1925) and The Children (1928); or, in a return to earlier themes, on the position of the artist, the subject of Hudson River Bracketed and its sequel, The Gods Arrive (1932). Other late stories feature favorite Wharton themes from early in her career: illegitimacy, illicit love affairs, and concealment and exposure, as in “The Old Maid” from Old New York and “Roman Fever” (1934). Wharton also published an increasing number of ghost stories during this period, including one of her best, “All Souls,” the last story she completed before her death. Wharton’s works continue to enjoy popular acclaim, with several film adaptations of her novels during the past 15 years. After a period of relative critical neglect following her death in 1937, her critical reputation continues to rise. For several decades during the mid twentieth century she was considered to be merely an echo of Henry James, but since the 1970s she has been recognized not only as an acute observer of the social scene but also as an author whose wide reading in evolutionary theory, anthropology, and philosophy infused her observations with depth and complexity. Although her style is realistic and satiric rather than experimental and modernist, Wharton brings a modern, twentieth-century sensibility to the study not only of her culture’s manners but also of its materialism. Her fiction studies the psychological and physical toll exacted by a social system organized like the ruthless capitalism of the early twentieth century, a social Darwinist universe in which a few, like Undine Spragg, triumph while others, like Ralph Marvell and Lily Bart, perish because of their inability to compete. SEE ALSO: Fitzgerald, F. Scott (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF); James, Henry (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bauer, D. M. (1994). Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bell, M. (1995). The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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Beer, J. (1997). Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s. Bendixen, A., & Zilversmit, A. (1992). Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays. New York: Garland. Dimock, W.-C. (1985). Debasing Exchange: Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. PMLA, 100(5), 783–92. Joslin, K., & Price, A. (1993). Wretched Exotic: Essays on Edith Wharton in Europe. New York: Peter Lang. Kassanoff, J. A. (2004). Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, H. (2007). Edith Wharton. New York: Knopf. Lewis, R. W. B. (1985). Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Fromm. Powers, L. H. (ed.) (1990). Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters, 1900–1915. New York: Scribner’s. Singley, C. J. (1995). Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit. New York: Cambridge University Press. Totten, G. (2007). Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Wharton, E. (1904). The Other Two. New York: Scribner’s. Wharton, E. (1905). The House of Mirth. New York: Scribner’s. Wharton, E. (1912). The Reef. New York: Scribner’s. Wharton, E. (1913). The Custom of the Country. New York: Scribner’s. Wharton, E. (1917). Summer. New York: Appleton. Wharton, E. (1922). Ethan Frome [1911]. New York: Scribner’s. Wharton, E. (1922). The Glimpses of the Moon. New York: Appleton. Wharton, E. (1925). The Mother’s Recompense. New York: Appleton. Wharton, E. (1927). Twilight Sleep. New York: Appleton. Wharton, E. (1934). A Backward Glance. New York: Appleton. Wharton, E. (1968). The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton. 2 vols. (ed. R. W. B. Lewis). New York: Scribner’s. Wharton, E. (1989). The Letters of Edith Wharton (ed. R. W. B. Lewis & N. Lewis). New York: Collier. Wharton, E. (1990). Old New York [1924]. In Novellas and Other Writings. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, pp. 315–549. Wharton, E. (2000). The Fruit of the Tree [1907] (intro. D. Campbell). Boston: Northeastern University Press. Wharton, E. (2003). The Age of Innocence [1920] (ed. C. Waid). New York: Norton.
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White, Edmund NICHOLAS F. RADEL
Perhaps more than any other author, Edmund White provides the literary and social outlines for understanding that moment in American history when homosexuality was transformed from a psychiatric condition to an identity. His dominant themes are the legitimacy of gay lives and sexual experiences and the differences between homosexual and heterosexual social identities. Born January 13, 1940 to an upper-middle-class businessman and his wife, Edmund Valentine White III spent his childhood and adolescence in the American Midwest: first in Cincinnati, then, when his parents divorced, primarily Evanston, Illinois near Chicago. After earning a BA at the University of Michigan, White divided his adult life between Paris and New York, cities that figure significantly in his work. At present, he is professor of creative writing at Princeton University. Although White rarely repeats the virtuoso formal and stylistic experiments that mark individual works, his fiction can be classified into several categories: innovative early novels displaying a masterly, baroque style suited to the mannered social worlds they explore; socially realistic novels and stories about the lives of gay American men like White himself; and recent historical novels that combine fiction with biography and autobiography. His earliest novels, Forgetting Elena (1973) and Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978) as well as the later Caracole (1985) look toward Continental models, especially Marcel Proust and Vladimir Nabokov, in focusing on memory and identity, albeit White wryly suggests that memory may impede rather than enable his characters’ developing identities. The novels reflect philosophical tensions contemporary with their composition, as existentialist anxiety about authenticity gave way to structuralist and poststructuralist theories of the contingency of identity. This concern with identity links White’s early novels to his most famous and accessible ones, a trilogy – A Boy’s Own Story (1982) The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988), and The Farewell Symphony (1998) – that chronicles middle-class gay life in America from the 1950s through the 1990s. An acknowledged masterpiece, A Boy’s Own Story is a
“coming-out” tale, a narrative of coming to terms with one’s homosexuality that remains an oral and literary form in gay subcultures. Unlike sentimental examples of the genre, however, White’s focuses on the psychological distortion resulting from his nameless narrator’s alienation as a homosexual. When he wrote A Boy’s Own Story, White was a member of the “Violet Quill,” a briefly convened collective of gay writers in New York that addressed questions of form and content in gay autobiographical writing. As evidenced by the increasingly sophisticated experimentation with autobiographical fiction in his later work, these issues continued to interest White. Other realistic works – such as The Married Man (2000); stories about AIDS in A Darker Proof (1987) and Skinned Alive (1995); and Chaos (2007), a collection of short fiction about aging gay characters – notably develop another key theme: the body as a simultaneous site of creative desire and physical disintegration. White’s latest novels echo an emphasis on history among other gay novelists at the turn of the century. In Fanny: A Fiction (2003), Frances Trollope, a fictional version of the novelist-mother of Anthony Trollope, pens the biography of Frances Wright, a fictional version of the noteworthy social reformer and utopian thinker. With Hotel de Dream (2007), White envisions the last months of the American author Stephen Crane, who died of tuberculosis in Germany at the age of 28, and he embeds within that narrative the tale of a gay prostitute Crane was rumored to have destroyed before he died. Both novels are metafictional, questioning relations between historical figures and modern sensibilities as well as connections between fictional and “real” selves that are implicitly thematized in White’s autobiographical work. Hence, they help clarify some of the ways White’s oeuvre is concerned with pressures placed on individuals by socially specific, discursive formulations of sex – of which, Hotel de Dream suggests, the novel is one example. An indefatigable writer of non-fiction, White became an early gay celebrity in the 1970s with The Joy of Gay Sex (1977) and, later, an American travelogue, States of Desire (1980). His biography of Jean Genet won the National Book Critics
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Circle Award, although his study of Proust remains controversial for its sexual emphasis, as does his autobiography, My Lives (2005). Innumerable essays on art, literature, and gay life collected in The Burning Library (1994) and Arts and Letters (2004) confirm White’s role as an important interpreter of gay and straight cultures, in America and abroad. A member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Sciences, White was also honored by the French government as an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for his work on Genet. SEE ALSO: Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Queer Modernism (AF)
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White, E. (1995). Skinned Alive: Stories. New York: Knopf. White, E. (1998). The Farewell Symphony. London: Chatto and Windus. White, E. (1999). Marcel Proust. New York: Viking Penguin. White, E. (2000). The Married Man. London: Chatto and Windus. White, E. (2003). Fanny: A Fiction. New York: Ecco. White, E. (2004). Arts and Letters. San Francisco: Cleis. White, E. (2005). My Lives: An Autobiography. London: Bloomsbury. White, E. (2007). Chaos: A Novella and Stories. New York: Carroll and Graf. White, E. (2007). Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel. New York: Ecco.
Whitehead, Colson SAUNDRA LIGGINS
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Barber, S. (1998). Edmund White: The Burning World. London: Picador. Bergman, D. (2004). The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Radel, N. (1994). Self as Other: The Politics of Identity in the Works of Edmund White. In R. J. Ringer (ed.), Queer Words, Queer Images: Communication and the Construction of Homosexuality. New York: New York University Press, pp. 175–92. Spear, T. C. (2001). Interview: Edmund White on Queer Autofiction, Biography, and Sidafiction. A/B: AUTO/BIOGRAPHY, 15(2), 261–76. White, E. (1973). Forgetting Elena. New York: Random House. White, E. (with Silverstein, C.) (1977). The Joy of Gay Sex: An Intimate Guide for Gay Men to the Pleasures of a Gay Lifestyle. New York: Crown. White, E. (1978). Nocturnes for the King of Naples. New York: St. Martin’s. White, E. (1980). States of Desire: Travels in Gay America. New York: E. P. Dutton. White, E. (1982). A Boy’s Own Story. New York: E. P. Dutton. White, E. (1985). Caracole. New York: E. P. Dutton. White, E. (with Mars-Jones, A.) (1987). The Darker Proof: Stories From a Crisis. London: Faber and Faber. White, E. (1988). The Beautiful Room Is Empty. New York: Knopf. White, E. (1993). Genet: A Biography. New York: Knopf. White, E. (1994). The Burning Library: Essays (ed. D. Bergman). New York: Knopf.
Colson Whitehead contributes an innovative voice not just to the field of African American literature, but also to American literature in general. He offers a vision of the African American and American experiences that reflects the modern preoccupations with technology and identity, using unconventional plots, settings, and themes to construct narratives that challenge the reader’s notions of the relationship between the past and future. Despite the fact that Whitehead’s desire to become a writer stemmed from his reading a novel by the horror author Stephen King when Whitehead was young, Colson Whitehead is most notably an heir to the tradition of African American literature that critiques the nature of race relations in the United States. While Whitehead’s name fits naturally among such African American authors as Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, he is also in the same company as such contemporary white authors as Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, writers who offer stinging commentaries on contemporary American culture. In addition to contributing essays and reviews to the New York Times Book Review, Granta, and Harper’s, Colson Whitehead has published three novels and one work of non-fiction. He also wrote the introduction to Get Your War On by David Rees, a collection of cartoons criticizing the United States’ war on terrorism that was published in 2002.
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WHITEHEAD, COLSON
Colson Whitehead was born in New York City in 1970. He attended Harvard University, before becoming a freelance writer and television columnist for the Village Voice. He published his first novel, The Intuitionist, in 1999. The rights to the novel have been purchased by filmmaker Jonathan Demme (director of The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia). The Intuitionist tells the story of a black female elevator inspector’s search for the cause of an elevator accident. In the process, the inspector, Lila Mae Watson, gets caught in the middle of a conflict between two rival elevator companies and the hunt for the missing plans of a new, revolutionary elevator system. A finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First Fiction, The Intuitionist is more than simply a reconfiguration of the detective novel genre. In the text, Whitehead tackles issues such as racial passing, generational conflicts within the African American community, and economic and racial progress. The idea of progress on all levels is central to Whitehead’s text. The modern, unnamed city that is the setting of the novel is one marked by segregated neighborhoods and workplaces, unemployment, and poverty – a city that economic and social progress seems to have bypassed. Throughout the novel, Lila Mae must navigate through and confront organizations and individuals that seek to impede not just the progress of her investigation, but also the progress of her career. Advancement is central to the elevator industry, as the competing companies are each in search of the mythological “black box,” the plans for the elevator of the future. The fact that the designer of this new elevator was an African American male makes the device that much more significant to both the black citizens of the city and the white executives of the elevator companies. Whitehead’s second novel, John Henry Days, published in 2001, was a National Book Critics Circle Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist. In a conversation with Walter Mosley, Whitehead revealed that John Henry – the “steel-driving man” who, according to legend, entered into a contest with a steam-powered drill to drive spikes into the railroad, ultimately winning the contest but losing his life – was the first black superhero that he knew as a black child growing
up in the 1970s. Whitehead reintroduces John Henry to the American public, and questions the implications of Henry’s absence in John Henry Days. In the novel, a black freelance reporter, J. Sutter, is hired by a website to go to a small West Virginia town to cover the ceremony celebrating the unveiling of a commemorative postage stamp honoring John Henry. In addition to covering the historic past of John Henry, J. is determined to make a little history of his own; he is determined to set the record for the most consecutive days attending a publicity event. The juxtaposition of the presentation of the noble feats of John Henry with the cynicism of J.’s quest does seem a bit jarring. But Whitehead’s resurrection of John Henry is a reminder to the audience of the importance of remembering one’s history. Colson Whitehead ventured into non-fiction with The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts. Published in 2003, the book is a collection of Whitehead’s reminiscences of growing up in New York, and of his still present love affair with the city. He takes the reader on a tour of such iconic locations as the Port Authority and Central Park, Broadway and Times Square, yet he also makes note of the hole-in-the-wall bars, anonymous street vendors, and seemingly countless subway lines that make up the city. Whitehead makes America’s fascination with labeling the focus of Apex Hides the Hurt (2006). The protagonist, a “nomenclature consultant” who, ironically, remains anonymous throughout the text, is hired by Winthrop, a Midwestern town in search of a new name. The disputes over the two main choices for the new name, one representing Winthrop’s past and the other its future, are not merely disagreements over a new name, but over the very identity of the town and its people. Whitehead’s latest work, Sag Harbor: A Novel, was published in 2009. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Eavesdropping: A conversation between Walter Mosley and Colson Whitehead. Book (May 2001), 44–7.
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WIDEMAN, JOHN EDGAR
Liggins, S. (2006). The Urban Gothic Vision of Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1999). African American Review, 40(2), 359–69. Miller, L. (1999). The Salon Interview: Going Up. Salon. At www.salon.com/books/int/1999/01/cov_si_12int. html, accessed Jan. 17, 2010. Russell, A. (2007). Recalibrating the Past: Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 49(1), 46. Whitehead, C. (1999). The Intuitionist. New York: Anchor. Whitehead, C. (2001). John Henry Days. New York: Doubleday. Whitehead, C. (2002). Introduction. In D. Rees, Get Your War On. New York: Soft Skull. Whitehead, C. (2003). The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts. New York: Doubleday. Whitehead, C. (2006). Apex Hides the Hurt. New York: Doubleday.
Wideman, John Edgar BONNIE TUSMITH
John Edgar Wideman is an African American writer of extraordinary skill, intellect, and commitment. His literary career spans some 40 years with 18 books and numerous essays, including 10 novels, four volumes of short stories, and four memoirs. Born in Washington, DC in 1941, he was raised in Homewood, a black community in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he won all-Ivy status on the basketball team and, subsequently, attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. In their narrative strategies, self-reflexive tone, and sense of alienation and despair, Wideman’s first three novels – A Glance Away (1967), Hurry Home (1970), and The Lynchers (1973) – might be categorized as “high modernist.” During an eightyear hiatus, he reconnected with his African American roots and worked to forge a new literary language grounded in the storytelling tradition of his family that resulted in three works of fiction – Damballah (1981a), Hiding Place (1981b), and Sent for You Yesterday (1983) – published as The Homewood Trilogy (1985). The third work in the trilogy received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and established the author as a major American writer. Three novels published in the 1990s are set in Philadelphia, an American city with a traumatic past. Philadelphia Fire (1990) addresses the city’s
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1985 bombing of the MOVE organization’s house, which killed 11 residents and burned down the neighborhood. With Part 2 structured as a letter to Wideman’s incarcerated son, the novel clearly engages James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963). The devastating social changes that have moved American society from the 1960s to the 1980s – and the further divide between black fathers and sons this has engendered – are movingly depicted and analyzed. This novel also won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, making Wideman the first writer to receive the award twice. The Cattle Killing (1996) takes place during Philadelphia’s 1793 yellow-fever epidemic. It employs viral disease as a metaphor for racial hatred, a device Wideman first used in a short story entitled “Fever.” The novel’s elegant, timeappropriate eighteenth-century prose displays Wideman’s virtuosity. In its combination of genres (picaresque, epistolary, medical journal, conversion narrative), this unique and compelling work exemplifies what literary scholars have termed “historiographic metafiction.” Two Cities (1998) examines the potential for healing and redemption within endangered black urban communities. Wideman’s version of “a love story” is anything but a conventional romance. Bridge imagery abounds, metaphorically linking the rivers of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia across generational, gender, and racial divides. Wideman has consistently received high praise for his artistry, especially for his ability to render voice and multiple perspectives through seamless, variegated prose that resembles a jazz performance. “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing” is the motto that informs Wideman’s writing. Play, improvisation, words, and images that transform and shape-shift – these characteristics can be attributed to his unique brand of postmodernist discourse. Wideman’s footloose, orally based poetic prose defies labeling, in ways similar to that of the “trickster” novelist Ishmael Reed and the “magic realist” Toni Morrison. In addition, the technique of metanarrative, whereby the “author” steps in and comments on the writing process, is an especially effective device in Wideman’s hands. Openly acknowledging the conscious construction of the text not only invites reader participation, but also conveys honesty – a sense that the writer is making every effort, through the medium of language, to tell a human story.
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Honesty is a salient trait in any Wideman text. In tracing, articulating, and debunking what he identifies as the historically destructive “paradigm of race” operative in the US and elsewhere, Wideman has been unsparing in his critique. Above all, his works convey profound insight into racial issues and the damage that racism has wrought in American culture and society. In “A Letter to Fanon” (in Wideman, 2008), he reveals a lifetime interest in writing a novel about the Algerian political activist because “I wanted to be somebody, an unflinchingly honest, scary somebody like Frantz Fanon whose words and deeds just might ignite a revolution, just might help cleanse the world of the plague of racism” (4). He has failed, the narrator/author concludes, but he keeps trying. Although Fanon is not the book Wideman had intended to write, this “novel” about trying to write a novel on Fanon is actually the successful culmination of Wideman’s literary efforts. As a courageous writer and risk-taker, Wideman has not worked to make his writing palatable or “comfortable” for the reader, especially when it comes to topics such as race and sexuality. In his intensity, skill, and overall achievement, Wideman is on a par with the Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison. However, unlike Morrison, Wideman’s works all tend to be treated as autobiographical, partly because he interweaves family members and real-life incidents into his narratives. A consummate artist who is obviously in control of his craft, Wideman often chooses to relinquish the “protection” afforded by fiction. The emotional rawness found in his works and the desperate world he portrays risk losing readers who simply do not want to “go there.” Despite these potential drawbacks, however, adventurous readers who seek intellectually challenging, brilliantly innovative, brutally honest, and deeply compassionate writing will be more than compensated for their efforts. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Morrison, Toni (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Byerman, K. (1998). John Edgar Wideman: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne.
Coleman, J. W. (1989). Blackness and Modernism: The Literary Career of John Edgar Wideman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Julien, C. (ed.) (1999). John Edgar Wideman: The European Response [special issue]. Callaloo, 22(3). TuSmith, B. (ed.) (1998). Conversations With John Edgar Wideman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. TuSmith, B., & Byerman, K. (eds.) (2006). Critical Essays on John Edgar Wideman. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Wideman, J. E. (1981a). Damballah. New York: Avon. Wideman, J. E. (1981b). Hiding Place. New York: Avon. Wideman, J. E. (1983). Sent for You Yesterday. New York: Avon. Wideman, J. E. (1989). Fever. New York: Henry Holt. Wideman, J. E. (1990). Philadelphia Fire. New York: Henry Holt. Wideman, J. E. (1996). The Cattle Killing. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Wideman, J. E. (1998). Two Cities. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Wideman, J. E. (2005). God’s Gym. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Wideman, J. E. (2008). Fanon. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Wilder, Thornton NANCY BUNGE
Thornton Wilder aspired to write so well that his work would help his contemporaries understand the importance of treating each other kindly. Thornton Wilder was born April 17, 1897 in Madison, Wisconsin to Amos Parker Wilder, a newspaper owner and editor, and Isabella Thornton Niven Wilder. He received a broad education, both in the classroom and out of it. In 1906, when his father moved to China as consul general to the British colony of Hong Kong, Thornton went with him and attended school there for six months. Wilder received the rest of his early education in California except for time he spent at the Inland Mission School, Chefoo, China in 1910. In 1915, he began undergraduate studies at Oberlin College in classics, later transferring to Yale, where he received his BA in 1920. He then went to Rome to study archaeology at the American Academy. After receiving his degree, he lingered in Rome studying art and in Paris studying language. He returned to the United States and taught at Lawrenceville, a preparatory school in New Jersey. While there, he composed and
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published his first novel, The Cabala (1926), which appeared the same year he earned an MA in French from Princeton University. Not surprisingly, given this background, Wilder’s first three books, The Cabala (1926), The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), and The Woman of Andros (1930), use gorgeous language to describe foreign settings and characters. While the other two books concentrate on the upper classes, The Bridge of San Luis Rey includes characters from a variety of backgrounds and raises broad questions about fate. It received the Pulitzer Prize in 1928. Some critics complained that the concerns at the center of Wilder’s work seemed remote from the Depression-era United States. Despite these accusations, Wilder made clear in the introduction to The Angel That Covered the Waters (1928) that he had no intention of writing for aesthetes; he wanted to produce work that would awaken all readers and audiences to their better selves. Wilder saw a culture that had lost respect for kindness and generosity; he hoped to remind people that these qualities matter by creating literature that evoked life’s spiritual resonance. Wilder’s believed point of view would play a central role in this enterprise because he aimed to produce work that would coax audiences to arrive at these insights themselves. His next novel, Heaven’s My Destination (1935), a comic novel describing the adventures of a textbook salesman, was set in America, and used common speech and experiences. But it did not succeed nearly as well as Wilder’s next effort, the play Our Town (1938), also composed with ordinary events and language. While Heaven’s Our Destination has fallen into oblivion, Our Town won a Pulitzer Prize and continues to garner praise, most notably from playwrights who testify to the play’s influence on their own work. Perhaps Wilder concluded that using familiar events worked better on a stage than in fiction, for his next novel, The Ides of March (1948), takes place in Rome. Since the novel presents imagined letters from people like Cicero and Caesar, here, as in a play, the job of synthesizing and making meaningful the information the letters present rests with the reader. The novel affirms the importance on entertaining various points of view, especially by linking this capacity to love, and
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nudges its readers toward intellectual flexibility since they must create a significant whole from the letters. The Eighth Day (1967) presents Wilder’s theme, life’s spiritual unity and imagination’s essential role in realizing it, more overtly than any of his earlier novels. Not only does its narrator state it repeatedly, but also the book fills out the concept with rich, complicated characters described in dense detail. Critics believed that this approach worked so well that Wilder won the National Book Award for the book. Wilder’s fictional career consists of a series of experiments with point of view that led him through a rich collection of materials from both the contemporary world and the ancient past, as well as a variety of writing styles ranging from the spare simplicity of Heaven’s My Destination to the dense particularity of The Eighth Day. Wilder’s final novel, Theophilus North (1973), again offers an affirmative vision through its characterization of Theophilus, a narrator-hero whose imaginative abilities allow him to give those he encounters advice that frees them by inviting them to regard events from new points of view. Theophilus, like his creator, spends his life trying to liberate others from their imaginative limits. In a way, this novel takes Wilder’s fiction career full circle in that The Cabala also presented a narrator who attempted, much less successfully than Theophilus, to help his friends; revealingly, at the novel’s conclusion, Theophilus decides to become a writer. SEE ALSO: Modernist Fiction (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Blank, M., Brunauer, D. H., & Izzo, D. G. (eds.) (1999). Thornton Wilder: New Essays. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill. Harrison, G. (1983). The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder. New York: Ticknor and Fields. Walsh, C. (1993). Thornton Wilder: A Reference Guide 1926–1990. New York: G. K. Hall. Wilder, T. (1926). The Cabala. New York: Boni. Wilder, T. (1928). The Angel That Troubled the Waters. New York: Coward-McCann. Wilder, T. (1930). The Woman of Andros. New York: Boni.
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Wilder, T. (1934). Heaven’s My Destination. New York: Harper. Wilder, T. (1938). Our Town. New York: Harper and Row. Wilder, T. (1939). The Bridge of San Luis Rey. New York: Boni. Wilder, T. (1942). By the Skin of Our Teeth. New York: Harper. Wilder, T. (1948). The Ides of March. New York: Harper and Brothers. Wilder, T. (1954). General Report. In The Artist in Modern Society [report of International Conference of Artists, Venice, 1952]. Venice: n.p. Wilder, T. (1967). The Eighth Day. New York: Harper and Row. Wilder, T. (1973). Theophilus North. New York: Harper and Row. Wilder, T. (1979). American Characteristics and Other Essays (ed. D. Gallup). New York: Harper and Row. Wilder, T. (1985). The Journals of Thornton Wilder. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Wolfe, Thomas TERRY ROBERTS
Thomas Clayton Wolfe was a major American novelist of the first half of the twentieth century, whose long-term reputation rests largely on the impact of his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929), and on the short fiction that appeared during the last years of his life. Wolfe was born on October 3, 1900, and his promising writing career was cut off by his premature death from tubercular meningitis on September 15, 1938. Wolfe’s biography is particularly significant because his own life was the source for much of his fiction, and he was haunted throughout his career by the charge that he could only write thinly disguised autobiography. This is unfortunate, because time has shown Look Homeward, Angel to be one of the finest American coming-of-age novels, and his widely celebrated short fiction ranges far beyond his personal experience. During the last 20 years, scholars have realized that Wolfe’s lasting value has little to do with autobiography but rather with his lifelong experiments in form and style. Wolfe was born and reared in the small mountain town of Asheville, North Carolina, the youngest of the seven children of W. O. and Julia Wolfe
who survived infancy. His raw and sometimes violent family history is retold as that of the Gant family in Look Homeward, Angel. Wolfe was educated in the public schools of Asheville and in a private academy run by John Munsey Roberts and his wife Margaret, whom Wolfe later called “the mother of [his] spirit.” He enrolled at the University of North Carolina when he was 16 and graduated in 1920. Widely read and intensely sensitive, he convinced his mother to finance further study at Harvard University, where he enrolled in the celebrated English 47 playwriting workshop taught by George Pierce Baker. He had two plays produced by the workshop while at Harvard and graduated with his MA in 1922. After Harvard, Wolfe moved to New York and accepted a teaching position at the Washington Square College of New York University, intending to pursue a career as a playwright. His plays were characteristically long and complex, and he was unable to find a producer for them. In 1924, he sailed for Europe to further his education – the first of seven trips he made there during his short lifetime – and during the return voyage in August 1925, he met Aline Bernstein, a respected costume designer in the New York theater world. Their turbulent relationship (which both went on to describe in fiction) was the primary intimacy of Wolfe’s life. It was Bernstein who encouraged Wolfe to give up playwriting for fiction, and during a 1926 trip to Europe with her, Wolfe began the “Autobiographical Outline” that became the basis for Look Homeward, Angel. Although their relationship would not withstand the pressures of extreme differences in background and circumstance, Bernstein’s faith in Wolfe’s talent freed him to devote his life to writing, which he was to do until his death in 1938. The result was one more monumental novel, Of Time and the River (1935b), and a collection of short stories, From Death to Morning (1935a), published during his life, as well as three controversial posthumous works. Significantly, the other important, non-familial relationships in Wolfe’s life had to do with editing his work. The first was with Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons who nurtured the careers of Hemingway and Fitzgerald as well as Wolfe. The second was a young agent named Elizabeth Nowell, who became Wolfe’s confidante, agent,
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and editor in the late 1930s, often laboring tirelessly to cut his short stories to a length that magazines would accept. Wolfe’s first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, is a quintessential Bildungsroman, describing the boyhood and young manhood of its protagonist Eugene Gant. It was edited and championed by Perkins, who helped Wolfe cut and shape the original manuscript (entitled O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life) to produce what he regarded as a publishable book. Early reviews were extraordinarily positive despite the book’s length and apparent lack of plot. In form, Look Homeward, Angel is a portrait of the life of its protagonist from birth to his university graduation that focuses on his rich inner life as it evolves; the evolution of Eugene Gant’s “buried life,” rather than an external plot, provides the book’s structure. Reviewers found the book new and different in a deeply moving way, at once scathingly honest and at the same time profoundly evocative. The heightened prose seemed perfectly appropriate to its highly sensitive protagonist. Many readers in Wolfe’s home town of Asheville, however, were outraged at his portrayal of recognizable individuals and events. The controversy surrounding the extent to which the novel was autobiographical fueled what was to become one of the two most consistent criticisms of Wolfe’s work: that it was little more than thinly disguised personal history and that Wolfe himself lacked critical control of his materials. These criticisms were not blunted by the appearance of Wolfe’s second novel six years later, Of Time and the River, a 912-page continuation of the story of Eugene Gant. Of Time and the River is a sprawling, modern epic that inspired ecstatic initial praise from many reviewers who saw it as the prototypical great American novel at a time when the demise of the novel was being widely discussed. Of Time and the River is divided into eight “books” with classical titles that continue the story of Eugene Gant’s search for understanding through graduate school, teaching in New York, and exploration of Europe; as with Look Homeward, Angel, the book has no traditional plot but rather takes its form from the evolution of the protagonist’s sensibility. Comparisons to Melville and Whitman were common because of Wolfe’s lush,
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poetic prose and his willingness to confront complex, deeply human questions head-on. Even in the midst of the praise, however, some critics began to ask just what sort of books Wolfe was producing: were Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River truly novels, or were they catalogues, anatomies, or even histories? This uncertainty as to form contributed to the critical backlash that was to follow. Among those who questioned Wolfe’s maturity as a writer was historian Bernard DeVoto, who in 1936 published an essay review infamously titled “Genius Is Not Enough,” in which he argued that Wolfe’s books had been created by the “assembly line at Scribner’s.” Stung by this and other attacks, Wolfe cut all professional ties with Perkins and Scribner’s just prior to his death and signed a new publishing contract with the young editor Edward C. Aswell at Harper and Brothers. After Wolfe’s unexpected death in 1938, Aswell would go on to publish three books that he stitched together out of the thousands of Wolfe manuscript pages with which he was left – books whose authorship has sparked continuing scholarly argument in the years since. Notably, the phrase most often associated with Wolfe – “You Can’t Go Home Again” – was the title of one of those books (1940). Although he was extraordinarily popular during his life, Wolfe’s posthumous reputation continued to decline until the very end of the twentieth century, in part because his books seemed all the more voluminous in an era of increasingly short, tightly plotted novels. Further, his rich, impressionistic style, which had seemed so new when it first appeared between the wars, came to seem more bloated than powerful. A number of commentators dismissed even Look Homeward, Angel as a book that only young, emotional readers could love, not a mature work of art. By the last decade of the twentieth century, however, the critical tides again shifted in Wolfe’s favor. First, there has been a renewed interest in his shorter fiction – the stories and novellas that appeared during the last years of his life – and for this reason the publication of The Short Novels of Thomas Wolfe in 1961 and of his Complete Short Stories in 1987 are both significant events. This trend has removed the critical spotlight from his long, often autobiographical novels and turned it instead on his shorter, more objective
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fiction. Second, there has been a slow but steady re-evaluation of his importance as a modernist innovator that has come from international as well as American scholars. This trend has challenged the stereotype of Wolfe as an overwrought romantic. The original – and mistaken – image of Wolfe as an overgrown adolescent spewing words at the page with ferocious and uncontrolled glee finally died out of the popular mind, leaving room for genuine reassessment. Scholars have in many instances returned to what made Wolfe unique in the first place: his lifelong willingness to experiment with narrative structure combined with his lush, evocative style. When the unsuspecting reader first opens the cover of Look Homeward, Angel – whether in 1929 or 2009 – he or she encounters something rare: a genuinely poetic novel about raw American experience. In addition, the new generation of readers and scholars has noticed how, late in his career, Wolfe turned his attention outward rather than inward, and in so doing, focused on lives other than his own. In a series of stories and short novels like “Child by Tiger,” “I Have a Thing to Tell You,” “Web of Earth,” “Party at Jack’s,” and “The Lost Boy,” he not only experimented with point of view and narrative structure, but also captured the inner lives of a wide variety of compelling characters. As C. Hugh Holman and others have pointed out, Wolfe’s eventual reputation may well rest on his mastery of the short novel – his ability to paint on the smaller rather than the larger canvas. The growing interest in Wolfe’s short fiction and renewed interest in his lifelong willingness to experiment with form bode well for his eventual place in the canon because they counteract what has become the stereotypical view of Wolfe’s fiction as critically immature. They suggest, instead, what is in the final analysis a more balanced view of Thomas Wolfe – that of a deliberate and innovative craftsman, a writer who sought constantly throughout his career to expand the power of language to convey human experience. SEE ALSO: Kerouac, Jack (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); The Southern Novel (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Conroy, P. (2000). A Love Letter to Thomas Wolfe. Thomas Wolfe Review, 24, 21–37. DeVoto, B. (1935). Genius Is Not Enough. Saturday Review of Literature, 13, 3–4, 14–15. Donald, D. H. (1987). Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe. Boston: Little, Brown. Frings, K. (1958). Look Homeward Angel: A Play Based on the Novel by Thomas Wolfe. New York: Scribner’s. Gurko, L. (1975). Thomas Wolfe: Beyond the Romantic Ego. New York: Crowell. Harper, M. M. (1990). The Aristocracy of Art in Joyce and Wolfe. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Holman, C. H. (1975). The Loneliness at the Core: Studies in Thomas Wolfe. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Kennedy, R. S. (1962). The Window of Memory: The Literary Career of Thomas Wolfe. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Melloni, M. (1999). “The Web of Earth”: Wolfe’s Art in a Nutshell. Thomas Wolfe Review, 23, 3–10. Nowell, E. (1960). Thomas Wolfe: A Biography. New York: Doubleday. Reeves, P. (1968). Thomas Wolfe’s Albatross: Race and Nationality in America. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Rubin, L. D. (1955). Thomas Wolfe: The Weather of His Youth. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Tattoni, I. (1992). The Unfound Door: Innovative Trends in Thomas Wolfe’s Fiction. Rome: Bulzoni. Wolfe, T. (1929). Look Homeward Angel: A Story of the Buried Life. New York: Scribner’s. Wolfe, T. (1935a). From Death to Morning. New York: Scribner’s. Wolfe, T. (1935b). Of Time and the River. New York: Scribner’s. Wolfe, T. (1936). The Story of a Novel. New York: Scribner’s. Wolfe, T. (1939). The Web and the Rock. New York: Harper. Wolfe, T. (1940). You Can’t Go Home Again. New York: Harper. Wolfe, T. (1941). The Hills Beyond. New York: Harper. Wolfe, T. (1956). The Letters of Thomas Wolfe (ed. E. Nowell). New York: Scribner’s. Wolfe, T. (1961). The Short Novels of Thomas Wolfe (ed. C. H. Holman). New York: Scribner’s. Wolfe, T. (1970). The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe. 2 vols. (ed. R. S. Kennedy & P. Reeves). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Wolfe, T. (1987). The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe (ed. F. E. Skipp). New York: Scribner’s.
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Wolfe, T. (2000). O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life (ed. M. J. Bruccoli & A. Bruccoli). Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
Wolfe, Tom LEONARD MUSTAZZA
Tom Wolfe is a prolific journalist, essayist, and novelist whose innovative style and astute social commentaries have had a profound influence on American intellectual life for more than a half century. He was one of the founders of the 1960s school of writing known as the New Journalism and the inventor of pervasive cultural catchphrases, including “Radical Chic,” the “Me Generation,” and the “Right Stuff.” His 1987 novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, virtually defined the political and social climate of the 1980s and continues to serve as a cultural touchstone for New York City politics. Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Jr. was born in Richmond, Virginia on March 2, 1931. He earned a doctorate in American studies from Yale in 1957, and, over the course of the next decade, worked as a writer of feature articles for various national newspapers and magazines. Many of Wolfe’s early articles were collected and published in his first book in 1965, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. The book is important less for its content than for its innovative style, which has come to be known as the New Journalism, a narrative technique whereby the journalist approaches his or her subject in much the same way as a novelist does, preferring subjective impression over objective description, combining factual exposition with invented scenes, and eliciting emotional reactions from readers. Wolfe did not actually turn his attention to fiction proper until some three decades into his career. An admirer of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Wolfe set out to satirize the narcissistic excesses and class injustices of New York City in the 1980s in much the same way that Thackeray did nineteenth-century London. Like Thackeray, too, Wolfe originally published his novel in serial installments. The Bonfire of the Vanities appeared in Rolling Stone magazine from July 1984 to August 1985 and was published as a hugely successful novel in 1987. Wolfe takes as
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his satiric targets an arrogant wealthy bond trader named Sherman McCoy and the political and media parasites who come to prey on him after he and his mistress fail to report an accident that they have one night in the South Bronx. In his superbly etched portraits of various self-promoting politicians and manipulative news reporters, Wolfe brings to bear all of the observational and narrative skills that he had honed as a practitioner of the New Journalism. For all its literary acclaim, however, the 1990 film adaptation, directed by BrianDePalmaandstarringTomHanksandBruce Willis, was a commercial and critical disaster. Another decade went by before Wolfe published his second novel. A Man in Full (1998) tells the story of Charlie Croker, a struggling Atlanta real estate developer who is recruited by the city’s scheming mayor to help protect a promising black college football player from a rape charge. Rejecting the minimalist style of late twentieth-century fiction, this novel, like Bonfire, is a sprawling, multiplotted satire of politics, class, and media in late twentieth-century America. Although it was much anticipated at the time, the book was not well received by literary critics, nor was it as commercially successful as its predecessor. Likewise, Wolfe’s third fictional outing, I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), did not fare well critically. The novel tells the story of a poor, hardworking, academically talented, and naive young student’s experiences at a fictional Ivy League university, where sports, casual sex, parties, and drinking are the principal student interests, and wealth, fame, material possessions, and social status the main goals. Although Wolfe succeeds at times to bring his keen eye and verbal wit to bear on the contemporary youth scene, critics generally found the book tedious and its sexual passages excessive. Indeed, the British publication Literary Review even awarded the novel its Bad Sex in Fiction Award that year. Wolfe won the American Book Award in 1979 for The Right Stuff and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature in 1984. He delivered the prestigious Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities in 2006. In January 2008, the New York Times reported that Wolfe had left his long-time publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and that Little, Brown had acquired the rights to his forthcoming novel, Back to Blood.
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SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF)
Wolfe, T. (2000). Hooking Up. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wolfe, T. (2004). I Am Charlotte Simmons. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bloom, H. (ed.) (2001). Tom Wolfe. New York: Chelsea House. Card, J. (1991). Tom Wolfe and the “Experimental” Novel. Journal of American Culture, 14(3), 31–4. Masters, J. (1999). Race and the Infernal City in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Journal of Narrative Theory, 29(2), 208–27. Kennedy, L. (1997). “It’s the Third World Down There!” Urban Decline and (Post)National Mythologies in Bonfire of the Vanities. Modern Fiction Studies, 43(2), 93–111. McKeen, W. (1995). Tom Wolfe. New York: Twayne. Mustazza, L. (1992). The Limits of Narcissism: Self and Society in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. Popular Culture Review, 3(2), 3–18. Ragen, B. A. (2002). Tom Wolfe: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Salamon, J. (1992). The Devil’s Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood. New York: Dell. Scura, D. M. (ed.) (1990). Conversations with Tom Wolfe. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Shomette, D. (ed.) (1992). The Critical Response to Tom Wolfe. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Wolfe, T. (1965). The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wolfe, T. (1968a). The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Bantam. Wolfe, T. (1968b). The Pump House Gang. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wolfe, T. (1970). Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wolfe, T. (1973). The New Journalism. New York: Harper and Row. Wolfe, T. (1975). The Painted Word. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wolfe, T. (1976). Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wolfe, T. (1979). The Right Stuff. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wolfe, T. (1980). In Our Time. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wolfe, T. (1981). From Bauhaus to Our House. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wolfe, T. (1982). The Purple Decades. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wolfe, T. (1987). The Bonfire of the Vanities. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wolfe, T. (1998). A Man in Full. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
WPA and Popular Front Fiction PAULA RABINOWITZ
The 1937 novel Murder in the WPA by Alexander Williams combines the sensibilities of the hardboiled crime story – a desiccated newspaperman is embroiled in solving a series of murders for which he appears to be a potential suspect – with the political perspectives of Popular Front coalitions of communists, left-wing unions, and New Deal government employees, all of whom work with a diligent urban police force to expose a protofascist group organized within the Works Projects Administration. Williams, scion of a Washington, DC family with longstanding ties to government employment, based his tale on the fractious New York WPA, especially its Arts Projects, riven with leftist sectarian politics, pressures from the Workers’ Alliance and other unions, high-profile publicity, and an ever-changing local administration that faced ongoing assaults by the national press and Congress (Martin Dies’s House UnAmerican Activities Subcommittee). The novel probes the workings of city homicide squads and the internal office politics of the WPA, with a simultaneous nod to Dashiell Hammett and John Dos Passos. As a literary investigation of the WPA Arts Projects, it cannot compare to insider novels, such as Jack Balch’s Lamps at High Noon (1941), Vardis Fisher’s Orphans in Gethsemane (1960), or Norman Macleod’s You Get What You Ask For (1939); but, deploying a popular form (detective fiction), it was the first to explore the politics of the WPA, outlining its deep association with Popular Front aesthetics. According to Jerre Mangione’s history/memoir of the Federal Writers’ Project, the “dream” of a federally funded commitment to American arts and the “deal” of its actuality could barely be bridged. Yet, during its brief existence, the Writers’ Project succeeded in producing hundreds of books and pamphlets, including the
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indispensible American Guide series (John Steinbeck owned all 48 state guides); collected countless oral histories of slaves and Southern tenant farmers; ferreted out arcane historical records from dusty archives; and recorded innumerable examples of “folksay” from across the continent, as folklore editor Benjamin Botkin dubbed them. At its height, in 1936, it employed almost 7,000 “writers”; 40 percent were women. Many of them were unemployed reporters, recent college graduates, or anyone in states not known as hotbeds for literature – such as Wyoming and South Dakota – who could write a coherent sentence. But the literary centers of the United States – New York, Chicago, and San Francisco – housed projects that nurtured the careers of John Cheever; Harold Rosenberg; Kenneth Fearing; Claude McKay; Ralph Ellison; Anzia Yezierska; Richard Wright, who transferred from Chicago and finished Native Son (New York); Margaret Walker; Jack Conroy; Willard Motley; Arna Bontemps; Frank Yerby; Nelson Algren; Studs Terkel; Katherine Dunham; Saul Bellow (Chicago); Kenneth Rexroth; Kenneth Patchen; and Miriam Allen de Ford (California). Zora Neale Hurston collected Florida folklore, publishing three books – Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Tell My Horse (1938), and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) – while on the project’s payroll. Meridel Le Sueur rode around Minnesota delving into its secret history – including her pioneering family of socialists – for its Guidebook; novelist Vardis Fisher of Idaho – a state sparsely populated, particularly with writers – almost single-handedly crafted its Guidebook; and Sterling Brown developed studies on the “Negro” as a part of “Life in America.” Those project offices in the larger cities and states boasted contributions to their Guidebooks from an array of upcoming and established writers who somehow managed, with the help of keen editing at the national office headed by Henry Alsberg, to craft their diverse voices into a coherent, lively expression of Americana – its geographic, economic, folk, ethnic, religious, and political histories – all accessible by road. By the mid-1930s, despite the Depression, over 25 million Americans owned cars; these government-sponsored Baedeckers were meant to encourage citizens to “see the USA in [their] Chevrolet,” as Dinah Shore crooned a generation later.
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While the Federal Writers’ Project, or any of the WPA, was not part of the Popular Front, its employees, who were overwhelmingly left-wing, often viewed their work as a contribution to Popular Front efforts to unite liberals, communists, and others against the threat of fascism. As did the press, which relished sensationalized headlines such as the one following demands to censor the number of pages the Massachusetts Guidebook devoted to Sacco and Vanzetti: “Guide Book seizure urged on Governor, Reds linked to Guide Book, Purge of Communist WPA writers demanded” (Mangione 216). Paradoxically, while acknowledging press red-baiting of striking WPA writers sitting in at the New York headquarters, Williams’s mystery turns on the discovery of a homegrown militia, “Four-Square Americans,” based on the Ku Klux Klan (except the robes were purple), that was planning a fascist takeover by infiltrating government programs. Displacing the threats to the New Deal from Republicans and conservative newspapers, the novel posits debates within the WPA as a representative microcosm of American ideology during the Depression. Were the unemployed who worked on various WPA projects – from writers to ditch diggers – truly needy or freeloaders? Was the effort by the federal government to aid workers a step toward socialism or a prop for capitalism? We tend to romanticize the WPA today, particularly Federal One, its Arts Projects, as the sole consolidated government support of artists in American history; yet tremendous shame attached to WPA jobs, even those in the elite Arts Projects. In order to qualify for WPA employment, one must have been on relief and declared indigent. Many writers, firmly middle-class, refused to declare themselves paupers, and so remained ineligible, despite eventual exemptions for up to 25 percent of the workforce (and all of the Projects’ administration). Those doing “pick and shovel work,” the vast majority of WPA jobs, were branded as relief cases, shaming their families when they participated in Public Works projects, often quite publicly. Assistant administrator of the WPA Ellen Woodward, testifying to the Dies Committee, reminded the Congressmen that “we are dealing with thousands upon thousands of people who are pretty well licked by this Depression” (Mangione 312).
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Social worker turned novelist Caroline Slade gave up work in New York’s child welfare offices to write fiction after witnessing the ambivalence among unemployed men upon receiving a WPA job and the utter neglect of unemployed women by the government. Proud to be able to feed their families, the men nevertheless became symbols of deprivation, while the women were consigned to prostitution; this was the implicit argument of her novels, The Triumph of Willie Pond (1940) and Sterile Sun (1936). Public disclosure of impoverishment was bad enough; the realization, when work began drying up as the Roosevelt administration cut back funding after 1937, that without the WPA job a family would retreat into poverty led unemployed father Willie Pond to “triumph” over the system of regulations restricting eligibility by committing suicide, leaving his children dependants qualifying for government aid. Slade’s critique, coming in 1940 when the Popular Front coalition was in tatters after the Non-Aggression Pact signed in 1939 between Hitler and Stalin, revealed how tenuous were the connections between government programs (though not necessarily their employees) and Popular Front organizations and ideas. The WPA was always conceived by the Roosevelt administration as a temporary solution to unemployment, but artists and progressives saw it quite differently: as a model for federal support of artists and other workers to refashion American mass culture into a truly democratic vernacular form. At the League of American Writers’ second congress in 1937, Alsberg argued, “We must get over the idea that every writer must be an artist of the first class, and that the writer of the second and third class has no function” (Hart 245). His case for a range of writers working across genres – from news reports to folklore collections to travelogue to fiction and poetry – implicitly updated Michael Gold’s earlier calls for a new kind of proletarian writer drawn from the mines, mills, and farms across the nation. Despite the Communist Party’s replacement of the John Reed Clubs (meant to develop these proletarian writers) with the more expansive League (designed to appeal to established authors), Alsberg’s call suggested a model for encouraging writing from below: in addition to assigning acclaimed authors to work, let mediocre ones contribute; they too have a right to eat. If some writers balked at assignments – those on
the Arts Project could spend time in their studios painting rather than being tied to an office desk, like newspaper reporters, or buried in a city’s hall of records, like legal secretaries – the research they gleaned from library archives, legal documents, and urban legend often found its way into their later fiction, or generated new literary forms. Jack Conroy, whose novel The Disinherited (1933) exemplifies proletarian fiction, worked on the Chicago Project collecting material that would find its way into They Seek a City (1945), the sociological study of black migration he co-authored with another WPA writer, Arna Bontemps. Such writers shared a democratic urge – to give voice to common people through oral histories, record “folksay,” reconstruct the seedy history behind a city government, or poke into local traditions. But their work also demonstrated how the Popular Front and Federal One might conjoin public, popular, and folk cultures and, with the employment of many writers in radio and movies (both also part of Federal One), mass media. The Popular Front, never stable, amalgamated multiple perspectives: viewed one way, it represented a repressive top-down effort by the Communist Party to rein in various factions comprising the Left in defense of Soviet (and Stalin’s) survival. Thus the cynical shift away from nurturing a radical proletarian culture to encouraging a broad coalition of progressives in support of “the people” was really an attempt to undermine criticisms of the Soviet Union and to squash diverse elements within the working class in an effort to stanch fascism not only seizing power across Europe in Spain, Italy, and Germany, but also taking root in America. Alan Wald sees this “anti-fascist crusade” as more complex, however, because the literary Left, especially Jewish and black writers, found ways to critique racism and anti-Semitism within the nation and within the party, even when these efforts defied Popular Front policies. The Popular Front also represented a democratic effort to widen the reach of culture and politics across classes and social groups, thereby producing a truer picture of the complexities of modern society through the guise of a simple formula: support striking workers; fight racism and fascism. Yet this Popular Front sensibility could appear as a sugar-coated vision
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WPA AND POPULAR FRONT FICTION
of solidarity, an effort to submerge differences within the working class by connecting African Americans, workers, hoboes, housewives, intellectuals, organizers – and anyone else living in “this land [that] was made for you and me,” as Woody Guthrie sang. This was essentially the criticism of the anti-Stalinist Left – and continued throughout the Cold War years. Those associated with Partisan Review, critics Robert Warshow, Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, and Philip Rahv among them, saw through what Wilson called, describing Ernest Hemingway’s work in a 1938 essay for the New Republic, “the snow blindness” of communism’s allure for writers during the Depression. Michael Denning argues that the Popular Front should best be understood as essentially a cultural movement responding to vast demographic changes in the United States as first- and second-generation immigrants and migrants flooded the workforce following World War I, transforming America’s cities with new languages and socialist politics. This “laboring of American culture,” Denning argues, permeated music, movies, literature, and drama, just as mass culture was developing new modes of communication – radio, magazines, and cinema – to attract these very audiences. As Murray Kempton noted, by 1937, “Popular culture replaced proletarian culture; the New Masses offered unguarded pleasantries to Fannie Hurst . . . Albert Maltz went to Hollywood; and others went to radio” (145). A Time to Remember (1936), Leane Zugsmith’s novel about the Orbach’s department store workers strike, offers a keen synopsis of Popular Front sensibilities as they were translated into fiction. Far less well known than John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath or Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls – both classic examples of critically acclaimed Popular Front novels dealing with the Dust Bowl and the Spanish Civil War, respectively – A Time to Remember updates Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900). It traces the story of a lowermiddle-class second-generation Brooklyn Jewish girl’s radicalization as she takes the train – actually, the subway – to the big city, joins a union, goes on strike, meets members of different ethnic and racial groups, falls in love, collaborates with left-leaning society types to organize the League of Women Shoppers in support of the striking shop girls, and defies her traditional parents to enter
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mainstream American culture through labor, union organizing, and shopping. Unlike reportage or poetry, novels cannot be topical in quite the same way as short work meant to respond viscerally to the moment; for the former, there is considerable lag time between conception, writing, and publication. Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), begun in 1938 in response to what he felt to be a misconstruing of his collection of stories, Uncle Tom’s Children, and to his outrage over the Robert Nixon case blazing across Chicago tabloids, could benefit greatly from the WPA; Wright was among the few New York authors allowed to work from home on his own writing. His essay for the WPA anthology American Stuff, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” a scathing indictment of racism placed at the heart of a collection by WPA authors meant to showcase their work to elicit congressional and popular support for Federal One, became the basis for his 1945 autobiography, Black Boy, which first appeared in print after World War II, without the sections on Wright’s party affiliation. Native Son concludes with communist lawyer Max explaining Bigger’s murders through the lens of pre-Popular Front ideas about the Black Belt but incorporating Popular Front sensibilities about the grand coalition linking wealthy left-wing whites, such as Mary Dalton, to street toughs like Bigger. All of which is to say that even loyal party members and diligent Writers’ Project authors produced work that was temporally, and temperamentally, out of synch with the theories and institutions supporting a progressive writer. Meridel Le Sueur’s novel The Girl, published in 1974, was written in 1939 while she worked for the Minnesota Writers’ Project collecting stories from unemployed women through the Workers’ Alliance and researching St. Paul history. Its description of the getaway that a girl and her lover Butch take through the Minnesota countryside following their botched bank robbery reads as a variant of the road tours elaborated in the Minnesota Guidebook. Her novel failed to find a publisher, despite her use of the gangster and fallen woman plots so popular in early 1930s Hollywood to augment a female proletarian novel, because it seemed too far-fetched by the late 1930s; it may have preached worker solidarity, but the workers who unite were all
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females working in bars or walking the streets, a far cry from the upbeat picture expected of Popular Front literature as Roosevelt geared for war and the party denounced war after the Hitler–Stalin Pact. Philip Roth’s novels, especially I Married a Communist (1998) and The Plot Against America (2004), take up the residual affect created in boys by the Popular Front culture from the late 1930s through World War II. In their attention to the ways radio, movies, and magazines spread a wholesome version of left-wing sentiment about America, the New Deal, and then the war, Roth’s novels convey the contradictory impact of the New Deal and the Popular Front on American vernacular culture. During the 1930s, it was not fiction but the mass media that normalized Popular Front and WPA programs: Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman are the powerful emblems of Spanish Loyalists; John Carradine and Jane Darnton driving the Joads’ jalopy into the New Deal camp are “the people.” These ironies extend to Margaret Mitchell’s bestseller, Gone With the Wind, written during the 1920s at the height of Ku Klux Klan violence but published in 1936, which became a Hollywood blockbuster in 1939. This nostalgic paean to Jim Crow competed with MGM’s Popular Front version of The Wizard of Oz, in which various segments of working-class Oz – intellectuals, youth, farmers, tradesmen, even dogs; some native-born, some immigrants – join together and overcome the sinister control of monomaniacal leaders beyond and within its borders. Roth’s novels capture these antinomies within postwar popular culture to reveal the complicated and lasting legacy of the Popular Front and WPA on American fiction. SEE ALSO: Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); Working-Class Fiction (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Aaron, D. (1977). Writers on the Left. New York: Oxford University Press. Alsberg, H. G. (1937). Extemporaneous Remarks at the Second American Writers Congress, June 1937. In H. Hart (ed.), The Writer in a Changing World. New York: Equinox Cooperative.
Bontemps, A., & Conroy, J. (1945). They Seek a City. New York: Doubleday. Botkin, B. A. (ed.) (1944). A Treasury of American Folklore. New York: Crown. Denning, M. (1996). The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso. Federal Writers’ Project, Federal Arts Project. (1937). American Stuff: An Anthology of Prose and Verse. New York: Viking. Foley, B. (1993). Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Garman, B. K. (2000). A Race of Singers: Whitman’s Working-Class Hero From Guthrie to Springsteen. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Kazin, A. (1942). On Native Grounds. New York: Harcourt Brace. Kempton, M. (1955). Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties. New York: Simon and Schuster. Le Sueur, M. (1978). The Girl. Cambridge: West End. Mangione, J. (1983). The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project, 1935–1943. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. McElvaine, R. (1984). The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941. New York: Times. Rabinowitz, P. (1991). Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Roth, P. (1998). I Married a Communist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, P. (2004). The Plot Against America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Saal, I. (2007). New Deal Theater: The Vernacular Tradition in American Political Theater. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Slade, C. (1936). Sterile Sun. New York: Vanguard. Slade, C. (1940) The Triumph of Willie Pond. New York: Vanguard. Szalay, M. (2000). New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wald, A. (2007). Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Welky, D. (2008). Everything Was Better in America: Print Culture in the Great Depression. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Williams, A. (1937). Murder in the WPA. New York: Robert McBride. Wright, R. (1940). Native Son. New York: Harper. Zugsmith, L. (1936). A Time to Remember. New York: Random House.
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WRIGHT, RICHARD
Wright, Richard WENDY W. WALTERS
Richard Wright was the most famous African American novelist of his era, and remains today one of the most prominent black writers in the world. His work spans multiple genres, including the short story, autobiography, novel, poetry, travelogue, essay, and haiku. He was the first African American writer to be able to support himself (and his family) solely from his writing, which has been widely translated throughout the world. Native Son (1940c), Wright’s most successful novel, was published to great acclaim by Harper and Brothers, a major American publisher. It was a landmark event since this was the first African American novel to be offered by the Book of the Month Club as one of its main selections. Wright’s work is philosophically driven by the major ideas and movements that influenced his life and his reading, including social realism, communism, existentialism, and psychoanalysis. He was particularly interested in the ways an individual is shaped by his or her environment. Wright’s upbringing in poverty in the Jim Crow American South, his migration to the urban North of Chicago, and his final expatriation in France all shaped his ideas and helped mold his global perspectives on literature, politics, and the human condition. Richard Nathaniel Wright was born on a Mississippi plantation, about 20 miles east of Natchez, on September 4, 1908. His father was an illiterate sharecropper, and his mother was for a time a schoolteacher. All four of Wright’s grandparents were born in slavery. The first 19 years of Wright’s life were spent in Mississippi and Tennessee, where his family struggled with the racist social structure and its concomitant conditions of poverty, illness, violence, and hunger. Wright’s schooling was erratic, and he and his family moved often, seeking affordable housing, available employment, andassistance for his mother’s illhealth, as his father had early on deserted the family. Despite these circumstances, Wright was an avid reader, and graduated from Smith Robertson Junior High in 1925 as the school valedictorian. Asserting his independence as a writer, he insisted on presenting his own speech, resisting the principal’s pressure to author it for him.
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Wright often worked to support his family and to afford his own schoolbooks, and his autobiography, Black Boy (1945), details his experiences working in the American South under heavy racial oppression. Wright always found ways to get reading material, often using his various places of employment to facilitate his access to books otherwise forbidden to black people in the South. One of these formative experiences, which he describes in Black Boy, concerns his reading of H. L. Mencken, a long-time critic of the South. In reading Mencken, Wright discovered that words could be used as weapons, and this realization solidified in him a desire to fight injustice with his writing. The constriction of living in the South finally became untenable, and, like so many other Southern-born African Americans in the first decades of the twentieth century, Wright migrated north to Chicago with his aunt in 1927. While working at various jobs in Chicago, including the post office, Wright met members of the John Reed Club, a literary organization sponsored by the Communist Party. He became involved in this group, reading its journals, submitting his own revolutionary poetry, and eventually joining the Communist Party in 1934. During this time he also read widely among such authors as Gertrude Stein (who would later become a friend), Henry James, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser, and many others. In 1935 he published a now widely anthologized poem about lynching, “Between the World and Me,” in the Partisan Review. In 1935 he was also hired by the Federal Writers’ Project, a part of the Works Progress Administration. He continued to support his family, to organize for the Communist Party, to meet with and organize various writing groups in Chicago and the Midwest, and to publish his work. His story “Big Boy Leaves Home” was published in the anthology The New Caravan (1936). Wright’s involvement with the Communist Party exemplifies his complex position and philosophy as an artist, since he was attracted by the party’s promise of social and political equality, and yet frustrated as the party leadership demanded more and more control over its writers and artists. For Wright, as a poor person, a working person, and a black man in America,
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the ideals of equality and freedom espoused by the party had appeal. And yet throughout his life, Wright sought to define himself apart from various groups, believing ultimately in the importance of both individual and artistic freedom. In 1937, he moved to New York City to attempt to earn a living as a writer, soon publishing an important essay, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” in which Wright took an authoritative position against earlier African American literature, which he accused of pandering to whites, “dressed in the knee-pants of servility.” He argued for a more social-realist aesthetic – one offering direct political confrontation with social inequalities, and in a sense ushering in his own forthcoming protest fiction. Wright’s positioning here demonstrates his human complexity and contradiction: he sought artistic freedom, and at the same time crafted a “blueprint” for future writing. Another important essay published in 1937 was “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch,” in American Stuff: WPA Writers’ Anthology. This essay would later become a part of his autobiography, Black Boy, and was also later included in the second edition of his well-received collection of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children (1940d [1938]). In this essay, he details some of the specific and myriad injustices faced by African Americans in the South. The House Special Committee on Un-American Activities denounced the essay, which initiated a long history of US state surveillance of Wright. His work also drew the attention of the literary establishment, and he received several important awards for his short fiction, culminating in a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1939. During this time he was active in various Harlem literary circles, which included such writers as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Alain Locke, and others. Wright’s first novel, Native Son (1940c), sold 215,000 copies in the first three weeks. The effect of Native Son is hard to overstate. In this novel, mainstream American readers saw a compelling and dramatic portrayal of the effects of American racism on a set of Northern, urban characters, especially on Wright’s difficult protagonist, Bigger Thomas. Wright uses Bigger, a poor, African American youth living in a segregated part of Chicago, to depict the ways that social exclusion damages one’s consciousness. In the interaction between Bigger and the wealthy white Dalton
family, readers also see the effects of residential segregation in the North. Bigger murders two women, the white Mary Dalton and his black girlfriend, Bessie, and ends the book facing the electric chair. Many have characterized the novel as a wake-up call (it opens with the ringing of Bigger’s alarm clock) about the potentially violent outcome of racism in America. Shortly after Native Son was published, Wright gave a lecture in New York entitled “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” and this text has been appended to later versions of Native Son. It provides an analysis of Wright’s aims for his novel and for his social critique in general. Wright explains that he felt his earlier collection of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children, was the kind of book “even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about,” and he determined to write a book no one could weep over, that would offer no salve for its hard and painful truths. Discussing the genesis of his protagonist, Wright cites several “Biggers” he had known growing up, African American males constrained by the racism of the South, and responding with violence of various kinds. He shows how the options for this character are limited to violent death, jail, or insanity. Influenced by the Chicago School of Urban Sociology, Wright created a social and literary experiment by placing his character in an urban Northern environment. The Chicago School sought to provide meaning to sociological statistics by way of individual life histories. In this sense the narrative of Bigger’s life sheds light on the plight of many of the urban poor. In his essay, Wright explains that there are also white Biggers, and thus Native Son can be read as a critique of American consumerism, materialism, and greed, finding no remedy in any healing communal value system. Here again the theme of hunger is present, as Bigger hungers for access to the glittering things that the media show him, as well as for opportunity. In writing of Bigger’s interaction with Chicago’s police force and the court system, Wright drew upon the actual case of Robert Nixon, an African American youth tried for murder in Chicago in 1938. Some of Wright’s portrayals of Bigger in the press, the police force, and the courts come directly from the Nixon trial, and stand as a scathing expose of the ways African Americans are viewed by these dominant American institutions. As Wright further explains in
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WRIGHT, RICHARD
“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” it is this fact of social (and legal) exclusion from the “vital processes of the nation’s life” that creates Bigger’s anguish, his emotional and cultural hunger. He explains that Bigger “is a dispossessed and disinherited man . . . who lives amid the greatest possible plenty on earth.” Native Son was also staged as a Broadway play, directed by Orson Welles and starring Canada Lee, and eventually it was also made into a movie, starring Wright himself as Bigger Thomas. Later, African American writers James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison would address Wright’s dominance by critiquing the portrayal of black culture in Native Son. Baldwin’s essays “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949) and “Many Thousands Gone” (1952) critiqued the one-dimensionality of Bigger Thomas and the efficacy of social protest fiction in general. Though Wright had earlier assisted Baldwin in his career in Paris, these essays led to a break between Wright and Baldwin. Wright continued his interest in examining how the Northern urban environment in many ways continued the forms of social exclusion practiced in the South, and he collaborated with Edwin Rosskam on 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (1941). Influenced by the Chicago School of Urban Sociology, this photodocumentary essay visually depicts the crumbling kitchenette apartments and poor living conditions that faced many African American migrants to the cities of the North. In his essay, Wright forcefully argues that the former tenant bosses of the South were simply replaced by the “bosses of the buildings,” who enforce a new kind of segregation in the Northern city. After the publication of this book, the FBI began a formal investigation of Wright to determine if the book was prosecutable as sedition. FBI interest in Wright continued throughout his life, despite his formal break with the Communist Party in 1942. That same year, Wright was awarded the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal for the highest achievement by an African American. Wright published his autobiography, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, in 1945 with Harper and Brothers. The book was very well reviewed, and maintained the number-one spot on the bestseller list for over a month. The publishing history of Black Boy sheds light on some of the various forces affecting African American literature more generally, and Wright’s career
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specifically. Originally Wright’s autobiography was titled American Hunger, and contained two parts: his early years in the South, followed by his migration to the North and his life in Chicago. The Book of the Month Club, however, told Wright’s publisher they would only accept the first section, so Wright changed the title to Black Boy. The second section of Wright’s autobiography, then titled American Hunger, was only published 32 years later, after Wright’s death. Though Wright’s experience with the Communist Party perhaps spurred his thinking toward internationalism, he had also expressed Bigger’s kinship with other oppressed people globally in his 1940 essay about his protagonist. In 1941 Wright married Ellen Poplar, a white woman of Jewish descent, and they had two daughters, Julia (b. 1942) and Rachel (b. 1949). Frustrated with the racism facing his young interracial family in New York, Wright moved them to Paris in 1947, where he associated with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Wright’s novel, The Outsider (1953) reflects his interest in existentialist philosophy, especially in its portrayal of a black antihero, Cross Damon. Wright also became a kind of spokesman and father figure for the community of expatriate African American artists often gathered at the Cafe Tournon, including James Baldwin, Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith, and Ollie Harrington. Wright and his family continued to live in Europe (primarily Paris) until Wright’s death in 1960. Throughout his expatriation, Wright traveled widely in Europe, Asia, and Africa, associating with many international intellectuals, including George Padmore, Aime Cesaire, Leopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon, and Eric Williams, and writing and recording his experiences. His trip to Africa in 1953 was centered in the Gold Coast, which was then a British colony with a growing independence movement that would eventually lead it to become the first independent African nation, Ghana. Wright traveled approximately 3,000 miles by car, meeting various African dignitaries, including Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah. He also visited several slave forts and confronted his own questions about the relationship between his African inheritance and his identity as a Western intellectual. His lengthy account of this journey was published in 1954 as Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos. Also in 1954, Wright
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published Savage Holiday, a Freudian experimental novel about a psychopathic murderer, featuring only white characters. Wright pursued his interest in the genres of travel writing and cultural analysis, journeying to Spain in 1954, and eventually publishing Pagan Spain (1957). Wright’s international political interests also led him to attend a conference of non-aligned nations in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955. Wright’s book about this conference, The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956), argued that these rising Third World nations were motivated by the forces of religion and race, not along lines of communism and democracy as had been depicted by Cold War superpowers. Throughout the first half of the 1950s, Wright had also been lecturing across Europe in his role as one of the world’s most famous African American authors. These lectures are collected in the book White Man, Listen! (1957). Here Wright continues his perspective as a world writer interested in the global kinship he had earlier implied between his most famous protagonist, Bigger Thomas, and other oppressed peoples of color around the world. Wright also continued to work on fiction during the late 1950s, finishing a novel set in Mississippi, The Long Dream (1958), and beginning work on “Island of Hallucinations,” which is still unpublished. A new genre for Wright in 1958 was haiku. He eventually completed approximately 4,000 haiku before his death in Paris of heart failure in 1960. Also before he died, Wright had completed proofreading another collection of stories, Eight Men, which was then published posthumously in 1961. Wright had also begun a new novel, A Father’s Law, which was published in its unfinished state on the centenary of his birth in 2008. SEE ALSO: Ellison, Ralph (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Naturalist Fiction (AF); Social-Realist Fiction (AF); WPA and Popular Front Fiction (AF)
Fabre, M. (1993). The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, 2nd edn. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Gates, H. L., Jr., & Appiah, K. A. (eds.) (1993). Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad. Hakutani, Y. (1996). Richard Wright and Racial Discourse. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. JanMohamed, A. (2005). The Death-Bound Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rampersad, A. (ed.) (1995). Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Wright, R. (1937). Blueprint for Negro Writing. New Challenge, 2, 53–65. Wright, R. (1940a). The Ethics of Living Jim Crow [1938]. In Uncle Tom’s Children: Four Novellas. New York: Harper. Wright, R. (1940b). How “Bigger” Was Born. In Native Son. New York: Harper. Wright, R. (1940c). Native Son. New York: Harper. Wright, R. (1940d). Uncle Tom’s Children: Four Novellas [1938]. New York: Harper. Wright, R. (1941). Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States. New York: Viking. Wright, R. (1953). The Outsider. New York: Harper. Wright, R. (1954a). Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos. New York: Harper. Wright, R. (1954b). Savage Holiday. New York: Avon. Wright, R. (1956). The Color Curtain: Report from the Bandung Conference. Cleveland: World. Wright, R. (1956). Pagan Spain. New York: Harper. Wright, R. (1957). White Man, Listen! New York: Doubleday. Wright, R. (1958). The Long Dream. New York: Doubleday. Wright, R. (1961). Eight Men. Cleveland: World. Wright, R. (1963). Lawd Today. New York: Walker. Wright, R. (1977). Black Boy. (American Hunger). (Originally published as Black Boy, 1945). New York: HarperCollins . Wright, R. (2008). A Father’s Law. New York: HarperCollins.
Wright, Stephen DAVID W. MADDEN
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bloom, H. (ed.) (1987). Richard Wright. Philadelphia: Chelsea House. Butler, R. (ed.) (1995). The Critical Response to Richard Wright. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Stephen Wright is an experimental writer dedicated to challenging fictional complacencies and traditions in postmodern fictions that examine American culture in all its extravagances. His subjects range among the Vietnam War,
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WRIGHT, STEPHEN
interstellar aliens, middle-class boredom, and the American Civil War, each distinguished by extraordinary stylistic virtuosity. Stephen Wright was born in 1946 in Cleveland, Ohio and attended Ohio State University. When he lapsed into academic jeopardy because of poor grades, he left the university and was drafted into the Army and educated at the US Army Intelligence School. He was sent to Vietnam, and that experience figures prominently in his first and (less overtly) fourth novels. After his discharge from the military, he returned to Ohio State and then entered the Iowa Writers’ Workshop MFA program, where he studied under John Irving. His first novel, Meditations in Green (1983), is an intricately constructed novel composed of three narrative strands. One is the subjective rumination of a drugged-out James I. Griffin, a Vietnam War veteran. The second is a thirdperson narrative of Griffin’s exploits in Vietnam, and the third offers 15 “meditations” on plant life (primarily poppies) from another subjective viewpoint. Griffin exists in a kaleidoscopic, hallucinatory condition, with dreadful nightmares of conflict, drug-addled days in postwar America, and projections of vegetable experience. Both Vietnam and Griffin’s narrative are postmodern in their shifting perspectives and uncertain boundaries. Like other chroniclers of Vietnam, Wright leaves the reader with an overriding sense of despair and utter waste. M31: A Family Romance (1988) is set in the rural Midwest, a departure from the jungles of Asia or the urban centers of America in his last novel. However, the bland exterior reveals another kind of mania in the figures of Dash and Dot and their four children, who believe they are extraterrestrials from the galaxy M31, to which they expect to return imminently. When the couple are not attending UFO conventions or preaching on latenight radio, they commit incest, terrify a pair of visitors, and interpret the wailings of their youngest child as communications with their home planet. Through this collection of grotesques, Wright interrogates fundamental American concerns of the pioneer spirit, evangelical faith, and consumer obsessiveness. Going Native (1994) is usually considered his magnum opus, a reconfiguration of the classic American road novel with far more sinister
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implications. Here Wylie Jones (later Coyote), a nondescript suburbanite, leaves his family, steals a car, and drives through the Western states on a bizarre crime spree. Composed of eight narratives, the novel presents a metafictional nesting of stories within stories united primarily by Wylie’s protean definitions of random selves. The novel teems with intertextual allusions to Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, Herman Melville, and Joseph Conrad, not to mention scores of films. The most extended and compelling of these narratives is a rewriting of The Heart of Darkness, in which a bored Hollywood couple journey through the wilds of Borneo to experience something new, only to interpret everything in terms of their vapid lives. Here, as he does throughout, Wright emphasizes the maze of postmodern simulations that define modern existence in a commercial culture. As he emphasized in each of his previous novels, when people lose their connection to any belief system larger than their immediate environment or their appetite for commodities, they are doomed. After an extended hiatus from writing, Wright returned with The Amalgamation Polka (2007), a novel he had been planning since finishing Meditations in Green. Set during the Civil War, it follows Liberty Fish, son of abolitionist parents and slaveholding grandparents, on a chronically straightforward picaresque journey from North to South and through battlefields. After deserting from the Union troops and terrors of battle, Liberty visits his racist grandparents and wanders into another horror show. The analyses of cultural failure and moral drift are once more presented in a fierce examination of slavery – its origins and legacy – America’s longest and most troubling of nightmares. Wright enjoys a solid standing in the academic community and has received a number of awards and grants, including the Maxwell Perkins Prize (1983), a Hodder Fellowship (1985), Guggenheim Fellowship (1989), the Whiting Writers Award (1990), and a Lannan Literary Award (1994). He has taught at Princeton and Brown Universities, Goucher College, and The New School. He lives in New York City. SEE ALSO: The Novel and War (AF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); The Road Novel (AF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Beidler, P. D. (1990). Re-Writing America: Literature as Cultural Revision in the New Vietnam Fiction. In Owen W. Gilman, Jr., & Lorrie Smith (eds.), America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War. New York: Garland, pp. 3–9. Byers, T., O’Donnell, P., & Schaub, T. (1998). An Interview with Stephen Wright. Contemporary Literature, 39(2), 157–79. Carpenter, L. (2003). “IT DON’T MEAN NOTHIN”: Vietnam War Fiction and Postmodernism. College Literature, 30(2), 30–50. Marın, P. (1989). Entropy in Meditations in Green. Atlantis, 11(1–2), 137–47. Mayer, R. (2005). “Just Driving”: Contemporary Road Novels and the Triviality of the Outlaw Existence. In Klaus Benesch & Kerstin Schmidt (eds.), Space in America: Theory, History, Culture. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 369–84. Metress, C. (1989). “Hopeless Tatters”: The American Movie Tradition and Vietnam in Stephen Wright’s
Meditations in Green. Studies in the Humanities, 16(2), 111–20. O’Donnell, P. (1996). Speed, Metaphor, and the Postmodern Road Novel: Stephen Wright’s Going Native and Others. Mississippi Review Online. At www.mississippireview.com/1996/odonnell.html, accessed June 28, 2010. Ringnalda, D. (1986). Chlorophyll Overdose: Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green. Western Humanities Review, 40(2), 125–40. Stewart, M. (1993). Stephen Wright’s Style in Meditations in Green. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 34(2), 126–36. Wright, S. (1983). Meditations in Green. New York: Scribner’s. Wright, S. (1988). M31: A Family Romance. New York: Harmony. Wright, S. (1994). Going Native. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wright, S. (2007). The Amalgamation Polka. New York: Vintage.
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Y Yezierska, Anzia TYRONE SIMPSON
We can find the making of Anzia Yezierska as a literary luminary in the publication history of her first short story, “The Free Vacation House” (1915). It is the tale of a poor immigrant mother and family who gain a paid retreat to the country, only to find themselves fettered to the effete lodge rules of the bourgeois woman who hosts them. The story emerged from a painstaking collaboration between the writer and her older sister, Annie, who at the time of the story’s conception was a mother of five children and the former victim of such condescending hospitality. Anzia coached her sibling into recalling her emotional response to the insulting treatment and asked her advice about how to represent the immigrant tongue on paper. Born from their partnership were the proletarian realism and ghetto dialect that gave Yezierska’s fiction its distinct accent, as well as the recurring themes of her sustained, albeit mercurial literary career: the vexations of married life and parenting, the uncertain fruits of assimilation, the spectacular material differences between the lives of the moneyed and those of the poor, the disappointments that attend the pursuit of beauty, the alienations forged by polite or malicious xenophobia, and the myriad sexisms that the ensuing jazz age would seek to remit. Using the raw materials of her own life and that of other Gotham-bound Jewish immigrants at the turn of the century, Yezierska deployed narrative to decipher the riddle of (a newcomer’s) pure desire.
Yezierska’s interest in desire’s vagaries fed off a lifetime of abiding by their demands. Born in Plotsk, a rural town in Russia’s Poland, on some day in 1882, Anzia was one of six children that the Yezierskys shepherded to the US in 1890. In 1899, at the age of 17, Yezierska fled the devout and patriarchal traditions of her father in search of education, availing herself of several of the opportunities available for young women in lower Manhattan. She boarded at the Clara de Hirsch Home for Girls, went to New York City Normal College, and then attended Columbia University, for degrees in teaching and the domestic arts. At Columbia, Yezierska had a propitious brush with the elite public intellectualism of John Dewey, which sparked their passionate yet unconsummated love affair, and enabled her to study social and political philosophy. She served as a translator and researcher in Dewey’s ethnography of an immigrant Polish community in Philadelphia, benefited from his editorial advice on her early stories, and was encouraged to mine the sublimity of the immigrant experience that she and her familiars had endured and knew the best. The sudden and heartbreaking demise of their relationship in the fall of 1918 left Yezierska to forge her fate on her own. The following year, she published the tale for which she had had Dewey’s aid, “Soap and Water and the Immigrant,” in the New Republic. Shortly afterward, another highbrow magazine, Century, published “The Fat of the Land,” a narrative brimming with the distress of a young woman first too poor to provide for her children and later, following their professional
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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success, made too rich to be comfortable in her adopted land. This portrait of an immigrant’s unyielding social discomfort and awkwardness, despite her material circumstances, caught the attention of Edward J. O’Brien, then editor of the Best Short Stories series, and in 1920 earned the writer the award named in his honor for the most distinguished sketch of the previous year. In six of the 12 months of 1920, Yezierska had her stories appear in reputed literary magazines. By the end of the year, many of these stories had been collected by Houghton Mifflin and released as a set under the title of Hungry Hearts. Anguishing over the critical silence that greeted the collection, Yezierska stormed the office of yet another Anglo male in search of intellectual justice and opportunity (Dewey was the first). The recipient of her appeal was Hearst columnist Dr. Frank Crane, whose subsequent account of their conversation and of the book made her a preoccupation of the American punditry and culture makers for years to come. The following year, Goldwyn studios tendered her a contract, a $10,000 advance, and a train ticket west, to help draft the screenplay that would transform the collection into a motion picture. Over the next 11 years, Yezierska published several books, and in doing so joined the ranks of other realist artists like Mary Antin, Fannie Hurst, and Michael Gold. There was Salome of the Tenements (1923), a novel about a manipulative Jewish female striver who marries herself into the dissatisfaction of gentile materialism; the hybrid of short fiction and narrative essays, The Children of Loneliness (1923), which explored further the excruciating cultural interstitiality of immigrant Americans; The Arrogant Beggar (1927), a philosophical novel about the virtues and vices of organized charities as they engaged with immigrants; and a novel that fictionalized the heartwrenching vicissitudes of her stillborn relationship with Dewey, entitled All That I Never Could Be (1932a). Of this work, Bread Givers (1925) was the most accomplished. Its elaborate narrative traces the immigrant struggles of the observant and socially striving young heroine Sara Smolinsky from ghetto austerity to mainstream acceptance and comfort. Dogged vigilance prevents Sara from becoming a “breadgiver,” a woman who sacrifices her own dreams and individuality to prop up those of the man in her life, be it father or spouse.
The novel’s feminist message would reignite Yezierska’s popularity in the 1980s. It also exemplifies her knack for spellbinding dialogue and her ability to depict characters that rhapsodize and ululate without irrevocably sliding into the sentimental. Though she continued to write through the Depression, Yezierska was never able to recapture the success she achieved after World War I. She wrote with the WPA in the 1930s, befriending a young Richard Wright. She spent the twilight of her writing career auspiciously nonetheless, publishing to acclaim at age 68 an autobiographical novel, Red Ribbon on a White Horse in 1950 and spending the balance of the next decade reviewing books for the New York Times. Her career closed with several stories and essays about society’s neglect of the aging, a topic that renewed the indignation that gave Yezierska’s prose its heat and energy. She passed away in 1970. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); Ethnicity and Fiction (AF); Gold, Mike (AF); Social Realist Fiction (AF); WPA and Popular Front Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Dearborn, M. V. (1988). Love in The Promised Land: The Story of Anzia Yezierska and John Dewey. New York: Free Press. Dearborn, M. V. (1989). Anzia Yezierska and the Making of an Ethnic American Self. In W. Sollors (ed.), The Invention of Ethnicity. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 105–23. Henriksen, L. L. (1988). Anzia Yezierska: A Writer’s Life. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kessler-Harris, A. (2003). Introduction. In A. Yezierska, Bread Givers, 3rd edn. New York: Persea, pp. xxi– xxxvi. Schoen, C. B. (1982). Anzia Yezierska. Boston: Twayne. Simpson, T. (2009). “The Love of Colour in Me”: Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers and the Space of White Racial Manufacture. MELUS, 34(3), 93–114. Yezierska, A. (1920). Hungry Hearts. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Yezierska, A. (1923). Salome of the Tenements. New York: Boni and Liveright. Yezierska, A. (1925). Bread Givers. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Yezierska, A. (1927). Arrogant Beggar. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
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YOUNG, MARGUERITE
Yezierska, A. (1932a). All I Could Never Be. New York: Brewer, Warren, and Putnam. Yezierska, A. (1932b). Children of Loneliness. New York: Funk and Wagnalls. Yezierska, A. (1950). Red Ribbon on a White Horse. New York: Scribner’s.
Young, Marguerite PATRICK O’DONNELL
Though she has a strong “cult” following, Marguerite Young (1908–95), novelist, poet, and essayist, has been regrettably overlooked as a significant modernist writer. Her neglected masterpiece, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965), was the work of two decades, and stands in company with James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Herman Broch’s The Death of Virgil (1945), or William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) as an encyclopedic novel that explores myriad relations between complex psychological interiorities and the labyrinths of modern culture. Equally, Young stands alongside Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Ana€ıs Nin, and Djuna Barnes as a major woman writer who charted the modernist terrain of ecriture feminine and expanded the reach of the novel in her experiments with language and form. It is difficult to say why Young has been so ignored: in 1993, Dalkey Archives reissued Miss MacIntosh, My Darling in two volumes of over 600 pages each – perhaps it is the prolixity of her work or the demands it makes upon the reader that have led to her non-recognition. The Dalkey reissue has led to a moderate outburst of new interest in her work, that ironic form of belated visibility as a writer before her time. Born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, Young studied English and French literature at Butler University and the University of Chicago, where she received the BA and MA, respectively. During her undergraduate and graduate years, Young began writing poetry, and she published her first book of poetry, Prismatic Ground, in 1937 while teaching high school in Indianapolis. At this time, Young became interested in utopian communities and lived for various periods in New Harmony, Indiana. She subsequently entered the English PhD program at the University of Iowa, and taught briefly as a lecturer at the university,
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but moved in the early 1940s to Greenwich Village in order to seek her living as a writer; she remained in Manhattan for most of the rest of her life as a writer and teacher at universities in and around New York City. Awarded Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships, in addition to Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, Young published during her lifetime two volumes of poetry; Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias (1945), a lyrical historical account of the founding of New Harmony; and numerous reviews and essays. At the time of her death, she was in the midst of the work of a quarter century, a multivolume biography of the social reformer Eugene V. Debs; an edited, one-volume version of the project was posthumously published as Harp Song for a Radical in 1999. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is a dreamlike, surrealistic portrayal of the complex relationship between Vera Cartwheel, a young girl growing up in a realm of eccentric and uncaring adults on a decaying New England sea coast estate, and Georgia MacIntosh, hired to serve as Vera’s governess, outwardly an elderly, down-to-earth, common sense native of “What Cheer, Iowa.” Miss MacIntosh takes on the role of mentor, spirit guide, and occasional alter ego to Vera; the seven years of their relationship comes to an end when Georgia commits suicide by waking into the ocean when Vera is 14 years old. The event, and their years together, haunt Vera for the rest of her life as she undertakes a hallucinatory journey through a landscape of shifting personalities and mutable identities – an erotic, physical, and spiritual voyage that only comes to an end when Vera takes up permanent residence and family life in southern Indiana. This bare summary does little to elicit the cast of characters, events, ancillary narratives, and stylistic experiments that fill the pages of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. If, as the Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky posited, the work of literature is to “defamiliarize” the reader – to make the world strange – then Young’s novel is an epic instance of the world made strange, its secret corners opened up for examination. Like Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling renders a multilayered world that operates analogically – the spiritual and the physical, the mundane and the extraordinary intertwined in the fatally connected personae to be
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encountered in the dream-journey of life. An example of the prolixity, inventiveness, and oddity of Young’s prose is revealed in a passage in which Vera considers the relation between existence and non-existence: There was simply, one must deduce still from all her energetic, caustic certainties, and I believed then that Miss MacIntosh, even though she might go against the grain, was right, no shadowy borderland where that exists which does not exist, where headless horsemen ride about in purple fog or old emperors play water polo or men have heads like dice, or if there was, then it was God’s murky business and not ours to tamper with or change, for God had suffered due to this erroneous creation and had quite frankly been filled with the greatest remorse ever since the day of the beginning which was not too far different from the day of the end. (1: 193) This passage is exemplary of the novel in its entirety, which is invested in discerning the “shadowy borderlands” between life and death, body and mind, self and other. It is without qualification one of the most important novels written in twentieth-century America, and though it was the only novel that she wrote, it elevates Marguerite Young to the unenviable status of the most significant “unknown” writer of her time.
SEE ALSO: Gender and the Novel (AF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Woolf, Virginia (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Burke, K. (1945). The Work of Regeneration. Kenyon Review, 7(4), 696–700. Eichenlaub, C. (n.d.). Who Is Marguerite Young? At www.home.earthlink.net/eichfr/youngweb.htm, accessed Jan. 18, 2010. Durand, R. (1975). La Fabrique de la Fiction: Lecture du Roman de Marguerite Young, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. Caliban, 12, 45–60. Fuchs, M. (ed.) (1994). Marguerite Young, Our Darling: Tributes and Essays. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archives. Shaviro, S. (1990). Lost Chords and Interrupted Births: Marguerite Young’s Exorbitant Vision. Critique, 31, 213–22. Young, M. (1937). Prismatic Ground. New York: Macmillan. Young, M. (1944). Moderate Fable. Cornwall, NY: Reynal and Hitchcock. Young, M. (1993). Miss MacIntosh, My Darling [1965]. 2 vols. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archives. Young, M. (1994). Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias [1945]. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archives. Young, M. (1994). Inviting the Muses: Stories, Reviews. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archives. Young, M. (1999). Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs. New York: Knopf.
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Editors Brian W. Shaffer is Professor of English and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs for Faculty Development at Rhodes College, USA. His previous publications include Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro (1998), and Reading the Novel in English 1950–2000 (Wiley-Blackwell 2006). He is the co-editor of Approaches to Teaching Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and “The Secret Sharer” (2002), and Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro (2008), and the editor of A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945–2000 (Wiley-Blackwell 2005). John Clement Ball is Professor of English at the University of New Brunswick, Canada, specializing in postcolonial and Canadian fiction. He is the author of Satire and the Postcolonial Novel: V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie (2003) and Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis (2004).
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer
Volume III
Twentieth-Century World Fiction Volume editor: John Clement Ball
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Acknowledgments
My involvement in the Encyclopedia of TwentiethCentury Fiction began three years ago with an invitation from Emma Bennett of Wiley-Blackwell and Brian Shaffer, the project’s editor-inchief. Both were tremendously helpful throughout the process and a pleasure to work with, as were Isobel Bainton and Amy Clark. I was assisted immeasurably in developing my list of headwords by colleagues who generously agreed to look over my draft lists and offer feedback; they all agreed to write entries as well, and I am grateful to them all: Jennifer Andrews, John Eustace, Chelva Kanaganayakam, Laura Moss, and Neil ten Kortenaar. Two anonymous reviewers for Wiley-Blackwell also made helpful suggestions before the assignments began, as did various contributors at later stages. I could not have finished this project on time without the expertise of three graduate students who worked as research or editorial assistants. Linnet Humble and Laura Pearson did exhaustive searches of criticism on the authors and topics covered by the volume so I could identify prospective contributors; Laura also tracked down several hundred email addresses. Joshua Prescott diligently and effectively corrected formatting and suggested line edits on numerous draft entries. For their dedication,
intelligence, and work ethic, I thank all three of these most promising young researchers; my gratitude as well to the University of New Brunswick for providing funding and for sabbatical release during the busy final year in which the draft entries were submitted and edited. To the 161 authors or co-authors of the volume’s 196 entries, this volume is as much your collective creation as it is mine. I tip my hat to you all for your willingness to hop aboard when I asked, for the insightfulness and elegant concision of your work, and for putting up with my cuts, comments, and questions. Although I know many of you, I have met the majority of you only by email, since you are as international a group as is the volume itself. Special thanks to contributors who offered or agreed to take on more than one entry, and to Rowland Smith, whose excellent entry on Nadine Gordimer arrived just three weeks before he passed away; it thus became, unexpectedly, his final piece of scholarly writing after a distinguished career. My final thanks to my family, as always, for your loving support and inspiration.
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John Clement Ball
Notes on Contributors to Volume III
Michelene Adams is an assistant professor of English at St. George’s University in Grenada. A Trinidadian, she graduated from the University of New Brunswick, where she wrote a doctoral thesis on Erna Brodber and Jamaica Kincaid. She has published articles on Caribbean women’s narrative in Sargasso, the College of the Bahamas Research Journal, and Anthurium. Chiji Akoma is associate professor of English at Villanova University. He teaches African diaspora literatures and anglophone postcolonial studies. Author of Folklore in New World Black Fiction, he has also published essays in such journals as Research in African Literatures, Oral Tradition, Wasafiri, and Modern Fiction Studies. Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru is associate professor of English at the University of Bucharest. She holds a PhD in postcolonial literature from the University of East Anglia and has published widely on contemporary Indian fiction in English, postmodernism, women’s literature, and ethnic studies. Her latest book is Identity Performance in Contemporary Non-WASP American Fiction (2008). She is currently working on a book entitled Performance and Performativity in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English.
American literature and the co-author of Border Crossings: Thomas King’s Cultural Inversions (2003). She recently completed a new monograph on contemporary Native North American women poets. John Attridge did his PhD at the University of Sydney on Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and the rise of professionalism. He has written articles on Ford, Conrad, Henry James, and Murray Bail for journals such as Modernism/Modernity, ELH, and the Henry James Review. He currently teaches at the Paris Diderot University. John Clement Ball, editor of the World Fiction volume of the ETCF, is a professor of postcolonial and Canadian literatures in the Department of English at the University of New Brunswick. He is the author of two books, Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis (2004) and Satire and the Postcolonial Novel: V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie (2003), and coeditor of the journal Studies in Canadian Literature.
Stella Algoo-Baksh, professor of English at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, is the author of Austin C. Clarke: A Biography and Austin C. Clarke and His Works. Her articles and reviews appear in The Reordering of Culture: Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada: In the Hood and in Canadian Literature, English Studies in Canada, Canadian Journal of African Studies, and Journal of West Indian Literature.
Mita Banerjee is professor and chair of American studies at the University of Siegen, Germany. Her research interests include postcolonial literature (The Chutneyfication of History: Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Bharati Mukherjee and the Postcolonial Debate, 2002), ethnic American literature (Race-ing the Century, 2005), and the American Renaissance (Ethnic Ventriloquism: Literary Minstrelsy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, 2008). She is currently working on a project that explores the intersection between naturalism and naturalization in nineteenth-century American fiction.
Jennifer Andrews is a professor in the Department of English at the University of New Brunswick and the coeditor (with John Clement Ball) of Studies in Canadian Literature. She is the author of numerous articles on English Canadian and
Salhia Ben-Messahel is the author of Mind the Country: Tim Winton’s Fiction, the first booklength critical study of one of Australia’s major authors. Her publications include the editing of Des frontieres de l’interculturalite, with Presses du
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Septentrion, Charles de Gaulle University–Lille 3, and several articles on Australia, place, and representation. She is senior lecturer of English at the Charles de Gaulle University–Lille 3. Bruce Bennett is emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales. He is an Officer of the Order of Australia and a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He has held visiting appointments at universities in Asia, Europe, and North America. His books include Spirit in Exile (1991), An Australian Compass (1991), The Oxford Literary History of Australia (1998), Australian Short Fiction (2002), and Homing In (2006). Neil Kalman Besner has taught Canadian literature at the University of Winnipeg since 1987, where he has been chair of the English Department, Dean of Humanities, Dean of Arts, and Deputy Provost and Associate Vice President (International). He has written books on Mavis Gallant (The Light of Imagination, 1988), and on Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women (1991); he has edited two collections of essays on Carol Shields (1995,2003), a translation of a Brazilian biography of Elizabeth Bishop (Rare and Commonplace Flowers, 2002), and coedited collections of short stories (The Short Story in English, 1991) and poetry (Uncommon Wealth, 1997). Delys Bird is a senior honorary research fellow in English and cultural studies at the University of Western Australia. Her major publications have been on Australian women writers, in particular Elizabeth Jolley and Katharine Susannah Prichard. Nicholas Birns is editor of Antipodes and coauthor of A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900. He teaches at the New School in New York. In 2008, he was a visiting fellow at the Literature, Identity, and Culture project at the University of Wollongong in Australia. Ann Blake is an honorary associate of La Trobe University, Melbourne, and formerly a senior lecturer. She is the author of Christina Stead’s Politics of Place (1999) and co-author of England through Colonial Eyes in Twentieth-Century Fiction (2001). She has published articles on Shakespeare and other dramatists, crime fiction, and Christina Stead. Her latest publications are new editions of Sheridan’s The School for Scandal and Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem.
M. Keith Booker is the James E. and Ellen Wadley Roper Professor of English and director of the program in comparative literature and cultural studies at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He has written or edited more than 30 books on literature, culture, and literary/cultural theory, including The African Novel in English: An Introduction and The Chinua Achebe Encyclopedia. Clare Bradford’s articles appear in journals including Children’s Literature, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Canadian Children’s Literature, Children’s Literature in Education, and Journal of Australian Studies. She is the author and co-author of 11 books, of which five are works of fiction for children. Her 2001 book Reading Race won the Children’s Literature Association Book Award and the International Research Society for Children’s Literature Award. She is a professor of literary studies at Deakin University. Sarah Brouillette is an assistant professor in the Literature Faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she teaches contemporary British, Irish, and postcolonial writing, and topics in print culture and media studies. Her first book, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace, was published in 2007. Heidi Butler is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of New Brunswick. Her academic interests include Canadian historical fiction, Atlantic literature, and Canadian invader–settler narratives. In 2007, she was awarded a Canada Graduate Scholarship by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; her doctoral dissertation examines contemporary Atlantic Canadian novelists’ representations of adolescent girls. David Callahan teaches at the University of Aveiro in Portugal, concentrating on world literature in English. The author of Rainforest Narratives: The Work of Janette Turner Hospital (2009), he has also edited Australia – Who Cares? (2007) and Contemporary Issues in Australian Literature (2002). M. Y. Chiu is assistant professor and undergraduate program coordinator in the Department of English at the University of Macau. Chiu teaches literature with special emphases on colonial writing and world literatures in English.
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME III
Rohit Chopra is assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Santa Clara University. He is the author of Technology and Nationalism in India: Cultural Negotiations from Colonialism to Cyberspace (2009). He has published articles in several journals including Cultural Studies, the Economic and Political Weekly, and South Asian Review, as well as book chapters in edited volumes. Maureen Clark is an honorary research fellow at the University of Wollongong where she teaches across the disciplines of media and cultural studies and English Studies. Her monograph Mudrooroo: A Likely Story was published in 2007. She has also published numerous book chapters and articles on the writing of both Mudrooroo and Janette Turner Hospital with refereed journals including Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, Australian Literary Studies, Kunapipi, and New Literatures Review. Anne Compton is the author of Opening the Island (2002), winner of the Atlantic Poetry Prize, and Processional (2005), winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Her critical work includes A. J. M. Smith: Canadian Metaphysical (1994), Meetings with Maritime Poets: Interviews (2006), and an article on Jane Urquhart. She is the editor of The Edge of Home: Milton Acorn from the Island (2002) and coeditor of Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada (2002). In 2008, she was awarded the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in the Literary Arts. Ralph Crane is professor of English and Head of the School of English, Journalism and European Languages at the University of Tasmania. He has published widely in the areas of Indian and AngloIndian literatures. His recent books include scholarly editions of four Raj novels with Oxford University Press India: Charles Pearce’s Love Besieged, Maud Diver’s Lilamani, Margaret Wilson’s Daughters of India, and A. E. W. Mason’s The Broken Road. David Creelman is a professor at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John, where he teaches Canadian literature and modern British literature. He has published articles on twentieth-century Canadian fiction and produced a book on Maritime realist fiction entitled Setting in the East.
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Isagani R. Cruz is the author of six books of plays, four books of literary criticism, two books on education, three biographies, several encyclopedia articles, and thousands of newspaper columns for Philippine media (including the Philippine Star). More than 120 of his scholarly articles have appeared in English Today, Media Development, Portal, World Englishes, and other journals and books. He is a professor emeritus of De La Salle University, a visiting professor at Ateneo de Manila University, and an academic administrator at Far Eastern University. Beverley Curran teaches linguistic, cultural, and media translation at Aichi Shukutoku University in Nagoya, Japan. Her publications include Theatre Translation Theory and Performance in Contemporary Japan: Native Voices, Foreign Bodies (2008), a collaborative Japanese translation of Nicole Brossard’s Journal intime (2000) and articles in a range of collections and journals, including Canadian Literature and Theatre Journal. Frank Davey retired in 2005 from the Carl F. Klinck Chair in Canadian Literature at the University of Western Ontario. He is the editor of the journal Open Letter and author of more than 30 books of poetry and literary and cultural criticism, including The Abbotsford Guide to India (1986), Post-National Arguments: The Politics of the Anglophone-Canadian Novel Since 1967 (1993), Canadian Literary Power (1994), Cultural Mischief (1996), Mr. & Mrs. G.G. (2003), and Risky Propositions (2005). Rocı´o G. Davis is associate professor of literature and Director of the Institute of Liberal Arts at the University of Navarra, Spain. She has published Begin Here: Reading Asian North American Autobiographies of Childhood (2007) and Transcultural Reinventions: Asian American and Asian Canadian Short Story Cycles (2001). Fran de Groen is adjunct associate professor in the research group Writing and Society at the University of Western Sydney. She has published a biography of Xavier Herbert and articles about his life and work; she has also coedited his letters with Professor Emeritus Laurie Hergenhan. Her most recent publication is Serious Frolic: Essays on Australian Humour (2009), coedited with Peter Kirkpatrick.
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R. K. Dhawan, a senior academic from University of Delhi, is widely traveled and has lectured on Indian literature at several Indian and foreign universities. He has published a number of articles and books, especially on Indian women novelists. Currently he is on the advisory board of the International Journal of Transnational Literature (Australia) and chief editor of the Commonwealth Review (New Delhi), a biannual journal of new literatures in English. Brian Dibble, emeritus professor of comparative literature, founded the Western Australian Institute of Technology’s (later Curtin University’s) School of English and Language Studies, in 1973, where he started Australia’s first BA in Australian studies and its first in creative writing. In 1975 he hired Elizabeth Jolley to teach on the latter course. He has published his own poems and stories and edited two volumes of William Hart-Smith’s poetry, a bicentennial anthology of Western Australian literature, and a collection of Australian folk humor/wisdom. His biography of Jolley, Doing Life, was published in 2008. Kieran Dolin is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Western Australia, where he teaches Australian literature, literature and the law, and nineteenth-century studies. He is the author of two books, Fiction and the Law (1999) and A Critical Introduction to Law and Literature (2007). He has published articles on Australian fiction in Southerly, Westerly, and the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Gillian Dooley is an honorary research fellow at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia. Her publications include From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch (2003), as editor, and V. S. Naipaul, Man and Writer (2006), and she coedited Matthew Flinders’ Private Journal 1803–1814 (2005). She has published essays on Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, V. S. Naipaul, and J. M. Coetzee, and is editor of Transnational Literature. She is currently writing a book on the novels and memoirs of J. M. Coetzee. Marta Dvorak is professor of postcolonial literatures at the University of the New Sorbonne. She has published books on Nancy Huston, Carol Shields, and Ernest Buckler. Her most recent books are The Faces of Carnival in Anita Desai’s
“In Custody” (2008), and Tropes and Territories: Short Fiction, Postcolonial Readings, Canadian Writings in Context, coedited with W. H. New (2007). Juniper Ellis is professor of English at Loyola College in Maryland, where she teaches Maori, Pacific Islands, and US literature. Her book Tattooing the World: Pacific Designs in Print and Skin (2008) was made possible by Fulbright, NEH, and Andrew W. Mellon fellowships. She has published articles in journals including PMLA, Ariel, and Arizona Quarterly. John Eustace is an associate professor in English at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, where he teaches postcolonial literature and theory. He has published articles on Joyce Cary, Peter Carey, Margaret Laurence, Rohinton Mistry, and Australian culture. Patrick Evans is professor of English at the University of Canterbury, where he has taught New Zealand literature since 1978. His publications include two books and several articles on Janet Frame, The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature (1990), and The Long Forgetting: PostColonial Literary Culture in New Zealand (2007). Moira Ferguson was born in Glasgow and taught in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln for many years where she was also the founding chair of women’s studies. Her publications include Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery 1670–1834 (1992) and Gender and Colonial Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid (1994). Among her forthcoming books are “A Human Necklace”: Paule Marshall’s Fiction, 1959–2000 and Locked Up and Free: Female Political Prisoners from Mary Prince to Amina Lawal. She is currently professor of English at New York University in London. Janice Fiamengo is associate professor of English at the University of Ottawa, where she teaches Canadian literature. She has recently published The Woman’s Page: Journalism and Rhetoric in Early Canada (2008). Roger Field is a senior lecturer in the Department of English at the University of the Western Cape. He has published a biography of Alex La Guma and coedited books on La Guma’s early writing, and on
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME III
landscape and memory (Trauma and Topography, 2000). His current research interests include the reception and appropriation of Constantine Cavafy in South African poetry and prose fiction. Susan Alice Fischer is professor of English at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York. She is coeditor of Changing English: An International Journal of English Teaching and book reviews editor of the online journal Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Swarming Streets: Twentieth Century Representations of London, and in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, the Women’s Review of Books, Critical Engagements, and elsewhere. She is completing a book about contemporary women’s London narratives. Annie Gagiano, emeritus professor in the English Department of the University of Stellenbosch, specializes in African English-language fiction studies and, more broadly, postcolonial writing. She has published a detailed account of Dambudzo Marechera’s full oeuvre in Achebe, Head, Marechera: On Power and Change in Africa (2000), as well as three journal articles and two book chapters on his work in essay collections. Since retiring from teaching in early 2008, she remains active as a researcher and in supervising dissertations. Fernando Galvan is professor of English literature at the University of Alcala, Spain, and currently President of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE). His most recent publications include essays on Caryl Phillips, J. M. Coetzee, and Anita Desai. His interview with Amit Chaudhuri was published in Wasafiri (1999). Carole Gerson, a professor in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University, has published extensively on early Canadian women writers and Canadian literary history. She is one of the editors of the three-volume History of the Book in Canada (2004–7) and, with historian Veronica StrongBoag, has co-authored two books on E. Pauline Johnson. Her new book, Canadian Women in Print, 1750–1918, was published in 2010. D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke, emeritus professor of English, University of Kelaniya–Sri Lanka, has been international chair of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies;
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Henry Charles Chapman Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London; and guest professor at the University of T€ ubingen. His books include Developing Countries in British Fiction (1977), Images of the Raj (1988), Joseph Conrad: Beyond Culture and Background (1990), Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” (2007), Salman Rushdie (1998), and Sri Lankan English Literature and the Sri Lankan People 1917–2003 (2005). Yogita Goyal is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she specializes in African American, black Atlantic, and postcolonial studies. She has recently published essays and reviews on black diaspora fiction in Diaspora, Modern Fiction Studies, New Formations, and Wasafiri, and is currently completing a book that explores nationalism and literary form in black Atlantic literature. Brenna Clarke Gray is a doctoral candidate and Canada Graduate Scholar in the Department of English at the University of New Brunswick. Her dissertation explores cultural responses to September 11 through the writing and visual art of Douglas Coupland. Anna Guttman is assistant professor of postcolonial literature at Lakehead University. She is the author of The Nation of India in Contemporary Indian Literature (2007) and coeditor of The Global Literary Field (2007). Her current research examines the representations of Jews and Jewishness in South Asian literature. Ambreen Hai teaches anglophone postcolonial and British literature at Smith College. She has published essays on Bapsi Sidhwa, Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, Salman Rushdie, and Sara Suleri in a number of scholarly journals. Her book, Making Words Matter: The Agency of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, is forthcoming from Ohio University Press. Aparna Halpe is a doctoral candidate affiliated with the English Department and the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Toronto. Her research is on the function of myth in contemporary postcolonial fiction from Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia and Southeast Asia. Her essays have appeared in the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature and in Across Cultures: Issues of
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Identity in Contemporary British and Sri Lankan Writing. Halpe is also a poet and her work can be found in Postcolonial Text and Channels. Faye Hammill is senior lecturer in English at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. Her research areas are Canadian literature and interwar middlebrow culture, and publications include Literary Culture and Female Authorship in Canada 1760–2000 (2003; winner of the Pierre Savard prize), Canadian Literature (2007), and Women, Celebrity and Literary Culture between the Wars (2007). She is editor of the British Journal of Canadian Studies and is currently leading the Middlebrow Network, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Brecken Rose Hancock is a doctoral candidate at the University of New Brunswick. Her research areas include contemporary non-mimetic Canadian fiction and cultural theory. Her articles have appeared in Studies in Canadian Literature, the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, and Early Modern Literary Studies. Heike H€arting is associate professor of English at the University of Montreal and is editor-in-chief of Postcolonial Text. She has coedited special issues of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (2008) and University of Toronto Quarterly (2009). She has published recent articles in Studies in Canadian Literature and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Her book manuscript Unruly Metaphor: Nation, Body, and Diaspora in Contemporary Fiction in English Canada is currently under review. Anthony J. Hassall is emeritus professor of English literature at James Cook University and honorary research consultant at the University of Queensland. He has written extensively on Australian fiction and eighteenth-century English fiction, including books on Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Randolph Stow, and Peter Carey. He is the founding general editor of the University of Queensland Press’s Studies in Australian Literature series. Jonathan Heawood is Director of English PEN, which campaigned successfully for the amendment of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act (2006) and the repeal of the laws of blasphemous
libel, seditious libel, criminal defamation, and obscene libel in the UK. He was previously editorial director of the Fabian Society and deputy literary editor of The Observer and wrote the introduction to a collection of George Orwell’s Observer journalism. Colin Hill teaches in the Department of English at the University of Toronto and is the director of the Canadian studies program at the university’s Mississauga campus. He is author of several articles on Canadian literature and a forthcoming book on the interplay of modernism and realism in Canadian fiction. He is editor of a critical edition of Irene Baird’s Waste Heritage and is currently editing editions of previously unpublished novels by Hugh MacLennan and Raymond Knister. Gugu Hlongwane is an assistant professor of English at Saint Mary’s University. Her essays on South African and Canadian literature appear in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Postcolonial Text, Studies in Canadian Literature, and the Journal of Literary Studies. David Huddart is an associate professor in the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author of two books: Homi K. Bhabha (2006) and Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography (2008). Huma Ibrahim is associate professor at Zayed University and has published Bessie Head: Subversive Identities in Exile (1996). She has also edited and contributed to a collection, Emerging Perspectives on Bessie Head (2004). Her book Epistemology of Colonial/Postcolonial Violence is currently in press and she is working on The Other Woman: Sexuality Silence Spectacle and Punjabi Weave, a collection of twentieth-century Punjabi women’s poetry in translation. C. Lyn Innes worked as an assistant editor on Okike Magazine and coedited two collections of African short stories with Chinua Achebe. She published a study of his work, Chinua Achebe, in 1990. Her other books are The Devil’s Own Mirror: The Irish and the African in Modern Literature (1990); Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and Society, 1880–1935 (1993); A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain (2008); The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME III
(2007); and Ned Kelly (2008). She is emeritus professor of postcolonial literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. Douglas Ivison is an associate professor in the Department of English at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario. He is the editor of Canadian Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers (2002) and coeditor, with Justin D. Edwards, of Downtown Canada: Writing Canadian Cities (2005); he has published articles on Canadian literature and popular culture, among other topics, in books and journals, including Studies in Canadian Literature and English Studies in Canada. Lyn Jacobs is an associate professor in humanities (Australian literature and Australian studies) and research fellow at Flinders University. She is a contributor to the Australian Literature Resource (Australian literary responses to Asia), the author of Against the Grain: Beverley Farmer’s writing (2001), and of multiple analyses of Australian fiction, most recently an article on Tim Winton in A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900 (2007). Louis James is emeritus professor of English literature at the University of Kent. His publications on British and Commonwealth literature include Fiction for the Working Man, 1830–50 (1963), Caribbean Writing in English (1999), and The Victorian Novel (2006). Sharanya Jayawickrama is a graduate of University College London and Cambridge University, where she wrote her PhD dissertation on Sri Lankan literature in English. Her main research interests are in postcolonial literatures and theory with a focus on South Asian literatures in English. Her articles appear in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and in edited collections on black British fiction, postcolonial women’s writing, and international children’s literature. She is currently a lecturer in literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. Lawrence Jones is emeritus professor of English at the University of Otago. He was editor of the Journal of New Zealand Literature from 1990 to 2000 and has edited or coedited several books. His critical and historical writings on New Zealand literature include Barbed Wire and Mirrors: Essays on New Zealand Prose (1987, 1990), “The Novel”
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in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English (1991, 1998), and Picking Up the Traces: The Making of a New Zealand Literary Culture 1932–1945 (2003). He is a trustee of the Janet Frame Literary Trust and a fellow of the New Zealand Academy of the Humanities. Chelva Kanaganayakam is professor of English and Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Toronto. His publications include Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction (2002), Dark Antonyms and Paradise: The Poetry of Rienzi Crusz (1997), Configurations of Exile: South Asian Writers and Their Worlds (1995), and Structures of Negation: The Writings of Zulfikar Ghose (1993). Jennifer Kelly teaches in the international Indigenous studies program at the University of Calgary. Her interests include Indigenous literatures and interpretive/pedagogical practices, Indigenous film, and research ethics. She is a coordinator (with Delia Cross Child, Ramona Big Head, and Georgette Fox) of “‘You May Laugh’: Surviving, Remembering, and Transforming Residential School Experience,” with members of the Kainai Nation, southern Alberta. Michelle Kelly is a graduate of the National University of Ireland, Galway and the University of York, where she is currently a teaching fellow in the Department of English and Related Literature. Her research interests are in the field of postcolonial fiction and autobiography, particularly South African literature, the relationship between literature and the law, especially human rights law, and literary and historical connections between Ireland and South Africa. She is currently at work on a book on confession in J. M. Coetzee’s work. Michelle Keown is lecturer in English literature at the University of Edinburgh. She has published widely on Maori, New Zealand, and Pacific writing and is the author of Postcolonial Pacific Writing: Representations of the Body (2005) and Pacific Islands Writing: The Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Oceania (2007). She has also published on diaspora theory and culture and is coeditor (with David Murphy and James Procter) of Comparing Postcolonial Diasporas (2009). Khurram N. Khurshid is a doctoral candidate at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. His
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research areas include postcolonial literature and theory, colonial discourse, and Indian and Pakistani fiction. He grew up in Pakistan, where he taught English literature at various colleges of the Punjab University for a number of years. His dissertation explores Muslim consciousness in the fiction of Ahmed Ali, Attia Hosain, and Mumtaz Shahnawaz. Neil Ten Kortenaar is an associate professor of English at the University of Toronto at Scarborough. He is the author of Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” (2004) and has published numerous articles on African and Caribbean literature in PMLA, Ariel, English Studies in Canada, and other journals. Sue Kossew is associate professor of English at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Her work is in contemporary postcolonial literature, with a focus on South Africa and Australia, on gender issues and women writers. Her publications include Pen and Power: A Post-Colonial Reading of J. M. Coetzee and Andre Brink (1996), Critical Essays on J. M. Coetzee (1998), Re-Imagining Africa: New Critical Perspectives (2001), edited with Dianne Schwerdt, and Writing Woman, Writing Place: Australian and South African Fiction (2004). She is editing a collection of essays and interviews on Kate Grenville to be published by Rodopi Press. Benedicte Ledent teaches Caribbean literature at the University of Liege, Belgium. She is the author of Caryl Phillips (2002) and has edited several volumes of essays. The latest, in collaboration with Kathleen Gyssels, is entitled The Caribbean Writer as Warrior of the Imaginary (2008). Judith Leggatt is an associate professor and chair of the English Department at Lakehead University. She has published articles on postcolonial pedagogy, Lee Maracle, Salman Rushdie, Jane Eyre, and the challenges of reading First Nations literature through a postcolonial lens. Her present research explores the representation of First Nations peoples in science fiction, and she is currently working on a book-length study of Indigenous science fiction. Peter Leman is a PhD candidate and Jacob K. Javits Fellow in the Department of English at the University of California, Irvine. His dissertation
examines literary appropriations of traditional orature in East Africa in relationship to colonial and postcolonial law, particularly in its authoritarian forms. He has presented papers on postcolonial literature and law in the UK, Canada, and the US, and his work on the poet Okot p’Bitek is forthcoming in Research in African Literatures. Liew-Geok Leong taught at the Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore, from 1981 to 2002. The author of two collections of poetry, Love Is Not Enough (1991) and Women without Men (2000), she edited More than Half the Sky: Creative Writings by Thirty Singaporean Women (1998). She contributed 24 entries on Singaporean literature in English to Singapore: The Encyclopedia (2006), and wrote the Literature in English section for Literature in Singapore (2007). Andrew Lesk is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, where he teaches Canadian literature. He has published widely on Canadian fiction (including two articles on Sinclair Ross), theory, film, and cultural studies. Ping-Hui Liao is distinguished professor of literary and critical studies at National Tsinghua University, Taiwan. Maria Helena Lima is a Brazilian who is a professor of English and comparative literature at the State University of New York at Geneseo, teaching Caribbean and women’s studies. She translated and coedited with Miriam Alves a bilingual anthology of short fiction by Afro-Brazilian Women, Women Righting/Mulheres Escre-vendo (2005). Forthcoming are her entries on Andrea Levy, Dorothea Smartt, and Meera Syal for the Dictionary of Literary Biography special issue on black British literature. Shao-Pin Luo teaches at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. She has published articles in book collections and in such journals as Critique, Commonwealth Literature, and Dalhousie Review as well as an English translation of a contemporary Chinese novel. Her research interests are in diaspora and translation studies. Gerald Lynch is the author of Stephen Leacock: Humour and Humanity (1988), The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles (2001), and four books of fiction. He has also
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME III
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edited a number of essay collections, critical editions, and anthologies. He teaches English at the University of Ottawa.
extensive bibliography, Elizabeth Jolley: A Bibliography 1965–2007; her most recent article appeared in Australian Literary Studies (2008).
Lynne Macedo teaches Caribbean and contemporary literature and film at the University of Warwick. Her recent publications include No Land, No Mother, coedited with K. Karran (2007), contributions to The Oxford Companion to Black British History (2007) and Fiction and Film: The Influence of Cinema on Writers from Jamaica and Trinidad (2003).
Katherine Miller is an English instructor at Concordia University College and Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta. She has published book reviews in Canadian Literature and an article on Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters in Studies in Canadian Literature.
Obi Maduakor, formerly professor of English at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, is currently teaching English as adjunct professor at Tyndale University College, Toronto. He is the author of Wole Soyinka: An Introduction to His Writing, and over 50 articles in learned journals. Sylvia Martin is an honorary associate of the School of English, Journalism and European Languages, University of Tasmania. Her biographies of Australian women include Passionate Friends: Mary Fullerton, Mabel Singleton and Miles Franklin and Ida Leeson: A Life, which was the recipient of the Magarey Prize for Biography in 2008. Andrew Mccann is associate professor in the Department of English at Dartmouth College. He is author of Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere (1999), Marcus Clarke’s Bohemia: Literature and Modernity in Colonial Melbourne (2004), and two novels, The White Body of Evening (2002) and Subtopia (2005). John Mcleod is professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures at the School of English, University of Leeds, England. He is the author of Beginning Postcolonialism (2000), Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (2004), and J. G. Farrell (2007), and has edited The Revision of Englishness (2004) and The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies (2007). Barbara Milech, associate professor at Curtin University, teaches narrative, cultural, and feminist studies. She has published widely on Elizabeth Jolley, including essays in the Journal of the Association of Australian Literature, Antipodes (USA), Australian Studies (UK), and the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, along with an
Rajeswari Mohan is associate professor of English at Haverford College. Her articles on fictions of empire, postcolonial literature, and Indian film have appeared in Textual Practice, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Genders, and College Literature. She is currently working on a book about narratives of women’s militancy. Linda Morra is an associate professor at Bishop’s University. Her publications include articles about Jack Hodgins, Mordecai Richler (Studies in Canadian Literature), and Emily Carr (Canadian Literature), and an interview with George Elliott Clarke (Open Letter). Corresponding Influence: Selected Letters of Emily Carr and Ira Dilworth, was published in 2006, and Troubling Tricksters: Revisioning Critical Conversations, coedited with Deanna Reder, appeared in 2009. Laura Moss is an associate professor of Canadian and postcolonial literatures at the University of British Columbia and the Director of the UBC Canadian Studies Centre. She is the coeditor, with Cynthia Sugars, of Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts, vols. 1 and 2 (2008–9), and editor of Is Canada Postcolonial? Unsettling Canadian Literature (2003). Miguel Mota is associate professor of English at the University of British Columbia. His research interests are in post-1950 British literature and in the relationships between film and print cultures. His book Invisible Texts: The Screenplay in Print Culture is forthcoming from Manchester University Press. Evan Mwangi teaches anglophone African literature at Northwestern University. He is the coauthor of The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English since 1945 (2007) and author of Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality (2009).
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Supriya M. Nair is an associate professor in the Department of English at Tulane University. She is the author of Caliban’s Curse: George Lamming and the Revisioning of History (1996) and is currently completing a book on anglophone Caribbean literature. She has published essays and articles on African and Caribbean literature. William New is University Killam Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia. His more than 40 books include Dreams of Speech and Violence (1987), Land Sliding (1997), Borderlands (1998), Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form (1999), The Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada (2002), Grandchild of Empire (2003), and A History of Canadian Literature (2nd edn. 2003). He is also the author of nine books of poetry and four books for children, and for 17 years he edited the critical quarterly Canadian Literature. He was awarded the Lorne Pierce Medal of the Royal Society of Canada and the Governor General’s Prize in International Canadian Literature. In 2006 he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada. Stephanie Newell teaches African and postcolonial literatures at the University of Sussex, England. She has published extensively on West African literature and colonial newspaper history. Andrew Hock Soon Ng teaches Theories of Authorship, Contemporary Fiction, and Postcolonial Literature at Monash University, Malaysia. He is the author of Dimensions of Monstrosity in Contemporary Narratives (2004) and Interrogating Interstices (2007), and the editor of Asian Gothic (2008) and The Poetics of Shadows (2008). Ode Ogede is professor of English at North Carolina Central University. His books include Art, Society, and Performance: Igede Praise Poetry (1997), Ayi Kwei Armah, Radical Iconoclast: Pitting Imaginary Worlds against the Actual (2000), Achebe and the Politics of Representation: Form against Itself from Colonial Conquest to Post-Independence Disillusionment (2001), Teacher Commentary on Student Papers (2002), and Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”: Reader’s Guide (2007). James Ogude is a professor of African literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He is the author of Ngugi’s Novels and African
History: Narrating the Nation (1999). He has also edited several books, including a compilation of essays of Es’kia Mphahlele. His recent book (edited with Joyce Nyairo) is Urban Legends, Colonial Myths: Popular Culture and Literature in East Africa (2007). He has published widely on Ngugi and popular culture in leading journals, including the Canadian Journal of African Studies and African Affairs. Sanya Osha holds a PhD in philosophy and is a senior researcher at the School for Graduate Studies, University of South Africa. He has also published extensively in the fields of anthropology, politics, and critical theory. He is the author of Kwasi Wiredu and Beyond: The Text, Writing and Thought in Africa (2005) and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Shadow: Politics, Nationalism and the Ogoni Protest Movement (2007). Ruth Panofsky, professor in the Department of English at Ryerson University in Toronto, specializes in Canadian literature and culture, publishing history, and textual studies. She has published widely on Adele Wiseman, most recently The Force of Vocation: The Literary Career of Adele Wiseman (2006). She is also a poet whose 2007 volume, Laike and Nahum: A Poem in Two Voices, received the Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry. Uma Parameswaran was born and educated in India. She has written extensively on Indo-English and diasporic literature, and on postcolonial topics. Her most recent collections of critical essays are Writing the Diaspora and Early Fiction of Salman Rushdie. She has lived in Canada for many years, and recently retired from the University of Winnipeg. She has published 10 books of creative writing, including the award-winning What Was Always Hers (1999). Makarand Paranjape is a critic, poet, fiction writer, and literary columnist with over 30 books, 100 published academic papers, and more than 200 reviews, notes, and popular articles to his credit. He is currently professor of English at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His latest book is Another Canon: Indian Texts and Traditions in English (2009). Laura Pearson studies and writes about various aspects of South and East Asia, migration, and
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME III
postcolonial literature. She recently completed her MA in English and creative writing at the University of New Brunswick. Donald E. Pease, professor of English and Avalon Foundation Chair of the Humanities at Dartmouth College, is an authority on nineteenthand twentieth-century American literature and literary theory. He is the author of Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (1987) and The New American Exceptionalism (2009), and coeditor (with Amy Kaplan) of The Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993). Joshua Prescott is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick. His research explores the relationship between sexuality, citizenship, and nation in contemporary Canadian Caribbean fiction, with a particular interest in the writing of Dionne Brand, Shani Mootoo, and M. NourbeSe Philip. Clive Probyn is professor of English at Monash University, Victoria, Australia. He has coedited all of Henry Handel Richardson’s novels, translations, and letters, as well as the letters of Henry and Sarah Fielding, and is the author of several books on Jonathan Swift, a study of the English eighteenth-century novel, and a biography of the linguist and philosopher James Harris. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Harshana Rambukwella completed a doctoral study on nationalist discourse in Sri Lankan anglophone and Sinhala-language writing at the University of Hong Kong in 2008. He continues to work as a researcher at the same university and teaches part-time in Hong Kong. Archana Rampure is a postdoctoral research fellow at Dalhousie University, where she is affiliated with the Department of English and the School of Information Management. She locates her work at the intersection of cultural studies, postcolonialism, and contemporary popular culture. Ruby Ramraj teaches in the Department of English, University of Calgary. Her areas of interest are Victorian fiction, science fiction, and postcolonial studies. She has published articles on Neil Bissoondath, Amitav Ghosh, Sara Suleri, Olive
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Senior, Isaac Asimov, Robert Sawyer, and Nalo Hopkinson. Victor J. Ramraj is professor of English at the University of Calgary. From 1990 to 2001, he was editor of Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, and he has numerous publications on international English Literature, including an early book on Mordecai Richler (1983). He is editor of Concert of Voices: An Anthology of World Writing in English (1995), and coeditor of Postindependence Voices in South Asian Writing (2001), with Alamgir Hashmi and Malashri Lal. He is currently studying the politics of differences and affinities in international English literature and working on theories of mimicry in postcolonial literatures. Ruvani Ranasinha is senior lecturer in postcolonial literatures at the Department of English, King’s College London. She specializes in postcolonial literature and theory, especially relating to South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. Her publications include Hanif Kureishi (2002) and South Asian Writers in Twentieth Century Britain: Culture in Translation (2007). Don Randall is associate professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Letters at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Having received his PhD from the University of Alberta in 1995, he subsequently held two postdoctoral fellowships in Canada before beginning his Bilkent career in 1999. His main research areas are postcolonial literature and British imperial literature, and he has published numerous articles in international journals. He is the author of two books: Kipling’s Imperial Boy: Adolescence and Cultural Hybridity (2000) and David Malouf (2007). Antje M. Rauwerda is an assistant professor of postcolonial literature and theory at Goucher College in Baltimore, USA. She has published in Antipodes, Canadian Literature, Continuum, InBetween, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Victorian Literature and Culture, and the South Asian Review. Her current work is on expatriate fiction. Norman Ravvin is chair of Concordia University’s Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies. His books include the novel Lola by Night and the story collection Sex, Skyscrapers and Standard
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME III
Yiddish. His essays on Canadian and American Jewish writing appear in A House of Words: Jewish Writing, Identity and Memory. He is also the author of Hidden Canada: An Intimate Travelogue and coeditor, with Richard Menkis, of The Canadian Jewish Studies Reader. Deanna Reder, of Cree-Metis heritage, holds a joint appointment as assistant professor in Simon Fraser University’s First Nations studies program and the Department of English. Her main fields of study are Indigenous literary theories and autobiography theory, with a particular focus on Cree and Metis life writing. She is series editor for the Aboriginal Studies series at Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Josna Rege is associate professor of literature at Worcester State College in Massachusetts, where she teaches postcolonial, world, and contemporary British literatures, and is affiliated with the women’s studies and global studies programs. Her book, Colonial Karma: Self, Action and Nation in the Indian English Novel, was published in 2004, and she is currently studying new forms of transnational cultural production. Constance S. Richards is the author of On the Winds and Waves of Imagination: Transnational Feminism and Literature, which examines, from a postcolonial critical perspective, issues of identity in the works of Virginia Woolf, Zo€e Wicomb, and Alice Walker. She is also the author of several essays, including one on Wicomb and Michelle Cliff published in Research in African Literatures. She teaches English, women’s and gender studies, and African American and African Studies at Ohio Wesleyan University and Ohio State University. Ian Richards is an associate professor at Osaka City University, Japan. He is the author of To Bed at Noon: The Life and Art of Maurice Duggan (1997) and Dark Sneaks In: Essays on the Short Fiction of Janet Frame (2004). He maintains a website on New Zealand literature at http://nofrillsnzlit.angelfire.com/index.html. Christian Riegel is associate professor of English and head of Department at Campion College at the University of Regina. He has published Twenty-First Century Canadian Writers (2007); Response to Death: The Literary Work of Mourning
(2005); Writing Grief: Margaret Laurence and the Work of Mourning (2003); A Sense of Place: ReEvaluating Regionalism in Canadian and American Writing (1997); and Challenging Territory: The Writing of Margaret Laurence (1997). He has published essays on a number of Canadian and American writers, and also writes poetry and fiction. Leah Rosenberg is an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Florida where she teaches Caribbean and Atlantic studies. She is the author of Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature (2007). Anjali Gera Roy is professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. She has published Bhangra Moves: From Ludhiana to London and Beyond (2009); Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement and Resettlement (2008); Rohinton Mistry: An Anthology of Recent Criticism (2007); Wole Soyinka: An Anthology of Recent Criticism (2006); New Directions in African Writing (2005); and Three Great African Writers: Achebe, Soyinka, Tutuola (2001), as well as several essays on postcolonial literature, culture, and theory. Meg Samuelson is an associate professor in the English Department, Stellenbosch University. She has published articles on Yvonne Vera’s fiction in collections and journals such as Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera, Research in African Literatures, English Studies in Africa, and African Identities. Her other research focuses on the politics of gender in South African literature, with publications including her study Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women? Stories of the South African Transition (2007), and on African urban cultures and the Indian Ocean world. Elaine Savory is associate professor of literature at the New School in New York City. She coedited Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (1990), and has written flame tree time (1993), Jean Rhys (1998), and The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys (2009), as well as many essays on Caribbean and African literatures. She is presently writing a study of anglophone elegiac poetry from the Atlantic rim.
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME III
Kamila Shamsie is the author of five novels, including Kartography and Burnt Shadows, which have publishers in 18 countries. She reviews for a number of publications, including The Guardian, The Telegraph, and the TLS. Between 2000 and 2006 she had a recurring position as visiting assistant professor of English at Hamilton College, New York. Muneeza Shamsie is a Pakistani writer and critic and editor of three pioneering anthologies of Pakistani English literature. She contributes to the online Literary Encyclopedia, is the Pakistan bibliographical representative for the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, is managing editor of the forthcoming Oxford Companion to the Literatures of Pakistan, and is writing Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of Pakistani English Literature. Paul Sharrad is associate professor in English literatures at the University of Wollongong in Australia. He has written widely on postcolonial fiction and has a special interest in writing from the Pacific and India. Susan Sheridan is adjunct professor of English and women’s studies at Flinders University. Her books include Christina Stead (1988), Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in Australian Women’s Writing 1880s to 1930s (1995), and Who Was That Woman? The “Australian Women’s Weekly” in the Postwar Years (2002); and, as editor, Grafts: Feminist Cultural Criticism (1988), Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s (1993, with Sue Rowley and Susan Magarey), and Thea Astley’s Fictional Worlds (2006, with Paul Genoni). Rezzan Koca€oner Silk€ u is an associate professor of English literature at Ege University, Izmir, Turkey, where she received her PhD in 1996 for her dissertation on Doris Lessing’s novels. Her teaching and research areas range from Victorian fiction to postcolonial studies. She has published on George Eliot, Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Arundhati Roy, Flora Nwapa, and she is the author of Industrialization, Modernity and the Woman Question. Tony Simoes da Silva teaches in the School of English Literatures, Philosophy and Languages at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He is the author of The Luxury of Despair: George
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Lamming’s Fiction as Decolonizing Project (2000), coeditor of Interactions: Essays on Literature and Culture in the Asia-Pacific (2000), and of numerous journal articles and book chapters on African writing in English and Portuguese. Hyacinth Simpson is an associate professor in the Department of English and the MA program in immigration and settlement studies at Ryerson University in Toronto, where she specializes in Caribbean literature and diaspora studies. She is the editor of MaComere, the international journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars. She has published in numerous journals, and has completed an edited book of essays on Caribbean migration, transnationalism and diaspora. Amardeep Singh is associate professor of English at Lehigh University, where he teaches anglophone postcolonial and modern British literature. He has published a book, Literary Secularism: Religion and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Fiction (2006), and essays on E. M. Forster, James Joyce, colonial modernist prefaces, and the politics of naming in the South Asian diaspora. In 2008, he coedited a special issue of South Asian Review entitled “Imagining South Asia.” He is currently working on a book-length analysis of the films of Mira Nair. Eric D. Smith is assistant professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where he teaches courses on anglophone postcolonial and modern/ postmodern British literatures. His work appears in journals such as Genre, Modern Fiction Studies, Critique, James Joyce Quarterly, Journal of Narrative Theory, Ariel, and Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Rowland Smith was born and raised in South Africa. A former Rhodes Scholar, he had a distinguished career as a professor of English and senior administrator at three Canadian universities: Dalhousie University, Wilfrid Laurier University, and the University of Calgary, where he was Dean of Humanities at the time of his death in 2008, shortly after submitting his entry for this volume. His many scholarly publications include a monograph on Roy Campbell and two edited collections, including Critical Essays on Nadine Gordimer (1990).
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME III
Heather Smyth is an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Her publications on multiculturalism, sexuality, and postcolonialism appear in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, Studies in Canadian Literature, and Topia: A Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.
Kenneth Strongman completed a BSc and PhD in psychology at London University, worked at the University of Exeter and then took up a chair of psychology at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He has written 10 books, several book chapters, more than 100 academic papers, and over 1,000 popular articles and reviews. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and is currently Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Arts) at Canterbury.
Lindy Stiebel is professor in English Studies at the University of KwaZulu–Natal. She has published books on nineteenth-century fictional and artistic constructions of Africa (Imagining Africa, 2001; Thomas Baines and the “Great Map”, 2001); and Australia (Thomas Baines in Australia, 2008). Recently completed is a volume on Rider Haggard for the series Lives of Victorian Literary Figures (2009). She has published on South African writing, particularly the work of Lewis Nkosi; and leads the KZN Literary Tourism research project, which features Nkosi, among other writers.
Luke Strongman teaches humanities at the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, where he is also research facilitator. His book Booker Prize and the Legacy of Empire was published by Rodopi in 2002.
Cheryl Stobie lectures in English studies on the Pietermaritzburg campus of the University of KwaZulu–Natal. She has presented numerous papers on postcolonialism and representations of gender, sexuality, and spirituality in literature. She is one of the editors of the journal Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, and her articles, chapters in books and book reviews have been published in South Africa, Nigeria, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Holland and Morocco. Her book Somewhere in the Double Rainbow: Representations of Bisexuality in Post-Apartheid Novels appeared in 2007. Nora Foster Stovel is professor of English at the University of Alberta. She has published books and articles on twentieth-century writers – specifically D. H. Lawrence, Margaret Drabble, Margaret Laurence, and Carol Shields – as well as essays on Jane Austen. She edited four books by Margaret Laurence and recently published Divining Margaret Laurence: A Study of Her Complete Writings (2008). She is currently composing “Sparkling Subversion”: Carol Shields’s Vision and Voice. She is also planning Women with Wings: The Ballerina in Romantic Ballets of the Nineteenth Century.
Cynthia Sugars is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa, where she teaches Canadian literature and postcolonial theory. She has published numerous articles on Canadian literature and is the editor of Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism (2004), Home-Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature (2004), and Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic (2009). She has recently coedited a new two-volume anthology of Canadian literature with Laura Moss, entitled Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts (2008–9). Cheryl Suzack is an assistant professor of English at the University of Victoria. She edited the critical edition of Beatrice Culleton Mosionier’s In Search of April Raintree (1999) and coedited Indigenous Women and Feminism: Culture, Activism, Politics (forthcoming). Andrew Teverson is principal lecturer and director of studies in English literature and creative writing at Kingston University, London. He is the author of Salman Rushdie (2007), and has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on Rushdie’s work. He is currently researching a book on the uses of folk narrative and fairy tales in colonial and postcolonial literature. John Thieme teaches at the University of East Anglia and has held chairs at the University of Hull and London South Bank University. His books include The Web of Tradition: Uses of Allusion in V. S. Naipaul’s Fiction (1987), The
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME III
Arnold Anthology of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (1996), Derek Walcott (1999), Post-Colonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon (2001), Post-Colonial Studies: The Essential Glossary (2003), and R. K. Narayan (2007). He is editor of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and general editor of the Manchester University Press Contemporary World Writers series. Alex Tickell is senior lecturer in English at the University of Portsmouth. He has published widely on colonial and postcolonial fiction, especially South Asian fiction, and also works on travel writing and literature and terrorism. His publications include a critical edition of Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s writing: Selections from “Bengaliana” (2005), and Alternative Indias: Writing, Nation and Communalism (2005), coedited with Peter Morey. He has recently completed a student guide, Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things” (2007), and is currently working on an AHRCfunded monograph project on violence and empire. Hildi Froese Tiessen is a professor of English and peace and conflict studies at Conrad Grebel University College, University of Waterloo. She has published numerous articles and edited nine volumes of work by and about Mennonite(s) writing in Canada, including Rudy Wiebe: A Tribute (2002). She is coeditor, with Paul Tiessen, of a scholarly edition of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s letters to an aspiring Mennonite writer: After Green Gables: L. M. Montgomery’s Letters to Ephraim Weber, 1916–1941 (2005). Alison Toron is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. She has published in the university’s Journal of Student Writing and has presented papers on gender performativity, trauma, and masculinity. Supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, she is writing her dissertation on feminist humor in novels by three Canadian women writers. Tony Tremblay is professor of English at St. Thomas University and Canada Research Chair in New Brunswick Studies. Primarily a Canadianist who specializes in Maritime studies, he has published widely in the fields of technology, film, media, pedagogy, and literary modernism. His recent editorial work includes the books George
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Sanderson: Editor and Cultural Worker (2007) and David Adams Richards: Essays on His Work (2005). Co-director of the New Brunswick and Atlantic Studies Research and Development Centre, he is currently researching New Brunswick’s modernist cultural workers. Harish Trivedi, professor of English at the University of Delhi, is author of Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India (1995), and has published reviews and articles on R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao, Salman Rushdie, and Vikram Seth. He is the coeditor of Interrogating Postcolonialism (1996, repr. 2000, 2006), and Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800–1990 (1999). He also writes in Hindi. Anthonia (Tonia) Inyang Umoren is a senior lecturer, researcher and head of the Department of English and Literary Studies at the University of Calabar, Nigeria. She is the author of three books and several journal articles and book chapters. Her books include The Portrait of Womanhood in African Literary Tradition: Reflections on Elechi Amadi (2002) and Literature and Society: Social Order in the Novels of Elechi Amadi (2004). She has organized international conferences for the Women’s Health Network and convened the International Conference on African Literature and the English Language in 2008. Susan Vanzanten is professor of English and Director of the Center for Scholarship and Faculty Development at Seattle Pacific University. Her books include Truth and Reconciliation: The Confessional Mode in South African Literature (2002) and A Story of South Africa: J. M. Coetzee’s Fiction in Context (1991). She also edited Postcolonial Literature and the Biblical Call to Justice (1994). Shunzhu Wang teaches Chinese language and literature at Rider University. As a literary critic, he has published essays, in both Chinese and English, in literary journals and books on a variety of subjects in modern Chinese literature, classic Chinese literature, Asian American literature, and modern American literature. He has published translations from English to Chinese of fiction as well as of critical theory. His current translation and editing projects are American Literary Criticism Since the 1980s by Vincent Leitch and Theory Mapped, Analyzed, and Defended: A Leitch Reader, schedule for publication in 2010.
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME III
Abigail Ward is lecturer in postcolonial studies at Nottingham Trent University and is finishing a monograph on representations of slavery in the work of Fred D’Aguiar, David Dabydeen, and Caryl Phillips. She has published essays in a range of books and in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and Moving Worlds. Tracy Ware is a professor of English at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, where he teaches Canadian literature. He has published on Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Poe, Trilling, Naipaul, Keneally, and various aspects of Canadian literature. He edited A Northern Romanticism: Poets of the Confederation (2000) and The Uncollected Short Stories of Duncan Campbell Scott (2002). Marita Wenzel is associate professor of English at North-West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa. Her main fields of interest are South African and postcolonial novels and feminist and translation studies within a comparative literary framework. She has published several articles in South African periodicals as well as chapters in books, and is also an accredited translator (from Afrikaans, German, and Spanish into English) for the South African Translators’ Institute. Darryl Whetter’s articles appear in Studies in Canadian Literature, English Studies in Canada, and the Journal of Indian Writing in English, and have been anthologized by Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle and America’s National Poetry Foundation. He is also the author of two books of fiction, 15 published stories, and numerous book reviews for Canadian media (including the Globe and Mail, the Montreal Gazette, and the Vancouver Sun). He is currently an assistant professor of English at Dalhousie University.
Mark Williams has written extensively on New Zealand, postcolonial, and modern literature. His books include Maoriland: New Zealand Literature 1872–1914 (2006), written with Jane Stafford, Patrick White (1993) and Leaving the Highway: Six Contemporary New Zealand Novelists (1990). He was coeditor with Jenny Bornholdt and Gregory O’Brien of An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English (1997). He is currently professor of English at the University of Canterbury. R. John Williams is an assistant professor of English at Yale University. His interests include postcolonial/transnational literature, film, and comparative American studies. He has published articles in Research in African Literatures, Transformations, and Comparative Critical Studies, and has articles forthcoming in Cultural Critique and American Literature. Sheena Wilson is assistant professor at the University of Alberta. Her research interests involve an interdisciplinary approach to the study of human and civil rights abuses as they are represented in literature, film, and media. Related areas of interest include patterns of exclusion exercised on non-dominant communities within the paradigm of state multiculturalism. She is particularly interested in the reception of ethno-cultural media representations, as well as the ways in which women writers and filmmakers represent marginalization. Lorraine York is professor of English and cultural studies at McMaster University. She has written books on photography and Canadian fiction, Timothy Findley, contemporary women’s collaborative writing, and Canadian literary celebrity. She is currently writing a book about the Margaret Atwood “industry.”
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Introduction to Volume III
At the four corners of the Albert Memorial in London’s Kensington Gardens are four large sculptures whose stylized groupings of animals and people allegorically represent Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas – an imperial version of the biblical four corners of the earth, it would seem, with only Australia and the South Pacific conspicuously missing from this display of Victorian England’s global reach. The bronze statue at the center of the memorial shows Albert himself seated, staring resolutely southeast, and holding in his right hand a catalogue of the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations. Since, from a distance, the Prince Consort’s reading matter could be any book at all, it is tempting (in a playfully postcolonial sort of way) to imagine the contents of his hand being regularly replenished by the literary works of the nations from those four corners in the years since the statue was built. Perhaps he has just now finished Things Fall Apart (1958), the most widely read novel by a black African – a writer whose given name, not coincidentally, is Albert, but who is better known to the world as Chinua Achebe.1 What, we might wonder, would Victoria’s Albert, enthusiastic sponsor of the Great Exhibition’s display of worldly creativity, have made of this other Albert’s works? Or, to extend our fanciful musings, of the more recent fiction of Samoa’s Albert Wendt? As he sits in his visionary pose, looking perennially about to begin a book or as though he has just finished one, what pleasures (or pains) might the Prince get from the emerging canon of fiction in English that his wife’s vast empire unwittingly helped create, a body of work that, over the course of the twentieth century, moved from the peripheral corners of literary consciousness to take its place at the center of English-language writing?
The novel is a European genre and the novel in English was, until the end of the nineteenth century, a primarily English genre, with notable contributions from the ex-colony of the United States and the then current one of Ireland. While English-speaking settlers in Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand were also writing during that century, composing such notable fictions such as John Richardson’s Wacousta (1832), Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm (1883), and Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1901) – the latter published during the eventful year in which Victoria died, Australia became a nation, and the new century began – more fully developed and confidently embraced national literary traditions would not emerge in these young nations until the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, in 1930, in a manifestation of what the critic A. A. Phillips would later call “the Cultural Cringe,”2 H. M. Green began An Outline of Australian Literature with the humble statement that “Australian literature is a branch of English literature, and however great it may become and whatever characteristics it may develop, it will remain a branch”;3 similar assessments of their literature’s branch-plant status, immaturity, belatedness, and the like – legacies of colonial paternalism – were typical in the other settler nations as well, despite the originality and international successes of writers such as L. M. Montgomery and Stephen Leacock of Canada, Henry Handel Richardson and Katharine Susannah Prichard of Australia, and Katherine Mansfield of New Zealand. In those imperial footholds that Britain continued to occupy well into the twentieth century, the colonies of invasion in the West Indies, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent, little or no English-language fiction was written by colonized residents in the nineteenth century; in
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME III
the first half of the twentieth, before widespread decolonization began after World War II, just a smattering of enduring home-grown writers emerged – notably Jean Rhys of Dominica and Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, and Raja Rao in India. In the postwar period, however, fiction from both the settler societies and the colonies of invasion, which were now becoming independent “Third World” nations, flourished to the point where it could, by century’s end, claim to be central to the story of English-language fiction as a whole. With various forms of political and cultural nationalism fostering national identities that were now officially untethered from an imported or imposed Englishness, and with burgeoning publishing industries, education systems, and interest in local stories told by local voices, writers from ex-colonies enhanced and extended the novel and short story genres, appropriating and transforming their formal conventions and linguistic raw material, and generally enlivening the literary scene. In the 1980s and 1990s writers from the West Indies, Africa, and India won top awards such as the Nobel Prize for Literature or the Booker Prize for Fiction; they were seriously taught and researched and theorized about in institutions of higher learning; and their fiction captured the imaginations of readers worldwide, topping bestseller lists and comprising a significant enough phenomenon to be celebrated on the cover of Time magazine.4 These new voices told the stories a decolonizing, globalizing, increasingly multicultural and transnational world wanted to hear. Not all world fiction in English comes from former colonies, of course; some of it originates in China, the Philippines, and other places without a British colonial past. But the global spread of English and its emergence as the dominant language of world literature can be overwhelmingly traced back to the success of the British imperial adventure, which sent not just English people and institutions and forces across the oceans but their language and literature and culture as well – the pen that so mightily complemented the sword. The world fiction on which this volume of the ETCF is focused is mostly (but not exclusively) a phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century and of a group of national literatures that collectively came into focus in the 1950s and
1960s with the emergence of writers such as Doris Lessing, V. S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soyinka, Patrick White, and the poet-playwright Derek Walcott (all of them Nobel Prize winners), not to mention Achebe, Ng~ ug~ı, Sam Selvon, George Lamming, Mordecai Richler, Janet Frame, Khushwant Singh, Kamala Markandaya, and many others. The study of these writers was encouraged, beginning in the 1960s, by the development of university courses and research on these “new” national literatures, particularly in the countries themselves, as an addition to the study of British and American literatures. At the same time, comparative study was fostered internationally by the then new field of “Commonwealth literature” and the founding of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS); though the association and its regional branches remain strong, Commonwealth literature has, since the late 1980s, largely ceded its ground to the more politicized rubric of “postcolonial literatures” and “postcolonialism,” which have transformed English studies over the past two decades. The “post” in postcolonial (spelled with or without a hyphen) is, in simple terms, understood as a marker not so much of a temporal shift to political independence as of a psychic awareness – a consciousness that oneself and one’s people have been colonized, and a consequent desire to engage critically and imaginatively with the implications and legacies of that transformative historical fact. For the authors of The Empire Writes Back (1989), the influential first book to offer a synoptic theory of postcolonial literatures, “What each of these literatures has in common beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics is that they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre.”5 The realm in which this tension, difference, and resistant assertion are most palpable is that of the writer’s most fundamental tool – the word. When writers of the postcolonial world use the language of Shakespeare and Austen (which may or may not be their mother tongue), they transform it, bending and reshaping it to reflect local speech rhythms, names, idioms, cosmologies, and other
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INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME III
languages with which it comes in contact. In the West Indies, many generations of plantation slavery, indenture, British-controlled education, and suppression of African languages had produced forms of creolized English as the language(s) most people spoke; writers often departed from standard “literary” English to embrace these variant Englishes in their fiction, as V. S. Reid and Sam Selvon did in their early novels New Day (1949) and The Lonely Londoners (1956) respectively. And while English was most West Indians’ mother tongue, this was usually not the case in Asia and Africa. As Raja Rao observed in the famous preface to his novel Kanthapura (1938), to write in English about the life of an Indian village “has not been easy. One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own.”6 For Salman Rushdie, in a Times article entitled “The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance” (1982), the history of colonialism means that the English language is “tainted by history”: “The language, like much else in the newly independent societies, needs to be decolonized, to be remade in other images, if those of us from positions outside Anglo-Saxon culture are to be more than artistic Uncle Toms.”7 Rushdie’s own novels are often applauded for their Indianized (or “chutneyfied”) English, as were those of predecessors such as Ahmed Ali (Twilight in Delhi, 1940) and G. V. Desani (All about H. Hatterr, 1948), and successors such as Shashi Tharoor (The Great Indian Novel, 1989) and Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things, 1997). However, in India, the majority of literary writing and reading takes place in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, or the nation’s many other official languages. English is the literary language of a minority of writers there, as it is elsewhere in Asia and in Africa, where a vigorous debate took place in the 1970s on the suitability of English as a medium for conveying African experience in literature. Squaring off most prominently were Achebe (who maintained that English has, for better or worse, become an African language and is flexible enough to ug~ı wa convey African experience)8 and Ng~ Thiong’o, who abandoned the English of his early novels for his native G~ık~ uy~ u beginning with Devil on the Cross (1982), arguing in Decolonising the Mind that language is “a carrier of culture” and “is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a
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specific form and character, a specific history, a ug~ı, specific relationship to the world.”9 For Ng~ continuing to write in the colonizer’s language would therefore be a capitulation to continued domination and alienation. (In a similar spirit, Malaysian government policies in the 1970s subordinated English, despite its widespread use, in an effort to promote Malay as the language of the new nation; this discouraged writing in English for a generation, though the new millennium has witnessed a comeback.)10 Although the outpouring of English-language fiction from the postcolonial world in the past few decades suggests that many writers voted with their pens (or perhaps, more cynically, their pocketbooks) and sided with Achebe’s rather than Ng~ ug~ı’s approach, there is a widespread perception that English-language literature from former colonies of invasion is the product of a mobile, often foreign-educated and expatriate elite out of touch with and unable to speak to the experience of common people. And while writers such as India’s R. K. Narayan, Jamaica’s Erna Brodber, and Nigeria’s Cyprian Ekwensi remained lifelong residents of their countries of birth, they are the exceptions that prove the rule, and a majority of the most prominent English-language authors from Asia, the West Indies, and Africa have spent their adult lives largely in Britain or other Western nations as diasporic migrants – or, in some cases, as unwilling exiles – from their original homeland. Nonetheless, these migrant writers continued to write about those homelands and their people, their cultures and histories, along with the contemporary experiences of immigration and adaptation, alienation and transformation, that their own lives have embodied and witnessed. In the process, such diverse figures as Austin Clarke (Barbados/Canada), Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua/US), Bharati Mukherjee (India/ US), Romesh Gunesekera (Sri Lanka/UK), M. G. Vassanji (Tanzania/Canada), and Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria/UK), have enhanced the literatures of their nations and regions of birth as well as offering new literary lenses through which to see their adoptive national (and increasingly mixed) societies. World fiction of the late twentieth century is therefore a fiction of multiple cultural and geographical influences and affiliations: it is as transnational and cross-cultural as it is postcolonial.
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INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME III
Throughout the world, fiction in English has pushed generic and stylistic conventions into new territory. Beyond the linguistic experimentation of writers like the aforementioned Selvon and Rushdie, or of Nigeria’s Amos Tutuola (The Palm-Wine Drinkard, 1952), Ken Saro-Wiwa (Sozaboy, 1984), and Ben Okri (The Famished Road, 1991), the foundational realism of the English novel also, like its language, proved an attractive tool for twentieth-century writers to use and to resist. The referential breadth of realism – its implicit claim that any kind of object, person, place, or experience could be worth including in a work of imaginative fiction – made it appealing to writers’ interests in representing the previously unrepresented (or misrepresented) world they knew. But realism’s presumption of objective observation and truth-telling limited its ability to represent subjective states of consciousness, or spiritual or supernatural experiences, or contradictory perceptions of reality; furthermore, ideas of objectivity, truth, and authority had been tainted by the Empire’s imposition of self-serving, oppressive truths that distorted and diminished the world of the colonized “other.” And so, as the modernists and postmodernists of British and American literature sought alternatives to realism in order to find suitable literary expressions of contemporary crises of faith (in God, in a coherent and unified world, in secular authority, in the signifying word), writers from the postcolonial world sought fictional forms that would convey the disjunctions their histories of colonization and displacement had produced between peoples, places, cultures, discourses, worldviews, and knowledges. Magic realism is renowned as one distinctively postcolonial innovation (with origins in Latin America and furthered by Indian and African writers), and the importance of oral storytelling in many developing countries and indigenous cultures was reflected in numerous works infused with oral traditions and narrative forms that predated colonial contact, including mythic and religious materials. In their pursuits of cultural recuperation, political resistance, and aesthetic innovation, writers of world fiction also developed their own uses for and ways of writing satire, fantasy, stream of consciousness, historical fiction, epistolary fiction, children’s fiction, crime fiction, and more.
For many writers, activism and fiction have gone hand in hand. Whether as anti-colonial nationalists (Wole Soyinka), anti-apartheid activists (Alex La Guma), feminists (Margaret Atwood), socialists (Mulk Raj Anand), pacifists (Katharine Susannah Prichard), anti-racists (Chinua Achebe), environmentalists (Arundhati Roy), gay activists (Dionne Brand), or as advocates of multiple causes, numerous authors have eschewed an art-for-art’s-sake approach to their writing. Parlaying their profiles as writers into prominent roles as essayists and public speakers for their causes at home and abroad, they may suffer censorship (Rushdie), exile (Soyinka), imprisonment (Ng~ ug~ı), and even death (SaroWiwa) for their pains. But whether or not the authors themselves are publicly active, their fiction frequently foregrounds social and political issues. The power politics of colonialism and neocolonial rule loom large, not surprisingly, particularly in historical fiction (a favored genre throughout the postcolonial world), but also in works with contemporary or speculative settings. Minority groups’ struggles for recognition and rights – Muslims and Parsis in India, West Indians in London, indigenous peoples in Canada – are a common subject; the search for origins and the place of home is another, whether from a locally rooted or diasporically routed perspective. The social and cultural transformations that a century of colonization and decolonization, wars and coups, migrations and resettlements, sexual and social and cultural and political revolutions have produced provide a seemingly bottomless (and variously exhilarating and disheartening) set of contexts whose human dimensions it is the novelist and short story writer’s task to explore. Of course, there is a marked difference between the overt polemics of activist non-fiction and the indirect, exploratory themes of politically engaged fiction. As Ikem Osodi, a character in Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987), memorably says, “Writers don’t give prescriptions . . . They give headaches!”11 As we return to the image of Albert, Prince Consort, sitting with book eternally in hand, we might guess that a steady stream of world fiction over the past century would give him something of a headache. After all, he was married to the monarch most associated with the ascent of empire and the expansion of British power to the four corners of the earth, and the
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INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME III
fiction he would be endlessly reading does not offer much in the way of thanks for that achievement. But even as he wishes he had a hand free to reach for an aspirin, he might also find his mind expanding, the ideas in his bronzed brain changing, as he is led to see Africa though Ng~ ug~ı’s eyes, India through Anita Desai’s, Australia through Peter Carey’s, New Zealand through Janet Frame’s, Canada through Alice Munro’s, America through Bharati Mukherjee’s, Singapore through Catherine Lim’s, and England through David Dabydeen’s. And we can guess that for them and for most of the other writers covered by this volume, the combination of headache and opened mind would be just about ideal.
Editing the World Fiction volume of the ETCF has been an exciting challenge and a daunting responsibility. How to cover such a vast, heterogeneous field, and so many fascinating and important writers, in fewer than 200 entries of 1,000, 2,000, or 3,000 words each? Some working principles helped guide my (sometimes agonizing) choices. Authors receiving one of the 162 author entries were expected to have established a significant international reputation as writers of literary fiction for adults before the end of the twentieth century, even if they have gone on to publish more
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and more significant work in the twenty-first. However, contributors were asked to bring those entries up to date as of their submission so as not to artificially halt coverage of an author’s career at the year 2000. Authors who published most of their work in the nineteenth century but continued into the twentieth were generally not included. Length of entries was guided primarily by relative scholarly reputation and, in some cases, of output, with 3,000-word entries limited to Nobel Prize winners and a handful of other figures who have dominated their respective national literatures and achieved international renown. The 34 subject entries cover the major national and regional literatures covered by the volume, as well as a limited selection of synoptic entries covering theoretical topics, genres, and/or worldly contexts for the study of twentieth-century fiction, as in the other volumes. Undoubtedly some readers will lament the omission of a favorite author or question the inclusion of another; like every other quasi-canonizing process, this one is inevitably imperfect, but I trust the final result will nonetheless prove useful and illuminating to scholars, students, and other fiction enthusiasts. John Clement Ball
Notes 1 Chinua Achebe, “Named for Victoria, Queen of England,” in Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (London: Heinemann, 1975), p. 67. 2 A. A. Phillips, The Australian Tradition: Studies in a Colonial Culture, 2nd edn. [1966] (Melbourne: Longman, 1980), p. 112. 3 H. M. Green, An Outline of Australian Literature (Sydney: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1930), p. 9. 4 Pico Iyer, “The Empire Writes Back,” Time (Feb. 8, 1993), pp. 54–9. 5 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, & Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 2. 6 Raja Rao, “Author’s Foreword,” in Kanthapura [1938] (New York: New Directions, 1967), p. vii. 7 Salman Rushdie, “The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance,” The Times (July 3, 1982), 8. 8 Chinua Achebe, “The African Writer and the English Language,” in Morning Yet on Creation Day, pp. 65–70. 9 Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986), pp. 13, 16. 10 The question of language is less fraught in the former settler colonies, though a substantial portion of Canadian literature is written in French, and in South Africa, Andre Brink writes fiction in both English and Afrikaans. 11 Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah [1987] (London: Picador, 1988), p. 161.
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A Abrahams, Peter YOGITA GOYAL
Though often neglected by scholars of African fiction, Peter Abrahams is one of the earliest voices in black South African fiction and an important theorist of nationalism, transnationalism, and exile. His works reveal the competing and complementary intersections of liberal humanism, Marxism, and Black Nationalism. Abrahams was born on March 19, 1919 in Vrededorp, a Johannesburg slum, to an Ethiopian father who worked the mines and a Cape Malay mother – leaders of an impoverished Afrikaansspeaking household classified as “colored.” In Tell Freedom (1954), Abrahams explains that his writing career stemmed from two sources of artistic inspiration. The first was African American writers and poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Abrahams discovered the writings of Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Marcus Garvey, and W. E. B. Du Bois in the mid-1930s as part of his work at the Bantu Men’s Social Center, later describing his encounter with their thinking as a catalyst for the awakening of racial and cultural pride. His second source of inspiration came when a young Jewish woman narrated Charles Lamb’s version of Othello to an 11-year-old Abrahams. Though drawn to the United States with the possibility of meeting the Harlem writers, he journeyed instead to England in 1939 by working his passage on a freighter. Abrahams invoked England as the home of Lamb, John Keats, and P. B. Shelley, suggesting that the metropolis would offer a refuge for his literary pursuits. In
London, he became involved with the Communist Party, writing for the Daily Worker, but soon broke with the party over their attempts to control his artistic freedom. Joining a community of African and Caribbean intellectuals, he helped organize the 1945 Pan-African Conference in Manchester before moving to Jamaica in the mid-1950s with his wife, Daphne, where they still reside. Following a volume of poetry, A Black Man Speaks of Freedom! (1941), Abrahams’s collection of short stories and reminiscences, Dark Testament (1942), offers unsentimental realist and naturalist sketches of South African urban squalor. His first novel, Song of the City (1945), presents a panoramic view of a group of characters in Johannesburg, linked by the organizing motif of the song – a ballad improvised in the beer halls recounting the journey to the big city as an allegory for the larger transition from tribal past to Western present. The well-received novel Mine Boy (1946) further represents the impact of urbanization by tracking the movement from rural to urban forms of political consciousness, exploring the possibility of freedom in a world marked by the exploitation of miners in a racist society. The Path of Thunder (1948) addresses similar issues, this time through the lens of interracial love, as it probes the ultimately tragic encounter between a colored schoolteacher and an Afrikaans woman, exploring the contradictions of the color line in the northern Cape Province. The historical novel Wild Conquest (1950) challenges the pioneer myth of the Great Trek: the Boer migration of the 1830s and 1840s into the Southern African interior seeking a homeland free of British control, which later
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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ACHEBE, CHINUA
became a founding event in Afrikaner nationalism. The narrative persona in these novels is often dispassionate, in contrast to Abrahams’s vivid autobiographical writing in Return to Goli (1953) and Tell Freedom (1954). His successive novels address broad conceptions of national liberation and the development of new governments, often thematizing the process of independence as a clash between personal freedom and the pull of tradition. They also explore interracial relationships, especially between black men and white women, as testing grounds for explosive racial antagonisms and liberal, sentimental beliefs in love, personal freedom, and friendship. A Wreath for Udomo (1956) uses the trope of betrayal to portray pan-African intellectuals in exile in London (including a harsh portrait of George Padmore), their relations with white women, and conflicts within complex artistic and political debates, all of which play out when they move to a fictional country, Panafrica (widely seen as modeled on Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana), bordered by Pluralia, a black majority nation tyrannized by a white racist regime and clearly reminiscent of South Africa. The novel opposes individualism to tribalism, and the need for privacy to the need for community. Though limited by its stereotypical invocations of the mysterious market woman or tribal man, the novel offers a dazzling and prophetic account of the intricacies of independence, especially the gap between transnational visions birthed in exile and local realities. The political thriller A Night of Their Own (1965) turns to South Africa to imagine its protagonist returning home in a submarine to challenge the racist regime. This Island Now (1966), a Caribbean counterpart to A Wreath for Udomo, offers a complex portrayal of the coming of independence and the inevitable betrayals and challenges brought on when a radical politician comes to power in a Caribbean island. The View from Coyaba (1985) offers a magisterial sweep across Jamaica, the American South, Liberia, and Uganda to depict struggles for black autonomy. Abrahams’s most recent autobiography, The Black Experience in the Twentieth Century (2000), displays an expansive geographical and historical scope as Abrahams mulls over the meaning of his life, placing it in a matrix of black liberation struggles across the globe.
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SEE ALSO: Censorship and Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); The Harlem Renaissance (AF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the African Diaspora (BIF); Southern African Fiction (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Abrahams, P. (1941). A Black Man Speaks of Freedom! Poems. Durban: Universal. Abrahams, P. (1942). Dark Testament. London: Allen and Unwin. Abrahams, P. (1945). Song of the City. London: Dorothy Crisp. Abrahams, P. (1946). Mine Boy. London: Dorothy Crisp. Abrahams, P. (1950). Wild Conquest. London: Faber and Faber. Abrahams, P. (1953). Return to Goli. London: Faber and Faber. Abrahams, P. (1954). Tell Freedom. London: Faber and Faber. Abrahams, P. (1956). A Wreath for Udomo. London: Faber and Faber. Abrahams, P. (1965). A Night of their Own. London: Faber and Faber. Abrahams, P. (1966). This Island Now. London: Faber and Faber. Abrahams, P. (1985). The View from Coyaba. London: Faber and Faber. Abrahams, P. (2000). The Black Experience in the Twentieth Century: An Autobiography and Meditation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ogungbesan, K. (1979). The Writing of Peter Abrahams. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Wade, M. (1972). Peter Abrahams. London: Evans.
Achebe, Chinua C. LYN INNES
Regarded by many as the father of contemporary African fiction, Chinua Achebe is almost certainly the world’s best-known African author. His groundbreaking first novel Things Fall Apart (1958) has been translated into over 55 languages and has sold more than 10 million copies. With its sympathetic depiction of a complex traditional African society, its adaptation of English to convey African speech and thought, and its portrayal of the tragic but flawed protagonist Okonkwo,
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who seeks to resist the imposition of colonial culture, Things Fall Apart provided a theme and a model that was to influence writers from many parts of the African continent. Together, Achebe’s five novels provide a history of Nigeria over a century of colonial and neocolonial rule. As a critic and editor, Achebe has also played a major part in the development of writing throughout the African continent since the 1960s. He was the founding editor of the Heinemann African Writers’ Series, which under his guidance between 1962 and 1972 published more than 100 African writers, including many emerging artists, in an affordable paperback format. Born in Ogidi in the Igbo-speaking area of eastern Nigeria on November 16, 1930, Achebe was christened Albert Chinualumogu, the fifth child of Christian converts. Achebe has argued that living at “the crossroads of cultures” gave him a particular advantage as a recorder of traditional Igbo society, for although as the son of a Christian catechist he was supposed to abhor the “heathen” practices of his uncle and cousins, he found himself fascinated by “the ritual and the life on the other arm of the crossroads.” And, Achebe continues, “I believe two things were in my favour – that curiosity, and the little distance imposed between me and it by the accident of my birth. The distance becomes not a separation but a bringing together like the necessary backward step which a judicious viewer may take in order to see a canvas steadily and fully” (1988, 23). A star pupil at school, Achebe was awarded a scholarship to study medicine at the newly established University College in Ibadan. There he published his first essays and stories in the student paper, the University Herald. Although slight, these first works already display qualities characteristic of his later writing – a keen eye for detail, a gentle irony, and an interest in the divergence between traditional African beliefs and customs and supposedly more sophisticated European ways of behaving. University College brought together from different regions of Nigeria young men and women who developed a sense of a larger nation and different traditions, and who shared a growing impatience with colonial rule and attitudes. It was there that Achebe decided to drop his Christian name Albert and become known as “Chinua,” and it was also here that he encountered colonialist writing about Africa – novels by
authors such as Joseph Conrad, Rider Haggard, Edgar Wallace, and Joyce Cary, as well as histories that assumed it was Europeans who had brought civilization to Africa. Achebe tells us, “At the university I read some appalling novels about Africa (including Joyce Cary’s much praised Mister Johnson) and decided the story we had to tell could not be told for us no matter how gifted or well intentioned” (1988, 25). In a controversial later essay Achebe denounced Conrad as a “thoroughgoing racist,” above all in his dehumanizing depiction of Africans and his denial of speech to them in Heart of Darkness (1975a, 38). Soon after his graduation from University College in 1954, while employed in the Talks Department of the Nigerian Broadcasting Service, Achebe began writing his first novel, partly in reaction to what he deemed Cary’s “most superficial picture – not only of the country – but even of the Nigerian character” (Duerden & Pieterse 4). The novel was intended to cover the story, told “from the inside” (4), of three generations, beginning with the arrival of European missionaries in eastern Nigeria toward the end of the nineteenth century, and ending with the story, paralleling Cary’s, of a young Nigerian who works for the colonial administration and is found guilty of taking bribes. However, in the process of writing, Achebe realized that he had the foundation for two separate novels, which eventually became Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease (1960). A story told from the inside involved not only crucial differences in attitude toward representing Nigerian society and character, but also a radical departure from the historical narratives that had dominated colonialist writing. Moreover, as Simon Gikandi (7) points out, there is in all of Achebe’s novels “a fundamental link between the idea of the nation, the concept of a national culture, and the quest for an African narrative.” Achebe was to declare later, in a lecture titled “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation,” that as an African writer his “fundamental theme” must be that “African peoples did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans” (1964b, 157). Thus, he set himself the difficult task of representing by means of the English language and literary tradition an oral culture rooted in the language and complex traditions of the Igbo people. The contrast between an oral culture and history and a colonialist written history is powerfully
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ACHEBE, CHINUA
conveyed through the disparity between the opening and closing paragraphs of Things Fall Apart. The opening paragraph introduces us to Okonkwo as the hero of the story about to be told, to the world and values he seeks to uphold, and to the legends and myths which sustain that world and which are passed down from one generation to the next. The final paragraph, a summary of the history the English district commissioner plans to write, consigns the 185-page novel we have just read to “a reasonable paragraph” used to illustrate the European “Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger” (185). Between those two paragraphs the reader inhabits the vibrant social, artistic, and religious culture of the Igbo village of Umuofia, which becomes present through the voices of Igbo speakers, and understands the tensions caused by divisions within the society as well as by the impact of the missionaries who make their appearance in the last third of the novel. Things Fall Apart is an anti-colonial novel that refuses to paint precolonial society as “one glorious technicolour idyll” (Achebe 1964b, 157). It does not evade the fact that it is a representation of precolonial society written after colonial power and culture have irretrievably changed that society. The novel’s title, taken from W. B. Yeats’s famous poem “The Second Coming,” foregrounds Achebe’s acknowledgment of his own dual heritage, Igbo and European, and of contested historical narratives. But the narrative voice is also a compound of Igbo and English cultural traditions, shifting seamlessly from allusions to the significance of the yam in local economic and symbolic systems to Tennyson’s reference to nature “red in tooth and claw” (Achebe 1958, 10). When, alienated by the sacrifice of his foster brother, Okonkwo’s son Nwoye takes Isaac as his Christian name, the reader is reminded of the biblical story of Abraham’s willingness to obey his god’s command to slay his son. As Gikandi points out, these allusions remind us that Achebe’s novel is in dialogue with colonialist representations of Africans as marginal, as barbaric, as lacking speech or coherence; they also allow the narrator to provide shifting perspectives and sustain an ambivalent ethics. On many occasions “the narrator seems to promote one perspective or world view but in the process also calls our attention to the negative side of that point of view” (Gikandi 44–5). This double perspective is demonstrated
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not only in descriptions of social practice and attitudes, but also in the representation of Okonkwo as a heroic but dogmatic and authoritarian defender of his community, and in the very language that Achebe adapts and “lays bare” in the novel, as in the description of the missionary Mr. Smith’s attitudes: “He saw things as black and white. And black was evil. He saw the world as a battlefield in which the children of light were locked in mortal conflict with the sons of darkness” (Achebe 1958, 164). Things Fall Apart is the novel that has made Achebe famous and that has had the greatest influence on African writers and on readers throughout the world. Wole Soyinka described it as “the first novel in English which spoke from the interior of an African character, rather than portraying him as exotic, as the white man would see him” (Jaggi 6). To some extent its extraordinary impact has overshadowed Achebe’s subsequent novels, which engage less with colonialist writing about the past and more with contemporary issues affecting the progress of Nigeria as an independent state. Although set in the 1920s, Achebe writes Arrow of God (1964a), with its focus on problems of leadership within the Igbo community amid disputed versions of community history and knowledge, at a time when contests for power between the different peoples of Nigeria (mainly Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa) were becoming apparent. This novel’s main protagonist, the priest Ezeulu, is an intellectual rather than a warrior, and at stake is the relationship between power and knowledge, between personal status and commitment to an exterior principle or authority. For some critics, Arrow of God, with its more complex portrayal of a changing African society, its powerful characterization of the proud and tragic priest who refuses to accept an appointment as warrant chief, and the secular power offered by the colonial administration, surpasses Things Fall Apart. It was awarded the Jock Campbell New Statesman Prize in 1965. Two novels set in contemporary Nigeria explored the dilemmas and challenges faced by young Nigerians. No Longer at Ease (1960) opens and closes with the trial of Obi, the grandson of Okonkwo, who has returned from university studies in England determined to become part of the new leadership as Nigeria gains independence. But he is unable to commit himself deeply
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to either the beliefs that sustain his parents or the “modern” view that rejects such traditional attitudes as the acceptance of a caste system. When Obi falls in love with a member of the despised osu caste, he is unable to defy his parents’ opposition to their marriage, or to withstand the expectation that he acquire the status symbols, such as a car and expensive flat, that appertained to the colonial rulers. As Obi travels between his comfortable urban world and the rural village where his parents live, the reader experiences the disparities in material and ethical being that characterized Nigeria on the verge of independence, and that Achebe’s later novels, A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987), demonstrate. For Obi, as for Odili Samula, the protagonist of A Man of the People, the problem of finding an appropriate form of language is crucial; rather, the language these characters use is a means for the reader to judge them. Obi describes his society through the prism of a European world view: amid the malodorous gutters of Lagos he adapts lines from T. S. Eliot to express his repugnance and, having witnessed police taking bribes, he compares the task of cleansing Nigeria of corruption to that of Hercules clearing the Augean stables. Indeed, the significance of that European cultural tradition in distancing Obi from his home community is highlighted by the title of the novel, a quotation from Eliot’s poem “Journey of the Magi,” in which the Magi declares himself “no longer at ease,” finding his people and their gods now alien (Eliot 110). In A Man of the People Odili narrates his own story, and the reader must discern his unreliability as a narrator, seeing through his breezy and often cliched justifications for his changing political allegiances. With A Man of the People Achebe moves from the tragic and ironic modes of his earlier novels to a sharply satiric portrayal of contemporary postcolonial Nigerian politics. Achebe demonstrates how easily Odili is seduced by the government minister Chief Nanga’s power, wealth, and rhetoric. Indeed, seduction becomes a metaphor for Nigerian politics, as the various groups of voters are symbolized by Nanga’s loyal first wife from his home village; Elsie, his fickle city mistress; and Edna, the young semi-educated rural girl he seeks as a second wife. In the end Odili courts and wins Edna, but at considerable cost. The novel closes with a military coup, an ending that coincided
with an actual coup in Nigeria a few months after the novel’s publication, precipitating the massacre of Igbos in northern Nigeria, the events that led to the secession of eastern Nigeria (as Biafra), and the Nigerian Civil War (1967–70). Achebe was Minister for Information for the prospective state of Biafra, and toured the world seeking support for the state. During the months and years of fighting, his home and university in Nsukka were bombed and he witnessed widespread suffering, including starvation, amid a population besieged by the federal government. There was no space to write novels, but he wrote many poems and several short stories in response to the violence and misery he witnessed. Immediately after Biafra surrendered in 1970, he set about the task of reconstruction with fellow writers and intellectuals at the University of Nsukka, and the salvaging of the ideals that had inspired his initial involvement on behalf of Biafra. He edited the university journal Nsukkascope and founded Okike: A Nigerian Journal of New Writing with the aim of providing a forum for writing by Africans and debating the criteria by which African writing should be judged. He also helped establish a publishing house, Nwamife Books (Enugu), whose first publications included fiction by Flora Nwapa, Emannuel Obiechina’s groundbreaking study of Onitsha Market Literature, and Beware Soul Brother (1972a), a collection of Achebe’s poetry which was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1972. He also published a collection of stories, Girls at War and Other Stories (1972b), and a number of books for children. Between 1972 and 1977, Achebe taught at several American universities before returning to the University of Nsukka and continuing his activities as a teacher, international lecturer, editor, and essayist. He also became deputy national president of the Peoples’ Redemption Party, expressing his analysis of the failure of Nigeria’s political leadership in the booklet The Trouble with Nigeria (1983). The ideas that inform his fifth novel, Anthills of the Savannah, set in a fictional state with strong resemblances to Nigeria, are in line with that booklet, although the novel is more complex and eschews dogmatism. Anthills acknowledges the changes that have taken place in African writing and African societies since 1960, particularly with regard to the changing role of women and the concern to create an all-inclusive
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society embracing different religions, cultures, and classes, especially the poor. One of its central characters, Beatrice Okoh, an English honors graduate and a senior administrator in the Ministry of Finance, becomes a narrator of the novel and the leader of a group of women who may represent a more positive future for Nigeria. Speech, rhetoric, and storytelling remain, as in the earlier fiction, central concerns, but in this novel the role of writers and writing also becomes a significant issue. In 2007 Chinua Achebe became the second writer to be awarded the International Man Booker Prize. One of the three judges, the distinguished South African novelist Nadine Gordimer, commented that Achebe had achieved “what one of his characters brilliantly defines as the writer’s purpose: ‘a new-found utterance’ for the capture of life’s complexity. This fiction is an original synthesis of the psychological novel, the Joycean stream of consciousness, the post-modern breaking of sequence. He is a joy and an illumination to read” (Jaggi 7). SEE ALSO: Cary, Joyce (BIF); Conrad, Joseph (BIF); English Studies, the Academy, and Fiction (WF); Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF); Soyinka, Wole (WF); West African Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Achebe, C. (1958). Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann. Achebe, C. (1960). No Longer at Ease. London: Heinemann. Achebe, C. (1964a). Arrow of God. London: Heinemann. Achebe, C. (1964b). The Role of the Writer in a New Nation. Nigeria Magazine, 81, 157–160. Achebe, C. (1966). A Man of the People. London: Heinemann. Achebe, C. (1972a). Beware Soul Brother: Poems. London: Heinemann. Achebe, C. (1972b). Girls at War and Other Stories. London: Heinemann. Achebe, C. (1975a). An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The Chancellor’s Lecture
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Series, 1974–75. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Achebe, C. (1975b). Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays. London: Heinemann. Achebe, C. (1983). The Trouble with Nigeria. Enugu: Fourth Dimension. Achebe, C. (1987). Anthills of the Savannah. London: Heinemann. Achebe, C. (1988). Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965–87. Oxford: Heinemann. Achebe, C. (2001). Home and Exile. New York: Random House. Achebe, C. (2009). Things Fall Apart: Authoritative Text, Contexts and Criticism (ed. F.A. Irele). New York: Norton. Booker, M. K. (ed.) (2003). The Chinua Achebe Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Carroll, D. (1990). Chinua Achebe. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Duerden, D., & Pieterse, C. (1972). African Writers Talking: A Collection of Radio Interviews. London: Heinemann. Eliot, T. S. (1974). Collected Poems 1909–1962. London: Faber and Faber. Ezenwa-Ohaeto, (1997). Chinua Achebe: A Biography. Oxford: James Currey. Gikandi, S. (1991). Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction. London: James Currey. Innes, C. L. (1990). Chinua Achebe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Innes, C. L., & Lindfors, B. O. (eds.) (1978). Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe. Washington, DC: Three Continents. Irele, A. (1990). The African Experience in Literature and Ideology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jaggi, M. (2000). Profile of Chinua Achebe. Guardian, pp. 6–7 (Nov. 18). Killam, G. D. (1977). The Writings of Chinua Achebe. London: Heinemann. Lindfors, B. O. (ed.) (2000). Conversations with Chinua Achebe. Oxford, MS: University of Mississippi Press. Newell, S. (2006). West African Literatures: Ways of Reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Obiechina, E. (1975). Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ogede, O. (2001). Achebe and the Politics of Representation. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Wren, R. M. (1980). Achebe’s World: The Historical and Cultural Context of the Novels of Chinua Achebe. Washington, DC: Three Continents. Yousaf, N. (2003). Chinua Achebe. Tavistock: Northcote House.
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Aidoo, Ama Ata NEIL TEN KORTENAAR
Ama Ata Aidoo is a Ghanaian dramatist and fiction writer whose voice is distinguished by its concern for women’s issues and African nationalism, but equally by its awareness of intellectual conundrums and its openness to dialogue and multiple perspectives. Born Christina Ama Ata Aidoo on March 23, 1942 into a Fante royal household in Abeadzi Kyiakor, she attended the University of Ghana in Legon, where she graduated in 1964. She wrote her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965), while still a student. Her subsequent writing career has, however, been characterized by slender works appearing at long intervals. Her parental duties, her need to support herself – mostly by university teaching, often in North America – the difficulties of publishing in a male-dominated literary environment, and the political hazards of publishing under dictatorships all contributed to the difficulty she has had in maintaining her literary career. The challenges faced by writers are the subject of a short story, “Choosing,” from the collection The Girl Who Can and Other Stories (1997). In 1982 she spent a brief term as minister of education under the Jerry Rawlings government. She subsequently lived in Zimbabwe for several years and was active in encouraging women’s writing there. The Dilemma of a Ghost details the crisis that arises in a marriage between a Ghanaian man and an African American woman because his family cannot accept her nor she their ways. Anowa (1970a) retells a story Aidoo heard from her mother of a rebellious girl who chose her husband against her family’s wishes and who later stood up to him, objecting to his buying of slaves. Aidoo subsequently turned to prose fiction, but her fiction reveals the sources of her inspiration in drama. Characters debate with each other, with themselves, and sometimes with the implied reader; husbands discuss with wives, mothers with daughters, African women with African men. Passengers in a taxi talk over problems (“The Message”); as do passengers in a plane (“Nowhere Cool”). In “Choosing,” a writer and her mother discuss not just the problems of writing in Africa, but also why they feel as they do and why they say what they say.
Some of Aidoo’s best stories are dramatic monologues which address an audience directly in the second person. The story “Payments,” in The Girl Who Can, is in the voice of a market trader. Aidoo has been taken to task for the intemperateness of the African nationalism in her first novel Our Sister Killjoy (1977), subtitled Reflections of a Black-Eyed Squint, but what appears as bitterness is best considered an experiment in allowing free rein to an incomplete but legitimate emotional response on the part of the sister of the title. Unusual for an African novel of that generation, Our Sister Killjoy recounts the experience of a young African abroad. Sissie lives in Germany but returns to Africa and calls on all African emigrants to do the same. (Sissie is also the name of the protagonist in the stories “Everything Counts,” “Lice,” and “Nowhere Cool.”) While experimenting with what it is possible for an African woman to say or do, Aidoo deliberately challenges orthodoxy and invites scandal. Her other novel, Changes (1991), explores what happens when an educated professional woman leaves her husband in an assertion of independence but then chooses to become the second wife of a Muslim with whom she falls in love. The polygyny here is in fact more modern than her original monogamous marriage because it involves only the individuals in the marriage and not their extended family ties. Aidoo’s protagonists often express the author’s ideas and feelings about patriarchy, colonization, and sexual fulfillment, but they are less mouthpieces than explorations of Aidoo’s questions. Her educated women characters think in broad categories like Westernization and authenticity, through which they define themselves, usually in argument with others, who may, however, be absent. In “Everything Counts,” the opening story in No Sweetness Here (1970), a woman lecturer involved in an African intellectual revolution engages in mental dialogue with her male counterparts about the significance of straight-hair wigs. The first story in The Girl Who Can, “Her Hair Politics,” is also about wigs: a woman in discussion with a saleswoman believes they are invidious, but is unsure how to weigh the fact that the poor may rely on selling their hair in order to survive. One of Aidoo’s great concerns is with class. The story “For Whom Things Did Not Change”
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involves a discussion among middle-class characters about the appropriateness of having domestic servants, juxtaposed with a discussion between a cook steward and his wife. The characters in Changes met in school, have white collar jobs, and employ maids. They take modern conveniences, international travel, and education for granted. They are also aware of how trivial their quest for personal fulfillment might seem against the background of African poverty. Aidoo also stages dialogue across cultures, as in Dilemma, Our Sister Killjoy, and a story like “Nutty,” about the tensions that surface between a Ghanaian and her white American friend. Part of the tension between characters is cultural, but it always also involves things larger than the characters such as history and politics. The fierce resentment the characters feel arises from the fear that they are judged as representatives of their culture and, concomitantly, from the need to defend it. SEE ALSO: Humor and Satire (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF); West African Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Aidoo, A. A. (1965). The Dilemma of a Ghost. Accra: Longman. Aidoo, A. A. (1970a). Anowa. London: Longman. Aidoo, A. A. (1970b). No Sweetness Here. Harlow: Longman. Aidoo, A. A. (1977). Our Sister Killjoy. Harlow: Longman. Aidoo, A. A. (1985). Someone Talking to Sometime. Harare: College Press. Aidoo, A. A. (1987). Birds and Other Poems. Harare: College Press. Aidoo, A.A. (1991). Changes: A Love Story. London: Women’s Press. Aidoo, A. A. (1992). An Angry Letter in January. Coventry: Dangaroo. Aidoo, A. A. (1997). The Girl Who Can and Other Stories. Legon: Sub-Saharan. Azodo, A. U., & Wilentz, G. (ed.) (1999). Emerging Perspectives on Ama Ata Aidoo. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
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Ali, Ahmed HARISH TRIVEDI
Ahmed Ali was an Indian fiction writer, poet, and translator who wrote in both Urdu and English. He published his first novel, Twilight in Delhi (1940), in the same decade as the founding trinity of Indian fiction in English, R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, and Raja Rao published theirs, but his career did not unfold to match theirs. His two other slim novels, Ocean of Night (1964) and Of Rats and Diplomats (1985), have long been out of print; neither came close, in any case, to the inspired vision and artistry for which Twilight in Delhi is acclaimed as a minor classic. Ali was born on July 1, 1910 in Delhi and brought up there. His forebears had acted as ulema or Muslim priests, though his father had received modern education and was an official of the British government in India. Ali received his BA in 1930 from the Aligarh Muslim University and his MA in English literature in 1931 from the University of Lucknow. He taught at the universities of Lucknow, Allahabad, and Calcutta, and was a visiting professor in Nanking, China in 1947 when India was partitioned. Ali opted to go to Pakistan, apparently not without some anguish and even bitterness at leaving the places he had lived in and lovingly written about. He served as a Pakistani diplomat in China and Morocco, and following retirement in 1960 set up a business. Ali was awarded the high state honor, the Sitarae-Imtiaz, in 1980. He died on January 14, 1994. Though his fame rests mainly on the work he produced in English, Ali had begun writing in Urdu. He was one of the four contributors to the collection of radically irreverent short stories Angarey (Zaheer 1932), which was later banned, and he published a collection of short stories under the title Sholay (1934). He continued to write short stories in Urdu and his novels in English. When Twilight was translated into Urdu, however, readers wondered how it could possibly have been written in English. Ali also published “a contemporary translation” of the Qur’an from Arabic and edited an anthology of Urdu poetry in English. Twilight in Delhi, which was originally begun as a short story, “Hamari Gali” (Our Lane), offers a lyrical and elegiac account of the decline of old
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Delhi, a city built in the seventeenth century by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan; in the second decade of the twentieth century, when the novel is set, it was being systematically ravaged by British rulers who were beginning to build their own grand capital, New Delhi, right next door. The novel dramatizes in poignant personal terms the extinction of indigenous Muslim traditions and the incursion of Western modernity. There are two set pieces at the heart of the novel: one describes in celebratory detail a joyous Muslim wedding, while the other bears angry witness to a triumphal procession led by King George V from the famed seat of Mughal power, the Red Fort. So effectively is the poetry of nostalgia complemented by the politics of outrage in the novel that when its British printers came to the latter episode, they stopped work on it for fear of prosecution for sedition, especially in the fervid climate of World War II. While literary works in the Indian languages were routinely banned by the British on the basis of sedition, Twilight is one of the few Indian works in English to have come close to this distinction. Ali’s second novel, Ocean of Night (1964), is set in another city associated with Muslim culture and glory, Lucknow, and again has for its theme the dying out of that culture, though the transition to modernity is treated in a more positive light here. Huma, a young courtesan whose first lover in the novel is an old and dissolute nawab, clandestinely steps out of her feudal ambience to have a liaison with a poor, young admirer, a lawyer. The story spans a period of one year, 1938–9, and though there are passing references to the Congress Party, the Muslim League, and Hitler, the novel is largely apolitical. Ali’s third and least successful novel, Of Rats and Diplomats (1985), is satiric and acerbic in tone, with the diplomat hero even growing a rat-like tail. Ali promised much but did not deliver nearly enough, and is now often regarded as a one-novel author. He was an early member of the Progressive Writers’ movement but, as Sajjad Zaheer recounts in his foundational narrative of the movement, Ali shortly afterwards “receded into his shell of egoism, and disappeared from the literary world” (2006, 68). Nonetheless, he has recently been acclaimed as a founder of Pakistani literature and a distinctly Muslim novelist (see Malak 2004). Today, in an age dominated by
monolingual South Asian writers who know only English, Ali’s chief distinction is that of having written creatively in Urdu as well as English, and of having inflected English with his Indian mother tongue in inventive ways comparable to those of Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao. SEE ALSO: Anand, Mulk Raj (WF); Censorship and Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Narayan, R. K. (WF); Pakistani Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Rao, Raja (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ali, A. (1934). Sholay. Lahore: Maktaba-e-Urdu. Ali., A. (1940). Twilight in Delhi. London: Hogarth. Ali, A. (1964). Ocean of Night. London: Peter Owen. Ali, A. (trans.) (1984). Al-Qura’n: A Contemporary Translation. Karachi: Akrash. Ali, A. (1985). Of Rats and Diplomats. Hyderabad: Sangam. Coppola, C. (ed.) (1974). Marxist Influences and South Asian Literature. East Lansing: Michigan State University. Coppola, C. (ed.) (1994). Ahmed Ali: A Tribute [special issue] Annual of Urdu Studies 9. Malak, A. (2004). Muslim Narratives and the Discourse of English. Albany: SUNY Press. Trivedi, H. (1985). Ahmed Ali: Twilight in Delhi. In N. S. Pradhan (ed.), Major Indian Novels: An Evaluation. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, pp. 41–73. Zaheer, S. (ed.) (1932). Angarey. Lucknow: Nizami. Zaheer, S. (2006). The Light: A History of the Movement for Progressive Literature in the Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent. Karachi: Oxford University Press. (Original work in Urdu published 1954.)
Amadi, Elechi ANTHONIA (TONIA) I. UMOREN
Elechi Amadi is a Nigerian writer and an enigmatic thinker whose literary career spans several decades and three literary genres. Amadi has published five plays, four novels, several poems and essays, the Civil War diary Sunset in Biafra (1973b), and Ethics in Nigerian Culture (1982), an attempt to establish a philosophy for Nigeria. He is a prolific and versatile contributor to African literature whose work reflects his strong belief in discipline and a quest for social order.
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AMADI, ELECHI
Born on May 12, 1934 in Aluu, Rivers State, Nigeria, Amadi spent his youth there before migrating to Ibadan University where he studied mathematics and physics. The secondary school he attended (Government College, Umuahia) made the reading of novels in the college library a compulsory activity three evenings a week, thus exposing Amadi to a world of literature in which he became increasingly interested. After university, he worked at a number of jobs, including as a secondary school teacher, part-time lecturer at the College of Education, and commissioner and head of the Ministry of Education, all in Port Harcourt. He was also briefly engaged in land surveying and was commissioned into the army where he rose to the rank of captain during the Civil War of 1967–70, an experience that provided the basis of Sunset in Biafra. Each job experience served as material for Amadi’s literary writing, all of which engages in a worldview that is essentially patriarchal, based on a traditional religion that determines the roles of gods and men and is restrictive to women. Like his contemporary, Chinua Achebe, Amadi does not believe in art for art’s sake but is a committed writer who delicately balances his message and his medium. He uses a variety of stylistic devices to capture characters, events, and impressions vividly: proverbs to ground his narratives in local images and symbols; simple present tense for dramatic effect and immediacy; periphrases or circumlocutions to challenge stereotypes; and varied lexical patterns, including culturally specific names for everyday things, to add local flavor. Amadi’s first three novels, The Concubine (1966), The Great Ponds (1969), and The Slave (1978), form a trilogy with a common background in his community of Ikwerre, Aluu. The trilogy explores contentious topics such as people’s complex relationship with the gods and the supernatural and their futile attempts to pacify their gods in pursuit of a harmonious coexistence. With dry humor, Amadi suggests that the dread of these imposing and poorly understood deities generates potentially destructive inner contradictions in their followers. The Concubine tells the story of a tragic heroine whose dual identity (as a god’s wife and a man’s concubine) disrupts the social order not just of the Omokachi society but also of the gods. In The Great Ponds, Amadi
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humorously satirizes the communities engaged in a war of attrition over the Great Ponds of Wagaba, whose economic potential is threatened as it teems with fish begging to be harvested by the rightful owners. The Slave treats the vexed issue of the caste system, in which an individual is labeled “a slave” or “free” depending on where and to whom he or she was born and where the conception took place. Amadi captures a prevailing frustration at the complexity of the society’s many inexplicable social conventions, and presents the saga of individuals needing deliverance from rigid adherence to constraining, culture-bound ethics. Estrangement (1986), Amadi’s fourth novel, indeed estranges Amadi from his Ikwerre background; it is set in urban Port Harcourt in the post-Civil War period. In this novel, Amadi directs his novelistic eye to the debilitating effects of war on the family and the larger society. He satirizes those who engage in futile acts of war. Amadi’s five plays – Isiburu (1973a), The Dancer of Johannesburg (1977a), Peppersoup and The Road to Ibadan (1977b; two plays in one volume), and The Woman of Calabar (2002) – address social activities, touching on the getting of titles, nightlife, relationships, polygamy, wrestling, and various forms of entertainment. Ethics in Nigerian Culture (1982) spells out the sexual taboos, beliefs, and myths that weigh heavily on women in particular. Unlike his peer Achebe, who holds external forces responsible for his society’s disintegration, Amadi believes that it is the functional roles played by its individual members that make or mar society. These roles are gendered: for instance, the man takes all the important decisions in the family and society while the woman cooks and takes care of the children. He sees the society’s narrow codes of convention, which can rob individuals of their voice and threaten their very existence, as a major stumbling block in the path to a much needed global accord. Amadi has served as a keynote speaker at international conferences and has been honored by many international bodies, including the Association of Nigerian Authors, the International Conference on African Literature and the English Language, and the University of Calabar, for his dexterity and literary craftsmanship. His novels are widely read in Nigerian secondary schools and universities. Amadi’s poetic and dramatic
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language underscores the politics of individuals and establishes the communities he portrays as microcosms of the larger society. SEE ALSO: Achebe, Chinua (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); West African Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Amadi, E. (1966). The Concubine. London: Heinemann. Amadi, E. (1969). The Great Ponds. London: Heinemann. Amadi, E. (1973a). Isiburu. London: Heinemann. Amadi, E. (1973b). Sunset in Biafra. London: Heinemann. Amadi, E. (1977a). The Dancer of Johannesburg. Ibadan: Onibonoje. Amadi, E. (1977b). Peppersoup and The Road to Ibadan. Ibadan: Onibonoje. Amadi, E. (1978). The Slave. London: Heinemann. Amadi, E. (1982). Ethics in Nigerian Culture. London: Heinemann. Amadi, E. (1986). Estrangement. London: Heinemann. Amadi, E. (2002). The Woman of Calabar: A Play. Port Harcourt: Gitelle. Amadi, E. (2004). Elechi Amadi: Collected Plays. Port Harcourt: Pearl. Eko, E. (1991). Elechi Amadi: The Man and His Work. Lagos: Kraft. Feuser, W., & Eko, E. (eds.) (1994). Elechi Amadi at 55: Poems, Short Stories and Papers. Ibadan: Heinemann. Umoren, T. (2002). Portrait of Womanhood in African Literary Tradition. Calabar: Clearline/Cats. Umoren, T. (2004). Literature and Society: Social Order in the Novels of Elechi Amadi. Calabar: University of Calabar Press.
Anand, Mulk Raj R. K. DHAWAN
Mulk Raj Anand is a pioneer of Indian English fiction. As a novelist and short story writer, Anand stands out prominently among his contemporaries through the vast range of his work, his wealth of living characters, his ruthless realism, and his fervent championing of the underprivileged. Born into a Hindu family on December 12, 1905 in Peshawar, Northwest Frontier Province (now in Pakistan), Anand spent the first 20 years of his life in the Punjab area. In 1920, he entered
Khalsa College, Amritsar, where he joined the non-violent struggle against the British government and courted arrest. In 1925, he graduated from Punjab University with honors in English and received a scholarship to study philosophy in London. He completed a dissertation on John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, and Bertrand Russell and was awarded a PhD by the University of London in 1928. During these years, Anand became interested in Indian art, avant garde movements, and left-wing politics. In London he also began creative writing. He was deeply influenced by the Progressive Movement in literature of the 1930s, and came under numerous literary, political, and social influences, synthesizing his own brand of Marxist leanings with humanist thought. Moreover, the General Strike of 1926, initiated with the goal of acquiring specific rights for mine workers (which Anand supported but which ultimately failed), also had a profound influence on his work. Although he had admired Britain for its achievements in science and technology, the strike shattered his illusions, making him increasingly conscious of a growing class war within British society. Following the destruction of World War I, European society plunged anew into the shadows of economic depression and cynicism. Alarmed at the situation, some Western intellectuals led by Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland, Thomas Mann, and E. M. Forster assembled in Paris, where Forster urged his fellow writers to fulfill their public calling – to arouse readers to act and struggle in the name of creating a just, humane society. Inspired by these ideas, Anand and other Indian students studying in England formed the Progressive Writers’ Association, claiming that the principal function of literature was to reflect and express the aspirations and fundamental problems of the toiling masses, and ultimately to help in the formation of a pluralistic society. Accordingly, Anand’s own writing is marked by his eclectic humanism, his zeal for social reform, and his humanitarian compassion for the downtrodden. These themes receive their best fictional treatment in his first novel, Untouchable (1935). With a laudatory preface by Forster, the novel received worldwide recognition and, now translated into 36 languages, is acknowledged as a classic. It broke new ground in Indian fiction by presenting an archetypal tension between
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individual and society from the point of view of a protagonist drawn from the downtrodden classes. It explores the issue of untouchability within the Hindu society as it describes an eventful day in the life of Bakha, a young sweeper outcaste. A well-built young man of 18, Bakha is entrusted with the work of cleaning the latrines, but as a victim of the caste system, he is slapped in the face for failing to announce the polluting shadow of his sweeper presence. The incident is followed by other humiliating events – the upper-caste woman’s hatred for the sweeper and the priest Kalinath’s attempt to molest Bakha’s sister. He feels outraged but cannot hit back until a speech by Mahatma Gandhi gives him hope for a brighter, more equitable future. Bakha is a prototype of the protagonists of several novels that Anand published soon after. Both Coolie (1936) and Two Leaves and a Bud (1937) deal with landless peasants, another underprivileged group. Coolie depicts the lives of displaced laborers who are exploited by various economic forces, including colonialism. Munoo is a rustic orphan hillboy forced to leave his idyllic village in the Kangra valley so that he can work and see the world. Working as a coolie with a bank clerk who has a shrewish and vindictive wife, Munoo is eventually knocked down by the car of an Anglo-Indian woman and taken to Simla as her servant, where he dies of tuberculosis watching the hills and valleys he had abandoned. Two Leaves exposes the conditions of plantation life in British India. It recounts the tragedy of Gangu, a Punjabi peasant lured to a British-owned tea plantation in Assam, where he is bullied, starved, and killed by a British official who tries to rape his daughter. The conditions of the 1930s account for many close resemblances between Anand and George Orwell, including their passionate sense of social justice. Both men hated the social prejudices that helped maintain the oppressive status quo – England’s class system and India’s caste system – and shared a profound dislike of colonialism. In tone and temper, Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier carried the same burden as Anand’s Coolie. The Village (1939), Across the Black Waters (1940), and The Sword and the Sickle (1942b) form an ambitious trilogy on the theme of war, set in Europe and Asia. The novels are unified through the central character of Lal Singh, a young peasant who is 17 as The Village opens
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and 24 as The Sword and the Sickle ends. Over the course of the trilogy, he rebels against village mores, fights in World War I in Flanders, is taken prisoner by the Germans, and finally becomes a communist. Across the Black Waters, the only World War I novel written by an Indian, covers the adventures of the Sikh hero as a soldier serving in France; it is a severe indictment of modern civilization. The Sword and the Sickle depicts the struggle of peasants against oppression, showing the hero returning home from the German prison, hobnobbing with communists, and ending up in prison again. Both communism and Gandhism are treated ironically. The Big Heart (1945) depicts one day in the life of a young coppersmith who unsuccessfully champions modernity in a traditional society; the novel debates the virtues of the machine and modernity. All these early novels portray the doomed lives of the downtrodden and the oppressed. Anand’s protagonists – a sweeper, a coolie, and a peasant – are victims of social exploitation, class hatred, race hatred, and inhuman cruelty. In a notable exception, Anand’s historical novel Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953) introduces a protagonist from the privileged class of Indian princes. In 1951, Anand published Seven Summers, the first in a series of seven planned autobiographical novels that correspond to Shakespeare’s seven ages of man in As You Like It. Seven Summers is an engaging fictional account of his childhood where a small boy looks at social life and customs in pre-world war Punjab. Morning Face (1968), the second novel, received the Sahitya Akademi Award for 1971. Its hero grows up at the beginning of the Gandhian era. The novel is set in Punjab during the violent years of Lal Lajpat Rai, the Rowlatt Acts and Jalianwala Bagh massacre. Confession of a Lover (1976) followed and was given the E. M. Forster Award. It describes the hero’s college years and an unsuccessful love affair. The Bubble (1984), Little Plays of Mahatma Gandhi (1991), and Nine Moods of Bharata: Novel of a Pilgrimage (1999) continued the series, in which Krishan Chander Azad emerges as a fictional image of the author. The novels of the 1960s are novels of affirmation, illustrating Anand’s faith in man’s ability to reconstitute himself. The Old Woman and the Cow (1960; republished as Gauri in 1976) explores
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peasant life and the pressures that drive people to inhumanity in order to survive; it is a spirited study of a docile, rustic girl’s transformation into a rebel. The Road (1961) travels the same territory as Untouchable, and Death of a Hero (1964) deals rather superficially with the Kashmir freedom movement. Reflections on the White Elephant (2002), Anand’s last novel, deals with the conflict between religious fundamentalism and liberalism. One of Anand’s literary achievements is the invention of an English that has the flavor of Punjabi, characterized by the literal translation of expletives and turns of phrase and proverbs from his mother tongue. Anand’s word patterns suggest unplanned and spontaneous speech, which contrasts with the controlled language of the descriptive passages. His use of Indian words falls into three categories: untranslated Hindi or Punjabi words such as girija ghar, harijan, or babu; proverbs and swear words translated into English such as “son of a pig,” “cock-eyed son of a bow-legged scorpion,” or “rape-mother”; and English words that have entered the Indian vocabulary by being adapted to Indian pronunciation: injun, gentreman. His free use of slang, lowlife epithets, and verbal coinages take Anand nearer to his avowed purpose of evolving a language as rich and powerful as Irish or Welsh English. An adept storyteller, Anand wrote more than 70 short stories, published in various collections; he also published two collections of retellings of older Indian tales. He contributed to the study of Indian art, notably as founder editor of the prestigious art journal Marg in 1946. Anand received wide recognition for his championing of the poor and the homeless. He was awarded the World Peace Council’s International Peace Prize in 1952 for promoting peace through his literary works, and the Padma Bhushan by the Indian government in 1967 for distinguished service to art and literature. He was honorary president of Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, from 1966 to 1971 and Tagore Professor of Punjab University in 1973–4. He died in 2004. SEE ALSO: Ali, Ahmed (WF); Forster, E. M. (BIF); Historical Fiction (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF);
Postcolonial Fiction of the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF); Rao, Raja (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Anand, M. R. (1934). The Lost Child and Other Stories. London: J. A. Allen. Anand, M. R. (1935). Untouchable. London: Laurence and Wishart. Anand, M. R. (1936). Coolie. London: Laurence and Wishart. Anand, M. R. (1937). Two Leaves and a Bud. London: Laurence and Wishart. Anand, M. R. (1938). Lament on the Death of a Master of Arts. New Delhi: Hind Pocket Books. Anand, M. R. (1939). The Village. London: Cape. Anand, M. R. (1940). Across the Black Waters. London: Cape. Anand, M. R. (1942a). Letters on India. London: Routledge. Anand, M. R. (1942b). The Sword and the Sickle. London: Cape. Anand, M. R. (1944). The Barber’s Trade Union and Other Stories. London: Cape. Anand, M. R. (1945). The Big Heart. London: Hutchinson. Anand, M. R. (1946a). Apology for Heroism. London: Lindsay Drummond. Anand, M. R. (1946b). Indian Fairy Tales (Retold). Bombay: Kutub Popular. Anand, M.R. (1947). The Tractor and the Corn Goddess and Other Stories. Bombay: Thacker. Anand, M. R. (1951a). The Private Life of an Indian Prince. London: Hutchinson. Anand, M. R. (1951b). Reflections on the Golden Bed and Other Stories. Bombay: Current. Anand, M. R. (1951c). Seven Summers. London: Hutchinson. Anand, M. R. (1959a). Lajwanti and Other Stories. Bombay: Jaico. Anand, M. R. (1959b). The Power of Darkness and Other Stories. Bombay: Jaico. Anand, M.R. (1960). The Old Woman and the Cow. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann. Anand, M. R. (1963). The Road. Bombay: Kutub Popular. Anand, M. R. (1964). Death of a Hero. Bombay: Kutub Popular. Anand, M. R. (1968). Morning Face. Bombay: Kutub Popular. Anand, M. R. (1973). Between Tears and Laughter. New Delhi: Sterling. Anand, M. R. (1976). Confession of a Lover. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann.
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Anand, M. R. (1978). Seven Little Known Birds of the Inner Eye. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle. Anand, M. R. (1981). Conversations in Bloomsbury. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann. Anand, M. R. (1984). The Bubble. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann. Anand, M. R. (1990). Pilpali Sahib. New Delhi: Arnold. Anand, M. R. (1991). Little Plays of Mahatma Gandhi. New Delhi: Arnold. Anand, M. R. (2002). Reflections on the White Elephant. New Delhi: Har-Anand. Bheemaiah, J. (2005). Class and Caste in Literature: The Fiction of Harriet B. Stowe and Mulk Raj Anand. New Delhi: Prestige. Dhawan, R. K. (1992). The Novels of Mulk Raj Anand. New Delhi: Prestige. Fisher, M. (1985). The Wisdom of the Heart: A Study of the Works of Mulk Raj Anand. New Delhi: Sterling. Savio, D. (2006). Voice of the Voiceless: Mulk Raj Anand and Jayakanthan. New Delhi: Prestige. Sharma, K. K. (ed.) (1978). Perspectives on Mulk Raj Anand. Ghaziabad: Vimal. Sinha, K. N. (1972). Mulk Raj Anand. New York: Twayne.
Anderson, Jessica SUSAN SHERIDAN
Australian novelist Jessica Anderson first gained widespread acclaim for Tirra Lirra by the River (1978), winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Her first three novels, published in England and misleadingly marketed as genre fiction, attracted little attention. In the 1980s, however, Australian publishing developed rapidly, igniting a renewed interest in Australian fiction as well as a significant new audience for women writers. In this encouraging milieu Anderson enjoyed the reception she had long deserved, becoming one of the major female voices of a period in which it seemed as though Australian women writers had regained the dominance in fiction they enjoyed in the 1930s. Their number included several other women of Anderson’s generation, such as Elizabeth Jolley, who had also been “late starters.” Jessica Anderson was born on September 25, 1916, the youngest of four children. Her father was a government-employed scientist, and both her parents were politically radical and encouraged intellectual independence. She grew up in suburban Brisbane, attending the State High
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School and the Technical College Art School. If her autobiographical tales in Stories from the Warm Zone (1987) are any guide, her childhood was serene, affectionate, and materially secure, although her much loved father died when she was only 16. At 18 she left home for Sydney, landing in Kings Cross, “the only Bohemian centre in the whole of the country” in the 1930s, lovingly described in Tirra Lirra (Willbanks 17). There she lived with the man she would marry when she was 21, Ross McGill, and went with him to London for several years, returning in 1940. Her daughter Laura was born in 1951. She and McGill divorced, and it was during her second marriage that she was able to turn her hand to the serious fiction she had always intended to write. Until she was in her forties, Anderson had earned her living from writing for magazines (formulaic stories, always under pseudonyms) and for radio. By her own account, she started late because she could not afford the leisure to write seriously: “What prompted me was Time’s dread chariot, what allowed me were easier financial circumstances” (Barry 5). Writing for radio – original plays as well as adaptations from Charles Dickens and Henry James – served as an excellent literary apprenticeship for the kinds of novels she would write. Her first novel, An Ordinary Lunacy (1963), concerns a Sydney lawyer’s fascination with a woman charged with her husband’s murder; they begin an affair but, when he ends it, the woman commits suicide. The novel began as a short story that grew and grew. When finally it was pruned to her satisfaction, Anderson decided to approach London publishing houses because, in the early 1960s, she could find no Australian publisher who had issued anything like this book. Other “dramas of sexual obsession” by Christina Stead and by Elizabeth Harrower were set – and published – overseas (Barry 5–6). Her second novel could not find a publisher, but her third, The Last Man’s Head (1970), a book in which an apparently criminal act becomes the focus of personal and sexual conflict, was accepted by Macmillan. To her distress, it was marketed as a crime novel. Likewise her fourth, The Commandant (1975), was marketed as a historical romance, although its well-researched setting in the penal colony that later became Brisbane is the scene of a story of
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brutality narrated by a gently reared but independent-minded young woman whose critical perspective on events is more like that of an Elizabeth Gaskell heroine. Tirra Lirra by the River, published by Macmillan Australia, was an immediate success. The subject of a woman’s life from youth to age, covering most of the twentieth century in Brisbane, Sydney, and London, the themes of memory and reconciliation with the past, together with Tennysonian echoes from the title, captivated readers. The focus on a single character, Nora Porteous, lent this novel a more accessible inner dimension than its predecessors. Like Ordinary Lunacy, this novel also had earlier lives as a short story and a radio play. It and her later books were all published in Australia, Britain, and the United States. In 1980 Anderson won the Miles Franklin again for The Impersonators (published in the US as The Only Daughter). Here she returned to multiple characters in a family rendered complex by divorce and remarriages; the situation is the death of the patriarch, a love affair between his only daughter and one of his stepsons, and conflict over inheritance. All her fiction from here on has contemporary Sydney as its setting, except for the pieces in Stories from the Warm Zone (1987). The latest two novels have youthful protagonists caught up in sexual confusions – Taking Shelter (1989) – and dealing with grief – One of the Wattle Birds (1994) – though in each case an older woman plays a somewhat mysterious presiding role. Anderson’s admiration for James is evident in her attention to the uses of power, and the power of money, while Henry Green is another favorite writer. She has said that she felt little affinity with other Australian writers and the documentary fiction that she felt predominated, but that Stead, in writing about Sydney, gave her courage. SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Green, Henry (BIF); Historical Fiction (WF); James, Henry (AF); Jolley, Elizabeth (WF); Joyce, James (BIF); Stead, Christina (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Anderson, J. (1963). An Ordinary Lunacy. London: Macmillan.
Anderson, J. (1970). The Last Man’s Head: “Chip-Chop, Chip-Chop, the Last Man’s Head off!” London: Macmillan. Anderson, J. (1975). The Commandant. London: Macmillan. Anderson, J. (1978). Tirra Lirra by the River. Melbourne: Macmillan. Anderson, J. (1980). The Impersonators. Melbourne: Macmillan. Anderson, J. (1987). Stories from the Warm Zone and Sydney Stories. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin. Anderson, J. (1989). Taking Shelter. Ringwood, Vic.: Viking. Anderson, J. (1994). One of the Wattle Birds. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin. Barry, E. (1996). Fabricating the Self: The Fictions of Jessica Anderson. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Willbanks, R. (1992). Jessica Anderson Interview. In Speaking Volumes: Australian Writers and Their Work. Ringwood Vic.: Penguin, pp. 15–25.
Anthony, Michael TONY SIMOES DA SILVA
Michael Anthony’s work is characterized by simple but intricately crafted depictions of the everyday lives of Trinidad people, represented in his fiction by the folk of Mayaro. Typically, a novel by Anthony is narrated by a young boy, usually of Afro-Caribbean and lower socio-economic background, and involves a close relationship between father and son. Through the interiorized world of experience of the young narrator, Anthony’s work offers a celebration of a tightly knit Trinidadian community and of the ways in which identities are formed relationally. Anthony was born in Mayaro, Trinidad, on February 10, 1930. The author of over 25 books, mostly novels, he is also a historian, focusing mainly on the local history of Mayaro and Trinidad. Although he has spent most of his life in Trinidad, Anthony wrote and published his first works while living in Britain, initially with the support of V. S. Naipaul. Anthony’s first novel, The Games were Coming (1963), offers a snapshot of the central aspects of his work. The novel records the subtle but dramatic processes of maturation 15-year-old Leon undergoes in his quest to become the bicycle-race champion in Trinidad’s Southern Games. Crowned the winner
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at the novel’s conclusion, a consciously self-aware Leon has learned the virtues of hard work, perseverance, and courage, but he has also come to appreciate the value of family and community support, and the duty they deserve. Leon’s consciousness provides a filter through which the heightened tension and anxiety leading up to the games are viewed as a stage for his own psychological development. The Year in San Fernando (1965), Anthony’s second novel, is again set in Mayaro and tells the story of a young boy sent by his mother to live as a servant companion to an old woman. This is undoubtedly Anthony’s best-known work, though not his most accomplished piece of writing, and is the only one that remains easily available. The novel concludes with Francis’s return to Mayaro and to his mother, a year older and perhaps wiser but nevertheless still a child. It is this ability to engage truthfully with the consciousness of a child that Anthony’s writing has come to embody most clearly. The point is especially significant because this is also Anthony’s most overtly autobiographical novel. In Green Days by the River (1967), Anthony uses yet another adolescent narrator, the shy and sensitive Shell, to paint a richly textured portrait of a family confronted with the impending death of Shell’s father. At 16, Shell finds himself between the nurturing world his parents created for him and a volatile, self-directed future. Help comes in the character of Mr. Ghidaree, one of various father figures in Anthony’s work, who recognizes a mutual attraction between his daughter and Shell, and thus creates the right conditions for the union to take place. The contortions both young lovers experience as the story develops are slightly overdone, but the real issue is the emerging closeness between Mr. Ghidaree and Shell. Described by one critic as the most complex of Anthony’s early novels (Griffiths 1973, viii), Green Days by the River confirms the craftsmanship of earlier work and highlights Anthony’s commitment to depicting the myriad ways the relational self emerges. Anthony’s later work also delves into these earlier concerns, though occasionally through experimentation with different genres, as in All That Glitters (1981). The influential Caribbean critic Kenneth Ramchand has referred to Anthony as “practicing an art of fiction of a very subtle kind” (209), and
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perhaps for this reason his work has not benefitted from the impact of postcolonial studies, which propelled so much Caribbean writing onto the world stage. While Louis James sees Anthony’s concern with the stories of ordinary people as the mark of writing “truly indigenous to the Trinidadian common people” (48), the charge of a lack of political concern was underscored by comparison to George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin (1953), a novel also told through the eyes of an Afro-Caribbean boy. To view the treatment of domestic servants in Anthony’s novels as “a metaphor for the slavery of the West Indian past” (Boxill 43) seems rather extreme, but certainly the political emerges in Anthony’s writing in the celebration of the everyday lives of Trinidadians. Anthony’s works each tell a relatively simple story, in language that is both uncomplicated and carefully measured, but by virtue of its concern with ordinary Trinidadians Anthony’s sizable body of writing emerges as a powerful historical and cultural document. He does not overtly gesture toward the political, but at the center of his most important fictions is a concern with the formative impact of social and familial relationships. While historical influences are only faintly outlined, they remain crucial to that process, and his writing forcefully re-enacts the personal as inherently political. SEE ALSO: Lamming, George (WF); Naipaul, V. S. (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); West Indian Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Anthony, M. (1963). The Games were Coming. London: Deutsch. Anthony, M. (1965). The Year in San Fernando. London: Deutsch. Anthony, M. (1967). Green Days by the River. London: Deutsch. Anthony, M. (1973a). Cricket in the Road. London: Deutsch. Anthony, M. (1973b). Sandra Street and Other Stories. London: Heinemann. Anthony, M. (1975). Profile Trinidad. London: Macmillan. Anthony, M. (1976). Streets of Conflict. London: Deutsch.
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Anthony, M. (1981). All That Glitters. London: Deutsch. Anthony, M. (1982). Bright Road to El Dorado. Port of Spain: Nelson. Anthony, M. (1988). A Better and Brighter Day. Port of Spain: Circle. Anthony, M. (1996). In the Heat of the Day. London: Heinemann. Anthony, M. (2001). High Tide of Intrigue. London: Heinemann. Baugh, E. (ed.) (1978). Critics on Caribbean Literature. London: Allen and Unwin. Boxill, A. (1979). The Beginning to 1929. In King (1979), pp. 30–44. Griffiths, G. (1973). Introduction. In M. Anthony, Green Days by the River [1967]. London: Deutsch. Griffiths, G. (1978). A Double Exile: African and West Indian Writing between Two Cultures. London: Marion Boyars. James, C. L. R. (1969). Discovering Literature in Trinidad. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 7, 73–80. James, L. (ed.) (1979). Islands in Between: Essays on West Indian Literature. London: Oxford University Press. King, B. (ed.) (1979). West Indian Literature. London: Macmillan. Ramchand, K. (1983). The West Indian Novel and Its Background. London: Heinemann.
Antoni, Robert ERIC D. SMITH
As Edouard Glissant observes, an abiding preoccupation of West Indian writers is the “longing for the ideal of history” (79) – a desire as impossible as it is indispensible. The novels of Robert Antoni vividly exemplify this call for a new historical consciousness. Incorporating an encyclopedic breadth of genres and discourses and exploring the possibilities of mythology, folklore, science, history, and both canonical and postcolonial literary traditions, his fiction enacts Glissant’s “prophetic vision of the past” (64), a creative reconstitution of a fragmentary Trinidadian history that figures, in the very act of its necessary failure, a Caribbean social reality to come. Born in Detroit, Michigan on May 7, 1958 to Trinidadian parents, Antoni grew up in the Bahamas. He holds a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University and a doctorate from the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa. He has taught creative writing and literature at the
University of Miami and Columbia University’s Barnard College. Though he currently lives in New York City, his fiction sustains a persistent focus on the island of Trinidad, where his family claims a 200-year history. Because of his lack of an immediate childhood experience with Trinidad – and the mythic dimensions the island assumed in his imagination as the primordial family locus – Antoni maintains in all but his most recent novel a fictional distance from it by setting his work on the fictional island of Corpus Christi, where he explores what Glissant calls “the sustained links between History and Literature” (71) through their earliest known mediator, myth. Antoni’s fascination with mythmaking is most clearly evident in Divina Trace (1992), winner of a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book and widely regarded as a landmark in contemporary Caribbean fiction. The most formally complex of his four novels, Divina Trace concerns the recovery and reconstruction of the lost history of La Divina Pastora (a black Madonna statuette that is an object of cross-cultural veneration in Trinidad) through the variant personal and discursive perspectives of seven narrators, each mediated by the dominant consciousness of 90-year-old Johnny Domingo, who searches his aged memory for the true story of the miraculous death and resurrection of the frog-child of Magdalena Divina/La Divina Pastora. Johnny’s quest leads him through the corridors of personal and collective cultural memory to the point where landscape, language, and identity merge at the matrix of Maraval Swamp and ultimately to the foil mirror placed at the novel’s heart. A selfconscious iteration of the search for Glissant’s la trace primodiale, Johnny’s quest is equally a figuration of postcolonial Trinidadian identity that clears space for the island’s polyphony of cultures without lapsing into merely syncretic or multiculturalist narratives of nationhood that often belie internal struggles for power and representation. Blessed is the Fruit (1997) deploys familiar elements of Afro-Trinidadian culture (mas’, calypso, and carnival) to explore further this (re) formation of a postcolonial national identity, particularly the intertwined narratives of African and Creole. Concentrating on the overlapping personal histories of an alcoholic white Creole mistress, Lil, who inhabits a history-haunted
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colonial estate fallen to ruin, and her pregnant and despairing Afro-Trinidadian servant, Vel, the novel examines the limits and fluidities of race, language, religion, and gender as it offers hope in the form of Vel’s unborn child. Blessed is the Fruit is also characterized by substantial literary experimentation, such that the form of the book often bodies forth its content. Most notable is the novel’s central section, actually the anticipatory dream of Vel’s unborn child, which features the twin narratives of the two protagonists braided into alternating couplets. This long “poem” is bisected by a transparent plastic membrane at the book’s center, symbolizing both the racial/ cultural boundaries separating the two women and the possibility of their transcendence. A collection of short tales given coherence by a play on the Scheherazade motif, My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales (2000) features the return of Granny Myna of Divina Trace, who must nightly entertain the US soldiers stationed on Corpus Christi/Trinidad during World War II by providing them with the Caribbean spice that they crave – both culinary and narrative – in order to divert their attention from the island’s young girls, many of whom have been forced into prostitution following the economic disruptions caused by the US presence. A wickedly bawdy and politically understated commentary on the transition from British colonial to American neocolonial dominion, Folktales uses comically exaggerated grotesquery to lampoon Western cultural icons such as Walter Raleigh, Dwight Eisenhower, Ernest Hemingway, and even Colonel Sanders. A drastic departure from Antoni’s previous idiom, Carnival (2005) parodically reauthors Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as a story of West Indian identity. Written in the realist mode, with standard English replacing dialect, Carnival also dispenses with the facade of Corpus Christi. Set in contemporary Trinidad, it tells the story of three friends living abroad who return home to Trinidad during carnival season in order to reconnect with their homeland and with one another only to discover that such connections are irrevocably severed. Haunted by personal and national trauma, guilt, and the homelessness of the exile, it is Antoni’s most deeply autobiographical work and perhaps his grimmest. Each of Antoni’s books explores the simultaneous need for and impossibility of the
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reclamation of lost history. Yet in the face of this necessary failure, the potential is consistently suggested for new personal, communal, and national narratives liberated from the inhibiting forms of the past. This subtle utopian impulse is perhaps the distinguishing characteristic of Antoni’s work. It is therefore not surprising that his most recent work in progress confronts a group of nineteenth-century European utopianists who seek in the Americas the terra nullius on which to erect their ideal society. The project signals a definitive shift in Antoni’s work toward the overtly socio-political in its interrogation of EuroAmerican ideals of the best possible world. SEE ALSO: Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Migration, Diaspora and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Realism/ Magic Realism (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Antoni, R. (1992). Divina Trace. New York: Overlook. Antoni, R. (1997). Blessed is the Fruit. New York: Henry Holt. Antoni, R. (2000). My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales. New York: Faber and Faber. Antoni, R. (2005). Carnival. New York: Black Cat. Glissant, E. (1989). Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (trans. J. M. Dash). Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Arasanayagam, Jean HARSHANA RAMBUKWELLA
A richly lyrical diction that speaks to themes of collective and individual identity, positioned within narratives of national belonging and unbelonging, has long characterized Jean Arasanayagam’s literary craft. Dutch Burgher by birth and married to a Tamil, Arasanayagam has articulated the creative tensions arising from the confluence in Sri Lanka of these multiple heritages, or what she has described as her “split-inheritance” (Arasanayagam 2008). She is one of few resident anglophone Sri Lankan writers to be published internationally. Her work has been widely anthologized and translated into several languages, and she has held several international writing fellowships. Beginning with poetry, Arasanayagam’s
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oeuvre has expanded over the years to include a significant body of prose. As a Dutch Burgher born in 1930, Arasanayagam (nee Solomons) belongs to one of the country’s smallest minorities, which has seen its numbers reduced and ethos threatened in postindependence Sri Lanka. The uncertainties of their cultural location have been an abiding concern in Arasanayagam’s work. In the title poem of her first collection, Kindura (1973), Arasanayagam draws upon Buddhist legend to explore the ambiguous potential of hybridity. Half-human and half-bird, the “Kindura” is seen as both exotic and alluring, but also stifled and unable to fully realize itself. This early work anticipates her later writing’s more explicit probing of the complexities and contradictions of a hybrid condition constrained by a national frame. The year 1983, which marked Sri Lanka’s worst ethnic rioting, was a watershed in Arasanayagam’s career. Her home was attacked because her husband was Tamil, and the family fled to government refugee camps. Apocalypse ’83, published immediately after these traumatic events, received significant attention for its chronicling of ethnonationalist violence. But these poems, largely impressionistic accounts of the futility of violence, lacked a specific historical or local focus. It is in her post-1983 writing that Arasanayagam begins a deeper investigation of her Burgher and Tamil heritages, using them as the basis for a claim of national identity. Arasanayagam’s memoir A Nice Burgher Girl (2006) is social history from a personal perspective. It records the diverse influences and traditions that shaped Burgher identity, including multicultural culinary creations that are part of Sri Lankan cuisine, to affirm Burghers as a truly local community. But the title’s ironic invocation also suggests a critical attitude toward received genealogies. Arasanayagam does not conform to the ideal Burgher identity that some community members were historically committed to preserving, instead exploring cultural identity as inherently fluid, implicitly questioning the arbitrary boundaries that often frame communal self-perceptions and nation-building projects. The stories collected in All is Burning (1995), In the Garden Secretly (2000), and The Dividing Line (2002) consider the socio-political turmoil of contemporary Sri Lanka. Collectively, they
convey a society divided on ethnic and class lines, though the individuals in them often attempt to affirm a common humanity. For instance, in “In the Garden Secretly,” a Sinhalese Air Force pilot reflects on whether, during ethnic conflict with Tamil rebels, he is perceived as liberator or oppressor. A statue of Christ that he finds in an abandoned house in previously rebel-occupied territory reminds him of the commonalities, like religion, that bind the two communities. The stories in The Cry of the Kite (1984), The Outsider (1989), and Peacocks and Dreams (1996) focus on Tamil culture in northern Sri Lanka and Arasanayagam’s fraught experiences within this community. While poignantly chronicling a traditional culture in transition, they also critique its more intransigent aspects. Fascination with Hindu ritual and the minutiae of life in the region is intermingled with a critique of its exclusionary dimensions, personified by the Tamil Hindu mother-in-law. Both in Arasanayagam’s poetry and fiction this matriarchal figure often embodies cultural exclusivity, which the Burgher Christian daughter-in-law has to contest or negotiate with to find acceptance – an encounter that represents the larger themes of cultural contact and conflict in her work. Arasanayagam’s latest prose work, Dragons in the Wilderness (2007), revisits the theme of hybridity through its protagonist Marian Laing. She is the daughter of a British planter who abandons her sister Marian and their village-born Sinhala mother but nevertheless bestows his name on the children and ensures they have an anglophone upbringing through a convent education. Despite cherishing memories of her mother, Marian cannot reconnect with her local ethos following her socialization in an anglicized environment. The text traces Marian’s lifelong quest to define her subjectivity as she moves from colonial Ceylon to Europe, marriage to a Burgher, widowhood, and a return to convent life in post-independence Sri Lanka. Her itinerant life provides a critical commentary on the unsettling legacies of colonialism. Arasanayagam’s literary voice spans Sri Lanka’s fraught transition from colony to independent nation. Her insistent focus on the country’s multiple heritages is a reminder that decolonization cannot simply erase the past but must engage with and reconsider what the past bestows upon the present.
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ARMAH, AYI KWEI
SEE ALSO: Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Sri Lankan Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Arasanayagam, J. (1973). Kindura. Kandy: privately published. Arasanayagam, J. (1984). The Cry of the Kite: A Collection of Short Stories. Kandy: Godamunne. Arasanayagam, J. (1985). A Colonial Inheritance and Other Poems. Kandy: privately published. Arasanayagam, J. (1987). Trial by Terror: Sri Lankan Poems. Hamilton, New Zealand: Rimu. Arasanayagam, J. (1989). The Outsider. Nagasaki: Nagasaki University, Faculty of Liberal Arts. Arasanayagam, J. (1991). Reddened Water Flows Clear. London: Forest. Arasanayagam, J. (1993). Shooting the Floricans. Kandy: Samjna. Arasanayagam, J. (1995). All is Burning. New Delhi: Penguin. Arasanayagam, J. (1996). Peacocks and Dreams. New Delhi: Navrang. Arasanayagam, J. (2000). In the Garden Secretly and Other Stories. New Delhi: Penguin. Arasanayagam, J. (2002). The Dividing Line. New Delhi: Indialog. Arasanayagam, J. (2003). Apocalypse ’83. Colombo: International Centre for Ethnic Studies. Arasanayagam, J. (2006). A Nice Burgher Girl. Colombo: Social Scientists’ Association. Arasanayagam, J. (2007). Dragons in the Wilderness. Colombo: Godage. Arasanayagam, J. (2008). Looking Back on the Writing of A Nice Burgher Girl. Island Midweek Review (July 23), p. IV. de Mel, N. (2001). Women and the Nation’s Narrative: Gender and Nationalism in Twentieth Century Sri Lanka. New Delhi: Women for Kali pp. 162–202. Ho, E. Y. L., & Rambukwella, H. (2006). A Question of Belonging: Reading Jean Arasanayagam through Nationalist Discourse. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 40(2), 61–81. Kanaganayagam, C. (1997). Jean Arasanayagam [interview]. In Configurations of Exile: South Asian Writers and Their World. Toronto: TSAR, pp. 12–25.
Armah, Ayi Kwei ODE OGEDE
Ayi Kwei Armah’s writing is distinguished by its simultaneous urbanity and obloquy – a style at
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once crisp and elaborately encrypted, concrete and ornate, naturalistic and symbolic, coarse and sublime, exhortatory and modulated. Typified by its propensity to jolt orthodox certainties and dogmatic convictions, his writing participates in the tradition of exploratory fictions by formerly colonized subjects: though initially devoted to articulating the gamut of the African experience in the wake of the colonial encounter, he has broadened his subject matter to accommodate the contemporary adventures of African Americans who sojourn in Africa in search of their roots. Born in 1939 in Takoradi, the Gold Coast (now Ghana), following his primary school education he attended the Prince of Wales College, then worked for eight months as a Radio Ghana scriptwriter, producer, and announcer. He left for the United States at 19 on a Carnegie Corporation scholarship, eventually studying at Harvard, but, like his fictional double Modin Dofu, he dropped out before receiving his degree in response to white racism. He later completed his Harvard degree by correspondence and went on to obtain an MFA at Columbia, followed by work as a translator for Revolution Africaine magazine in Algiers; as an editor for Jeune Afrique in Paris; as an English schoolteacher in Ghana and at a teachers college in Tanzania; and as a professor at several universities in the United States and in Lesotho. As a writer relentlessly searching for new forms and styles, Armah’s signature themes include his stance on troubled African realities such as the demoralizing effects of post-independence political corruption, the inferiority complexes that assailed the Westernized African elite and hampered decolonization efforts, and urban malaise – all of which are memorably captured in his debut novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968). Published to worldwide critical acclaim, it details the efforts of an anonymous railway office cargo clerk to conduct himself with integrity, and the subsequent disillusionment that overtakes him during a losing fight against institutionalized corruption. Its sequel, Fragments (1970), a semiautobiographical novel also set in Ghana, extends these themes and features the sanguine experiences of Ghanaian artist protagonist Baako Onipa, who returns from his studies abroad to face the shocking discovery that political
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independence has merely compounded problems inherited from colonial rule – a disappointment that results in his mental breakdown as he wages a lonely battle to restore integrity to his nation’s moral fiber. Why Are We So Blest? (1972) experiments with the diary form in an attempt to record the failure of Westernized African intellectuals and wouldbe revolutionaries in Ghana. Armah’s protagonists, Ghanaian scholar Modin Dofu and his white American mistress Aimee Reitsch, return to Africa hoping to enroll in a liberation movement but are denied enlistment by the recruitment committee. While Two Thousand Seasons (1973) uses Akan storytelling to represent the repercussions of slavery and colonialism through a bilateral assault mounted on Africa, first by Arab conquerors from the north and then by their European counterparts from the south, The Healers (1978) utilizes the epic-historical narrative frame to issue a call for a return to African indigenous communal values as both a source of revitalization and a counter to the dehumanizing impacts of domination. Both novels show the profound influence of Ujaama – policies of collectivization that were pursued under President Julius Nyerere. Osiris Rising (1995) presents Armah’s vision for African American involvement in spreading democratic ideals within the context of military dictatorships in Africa, and KMT: In the House of Life (2002), his least artistically satisfying work to date, is an esoteric claim for the blackness of ancient Egyptian civilization and the purported relevance of its feudal empires to contemporary Africa. Part memoir, part criticism, The Eloquence of the Scribes (2006) resonates with Armah’s convictions in his role as a spokesperson for marginalized cultures. Although expansive when declaring his literary tastes, denouncing the deadly exploitative tendencies of Western publishing conglomerates, or outlining his longstanding ambition to achieve publishing independence, he remains guarded and reticent beyond these professional matters. While Armah has written across diverse genres including criticism, essays, short fiction, memoir, and poetry, he is best known for his work as a novelist. The versatility of his style has garnered an abiding interest in his analytical, introspective, realistic, and visionary fiction, and the volatility
of his themes has galvanized heated controversy and polarized his readership. He has turned his back entirely on the West and on Western publishers such as Heinemann and Houghton Mifflin, and relocated to Popenguine, Senegal, in West Africa, where he now runs his own publishing outfit, Per Ankh Publishers. If it has been his intention to be the enfant terrible of African literature, as some critics have claimed, it is a role he has played with astonishing confidence. While his most intense admirers have described his attempt to interrogate social ills as brilliant and compelling, his ardent detractors have commonly portrayed his temper as bitter, decadent, and disillusioned. Armah’s role as a prose stylist in African literature, it would appear, will continue to spark controversy in perpetuity. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF); West African Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Armah, A. K. (1968). The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Armah, A. K. (1970). Fragments. London: Heinemann. Armah, A. K. (1972). Why Are We So Blest? New York: Doubleday. Armah, A. K. (1973). Two Thousand Seasons. Nairobi: East African Publishing House. Armah, A. K. (1978). The Healers. Nairobi: East African Publishing House. Armah, A. K. (1985). One Writer’s Education. West Africa 26, 1752–3. Armah, A. K. (1995). Osiris Rising: A Novel of Africa Past, Present, and Future Popenguine, Senegal: Per Ankh. Armah, A. K. (2002). KMT: In the House of Life. Popenguine, Senegal: Per Ankh. Armah, A. K. (2006). The Eloquence of the Scribes. Popenguine, Senegal: Per Ankh. Fraser, R. (1980). The Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah: A Study in Polemical Fiction. London: Heinemann. Lazarus, N. (1990). Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ogede, O. (2000). Ayi Kwei Armah, Radical Iconoclast: Pitting Imaginary Worlds against the Actual. Athens: Ohio University Press. Wright, D. (1989). Ayi Kwei Armah’s Africa: The Sources of His Fiction. London: Hans Zell.
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ASLAM, NADEEM
Aslam, Nadeem KHURRAM N. KHURSHID
A novelist of tragic vision, the Pakistan-born British novelist Nadeem Aslam writes narratives that confront violence, bigotry, and oppression in the contemporary world. While such forces are opposed by love and compassion in his work, the latter prove inadequate in the face of violent turmoil and are regularly thwarted by moribund social and religious conventions. Aslam was born in 1966 in Gujranwala, a small town in Punjab, Pakistan. When he was 14, his father, a Communist, poet, and filmmaker, migrated with his family to England, fearing persecution by Pakistan’s military regime. Aslam studied biochemistry at the University of Manchester for two years but then left to pursue a career in writing. A meticulous craftsman and imagist, he revises his narratives laboriously and isolates himself completely when he writes, a habit that he links to the creative process: “I always think of the silence and the darkness of a root that enables the flower to grow” (Brace 2004). Aslam’s plots unfold on the confluence of war, violence, and intrigue, punctuated with minutely detailed imagery. His intensely atmospheric narratives are immaculate constructs that trace the impact of religion and politics on the lives of individuals and on societies and cultures. Aslam’s first novel, Season of the Rainbirds (1993), won the Betty Trask Award and the Authors’ Club First Novel Award, and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Whitbread First Novel Award. Set in a small Pakistani town in the 1980s, during the repressive military rule of General Zia ul-Haq, it exposes the power wrangling that ensues as a cleric, a feudal landlord, and a government bureaucrat vie for influence and control in the town. In the seven-day-long plot, with each chapter marking one day of the week, the murder of a judge is under investigation and a mailbag lost in a train crash 19 years ago has been found, while the country is on the verge of uncertainty and fear following an assassination attempt on its president. The novel captures what Aslam sees as the decadence and retrogression of Pakistani society, as dogmatic religiosity and embedded prejudices erect barriers between people and become tools of oppression in the hands of the powerful.
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Aslam’s novel evinces compassion for the religious minorities in Pakistan, with its sympathetic portrayal of the marginalized Christian family and Mr. Kasmi of the Ahmadiya sect. It also spotlights the plight of women trapped in a patriarchal culture: Kulsum, whose son is killed by Mujeeb Ali’s thugs; Zebun, the ex-prostitute whose lover abandons her for fear of social shame; and Elizabeth Masih, who is brutalized by the mob. With delicate imagery and in chiseled prose, Season of the Rainbirds is a compelling portrayal of a society in the throes of panic and prejudice as it contends with a dangerous combination of oppression, bigotry, and power. Aslam’s widely acclaimed second novel, Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), which took 11 years to write, won the 2005 Encore Award and the 2005 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize. It depicts the lonely and agonizing lives of Britain’s expatriate Pakistani community in a small British town, which has been rechristened Dasht-e-Tanhai (Desert of Loneliness) by its unhappy residents. Precariously situated on the crossroads of culture, nation, and religion, Shamas and Kaukab struggle to find meaning in their lives, while their children are crushed by the clash of opposing cultures and their mother’s rigid, suffocating faith. Religion and tradition also become motives for the twin murders at the heart of the story, while Islam’s marriage laws come in the way of Suraya’s happiness, allowing her no agency in her marital crisis. Aslam’s migrant groups fail to evolve new, hybridized selves or reinvented identities, getting caught in a head-on cultural collision. Maps for Lost Lovers is a scathing attack on obscurantist Islamist culture and a moving depiction of the tragic and fragmented lives of Pakistani minority groups in Britain. Sometimes excessively sentimental and melancholic, the novel underscores the transience of joy and the impermanence of existence, enacting the fractured lives of its characters amid exquisite descriptions of landscape and the natural world. The Wasted Vigil (2008), Aslam’s third novel, is set in Usha (Teardrop), a city in war-torn Afghanistan, the “Graveyard of Empires” (259). Marcus Caldwell, an Englishman, plays host to an American CIA agent, a Russian woman, and a young Afghan in his house where the wall paintings have been covered with mud and the books are nailed to the ceiling for fear of Taliban reprisals.
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ASTLEY, THEA
A chronicle of the destruction and violence afflicting contemporary Afghanistan, The Wasted Vigil is vitriolic in its indictment of war and religious bigotry, and passionate in its appeal for humanism and compassion. With graphic depictions of the atrocities of war, Taliban-style executions and amputations, and the treachery and infighting of Afghan warlords, the narrative gradually pieces together the stories of its three main characters in measured prose interspersed with delicately wrought imagery. Overseeing the war and destruction is the giant statue of the Buddha, the “god of knowledge, the god who repented” (121), which brings Afghanistan’s present violence into stark contrast with the peace and brotherhood associated with its ancient civilization. Despite the efforts of the main characters, love does not triumph in the book, being trampled by violence and hatred, and the narrative ends on a note of despair and grief. With sensitivity to the politics and cultures of the places about which he writes, Nadeem Aslam champions the cause of humanism and indicts prejudice, intolerance, violence, and religious bigotry. He is an important voice in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction. SEE ALSO: “Black British” Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Pakistani Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Aslam N. (1993). Season of the Rainbirds. London: Deutsch. Aslam N. (2004). Maps for Lost Lovers. London: Faber and Faber. Aslam N. (2008). The Wasted Vigil. New York: Knopf. Brace M. (2004). Nadeem Aslam: A Question of Honour (June 11). At www.independent.co.uk, accessed Feb. 18, 2009. Ranasinha R. (2007). South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Astley, Thea SUSAN SHERIDAN
Thea Astley, one of Australia’s outstanding fiction writers of the twentieth century, is admired for
her unflinching confrontations with the violence that human beings commit against one another – both the daily aggressions of class and gender in suburban and small-town life, and the violent past and present of colonialism. Although satire, marked by gallows humor and sometimes brutal irony, is the dominant mode of representing these conflicts in her fiction, her portrayal of social outsiders is ultimately compassionate. Her narratives are condensed, her language characterized by metaphor and word play. Astley was born on August 25, 1925 in Brisbane, the daughter and granddaughter of journalists. She always wrote poems and stories, though she claimed that she would have preferred a talent for music, which she loved. Raised a Catholic – her only brother became a Jesuit priest – she was educated at All Hallows Convent and the University of Queensland. She attended university as an evening student while undertaking teacher training. During this time she was introduced to a group of young writers who produced their own journal, Barjai, where she published poems. For five years she taught in rural Queensland, including Townsville in the far north – the setting for her first novel, Girl with a Monkey (1958). After her marriage to Jack Gregson, the couple moved to Sydney in 1949, where their son Edmund was born in 1955. She taught in primary and secondary schools for over 20 years. In 1967 she was appointed to teach creative writing at Macquarie University in Sydney. On “retirement,” she and her husband moved first to Kuranda, near Cairns in north Queensland, and later to the coast south of Sydney. Astley continued to publish to wide acclaim, and her last novel, Drylands (1999), won Australia’s oldest and most prestigious literary award, the Miles Franklin Literary Award. She died in 2004. Astley was the only Australian woman novelist of her generation to have won early success, publishing continuously throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Her third book, The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), was awarded the Miles Franklin Award, as were two other books, The Slow Natives (1965) and also The Acolyte (1972). This was an unprecedented success for a young woman at the time. She often named The Acolyte as her favorite novel, and indeed it displays her stylistic pyrotechnics most brilliantly. It is a key work as well, in that as a study of the acolyte, not the artist
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ATWOOD, MARGARET
whom he served, it brings a new dimension to her fascination with outsiders, misfits, and failures. “I was getting sick of great men,” she remarked (Sheridan & Genoni 27), as usual looking askance at the male-dominated Australian tradition of lauding explorers and pioneers. During the 1970s Astley struck out in several new directions. A Kindness Cup (1974) was the first of her novels to take a historical perspective on settler–Aboriginal relations, and Hunting the Wild Pineapple (1979a) was her first book of connected stories, a technique of “discontinuous narrative” which she later used frequently. In the 1980s these two innovations came together in It’s Raining in Mango: Pictures from the Family Album (1987). Astley thought highly of the short story form, admiring among its practitioners Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Mavis Gallant, and Carson McCullers. Another development in Astley’s art during the 1980s was the invention of a female narrator. After her first and largely autobiographical book, she habitually used a male narrative point of view, believing that no one would read novels written from a female perspective. She said later, “I felt I’d been spiritually neutered by society” (Ellison 56–7). Her later novels, however, often feature females among their multiple narrators, and with Belle in Reaching Tin River (1990) and Kathleen in Coda (1994) she achieves a recognizably female, sometimes outrageously feminist, narrative voice. Astley always set her fiction in the tropics, mostly her heartland of Queensland, but also, as in A Boat Load of Home Folk (1968) and Beachmasters (1985), on small Pacific islands. Some of the tropical north’s special significance for her is captured in the essay “Being a Queenslander,” where she writes: “Queensland is where the tall yarn happens, acted out on a stage where, despite its vastness, the oddballs see and recognize each other” (Sheridan & Genoni 19). Most of her main characters are outcasts or exiles of one kind or another. As she came to include Aboriginal characters in her stories, they too shared this characteristic of being out of place, but doubly so – displaced in their own country, and from their own land, by colonialism. SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Astley, T. (1958). Girl with a Monkey. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Astley, T. (1960). A Descant for Gossips. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Astley, T. (1962). The Well Dressed Explorer. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Astley, T. (1965). The Slow Natives. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Astley, T. (1968). A Boat Load of Home Folk. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Astley, T. (ed.) (1970). Coast to Coast: Australian Short Stories 1969–1970. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Astley, T. (1972). The Acolyte. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Astley, T. (1974). A Kindness Cup. Melbourne: Nelson. Astley, T. (1979a). Hunting the Wild Pineapple and Other Related Stories. Melbourne: Nelson. Astley, T. (1979b). Three Australian Writers. Townsville: Townsville Foundation for Literary Studies. Astley, T. (1982). An Item from the Late News. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Astley, T. (1985). Beachmasters. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin. Astley, T. (1987). It’ s Raining in Mango: Pictures from the Family Album. Ringwood, Vic.: Viking. Astley, T. (1990). Reaching Tin River. Port Melbourne: Heinemann. Astley, T. (1992). Vanishing Points. Port Melbourne: Heinemann. Astley, T. (1994). Coda. Port Melbourne: Heinemann. Astley, T. (1996). The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow. Ringwood, Vic.: Viking. Astley, T. (1997). Collected Stories. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Astley, T. (1999). Drylands: A Book for the World’s Last Reader. Ringwood, Vic.: Viking. Ellison, J. (1986). Thea Astley. Rooms of Their Own. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin pp. 50–69. Sheridan, S., & Genoni, P. (eds.) (2006). Thea Astley’s Fictional Worlds. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Atwood, Margaret CYNTHIA SUGARS
“We need to know about here, because here is where we live,” wrote Margaret Atwood in her landmark literary manifesto, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972b, 19). Atwood has contributed to that literature in myriad
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ways, becoming the twentieth century’s most celebrated and well-known Canadian writer. It is not an exaggeration to say that Atwood put Canada on the literary map. She was a central voice in the late 1960s and early 1970s, promoting the importance of Canadian national identity against the cultural inferiority complex that had come to dominate Canadian society, particularly in relation to the United States. Survival became something of a rallying cry to writers and readers of that generation. However, it is not only the politics of Canadian nationalism that has informed Atwood’s writing. She has taken on many of the political and social issues of her time, including women’s equality, violence against women, totalitarianism, religious fundamentalism, environmentalism, genetic modification, American cultural imperialism, consumerism, freedom of speech, authors’ rights, Amnesty International, and many more. Atwood is an enviably multitalented writer and thinker: a poet, novelist, short story writer, literary critic, editor, satirist, children’s author, painter and illustrator, cultural commentator, and mentor to numerous Canadian writers. Atwood was born on November 18, 1939 in Ottawa, and moved with her family to Toronto in 1946. Her childhood was unusual, especially for a family in the 1940s: they spent every spring, summer, and autumn living in the bush in northern Quebec or Ontario while her father, an entomologist, did field research on insects. As a result, Atwood grew up with a foot in two worlds: the isolated and unsophisticated world of outhouses and log cabins (without electricity or running water), and the middle-class world of 1950s Toronto. This experience gave her an “observer’s” perspective on much of the social conformity and materialism of urban life at the time. From early on, Atwood knew that she wanted to be a writer. Her stated ambition, as recorded in her high school yearbook, was “to write THE Canadian novel” (Sullivan 75). Atwood graduated with a BA in English literature from the University of Toronto in 1961, where she was a student of Northrop Frye. Under Frye’s influence, Atwood absorbed a sense of the underlying mythological structure of all stories, a motif that runs throughout her writing, even as late as 2005 when she published her revision of Homer’s Odyssey in The Penelopiad. Her extensive
background in English literary forms (particularly gothic literature) is evident in her varied body of writing, in which she plays with multiple genres: the dystopian novel (The Handmaid’s Tale, 1985), gothic literature (Lady Oracle, 1976), speculative fiction (Oryx and Crake, 2003; The Year of the Flood, 2009), fairy tales (Bluebeard’s Egg, 1983; The Robber Bride, 1993), and the thriller (Bodily Harm, 1981a). In 1961 Atwood entered Harvard University’s Radcliffe College, receiving her MA in 1962 and beginning a PhD in Victorian literature. After some time teaching English at the University of British Columbia, Atwood returned to Harvard in 1965. However, she was spending more and more time on creative writing, having completed her first novel, The Edible Woman (1969), while in Vancouver. After winning the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for The Circle Game (1966) – the youngest recipient ever at that time – Atwood decided not to complete her PhD. Yet undeniably her experience at Harvard gave her a sense of Canadians’ distinctiveness from Americans. From early on, Atwood was an important part of the burgeoning literary and cultural scene in Toronto in the 1960s and 1970s, publishing widely in little magazines alongside writers such as Leonard Cohen, Michael Ondaatje, and George Bowering. After leaving Harvard, she devoted herself to writing, editing, and reviewing, including a stint on the editorial board of the newly established House of Anansi Press. Atwood also faced the problem of defining the woman writer’s role in this milieu of very strong, and sometimes misogynistic, male personalities. Fellow poet Irving Layton accused her of treading into male territory, and in a world where women were typically regarded as muses to male writers rather than as artists in their own right, Atwood struggled to find a place for herself. Many of her writings, including her first book of poems, Double Persephone (1961), provide tongue-incheek meditations on female stereotypes. Atwood wrote prolifically after her Governor General’s success, publishing numerous poetry collections, including The Animals in That Country (1968), The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970a), Procedures for Underground (1970b), Power Politics (1971), and Two-Headed Poems (1978). Her poetry is marked by a curiously clinical style mixed with startling, often macabre
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ATWOOD, MARGARET
or gothic, imagery. The clash between the deadpan tone and the almost hallucinatory imagery is a trademark of Atwood’s work. These early books are also replete with mythological resonance and scientific imagery, the latter emerging from Atwood’s longstanding interest in biology. Susanna Moodie is a key collection from this period, lauded for its attempt to resuscitate a forgotten Canadian ancestor, a British settler who immigrated to Canada in 1832 and wrote about her experiences in the “bush.” The collection posits Susanna Moodie as an archetypal Canadian who, caught between the Old World and the New, emblematizes the divided nature of the Canadian psyche, or what Atwood in her Afterword termed Canadian culture’s “paranoid schizophrenia” (1970a, 62) – a theme she also explored in Survival. The poems have strangely gothic undertones: boundaries between self and other, human and animal, civilization and wilderness are dissolved as Moodie metamorphoses into something different from what she started out to be. This interest in uncovering a buried history is echoed by many Canadian writers from this period, such as Rudy Wiebe, Margaret Laurence, and Robert Kroetsch. Atwood’s remarkable collection of elegiac poems, Morning in the Burned House (1995a), published years later after her father’s death, is also preoccupied with personal and cultural memory and forgetting. In the late 1960s, Atwood established herself as a fiction writer with The Edible Woman, which humorously critiques consumer society – including the consumption of women’s bodies and identities – through a protagonist who enacts a refusal of materialist values by engaging in willed anorexia. This and Atwood’s subsequent novels, Surfacing (1972a) and Lady Oracle, along with her early poetry, earned her a reputation as a notable feminist writer and social commentator, though her tongue-in-cheek comments also took the women’s liberation movement to task for its sometimes myopic intolerance of any but a woman-centered agenda. Surfacing is perhaps Atwood’s most important novel of this early period, addressing some of the major issues of late 1960s Canada as the protagonist journeys into the Quebec wilderness – and, internally, into her personal past – to search for her lost father. It is a groundbreaking novel for its skeptical engagement with such ideological developments of the
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late 1960s and early 1970s as Canadian nationalism, anti-Americanism, the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, the sexual revolution, and environmentalism, simultaneously empathizing with these burgeoning movements and examining them critically. Lady Oracle similarly satirizes many fashionable topics of the day (sexual mores, women’s lib, the peace movement), but its importance rests in its self-conscious parody of the gothic genre. The protagonist, Joan Foster, has faked her own death to escape various ruses and disguises under which she has been living. One of her false identities is that of Louisa Delacourt, the pseudonym under which she writes cheap gothic romances. The novel engages with the theme of illusion and disguise by presenting Joan’s self-fashioning, indeed “gothicizing,” of her identity, construing herself according to a series of contrived plot lines. Atwood’s unique contribution to the female K€untslerroman destabilizes the very premise of the artist’s growth, especially when Joan attributes her literary success to “automatic writing” over which she has no conscious control. With Graeme Gibson (her future husband), Atwood became involved in the 1970s movement to establish the Canadian Writers’ Union, becoming its president from 1981 to 1982. Also in the 1970s she published her momentous work of Canadian literary criticism, Survival. Lamenting the absence of Canadian content in Canadian schools (it was in part intended as a manual for high school and college English teachers), the book proposed a characteristic mode of expression in Canadian literature: that of “survival.” This thematic approach undoubtedly emerged out of the period’s sense that Canada was under threat by the weight of established British tradition and by the world dominance of the US, though it also took its lead from Frye’s postulation of the “garrison mentality” in Canadian culture – a tendency to cordon oneself off from the perceived threat of the surrounding world, including nature, animals, or people perceived as “other” – discussed in his Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada (1965). In Survival, Atwood outlined a series of “victim positions” that were identifiable in Canadian literature, concluding that the real test was to discover how to be a “creative non-victim.” Today, Atwood’s thesis is criticized by many Canadian scholars for
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being overly simplified, homogenizing, and for excluding many non-mainstream voices. Nevertheless, Survival garnered much support for Canadian literature and supplemented government-led initiatives to promote the teaching of Canadian content in schools and universities. In the 1980s and 1990s, Atwood extended her interests beyond Canadian national and cultural questions to issues of international human rights. She became a prominent member of the human rights organization PEN International, acting as president of its Canadian branch from 1984 to 1986. This political and social engagement took a unique form in Bodily Harm, set on a fictional Caribbean island on the brink of revolution. The protagonist, Rennie, flees her Toronto home after a struggle with breast cancer, ostensibly to write a travel article about the island. Rennie’s naivety in the face of poverty and political upheaval becomes a stark commentary on Canadians’ ignorance of international affairs. Finding herself increasingly out of her depth, subsumed within the turmoil overtaking the island, she is forced to acknowledge the privilege and narcissism that cushion her life back home. Atwood’s groundbreaking novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which won the Governor General’s Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, catapulting her into international prominence, launches a harsh critique of fundamentalist totalitarianism and the oppression of women. In its bleak dystopian vision, women are forced into slavery as “handmaids” to produce children for the governing elite. While set in a futuristic United States, it clearly condemns the threat of absolutist and misogynistic dictatorships worldwide. A similar interest emerges in Atwood’s political poetry from this period, particularly in True Stories (1981b). Two poems from this collection, “Footnote to the Amnesty Report on Torture” and “Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written,” are among the most powerful and unflinching human rights poems ever produced in Canada. Biographer Rosemary Sullivan states that for Atwood “the writer’s responsibility is to expose the conventions . . . by which we invent convenient versions of ourselves. She sees modern man as being . . . committed to an anachronistic belief in civilized order that is patently contradicted by the barbarism of the twentieth century” (64). This is certainly true of much of Atwood’s writ-
ing, particularly The Handmaid’s Tale, but critiques of conformity and totalitarianism are also evident in other novels such as Bodily Harm, Cat’s Eye (1988), The Robber Bride, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood. Cat’s Eye charts the horrific machinations that take place in the social circles among girls in grade school in the 1950s. Elaine Risley, returning home decades later for a retrospective exhibition of her paintings, recalls her childhood years as the target of a sadistic schoolgirl, Cordelia. The novel moves powerfully back and forth between the childhood trauma and the artworks that contain masked versions of past events, a textual encryption that is common to many of Atwood’s writings, including Lady Oracle and The Blind Assassin (2000). The Robber Bride tackles similar territory as four women living in 1980s Toronto are brought together through shared trauma. It opens with the women meeting in a Toronto cafe, and through flashbacks delineates how each was in turn duped and betrayed by Zenia, an ingenious Machiavellian shape-shifter who stole the men in their lives. Zenia represents the kind of female villain that Atwood argues has been suppressed in much contemporary women’s writing, which seeks to present more positive portrayals. The novel’s genius is its refusal to allow a final assessment of Zenia’s character: her behavior is reprehensible, but she might also represent an empowered woman who gets what she wants by whatever means she can. Atwood has written numerous short story collections, such as Dancing Girls (1977), Bluebeard’s Egg, Wilderness Tips (1991), and Good Bones (1992). Wilderness Tips contains memorable stories that reflect ironically on Canadian cultural icons, including the Group of Seven (in “Wilderness Tips”) and John Franklin (in “The Age of Lead”). Her 1995 essay collection Strange Things identifies the Franklin Expedition as one of the central “image-clusters” in Canadian literature because of its links with the Far North’s allure and terror. In “The Age of Lead” Atwood parallels Franklin’s hubris with contemporary consumerism and environmental destruction. These themes are present throughout Atwood’s impressive oeuvre, which as a whole addresses the dangers of a utilitarian individualist ethos underwritten by social conformity and exploitation. This subject is evident in Atwood’s specula-
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ATWOOD, MARGARET
tive fiction Oryx and Crake, which echoes the dystopian themes of The Handmaid’s Tale in envisioning the end of civilization through the character of “Snowman,” apparently the last human being on earth. Engaging the scientific and technological trends of the early twenty-first century, the novel critiques the increased commodification of humanity through technologies of genetic modification, organ transplants, and germ warfare and anticipates their potentially devastating consequences for the future. Atwood’s writings are marked by an elegiac quality, often positing a dialogue between past and present, living and dead – evident in Susanna Moodie, but also in two historical novels, Alias Grace (1996) and The Blind Assassin. The former, based on a famous case, focuses on Grace Marks, a nineteenth-century servant accused of murdering her employer and his housekeeper in 1843. Like other contemporary historical fictions, it plays on the instability of historical evidence, though here it is framed in the context of late nineteenth-century theories of psychology and spiritualism as Grace claims to have no conscious recollection of the murders. The Blind Assassin, which won the Booker Prize in 2000, is a tour de force of various Atwoodian interests: the continuity between life and art; the layering of texts within texts; the tenacity of buried secrets; the gothic underlay of everyday experience; the precariousness of identity. The novel centers on two sisters: Iris, an old woman remembering her youth, and Laura, who commits suicide by driving off a bridge after World War II. As in Lady Oracle, the novel takes its title from a novel embedded within it, ostensibly written by Laura. Within that novel is yet another story, a science fiction tale about a blind assassin. This multiple layering proceeds by gradual revelation and contributes to the sense that voices are speaking from beyond the grave as events in the fictional narratives begin overlapping with events in the main text. Atwood has always been fascinated by the underside of appearances, particularly by the irony that the mask or the false side of the individual often passes for the reality. This interest also applies to her analysis of societal norms and political regimes that impose an often suspect version of truth. Atwood’s fascination with the
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gothic and the supernatural is part of this interest in unseen or hidden depths. In her essay “An End to Audience?” in Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (1982), Atwood defines writing as “a kind of sooth-saying, a truth-telling . . . . It’s also a witnessing. Come with me, the writer is saying to the reader. There is a story I have to tell you, there is something you need to know” (348). SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Kroetsch, Robert (WF); Laurence, Margaret (WF); Ondaatje, Michael (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (AF); REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Atwood, M. (1961). Double Persephone. Toronto: Hawkshead. Atwood, M. (1966). The Circle Game. Toronto: Anansi. Atwood, M. (1968). The Animals in That Country. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Atwood, M. (1969). The Edible Woman. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Atwood, M. (1970a). The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Atwood, M. (1970b). Procedures for Underground. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Atwood, M. (1971). Power Politics. Toronto: Anansi. Atwood, M. (1972a). Surfacing. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Atwood, M. (1972b). Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Anansi. Atwood, M. (1976). Lady Oracle. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Atwood, M. (1977). Dancing Girls and Other Stories. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Atwood, M. (1978). Two-Headed Poems. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Atwood, M. (1981a). Bodily Harm. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Atwood, M. (1981b). True Stories. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Atwood, M. (1982). Second Words: Selected Critical Prose. Toronto: Anansi. Atwood, M. (1983). Bluebeard’s Egg. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Atwood, M. (1985). The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
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Atwood, M. (1988). Cat’s Eye. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Atwood, M. (1991). Wilderness Tips. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Atwood, M. (1992). Good Bones. Toronto: Coach House. Atwood, M. (1993). The Robber Bride. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Atwood, M. (1995a). Morning in the Burned House. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Atwood, M. (1995b). Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature. Oxford: Clarendon. Atwood, M. (1996). Alias Grace. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Atwood, M. (2000). The Blind Assassin. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Atwood, M. (2002). Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Atwood, M. (2003). Oryx and Crake. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Atwood, M. (2005). The Penelopiad. Toronto: Knopf. Atwood, M. (2009). The Year of the Flood. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Cooke, N. (1998). Margaret Atwood: A Biography. Toronto: ECW. Davey, F. (1984). Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics. Vancouver: Talonbooks. Davidson, A., & Davidson, C. (eds.) (1981). The Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism. Toronto: Anansi. Frye, N. (1965). Conclusion. In Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English (ed. C. F. Klinck). Toronto: University of Toronto Press pp. 821–49. Grace, S. (1980). Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood. Montreal: Vehicule. Howells, C. A. (2005). Margaret Atwood. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Howells, C. A. (ed.) (2006). The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ingersoll, E. (ed.) (1990). Margaret Atwood: Conversations. Willowdale: Firefly. Moss, J., & Kozakewich, T. (eds.) (2006). Margaret Atwood: The Open Eye. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Nicholson, C. (ed.) (1994). Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity. New York: St. Martin’s. Sullivan, R. (1998). The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out. Toronto: HarperFlamingo. York, L. (ed.) (1995). Various Atwoods: Essays on the Later Poems, Short Fiction, and Novels. Concord, ON: Anansi.
Australian Fiction BRUCE BENNETT
Australia became postcolonial in 1901, when the six colonies federated and formed the Commonwealth of Australia. The 1880s and 1990s had produced a crop of writers who tested an emergent sense of Australian identity against British values and attitudes. The outstanding literary figure of this period was the short story writer Henry Lawson, whose While the Billy Boils (1896) and Joe Wilson and His Mates (1901) explored Australian frontier masculinity and mateship, and their limits. Joseph Furphy’s novel Such is Life (1903), sometimes referred to as Australia’s Moby-Dick, interweaves the voices of outback bullock drivers with a freewheeling set of philosophical speculations by the autodidactic narrator Tom Collins, whose favorite writer is Shakespeare. Steele Rudd’s stories were also born in the nineteenth century but continued well into the twentieth. From On Our Selection (1899) to Dad Rudd MP (1940), Rudd’s stories comically dramatize the hardships and ingenuity of rural Australian “battlers.” Several major novelists of the early twentieth century were expatriates living in Europe or North America. They include Miles Franklin, Henry Handel Richardson, Martin Boyd, Frederic Manning, and Christina Stead. Franklin’s novel My Brilliant Career (1901) was written before she left Australia in 1906 for North America and Europe. Franklin never forgot her sense of an identity forged in the Australian bush and wrote family sagas set in cattle and farming country. It is fitting that the Miles Franklin Literary Award, bequeathed on her death in 1954, has become Australia’s most recognized annual award for fiction. The expatriate experiences of Richardson and Boyd incorporated both “the Continent” and England. Richardson’s Maurice Guest (1908) is set in Leipzig where the author was a music student, but her trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1930) returns to the Australia of her upbringing, her parents’ ill-matched marriage, and the tragedy of a restless doctor’s failure to find “home” in either his native Britain or his adoptive Australia. Boyd’s novels trace the fortunes of an artistic aristocracy whose members sailed regularly between Australia and Europe.
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AUSTRALIAN FICTION
From The Montforts (1928) to Lucinda Brayford (1946), and in the postwar Langton quartet, Boyd explores issues of birth, sexuality, money, class, the impact of war, and the possibility of transcendence through art or religion. Experience of World War I was the catalyst for Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929). Manning’s protagonist, Private Bourne, and his comrades in arms are depicted chiefly through the minutiae of military life, although the few battle scenes and Bourne’s death are finely rendered. Stead’s expatriate experience and literary temper led to a more politically aware and vigorously satiric fiction, targeting Europeans, Americans, and Australians whose financial, political, or intellectual pursuits are subverted by overweening ambition, ineptness, or greed. Stead’s novels range from House of All Nations (1938), about international bankers and their associates in Paris, to the more autobiographical, Australian-based novels The Man Who Loved Children (1940) and For Love Alone (1944). Unlike these expatriate writers, Katharine Susannah Prichard and Vance Palmer wrote novels and short stories set mainly in Australia. Though both traveled widely in Europe (and Prichard in the Soviet Union), they espoused literary nationalism as a way of expressing the distinctive qualities of Australian life. From their respectively “straight left” and center-left political persuasions, Prichard and Palmer produced fiction through the 1920s and 1930s that threw a critical spotlight on Australians at work, the growing pains of children and adolescents, and the special problems of Indigenous Australians. In 1920 Prichard became a founding member of Australia’s Communist Party; during this decade she traveled widely in Western Australia and wrote two major social-realist novels, Working Bullocks (1926) and Coonardoo (1929), and stories that appeared in Kiss on the Lips (1932). Palmer’s first major works were also written in regional Australia, including Caloundra, a Queensland fishing port where he wrote his novel The Passage (1930). Palmer’s short fiction in Separate Lives (1931), Sea and Spinifex (1934), and Let the Birds Fly (1955) shows a developing interest in impressionist techniques. A powerful sense of place is exhibited also in Xavier Herbert’s novel Capricornia (1938), which dramatically renders scenes in Australia’s
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Northern Territory from 1885 to 1930. Herbert’s anti-racist stance confronts white prejudice against Aborigines, half-castes, and Chinese. The half-caste protagonist Norman discovers his Aboriginal heritage alone in the bush. Australia’s most eminent novelist, Patrick White, criticized the dull realism of postwar Australian writing. Although unfair to many writers, White’s criticism was a platform from which he could launch his own brand of non-realist fiction that was rich in metaphor, idiosyncratic syntax, and bizarre characters. White completed his third novel The Aunt’s Story (1948) on a sea voyage home from serving as an RAF intelligence officer in the Middle East. The Tree of Man (1955) and Voss (1957) give the eras of pioneering and exploration an epic, ironic, and psychological dimension. White was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973, the year of his ninth novel The Eye of the Storm. The citation was both personal and national, referring to earlier novels as well as The Eye: “To Patrick White for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature” (quoted in Marr 535). Two major novels followed: A Fringe of Leaves (1976) and The Twyborn Affair (1979). Randolph Stow’s novels To the Islands (1958) and Tourmaline (1965) also employ poetic and symbolic prose to reimagine outback Australian landscapes and outlandish Australian characters. Other major work includes the semiautobiographical Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1965) and Midnite: The Story of a Wild Colonial Boy (1967). An increase in literary fiction in the 1970s and 1980s was accompanied by a new diversity in subject, style, and point of view. The short story led this break from the still persistent bush yarn; international influences also contributed to a new sophistication in short fiction. Peter Cowan, influenced by Sherwood Anderson and others, adopted a realist–impressionist style to convey the loneliness of individuals in Western Australian land- or seascapes. The more autobiographical Hal Porter drew attention to his narratorial performance as a freewheeling, idiosyncratic raconteur of Victorian country towns and of postwar occupation forces in Japan. Another idiosyncratic stylist was the English-born Elizabeth Jolley, whose stories and novels of migrants arriving and settling in Australia have a “sweet and sour” flavor.
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Experimentation with structure and texture in short fiction was led by Frank Moorhouse, whose chronicle of the 1970s, Days of Wine and Rage (1980), pays homage to Sydney and the libertarian spirit. The country-bred Moorhouse saw the city and inner suburbs as a laboratory of emergent attitudes toward sexuality, relationships, and political activism. The Americans, Baby (1973) is a “discontinuous fiction” exploring a new generation’s simultaneous attraction and resistance to American values. The English-born Michael Wilding also dramatized the “alternative” Sydney of beach, pubs, parties, and drugs and excelled as a parodist half in love with his subject. When Moorhouse turned to the novel he produced two long ones, Grand Days (1993) and Dark Palace (2000), set in interwar Geneva. Helen Garner, Robert Drewe, and Peter Goldsworthy are renovators of realism. Garner’s short fiction in Postcards from Surfers (1985) and her novel The Spare Room (2008) show how close observation of people and situations can yield searing insights into motives and feelings. Drewe’s sharp awareness of contemporary events combines with an ironic and compassionate interest in the motives that drive people and the play of chance in their lives. From his early novel about race relations, The Savage Crows (1976), to his sixth, Grace (2005), Drewe skillfully combines narrative pace with psychological insight; in The Bodysurfers (1983), a series of linked stories, he shows the place of the beach in the sexual and psychic lives of Australians. Peter Goldsworthy is a physician who draws on personal and professional experience to provide sharply rendered, tragic-comic scenes of suburban Australia. When Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark won the Booker Prize in 1983 a controversy ensued: was this novel about Oskar Schindler, who saved over a thousand Jews during the Holocaust, really “faction” or fiction? In 1993, director Steven Spielberg turned Schindler’s Ark into an awardwinning film, Schindler’s List. Many of Keneally’s Australian novels, including The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972) and A Family Madness (1985), also explore the impact of violence and the possibility of redemption. Peter Carey left Australia for New York in mid-career in 1989, one year after winning the Booker Prize for Oscar and Lucinda. The eccentric young vicar Oscar’s gambling and its effect on
spirituality and human relationships is explored by Carey in a risk-taking historical novel of surrealistic verve, filmed in 1998 by director Gillian Armstrong. Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang, which ventriloquizes Australia’s most famous bushranger, won the 2001 Booker Prize. Like Keneally and Carey, Kate Grenville has mined Australian history. She returned to the first phase of European Australian history in The Secret River (2007), which shows the precarious relations and violent outbreaks between Australia’s first inhabitants and the newcomers. Novelists in Australia have often been regionally based and demonstrate a strong interest in place. Tim Winton has set his major novels, including the magic-realist Cloudstreet (1991), in his native southwest corner of Western Australia, but Dirt Music (2001) moves to the northwest, where his character survives difficult terrain and begins to find himself spiritually. In Breath (2008), Winton’s protagonist never outgrows the adrenalin rush of surfing and is both made and damaged by his encounters with the great western ocean. David Malouf is associated with his native Brisbane through his semiautobiographical novel Johnno (1975) and the essay-story 12 Edmonstone Street (1985). In contrast, An Imaginary Life (1979) explores exile through a narrative of the Roman poet Ovid and a wild child. Set in midnineteenth-century Queensland, Remembering Babylon (1993) explores exile through the experience of a “white black man.” Richard Flanagan’s Tasmanian wilderness is brought alive in Death of a River Guide (1994) and in his experimental novel Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish (2002). The expatriate Queenslander Janette Turner Hospital returns frequently to her formative experiences in north Queensland in short fiction and novels ranging from Oyster (1996) to Orpheus Lost (2007), employing postmodern techniques to dramatize the transitory states of transnational characters. Indigenous Australian fiction has shown welcome signs of renewal with Kim Scott’s novel Benang (1999) and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006), both winners of the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Scott’s novel is set among southwest Australia’s Nyoongar people and is something of a sequel to Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987) in revealing the pain and pleasure of discovering an Aboriginal identity. Carpentaria, set in
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AWARDS AND PRIZES
northwestern Queensland, portrays Aboriginal and white communities at loggerheads over mining developments. Race relations in Australia and the relationship of Indigenous Australians to their country are also explored in Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country (2002) and Landscape of Farewell (2007). Australia’s increasing links with Asia have been a persistent theme and challenge in Australian fiction since the 1970s in work by Christopher Koch, Nicholas Jose, and Brian Castro. In his essay Crossing the Gap (1987), Koch wrote of the “family closeness” that links Australia with the Indo-European zone which includes India and Indonesia. Most of Koch’s novels deal with Australian–Asian tensions and relationships including Across the Sea Wall (1965, 1982), The Year of Living Dangerously (1978), Highways to a War (1995), and The Memory Room (2007). Jose’s book of essays Chinese Whispers (1995) explains his close interest in China. His novel Avenue of Eternal Peace (1989), set in China and completed in 1987, foreshadows the Tiananmen Square massacre. Asian immigrants have made their presence felt in Australian fiction since the 1980s. Hong Kong-born Brian Castro’s novels present China from an insider-outsider’s perspective. Noting that the word “Asia” is found within “Australia,” Castro advocates presenting Asia as part of Australia in Birds of Passage (1983), After China (1992), and Shanghai Dancing (2003). Adib Khan was born in Dhakar, Bangladesh and moved to Australia in 1973; his novels reflect the traumas and pleasures of straddling cultures. SEE ALSO: Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Indigenous Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); New Zealand Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF); Southeast Asian Fiction (WF); South Pacific Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource. At www.austlit.edu.au, accessed Jan. 13, 2010.
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Bennett, B. (2002). Australian Short Fiction: A History. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Bennett, B., & Strauss, J. (eds.) (1998). The Oxford Literary History of Australia. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Clancy, L. (1992). A Reader’s Guide to Australian Fiction. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Gelder, K., & Salzman, P. (1989). The New Diversity: Australian Fiction 1970–88. Melbourne: McPhee Gribble. Hergenhan, L. (ed.) (1988). The Penguin New Literary History of Australia. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin. Marr, D. (1991). Patrick White: A Life. Sydney: Random House. Webby, E. (2000). The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilde, W., Hooton, J., & Andrews, B. (eds.) (1994). The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Awards and Prizes LUKE STRONGMAN
Literary prizes confer status upon books, authors, and publishers; they are commendations to authors and publishers for a job well done. Prizes that reflect serious literary judgment can impart a sense of literary clout to a work of fiction. They also help publishers sell books and are an important part of the promotion and marketing activities of the book industry. Despite Richard Todd’s claim in 1996 that “only the Booker and the Whitbread Prizes really have any significant impact on fiction sales” (62), literary prizes have proliferated since the 1980s in tandem with the rise of world literatures and globalization. Their profusion is a positive influence insofar as they help stimulate writers, publishers, and readers, but negative insofar as arbitrary or ill-defined awards may be seen more as a tool of commercialism than of literary discrimination. The organizations that bestow prizes may perform a canonizing function by validating dominant metropolitan voices; they may, through their choices, extend the terms of reference for the novel or short story as an art form: for instance, by recognizing experimental forms of narrative, politically disenfranchised authors, or minority cultures. Prizes can be understood as devices for achieving cultural objectives along social, institutional,
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ideological, economic, historical, and artistic lines (English 2005a, 50); they help to preserve and shape the development of the genre. By providing external and independent forms of recognition and reward to authors, publishers, and the styles of literature they represent, they are a form of “cultural credentialing” (English 2005a, 41). Moreover, prizes can stimulate goodwill and provide a focus for literary judgment. They may also bring financial success and establish the careers of authors. The benefits to winning or even being shortlisted for a major literary prize are considerable in terms of publicity and sales. A novel shortlisted for the Booker Prize can have its print run boosted by 10,000 copies, even if it doesn’t win (Jury 2003). However, awards can also be beset by scandal, the taint of which is best (but rarely entirely) avoided by award committees, and the awarding of prizes to particular works and authors is often controversial. For example, when V. S. Naipaul failed to win the 1979 Booker Prize with his novel A Bend in the River, he reportedly “announce[d] the classic novel is in decline and can only be resuscitated by one of a small number of authors” (Blackler 2007). Examined thematically, prizes may reveal patterns of literary production that reflect larger trends of cultural development. For example, the Man Booker Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize reflect the emergence of cultural changes in the aftermath of the British Empire (see Huggan 2001; Strongman 2002). Many largescale contemporary prizes have a national agenda; whether publicly or privately sponsored, they intend to showcase the best examples of a nation’s literary production in a particular year, as with Britain’s Somerset Maugham and Geoffrey Faber awards, or the Scotiabank Giller for Canadian fiction. Historically, by singling out particular novels for award, these prizes have helped shore up national identities against the potential relativism of an increasingly globalized writing and publishing scene. The criteria for a literary prize reflect the values of its sponsor, which may be a government, an institution, a corporation, or an organization specifically established to administer the prize. Prize juries are most often composed of writers but may also include academics, publishers, or celebrities. There are three general categories: international awards, in which a particular novel
or author is selected for distinction independently, though not exclusively, from the country of national origin of the author; national or regional awards, which may be privately or publicly sponsored, and in which terms of reference for selection are directly related to a national or geographic compass, with criteria derived from the author’s belonging to a particular nation state and contributing to its literature; and awards with a transcending imperative, recognizing a particular gender or ethnicity, or emphasizing literary production under a particular set of cultural conditions. Some awards, such as the Nobel Prize in Literature, share more than one set of these characteristics. Of the prizes with an international or global frame of reference, the Nobel Prize is the most renowned and prestigious. It is also the award that carries the largest international monetary value (currently set at just over one million euros). Founded in 1901, the Nobel Prize is awarded every autumn by an academy based in Sweden for an author’s work as a whole, though individual works may be cited; writing in any language and genre is eligible. Nobel Prize-winning writers’ works invariably exhibit idealistic tendencies, and the Nobel is arguably now seen to be as much a literary-humanitarian award as a prize for literature, and has been won by such notable Englishlanguage writers as Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), Derek Walcott (St. Lucia), Nadine Gordimer (South Africa), V. S. Naipaul (Trinidad), and J. M. Coetzee (South Africa). The best-known international literary award after the Nobel is the Man Booker Prize for Fiction (formerly the Booker-McConnell Prize), awarded each year for the best novel in English by a citizen of the Commonwealth or Republic of Ireland. Conceived in 1968 and inaugurated in 1969 as a prize to rival the French Prix Goncourt, the “Booker” was originally sponsored by food conglomerate Booker PLC and, as James English suggests, “was a postcolonial prize by means of which London could – couldn’t not – reaffirm its domination of the formerly colonised space” (2005b, 170). The Booker Prize can also be seen as a having a post-imperial agenda by means of which literary recognition is conferred by the London metropolitan center to a deserving novelist from among the Commonwealth nations. It has evolved with new sponsorship from the Man
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Group in 2005 and broadened its geographic and literary-political remit even further; its financial value is currently set at £50,000. Salman Rushdie won the “Booker of Bookers” in 1993 for Midnight’s Children (1981), a groundbreaking novel of Indian independence that also won the “Best of the Booker” in 2008 to celebrate the prize’s fortieth anniversary. The Booker is seen as the most “literary” and is consequently often the most sought-after and controversial prize for the modern novel. In recent years its Commonwealth aegis and literary cache was challenged by Australian-born D. B. C. Pierre’s Vernon Little God (2003), with its Texas setting and witty adolescent monologue. Other notable winners include Coetzee, Peter Carey, Margaret Atwood, Arundhati Roy, and Yann Martel, whose Life of Pi became an international bestseller after its surprise Booker win in 2002, reportedly selling 300,000 copies within a year (Jury 2003). Complementing the Man Booker Prize is the Man Booker International Prize, established in 2005 as a biennial literary award for excellence in world fiction over a writer’s career. In 2007 the prize went to Chinua Achebe, for his novels of African history and consciousness that, since the late 1950s, have provided an African literary counterpoint to mid-twentieth-century Western modernism. More recent in conception than the Booker, though with similar criteria of eligibility, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize was founded in 1987 as a preeminent award for fiction among authors of nations influenced by British colonization. It was established to encourage new Commonwealth fiction, promoting democracy, human development, and cultural understanding. It is currently sponsored by the Macquarie Group Foundation. The judging committees are composed mainly of academics and fiction writers, one consequence of which may be to promote books with academic appeal. Canadian Lawrence Hill won the overall “Best Book” category for The Book of Negroes in 2008, while Tahmima Aram from Bangladesh won the overall “Best First Book” award for A Golden Age. Previous winners include Lloyd Jones of New Zealand for Mister Pip (2007), Australian Kate Grenville for her novel of Australian ex-convict colonization The Secret River (2006), and Andrea Levy for her novel of British/Jamaican reverse colonization, Small Island (2004). Aside from the
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overall “Best Book” and “Best First Book” awards, the Commonwealth Prize has a regional structure with different judges and winners from four different geographical regions: Africa; the Caribbean and Canada; Europe and South Asia; and Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. The two winners from each region then compete for the overall awards. Of the major international literary prizes for fiction, one is wholly dedicated to women’s writing. The Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction is given annually to the female writer deemed to have written the best eligible novel in English. There is also an Orange Broadband award for new writers. The Orange Prize has been controversial, with A. S. Byatt describing it as “ghettoizing” women writers (Guest 2008); Byatt and fellow British author Anita Brookner have declined to allow their books to be considered. In 2007 the winner was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria) for Half of a Yellow Sun, and in 2008 it was Rose Tremain (Britain) for The Road Home. Despite its gendered entry criteria, the Orange Broadband judging committee remains broad and consists of writers, critics, broadcasters, book-trade workers, and library editors. Inaugurated by its namesake in 1947, the Somerset Maugham Award is bestowed by the British Society of Authors. The winners list over the years has included most of the authors at the forefront of British fiction (with some notable exceptions such as Graham Swift), including Alan Hollinghurst, Julian Barnes, A. N. Wilson, Lisa St. Aubin de Teran, and Peter Ackroyd. The award also helped launch the prize-winning career of Ian McEwan (for First Love, Last Rites, in 1976). The Whitbread Literary Awards were founded in 1971, renamed the Whitbread Book Awards in 1985, and with renewed sponsorship in 1996 by the Costa coffee company, became the Costa Book Awards. The Costa Awards are among Britain’s most prominent international literary awards, open to writers from the UK and the Republic of Ireland. The Costa is more populist than the Man Booker Prize. Winners include A. L. Kennedy in 2007 for her novel Day and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), a humorous, age-transcending novel of latent suburban autism. Across the Irish Sea from London, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, inaugurated in 1986, is
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the largest and most “global” of the new wave of international literary prizes for fiction. It is awarded annually for a single work of fiction published in English. The award is administered from Ireland by the Dublin City Public Libraries from nominations submitted by public libraries across the world. The prize is valued at 100,000 euros. Lebanese-born Canadian author Rawi Hage won in 2008 for De Niro’s Game, and Per Petterson of Ireland in 2007 for Out Stealing Horses – both inventive fiction titles situated on the political left. Recent winners have included French, American, Irish, and Turkish authors; in this respect the award census seems to preclude writers from Britain. Further west, the longest-running Canadian literary prize is the Governor General’s Literary Award, given annually to the best English-language and French-language books in seven categories of Fiction, Literary Non-fiction, Poetry, Drama, Children’s Literature (text), Children’s Literature (illustration), and Translation. Each laureate receives C$25,000. Michael Ondaatje, who co-won the Booker Prize in 1992, was the 2007 winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction for Divisadero. Being a prestigious statesponsored prize, the aim of the Governor General’s Literary Award is to fulfill a national agenda of recognizing Canadian literary excellence. The other preeminent Canadian literary award is the Scotiabank Giller Prize, known as the Giller Prize from its inception in 1994 until 2005. Scotiabank’s co-sponsorship produced Canada’s most financially valuable award for fiction, with a prize value of C$50,000 for the winner. The Scotiabank Giller has the nationalistic aim of celebrating the best Canadian fiction for each year but differs from the Governor General’s Award in that it is not state-sponsored. Tanzanian-Canadian M. G. Vassanji is the Giller’s only two-time winner, in 1994 and 2003, and other winners have included Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, and Austin Clarke. South of the equator and established in 1948, the Miles Franklin Literary Award continues to be Australia’s most illustrious prize. Its purpose is to celebrate annually the best Australian-published novel or play portraying Australian life and culture. Recent winners include Steven Carroll in 2008 for The Time We Have Taken, Alexis Wright for Carpentaria in 2007, and Roger McDonald in
2006 for The Ballad of Desmond Kate. Novels chosen for the award usually celebrate aspects of Australian nation formation. A new Australian literary award, the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, was established in 2008 with two categories: fiction and non-fiction. At A$100,000, it is the nation’s richest literary award. Conceived as an international award and open to Australian writers anywhere in the world, it is expected to confer considerable status. Steven Conte won the inaugural fiction award in 2008 for The Zookeeper’s War. Across the Tasman Sea, the Prime Minister’s Literary Award is also the name of New Zealand’s top literary prize. It began in 2003 and celebrates the careers of prominent New Zealand writers, with a financial value of NZ$60,000. Authors are eligible in the categories of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. Recent winners for fiction include Fiona Farrell in 2007 for her experimentations in genre and narrative, Patricia Grace in 2006 for a body of works representing Maori culture, and Maurice Gee in 2004 for his sharply scripted novels exploring national and regional identity. Second to the New Zealand Prime Minister’s Literary Award, though with longer-standing origins, are the Montana New Zealand Book Awards. The main fiction prize is the Deutz Medal, which was won by Charlotte Grimshaw for her collection of pithy short stories Opportunity in 2008. One of the most controversial winners was Craig Marriner’s Stone Dogs (2001), a novel of New Zealand’s underculture which was selected over books by more established literary figures such as Lloyd Jones and Elizabeth Knox. Among the countries of the Pacific Rim and South Asia, the leading literary prize is the Kiriyama Prize, established in 1996 to recognize outstanding books and encourage mutual understanding of a culturally diverse region. It consists of a cash award of US$30,000, split equally between the fiction and non-fiction winners. It was won in 2008 by Lloyd Jones for Mister Pip, which transposes a Dickensian narrative motif to the setting of Papua New Guinea’s Bougainvillea. Mister Pip also won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2007. The Man Asian Literary Prize, a recently established adjunct of the Man Booker Prizes, is an
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annual award for the best “Asian novel unpublished in English.” The first prize was awarded to the Chinese writer Jiang Rong for Wolf Totem in 2007. The prize has three objectives: to bring prominent new Asian authors to the attention of the literary community, to facilitate Asian publishing in the English language, and to recognize Asia’s developing role in world literature. It is administered by representatives from the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival, the University of Hong Kong, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Two older Japanese national literary prizes are the Akutagawa and Naoki Prizes, both originating in 1935. Africa’s two most prominent literary awards are the biennial Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa and the Caine Prize for African Writing. The Macmillan Prize aims at promoting previously unpublished works of fiction by African writers and is sponsored by Macmillan Education. The senior category award was won in 2007–8 by Jayne Bauling (South Africa) for E Eights. The Caine Prize has been awarded since 2000 to a short story by an African writer published in English, whether in Africa or elsewhere. The four African winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature – Soyinka, Gordimer, Naguib Mahfouz, and Coetzee – are patrons of the Caine Prize, which has a value currently of £10,000. It was won by Henrietta Rose-Innes (South Africa) in 2008 for “Poison” from Africa Pens. The foremost literary prize in the West Indies is the Guyana Prize for Literature, which began in the 1950s as the Cheddi Jagan Gold Medal for Literature. Past winners have included Wilson Harris, Fred D’Aguiar, and David Dabydeen. SEE ALSO: Awards and Prizes (BIF); Critical Theory and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Blackler, T. (2007). Booker Prize Scandals We Have Loved (and Imagined . . .). Independent. At www. independent.co.uk, accessed Dec. 8, 2008. English, J. F. (2005a). The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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English, J. F. (2005b). The Literary Prize Phenomenon in Context. In B. W. Shaffer (ed.), A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945–2000. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 160–76. Guest, K. (2008). The Big Question: Has the Time Come to Close the Book on Women-Only Literary Prizes? Independent. At www.independent.co.uk, accessed Dec. 19, 2008. Huggan, G. (2001). The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. New York: Routledge. Jury, L. (2003). Beckham v. the Booker List: A OneSided Battle for Sales. Independent. At www. independent.co.uk, accessed Dec. 17, 2008. Strongman, L. (2002). The Booker Prize and the Legacy of Empire. New York: Rodopi. Todd, R. (1996). Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today. London: Bloomsbury.
Awoonor, Kofi OBI MADUAKOR
Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor, formerly George Awoonor-Williams, is a well-known Ghanaian novelist, poet, professor, and diplomat. He began his career as a lecturer at the University of Ghana (1960–4), was assistant professor of English at the State University of New York (1968–75), and was imprisoned in Ghana as a political detainee (1975–6). Awoonor later became Ghana’s ambassador to several South American countries (1983–8), to Cuba (1988–90), and finally to the United Nations (1990–4). He remains active as an elder statesman within government circles at Accra. Born in Wheta, Ghana on March 13, 1935, Awoonor gained his BA in English from the University of Ghana (1960), MA from the University of London (1970), and PhD from the State University of New York (1973). His early poetic works, Rediscovery and Other Poems (1964) and Night of My Blood (1971a), and the novel This Earth, My Brother (1971b), are voyages of personal discovery and homecoming. Awoonor conceived of all three books as one work on the theme of absence and return (Lindfors 49). In Rediscovery, later reworked and integrated into Night of My Blood, the voice of a poet persona, a sage, clearly represents the ancestors hectoring “lost souls” (in the poem “Exiles”) to
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return to the clan and “relearn the wisdom of their fathers.” “I Heard a Bird Cry” celebrates an exile’s return to origins. Awoonor derives the technique of the early poems from Ewe oral poetry, especially the Ewe dirge with its strong rhythm, direct address, parallel structure, and repetitions. This Earth, My Brother presents the predicaments of an individual torn between tradition and modernity. Amamu, a successful lawyer, abandons family, friends, and career, returning to the shores of his native river for an encounter with a childhood lover long dead but who, in his demented imagination, has become a sea goddess – a feature that has puzzled many critics. The novel’s political sub-theme links the land’s tragic destiny to Amamu’s unease: the foolishness and timidity of the signatories of the famous Bond of 1884, who gave the land away for private gain; the greed of the modern leader with his vain campaign promises; and the realization that both the ancestor and the modern leader are responsible for fathering the monstrosity that is modern Ghana. A more serious and personal source of unease, however, is Amamu’s abdication of his traditional responsibility as priest, pledged at birth to the ancestors and gods of the land as their special “torchbearer all his life” (1971b, 12). Awoonor is troubled here and in other works by the consequences of abdication, insisting that the tensions within Amamu can be resolved only in death. The Ghanaian scholar Atukwei Okai has coined the word “Amamuosis” to designate Amamu’s pathological condition of “moral impotence” or selfdestructive narcissism (Anyidoho 86). The House by the Sea (1978) collects poems Awoonor wrote during his one-year detention at Usher Fort. The “house” in the title refers to this fort, a maximum-security facility built by the Dutch in the seventeenth century to hold slaves before the transatlantic journey. These prison poemsbreathedefianceagainst Awoonor’scaptors, but they also exude confidence in his will to survive. Comes the Voyager at Last (1992a) focuses on African Americans during the Civil Rights movement, particularly their obsession with Africa as homeland, and is heavily influenced by Awoonor’s student experience in America during the 1960s and 1970s. The novel’s young hero, Sheik Lumumba Mandela, is drawn to the image of the Black Muslim militant. He casts off his slave name, dons a romantic Arab title, and
attempts to reinvent himself through a kinship with two icons of African independence (Patrice Lumumba and Nelson Mandela). Following his release from a New York prison for an offense he did not commit, Lumumba goes to Africa seeking a homeland. He is welcomed into the maternal womb of Africa, where he finds a level of love and care unavailable in ‘‘Babylon’’, finally recognizing the supremacy of the African way of life, and its sense of community and family solidarity, over the exploitative instincts of Western individualism. The Latin American and Caribbean Notebook (1992), Awoonor’s weakest poetry collection, lacks the nervous energy and ebullient confidence of Night of My Blood. Instead we hear the nostalgic voice of a sober and reflective poet, conscious of his increasingage and the incipient decline ofhispoetic power. The collection includes commentary on international affairs, especially the underprivileged and oppressed people of the developing world. Awoonor published a volume of collected poems as Until the Morning After (1987), and a study of African culture and literature titled The Breast of the Earth (1975) – an apologia for the cosmology and the worldview within which he writes. One element of this worldview, Awoonor argues, is the deep spirituality of the African mind – best reflected in African art itself – with the artist functioning occasionally as priest, uttering words imbued with magical power. Having established this theoretical framework, Awoonor then discusses the continuity between oral and written literature in the works of his favorite writers. SEE ALSO: Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); West African Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Anyidoho, K. (1991). Kofi Awoonor. In B. Lindfors & R. Sander (eds.), Twentieth-Century Caribbean and Black African Writers. 1st series. Detroit: Gale pp. 77–92. Awoonor, K. (1971a). Night of My Blood. New York: Doubleday. Awoonor, K. (1971b). This Earth, My Brother. London: Heinemann. Awoonor, K. (1975). The Breast of the Earth: A Survey of the History, Culture and Literature of Africa South of the Sahara. New York: Nok.
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Awoonor, K. (1978). The House by the Sea. New York: Greenfield Review. Awoonor, K. (1987). Until the Morning After: Collected Poems. New York: Greenfield Review. Awoonor, K. (1991). Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor. In Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, vol. 13. Detroit: Gale, pp. 29–53. Awoonor, K. (1992a). Comes the Voyager at Last: A Tale of Return to Africa. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
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Awoonor, K. (1992b). The Latin American and Caribbean Notebook. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Lindfors, B. (1972). Interview with Kofi Awoonor. In B. Lindfors, I. Munro, R. Priebe, & R. Sander (eds.), Palaver: Interviews with Five African Writers in Texas. Austin: African and Afro-American Research Institute, University of Texas pp. 47–64. Maduakor, O. (1994). Kofi Awoonor as Critic. African Literature Today 19, 8–21.
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B Bail, Murray JOHN ATTRIDGE
Murray Bail occupies a unique place in recent Australian literature, combining self-conscious formalism with an idiosyncratic vision of Australianness. His small, highly wrought oeuvre appears as a bold attempt to redefine the fiction of national identity, eschewing the canons of realism in favor of a more cosmopolitan modernist tradition. Born on September 22, 1941, Bail’s childhood and adolescence were spent in Adelaide, a city he has described as “the most boring place on Earth” (Hawley 44). The complacent parochialism of this postwar milieu, dominated by the conservative figure of Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies, is dissected in his novel Holden’s Performance (1987). Bail lived abroad between 1968 and 1975, sojourning in India and England and accumulating the travel experiences that would inform his first novel, Homesickness (1980). With the exception of compatriot Patrick White, Bail tends to identify less with Australian writers than with a European, avant garde literary tradition, acknowledging in particular the influence of Franz Kafka (Davidson 274). His erudite interest in art history and aesthetics is reflected in his 1981 monograph on the painter Ian Fairweather. Bail’s writing has remained rigorously consistent in its style and preoccupations, although the facetiousness of his early fiction has given way to a more lyrical mood in the last two novels. All of his four novels deliberately engage with the idea of national character, often building their surreal conceits and quirky theories around the totems
and icons of the Australian cultural imaginary. Bail’s truculent take on national cliches, along with his persistent interest in collecting and classification, were already apparent in his first book, Contemporary Portraits and Other Stories (1975). In “Huebler,” a photographer attempts an exhaustive typology of humankind, while “The Drover’s Wife” a kind of suburban “My Last Duchess” has a dentist narrate the back-story to Russell Drysdale’s iconic painting. Homesickness follows the itinerary of 13 Australians on a package tour that takes them to Africa, England, Ecuador, New York, and the USSR. The peculiarities and emotional handicaps of the group emerge gradually against a backdrop of satirical, often surreal, museums and attractions, like the Collection of Pygmies, containing diminutive likenesses of Western political figures. Although episodic in structure, the novel skillfully develops the relationships that germinate among the tourists, such as the romance between a whimsical intellectual and the unhappy wife of a sadistic dentist. Bail’s sharp ear for dialogue, especially the tedium of small talk, bestows a vivid reality on these elliptically sketched characters, although some, like the lonely larrikin Garry Atlas, are more burlesque than others. Bail apparently regrets that “a kind of applied psychology has taken over story-telling,” and largely forgoes conventional characterization in the endeavor to craft contemporary myths (1998, 24). Both the strengths and weaknesses of this approach are apparent in Holden’s Performance, an ironic national epic that lacks the readerly pleasures of identifying with characters, but which effectively fuses witty sketches of
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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Australia’s postwar evolution with the trajectory of the eponymous protagonist. The stolid, mechanically minded Holden Shadbolt, whose name alludes to a domestic car manufacturer, drifts compliantly through a series of colorful jobs and low-key adventures, eventually becoming a bodyguard to the prime minister, but without achieving much understanding of himself or others. Alongside its portrait of uncritical, inarticulate Australian masculinity, Holden’s Performance presents the image of an awkward, adolescent nation, “a young country, a place existing in the consciousness as largely a blank . . . where liberty is so vast it verged on nothingness’ (Bail 1987, 284). Bail’s third novel, Eucalyptus (1998), was an unwonted popular success, and brought his work to the attention of an American readership. The novel’s mocking gaze is tempered by a more overt concern with the structure of myth and fairytale: Holland, an eccentric landowner and collector of eucalypts, offers his daughter Ellen’s hand in marriage to the man who can name the several hundred species assembled on his property. The eventual victor is not the well-meaning but emotionally obtuse botanist Mr. Cave, but the “stranger” who beguiles Ellen with fragmented, enigmatic yarns, loosely inspired by the trees and bearing buried echoes of Ellen’s own predicament. The novel seems to pit the narrative instinct against the urge to classify and describe, although both art and classification, the narrator says, serve the same impulse to “humanise” nature (35, 131). Eucalyptus won the Miles Franklin Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Bail followed its success with a collection of two short stories, Camouflage (2000). Bail’s ongoing negotiation between a European intellectual heritage and the laconic culture of the Australian bush is staged most explicitly in The Pages (2008), in which Erica Hazlehurst, a Sydney philosophy professor, is commissioned by the estate of a country-born autodidact to pass professional judgment on his life’s work. The novel interleaves Wesley Antill’s pensees and spiritual biography with Erica’s own inverse trajectory from her urban university to the backblocks of western New South Wales, where she is offhandedly wooed by Wesley’s younger brother, Roger. Bail’s deft, understated manner of narrating emotional crises is used to great effect
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here, while Wesley Antill’s European travels and aphoristic notebooks suggest a slightly mocking portrait of the artist. SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF); White, Patrick (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ackland, M. (2006). Murray Bail. In S. Samuels (ed.), Australian Writers, 1975–2000.Detroit:Cengage Gale, pp. 24–30. Bail, M. (1975). Contemporary Portraits and Other Stories. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Bail, M. (1980). Homesickness. Melbourne: Macmillan. Bail, M. (1981). Ian Fairweather. Sydney: Bay. Bail, M. (1987). Holden’s Performance. London: Faber and Faber. Bail, M. (ed.) (1988). The Faber Book of Contemporary Australian Short Stories. London: Faber and Faber. Bail, M. (1989). Longhand: A Writer’s Notebook. Melbourne: McPhee Gribble. Bail, M. (1998). Eucalyptus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Bail, M. (2000). Camouflage. Melbourne: Text. Bail, M. (2005). Notebooks. London: Harvill. Bail, M. (2008). The Pages. London: Harvill. Davidson, J. (1982). Interview: Murray Bail. Meanjin, 41(2), 264–276. Hawley, J. (1987). Murray Bail: Perfecting the Art of the Selfish Writer. Sydney Morning Herald, p. 44 (May 16). Observer, (1998). The Books Interview: How Many Trees Make a Novel?, p. 17 (July 5).
Baratham, Gopal LIEW-GEOK LEONG
Gopal Baratham was one of Singapore’s most provocative writers in English. His frank, often controversial treatment of religion, sexual relations, interethnic relationships, and the relations between colonist and colonized, victor and vanquished, and the individual and the state gives his fiction narrative breadth, while his pursuit of the ambiguities and ambivalences of human behavior imbues it with a realistic and skeptical dimension. Of ethnic Indian ancestry, Baratham was born on September 9, 1935 in Singapore, the son of a
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doctor and a nurse. His father taught him to read and write when he was 4, and both his father and maternal uncle, enthusiasts of literature, encouraged him to read the English classics. Baratham read Shakespeare’s King Lear with his father when he was 8, and Milton’s Paradise Lost with his uncle when he was a little older. He attended St Andrew’s School when the Japanese occupation of Malaya and Singapore ended in 1945 and, having been persuaded by his father that a medical career was preferable to a literary one, subsequently graduated in medicine at the University of Malaya (Singapore). It was while Baratham was living abroad, first as a graduate student of neurology at London Hospital, then as a member of the University of Edinburgh’s Department of Neurosurgery, that he began writing. Like many Singaporean writers of his generation, Baratham’s first publications were collections of short stories – Figments of Experience (1981), reissued as Love Letter and Other Stories (1988a), and People Make You Cry and Other Stories (1988b). His first novel, A Candle or the Sun, was completed in 1985 but was rejected by Singaporean publishers who thought that its content was seditious; it was eventually published in London in 1991. Depicting a political conspiracy by a religious group called the Children of the Book, Candle’s plot uncannily anticipates the Marxist plot uncovered in Singapore in 1987. Baratham rejected the Commendation Award given Candle by the National Book Development Council of Singapore in 1992 because he felt it deserved the top prize. While Candle explores the relationship between religion and politics, Sayang (1991), the Malay word for love, deals with the fortunes of a group involved in sex, drugs, and religion. Baratham has described Sayang as “an ill-disguised allegory lifted from the New Testament” (2001, 379). Baratham’s third collection, Memories that Glow in the Dark (1995b), comprises 14 short stories – 11 of which deal with sexual awakenings, escapades, and thwarted sexual desire – presented with characteristic candor. The City of Forgetting (2001) collects his published stories and includes two new ones (“Small Change” and “Shelter”). Moonrise, Sunset (1996), Baratham’s third novel, is a murder mystery with an improbable plot, slick dialogue, and the ingredients for an entertaining
read: a seance, kinky sex, and psychosexual theorizing. Baratham’s fiction exhibits a pervasive preoccupation with the certainty of doubt, the unreliability or partiality of memory, and the subjective ambivalences of truth. All, in varying degrees, inform “Living Memory,” whose elderly British protagonist recalls the glory days of Empire. The historical background of the Japanese occupation of Malaya and Singapore, and the Communist insurgency that followed the return of the British after the Japanese surrender, provides the grimmer tenor of “The Interview,” in which the interrogator-cum-torturer of a British prisoner of war is executed for war crimes, and “Dutch Courage,” where a Dutch captain confronts an enemy saboteur who was once his ally against the Japanese. Death, one of the few certainties Baratham acknowledges, is poignantly treated in “Roses in December” and “Mandarin.” In Baratham’s many love stories, like “Island,” “Love Letter,” and “Gretchen’s Choice,” protagonists are entangled in relationships that are usually denied convenient, amicable solutions. A political liberal, Baratham was often critical of the long-ruling People’s Action Party. “The Personal History of an Island” in Memories critiques the evolution of Singapore from British colony to independent state, one in which “the new freedom was worse than the old bondage” (Baratham 1995b, 5). Baratham wrote The Caning of Michael Fay (1994) – a national bestseller – to protest against the caning and imprisonment of an American teenager for vandalism and theft. Baratham was a manic-depressive whose personal life was marked by several crises. In 1990, he underwent six coronary bypasses. In 1991, one of his four sons committed suicide. Baratham and Pauline Wong were divorced after more than 30 years of marriage. He died of complications from pneumonia in 2002. SEE ALSO: Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Southeast Asian Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ban, K. C. (2000). Of Memory and Desire: The Stories of Gopal Baratham. Singapore: Times Books. Baratham, G. (1981). Figments of Experience. Singapore: Times Books.
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BISSOONDATH, NEIL
Baratham, G. (1988a). Love Letter and Other Stories. Singapore: Times Books. Baratham, G. (1988b). People Make You Cry and Other Stories. Singapore: Times Books. Baratham, G. (1990). After Words. British Medical Journal, 300(6738), 1531. Baratham, G. (1991a). A Candle or the Sun. London: Serpent’s Tail. Baratham, G. (1991b). Sayang. Singapore: Times Books. Baratham, G. (1992). Ready for the Next Century? Index on Censorship, 21(5), 4. Baratham, G. (1994). The Caning of Michael Fay. Singapore: KRP. Baratham, G. (1995a). Defining Ourselves. Asia Magazine, 33(K-21), 30. Baratham, G. (1995b). Memories that Glow in the Dark: A Collection of Short Stories. Singapore: Pipal Tree. Baratham, G. (1997). The Scapel and the Pen: A Memoir. Singapore Medical Journal, 38(4), N4–5. Baratham, G. (2000). Of Memory and Desire: The Stories of Gopal Baratham (ed. K. C. Ban). Singapore: Times Books. Baratham, G. (2001). The City of Forgetting: The Collected Stories of Gopal Baratham (ed. K. C. Ban). Singapore: Times Books. Kanaganayakam, C. (2002). Ritual, Religion and Cultural Transformation in Gopal Baratham’s Moonrise, Sunset. In M. A. Quayum & P. Wicks (eds.), Singaporean Literature in English: A Critical Reader. Serdang, Malaysia: Universiti Putra Malaysia Press, pp. 384–91. Klein, R. (ed.) (2001). Gopal Baratham. In Interlogue: Studies in Singapore Literature, vol. 4: Interviews. Singapore: Ethos pp. 80–103. Lee, T. J. (dir.) (2003). Vocation. [From The City of Forgetting.] The Singapore Short Story Project, episode 1. Film Formations for Mediacorp TV 12. Leong, L. G. (2000). Dissenting Voices: Political Engagements in the Singaporean Novel in English World Literature Today, 74(2), 285–92.
Bissoondath, Neil RUBY S. RAMRAJ
Neil Bissoondath, a Trinidad-born Canadian fiction writer and essayist, is concerned primarily with how immigrants adjust to adopted homelands – particularly Canada. Characteristically he approaches immigrants less as representatives of ethnic groups than as individuals; though he does not ignore cultural particularities, he addresses
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human commonalities rather than differences. Writing about diverse immigrant populations, he has (controversially) criticized Canada’s policy of multiculturalism as divisive. Moreover, although he portrays – invariably sympathetically – immigrants’ lives as harsh, he questions whether their plights are of their own making, often suggesting that those who fled corruption and violence are better off (if only marginally) in Canada. Born on April 19, 1955, Bissoondath immigrated to Canada at 18. After obtaining a BA in French from Toronto’s York University in 1977, he taught French and English in Ontario before writing full-time and eventually moving to Quebec City. Bissoondath’s uncle V. S. Naipaul felt little regret leaving Trinidad for England, and Bissoondath has expressed similar feelings about moving to Canada. Bissoondath’s well-received first book, Digging Up the Mountains (1985), is an impressive collection of stories, mainly about new Canadians from the West Indies but including Japanese and European immigrants as well. His first novel, A Casual Brutality (1988), a stinging indictment of Caribbean socio-politics and some Canadians’ reception of immigrants, relates the life of an immigrant from a fictional Caribbean island. It was followed by a second book of stories, On the Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows (1990) and five novels: The Innocence of Age (1993), The Worlds within Her (1998; nominated for a Governor General’s Award), Doing the Heart Good (2002), The Unyielding Clamour of the Night (2005), and The Soul of All Great Designs (2008). The emotionally alienated, ostracized immigrants that populate Bissoondath’s fictions are acutely aware of their uncertain position in the divide between original and adopted homelands. In stories such as “Insecurity” in Digging Up and “Security” and “Kira and Anya” in On the Eve, Bissoondath creates tension by both sympathizing with and censuring his characters. Protagonists feel trapped yet secure in communities that are both cages and places of refuge. Bissoondath often omits details of nationality and ethnicity, as if to underscore the universality of immigrants’ and refugees’ emotional and spiritual experiences. His work consistently explores the circumstances that force immigrants from their homelands – violence, prejudice, and political corruption. He does, however, raise larger issues of
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responsibility and universal human rights, especially in A Casual Brutality and The Unyielding Clamour, in which Raj and Arun respectively, like Naipaul’s narrator in “Tell Me Who to Kill” (1971), are victims of violence and atrocities; despairing and haunted by a sense of nihilism, their narratives invite readers to consider who is responsible for such negativity – the individuals, their societies and governments, or historical circumstances. The Innocence of Age (1993) and Doing the Heart Good (2002) focus on white immigrants and their second-generation children born and raised in Canadian cities. Gilbert Taggart of Innocence, an Italian Canadian initially resentful of immigrants, eventually realizes the importance of love and understanding for others. A similar epiphany occurs in Doing when Alistair Mackenzie, a retired professor, confronts his bigotry. In The Worlds within Her, Bissoondath further downplays ethnicity by interweaving communal and family issues in his portrayal of a secondgeneration immigrant, Yasmin, returning to the Caribbean with her mother’s ashes. Yasmin connects with unfamiliar extended family members and re-establishes her roots, learning about the racial and political problems that forced her parents to leave. The Unyielding Clamour is exceptional in Bissoondath’s oeuvre in addressing global terrorism through an involved plot complete with flashbacks and cinematic dissolves. He tells a compelling story of a privileged but idealistic youth, Arun, who leaves his urban home (in a fictionalized Sri Lanka) to become a schoolteacher in a poverty-stricken village school. As Arun becomes increasingly disenchanted with the squalor and despair of his students’ lives, his darkening vision infects the whole novel. The Soul of All Great Designs is on the surface a love story between Sue (Sumintra) and Eric, both of Indo-Canadian ancestry. Multicultural themes are subordinated to questions of personal identity – can one recreate oneself, and what is lost in the transformation? The characters are psychologically complex, the narrative intricate and suspenseful. Bissoondath’s controversial non-fiction book, Selling Illusions (1994), argues strongly against prevailing celebratory views of Canadian multiculturalism as a form of nation building. Bis-
soondath rejects the multicultural mosaic and so-called hyphenated identities as separating ethnic groups from mainstream society and each other, thus working against a necessary assimilation. In fiction and essays, Neil Bissoondath embraces contentious subjects and articulates his concerns about injustices in Canada and the larger world. In an interview, he affirms that in his writing he speaks “to the human heart” (Kruk 64), yet he apportions blame to both victim and victimizer when warranted. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Naipaul, V. S. (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Birbalsingh, F. (2005). Neil Bissoondath: IndoCaribbean–Canadian Diaspora. New Delhi: Rewat. Bissoondath, N. (1985). Digging Up the Mountains. Toronto: Macmillan. Bissoondath, N. (1988). A Casual Brutality. Toronto: Macmillan. Bissoondath, N. (1990). On the Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows. Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys. Bissoondath, N. (1993). The Innocence of Age. Toronto: Knopf. Bissoondath, N. (1994). Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada. Toronto: Penguin. Bissoondath, N. (1998). The Worlds within Her. Toronto: Knopf. Bissoondath, N. (2002). Doing the Heart Good. Toronto: Cormorant. Bissoondath, N. (2005). The Unyielding Clamour of the Night. Toronto: Cormorant. Bissoondath, N. (2007). The Age of Confession: The Antonine Maillet–Northop Frye Lecture. Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane. Bissoondath, N. (2008). The Soul of All Great Designs. Toronto: Cormorant. Genetsch, M. (2008). The Texture of Identity: The Fiction of M. G. Vassanji, Neil Bissoondath, and Rohinton Mistry. Toronto: TSAR. Kruk, L. (2004). All Voices Belong to Me: An Interview with Neil Bissoondath. Canadian Literature, 180, 53–69. Naipaul, V. S. (1971). In a Free State. London: Deutsch. Van Toorn, P. (1995). Building on Common Ground: An Interview with Neil Bissoondath. Canadian Literature, 147, 127–35.
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BLACK BRITISH FICTION
Van Toorn, P. (1996). Neil Bissoondath and His Works. In R. Lecker, J. David, & E. Quigley (eds.), Canadian Writers and Their Works: Fiction Series, vol. 2. Toronto: ECW, pp. 23–70.
Black British Fiction ABIGAIL WARD
Black British fiction is an expanding area of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. The term “black British literature” has been used since the 1980s, but it has been controversial because both “black” and “British” are deceptively complex terms that cause problems of categorization for writers and critics. Novelist and poet Fred D’Aguiar raised his objections in his essay “Against Black British Literature,” arguing that the term marginalizes black creativity and fails to recognize it as part of, rather than distinct from, Britishness (106). There is, equally, a danger of homogenization – of failing to recognize the diversity of peoples within this grouping. Moreover, as many “black British” authors now reside outside the UK – Caryl Phillips and George Lamming, among others – the label seems particularly inappropriate for them. As literary critic John McLeod has argued, the transnational elements of much black writing in Britain may be compromised by viewing the work as solely British (2002, 59). “Black writing in Britain,” an alternative phrase deployed by some critics, is an attempt to avoid the closed-off nature of “black British,” suggesting instead the potential for movement, heterogeneity, and migration, recalling cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s emphasis on diasporic identities “constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew” (402). As the historian Peter Fryer has noted (1), there has been a black presence in Britain since Roman times, and the earliest literary writings in existence (fictional or otherwise) by black people in Britain are the eighteenth-century slave narratives and poems by such figures as Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, and Mary Prince. In the twentieth century, although authors like C. L. R. James and Una Marson were writing in Britain in the 1930s, the docking of the SS Empire Windrush with 492 Caribbean immigrants on June 22, 1948 was a crucial moment of arrival. The “Windrush period”
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saw the migration of such literary figures as Lamming, Sam Selvon, Wilson Harris, Beryl Gilroy, V. S. Naipaul, and Andrew Salkey. The postwar novels or short stories by these writers were often set in Britain’s metropolitan centers, typically London, and are characterized by a sense of alienation and struggle in the unforgiving social climate of the time. Authors of the late 1940s onward often wrote of the dangerously intensifying racial tensions that culminated in the 1958 Nottingham and Notting Hill riots. Of course, Caribbean migrants were not the only non-whites in Britain at this time; South Asian and African migration also intensified from 1948 until the passing of repressive legislation in 1962, 1968, and finally 1971, when the Immigration Act severely restricted primary immigration. Buchi Emecheta’s semiautobiographical novels In the Ditch (1972) and Second-Class Citizen (1974) epitomized for many the struggle to exist as a female Nigerian migrant in 1960s Britain. Her protagonist, a young mother with an unsupportive husband, experiences both racism and sexism, and has the added complications of finding accommodation for, and raising, her young family amid white fears of a growing black population. The 1990s saw the subject of transatlantic slavery explored in novels by a second generation of black British writers. Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge (1991) and Crossing the River (1993), S. I. Martin’s Incomparable World (1996), Fred D’Aguiar’s The Longest Memory (1994) and Feeding the Ghosts (1997), and David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress (1999) all explored, in diverse ways, the relationship between current concerns of late twentieth-century Britain (including ongoing racial anxieties) and Britain’s oft-ignored slave past. Some important British Asian writing also appeared, including Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and The Black Album (1995), and Meera Syal’s Anita and Me (1996) and Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999), the latter novels recounting young Asian female experiences of British life. Other black British fiction produced in this period by migrant or Britishborn authors includes writing by Andrea Levy, Ben Okri, Courttia Newland, Jackie Kay, and Diran Adebayo. Adebayo’s Some Kind of Black (1996) explored urban black British identities and politics, while Jackie Kay’s novel Trumpet (1998) exploded boundaries of gender and
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sexuality in the poetic story of transvestite jazz trumpeter Joss Moody. At the turn of the century, Zadie Smith’s acclaimed bestseller White Teeth (2000), with its ironic investigation of “Happy Multicultural Land” (465), won several literary prizes, and follow-up novels The Autograph Man (2002) and On Beauty (2005) reinforced her stature as one of Britain’s most successful contemporary authors. Like Kureishi, Smith often uses the United States as a comparative site for exploring black British identities, whereas Bernardine Evaristo’s novel in verse The Emperor’s Babe (2001) makes a historical comparison between Roman Londinium and twenty-first-century Britain. Evaristo uses the story of Zuleika – a young black woman living in 211 AD – to raise contemporary race, class, and gender issues. With her careful blend of prose, poetry, and script in The Emperor’s Babe, and in Lara (1997) and Soul Tourists (2005), Evaristo makes a bold contribution to black British fiction and challenges the limits of this continually developing genre. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); London in Fiction (BIF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the African Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); West African Fiction (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ball, J. C. (2004). Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. D’Aguiar, F. (1989). Against Black British Literature. In M. Butcher (ed.), Tibisiri: Caribbean Writers and Critics. Sydney: Dangaroo, pp. 106–114. Fryer, P. (1984). Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto. Hall, S. (1993). Cultural Identity and Diaspora. In P. Williams & L. Chrisman (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 392–403. Low, G., & Wynne-Davies, M. (eds.) (2006). A Black British Canon? Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
McLeod, J. (2002). Some Problems with “British” in a “Black British Canon”. Wasafiri, 36, 56–9. McLeod, J. (2004). Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis. Abingdon: Routledge. Owusu, K. (ed.) (2000). Black British Culture and Society: A Text Reader. London: Routledge. Procter, J. (ed.) (2000). Writing Black Britain 1948–1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Procter, J. (2003). Dwelling Places: Postwar Black British Writing. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sesay, K. (ed.) (2005). Write Black Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature. Hertford: Hansib. Smith, Z. (2000). White Teeth. London: Hamish Hamilton. Stein, M. (2004). Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Boyd, Martin KIERAN DOLIN
An upper-class Australian expatriate who spent most of his adult life in England, Martin a Beckett Boyd explored the complexities of Anglo-Australian identity and chronicled the decline of aristocratic power and culture in the twentieth century. Having witnessed the end of an old order in World War I, he eventually wrote with great discernment and conviction about the psychological and social costs of modern warfare. Boyd was born on June 10, 1893 in Lucerne, Switzerland. Shortly thereafter, the family fortunes were halved by an economic depression, so Boyd grew up on a dairy farm outside Melbourne. His secure, happy childhood and youth ended with the outbreak of war. Boyd used family connections to obtain a commission in an English regiment and served on the Western Front before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps. Returning to Australia after the war, he felt acutely unsettled and out of place. With an allowance from his parents, he returned to England, where, after a brief attempt at monastic life, he began to write fiction. Boyd made a modest living as a novelist of manners in the 1920s and 1930s. His third novel, The Montforts (1928), won the Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society, and its revelations of a Beckett family history gave it local notoriety,
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BOYD, MARTIN
but otherwise Boyd’s work was little noticed in Australia. It was not until his twelfth book, Lucinda Brayford (1946), was selected by the Book of the Month Club that Boyd found critical and popular acclaim. On the strength of this success, he returned to Australia in 1948 intending to restore his grandparents’ country house. Physically, this dream of recreating the past was a failure, but Boyd’s discovery of his grandmother’s diaries inspired an ambitious fictional architecture. Isolated and too English in Australia, he returned to England, but felt alienated there as well. He became convinced that Italy represented an ideal balance of nature and culture, and moved there in 1957. In 1965 Boyd’s autobiography, Day of My Delight (1965), was published, and he died in Rome in 1972. In the opening pages of The Cardboard Crown (1952), the first novel in his Langton Quartet, Boyd wrote that “Creation only comes from an inner tension” (11) – a statement applicable to himself. He felt drawn to both Australia and Europe, but could find no abiding sense of home in either place. He acknowledged the ethical authority of both classical and Christian traditions, adhering to a religious view of reality, including a moral law, while celebrating the sensual joys afforded by natural beauty, aesthetic pleasure, and the human body. He tried to reconcile these in a consciously developed philosophy that combined Christianity and aestheticism, and his fiction and autobiographical works often stage dramatic conflicts between this worldview and materialist or puritanical alternatives. His writing is marked by both worldly wit and romantic idealism. As his middle name indicates, Boyd was born if not to the purple, then at least within its penumbra. His maternal grandfather, a chief justice and lieutenant governor of Victoria, was descended collaterally from Saint Thomas a Becket. Boyd’s fascination with family history and with genetic and cultural inheritance provided the imaginative source for his best writing. Over several novels he shaped and reshaped aspects of personal and family experiences into an embodiment of their class and its eclipse in colonial and metropolitan society. His first work in this vein, The Montforts, was a family saga tracing through the descendants of two brothers competing systems of value – one creative and unruly, the other legalistic and conformist. In Lucinda Brayford the a Beckett avatars,
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the Lanfrancs, are minor characters in a realist novel focused on the newly wealthy pastoralist class represented by the Brayfords. Boyd offers a detailed portrait of his sympathetic heroine, tracing her growth from Australian innocent through marriage into the English aristocracy, while following the horrific personal impact of both world wars to a subdued, sorrowful hope. Lucinda Brayford achieves a realistic but critical perspective on the adaptation of English customs in Australia, the attractions and flaws of a decaying aristocracy, and the fate of moral absolutes in modernity. In the first three Langton novels, The Cardboard Crown, A Difficult Young Man (1955), and Outbreak of Love (1957), Boyd foregrounds the search for knowledge about the past through his narrator Guy Langton’s discovery of ancestral diaries. As in much recent fiction, these documents are the springboard for interpretation, investigation, and a creative filling in of gaps. The result is a series of epiphanies, what Guy in Outbreak calls “illuminations . . . of forgotten tracts of [our] minds” (6). The poignant comedy of this family mythmaking is abandoned in the final volume, When Blackbirds Sing (1962), as Boyd revisits his World War I experiences. Focusing squarely on the ethical violation of killing another in hand-to-hand combat, the novel leads its protagonist Dominic Langton to a radical critique of war and the centrality of violence in English aristocratic life. Boyd was the literary member of Australia’s best-known artistic family, being uncle to the painter Arthur Boyd and his siblings. His stories of complex cultural affiliation are deeply infused with classical and Christian myths, and with a belief in the power of art, music, and literature to challenge, inspire, and delight. SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Boyd, M. (1928). The Montforts. London: Constable. Boyd, M. (1946). Lucinda Brayford. London: Cresset. Boyd, M. (1952). The Cardboard Crown. London: Cresset.
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Boyd, M. (1955). A Difficult Young Man. London: Cresset. Boyd, M. (1957). Outbreak of Love. London: John Murray. Boyd, M. (1962). When Blackbirds Sing. New York: Abelard-Schuman. Boyd, M. (1965). Day of My Delight. Sydney: Lansdowne. Boyd, M. (1988). The Langton Quartet (intro. B. McFarlane). Melbourne: Heinemann. Hooton, J. (2002). The Self as Homeless: The Case of Martin Boyd. In R. Dalziell (ed.), Selves Crossing Cultures: Autobiography and Globalization. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, pp. 79–90. Lever, S. (2002). Martin Boyd (1893–1972). In S. Samuels (ed.), Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 260: Australian Writers, 1915–1950. Detroit: CengageGale,pp.14–21. Niall, B. (1988). Martin Boyd: A Life. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Brand, Dionne HEATHER SMYTH
Dionne Brand comes to fiction through poetry, and her fiction demonstrates a poet’s tautness of image and interrogation of language. She also comes to writing through a commitment to social justice, and the themes of her poetry and prose – the precarious lives of women and racialized minorities in capitalist systems, the haunting of traumas like the Middle Passage, the rootlessness of the diaspora, and the hard-won joy of finding compatriots – have helped her work define Caribbean and Canadian writing. Brand was born in Guayguayare, Trinidad on January 7, 1953, and emigrated to Canada in 1970, where she joined the Black Power, feminist, and socialist movements. She began her writing career with three poetry collections for adults and the children’s collection Earth Magic (1979). Then, deciding that “writing is not enough” (1994, 12), Brand joined the socialist revolution in Grenada in 1983 as an information officer and witnessed the deaths of friends during the American invasion. She revisits this formative experience throughout her work, including the poetry collection Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (1984) and the novel In Another Place, Not Here (1996). Brand also writes short fiction (Sans Souci and Other
Stories, 1988) and essays (Bread Out of Stone, 1994) and has created three oral histories and four documentary films about women of color. She lives in Toronto. Brand’s 1990 collection of poetry No Language is Neutral marked her growing prominence as a Canadian poet. Innovative in its prose/poetry form and use of the Caribbean demotic, No Language also introduced Brand’s exploration of her lesbianism. No Language offered images and the title for Brand’s first novel, In Another Place, Not Here, which juxtaposes the perspectives of two lovers – Elizete, a cane-field laborer, and Verlia, a Black Power revolutionary – just before the military invasion of their Caribbean island, recognizable as Grenada, that results in Verlia’s death. The title illustrates a deferral of belonging: Elizete’s subsequent undocumented migration to Toronto shows that no place, and no country, can be home to these women who love women in a world that does not, and who carry the legacies of the Middle Passage into the defeats of a capitalist present. Elizete’s ancestor Adela articulates the losses endured by enslaved Africans: upon her arrival in the Caribbean she “done calculate the heart of this place” and gives up on names, calling it “Nowhere” (1996, 18). All of Brand’s work takes up this paradox: that although the incalculable losses of the Middle Passage haunt all subsequent experience, the geographies to which diasporic Africans have traveled must be calculated and mapped, and their hearts found, in attentive testing of language. In calculating these geographies, Brand’s characters move constantly and often uneasily through spaces, marking a preoccupation with mobility, border crossing, and the sea, as reflected in the title of her Governor General’s Awardwinning poetry collection Land to Light On (1997). “I love this notion of wandering forever to find a place,” says Brand in an interview; “That search is a way of reaching beyond boundaries” (Methot 16). Her next novel, At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999), charts the diasporic wandering that flows from the Middle Passage, illustrated by the far-flung descendants of Marie Ursule, an enslaved woman who organizes a mass slave suicide on a Trinidad plantation in 1824. The fluidity of this wandering is forecast in the eyes of her daughter Bola, “full like an ocean,” whom she sends to freedom “like sending
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BRINK, ANDRE
messages, but not knowing their destination” (1999, 20–1). Marie Ursule’s liberating and tragic act catalyzes the dispersal and temporary landings of six generations of descendants, who drift to Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas, passing their relatives anonymously in the street. All of Brand’s work explores a tension between an ambivalent desire for destination and the reality of ruptured history. In a memoir Brand reflects on the “irrecoverable losses” instituted by past and contemporary imperialisms (2001, 24). However, she refuses nostalgia for homeland, whether in Africa or a fuller sense of belonging to Canada, opting for an alternative human community forged in solidarity between people sharing histories of dispossession. The scope of these alliances is both transnational (in the long poem Inventory, 2006) and local: in Map, the long poem Thirsty (2002), and the novel What We All Long For (2005), Brand explores metropolitan cities as places that demonstrate how “we [are] all implicated in each other” (2001, 166). What We All Long For, which won the City of Toronto Book Award, marks a shift in Brand’s style in its less poetic prose and focus on characterization. The four secondgeneration migrant protagonists, however, by boldly self-defining as citizens of Toronto rather than Canada, illustrate the recurring themes of Brand’s work. Tuyen, Oku, Carla, and Jackie improvise their lives, creating the world they want through visual art, poetry, and activism. Tuyen’s art installations show the affinities of the intimate but anonymous city, and the heterogeneous migrations that lead people there. Similarly, Brand takes the measure of catastrophe and translates it into something open and resonant. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/ Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Brand, D. (1978). ’Fore Day Morning. Toronto: Khoisan. Brand, D. (1979). Earth Magic: Poetry for Young People. Toronto: Kids Can Press.
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Brand, D. (1982). Primitive Offensive. Toronto: Williams-Wallace. Brand, D. (1983). Winter Epigrams & Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia. Toronto: Williams-Wallace. Brand, D. (1984). Chronicles of the Hostile Sun. Toronto: Williams-Wallace. Brand, D. (1988). Sans Souci and Other Stories. Stratford, ON: Williams-Wallace. Brand, D. (1990). No Language is Neutral. Toronto: Coach House. Brand, D. (1994). Bread Out of Stone. Toronto: Coach House. Brand, D. (1996). In Another Place, Not Here. Toronto: Knopf. Brand, D. (1997). Land to Light On. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Brand, D. (1999). At the Full and Change of the Moon. Toronto: Knopf. Brand, D. (2001). A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Toronto: Doubleday. Brand, D. (2002). Thirsty. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Brand, D. (2005). What We All Long For. Toronto: Knopf. Brand, D. (2006). Inventory. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Methot, S. (1999). She’s a Wanderer: Dionne Brand. Quill and Quire (Apr.), 16.
Brink, Andre MARITA WENZEL
The prolific South African author Andre Brink has published 25 novels, 14 plays, six travel journals, and several short stories. His knowledge of European languages, especially French, has inspired him to translate a variety of literary works into Afrikaans, and he has promoted Afrikaans literature by translating prominent authors into English and publishing most of his own novels in both languages simultaneously. An intense interest in South African society and politics remains the mainstay of his oeuvre. Born on May 29, 1935 in South Africa, Brink graduated from a Christian university with separate honors degrees in English (1958) and Afrikaans (1959). After graduation, a thirst for knowledge and experience impelled him to travel; a sojourn in France during the 1960s exposed him to new ideas and led him to question and rebel against South Africa’s apartheid system. His first
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novels, of which The Ambassador (1964) and Orgie (1965) are two of the most significant, were experimental in form, modernist in sensibility, and existentialist in influence. In The Ambassador, set in Paris, the protagonist begins a journey of discovery and self-realization through erotic experience, a pattern that recurs in many later novels. On returning from Europe, Brink sided with other young dissident Afrikaans writers protesting against apartheid, and he entered a second phase by focusing, like Nadine Gordimer, on writing committed literature. During this period, controversial plots and themes openly challenged the proclaimed ideologies of apartheid as well as common religious beliefs. His disdain for racial discrimination and political oppression was grounded in the historical contexts of slavery, and he featured sexual relationships across the color bar in novels such as An Instant in the Wind (1976), A Chain of Voices (1982), and An Act of Terror (1991). His defiant stance toward the government earned him criticism from peers and caused two novels, Looking on Darkness (1974) and A Dry White Season (1979), to be banned by the Censorship Board. During the 1970s and 1980s, Brink used fiction to contest the validity of reality and historical documentation. He experimented with literary conventions and employed techniques such as magic realism to subvert and challenge Afrikaners’ staunch adherence to nation, tradition, and church. These novels express an acute awareness of the construction of stories and their role in society, and the meaning of history; they take a postmodernist stance that challenges readers to take action and assume responsibility for their future – for instance, by leaving endings unresolved. Devil’s Valley (1998) is particularly concerned with the hypocrisy of apartheid and Christian orthodoxy, which are exposed in the juxtaposition of past and present as the valley is populated with eccentric characters and resurrected spirits from times past. Brink uses myths and stories from African oral traditions to conflate the histories of indigenous and European inhabitants and show a shared, common past that could, with concerted cooperative effort, develop into one future for all. For instance, Imaginings of Sand (1996) traces the female lineage of Kristien from South Africa’s earliest beginnings to illustrate the role of women
and their omission from historical writing. Praying Mantis (2005) invokes stories of the San god, Tsui-Goab, and explores beliefs and myths that originate from them; it also articulates the conflicting perspectives of colonizers and Christian missionaries with indigenous beliefs. Through intertextuality, Brink makes history more comprehensive, interspersing it with anecdotes and stories that subtly underline the fictionality of historical documentation in order to generate new metaphors and myths. Since the late 1990s, Brink’s ongoing third phase has focused on the role and position of the writer. In response to challenges posed by the new democratic political dispensation, and spurred by the example of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to scrutinize and confront the past, Brink has explored gender and race from a more personal as well as a historical perspective. In particular, slavery, feminism, and the sexual objectification of women attain more prominence in his novels The Rights of Desire (2000), The Other Side of Silence (2002), and Before I Forget (2004). Brink’s most recent novel, Other Lives, was published in 2008, and his memoir, A Fork in the Road, was published in 2009. Brink is a three-time recipient of the South African Central News Agency Prize and has been shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize (in 1976 and 1978); he has also won the Martin Luther King Prize (1980) and three prestigious awards from France. He obtained his PhD from Rhodes University in 1975, and has taught there and at the University of Cape Town. He has been active as a literary critic with a thorough theoretical grounding. His status as novelist and academic has been recognized with honorary doctorates from four universities in South Africa and one in France. SEE ALSO: Censorship and Fiction (WF); Gordimer, Nadine (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF); Southern African Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Brink, A. (1964). The Ambassador. Johannesburg: CNA. Brink, A. (1965). Orgie [Orgy]. Cape Town: Malherbe. Brink, A. (1974). Looking on Darkness. London: Allen. Brink, A. (1976). An Instant in the Wind. London: Allen.
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Brink, A. (1979). A Dry White Season. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Brink, A. (1982). A Chain of Voices. London: Faber and Faber. Brink, A. (1988). States of Emergency. London: Faber and Faber. Brink, A. (1991). An Act of Terror. London: Secker and Warburg. Brink, A. (1996a). Imaginings of Sand. London: Secker and Warburg. Brink, A. (1996b). Reinventing a Continent (Revisiting History in the Literature of the New South Africa: A Personal Testimony). World Literature Today, 70(1), 17–23. Brink, A. (1998a). Devil’s Valley. London: Secker and Warburg. Brink, A. (1998b). The Novel: Language and Narrative from Cervantes to Calvino. London: Macmillan. Brink, A. (2000). The Rights of Desire. London: Secker and Warburg. Brink, A. (2002). The Other Side of Silence. Secker and Warburg. Brink, A. (2004). Before I Forget. London: Secker and Warburg. Brink, A. (2005). Praying Mantis. London: Secker and Warburg. Brink, A. (2008). Other Lives. Chicago: Sourcebooks Landmark. Brink, A. (2009). A Fork in the Road: A Memoir. London: Secker and Warburg. Meintjes, G. (1996). A Chain of African Voices: The Prose Oeuvre of Andre P. Brink. In E. Ngara (ed.), New Writing from Southern Africa: Authors Who Have Become Prominent Since 1980. London: Currey, pp. 3–19.
Brodber, Erna MICHELENE ADAMS
Jamaican Erna Brodber has published extensively in her fields of training – sociology and history – but she also produces some of the most original fiction in the West Indian region. She has published four critically acclaimed novels: Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (1980), Myal (1988), Louisiana (1994), and The Rainmaker’s Mistake (2007). Her books have garnered awards, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, which she received in 1989 for Myal. Brodber’s formally inventive texts are thematically concerned with women’s social and psychological development, but the principal focus is the history of Caribbean blacks, how that history has
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shaped their present, and how its negative impact might be diminished. Although the Middle Passage and its aftermath are very real fragments of the past for her, her vision extends beyond the potentially imprisoning subjects of slavery and racism. She looks further, into the ancestral past, and taps into resources that have the potential to expand the territory of history and to foster more composite West Indian selves. Her fiction has been associated with that of the visionary and influential writers Wilson Harris and Kamau Brathwaite. Brodber was born on April 20, 1940, in the rural village of Woodside, St. Mary, to parents who respected education and were active in their community. Her inherited social consciousness has distinguished her career and her writing. As well as serving as lecturer in sociology at the University of the West Indies for a number of years, she has worked for the Jamaican government and the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER), for which she has produced studies on subjects of social concern such as life in Jamaican yards, gender stereotypes, and the abandonment of children. In addition, she works actively in Woodside, where she still resides, serving on its council and spearheading Emancipation Day festivities. Her establishment of Blackspace in Woodside best demonstrates her vision: here blacks and others are educated about the experiences of Africans and their descendants and discover alternative ways of seeing histories that have previously been represented by whites. Blackspace hosts classes for children, forums, and “reasoning” sessions, where those who identify as black discuss topical issues and come up with practical means of dealing with social problems. Brodber’s research as a historian and sociologist has always intersected with her fiction. In fact, she took up fiction in earnest in the 1970s to help work through the issues she was tackling with her students at the University of the West Indies (O’Callaghan 72). She has stated that she came to fiction because she felt there were “some issues that she could not share in any other way” (personal communication, June 2008). Her fiction is difficult. More than simply non-linear, it generates a fluid sense of time in which events from the past are interspersed with those of the present without explanation or obvious context. The dead often communicate with the living and, in one
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novel, they reincarnate through various generations, unmooring both time and space. In each novel, narrative voices combine to create a more composite picture of the community. The works are multiform, shape-shifting from more traditional narrative and dialogue into song, folktale, nursery rhyme, chant, and more. They are always diffuse – and yet Brodber manages an uncanny symmetry, largely by means of repetition and by her skillful handling of motif. She moves among the registers on the Creole continuum – an especially rich linguistic array born of the complex history of the region – and provides a soundscape that reflects the Caribbean’s multitextured culture. In engaging with the past, Brodber moves beyond the need to accuse to the desire to help heal the wound of history and encourage a renewed vision. A major source of renewal is African-rooted spirituality. Her writing consistently reveals the bridges that connect peoples of the African diaspora. Brodber’s vision recalls writers such as Edouard Glissant and Harris who believe mythology is inextricable from history: Anancy, the Caribbean Spider Trickster, is often present in her texts as a figure which initiates the tumult that will lead to necessary change. The central characters are usually females who need healing and must journey toward wholeness. The particular struggles that West Indian women undergo are represented, but invariably, through their engagement with aspects of their ancestral past that have been submerged and discounted by the dominant culture, these women uncover their true subjectivity and find a place alongside men. The ideal society that Brodber imagines is balanced in terms of gender. Brodber’s concept of Africa as the source of healing for black West Indians is not unique, but she has set herself apart by constructing texts whose radical forms reflect this vision and by focusing on women to map the journey back to wholeness. She also distinguishes herself by imbricating West Indian history with black history generally, and the media that she uses to suggest the overlap – folk practices, folklore, mythology, religious ritual, and music – are especially provocative. The racial and social background of the protagonist and main narrator of Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home positions her between the
black grassroots society and the lighter-skinned middle class which attempts to live largely by European values – a common dilemma for Caribbean people and a major concern for the region’s writers. This colonial legacy is tackled in a singular way in this novel, however, since Brodber recruits Anancy to lead Nellie Richmond toward a reconciliation of her divided selves. The Trickster reflects the region’s turbulent history in his tendency toward disruption, disorder, and disparity, and yet he tends to survive and often to triumph by means of his inventiveness, so he also evokes the tremendous creative potential inherent in a society formed by the fusion of so many disparate parts. Jane and Louisa’s structure reflects the ring game that is referred to in the novel’s title. Another unusual feature is the layering of folksongs upon communal dialogue upon folktales so that readers get the impression that they are listening to the voice of an entire community over generations. It appears initially as a babble, but apparently irreconcilable elements that initially collide to create chaos eventually arrange and rearrange themselves around each other, like the multicolored glass shards in a kaleidoscope. Brodber’s second novel, Myal, uncovers what it means to West Indians that “the half has never been told” (1988, 34). This cryptic line, which becomes a refrain throughout the text, indicates that the histories of the colonized were buried during the process of colonization. The central storyline deals with Ella, a young woman of mixed blood who is not white enough to bear the children of the American man she marries but too white to be accepted in Grove Town, her home. Unclaimed by the villagers, she is left wide open to the “spirit thievery” or “zombification” that colonialism has bred. Designed to convince West Indian colonials that what they value is worthless, the British colonial education system is portrayed as the major institutional means of zombification. It is only with the help of elders in her community who rally to rescue her – elders who have continually reincarnated and gained the wisdom of centuries of experience – that Ella is saved. In Louisiana, Brodber ventures beyond the West Indies to the Southern United States to explore how the two cultures interconnect, remaining mindful of the influence of the source of
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their connectivity: Africa. Set in Louisiana in the 1930s, the novel incorporates jazz history but also involves what could be described as a jazz aesthetic. Brodber applies the principles of the music to theme, rhythm, and narrative structure, highlighting jazz’s metaphorical significance in black cultures. As well, she introduces the Trickster once more, establishing its connection to this musical form that combines disruption with harmony. Louisiana’s protagonist Ella Townsend, an anthropologist whose heritage is Jamaican, is recruited through the Federal Writers’ Project to research a cane-cutting community in southwest Louisiana. However, the principal research subject, matriarch Mammy King, takes control of the project – despite dying before it gets off the ground. Speaking to Ella through her tool the tape recorder, Mammy King’s ghost unsettles Ella’s academic principles and makes her rethink Western assumptions about chronicling history. In the narratives the old woman and her departed friends transmit through the tape recorder, Ella discovers the link between African Americans and West Indians. As well, she learns alternative ways of conceiving of wisdom and power, time and space, and the relationship between individual and community. Her understanding is underpinned by a newfound sense of her ethnicity and her gender and by an awareness of how to resist absorption by the dominant culture. The Rainmaker’s Mistake, Brodber’s latest novel, is her most enigmatic. It opens at the brink of emancipation, focusing on Mr. Charlie, a plantation owner and patriarch to his slaves, whose popular conception of their origin is that Mr. Charlie devotedly deposited his seed into the earth and that they are the yams that grew there. When the patriarch announces that his yams are now free by law, they are stupefied. They cannot imagine a life other than the strictly organized plantation existence centered on labor. The Rainmaker’s Mistake is an allegory about growth and the fear of it. Though the freed slaves have the initiative to swim to an island and establish a new life there, they are uncomfortable with any signs of change in their midst. Greying hair and weakening bodies disturb them, as does sexual awakening; for a long period most of them are petrified of evolving. Despite certain markers of time, such as emancipation, the former slaves move between present, past, and
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future. They also travel to distant temperate lands. This is Brodber’s furthest journey into speculative fiction, but it resembles the other novels in its concern with the need for blacks to understand the past in order to grow. Erna Brodber’s contribution to Caribbean, and, more widely, to postcolonial literature has been significant because of her uncommon ways of seeing. SEE ALSO: Feminism and Fiction (WF); Harris, Wilson (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Brodber, E. (1974). Abandonment of Children in Jamaica. Mona, Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research. Brodber, E. (1975). A Study of Yards in the City of Kingston. Mona, Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research. Brodber, E. (1980). Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home. London: New Beacon. Brodber, E. (1982). Perceptions of Caribbean Women: Towards a Documentation of Stereotypes. Cave Hill, Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research. Brodber, E. (1988). Myal. London: New Beacon. Brodber, E. (1989). Sleeping’s Beauty and the Prince Charming. Kunapipi, 11(3), 1–4. Brodber, E. (1989–90). One Bubby Susan. Jamaica Journal, 22(4), 52–3. Brodber, E. (1990a). Fiction in the Scientific Procedure. In Selwyn R. Cudjoe (ed.), Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference. Wellesley, MA: Calaloux, pp. 164–8. Brodber, E. (1990b). The Spirit Thief. In Mervyn Morris (ed.), The Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories. London: Faber and Faber, pp. 15–24. Brodber, E. (1994). Louisiana. London: New Beacon. Brodber, E. (1999). The People of My Jamaican Village. Woodside, Jamaica: Blackspace. Brodber, E. (2004a). The Continent of Black Consciousness: On the History of the African Diaspora from Slavery to the Present Day. London: New Beacon. Brodber, E. (2004b). The Second Generation of Freemen in Jamaica, 1907–1944. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
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Brodber, E. (2004c). Woodside, Pear Tree Grove P.O. Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press. Brodber, E. (2007). The Rainmaker’s Mistake. London: New Beacon. O’Callaghan, E. (1986). Erna Brodber (1940–). In D. Cumber Dance (ed.), Fifty Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood, pp. 71–82.
Roberts, J. E. (2006). Reading Erna Brodber: Uniting the Black Diaspora through Folk Culture and Religion. Westport, CT: Praeger. Russell, N. (2001). Crossing Borders: An Interview with Writer, Scholar and Activist Erna Brodber. At http:// inthefray.org/images/stories/mpn/issues/200105/ imagine/brodber2/brodber2.html, accessed Oct. 5, 2008.
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C Callaghan, Morley COLIN HILL
Morley Callaghan was among the most significant Canadian novelists of the mid twentieth century. In his early career, he was an originator of Canadian modern realism and was connected with international modernists including Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Sherwood Anderson. Although he wrote fiction until his death in 1990, he is best known for his first two collections of short fiction – A Native Argosy (1929) and Now That April’s Here (1936) – and for a string of social, urban realist novels published between 1928 and 1937 which were widely read in Canada. His fiction is characterized by a stark realism, a leftist political stance, sustained interest in moral and religious questions, and a sociological and naturalistic interest in human nature and experience. Callaghan was born on February 22, 1903 in Toronto to literary and politically active parents. Except for a European sojourn explored in his memoir That Summer in Paris (1963), Callaghan lived nearly all his life in Toronto, which is the setting for most of his writing. He trained as a lawyer but never joined the bar. He began publishing short fiction in 1925, and his stories appeared in venues such as This Quarter, the New Yorker, Scribner’s Magazine, transition, and Exile. His first novel, Strange Fugitive (1928), explored working-class life and politics; it was published in 1928 after Fitzgerald – who refereed an infamous
boxing match in which Callaghan defeated Hemingway in Paris in 1929 – recommended it to Max Perkins of Scribner’s. Two naturalistic novels published in the 1930s, It’s Never Over (1930) and A Broken Journey (1932), are similar in tone and subject matter to Strange Fugitive. Callaghan’s fourth novel, Such is My Beloved (1934), is commonly considered his finest. It focuses on Father Dowling, a naive Catholic priest who tries unsuccessfully to redeem two female prostitutes against the backdrop of a generic North American city in the grip of the Great Depression. They Shall Inherit the Earth (1935) is Callaghan’s most overtly political novel and deals with class politics through a symbolic and violent family conflict. The most productive and important phase of Callaghan’s career came to a close with the publication of More Joy in Heaven in 1937. This final novel of his early period follows a convict after his release from prison and explores the social forces that lead him to reoffend. Callaghan would not publish serious fiction again for a decade and a half. In 1951, Callaghan re-emerged with The Loved and the Lost, a social-realist novel set in Montreal which explores various facets of racism and social inequality using the methods of his earlier works. His later novels, which received mixed reviews, became increasingly experimental and adventurous. The Many Colored Coat (1960) is a melodrama with biblical parallels that explores the lives of an eccentric cast of characters: a business man, a distillery worker, an ex-boxer, and a prostitute. Callaghan became overtly symbolic in the controversial A Passion in Rome
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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(1961) and in the autobiographical and poorly received A Fine and Private Place (1975), which offers an underappreciated novelist as its central character and satirizes Callaghan’s critics. A Time for Judas (1983) is narrated by a secretary of Pontius Pilate and casts Judas Iscariot in an unusually human light. In Our Lady of the Snows (1985), Callaghan rewrote and expanded an earlier novella, The Enchanted Pimp (1978), about a small-time criminal who recruits bored housewives to work for him. His final novel, A Wild Old Man on the Road (1988), is an autobiographical text set in the 1920s. Although Callaghan’s writing did much to invigorate Canadian nationalism at a crucial point in the nation’s literary development, he was a lifelong proponent of cosmopolitanism and insisted that Canadian authors ought to be international in their approaches. At one time Canada’s leading novelist and an elder statesman of Canadian letters, his reputation has fallen into steep decline in recent years and many contemporary readers consider his works excessively bland, moralistic, and contrived. Although he remains widely read and taught, more recent writers such as Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Michael Ondaatje have built international reputations and Callaghan’s pioneering contribution to modern Canadian fiction has been eclipsed. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Fitzgerald, F. Scott (AF); Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Historical Fiction (WF); MacLennan, Hugh (WF); Social Realist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Boire, G. (1990). Morley Callaghan (1903–90). In R. Lecker, J. David, & E. Quigley (eds.), Canadian Writers and Their Works. Toronto: ECW, pp. 79–145. Callaghan, M. (1928). Strange Fugitive. New York: Scribner’s. Callaghan, M. (1929). A Native Argosy. Toronto: Macmillan. Callaghan, M. (1930). It’s Never Over. New York: Scribner’s. Callaghan, M. (1932). A Broken Journey. New York: Scribner’s. Callaghan, M. (1934). Such is My Beloved. New York: Scribner’s.
Callaghan, M. (1935). They Shall Inherit the Earth. New York: Random House. Callaghan, M. (1936). Now that April’s Here and Other Stories. New York: Random House. Callaghan, M. (1937). More Joy in Heaven. New York: Random House. Callaghan, M. (1951). The Loved and the Lost. Toronto: Macmillan. Callaghan, M. (1960). The Many Colored Coat. Toronto: Macmillan. Callaghan, M. (1961). A Passion in Rome. Toronto: Macmillan. Callaghan, M. (1963). That Summer in Paris. Toronto: Macmillan. Callaghan, M. (1975). A Fine and Private Place. Toronto: Macmillan. Callaghan, M. (1978). The Enchanted Pimp. Toronto: Macmillan. Callaghan, M. (1983). A Time for Judas. Toronto: Macmillan. Callaghan, M. (1985). Our Lady of the Snows. Toronto: Macmillan. Callaghan, M. (1988). A Wild Old Man on the Road. Toronto: Stoddart. Conron, B. (1966). Morley Callaghan. New York: Twayne. Conron, B. (ed.) (1975). Morley Callaghan. Toronto: McGraw. Hoar, V. (1969). Morley Callaghan. Toronto: Copp Clark. Kendle, J. (1984). Morley Callaghan: An Annotated Bibliography. In R. Lecker, J. David, & E. Quigley (eds.), The Annotated Bibliography of Canada’s Major Authors. Toronto: ECW, pp. 13–177. Metcalf, J. (1993). Winner Take All. Essays on Canadian Writing, 51–2 113–45. Staines, D. (ed.) (1981). The Callaghan Symposium. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Sutherland, F. (1972). The Style of Innocence: A Study of Hemingway and Callaghan. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin. Woodcock, G. (1997). Morley Callaghan. In E. Benson & W. Toye (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Oxford, pp. 164–65.
Canadian Fiction DOUGLAS IVISON
The twentieth century may not have belonged to Canada, as Sir Wilfrid Laurier famously predicted it would, but it may have belonged to Canadian literature. By the end of the century, the literary institutions and infrastructure necessary for a viable national literature were firmly in place,
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and Canadian fiction writers had taken their place among the world’s leading writers in English. Looking back at the century’s beginning, however, it is difficult to find much evidence of an identifiably Canadian tradition in English-language fiction, nor much reason to believe that such a tradition would develop. Before World War I, Canada did produce some popular bestsellers, such as the animal stories of Charles G. D. Roberts, Ralph Connor’s Christian adventure tales, and Gilbert Parker’s historical romances, but few fiction writers of great significance. The exceptions were Sara Jeanette Duncan, Stephen Leacock, and L. M. Montgomery, all of whom are best remembered for their fictions of small-town Canada, most notably The Imperialist (1904), Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), and Anne of Green Gables (1908), respectively. World War I was a transformative event that played a key role in developing a Canadian national identity. In its aftermath, a number of institutions appeared, literary and otherwise, that provided venues and support for Canadian writers. In this context, the German immigrant writer Frederick Philip Grove positioned himself as being in the vanguard of the development of a Canadian literature as a result of his familiarity with European literary movements. Along with fiction by Martha Ostenso and Robert Stead, among others, Grove’s at the time scandalous novel of prairie immigrant life, Settlers of the Marsh (1925), helped establish the prairies as a privileged literary region within Canadian fiction, a tradition exemplified by the 1930s short stories of Sinclair Ross, among the most anthologized in Canadian literature, and Ross’s 1941 novel of small-town prairie life, As for Me and My House. Although realism was the dominant mode in this period, a notable exception was Howard O’Hagan’s mythic, non-realist Tay John (1939), a significant early attempt to address the Aboriginal–European cultural conflict. Modernist fiction was generally notable by its absence in the period between the wars, although Morley Callaghan looked to the American naturalists and modernists and associated with well-known American contemporaries such as Ernest Hemingway. Marked by a spare, modernist prose style, Callaghan’s short stories and novels, particularly from the 1920s and 1930s, are also noteworthy for their attention to urban settings.
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Although the dominant trends were largely regionalist or cosmopolitan, Hugh MacLennan explored explicitly national themes in Two Solitudes (1945), which examined relations between French and English Canadians. Published during a period of increasing governmental emphasis on the development of a national culture, MacLennan’s work was immensely popular at the time, if less so today. In contrast to his conventional, even stodgy, style, novels such as Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945) and Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook (1959) reflected the modernist, anti-realist aesthetic that had largely been absent from Canadian fiction, and were notable for their attention to the personal and archetypal rather than the national. After World War II, regional writing continued to be prominent. W. O. Mitchell continued the tradition of prairie writing, emphasizing the vernacular and comedic. Others, such as Ernest Buckler and Ethel Wilson, continued to write peripheral regions, rural Nova Scotia and British Columbia respectively, into Canadian literature. Jewish Canadian fiction also came to prominence in the post-World War II period, with writers such as Henry Kreisel and A. M. Klein engaging with the complex and tragic history of Jewish experience. In The Sacrifice (1956), Adele Wiseman presented a portrait, deeply grounded in biblical allusion, of Jewish immigrant experience in an unspecified Winnipeg. Most famously, in his fictions of the Montreal Jewish community, Mordecai Richler established himself as the foremost chronicler of Jewish Canadian life, and one of the major Canadian novelists and satirists of the second half of the century. Partly because of the increasing development of a national literary infrastructure and institutions, the late 1950s and 1960s saw the arrival of a generation of “major” writers who could access the material resources needed to produce, publish, and promote their works, and thus could pursue a relatively uninterrupted literary career and achieve commercial and critical success. In addition to Richler, writers such as Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, Rudy Wiebe, and Robert Kroetsch established significant careers as fiction
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writers whose impact often extended beyond Canada and into the twenty-first century. As the above list suggests, women writers were particularly prominent. Reflecting the success of the women’s and feminist movements, they engaged in a critique of the patriarchal structures of Canadian (and, more broadly, Western) society and their impact upon women’s lives and opportunities. Laurence, for example, in several novels and stories culminating with The Diviners (1974), articulated female desires and examined the ways society inhibits the expression and fulfillment of those desires. Atwood was the most famous Canadian woman writer (arguably the most famous Canadian writer, period) of the twentieth century. In her novels, short fiction, and poetry, Atwood engaged in an extended and wide-ranging feminist critique of Western culture and its oppression of women, most notably in her dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Nearly as successful internationally as Atwood, Alice Munro is considered one of the greatest English-language writers of short fiction. Extensively anthologized and the recipient of numerous awards, Munro is widely admired as a master stylist and for her complex, nuanced portraits of women’s experience. Although much less well known to most Canadian readers, and given less attention by Canadian critics, the Paris-based writer Mavis Gallant is a short fiction writer arguably the equal of Munro. The 1960s was also notable for the increased publication of experimental, non-realist novels by Leonard Cohen, Scott Symons, and Graeme Gibson, among others. The novelist, poet, and theorist Robert Kroetsch played a key role in introducing poststructuralist and postmodernist concepts into Canadian literature. In his fiction, Kroetsch playfully mixed mythological elements, history, tall tales, and an anti-realist aesthetic, creating a non-representational regionalism that recognized the constructedness of place. Historical fiction, of varying degrees of selfreflexivity, was a major Canadian genre in the late twentieth century. Rudy Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear (1973), Timothy Findley’s The Wars (1977), George Bowering’s Burning Water (1980), Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1987), and Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Englishman’s Boy (1996), among others, exposed the way in which history is constructed, and challenged under-
standings of history as truth. Notable feminist critiques of patriarchal history included Daphne Marlatt’s fragmented and poetic Ana Historic (1988) and Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996). Like Kroetsch, Jack Hodgins challenged the representational aesthetic associated with regional writing, combining everyday realism with elements of the mythical in order to broaden and deepen the resonance of his tales. By contrast, the fiction of Atlantic Canadian writers such as David Adams Richards and Alistair Macleod was more strongly grounded in realism. Over many novels, Richards provided a rich, if often bleak, portrayal of working-class New Brunswick life. Although unprolific, having produced only two slim volumes of short fiction until his award-winning novel No Great Mischief (1999), Alistair MacLeod was undoubtedly one of Atlantic Canada’s most important and influential writers, producing fiction firmly grounded in the culture and traditions of Cape Breton. Less conventionally, perhaps, Ann-Marie MacDonald utilized Gothic and melodramatic conventions in Fall On Your Knees (1996), a best-selling and award-winning novel that dealt with race and sexuality in ways that challenged regional stereotypes. Newfoundland fiction also experienced a renaissance in the 1980s and 1990s, with Wayne Johnston achieving significant international success with The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998). The changing demographics of Canadian society that resulted from immigration and the adoption of multiculturalism as official government policy contributed to the increased prominence of fiction by writers of color. AfroCaribbean Canadian writers achieved particular prominence with fictions about the struggles and hopes of Caribbean immigrants to Canada, the challenges faced by and in the Caribbean nations from which they came, and the tensions and possibilities produced by the juxtaposition of Canadian and Caribbean experiences. In particular, Austin Clarke, beginning in the 1960s, and Dionne Brand, beginning in the 1980s, established themselves as major writers. In the 1990s, the experiences of Chinese Canadians were portrayed in fiction by Sky Lee and Wayson Choy. Powerfully and memorably, Joy Kogawa recovered the lost history of the Japanese Canadian internment during World War II and its impact in Obasan (1981).
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Several writers of South Asian descent, such as Neil Bissoondath, Rohinton Mistry, M. G. Vassanji, and Shyam Selvadurai, achieved prominence at the end of the century. Their work and its success represented a challenge to conventional understandings of the nature and role of Canadian literature, as their fictions were frequently set outside Canada, often featured non-Canadian characters, and were written by authors born elsewhere. The Sri Lankan-born Michael Ondaatje, who came to international prominence with The English Patient (1992), and rivaled Atwood as Canada’s best-known novelist of the late twentieth century, has made a career of blurring national and other boundaries. Notably, however, it is In the Skin of a Lion, his most explicitly “Canadian” novel, that has the firmest position in the Canadian canon. Another immigrant, American-born William Gibson, achieved international cultural prominence by virtue of his role as the prophet of cyberspace. His first science fiction novel Neuromancer (1984) became one of the defining texts of postmodern culture. His success, and that of fantasy writers Charles de Lint and Guy Gavriel Kay, anticipated the sudden flowering of Canadian speculative fiction in the 1990s. Like Gibson, Douglas Coupland achieved remarkable extraliterary success when his novel Generation X (1991) captured the cultural zeitgeist of late twentiethcentury North America’s postmodern culture, a largely urbanized, media-infused environment also explored by Russell Smith and Catherine Bush. Gay and lesbian writers began to challenge the heteronormative assumptions of Canadian society and literature in the 1960s, as novelists such as Scott Symons and Jane Rule openly explored gay and lesbian experiences and issues. Similarly, Timothy Findley’s fiction presented an extensive critique of the oppressiveness and violence of patriarchal masculinity. In the last decade of the century, a number of queer writers, including Brand, MacDonald, Selvadurai, Gail Scott, Shani Mootoo, and Tomson Highway, achieved success with novels that articulate queer experiences, desires, and subjectivities. One of the most important developments of late twentieth-century Canadian fiction was the
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success of Aboriginal writers. Historically in Canadian fiction, Aboriginal peoples were the subject of demeaning stereotypes and racist representations and were frequently silenced or invisible. Beginning in the 1980s, however, Aboriginal authors began to publish fiction in English. Authors such as Highway, Beatrice Culleton Mosonier, Jeanette Armstrong, and Lee Maracle explored the conflict between Aboriginal and Euro-Canadians and the consequences of the history of exploitation and racism for Aboriginals. It was Thomas King’s humorous and complex Green Grass, Running Water (1993), however, that had the greatest impact. Reflecting his academic background and theoretical awareness, King’s novel successfully integrated Aboriginal storytelling traditions and mythologies with the postmodern literary conventions of the late twentieth-century novel. At the end of the century, then, Canadian fiction had firmly taken its place on the world stage, as the frequent presence of Canadian writers on the shortlists of the Booker Prize and other international awards indicates. The success of Canadian fiction was not simply manifested in the handful of Canadian authors known around the world, but in the sheer quantity and diversity of Canadian novels and short stories, which would have been unimaginable at the beginning of the century. SEE ALSO: Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Indigenous Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Benson, E., & Toye, W. (eds.) (1997). The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, 2nd edn. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press. Keith, W. J. (2006). Canadian Literature in English, rev. edn. 2 vols. Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill.
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Kr€ oller, E.-M. (ed.) (2004). The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. New, W. H. (ed.) (2002). Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. New, W. H. (2003). A History of Canadian Literature, 2nd edn. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Carey, Peter NICHOLAS BIRNS
Even though Patrick White won the Nobel Prize in 1973, it was Peter Carey’s generation, which also included David Malouf, Kate Grenville, and Frank Moorhouse, whose work brought Australian fiction to the world stage. Of these, Carey’s work was both the most popular and the most consequential. Combining the excitement-filled plots of Victorian fiction, the imaginative splaying of reality and fantasy pioneered by Latin American novelists, and the determination to tell the stories of a largely unknown country shared by so many of his Australian counterparts, Carey canvassed the dreams and nightmares of Australia as no other writer had before him. In a nation whose short history and heritage of conquest, dispossession, and sense of inadequacy toward the rest of the world raised a perpetual sense of self-doubt, Carey’s questioning of the nature of reality would have had pronounced resonance in any case. Carey, though, added to this a particular emphasis on the vocation of the artist, both its soaring possibilities and self-consuming inauthenticities, and on the way national difference helps define the reception and betrayal of art in an age of globalization. Carey writes about national identity, but he does so in an international arena. His validation of Australian experience opened the door for many Australian writers not only to publish globally, but also to realize there was an audience interested in what they had to say. Carey was born on May 7, 1943 in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, of a middle-class family that ran a local car dealership. He won a scholarship to the prestigious Geelong Grammar School and did undergraduate work in zoology and chemistry at Monash University in Melbourne, though he did not receive a degree. For the next decade or so, he
worked in advertising in Sydney and London, eventually becoming a partner in his own Sydney advertising firm. While working full-time in advertising, Carey read widely and began writing short stories. Two crucial mentors for him during his time were the novelists Barry Oakley and Morris Lurie. In the 1970s, Carey began publishing short stories, collected in his first book, The Fat Man in History (1974). “American Dreams,” in which an American visitor seeks to market a miniature Australian town as a touristic commodity; “Kristu-Du,” where an architectural palace built by a malignant ruler turns out to be a slaughterhouse; and “The Fat Man in History,” in which a plot among fat men discriminated against in a future society is foiled by the rebels’ own structural complicity in the system, immediately marked Carey out as straddling the realms of metafiction, fantasy, and horror, all the while writing from a noticeably Australian perspective. In 1981, Carey withdrew from advertising and lived in a commune on the Bellinger River in northern New South Wales. This experience was reflected in his novel Bliss (1981), in which Harry Joy finds happiness with Honey Barbara in a paradisiacal world of nature. Harry, who like Carey is an advertising executive, has a near-death experience which convinces him that the world in which he has flourished is in fact a living hell. Harry is redeemed by the love of Honey, an “earth mother” figure who provides a surprisingly harmonious, pastoral ending to the book. Despite the happiness of the conclusion, though, the book’s critique of modern society remains searing. Bliss was made into a film directed by Ray Lawrence in 1985. Illywhacker (1985) turned to history as Herbert Badgery, a 118-year-old man, rollicks through a colorful rendition of twentieth-century Australia, which ends with a Japanese economic takeover. The novel, which in many ways is an extended commentary on Mark Twain’s observation, on visiting Australia, that Australian history is full of “the most beautiful lies,” is animated by the Australian love of yarn-spinning, and for all its literary dexterity and self-reflexive knowingness has a strong tie to a sense of oral tradition and the fun that popular storytellers have in spinning tall tales. The influence of Latin American writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel
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Garcıa Marquez is at its strongest here. Carey, though, adds a highly pictorial, cartoonish aspect, laced with dry wit and wicked humor, to create a novelistic concoction all his own. Oscar and Lucinda (1988), which won the prestigious Booker Prize, is an unconventional nineteenth-century love story featuring Oscar Hopkins, a young Englishman from a strict Evangelical background whose Oxford education does not allay his addiction to gambling. Oscar goes to Australia where he meets Lucinda LePlastrier, a factory heiress. Together, the two conceive of building a glass church on a rural Australian river, signifying the hope of creating an untarnished version of European ideals in the new land. That this enterprise is a fiasco and ends in tragedy does not compromise its pathos, which resonates as an emblem of the paradoxes of white settler identity in Australia. Oscar and Lucinda is also a commentary on, and expansion of, Patrick White’s great novel Voss (1957), which similarly features a doomed romantic couple. With comedy and pathos, Carey supplements and augments White’s sobriety and lyricism. Oscar and Lucinda was made into a successful film in 1997, directed by Gillian Armstrong, part of the wave of Australian directors who had emerged in the 1970s along with the generation of fiction writers led by Carey. The Tax Inspector (1992) was a far more somber novel that showed, with increased realism, an unsparing stance toward the flaws of Australian society; it generally met a less positive reception. By this time, Carey had moved to New York, eventually seeing himself as a permanent resident there. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994) was consciously influenced by postcolonial theory. Carey creates two fictive nations in a world otherwise much like the “real” one; Efica is a country of small islands that is economically and politically dependent on Voorstand, a vast continent to the north. Efica is like Australia, except it is an archipelago, not a continent, whereas Voorstand is like the US – with idealistic beginnings but ending up as a great power – except it is of part Dutch heritage (a choice Carey said was influenced both by South Africa and by the Dutch street names in New York). The Voorstandish cult of “Bruder Mouse,” the icon of the “Franciscan Free Church,” and its incarnation of a kindness to animals grown into an ideology, was influ-
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enced by Carey’s visit to Walt Disney World in Orlando in 1990. In search of the people who killed his mother and of a father he had never known, Tristan Smith flees from Efica to Voorstand, where he encounters the ambiguous and ever shifting ironies of the relation between colonizers and colonized. Carey’s next novel, Jack Maggs (1997), consciously rewrote Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations in order to foreground Australian elements that were on the margins in the original novel. This conscious rewriting of a European classic from a subversive Australian perspective involves a manipulative writer, a footman with an unrevealed past, as it evokes a Victorian England that is at once stunningly rendered in detail and strikingly grim in valence. Carey uses a family name, Warriner, for one of his characters, tying his own personal history, his English heritage, and his Australian identity to his rewriting of Dickens. There is also a particularly mordant and cutting portrait of a Dickens-like novelist, which foreshadows the darker and more skeptical view of art that Carey would take in his fiction of the next decade. Carey’s next novel was particularly daring in its coming to grips with Australia’s paramount national story: the trial and execution of the renowned outlaw Ned Kelly. In True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), Carey uses the run-on, paratactic style of Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter as a kind of homegrown Australian modernist mode of writing. The “true history” of the title is ironic, as not only is Carey’s novel necessarily by Carey, not Kelly, but the approach Carey takes casts doubt on the claims of any version of truth or full authority, while also unapologetically championing Kelly and the spirit of subversion and rebellion he brought to Australian culture, which, though quashed at the time, has never been determinatively quelled. The Kelly novel won Carey a second Booker Prize. Carey produced a children’s book, The Big Bazoohley, in 1995 and two short, experimental travelogues, Thirty Days In Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (2001) and Wrong about Japan (2004). These books were treated roughly by reviewers but are important in giving perceptive accounts of Carey’s impressions of a country he knew well but which, because he saw it from afar, had become unfamiliar to him. By this time,
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Carey had become very well known on the American literary scene, and, without losing his connection to Australia, was more comfortable with American settings and resonances in his fiction. Carey’s novels of the 2000s show an awareness of the perils faced by an artist with, at times, a necessarily opportunistic stance toward experience: My Life as a Fake (2003) was based upon the Ern Malley hoax staged by the Australian poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart in the 1940s. The two poets, hoping to satirize trendy modernist practices, submitted poems under the pseudonym Ern Malley to the journal Angry Penguins. Carey asks what would happen if Ern Malley actually had been, or had become, a real person. Bob McCorkle, the Malley figure, is originally created by Christopher Chubb as a hoax but metamorphoses into a living, three-dimensional person. The novel’s Malaysian setting alludes to the early work of Anthony Burgess, but also to the postcolonial condition of Australia, suggesting that the recurring motif of hoaxes in Australian literature may indicate a continuing struggle for identity and authenticity. Theft (2005), chronicling the interaction of the Australian artist Butcher Bones with an unscrupulous New York art dealer, constituted a diptych that is often searing in its evocation of how art sometimes must be ineluctably dishonest. His Illegal Self (2008) takes a more political turn (returning in this way to the atmosphere of the early short stories), narrating the abduction of a young child in the US by an Australian revolutionary group led by friends of the boy’s activist-terrorist mother. This political emphasis underscored that Carey’s seemingly effortless inventiveness belies a deep involvement with the world in which he lives. Indeed, Carey is one of the few novelists of his generation whose career engages the constitutive social issues and artistic dilemmas of this period. He started out to tell Australia’s stories; he ended up telling the world’s. SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Realism/ Magic Realism (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Armstrong, G. (dir.) (1997). Oscar and Lucinda. Meridian Films. Bliss, C. (2007). Peter Carey. In N. Birns, & R. McNeer, (eds.), A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900. Rochester: Camden House, pp. 201–92. Carey, P. (1974). The Fat Man in History. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Carey, P. (1981). Bliss. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Carey, P. (1985). Illywhacker. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Carey, P. (1988). Oscar and Lucinda. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Carey, P. (1991). The Tax Inspector. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Carey, P. (1994). The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Carey, P. (1997). Jack Maggs. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Carey, P. (2000). True History of the Kelly Gang. New York: Knopf. Carey, P. (2003). My Life as a Fake. New York: Knopf. Carey, P. (2005). Theft. New York: Knopf. Carey, P. (2008). His Illegal Self. New York: Knopf. Gaile, A. (2005). Fabulating Beauty. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Hassall, A. (1994). Dancing on Hot Macadam: Peter Carey’s Fiction. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Huggan, G. (1996). Peter Carey. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Lamb, K. (1992). Peter Carey: The Genesis of Fame. Pymble, NSW: Angus and Robertson. Lawrence, R. (dir.) (1985). Bliss. Window III Productions. Woodcock, B. (2003). Peter Carey. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Censorship and Fiction JONATHAN HEAWOOD
The history of censorship in the twentieth century is bound up with the development of free speech as a human right. Before the publication of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, free speech in the British Empire was merely a residual right, consisting primarily of whatever was not expressly forbidden in English law. While censorship was not a feature of the common law, colonial administrations could draw upon a range of powers to penalize
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authors whose writing they deemed blasphemous, defamatory, obscene, or seditious. As the Empire gave way to independence for many states in the second half of the twentieth century, their citizens acquired the right to freedom of speech, as set out in international conventions and domestic constitutions. However, free speech has proved difficult to define and to uphold, and many states have continued to silence authors with impunity. Overt state censorship – whereby books are submitted for approval before their publication – is not the only political means by which authorial freedom is constrained. As the twentieth century drew to a close, relativist and religious critiques of the human rights framework coincided with the rise of the Internet to globalize new forms of suppression. In British India, the fear of terrorism led to the passing of the 1910 Press Act, providing the state with enhanced powers to monitor the press and to seize all copies of an offensive publication. The Act was extremely broadly drafted, and it caught both journalism and works of the imagination in its net. Within four years, 26 plays, nine biographies, 33 songs and poems, and four studies of Irish or Russian politics had been banned, alongside numerous political pamphlets and two bomb manuals (Barrier 62). Books continued to be banned throughout the 1920s and 1930s, including Hindu Heaven, a novel by Max Wylie that describes the jaded world of British and American missionaries in India; Katherine Mayo’s Mother India; Arthur Miles’s Land of the Lingam, a study of Indian sexual practices; and Frank Richards’s Old Soldier Sahib, an account of a veteran soldier’s army service in India. All four titles remain on the list of prohibited imports today. It was not only English-language writing that caught the censors’ attention. An early volume of short stories in Urdu by Ahmed Ali and other authors, Angaray (Burning Coals), was banned by the Indian government in 1933. In response to this book’s suppression, Ali co-founded the League of Progressive Authors, which later became the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association, a leftist group opposed to political censorship. He went on to publish Twilight in Delhi with the Hogarth Press in 1940, despite the objections of British printers, who refused to print passages dealing sympathetically with the Indian War of
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Independence (aka the “Mutiny”) of 1857. Ali later claimed that this problem was solved only when Virginia Woolf – “the moving spirit of the Press” – called on the support of Harold Nicolson, “the official censor,” who passed the book (A. Ali, xvii). Nicolson was serving as parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Information and presumably carried enough weight to override the printers’ concerns. The experience of suppression similarly galvanized the Jamaican journalist Roger Mais, who was charged with sedition for publishing a newspaper article, in July 1944, in which he argued that soldiers from Jamaica and elsewhere in the British Empire were defeating their own interests by fighting alongside the British. In the article “Now We Know,” published in the nationalist journal Public Opinion, Mais alleged that Britain’s aim in World War II was to extend its own interests of “privilege and repression and exploitation” in order that “the sun may never set upon the insolence and arrogance of one race toward all others” (Hart 287). Mais was feted by his compatriots, but imprisoned for six months for sedition and “endangering England in time of war” (Arnold 336). This experience contributed to the strongly nationalist sentiment of his first novel, The Hills Were Joyful Together, published by Jonathan Cape in 1953. The examples of Ali and Mais inevitably discouraged other writers from putting their political concerns into print, discrediting the free speech guarantee in the UDHR. Groups such as Ali’s League of Progressive Authors and the writers’ association International PEN, founded in London in 1921, countered this tendency toward self-censorship by loudly supporting censored and persecuted writers. Under the presidency of H. G. Wells, International PEN drafted a Charter that articulated its members’ commitment to “the principle of unhampered transmission of thought within each nation and between all nations.” By signing this Charter, PEN’s members pledged themselves “to oppose any form of suppression of freedom of expression in the country and community to which they belong as well as throughout the world whenever this is possible” (International PEN 1948). Wells was a pivotal figure in the evolution of a discourse of free speech, and the terms of the PEN Charter were closely echoed in the UDHR.
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Elsewhere, Wells argued against blanket censorship under the justification of national security. He noted that the state was capable of distinguishing between the censorship of “any information likely to be of the slightest use to an enemy” and the desirability of allowing “statements or suggestions that may affect public opinion in one’s own country or abroad, and which may help us toward wholesome and corrective political action” (Wells 10). This acceptance of the need for the state to retain a power of censorship, while holding the door open for vigorous political debate in the public sphere, contributed to the formulation in 1948 of Article 19 of the UDHR, which promised the “freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers” (United Nations 1948). Writing in the immediate wake of World War II, the United Nations committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt that drafted the UDHR described freedom of speech as “the highest aspiration of the common people.” Yet in The Hills Were Joyful Together, the Chaplain complains that the UDHR “has come to mean nothing to us but more words in a book” (Mais 238). Universal freedom of expression acquired legal status through the publication in 1966 of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which came into force in 1976. However, the near-universal ratification of the ICCPR did not signal an end to censorship or suppression. Censorious states lobbied successfully for a series of exemptions allowing governments to limit free speech in the interests of “the rights or reputations of others; . . . national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health or morals” (United Nations 1976). In effect, these exemptions allowed states to continue practicing some forms of censorship, although they were now obliged to justify any restraints on free speech as necessary, proportionate, and subject to the rule of law. The Indian constitution, for example, repeats the terms of the UDHR, but qualifies the right to free speech in the interests of “the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence” (Sorabjee 207).
These comprehensive qualifications were exceeded by the Burmese constitution, adopted in 1974, Article 157 of which states: “Every citizen shall have freedom of speech, expression, and publication to the extent that such freedom is not contrary to the interests of the working people and socialism” (Allott 5). This blanket exemption makes a mockery of the human right to freedom of speech, as has been shown by the Burmese government’s consistent censorship of anything slightly subversive and the long-term imprisonment of the pro-democracy leader and writer Aung San Suu Kyi. International treaties alone were unable to prevent rampant censorship in apartheid South Africa, where the Publications Act (1975, amended in 1978), allowed for a publication to be declared “undesirable” (Coetzee 185) if it met any one of a number of stringent conditions that were overseen by the Publications Appeals Board, a de facto censorship committee. Writers of fiction including Nadine Gordimer, Peter Abrahams, Andre Brink, Bessie Head, and Alex La Guma were all subject to censorship. In Nigeria, Chinua Achebe was subject to harassment and Wole Soyinka was imprisoned as a result of his political activism. Soyinka later claimed that he was subjected to “the most rigorous security measures ever taken against any prisoner in the history of Nigerian prisons, measures taken both to contain and destroy my mind” (Soyinka 8). The writer Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed by the military government in 1995 as a result of his campaigns on behalf of the Ogoni people. These authors may have been subjected to such extreme punishment because of their literary standing, which amplified their dissenting voices. In India, Salman Rushdie was attacked for Midnight’s Children (1980), in which he touches on Indira Gandhi’s premiership, and in Pakistan his novel Shame (1983), an allegorical satire of the nation’s political history, was banned. While it did not extinguish censorship, the development of an international rights-based discourse of free speech at least created a framework within which writers could defend their work and that of their colleagues. Organizations including International PEN, Amnesty International (founded 1961), and Index on Censorship (founded 1972) mobilized large communities of writers and human rights advocates to ensure that
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no writer languished in prison unnoticed or unsupported. However, the attempt of such international NGOs to define and uphold global standards of free speech encountered a series of major obstacles. Moral relativists questioned whether a set of rights developed in western Europe and North America in a particular historical context can have universal validity. Some have suggested that rights embody a form of Anglo-American individualism that corrodes the more collectivist identity of other cultures. Others have argued that rights must reflect a specific social contract entered into by citizens of a particular state, and cannot be supranational. These broadly relativist critiques have developed alongside some specific religious challenges. In Canada, a movement led by Christian fundamentalists campaigned for Margaret Laurence’s novel The Diviners (1974) to be removed from the school syllabus in a number of counties because of its sexual content. These attempts were largely unsuccessful but they provoked a national debate on the limits of free speech in which even Laurence herself concluded that there may be grounds for censorship in the interests of protecting children from obscenity: “It is not enough for citizens to dismiss our obscenity laws as inadequate and outdated” (Cohen 88). The Laurence case revealed a growing rupture between faith-based groups and the discourse of universal rights, which reached its apotheosis on February 14, 1989, when Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie, urging Muslim believers around the world to seek his death and that of anyone associated with the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses (1988). Rushdie was immediately ushered into hiding by the British government. His Norwegian publisher was attacked, however, and his Japanese translator killed by fanatics. The Muslim Council of Britain sought to bring a private blasphemy prosecution against Rushdie, which failed because the court ruled that the English blasphemy law only protected adherents of the Church of England. However, Rushdie’s barrister, Geoffrey Robertson QC, showed that the alleged blasphemies were either the delusions of a fictional character whose mind is unbalanced, or notions that were familiar to Muslim scholars. Rushdie has described the attack on The Satanic Verses as “part of a broader,
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global assault on writers, artists, and fundamental freedoms” (Appignanesi 2005, 8). In response, it has been said that “Islam is a religion of duties, and that the concept of rights, especially of fundamental rights, is foreign to the Sharia” (Kamali 1). The scholarly debate about the relationship between Islam and fundamental rights has run alongside a set of more violent confrontations between imaginative authors and religious groups in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. When Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane (2003) was published in the United Kingdom, she was attacked by a group of Bangladeshi Britons with global links. Her novel portrays a young Bangladeshi woman who is transported from Sylhet to London’s Brick Lane, where she eventually shakes off the shackles of her unhappy arranged marriage and finds her own place. Ali was attacked by members of the Brick Lane’s Sylheti community, who accused her of a patronizing colonial attitude in her portrayal of the rural Sylhetis of the novel. Germaine Greer applauded their attempts to shut down production of the film of the novel on Brick Lane itself in 2006, arguing that the “community has the moral right to keep the film-makers out” (Greer 24). Reflecting on the fate of her novel and the film, Ali has described the new “economy of outrage” (M. Ali 4), in which groups and individuals capitalize on perceived insults to attract interest. The playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti has similarly deplored the fate of her play, Behzti, which was removed from the stage by the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 2005. Rushdie, Ali, and Bhatti were not censored by the British state, yet each suffered verbal or physical intimidation as a result of their work. The state support offered to these writers has been uneven. Whereas the British government in 1989 offered Rushdie immediate and unconditional protection, Fiona Mactaggart, the Home Office minister responsible, failed to condemn violent protesters who closed down the production of Behzti in Birmingham. The combination of religious and relativist critiques has left the human right to free speech fragile and vulnerable to further erosion. New religious-hatred legislation has put the British government’s aspiration for community cohesion at odds with its commitment to universal speech rights. By seeking to criminalize
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incitement to religious hatred, even in the context of a novel such as The Satanic Verses, the government signaled its support for forms of censorship that go beyond Wells’s immediate harm principle; the law sought to close down the space for vigorous debate and the exchange of information and ideas. Writers in South Asia, the Middle East, and western Europe have all been persecuted on the grounds of “offense,” a loose category which privileges the feelings of the supposed victim over the right of the speaker or writer to express ideas or to contribute to public debate or understanding. Some writers have responded by acknowledging their own practice of self-censorship. Others have faced up to the new challenge, taking the line that the best response to writing is more writing; in Rushdie’s words, “Human beings understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the unsayable; not by bowing the knee, whether to gods or to men” (Rushdie 4). While the practice of censorship in the classical sense is rare in the English-speaking world, it remains a relevant term with which to mark the conflict between the individual voice of the writer and the interests of powerful groups. Censors today may be found in law courts, religious institutions, and on the streets. The international human rights framework has struggled to respond to this shift from overtly political censorship to censorship on the grounds of religious sentiment or community cohesion, and writers who explore such forms of cultural censorship are themselves vulnerable to attack. The canon of twentieth-century world fiction in English consists of authors who successfully navigated both the English common law tradition and the publishing codes of their respective times and places. It is a canon of survivors. We will never be able to catalogue the books that went unwritten as a result of self-censorship by writers who were unwilling or unable to make the compromises that were asked of them. It is difficult now to know whether cultural censorship is leaving behind a new generation of ghost books that will haunt their authors’ imaginations but never be published, out of reluctance to offend or fear of the consequences of doing so. SEE ALSO: Censorship and the Novel (BIF); Humor and Satire (WF); Modernist
Fiction (BIF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ali, A. (1994). Introduction: The raison d’^etre of Twilight in Delhi. In Twilight in Delhi. New York: New Directions, pp. xi–xxi Ali, M. (2007). The Outrage Economy. Guardian, review section, pp. 4–6 (Oct. 24). Allott, A. J. (ed.) (1993). Inked Over, Ripped Out: Burmese Storytellers and the Censors. New York: PEN American Center. Appignanesi, L. (ed.) (1989). The Rushdie File. London: Fourth Estate. Appignanesi, L. (ed.) (2005). Free Expression is No Offence. London: Penguin. Arnold, A. J. (2001). A History of Literature in the Caribbean, vol. 2. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Barendt, E. (2005). Freedom of Expression, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barrier, N. G. (1974). Banned: Controversial Literature and Political Control in British India 1907–1947. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Coetzee, J. M. (1996). Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cohen, M. (2001). Censorship in Canadian Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Greer, G. (2006). Reality Bites. Guardian, p. 24 (July 24). Hart, R. (1999). Towards Decolonization: Political, Labor and Economic Developments in Jamaica 1938–1945. Kingston: University Press of the West Indies. Index on Censorship (1972–present). International PEN. (1948). International PEN Charter. At www.internationalpen.org.uk/go/about-us/ charter, accessed Nov. 24, 2009. Kamali, M. H. (1997). Freedom of Expression in Islam, rev. edn. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society. Karolides, N. J., Bald, M., & Soba, D. B. (eds.) (2005). 120 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature. New York: Checkmark. Mais, R. (1981). The Hills Were Joyful Together [1953]. London: Heinemann. Popescu, L., & Seymour-Jones, C. (eds.) (2007). Another Sky: Voices of Conscience from Around the World. London: Profile. Robertson, G., & Nicol, A. (2007). Media Law, 5th edn. London: Sweet and Maxwell. Rushdie, S. (1990). In Good Faith. London: Granta. Sorabjee, S. J. (1976). Law of Press Censorship in India. Bombay: N. M. Tripathi. Soyinka, W. (1972). The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka. London: Rex Collings.
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United Nations (1948). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At www.un.org/en/documents/ udhr/, accessed Nov. 24, 2009. United Nations (1976). International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. At www2.ohchr.org/ english/law/ccpr.htm/, accessed Nov. 24, 2009. Wells, H. G. (1940). The New World Order. London: Secker and Warburg.
Chandra, Vikram MARIA-SABINA DRAGA ALEXANDRU
Vikram Chandra belongs to the younger generation of contemporary non-resident Indian authors writing in English. His fiction combines the South Asian storytelling tradition with a different kind of dynamic textuality inspired by the flexible patterns of the Internet. A postmodern author influenced by John Barth and Donald Barthelme, and supported through graduate school by work as a computer programmer, Chandra writes fiction in which oral storytelling and computing, history, and invention come together. Chandra was born in New Delhi on July 23, 1961 and completed his university schooling in the United States. As a film student at Columbia University, he came across the autobiography of the Indo-British Colonel James “Sikander” Skinner, a legendary nineteenthcentury soldier, and Skinner’s life became the inspiration for his award-winning first novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995). The novel relies on Chandra’s belief that “all stories have in them the seeds of other stories” (1995, 113–14) and makes conscious use of the self-generating quality of traditional Indian storytelling. The novel is rich in cinematic imagery and draws on the Arabian Nights through its narrative frame and motif of storytelling for survival. The main narrators are Sanjay, a white monkey who, being shot, regains human consciousness from a previous life, and Abhay, an American-returned Indian student who fails to readjust to Indian realities. To postpone his death, Sanjay, supported by the Hindu protectors of storytellers Hanuman and Ganesha, signs a contract with the death god Yama to tell stories that will entertain a demanding audience of story-loving children. As the stories gain a life of their own, growing from each other like tree
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branches, the interchange between storyteller and audience, maintained through the magic word “Listen,” assumes greater significance than the plot. Eventually, Sanjay cannot be saved, but the storytelling process continues through Abhay. Chandra’s second book, Love and Longing in Bombay (1998), is a sequence of five stories (like the traditional Indian collection the Panchatantra), some of which were previously published in the New Yorker. Whereas Red Earth presented features of magic realism that encouraged comparisons with Salman Rushdie, the stories here are mostly realist in style. They are told in a city bar called the “Fisherman’s Rest” by Subramaniam, a retired civil servant. Once again the word “listen” keeps the audience connected as each story explores one key concept in Sanskrit philosophy, indicated by the story titles: “Dharma” (moral duty), “Shakti” (the divine feminine principle), “Kama” (love), “Artha” (purpose, cause, reason, meaning), and “Shanti” (inner peace). The short story “Kama” – a meditation on the transitoriness of love and the ubiquitousness of death – features the Sikh police inspector Sartaj Singh, one of Chandra’s favorite characters and the protagonist of Sacred Games (2006). Sacred Games is Chandra’s bestselling book to date. It is a 900-page detective novel about the Bombay underworld, which Chandra began researching while writing Love and Longing in Bombay. This world of policemen, criminals, and beggars is shown as an alternative universe ruled by the same principles written down by “the man upstairs,” Chandra’s name for God (see Alexandru 2005, 15). As such, detective investigation becomes an effective path toward a deeper understanding of the world. Sartaj Singh, the only Sikh policeman in Bombay (whose religion binds him to a life of modesty and sainthood, not really compatible with the corruption necessary to survive as a Bombay detective), explores life retrospectively, starting with the death of the crime lord Ganesh Gaitonde, whom Sartaj is lucky enough to find, only to see him commit suicide. Gaitonde returns as a narrator whose perspective overlaps Sartaj’s in a complex game in which good and evil are relative concepts that often overlap. The personal lives of other characters from the real and virtual worlds of business, finance, cinema, television, and crime are caught in an interlocking pattern of public violence. While
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Sacred Games, unlike Red Earth, focuses on plot, it is actually on a different, transcendent level of meaning that the many events in this epic thriller gather significance, as the word “sacred” in the title suggests. An author whose popularity is on the rise, Chandra is faithful to a nomadic life-pattern that matches his characters’ positioning in a continuous process of becoming. He lives in Oakland, California with his wife and daughter, and teaches creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley; yet every year he spends some time in Bombay, still his main source of inspiration. SEE ALSO: Barth, John (AF); Barthelme, Donald (AF); Detective/Crime Fiction (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF); Rushdie, Salman (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Alexandru, M.-S. (2005). Virtual Reality on Infinite Bandwidth: Vikram Chandra Interviewed by MariaSabina Alexandru. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 40(2), 5–21. Alexandru, M.-S. D. (2008a). Alternatives to the Novel Form: Oral Storytelling and Internet Patterns in Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 43(3), 45–60. Alexandru, M.-S. D. (2008b). Performance, Performativity and Nomadism in Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain. Comparative Literature Studies, 45(1), 23–39. Chandra, V. (1995). Red Earth and Pouring Rain. London: Faber and Faber. Chandra, V. (1997). Eternal Don. New Yorker, pp. 130–3 (June 23 and 30). Chandra, V. (1998). Love and Longing in Bombay. London: Faber and Faber. Chandra, V. (2000). The Cult of Authenticity: India’s Cultural Commissars Worship “Indianness” Instead of Art. Boston Review. At www.bostonreview.net/ BR25.1/chandra.html, accessed Nov. 20, 2008. Chandra, V. (2006). Sacred Games. London: Faber and Faber. Chandra, V. (2008). Vikram Chandra Home Page. At www.vikramchandra.com, accessed Oct. 10, 2008. Fadem, M. (2000). Vikram Chandra and the Sea of Stories: Red Earth and Pouring Rain. Monsoon
Magazine. At www.monsoonmag.com/reviews/ author_vc.html, accessed Oct. 10, 2008. Ganapathy-Dore, G. (1996). The Story-Teller’s Voice in Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain. Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 19(1), 102–110. Levasseur, J., & Rabalais, K. (2001). Interview with Vikram Chandra. Glimmer Train Stories, 40, 160–74. Rollason, C. (2003). The Storyteller in the Information Age: Vikram Chandra’s Entwining Narratives. At www.seikilos.com.ar/Chandra_en.pdf, accessed Nov. 30, 2008. Teverson, A. (2002) Vikram Chandra in Conversation. Wasafiri, 37, 5–7.
Chaudhuri, Amit FERNANDO GALVAN
Amit Chaudhuri achieved public and critical acclaim as a novelist in the last decade of the twentieth century. He is the author of five novels and a short story collection, as well as poetry, criticism, and reviews. His first two novels received important literary prizes in Britain: A Strange and Sublime Address (1991) won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Eurasia), having also been shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize; and Afternoon Raag (1993) was recognized with the Encore Prize and the Southern Arts Literature Prize. Freedom Song (1998) and A New World (2000) have been successful in the US and India: Freedom Song received the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, and A New World the 2002 Sahitya Akademi Award, India’s highest honor for a single book. However, his confessed vocation has always been that of a poet, singer, and musician, and he has published St. Cyril Road and Other Poems and an academic monograph on D. H. Lawrence. As a musician, Chaudhuri is trained in Indian classical singing but has also been influenced by rock music. He has performed with his group in India and in several European countries, and in 2007 released a CD entitled This Is Not Fusion. Born on May 15, 1962 in Calcutta into a prosperous, middle-class family, Chaudhuri grew up in Bombay where he was educated in an intellectual atmosphere and learned to appreciate the artistic achievements of Bengali culture. Chaudhuri has acknowledged his literary debt to
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and admiration for Rabindranath Tagore, Jibanananda Das, Bibhuti Bhusan Bandyopadhyay, and the film director Satyajit Ray. He moved to Britain in 1983, reading English at University College London and later completing a doctorate on Lawrence’s poetry at Balliol College, Oxford. He returned to Calcutta, where he lives part of the year with his wife and daughter, although he has also taught at British, European, and American universities. In 2007 he was appointed professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia. Given his interest in poetry and music, his novels and collection of short stories, Real Time (2002), are not surprisingly marked by a highly lyrical tone. For many readers, his first four novels are the works of a miniaturist: collections of poetic notes rather than stories with well-developed characters or actions. A Strange and Sublime Address presents a lyrical evocation of childhood through Sandeep, a boy from Bombay who spends summer holidays with relatives in Calcutta. Although there are passing references to Indian social and political realities, the dominant effect is of personal melancholy, with epiphanies happening to the young hero as he goes through adolescent initiation rites. Afternoon Raag is written in a similar autobiographical and nostalgic mood, depicting the life of a young man who has left India to study at Oxford. There are many details in common between the anonymous first-person narrator of this novel and the boy Sandeep: the magical atmosphere and the affectionate picture of his parents, particularly his mother. The novel is built around the anonymous male character, and each chapter is almost an independent lyrical picture or tableau vivant of memories, evocations, or feelings: the narrator’s recollections of his childhood, the noise and traffic of Bombay and Calcutta streets, the smells of Indian food, the colors of Indian garments. Homesickness, nostalgia, and ambivalence about belonging to both India and England permeate the narration. With Freedom Song and A New World Chaudhuri left solipsism behind. In Freedom Song he depicts the social, economic, and religious unrest of Calcutta in 1993, presenting characters from two families, of different ages and professions, against the backdrop of Hindu–Muslim confrontation. A New World narrates the return home to Calcutta of Jayojit, a writer recently divorced in
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America, and his son. Both must come to terms with grandparents and their traditional life in the overheated flat they share during their summer holidays. But if the topics differ from the first two books, Chaudhuri’s narrations are not sociological or politically inspired, and the dreamy and evocative atmosphere of his previous novels persists here. The Immortals (2009) is much longer than the previous novels, although the lyrical and meditative tone and the musical resonances are still predominant. It presents a realistic, psychological portrait of everyday urban India (mainly 1970s and 1980s Bombay), focusing on three middleclass characters connected through classical Indian music. Western culture is never completely absent, but nineteenth-century Bengali and Hindi modernist artistic traditions dominate. Chaudhuri’s cultural and political views of India (very unlike those of Indian writers such as Salman Rushdie) are evident in his internationally published reviews and articles, collected in two volumes: Small Orange Flags (2003b) and Clearing a Space (2008). The introductory essays in his edition of The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature (2001) are an excellent source of his ideas on Indian writing. SEE ALSO: Black British Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Lawrence, D.H. (BIF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF); Rushdie, Salman (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Chaudhuri, A. (1991). A Strange and Sublime Address. London: Heinemann. Chaudhuri, A. (1993). Afternoon Raag. London: Heinemann. Chaudhuri, A. (1998). Freedom Song. London: Picador. Chaudhuri, A. (2000). A New World. London: Picador. Chaudhuri, A. (2002). Real Time: Stories and a Reminiscence. London: Picador. Chaudhuri, A. (2003a). D. H. Lawrence and “Difference”: Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present. Oxford: Clarendon. Chaudhuri, A. (2003b). Small Orange Flags. Calcutta: Seagull. Chaudhuri, A. (2005). St. Cyril Road and Other Poems. New Delhi: Penguin.
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Chaudhuri, A. (2008). Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture. Oxford: Peter Lang. Chaudhuri, A. (2009). The Immortals. London: Picador. Chaudhuri, A. (ed.) (2001). The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. London: Picador. Chaudhuri, A. (ed.) (2008). Memory’s Gold: Writings on Calcutta. New Delhi: Penguin. Galvan, F. (2003). Amit Chaudhuri’s Would-Be Writers: A Joycean Rewriting. In J. Simons, J. M. Tejedor Cabrera, M. Estevez Saa, & R. I. Garcıa Leon (eds.), Silverpowdered Olivetrees: Reading Joyce in Spain. Sevilla: Secretariado de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Sevilla, pp. 83–90. Galvan, F. (2004). Amit Chaudhuri with Fernando Galvan. In S. Nasta (ed.), Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk. London: Routledge, pp. 216–28. Shukla, S., & Shukla, A. (eds.) (2004). The Novels of Amit Chaudhuri: An Exploration in the Alternative Tradition. New Delhi: Sarup.
Children’s and Young Adult Fiction CLARE BRADFORD
Fiction for children and young adults necessarily reflects the social, cultural, and political contexts in which it is produced and received. This field of literature is deeply implicated within processes and practices of socialization, since throughout the world children’s books are used extensively in family and school settings to introduce children to cultural values. While some children’s texts explicitly advocate ideological positions (such as literature dealing with the environmental effects of global warming), others implicitly propose what is desirable and undesirable in human behavior. The language and visual images of novels and picture books are imbued with values. In some nations, such as China, state systems of censorship control what books are imported and published; Chinese writers for children have long been regarded as “engineers of children’s souls.” It should not be imagined, however, that censorship does not exist in Western countries. Very often authors engage in processes of self-censorship, avoiding or moderating themes and language that may decrease the appeal of their books to mainstream audiences. Much children’s fiction seeks to
align readers with protagonists, either through first-person narration (particularly common in young adult fiction) or by way of focalization through the perspective of a character. This is a powerful way of inducting readers into the world of the text. The term “children’s literature” is generally understood to refer to books for children from birth to the early teenage years, while the term “young adult” (YA) is now widely used of work for readers from the ages of around 12 to 18 (although there is enormous variation in the interests and reading abilities of young people). Over the twentieth century the children’s book industry developed rapidly, and it now constitutes a key component of publishing generally. At the same time, especially since the 1970s, research in children’s literature increased in volume and quality, and courses in children’s literature were introduced in many universities and colleges. National literatures vary considerably in the extent and scope of their fiction for children and young adults. Throughout the postcolonial world, twentieth-century literature in English has been shaped by histories of slavery, colonization, and decolonization. In some countries, such as South Africa, children’s books are published in several languages, with English-language books comprising the largest component. In India, in contrast, fiction in English comprises a relatively small proportion of published works. There is something of a tension between publishing in English and in other languages in bilingual and multilingual nations – between, on the one hand, the legitimate interests of readers who seek reading material in their first language, and on the other, the power and influence of global publishing in English. In the heyday of European imperialism, colonizing powers sought to impose European languages and cultures on colonized peoples in order to reduce the influence of indigenous traditions and cultural practices. In the field of children’s literature this process played out through the introduction of canonical European texts and pedagogical materials. The effects of these colonial strategies are evident well into the twentieth century, in the high status attributed to canonical European books in many former colonies, and in the slow beginnings of local publishing for children. Rather than investing in work produced by local writers, publishers have often focused on
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translating English and American texts into local languages. Displays of children’s literature in bookshops in China, India, and Taiwan, for instance, are dominated by translations of Harry Potter titles and English and American fiction. In the West Indies, Caribbean children’s literature in English did not begin to develop until the 1960s, when the Jamaican novelist Andrew Salkey published fiction for children, using a combination of English and Creole (a language formed through the combination of two or more languages) not merely for the dialogue of protagonists but also for narration – as his contemporary Sam Selvon of Trinidad had begun doing in his adult fiction in the 1950s. This strategy, common across contemporary writing by authors from minority cultures, avoids suggesting a hierarchy in which narration is rendered in standard English and Creole (or a non-standard form of English) is used by characters, so drawing attention to the fact that standard English is the normative form. By using Creole in narration as well as dialogue, Salkey suggested that the old hierarchies of colonizer/colonized no longer applied. Themes of immigration, displacement, and hybrid identities dominate Caribbean children’s literature, in line with the lived experience of Caribbean people, many descended from African slaves, who have sought new lives in Britain and other countries. Indeed, most Caribbean writers for children live and publish outside their countries of origin; such authors include Valerie Bloom, John Agard, Jean d’Costa, C. Everard Palmer, Grace Nichols, and James Berry. Berry, for example, left Jamaica at 17 for the United States, eventually migrating to Britain where he has published highly regarded poetry and fiction. His short story collection A Thief in the Village (1987) is narrated from the perspective of children growing up in Jamaica, and examines the ways the experience of slavery has shaped Caribbean identities. The poetry of Berry, Nichols, and Agard draws on Caribbean Creole and reggae rhythms in subtle and inventive ways that often talk back to mainstream British culture and its treatment of cultural difference. Secondgeneration authors of West Indian ancestry include Malorie Blackman, whose “Noughts and Crosses” YA sequence, beginning with Noughts and Crosses (2001), treats race relations through fantasy. In the dystopian, near-future setting of
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these novels, the black-skinned Crosses are the dominant race, exercising power over the white-skinned noughts, former slaves who are denied access to economic and educational opportunities. Across the Indian subcontinent, publishers have generally produced children’s texts in local languages, with some exceptions such as Adventures of a Nepali Frog (1996), by the Nepalese author Kanak Mani Dixit. In Sri Lanka, several works in Sinhala and Tamil have been translated into English, such as Sybil Wettasinghe’s popular The Umbrella Thief (1956). In the Republic of India, Hindi is the dominant language, followed by Bengali; Indian English is the second language of millions of Indian citizens. Following Indian independence in 1947, publishers began to produce books for children in Hindi and English, as well as in the languages of the various states of the republic. The Children’s Book Trust, founded in 1957, publishes and promotes indigenous children’s literature. In the absence of a statefunded library system, however, locally published books do not have a ready market, and publishers tend to focus on the production of textbooks rather than fiction. Ruskin Bond is an important figure in the development of English-language children’s literature in India. His early books The Room on the Roof (1956), Grandfather’s Private Zoo (1967), and Angry River (1972) introduced children and young adults to contemporary stories in Indian settings, and his output includes short stories, poetry, novels, and retellings of traditional stories. In general, Indian children’s literature in English has avoided dealing with contentious topics. However, the independent publishing houses Tara, Tulika, and Young Zubaan have produced picture books and novels that are inventive in form and progressive in content. Sirish Rao’s Real Men Don’t Pick Primroses (On an Alpine-Style Ascent) (1998), published by Tara, parodically treats a climbing expedition in the Himalayas, examining the various versions of masculinity represented by the members of a group of young climbers. Salman Rushdie’s only work for children, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), proceeds from the young protagonist’s question “What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” (20) to a self-reflexive narrative that addresses the interplay of language and power in a repressive society where stories are prohibited.
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The rich traditions of Confucian literature, epic tales, and folklore comprise the foundations of Chinese children’s literature. At the beginning of the twentieth century many Western works were translated for Chinese readers: Aesop’s Fables, the folktale collections of the Brothers Grimm, and the Arabian Nights. Following the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, children’s literature was deployed to train readers in the principles of Marxist-Leninist philosophy. In modern China comic books are widely consumed and inexpensive; relatively few books are available in English, but many Western books are translated in addition to fiction from Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Modern Japanese children’s literature, too, is heavily influenced by translated works, but as in China comic books (manga) are immensely popular and have given rise to animations such as Miyazaki Hayao’s Spirited Away (2001) and Princess Mononoke (1997). Korean children’s literature developed from the magazines published in the first half of the twentieth century, with a marked increase in publishing since the 1980s. In Taiwan, translated works dominate the market, although local authors and artists are now beginning to produce works located in Taiwanese culture, such as the picture book Guji Guji (2004) by Chen Chih-Yuan. As in China, the countries of Southeast Asia tend to regard children’s literature as a means of propagating cultural and national values. In Malaysia, for instance, agendas of nation building are served through narratives in which children of different cultures work and play together. English serves as a lingua franca in this multilingual nation, and publishing in English favors stories about slightly naughty or selfish children who learn from their mistakes within conventional family settings where (unlike social realities in modern Malaysia) mothers are located firmly in the domestic sphere. The values of simple country life are expounded in many stories, often suggesting a nostalgic flight from a technologized modernity. In the Philippines, the continuing influence of American culture is visible in the dominance of imported American books for children, while in other Southeast Asian countries (including Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia) most children’s books are published in local languages.
Children’s literature in Africa has been shaped by histories of colonization and migration. Following the “scramble for Africa” late in the nineteenth century, European powers dominated the continent until African nations achieved independence around the middle of the twentieth century. English is used as the language of instruction in Namibia and Zambia, and imported books in English dominate the market. In South Africa, fiction for children is published in English and Afrikaans, with a small number of texts in African languages. One of the most influential early twentieth-century South African books for children is Sir Percy FitzPatrick’s Jock of the Bushveld (1907), a novel of pioneer life that celebrates the friendship between a boy adventurer and his dog. A notable feature of South African children’s literature in the first half of the twentieth century is the large number of collections of folktales from indigenous cultures that were translated into English. As they were translated, these narratives were converted into Western forms familiar to English-speaking readers, losing most of the narrative and linguistic features that distinguished them as oral stories. Between 1948 and 1994, under the apartheid system enforced by the National Party government, a system of censorship monitored all children’s books published in or imported to South Africa. In the 1980s children’s texts began to address the racism of the apartheid laws explicitly as authors such as Jenny Seed, Dianne Case, Lesley Beake, and Lawrence Bransby incorporated black characters into their novels. Nevertheless, most black and colored people were represented through the perspective of white protagonists, who typically gained insight or empathy through friendships with non-whites. It remains the case that few black South Africans publish fiction for children. In the former British settler colonies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, publishing for children during the first half of the twentieth century was modeled on British texts and styles, with an eye to the English market. In these three nations the production of children’s literature began in earnest after World War II, with a sharp increase from the 1970s. In Australia, Mary Grant Bruce’s 15 Billabong books, which commenced in 1910 with A Little Bush Maid (1910) and concluded with Billabong Riders in 1942, tracked changing attitudes toward Australia’s relationship to
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C H I L D R E N ’S A N D Y O U N G A D U L T F I C T I O N
Britain and toward its non-white others. These novels are set on a cattle station and trace the progress of Norah, the “little bush maid,” and her brother Jim. Whereas the first Billabong books treat the Aboriginal farm worker, Black Billy, and the Chinese gardener, Lee Wing, as comical and stereotyped figures, the last books represent the two as respected members of the community. Nevertheless, Black Billy and Lee Wing are still marginal to the Linton family and occupy a lowly position in hierarchies of class. In New Zealand, too, fiction published in the first half of the twentieth century promoted national mythologies of the “typical” New Zealander, with a focus on novels dealing with the lives of children living on sheep stations. Esther Glen’s Six Little New Zealanders (1917) constituted a response to Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians (1894), similarly claiming a national identity distinct from that of what was still referred to at this time as “the mother country.” The Canadian equivalent is L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908), which is located in a rural setting on Prince Edward Island. Anne is an orphan whose quest for a home is metonymic of the many Canadian texts, up to the present time, that feature characters searching for a sense of belonging. Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are nations of immigrants, and their early twentieth-century children’s texts negotiate the anxieties of newcomers to a strange and sometimes hostile land. Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand children’s books since World War II have been markedly influenced by feminism and by the impact of multiculturalism on national identities. Since the 1980s indigenous and mainstream publishers have produced fiction by Aboriginal and Maori writers, with an emphasis on picture books. In Australia, the distinguished picture book Do Not Go Around the Edges (1990), by Daisy Utemorrah and Pat Torres, works dialogically to suggest the complexity of Utemorrah’s life and the effects of colonialism on individuals and clans. A key Aboriginal text in Canada is Beatrice Culleton Mosionier’s In Search of April Raintree (1983), rewritten for young readers as April Raintree (1984). This novel traces the identity formation of two Metis (mixed race) sisters and addresses the systems of power and control that limit the girls’ agency and construct them as
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marginal to mainstream culture. In New Zealand, Gavin Bishop’s The House that Jack Built (1999) presents a revisionary version of the colonial past as the land itself encourages Maori to rise up against the British invaders. The New Zealand author Margaret Mahy is the country’s preeminent children’s writer, having produced picture books, junior novels, and YA novels. Mahy’s fiction, set in contemporary New Zealand, often plays with magic-realist elements to suggest the irruption of ancient mythologies into the modern world. Among her novels are The Haunting (1982) and The Changeover (1984). The author-illustrator Lynley Dodd has achieved international success with her picture books based on the adventures of the canine hero Hairy Maclary and his friends, beginning with Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy (1983). Post-disaster fiction has been a dominant genre in New Zealand YA literature, including novels by Maurice Gee, Jack Lasenby, Gaylene Gordon, and Caroline Macdonald. In Australia, Shaun Tan has published a number of innovative picture books, including The Lost Thing (2000) and The Red Tree (2001), but his most ambitious work is the graphic novel The Arrival (2006), which addresses questions about belonging, cultural plurality, and identity pertinent to refugee and diasporic populations. Similar questions have been raised by YA authors including Sophie Masson, Matt Zurbo, and Melina Marchetta, some of whom are secondgeneration descendants of migrants to Australia, who have contested national mythologies of the “fair go” by pointing to the marginalization of non-Anglo migrants. Robert Munsch is the best-known Canadian children’s author, having published over 40 picture books including The Paper Bag Princess (1980) and Love You Forever (1986). Over the last two decades fiction by writers of color has foregrounded the experience of children who negotiate the spaces between cultures, notably Rachna Gilmore’s series of picture books featuring Gita, a young girl of Indian heritage. These books offer children of color the experience of narrative subjectivity by telling stories from the perspective of minority populations; at the same time they encourage children of the dominant culture to appreciate and understand difference.
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SEE ALSO: Censorship and Fiction (WF); Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (BIF); Indigenous Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bradford, C. (2001). Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children’s Literature. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Bradford, C. (2008). Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Desai, C. M. (2006). National Identity in a Multicultural Society: Malaysian Children’s Literature in English. Children’s Literature in Education, 37(2), 163–84. Farquhar, M. (1998). Children’s Literature in China: From Lu Xun to Mao Zedong. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Hunt, P. (ed.) (2004). International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Inggs, J. (2001). Bringing the Strands of History Together: Myth and Legend in Contemporary South African Children’s Literature. South African Journal of Library and Information Science, 67(1), 1–7. James, C. (2005). From Orature to Literature in Jamaican and Trinidadian Children’s Folk Traditions. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 30(2), 164–78. Jenkins, E. (2006). National Character in South African English Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge. Khorana, M. (ed.) (1988). Critical Perspectives on African Children’s and Young Adult Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Khorana, M. (2003). The Life and Works of Ruskin Bond. Westport, CT: Praeger. Pink, H. (2008). Magical Realism in Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Journal of Children’s Literature, 2(2), 78–93. Reimer, M. (ed.) (2008). Discourses of Children’s Literature in Canada. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Rushdie, S. (1990). Haroun and the Sea of Stories. New York: Penguin. Sands-O’Connor, K. (2007). Soon Come Home to This Island: West Indians in British Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge. Stephens, J. (1992). Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction. London: Longman. Viswanathan, G. (1998). Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Williams, S. (2003). Constructing a National Identity through the Adventures of a Nepali Frog. Bookbird, 41(3), 36–9.
The City in Fiction RUVANI RANASINHA
Twentieth-century fictional representations of the city from writers of the postcolonial world both appropriate and modify the urban themes of Euro-American literature, where the city is often defined in relation to the country. In colonial and postcolonial contexts, the archetypal rural/urban divide is sometimes mapped onto an international division between the colonial periphery and the metropolitan center. If V. S. Naipaul’s portrayal of Port of Spain, Trinidad, as a colonial backwater in A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) reinforces these paradigms, then his depiction of the constrained lives of male immigrants in decaying London in The Mimic Men (1967) destabilizes them. Salman Rushdie’s heightened evocation of Bombay’s linguistic verve, vitality, and metropolitan excitement in Midnight’s Children (1981) presents a further challenge. Urban representations from the “Third World” often underscore the uneven development of urban and rural areas, as in “the city and the veld” writings of Doris Lessing from Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. In Australian literature, Patrick White’s novels interrogate the polarized relationship between the city and the outback. White’s indictment of urban culture depicts Sydney and suburbia as sites of confusion and danger; his novel The Vivisector (1970) laments Sydney’s evolution from village to city within a lifetime. David Malouf’s Johnno (1975) and New Zealander Ian Wedde’s Symmes Hole (1986) express disaffection for the modern, uniform metropolis in terms of a resistance to fragmentation. However, postcolonial and postmodern celebrations of the city often overlap: the heterogeneous, cosmopolitan, fragmented, and protean cities that postcolonial writers like Rushdie brought to the fore are equally central to the analysis of postmodernity, where the city emblematizes distinctive conditions of contemporary life. In The Satanic Verses (1988) and subsequent novels, cities like Bombay, London, and New
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York are places where identities constantly change. Postcolonial Bombay and multicultural London and New York in Rushdie’s fiction share potentially transformative powers created by the constant contact of different languages and people; they generate newness through hybrid combinations, and emerge as sites where authentic traditions or any claims to Western superiority are destabilized. Bombay serves as a place where different cultures mix and the divided nation becomes defined by heterogeneity and cosmopolitanism: in other words, where India meets the world. In The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999), it is connected to global popular culture. In urban fiction from around the postcolonial world, the city is often conceptualized as a troubled marker of modernity, a space where discourses of tradition and modernity are negotiated in terms of such dialectics as “the home and the world” and spiritualism and secularism. The former binary is mapped onto representations of the village in terms of cultural selfhood, and the city in terms of modernity. This is particularly evident in early Indian writing in English, particularly Raja Rao’s work and R. K. Narayan’s many novels set in the imaginary South Indian city of Malgudi, peopled with characters from all walks of life. The more recent urban portraits of Anita Desai (Delhi in Clear Light of Day, 1980) and Amitav Ghosh (Calcutta, Dhaka, and London in The Shadow Lines, 1988) underscore the contradictions in the promise of modernity; Amit Chaudhuri’s fictional Bombay in Freedom Song (1998), as a symbol of disorienting modernity, compares unfavorably with Calcutta. The city may also be rendered as a palimpsest where history and memory are written into “local” and “global” urban culture. In Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), for instance, Bombay is a city where past successful intercultural exchange is overlaid (and thus covered up) by contemporary ethnic division. The novel emphasizes Bombay’s myriad connections in time as well as culture, drawing a parallel between the contemporary destruction of the secularist ideal in the communal politics of 1990s Bombay, and the sixteenth-century Catholic reconquista of Moorish Spain, where conjoined Christian, Jewish, and Islamic cultures coexisted. More recently, The Enchantress of Florence (2008) traces the rise and fall of the Mughal city of Fatehpur Sikri.
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Rushdie’s conceptions of Bombay’s heterogeneity and articulation of its minority voices are also defined in relation to his description of Pakistani cities as monologic and insular in Midnight’s Children and Shame (1983). Such constructions are revisited in Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke (2000), a portrait of a fissured, drugfueled subworld of modern Lahore that serves to challenge conventional representation of the orthodox Islamic city. Kamila Shamsie’s novels City by the Sea (1998) and Broken Verses (2005) similarly engage with the lived complexities of Karachi as both lively and dangerous, while emphasizing the way gender, class, and ethnicity determine lives in the city, drawing on Anita Desai’s figuring of the alienation of modern urban life in gendered terms. Rohinton Mistry’s powerful novel A Fine Balance (1995) foregrounds questions of class and social injustice in its mapping of the subterranean, labyrinthine bowels of Bombay’s slums and its depiction of urban penury. Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prizewinning novel The White Tiger (2008) maps Delhi’s social inequality in similar terms. In Africa, John Kiriamiti’s depiction of transitional Kenyan social and economic urban landscapes in My Life in Crime (1984), Meja Mwangi’s record of Nairobi slum life in Kill Me Quick (1973), and Ben Okri’s renderings of Lagos’s urban ghettos in The Famished Road (1991) and Infinite Riches (1999) all show the city to be a site of social chaos, economic desperation, and postcolonial crisis, but also of resilience. In this way, they revisit the concerns of Cyprian Ekwensi in People of the City (1954) and Chinua Achebe in No Longer at Ease (1960). Both novels focus on urban experiences in conveying the challenges facing West African countries on the threshold of independence. The Zimbabwean Yvonne Vera revisits the 1940s in her depiction of female resistance to the patriarchal oppression of township life in Bulawayo in her poetic novel Butterfly Burning (1998); the city is depicted with love and affection as a kind of refuge for its black majority, despite the searing descriptions of violence and squalor. Fictions of South Africa’s formerly apartheid (now aspirant global) cities Johannesburg and Cape Town foreground the racialization of space and the black urban (specifically township) experience in terms of dispossession, repression, social struggle, and protest – as in Nadine Gordimer’s
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Burger’s Daughter (1979) and My Son’s Story (1990), and Achmat Dangor’s short story collection From Riverlea to Parkview (1995), tracing his journey from black township to white suburb. In this regard they may be compared with the vivid portrayals of “invisible” cities as spaces of racial segregation and social protest in African American novels by Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Toni Morrison. Urban “black British” fiction underscores how cities in Britain, notably London, were transformed both demographically and imaginatively by migration, particularly as a consequence of Britain’s imperial legacy, since decolonization began after World War II. Recent studies (Sandhu 2003; Ball 2004; McLeod 2004) explore how black and Asian writers have represented the negotiation of London as imperial or post-imperial urban space. London is ambivalently portrayed as a spiritual home in Trinidadian emigre Sam Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners (1956). His characters’ intimate knowledge of London geographies before they migrate conveys the impact of the colonial project but also serves as a defiant rejoinder to claims they do not belong. Selvon’s novel is pivotal in its representation of a London characterized by racism, segregation, and fear, while simultaneously staking a postcolonial claim of possession; a similar balance between alienation and belonging is achieved in Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990). Naipaul’s mournful narratives of the profound transformation Britain, particularly London, began undergoing in 1950s is juxtaposed with his poignant desire to “find the center,” the London of his literary dreams. In different ways, the early London novels of Selvon and Naipaul register the important shift that occurred in London’s identity in the 1950s as received ideas of race, citizenship, and nationality – of London as a “white city” – began to be dismantled. Indian Kamala Markandaya’s novel The Nowhere Man (1972) offers a muted critique of resurgent neo-imperialism in 1960s London via the rising tide of racism encountered by immigrant protagonist Srinivas. Nigerian Buchi Emecheta’s novel Second-Class Citizen (1974) maps black women onto a cityscape of racism and patriarchy, while the radicalizing of blacks and Asians in London (and other British cities
like Bradford) is captured in Linton Kwesi Johnson’s poetry (Mi Revalueshanary Fren, 2002). Rushdie’s incendiary portrait of “Babylondon” in The Satanic Verses (1988), which simultaneously extols a hybridized postcolonial London, is revisited in Kureishi’s cartography of London in Buddha, with its sustained exposure of London’s underbelly of dereliction and violence, as well as its celebration of the capital’s potential for freedom and self-reinvention – for energizing creativity and multicultural possibilities. Kureishi’s protagonists’ escape from the suburbs to the metropolis is key to their selfdevelopment. These patterns and themes are revisited by younger writers Zadie Smith (White Teeth, 2000) and Gautam Malkani (Londonstani, 2006) in their different versions of multicultural London. Monica Ali’s Bangladeshi East End of London is counterpointed with Dhaka and becomes a world in itself for her protagonist Nasneen in Brick Lane (2003). Similar preoccupations emerge in representations of Canadian cities with different patterns of migration. Mordecai Richler’s large oeuvre centers around Montreal’s Jewish community, while Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of the Lion (1987) focuses on marginalized immigrant communities in Toronto and southern Ontario during the first half of the twentieth century. As he imagines the stories of the immigrants who built the city, the construction of the Bloor Street Viaduct becomes a symbol of Toronto’s optimism and potential. A similar figuring of cosmopolitan immigrant Toronto can be found in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces (1996) and some of Bharati Mukherjee’s Canadian short stories; M. G. Vassanji’s No New Land (1991) is set among an exiled, dispossessed community of Tanzanian Asians in Toronto following political upheaval in Africa. Austin Clarke and Dionne Brand have written notable works on the racism experienced by West Indian immigrants in Toronto. The global city is particularly important to younger diasporic writers such as Hari Kunzru, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Kiran Desai, whose texts and lives straddle cities in America, India, and Britain. Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006) is particularly concerned with the relationship between individuals and increasingly global, corporate capitalist cities, and the spatial interpenetration
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and integration of the First and Third Worlds, but also with the workings of global capital. The depiction of illegal immigrant Biju’s grueling exploitation in a subterranean New York Indian restaurant is contrasted with the different trajectories of the well-heeled Green Card holders, exposing New York’s underbelly and the disparity of Western cities that are “perfectly first world on top, perfectly third-world twenty-two steps down” (23). As a site of history, culture, and memory, the city in world fiction bears witness to its past. Furthermore, as a network of connections the city remains a compelling metaphor to interrogate the intersection (and the complex hierarchies) of race, class, and gender in contemporary constructed spaces. In these ways, the relationship between city and citizen often provides a model for larger national and transnational identities and affiliations. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (AF); London in Fiction (BIF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ball, J. C. (2004). Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Blunt, A., & Rose, G. (eds.) (1994). Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies. New York: Guilford. Desai, K. (2006). The Inheritance of Loss. London: Hamish Hamilton. Edwards, J. D., & Ivison, D. (eds.) (2005). Downtown Canada: Writing Canadian Cities. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Jacobs, J. M. (1996). Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City. London: Routledge. Kurtz, J. R. (1998). Urban Obsessions Urban Fears: The Postcolonial Kenyan Novel. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Lindner, C. (ed.) (2006). Urban Spaces and Cityscapes: Perspectives from Modern and Contemporary Culture. London: Routledge. Massey, D. (1994). Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity.
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McLeod, J. (2004). Post-Colonial London: Re-Writing the Metropolis. London: Routledge. Mehta, S. (2004). Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. London: Knopf. Sandhu, S. (2003). London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City. London: HarperCollins. Williams, R. (1973). The Country and the City. London: Chatto and Windus.
Clarke, Austin STELLA ALGOO-BAKSH
Austin Chesterfield Clarke has been a significant voice in the rise of Canadian and Caribbean literature to international prominence. His novels, short stories, and autobiography transcend the national contexts of their settings, achieving thematic coherence in their persistent probing of marginalization, emasculation, and fractured identity within segments of the African diaspora. In energetic and often witty prose, though with an initial predilection for linear narrative, Clarke targets the inequities and attendant evils of Barbadian colonial life, but he also penetrates the calm surface of Canadian society to explore the social and psychological destitution faced by black West Indian immigrant groups just beginning the struggle, in defiance of white hegemony, to articulate a cultural identity. Born on July 26, 1934 to a working-class family in Barbados, Clarke acquired the values and preferences of a society still immersed in British culture; however, his arrival in Canada in 1955, initially to study at the University of Toronto, shortly intensified his self-awareness as a black man. His association with other black West Indians and his frustrating search for employment after abandoning his studies in 1956 alerted him to what he saw as the liabilities of a black skin in Canada, a racial consciousness sharpened by his immersion in contemporary black American writing, by visits to New York to contact black activists, and, later, by encounters with black American artists and intellectuals. Driven to write, he found inspiration in the foregrounding of peripheral peoples in the work of Samuel Selvon, V. S. Naipaul, George Lamming, and other Caribbean writers. In time, he became
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a more conspicuous participant in mainstream Canadian society, engaging, for example, in newspaper and radio journalism and serving on the Ontario Board of Censors (1983–5) and the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (1988–93). Nevertheless, he has never abandoned the quest for equity for blacks in Canada, involving himself in protest marches, publishing tracts and journalism on race relations in Canada, and helping to launch Toronto’s Caribana Festival to celebrate black West Indian culture and identity. His activism has complemented his fiction’s central theme, the victimization of blacks in white-dominated societies. Clarke’s very first novel, The Survivors of the Crossing (1964), is informed by the us/them polarity characteristic of postcolonial writing. The black Barbadian masses trapped at the bottom of a transitional colonial society live in crippling poverty and despair, with the new black middle class now enjoying political power unable to mediate the divergent interests between the poor and a dominant white elite. Rufus, a plantation laborer, attempts to organize a strike against a white planter but fails. The establishment proves impregnable and the poor remain disenfranchised. This social system, Clarke demonstrates, emasculates the black male by denying him adequate resources to discharge his role as provider for his family. In this context Clarke advances the notion of women as potentially strong and valiant beings. Convinced that black Caribbean and North American writers have not truly represented black women as full characters, he paints Stella and Clementina as courageous figures battling overwhelming odds to promote the well-being of their families. The school and the church are shown as complicit in preserving the status quo by promoting social passivity and the worship of European culture. This layering of white culture over a black psyche induces a divided and denigrated black self and an acceptance of inferiority. In Amongst Thistles and Thorns (1965), Clarke again shows how social institutions produce internally conflicting identities, though he now hints at a more benign alternative. The young Milton seeks out his biological father, who stimulates him through stories about Harlem. The attribution to this New York community of the power of black regeneration is perhaps not surprising since,
as Clarke concedes, he has himself drawn “emotional and psychic energy from Harlem” (Algoo-Baksh 59), and Harlem, in Clarke’s work, repeatedly symbolizes a world of black possibilities. Other novels attempt to recapture the social and psychological realities of colonial life. In The Polished Hoe (2002), the interaction between Mary and the constable Percy as she makes a statement about her murder of Bellfeels, a white plantation manager, offers insights into life in a quintessential colonial society in which blacks are granted little intrinsic value. Mary, for example, while still a young girl, is claimed by Bellfeels as a future sexual possession. The recurrent problem of self-location manifests itself in the son she bears the manager: Wilberforce, educated as a doctor in England, is brimming with English culture but proves neither “white” nor “black.” Clarke insists, too, that the imprint of the colonizing power endures long after constitutional change has begun. The Prime Minister (1977) depicts the frustrations confronted by John Moore, who dreams of creating a new national identity but is thwarted by a morally bankrupt black government still attached to white values, while Proud Empires (1986b) demonstrates how the mixed-race Boy, an aspirant to political leadership, is ill equipped to effect real reform because of his commitment to European values and institutions. An insidious legacy of colonialism, in Clarke’s view, is the preponderance of black men in white skins, men who are incapable of devising measures to foster a distinct black identity. From Clarke’s perspective, the black experience in Canada has in some respects differed little from that in colonial Barbados. The Meeting Point (1967), Storm of Fortune (1973), and The Bigger Light (1975) – which as a trilogy constitute the first comprehensive treatment in fiction of black West Indian life in Canada – censure the country for marginalizing and demeaning new arrivals. Unemployed or locked into low-status jobs, Clarke’s characters inhabit a virtual caste system which inflicts upon them both overt and subtle racism. The maid Bernice, for example, has simply moved from one psychologically debilitating society to another. Furthermore, the crippling impact of racism recurs in the lives of the immigrants’ children. In More (2008),
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Idora negotiates the hazards of discrimination in providing for her son, but the latter succumbs to stereotyping and denial of opportunity, drifting into gangs and crime. As Clarke’s trilogy demonstrates, Canada is no haven for already deracinated subjectivities, since the process of self-location is again a challenge. Symbolized by the admixture of dialect and Standard English in Clarke’s writing, the fractured self reasserts itself: West Indians must determine how much to surrender culturally to accommodate a white society. The complexity of this quest for a satisfying yet serviceable identity is vividly illustrated in The Bigger Light. Boysie, while a laborer in Barbados, has a negative self-image, but his experiences in Canada do little to eliminate this handicap. Allying himself with the white community accomplishes nothing since the ambiguous self that results is untenable, driving him to contemplate life in Harlem as a solution. The issue of black selfhood resurfaces in Clarke’s The Origin of Waves (1997), in which an extended conversation between Tim and John depicts Canada and the United States as alien environments that generate in black immigrants a strong sense of dislocation, and The Question (1999b), in which Malcolm marries a white Canadian in a psychologically frustrating drive to compensate for his blackness. Clarke’s six short story collections further explore his central concerns. Nine Men Who Laughed (1986a), for example, suggests that white racism in Canada, evidenced by its message of black inferiority and cultural inadequacy implicit in the label “immigrant,” has tended to confine individuals to marginal status. At the same time, as in When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks (1971), Clarke recognizes the frequent futility of the immigrants’ reaction to labeling. Some, like Henry in “Give Us This Day: and Forgive Us,” simply accept their assigned status, while others, like Jefferson in “Four Stations in His Circle,” adopt the tastes and values of the dominant society to gain acceptance but achieve only self-hatred and alienation from their peers. Marginalization, of course, is not always passively accepted. Through retention of their dialect, social activity, interracial sexual relationships, and ventures into new areas of employment, the immigrants carve out space for themselves and begin to subvert the entrenched white culture.
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Clarke is careful to suggest, too, that it is not only social forces that erode the black psyche. Several stories in When Women Rule (1985) and Nine Men intimate that women may often contribute to male emasculation. Included here are black women like Alexander’s wife in “On One Leg” and the protagonist’s wife in “Griff!” who humiliate and destroy men, a portrayal that counterbalances Clarke’s other image of women as noble, nurturing, and self-sacrificing. In “The Collector” and “The Discipline,” white women are shown to destroy black men. Since they are often symbolic of Canada in Clarke’s work, white women often reinforce through their actions the theme that Canada, while alluring to blacks, might ultimately mutilate them. In his long writing career, Clarke has not confined himself to fiction. He has published Growing Up Stupid under the Union Jack (1980), a scintillating autobiographical account of his boyhood and adolescent years, A Passage Back Home: A Personal Reminiscence of Samuel Selvon (1994), and Pig Tails ’n Breadfruit: Rituals of Slave Food: A Barbadian Memoir (1999a), which embeds Barbadian recipes into a social and historical context. But his fiction has gained him the greatest recognition. His work has generally been well received by critics, who have been impressed by his sensitivity to the black experience, his skillful rendering of Barbadian dialect, and the exuberance of his narration and characters. Dissenting voices have pointed to weaknesses in characterization and plot, particularly in his early novels. His earlier writing earned him the Casa de las Americas Literary Prize (1980), the Toronto Arts Award for a Lifetime Achievement in Literature (1992), and the W. O. Mitchell Literary Prize (1999). With time, especially in The Polished Hoe and More, Clarke has become an increasingly sophisticated writer more willingly experimenting with dialogue and with complex narrative structures featuring shifts of time and place. The resulting enhancement of his stature as a writer is evident from the success of his Joycean tome, The Polished Hoe, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize as well as two prestigious Canadian awards, the Giller Prize (2002) and the Trillium Book Award (2003). In recognition of his services to literature and/or the community, Clarke has also received the Martin Luther King Junior Award for Excellence in
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Writing (1999), the Barbados National Builder Award (2001), and four honorary doctorates, and he has been invested as a Member of the Order of Canada (1998). SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Lamming, George (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Naipaul, V. S. (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Selvon, Sam (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Algoo-Baksh, S. (1994). Austin C. Clarke: A Biography. Toronto: ECW Press; Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press. Brown, L. (1989). El Dorado and Paradise: Canada and the Caribbean in Austin Clarke’s Fiction. London, ON: University of Western Ontario; Parkersburg: Caribbean. Clarke, A. (1964). The Survivors of the Crossing. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Clarke, A. (1965). Amongst Thistles and Thorns. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Clarke, A. (1967). The Meeting Point. Toronto: Macmillan. Clarke, A. (1971). When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks, rev. edn. Toronto: Anansi. Clarke, A. (1973). Storm of Fortune. Boston: Little, Brown. Clarke, A. (1975). The Bigger Light. Boston: Little, Brown. Clarke, A. (1977). The Prime Minister. Toronto: General Publishing. Clarke, A. (1980). Growing Up Stupid under the Union Jack: A Memoir. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Clarke, A. (1985). When Women Rule. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Clarke, A. (1986a). Nine Men Who Laughed. Markham, ON: Penguin. Clarke, A. (1986b). Proud Empires. London: Gollancz. Clarke, A. (1992). In This City. Toronto: Exile. Clarke, A. (1993). There Are No Elders. Toronto: Exile. Clarke, A. (1994). A Passage Back Home: A Personal Remembrance of Samuel Selvon. Toronto: Exile. Clarke, A. (1997). The Origin of Waves. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Clarke, A. (1999a). Pig Tails ’n Breadfruit: Rituals of Slave Food: A Barbadian Memoir. Toronto: New Press. (Also published as Love and Sweet Food. Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2004.) Clarke, A. (1999b). The Question. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
Clarke, A. (2002). The Polished Hoe. Toronto: Thomas Allen. Clarke, A. (2008). More. Toronto: Thomas Allen.
Cliff, Michelle CONSTANCE S. RICHARDS
Transnational feminist writer Michelle Cliff engages issues of identity, home/exile, marginality, and national struggle in her essays, short stories, novels, and poetry. As a novelist, Cliff is perhaps best known for her Clare Savage novels, Abeng (1984) and No Telephone to Heaven (1987). The protagonist, light-skinned, mixed-race, Jamaicanborn Clare Savage, is, according to Cliff, somewhat biographical. Like her protagonist, Cliff was born in Jamaica (on November 2, 1946) but emigrated to the US at a young age, returning periodically to Jamaica to attend school. In her 1985 essay “If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write This in Fire,” Cliff describes how her separation from her darker-skinned friend Zoe at a private, all-girls English school in Kingston reinforced the sort of caste system into which she was born. Following her 1974 PhD at Warburg Institute in London, Cliff published a collection of prose poems entitled Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise (1980) in which she explores color prejudice and its effects, a topic that became a central focus of her novels. Abeng is a fairly linear narrative that follows Clare through her girlhood in Jamaica. Clare’s friendship with her best friend, Zoe, and their encounters with adolescent sexism, dramatize hierarchies of color, race, class, and gender. A parallel narrative running throughout the novel traces the history of British colonialism and slave labor used in the production of sugar, the second narrative offering an explanation of the first. Yoked to the narrative of oppression, however, is a counter-narrative of resistance. Cliff recovers the story of the Jamaican folk hero Grandy (Granny) Nanny and the Maroon community, who are credited with furthering the 1834 emancipation of slaves on the island. This historical narrative of resistance becomes a personal challenge to the older Clare Savage of Cliff’s second novel, No Telephone to Heaven. This non-linear narrative opens near the end of Clare’s
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life, when she has joined a group of self-styled revolutionaries who have embraced Maroon tactics in a contemporary Jamaica, suffering under neocolonialism in the form of American tourism and popular culture, as well as multinational capitalism. We encounter Clare at different points of her development: leaving Jamaica for the US and a life with her father who encourages her to pass as white; developing a political consciousness, prompted by racial prejudice and black resistance in the US and England; and returning to Jamaica in an attempt to sort out her identity and its accompanying position of privilege. Drawing on oral storytelling and remnants of pre-contact art, Clare attempts to unlearn the assumptions imposed by her colonialist education. Assigning Michelle Cliff to any particular community of writers reveals the complexity of the colonial project and the identities it has created. At various points, Cliff has claimed African, English, Creole, and Carib identity. While she claims Jamaican as her nationality, she also says, “I grew up partly in the United States, I was educated in London, and I originated in Jamaica, so I can’t limit myself to just one place” (Schwartz 597). She has not been back to Jamaica for many years, in part because, as a lesbian, she would not be comfortable with the intolerance for sexual difference. When asked if she considers herself part of a community of Caribbean writers in exile, however, Cliff suggests that such a designation is problematic. A more appealing designation is “political novelist,” and as such she counts among her literary influences Ama Ata Aidoo from Ghana, Nawal El Saadawi from Egypt, Southern African Bessie Head and African American Jean Toomer, the last two of whom also address complex racial issues and color consciousness. In particular, she singles out Toni Morrison’s Beloved as an inspirational work in terms of her reconstruction and reclamation of a painful history as an act of redemption. Like Morrison’s novel, which was inspired by a historical account of a fugitive slave woman, Cliff’s third novel, Free Enterprise (1993), introduces readers to a little-known free black woman who helped to finance abolitionist John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Having heard brief references to Mary Ellen Pleasant, and having discovered her grave in California wine
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country, Cliff, through the same kind of “act of imagination” Morrison employs, combined with historical research, creates a history of resistance to American slavery for Pleasant and a West Indian comrade whom she renames Annie Christmas. Fortunately, both women avoid Brown’s fate following the insurrection. Christmas’s ongoing relationship with the prisoners provides the occasion for oral storytelling that situates her own history as a freedom fighter among other acts of resistance on the part of others – a Jewish woman from Surinam and an aboriginal man from Hawai’i, for example – and continues the transnational concerns of much of her earlier work. SEE ALSO: Aidoo, Ama Ata (WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Head, Bessie (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Morrison, Toni (AF); Politics/ Activism and Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF); Toomer, Jean (AF); West Indian Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Adisa, O. P. (1994). Journey into Speech – A Writer between Two Worlds: An Interview with Michelle Cliff. African American Review, 28(2), 273–281. Agosto, N. (1999). Michelle Cliff’s Novels: Piecing the Tapestry of Memory and History. New York: Peter Lang. Cliff, M. (1980). Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise. Watertown, MA: Persephone. Cliff, M. (1984). Abeng. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing. Cliff, M. (1985). The Land of Look Behind: Prose and Poetry. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand. Cliff, M. (1987). No Telephone to Heaven. New York: Dutton. Cliff, M. (1990). Bodies of Water. New York: Dutton. Cliff, M. (1993). Free Enterprise. New York: Dutton. Cliff, M. (1998). The Store of a Million Items. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Gourdine, A. K. M. (2002). The Difference Place Makes: Gender, Sexuality, and Diaspora Identity. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Hornung, A., & Ruhe, E. (eds.) (1998). Postcolonialsim and Autobiography: Michelle Cliff, David Dabydeen, Opal Palmer Adisa. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Gifford, W. T. (2003). Narrative and the Nature of Worldview in the Clare Savage Novels of Michelle Cliff. New York: Peter Lang.
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Macdonald-Smythe, A. (2001). Making Homes in the West Indies: Constructions of Subjectivity in the Writings of Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid. New York: Garland. Schwartz, M. F. (1993). An Interview with Michelle Cliff. Contemporary Literature, 34(4), 595–619.
Coetzee, J. M. MICHELLE KELLY
Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee is among the most widely celebrated and studied novelists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He was born in South Africa, educated there and in the United States, and recently became a citizen of Australia, but Coetzee’s reach as a writer is global, even if he is still most closely identified with his native South Africa. Coetzee is the author of 11 novels, six of which were published in the shadow of apartheid South Africa and, with varying degrees of explicitness, bear traces of their author’s attempts to take on that history. His fiction and essays explore the distorting effects of colonialism, of which, in his reading, apartheid South Africa is a late example, and consistently pose questions about the nature of power, authority, and the creative process. He was the first writer to win the Booker Prize twice, for Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace (1999), and in 2003 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His novels have been translated into 45 languages, and adaptations include an opera version of Waiting for the Barbarians by Philip Glass (2007) and a film of Disgrace directed by Steve Jacobs and starring John Malkovich (2008). He has translated fiction and poetry from Dutch and Afrikaans and published numerous academic essays, collected in Doubling the Point (1992), which also includes illuminating interviews with David Attwell, White Writing (1988); essays on South African literature; and Giving Offense (1996), on censorship. His recent essays are collected in Stranger Shores (2001) and Inner Workings (2007b). Coetzee was born in Cape Town in 1940 into an English-speaking Afrikaner family. His mother was a primary school teacher and his father qualified as an attorney but practiced only intermittently. The family’s late-1940s move from
Cape Town to Worcester, a small town in the western Cape, coincided with the coming to power of the National Party in South Africa and the formalization of the system of race-based segregation known as apartheid. Boyhood (1997), the first volume of the autobiographical trilogy Scenes from Provincial Life, conveys the perceived pressure on those of Afrikaner descent to conform to nationalist expectations: the young protagonist is educated in English at the local school, but fears being exposed as an Afrikaner. Coetzee’s graduation from the University of Cape Town with honors degrees in English and mathematics coincided with the period of social unrest following the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, prompting the aspiring poet to leave South Africa for London, where he worked as a computer programmer and completed an MA thesis on Ford Madox Ford. In 1963 he married Philippa Jubber (1939–91); they had two children, Nicolas (1966–89) and Gisela (b. 1968). He left England for the United States, where he wrote a PhD thesis on Samuel Beckett’s early fiction at the University of Texas, Austin. He was eventually forced to leave a teaching position at the State University of New York, Buffalo in 1971 when an application for permanent residency was declined. He returned to South Africa and taught at the University of Cape Town, where he became distinguished professor of literature until he resigned in 2000. He emigrated to Australia in 2002 where he has an honorary position at the University of Adelaide. It was in Buffalo that Coetzee embarked on his first novel, Dusklands, published in South Africa in 1974. Comprising two novellas, “The Vietnam Project” and “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee,” Dusklands knits together US military intervention in Vietnam with the excesses of colonialism in Southern Africa in the eighteenth century, in parodies of colonial discourse. “The Vietnam Project” is structured around the narrator’s research into military propaganda in Vietnam, but culminates in a violent attack on his son and his resulting institutionalization. The novella critiques both the rational discourse of the report that dehumanizes the Vietnamese enemy, and the hyper-rational discourse of the narrative itself, in which self-consciousness is no barrier to cruelty. “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee” collects accounts of expeditions to the
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Cape interior by the eighteenth-century hunter and adventurer Jacobus Coetzee, which see Jacobus assert his dominance over the native population in acts of disturbing violence. The narrative is framed as a translation, putting the reliability and transmission of the colonial archive under scrutiny. The use of the name “Coetzee” for four different characters across the two novellas is an assertion of complicity with the colonial history and, together with the novel’s skepticism about the hyper-rationality of its own processes, introduces a unique form of postmodernism to South Africa. His second novel, In the Heart of the Country (1977), sees the tropes of the South African farm novel filtered through a radically anti-realist narrative consisting of a sequence of 266 numbered passages, some of which play out alternative versions of the novel’s central acts: Magda, the female protagonist, murders her father and is later raped by a farm laborer. In the absence of her father, Magda attempts to create a new social order by inviting the non-white servants to share the farm house. Her experiment backfires, however, and she remains an isolated figure on a remote, failed farm. But the intensity of the desire to transcend the restrictive social relations of the farm, locked within the doubting, Beckettian narrative voice, points to the ethical concerns that would characterize Coetzee’s future work. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) is less formally experimental, but nonetheless challenges the conventions of realist fiction in its unspecific setting in time and place. The central character, known only as the Magistrate, is a colonial administrator in a sleepy frontier town until the threat of attack from unspecified barbarians brings the presence of security police and ushers in a period of emergency in which interrogations, torture, and imprisonment without trial hold sway. These “emergency powers” challenge the Magistrate’s liberal values and, after he makes an expedition to the frontier to allow the barbarian girl who has become his companion to return to her people, these powers are turned against him. Narrated by the Magistrate, the novel nonetheless manages to protect the alterity of the barbarian girl whose injuries excite such fascination in her benefactor. In its treatment of torture, the novel is a powerful indictment of state violence, but it is also an unflinching exploration of the
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options available to a “man of conscience” like the Magistrate who opposes such violence (Coetzee 1992, 363). Written and published after the death in police custody of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko in 1977, the novel has been described alternately as an allegory of the apartheid state and as a universally applicable story. The inconsistent and anachronistic setting reads like a parody of an Aesopian allegory, drawing attention both to the pressures of writing under apartheid, with particularly vigilant state censorship in this period, and what Coetzee has described as “[t]he true challenge . . . how not to play the game by the rules of the state, how to establish one’s own authority, how to imagine death and torture on one’s own terms” (1992, 364). Life & Times of Michael K is set in a projected South Africa riven by civil war, but focalized through the consciousness of a marginal figure who seeks to avoid being drawn into the conflict. Hare-lipped gardener Michael K escapes the turbulence of Cape Town, tenaciously avoiding the state camps that dot the countryside and evading the attentions of an apparently benevolent doctor in order to dedicate himself to cultivating pumpkins, an endeavor that ultimately results in starvation. Building on the success of his previous novels, which had attracted international attention and won awards in South Africa and beyond, Michael K won the Booker Prize. But the perceived passivity of Michael K drew the ire of Coetzee’s fellow South African novelist Nadine Gordimer, who admonished Coetzee in a review for his avoidance of political struggle. Gordimer’s position is not untypical of the attitude to Coetzee in 1980s South Africa, where political struggle was considered to have a cultural counterpart in the social realism that dominated South African literature. Coetzee’s style also had ironic implications for his treatment at the hands of the state censors. Recent research has shown that In the Heart of the Country, Barbarians, and Michael K were all subject to the censors’ attentions, and eventually released, in some cases with readers’ reports glossing potentially offensive material – obviously critical of the apartheid state – as “literary” and consequently of limited appeal and influence (McDonald 2009). Foe (1986) shifts away from the immediate South African context to eighteenth-century England and the writing of Daniel Defoe. Coetzee
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brings together Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Roxana in the character of Susan Barton, a female author so eager to publish her castaway narrative that she enlists the help of one Daniel Foe, a famous author who ultimately betrays Susan’s story. The novel ends on an astonishing note, however, as the narrative shifts away from Susan, Cruso, and Foe to the seemingly mute, former slave Friday, evoking a history of oppression. Foe directly engages the history of the novel, and in singling out Robinson Crusoe, points to its coincidence with the history of colonialism. Following Foe, Age of Iron (1990) represents a return to the turbulence of the late apartheid period, but again engages the history of the novel by adopting an epistolary style: the novel is an extended letter from Mrs. Curren, a woman dying of cancer in Cape Town, to her daughter in the US. As the novel opens, a homeless man, Mr. Verceuil, enters Mrs. Curren’s life, initially seeking shelter but eventually becoming her companion and carer. Mrs. Curren’s letter documents the relationship with Verceuil but also the violence and upheaval in the townships of the Cape Flats, where Florence, her domestic help, lives with her family. The novel’s first-person narrative brings it closer to a direct confessional form than any of Coetzee’s previous works and is the first of his novels to engage directly with contemporary events. The twin concerns of the history of the novel and the ethics of confession are again in evidence in The Master of Petersburg (1994). This time Coetzee engages the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky, particularly his late novel The Possessed. The master of the title is the Russian novelist, who travels to Petersburg to investigate the death of his stepson, Pavel, who had fallen in with a group of political radicals. Coetzee’s novel is concerned with the writing of The Possessed, supposedly the work produced by the grieving novelist. But the creative process in this novel relies more on betrayal than faithfulness, and the artist Dostoevsky, no longer a radical and grieving for his dead stepson, is prepared to make deep personal sacrifices for his art. Published in the same year as South Africa’s first democratic elections, The Master does not reflect the celebratory tone of the period. Instead, with its emphasis on mourning and implicit concern with censorship, it has an eye on the immediate past and, published soon
after the death of Coetzee’s son, takes on a particularly personal resonance. Coetzee’s next novel would continue his preoccupation with creativity but in an almost unrecognizable guise, and submerged in a narrative of such complexity and controversy that this aspect is frequently overlooked. Disgrace recounts the fall from grace of a middle-aged literature professor, David Lurie, dismissed after having a sexual relationship with a student. He withdraws from the scandal to his daughter’s farm in the eastern Cape, where one day they are robbed and his daughter is gang-raped by three men. In the aftermath, Lurie spends his time helping to dispose of the bodies of dead dogs and working on a chamber opera based around the life of Byron. His daughter Lucy, pregnant as a result of the rape, agrees to fall under the protection of her neighbor, Petrus, nominally becoming his wife and tenant in exchange for her land. In the disciplinary committee Lurie faces early in the novel there are distinct echoes of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), an ambitious attempt to address the injustices of the apartheid period while facilitating a smooth, non-violent political transition. But the novel’s implicit acknowledgment that the history of injustice in South Africa might manifest itself in sexual, vengeful, or sacrificial acts complicates the Christian model of forgiveness championed by the TRC. With Disgrace, Coetzee won his second Booker Prize, but its bleak portrait of post-apartheid South Africa provoked intense controversy there, and the novel was cited by the ruling ANC party as an example of racism in the media. Disgrace has since become Coetzee’s most widely read and widely discussed novel, in part because of the strong reaction it provoked in South Africa, but also because it brings animals, and humankind’s ethical relation to animals, into the critical debate. This debate intensified with the publication of The Lives of Animals (1999b), a series of short fictions in which an Australian novelist, Elizabeth Costello, gives public lectures on the relationship between humans and animals. These were originally delivered by Coetzee as the Tanner Lectures at Princeton, and were eventually collected with fictional lectures in Elizabeth Costello (2003). The genesis of Elizabeth Costello in invited lectures suggests that it was an attempt by Coetzee
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to address the role of public intellectual. But his subsequent novels have maintained its radically experimental form and preoccupation with ideas, without jettisoning the powerful emotional involvement characteristic of his best work. Slow Man (2005) begins as an ostensibly realist fiction about an accident victim who has a leg amputated, but the realist frame is interrupted by the arrival of its author, Elizabeth Costello. In Diary of a Bad Year (2007a), the reading experience is interrupted even more dramatically, as the narrative is broken into three distinct strands on each page: essays by the author-protagonist, JC; JC’s private diary; and the diary of Anya, a young woman whom he opportunistically invites to be his secretary. Reading Diary of a Bad Year involves integrating these seemingly distinct strands, an exercise to which the reader adapts remarkably quickly, and with powerful results. It is also difficult to preserve a distinction between the author, Coetzee, and the character, JC, author of, among other things, a novel entitled Waiting for the Barbarians. Both Slow Man and Diary are set in Australia, but the world described is frequently that of an immigrant population, and in Diary in particular, JC’s native South Africa features quite prominently. Against the background of political transition and the TRC, post-apartheid South African literature has been characterized by various attempts, in fiction and non-fiction, to document and engage with apartheid’s conflicted history. Disgrace undoubtedly makes a controversial intervention in this field, but Coetzee has also contributed an autobiographical trilogy, Scenes from Provincial Life. Along with the description of his early life in Cape Town and Worcester that we find in Boyhood, Youth (2002) describes university life in Cape Town and his adjustment to adult life in London, working as a computer programmer and pursuing his dream of being a poet. Written in the third person and present tense, Boyhood and Youth take an unusual form for autobiographical texts, and, from the biographical information already in the public domain, represent highly selective accounts of Coetzee’s life. His most recent book, Summertime (2009), concludes the trilogy. It too stretches the autobiographical form beyond recognition, presenting a series of fictional interviews between the
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would-be biographer of the now deceased John Coetzee and people who knew him when he lived with his father in Cape Town in the mid-1970s, including a cousin and former lovers. The book is funny and moving: the interviewees remember John Coetzee with bemusement but also fondly, giving accounts of a caring if reticent man living an ascetic existence with his father. The volume opens and closes with the subject’s diary fragments from the same period, focusing largely on his relationship with his father. The biographical account provided in this entry should be enough to indicate that the scenario of Summertime is, to some extent, invented. It is, perhaps, only when one takes Scenes from Provincial Life in its entirety that the autobiographical truth begins to emerge. SEE ALSO: Beckett, Samuel (BIF); Censorship and Fiction (WF); Critical Theory and Fiction (WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Ford, Ford Madox (BIF); Gordimer, Nadine (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Southern African Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Attridge, D. (2004). J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Attridge, D., & McDonald, P. D. (eds.) (2002). J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace [special issue]. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 4(3). Attwell, D. (1993). J. M. Coetzee and the Politics of Writing. Berkeley: University of California Press. Coetzee, J. M. (1974). Dusklands. Johannesburg: Ravan. Coetzee, J. M. (1977). In the Heart of the Country. London: Secker and Warburg. Coetzee, J. M. (1980). Waiting for the Barbarians. London: Secker and Warburg. Coetzee, J. M. (1983). Life & Times of Michael K. London: Secker and Warburg. Coetzee, J. M. (1986). Foe. London: Secker and Warburg. Coetzee, J. M. (1988). White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press. Coetzee, J. M. (1990). Age of Iron. London: Secker and Warburg.
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Coetzee, J. M. (1992). Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (ed. D. Attwell). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Coetzee, J. M. (1994). The Master of Petersburg. London: Secker and Warburg. Coetzee, J. M. (1996). Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Coetzee, J. M. (1997). Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life. London: Secker and Warburg. Coetzee, J. M. (1999a). Disgrace. London: Secker and Warburg. Coetzee, J. M. (1999b). The Lives of Animals (ed. A. Gutmann). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Coetzee, J. M. (2001). Stranger Shores: Essays 1986–1999. London: Secker and Warburg. Coetzee, J. M. (2002). Youth. London: Secker and Warburg. Coetzee, J. M. (2003). Elizabeth Costello. London: Secker and Warburg. Coetzee, J. M. (2005). Slow Man. Secker and Warburg. Coetzee, J. M. (2007a). Diary of a Bad Year. London: Harvill Secker. Coetzee, J. M. (2007b). Inner Workings: Essays 2000–2005. London: Harvill Secker. Coetzee, J. M. (2009). Summertime. London: Harvill Secker. Gordimer, N. (1984). The Idea of Gardening. New York Review of Books, 3(6), (Feb. 2). Head, D. (2009). The Cambridge Introduction to J. M. Coetzee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huggan, G., & Watson, S. (eds.) (1996). Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee. London: Macmillan. Jacobs, S. (dir.) (2008). Disgrace. Fortissimo Films. McDonald, P. D. (2009). The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and Its Cultural Consequences. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The Nobel Prize in Literature 2003. At http:// Nobelprize.Org/Nobel_Prizes/Literature/Laureates/ 2003/Index.Html, accessed Aug. 4, 2009.
Collins, Merle MARIA HELENA LIMA
Merle Collins’s writing affirms the power of an oral tradition – with proverbs, riddles, and folktales interspersed in the French Creole and English spoken in Grenada – to tease out the truths behind that country’s post-independence reality. While living, at different times, between Grenada and the United States, and Grenada and
England, Collins continues to write about Grenada, attempting to reimagine the land she first knew as home. Her poems and narratives constitute meditations on history, like “Tout Moun ka Plewe (Everybody Bawling),” which follows Grenadians’ struggles to survive both hurricanes and revolutions not born in nature. The questions Collins seeks to answer – whether some kind of colonialism is inevitable and whether her nation’s destiny is necessarily one of dependence – are central to the majority of the world’s peoples. Born in Aruba on September 29, 1950 and raised in St. George’s, Grenada, Collins grew up under the post-independence rule of E. M. Gairy and joined Maurice Bishop’s revolutionary government in 1979, becoming popular as a performer of her poetry at rallies and meetings of the Workers’ Parish Councils. She studied at the University of the West Indies and at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, returning to Grenada to serve in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. After the US invasion of 1983, Collins left for England and taught at the University of North London. While writing her first novel, Angel, Collins researched Grenadian political history at the Public Records Office and earned a PhD in government from the University of London. Considered the foremost writer of Grenada, she is the author of three collections of poetry, Because the Dawn Breaks (1985), Rotten Pomerack (1992), and Lady in a Boat (2003), as well as a short story collection and three novels (her third, Invisible Streams, not yet published). She is currently professor of comparative literature and English at the University of Maryland at College Park. As a Caribbean woman writer, Collins tends to be concerned with all that has gone into the shaping of Caribbean societies – colonization and its consequences, the effects of slavery and indenture, the meaning or meaninglessness of independence, and the possibility of a nationalism not gendered male. As she writes about Caribbean literature in general, her own writing shows “a concern with formation – formation of the society, formation of the individual – and with reclaiming and revoicing” (Collins 1996, 8). Her coming-of-age novel – Angel (1987) – creates parallels between Grenada’s movement toward independence and the story of three generations
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of women. The novel is unique in bringing together conventionally male and female spheres – public and private, personal and political – to chronicle the history of Grenada through multiple narrative centers that convey sometimes overlapping, sometimes conflicting versions of self and history. Angel also explores the function of education, reading, and writing in nation formation and decolonization. In her second novel, The Colour of Forgetting (1995), Collins blurs the boundaries between myth and history. While land continues to be the contested terrain young people fight over, and Thunder, like Angel, is a representative of his community’s future, it is the character named Carib who is the soul of the novel. Collins achieves a powerful invocation of the region’s Amerindian past through a character who bears the collective memory of her people, and also with the novel’s fictional setting, Paz. The short stories collected in Rain Darling (1990) are mostly set in Grenada. The one set in Brooklyn, NY, “Madelene,” emphasizes the importance of family, traditions, and a person’s native land. The story is also about storytelling, for Madelene teaches the next generation about her family, its traditions, and her native land through her tales. One of the collection’s most anthologized stories, “The Walk,” depicts the real world of Caribbean rural poverty and compels readers to know more about the people and the place where the story is set. Collins’s work celebrates the beauty and resilience of the land and people of Grenada by capturing the nature of the Caribbean colonial past and individual battles against the weight of history and a sometimes treacherous natural world. She has been able to create an imaginary homeland in the places she has lived, including Mexico. Her writing has also been central to the collective project of a black feminism, challenging empty theoretical labels such as “postcolonial,” and generating intense discussions in university classrooms in the Caribbean, Britain, and the United States. SEE ALSO: Black British Fiction (WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Berrian, B. (1994). “We Speak Because We Dream’: Conversations with Merle Collins”. In C. B. Davies (ed.), Moving beyond Boundaries, vol. 2: Black Women’s Diasporas. New York: New York University Press pp. 31–42. Collins, M. (1985). Because the Dawn Breaks: Poems Dedicated to the Grenadian People. London: Karia. Collins, M. (1987). Angel. London: Women’s Press. Collins, M. (1990). Rain Darling: Stories. London: Women’s Press. Collins, M. (1992). Rotten Pomerack. London: Virago. Collins, M. (1995). The Colour of Forgetting. London: Virago. Collins, M. (1996). “Framing the Word: Caribbean Women’s Writing”. In J. Anim-Addo (ed.), Gender and Genre in Caribbean Women’s Writing. London: Whiting and Birch, pp. 4–11. Collins, M. (1999). “Writing Fiction Writing Reality”. In M. Conde & T. Lonsdale (eds.), Caribbean Women Writers: Fiction in English. New York: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 23–31. Collins, M. (2003). Lady in a Boat. London: Peepal Tree. Collins, M. (2007). “Tout Moun Ka Plewe (Everybody Bawling)”. Small Axe, 22, 1–16. Cooper, C. (1999). “‘Sense Make befoh Book’: Grenadian Popular Culture and the Rhetoric of Revolution in Merle Collins’ Angel and The Colour of Forgetting.” In J. L. Lidell & Y. B. Kemp (eds.), Arms Akimbo: Africana Women in Contemporary Literature. Gainesville: University Press of Florida pp. 176–188. Duckett, K. Lopez, D., & Plata, M. R. (2002). “The Literary Representation of a Creole: A Linguistic Analysis of Angel”. Torre: Revista de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 7(26), 631–56. Lima, M. H. (2006). “Merle Collins’s Angel of History.” In M. Inghilleri (ed.), Swinging Her Breasts at History: Language, Body and the Caribbean Women’s Text. London: Mango pp. 47–60. Wilson, B. (1993). “An Interview with Merle Collins”. Callaloo, 16(1), 94–107.
Coupland, Douglas BRENNA CLARKE GRAY
Douglas Coupland is a Canadian novelist, nonfiction writer, and visual artist who rose to prominence with the publication of the bestselling Generation X in 1991. Coupland’s writing and art focuses primarily on making meaning out of popular culture and postmodern life, as well as the
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corresponding issues of consumerism, religion and spirituality, and the formation of identity. He was born on a Canadian Air Force base near Baden-Baden, Germany on December 30, 1961, and his family relocated to Vancouver in 1965; Coupland continues to live and work in this city, setting many of his novels in and around Greater Vancouver. Primarily educated in art and design, Coupland worked in these fields until the publication of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. This first novel examines the lives of three friends who, feeling alienated from an economic system dominated and controlled by baby boomers, decide to opt out and move to the Palm Springs desert. Removed from contemporary life, the three learn to form their own conception of family and identity through the act of storytelling. While his interest in visual arts never waned, and indeed the visual experience of his novels has remained an important facet of his work, Coupland spent a decade focusing primarily on his writing. In 2001, he once again made visual art a central focus, beginning with sculptural and photographic installations in the Totem Gallery in New York. With the publication of Generation X, Coupland became – against his will – viewed as the spokesperson for those born just after the postwar baby boom, who soon became known in common parlance as “Generation Xers.” In reality, however, Coupland is most interested in chronicling not a specific generation, but rather individual characters in particular historical moments. Microserfs (1995), for example, examines the lives of people experiencing the “one-point-oh” technology boom of the mid-1990s; similarly, Girlfriend in a Coma (1998) contrasts teenage life in the 1970s with the protracted adolescence of those same characters and their inability to mature at the turn of the century. Coupland’s prose incorporates popular brand names and relevant cultural references to construct a representation of what matters to individual people at a given time. In JPod (2006), he takes this trope to the extreme: by saturating the entire novel with corporate brand names, he satirizes consumer culture and the ways in which we construct our identity through the goods we purchase and consume, yet he does so often without passing judgment. Coupland is more intrigued by consumer society than opposed to it. Critically, Coupland often draws interest for the ways in which his characters deal with the
intersection of spirituality and consumerism. In Life After God (1994), he forwards the thesis that those born after the mid-1960s are increasingly raised without religion and spirituality, and probes the difficulty of making life meaningful without the structure of organized faith. This theme continues through much of his work. Hey Nostradamus! (2003) examines the dangers of allowing religion to supersede responsibilities to community and family; Eleanor Rigby (2004) asserts that spiritual faith can coexist with contemporary life, symbolized by a character who can have religious visions anywhere, including on the side of the Trans-Canada Highway. Coupland’s prolific output in non-literary media is particularly distinctive. As a visual artist, he has gained recognition for public art projects such as Monument to the War of 1812 (2008) near Fort York in Toronto and, in 2009, a clock tower tribute to postwar Canada Mortgage and Housing homes located in Don Mills, Ontario; the same year, he designed a three-hectare downtown park in Toronto featuring his sculptures. Other important visual art projects from Coupland’s oeuvre include a collection of wasp nests made by chewing and resculpting the pages of his own novels (2004) and The Penguins (2007), a series of Penguin novel covers “defaced” with thematic terms displayed in the style of ransom notes. Outside the visual arts, in 2006 the feature film Everything’s Gone Green was released based on Coupland’s first screenplay, and in 2007 his popular novel JPod was adapted for television by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In 2004, Coupland performed his own 80-minute oneman show, September 10 2001, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. As Coupland’s career has progressed, his interest in exploring Canadian identity has become increasingly prominent. While early in his career he was often mistaken for an American novelist due to his interest in American popular culture, Coupland has since become more interested in Canadian narratives. Though he asserts that he does not create stereotypical Canadian literature (which he defines as rural, grim, realist narratives without space for experimentation), many of his recent multimedia projects self-consciously examine what it means to be Canadian: most overtly, the Souvenir of Canada series, including two coffee table books (2002 and 2004),
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a feature-length documentary (2006), and an art installation at Canada House in London (2004). Souvenir collects images, essays, objects, and commentary with the intent to suggest that each item is uniquely and unapologetically Canadian; by interrogating and celebrating a national relationship to these pieces, Coupland creates a narrative of Canada. He embarks on a similar journey in Terry (2005), this time exploring Canada’s relationship to cancer victim Terry Fox and his heroic place in the national memory. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bilton, A. (2003). An Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Coupland, D. (1991). Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. New York: St. Martin’s. Coupland, D. (1994). Life After God. New York: Pocket Books. Coupland, D. (1995). Microserfs. New York: HarperCollins. Coupland, D. (1998). Girlfriend in a Coma. Toronto: HarperCollins. Coupland D. (2002, 2004). Souvenir of Canada, 2 vols. Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre. Coupland, D. (2003). Hey Nostradamus! New York: Bloomsbury. Coupland, D. (2004). Eleanor Rigby. Toronto: Random House. Coupland, D. (2006). JPod. Toronto: Random House. Douglas Coupland’s website: www.coupland.com. Forshaw, M. (2000). Douglas Coupland: In and Out of “Ironic Hell.’’ Critical Survey, 12(3), 39–58. Grassian, D. (2003). Hybrid Fictions: American Literature and Generation X. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Tate, A. (2007). Douglas Coupland. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Critical Theory and Fiction DAVID HUDDART
The wave of decolonization in the two decades following 1945 ultimately led to fundamental intellectual shifts. The thinkers commonly
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associated with critical theory (often just theory) were reacting to specific histories like that of decolonization: for example, Jean-Fran¸cois Lyotard, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Derrida were all influenced by the Algerian War of Independence. Assumptions common to the European colonial mindset came under historical and intellectual pressure, and theory was one result. These influences are sometimes difficult to pinpoint: they are often indirect, and are felt in many different intellectual fields. Indeed, theory is not really a theory of something, but more a general critical attitude to assumptions about identity and meaning. Accordingly, the specific questions theory asks about fiction are part of a continuum of questioning of the cultural meanings surrounding us. Theory is therefore fundamentally interdisciplinary, drawing on fields like anthropology, philosophy, and sociology. This diversity of influences means that it is not possible to cover all theory’s methods; however, a representative sample gives a sense of the questions theory asks, and indicates its influence on the study of fiction. Theory’s questions challenge our unexamined assumptions: for example, about literature’s representation of the world, about the author’s control of its meaning, and about textual autonomy. One assumption theory challenges is that a novel is structured by an authorial intention, which our duty as readers is to uncover: this discovery delivers the meaning of the novel. This assumption grants authority to the author, but different theories argue instead that the meaning of a text is not the property of an author, and is not single, but instead is something drawn from diverse, changing contexts. Theory frequently celebrates plurality and difference: indeed, the novel itself can be examined for its multiple, competing voices or discourses, as in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, who writes that the “novel as a whole is a phenomenon multiform in style and variform in speech and voice” (1981, 261). Even in theories that aim to establish meaning, emphasis will shift from the genius of an individual writer toward the constraining and enabling structures of social, political, and cultural contexts. One example is structuralism, which has been influential on theory in general. Structuralism approaches (in principle) anything in terms of
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the meaning of its structure. Many examples are found in disciplines like anthropology. Claude Levi-Strauss studies the superficially different manifestations of cultures in terms of their deeper similarities: he argues that “primitive” cultures are characterized by complexity of structural meaning, just like “advanced” cultures. Structuralist anthropology categorizes different cultures in terms of deeper structures, and structuralist literary criticism likewise sees superficially different narratives as based on the same deep structures. Structuralism is driven by insights from the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1959). Saussure considers language as a system of differences without positive terms, as an alternative to historical approaches. For him, this approach is necessary because “it is linguistic structure which gives language what unity it has” (11). Saussure studies language by first suspending our normal sense of the relation of meaning and reference: he explores how language works as a system in itself (at the level of the signifier), rather than exploring its history or comparing it with reality (the level of the signified). This is to study language synchronically (structurally) rather than diachronically (historically). The linguistic system works as a system of differences and deferrals: “cat” means cat not because of a literal or necessary connection with real cats (indeed, the word directs us to a concept of cat) but because of its difference from words like “bat” or “mat.” Language, Saussure argues, is unmotivated: this means that it has no natural relation with reality, although of course it has a conventional relation with reality. For some time, Saussure’s influence on literary criticism was controversial, with many critics extending his emphasis on the unmotivated connection between language and reality. Misreadings of the work of poststructuralists like Jacques Derrida, who discusses Saussure in Of Grammatology (1976), focus on how meaning is never fixed, and see literary criticism as always in search of ambiguity and openness. This tendency led many critics to believe that the meaning of a text was fundamentally uncertain, and created anxiety that literary criticism would say just about anything it liked about the literature it was interpreting. This was certainly not Derrida’s argument, which reintroduced the diachronic into Saussure’s synchronic approach to language.
Derrida suggests that interpretation always takes place within a context that it cannot escape, but instead of resigning himself to the arbitrary nature of our reading, he suggests that we must draw the justifications we can from that context. For Derrida, meaning is context-bound, but context is boundless: this means that contexts change, and the diachronic can always complicate the synchronic. He writes about this necessary possibility as a structure of iterability, which is just what allows us to read anything in the first place, and so not something to bemoan. In literary studies, a more focused approach to Saussure explores how structuralism rethinks literature as a system. Instead of comparing systems of representation with reality, it invites us to see them functioning with meaning in their own right. For example, we can think of literary fiction as a system, with its own conventions, traditions, and expectations, against which innovative fictional developments take shape. In this way structuralist approaches to literature are similar to formalist approaches, which stress the specific qualities of literary form. Literary fiction might seem merely one example of the many narratives permeating our everyday lives, but literature has specific ways of giving plot to story, and can be seen as the most complex meditation on what it means to plot in general: literary fiction is a series of explorations in narrative form. Certainly, this emphasis on fiction as a system allows us to rethink literary fiction throughout history, but it is particularly pertinent to the postmodern, metafictional, and magic-realist works of the mid to late twentieth century. The formalist approach can be seen in Vladimir Propp’s work (1968), which analyzes the functional similarities between different folktales, arguing that entirely different characters, in separate stories, fulfill the same functions. Despite differences, the structuralist and formalist approaches share a stress on the patterns that govern individual examples of a given system. Using Saussure’s terms, Gerard Genette (1980) distinguishes the story (signified), narrative (signifier), and narrating. Focusing on the narrative as signifier, there have been many narratological studies of fiction which have explored the nature of literary plotting as such, rather than focusing on a work’s uniqueness. In this way, fiction is understood as a system with its own rules which
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inform our reading of even the most rule-breaking and counter-intuitive experimental novel. However, such an approach demands that readers go beyond the literary system as a self-enclosed space, to think about the wider cultural codes in which literary fiction takes shape. These codes are a form of cultural mythology, in the words of Roland Barthes (1974), a central figure in structuralist analysis of literature. Barthes focuses on the ways in which literature is informed by broader connotative languages: mythologies. His application and development of the distinction between denotation and connotation takes us beyond the analysis of a single text, and draws us into networks of meaning often characterized as intertextuality. For Barthes, any given novel, no matter how original, is a “tissue of quotations” drawn from the endless diversity of cultural meanings: innovation might therefore seem impossible, but it comes about when these quotations are brought together in new and unexpected ways, leading readers to produce new connections and interpretations. Barthes’s analysis (1974) of Balzac’s “Sarrasine” is a classic example of literary structuralism: it breaks down the narrative into constituent elements, which are categorized in terms of theme and form, and then given commentary without trying to combine everything into a single reading. Indeed, Barthes’s text explores how commentary inevitably takes us beyond Balzac’s work and the appropriate context for its reception, suggesting that the context we use to read a work of fiction will always be open to challenge and change, leading to new readings. Barthes thinks about this openness in terms of a distinction between writerly (often experimental) texts and readerly (or “classic”) texts. Really, readerly texts can always be read as writerly and the distinction is only one of convenience: this is because the readerly depends on the authority of an author, something Barthes challenges. As readers we are participants in an active process, engaging with denotation and supplying connotation, and so our commentary cannot be passive: “the work of the commentary, once it is separated from any ideology of totality, consists precisely in manhandling the text, interrupting it” (15). Any novel has meaning derived from both its participation in networks of literary allusion (the intentional) and in networks of intertextual cultural connotation (the unintention-
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al). Some of the most obvious of these networks of connotation are national narratives. In a given time and place we may operate with assumptions similar to our fellow readers, and so we are part of what Stanley Fish (1980) calls interpretive communities. However, these communities are ones that are imagined and in turn imagine themselves into being. A central statement of this argument is Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1991 [1983]), which gives historical insight into the connection between nation and narration, and provides a theoretical framework for understanding the unfinished, open quality of that narration. Anderson stresses the relative novelty of the modern concept of the nation, and the changing technologies that allowed ready and widespread dissemination of the print narratives that enabled disparate peoples to imagine themselves as members of a common national community. He suggests that newspapers and novels were key elements in the production of the sense of “horizontal” comradeship that characterizes the modern nation (in contrast to the previous “vertical” authority). A specialist in the politics of Indonesia, Anderson explores the worldwide dissemination of the European concept of the nation. The disparate cultures and communities that have come together to make up modern national identities make up those identities only by being plotted, the denotative literal meaning given connotative mythological significance. Developing Anderson’s insights, Homi K. Bhabha (1994) has argued that national narrative is characterized by two modes: the pedagogical and the performative. The pedagogical is a “teaching” of national identity, which presents it as fully formed and fixed, with a long history and inevitable future. This teaching is bound up with classroom teaching, but extends beyond schools to the signs, rituals, and narratives of everyday culture that encourage identification with national identities: anthems, international sports, iconic cultural and political figures. The pedagogical attempts to give stability to the abstract and fluid bonds that constitute the nation. By contrast, the performative is a concept that Bhabha adapts from philosopher J. L. Austin, who wanted to understand the sense in which language use is not always truth-evaluable but instead often an action:
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Austin uses the term for any utterance about which we can say that “the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action” (6). Applied to the nation, the performative captures how the nation is more about becoming than being: national identities are not fixed, because they require everyday repetition or narration, and when this repetition happens, the identity may be transformed. The performative has also been applied in the context of sexuality and gender, for example by Judith Butler (1990), to explore the ways these aspects of identity are defined by an unstable process. Bhabha describes the performative in terms of the “scraps, patches and rags of daily life” (145): it is, then, rather like the “tissue of quotations” that Barthes uses to think about culture as fundamentally intertextual. The performative is another way of describing how meanings and identities derive from difference rather than sameness, and so it can be connected with Saussurean structuralism. However, for many this difference is less an abstract philosophical point and more an everyday experience: Butler argues that gender and identity can be productively analyzed for their politics of the performative, while Bhabha suggests that minority cultures best understand this aspect of national identities, since they cannot take those identities for granted. He also argues that literary narrative is a complex exploration of the interplay between the pedagogical and the performative. In this, Bhabha is following a tradition of critics who have analyzed literature’s place within culture in general, one that gives us access to an ideal of community. Such analysis is found in the work of the Victorian poet and school inspector Matthew Arnold (1993 [1867–8]), who saw culture as a means of uniting diverse identities through common cultural investment. Arnold is a founding figure in a tradition that understands English literary studies as central to a culture that is under threat. Chris Baldick (1983) analyzes the way university literary study was conceived as a response to a crisis of culture: he explores how traditions of criticism are responses not only to intellectual change, but also to broader historical developments. Similarly, Gauri Viswanathan (1989) considers the colonial origins of English literary study: literature was conceived as uniting the anarchistic British identities (as in Arnold) but was also a key means of producing colonial
“mimic men.” This analysis draws on the key postcolonial thinker Edward W. Said, whose Orientalism (1978) analyzes literature as one form of representing the Middle Eastern other. Positive or negative, these representations have tended to portray an absolute distinction between Orient and Occident, with the former feminized and the latter the masculine norm: Western culture (including canonical fiction) that assumes such a distinction can be seen to misrepresent nonWestern cultures. Writers, like critics, have drawn on Said’s ideas about the worldliness of culture. Classic Western fiction has been rewritten to challenge its limited and biased representations of non-Western cultures, and to emphasize the role of the reader in producing contestable meanings. These rewritings assume the political potency of literature, and theory in general assumes the political significance of genres like the novel. It should be remembered, therefore, that there are political approaches that theory both echoes and challenges: most obviously underlying this theoretical attention to fiction’s politics is engagement with Marxist criticism. Marxism has evolved and taken many forms, but has proven a durable set of basic assumptions about the politics of literature. In particular, Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) category of hegemony reminds us that governing classes and controlling interests operate through persuasion and consensus: hegemony therefore positions literature and culture in general as key elements in the struggle of meaning-making, in which consensus is met by questioning and dissensus. This concept of culture implies a struggle over plurality of meaning, but then classical Marxism itself was never the caricature “vulgar” Marxism that read culture as a direct expression of economic and political factors. Indeed, following Marx and Engels, Louis Althusser (1971) conceptualized superstructure (including literature) as relatively autonomous from the base (the economy), and so literature could not be the latter’s direct expression. Meanwhile, non-Western Marxists declare that Marxism has to be adapted to other cultural contexts, and indeed Marxism has been appropriated and transformed, producing new perspectives on culture and identity. This can be seen in the analysis of Fredric Jameson (1986), who argues that “Third World” literatures can be
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read as national allegory: the narratives of such fiction are open to interpretation as expressions of the development of national cultures. In response, Aijaz Ahmad (1992) suggests that this idea reduces the aesthetic complexity of these literatures. This debate again centers on the idea of textual autonomy: Ahmad argues that Western theory denies aesthetic quality to the non-Western literature it interprets. Despite the assumption of the relative autonomy of art, it seems that non-Western art is usually judged in political terms. One example is the Nobel Prize citation for the Chinese writer Gao Xingjian, an “exiled” long-term resident of Paris who has consistently defended the non-political nature of his writing (2005). He was presented as speaking for China, and opening new ground for Chinese literature. Gao, however, is one of many writers who have a negative identification with community, and who argue for the apolitical quality of their writing. Other recent Nobel laureates like Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, and J. M. Coetzee, have likewise been read from postcolonial and other political perspectives, but all maintain a critical sense of community and insist upon literature’s prerogatives. Nonetheless, the “literary world” is related to a worldwide economy of cultural capital, despite the protestations of individuals writers and readers; it is just that, as Pascale Casanova has insisted, “its boundaries, its capitals, its highways, and its forms of communication do not completely coincide with those of the political and economic world” (2004, 11). Critical theory in its various forms positions literature within the world, but not straightforwardly or predictably: today, echoing Marxism, theory analyzes fiction as autonomous, but always relatively so. SEE ALSO: Critical Theory and the Novel (BIF); English Studies, the Academy, and Fiction (WF); Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Globalization and the Novel (BIF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ahmad, A. (1992). In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso.
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Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (trans. B. Brewster). New York: Monthly Review Press. Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism [1983], rev. edn. London: Verso. Arnold, M. (1993). Culture and Anarchy [1867–8], Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Austin, J. L. (1975). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon. Bakhtin, M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (trans. C. Emerson & M. Holquist). Austin: University of Texas Press. Baldick, C. (1983). The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848–1932. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barthes, R. (1974). S/Z (trans. R. Miller). New York: Hill and Wang. Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Casanova, P. (2004). The World Republic of Letters (trans. M. B. Debevoise). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology (trans. G. C. Spivak). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fish, S. (1980). Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gao, X. (2005). Cold Literature: Selected Works by Gao Xingjian (trans. G. C. F. Fong & M. Lee). Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. Genette, G. (1980). Narrative Discourse (trans. J. E. Lewin). Oxford: Blackwell. Gramsci, A. (1971). Prison Notebooks. New York: Columbia University Press. Jameson, F. (1986). Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism. Social Text, 15, 65–88. Propp, V. (1968). Morphology of the Folk Tale (trans. L. Scott). Austin: University of Texas Press. Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. New York: Vintage. Saussure, F. de (1959). Course in General Linguistics (trans. W. Baskin). London: Owen. Sontag, S. (ed.) (1982). A Barthes Reader. New York: Hill and Wang. Viswanathan, G. (1989). Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia University Press.
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D Dabydeen, David LYNNE MACEDO
Acclaimed novelist and poet David Dabydeen is a professor of literary studies at the University of Warwick, a critic and broadcaster, and an ambassador-at-large for his native Guyana. Aspects of his multifaceted affiliations and hybrid personality are clearly reflected in his fiction, which contains discernible traces of his Caribbean background but nonetheless ranges freely across cultural, linguistic, and racial boundaries. Dabydeen was born on a sugar plantation in Berbice, Guyana on December 9, 1955 and moved with his parents to England in 1969. After attending school in south London he won a scholarship to read English at Cambridge. An honors degree in 1978 was followed by a PhD from University College London in 1982. It was during his time at Cambridge that Dabydeen began the poems whose subsequent publication as Slave Song (1984) would lead to his first literary awards – the Quiller-Couch Prize and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Slave Song was notable for focusing on the harsh lifestyle of Guyanese cane cutters and for using a very distinctive form of Creole. The deliberately crude rhythms of Dabydeen’s broken, monosyllabic, even painful language gave authenticity to the voice of his Indo-Guyanese characters. Coolie Odyssey (1988a), by contrast, is largely composed in Standard English and explores exile and alienation from a Caribbean homeland that is gradually transformed through its rendering in poetry. Turner (1994) features a title poem writ-
ten in response to the celebrated Slave Ship painting by the artist J. M. W. Turner. Dabydeen gives voice to the submerged head of the African in the foreground of Turner’s painting, whose very absence from clear visibility highlights the West’s historical erasure of black life, history, and culture. Dabydeen’s writing has shifted toward prose fiction since the 1990s, although the language of his novels is still poetic. The Intended (1991) won Dabydeen the first of three Guyana Prizes for Literature in 1992. The life of the unnamed young narrator bears more than a passing resemblance to Dabydeen’s own, as he wistfully contrasts his idealized boyhood in Guyana with the harsh realities of schooling in London and studying English in Cambridge. In Disappearance (1993), an Afro-Guyanese engineer is sent to England to help prevent cliffs from crumbling away along the Hastings coastline. His struggle to find a sense of identity among a range of eccentric villagers consciously echoes V. S. Naipaul’s exploration of similar themes in The Enigma of Arrival. Both of Dabydeen’s first two novels allude to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in their exploration of the aftermath of Empire, while the ambiguous nature of Disappearance also pays homage to fellow Guyanese author Wilson Harris. Harris’s influence can also be found in Our Lady of Demerara (2004), recipient of the 2004 Guyana Prize for Literature. Ranging from Coventry to the Guyanese interior, Dabydeen’s complex tale of illicit sexual relationships and murder is intertwined with the story of two Irish priests, teasingly named Father Wilson and Father Harris.
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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Their arguments about the nature of sin and forgiveness frame a narrative in which the identity of individual characters, as in Harris’s own work, is constantly shifting and transitory. The Guyanese interior features again in Molly and the Muslim Stick (2008). Here he provocatively tackles the topical subjects of sexual abuse and religious fundamentalism through the unlikely pairing of Molly, an embittered woman from Lancashire, with Om, a young Guyanese Amerindian. The Counting House (1996) and A Harlot’s Progress (1999) present a marked stylistic change as they are both works of historical reclamation. The Counting House explores the early days of indentureship through characters that, like Dabydeen’s ancestors, migrate from India to the sugar estates of Guyana. A Harlot’s Progress – winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2000 – has more direct links back to Dabydeen’s doctoral work on racial representation in eighteenth-century England. Using Hogarth’s prints of A Harlot’s Progress as a framework, this novel playfully foregrounds the experiences of a black servant named Mungo, whose deeply ambiguous narration deliberately draws attention to the fictional construction of the novel itself. Recent interviews suggest parallels with Dabydeen’s own mischievous personality: “Without language, I’d be a beggar or a banker, so writing is a kind of benediction for me” (Mair 52). The desire to range freely from the local to the universal can be similarly traced in Dabydeen’s academic works. He is author and editor of numerous scholarly books and articles, a well-known presenter of television and radio programs, and winner of many awards including the 2004 Raja Rao Award for Literature and the 2008 Anthony N. Sabga Award for Literature – the largest literary prize in the Caribbean. Ranging from guidebooks such as the Handbook for Teaching Caribbean Literature (1988b) to the more recent, coedited Oxford Companion to Black British History (2007), Dabydeen’s diverse body of work reflects his wide-ranging and scholarly interests in art, history, and literature. SEE ALSO: Black British Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Harris, Wilson (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF);
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Naipaul, V. S. (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Dabydeen, D. (1984). Slave Song. Aarhus: Dangaroo. Dabydeen, D. (1987). Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art. Manchester. Manchester University Press. Dabydeen, D. (1988a). Coolie Odyssey. London: Hansib. Dabydeen, D. (1988b). Handbook for Teaching Caribbean Literature. Oxford: Heinemann. Dabydeen, D. (1991). The Intended. London: Secker and Warburg. Dabydeen, D. (1993). Disappearance. London: Secker and Warburg. Dabydeen, D. (1994). Turner. London: Jonathan Cape. Dabydeen, D. (1996). The Counting House. London: Cape. Dabydeen, D. (1999). A Harlot’s Progress. London: Cape. Dabydeen, D. (2004). Our Lady of Demerara. Chichester: Dido. Dabydeen, D. (presenter) (2005). Painting the People [documentary]. BBC 4, Sept. 27. Dabydeen, D. (2008). Molly and the Muslim Stick. Oxford: Macmillan Caribbean. Dabydeen, D., Gilmore, J., & Jones, C. (eds.) (2007). The Oxford Companion to Black British History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grant, K. (1997). The Art of David Dabydeen. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Guardian (2008). The Loose-Tongued Ambassador, p. 11 (Apr. 1). Macedo, L., & Karran, K. (eds.) (2007). No Land, No Mother: Essays on David Dabydeen. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Mair, J. (2005). Guyana Don. BWIA Caribbean Beat, 75, 50–5. Naipaul, V. S. (1987). The Enigma of Arrival. London: Deutsch.
Dangarembga, Tsitsi AMBREEN HAI
Tsitsi Dangarembga was the first black woman writer from Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) to publish fiction in English. After several rejections from publishers in Zimbabwe, her novel Nervous Conditions was published by the Women’s Press
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in London in 1988. It won the African section of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1989, and has since become an internationally acclaimed work, frequently taught in university courses in various disciplines. It is also the subject of numerous scholarly articles as well as a scholarly collection (Willey & Treiber 2002). Set in colonial Rhodesia in the 1960s, the novel focuses on the lives of five women in a Shona family, and explores tricky questions such as how issues of gender intersect with those of race, class, and colonization, how a colonized subjectivity is formed, and how a colonial education can both liberate and entrap. Its long-awaited sequel, The Book of Not, appeared in 2006. Dangarembga has also written short stories and three plays, and produced and directed films. Dangarembga was born on February 14, 1959 in Mutoko, Rhodesia. Like Nyasha in Nervous Conditions, she spent her early childhood in Britain, where her parents had moved for their higher education. Upon returning to Rhodesia in 1965, Dangarembga studied at a mission school and then an American convent school, where she completed her A levels. In 1977 she began studying medicine at Cambridge University, but returned to Zimbabwe a few months before independence in 1980. She worked briefly as an advertising copywriter before entering the University of Harare (then Salisbury) to study psychology. There she became involved with a drama group and wrote three plays which were performed locally. After publishing Nervous Conditions, Dangarembga studied film directing in Germany. Eager to familiarize her two children with Zimbabwe, however, she moved back there in 2000, and works as a scriptwriter, consultant, and film director. As a fictional autobiography, Nervous Conditions unfolds the coming to awareness of Tambudzai Sigauke as she struggles against restrictive gender expectations to acquire an English education, moves from her parents’ rural homestead to the luxurious urban home of her uncle, enrolls in a mission school, and begins to understand the implications of becoming culturally hybrid. But it is also a narrative of community, of a collectivity of women – Tambu’s mother, grandmother, aunts, and cousin – who provide a network of support as well as cautionary alternatives, as they either “rebel,” “escape,” or are “entrapped” by the double yokes of indigenous
patriarchy and exogenous colonialism and racism (1988, 1). When her feisty cousin Nyasha, torn between her father’s expectations and her own English-educated but questioning sensibility, succumbs to bulimia, Tambu must contemplate how, as she acquires the education that will bring material advantages yet distance her from her natal culture, she may question the interlocking systems that surround her and still survive. Dangarembga contests earlier colonial and postcolonial male narratives by emphasizing that gender (in addition to other aspects of identity) is crucial to understanding colonized subjectivities and experiences. Alluding in her title to Frantz Fanon’s famous insight that “the condition of a native is a nervous condition,” she elaborates on the psychic effects of colonization even as she shows how those conditions depend on different gender positions. Critics have taken many different approaches to Dangarembga’s work, arguing for instance that anorexia or bulimia, usually understood as afflicting Western middle-class women, are appropriate tropes for the colonized cultural hybrid, or indeed for the self-destructive struggles of Zimbabwe as a nation. The Book of Not seems surprisingly different: it foregrounds the brutal guerilla war that led to Zimbabwean independence, and focuses almost exclusively on Tambu’s subjectivity as she continues her education during the war at an elite white girls’ convent school, where she suffers the constant psychic violence of institutional and individual racism in 1970s Rhodesia. Yet continuities are apparent: in the subtle, sensitive delineation of the paradoxes of a gendered, racialized, and colonized sensibility caught between oppositions; in the minute focus on psychic damages wrought by colonial history; in the continuation of the narrative of individual and nation into the years immediately after independence; and in focusing upon women to address the challenging questions of Zimbabwe’s future. Dangarembga’s concern for women and children in the context of Zimbabwean history and gendered traditions also appears in her plays and films. She No Longer Weeps (1987), her first published play, boldly depicts an unmarried, educated woman lawyer who tragically defies social expectations to keep her child. Neria (1993), the highestgrossing film in Zimbabwean history, was based on a short story by Dangarembga, and depicts a
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widow battling her in-laws and drawing upon new legal rights to retain her farm and child. Dangarembga was the first black Zimbabwean woman to direct a feature film: Everyone’s Child (1996), about the predicament of four siblings whose parents have died of AIDS, calls for communal action and responsibility in caring for “everyone’s children.” Most recently, she has written and directed Kare Kare Zvako, or Mother’s Day (in Shona), which won Best Short Film at the 2004 Harare International Film Festival. It retells a Shona myth about a mother who is butchered by her husband but revives to nurture her children. Dangarembga has carved out new directions for postcolonial, feminist, and African literature, and her work continues to inspire new African and Zimbabwean writers, male and female alike. SEE ALSO: Feminism and Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Southern African Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Dangarembga, T. (1987). She No Longer Weeps. Harare: College Press. Dangarembga, T. (1988). Nervous Conditions. London: Women’s Press. Dangarembga, T. (dir.) (1996). Everyone’s Child. Media for Development Trust. Dangarembga, T. (dir.) (2005). Kare Kare Zvako (trans. as Mother’s Day). Pangolin Films and Nyerai Films. Dangarembga, T. (2006). The Book of Not. Banbury: Ayebia Clarke. George, R. M., & Scott, H. (1993). An Interview with Tsitsi Dangarembga. Novel, 26(3), 309–19. Wilkinson, J. (ed.) (1992). Tsitsi Dangarembga. Talking with African Writers: Interviews with African Poets, Playwrights and Novelists. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 189–98. Willey, A. E., & Treiber, J. (eds.) (2002). Negotiating the Postcolonial: Emerging Perspectives on Tsitsi Dangarembga. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Davies, Robertson CYNTHIA SUGARS
Robertson Davies stands apart from many other Canadian writers for setting the world of small-
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town central Canada alongside the realm of myth and magic. Committed to countering strictly rationalist interpretations of human experience, Davies explored the links between psychology, religion, art, and science in a remarkable oeuvre that spanned more than six decades. As a result, his works are difficult to categorize, for they are neither realist nor fabulist. While they contain withering critiques of social and cultural posturing, they indulge in esoteric, sometimes Gothic, subject matter and elevated themes. This interest in the arcane, combined with Davies’s eccentric and witty public persona, earned him a reputation as a formidable Renaissance man and polymath. Davies was born on August 28, 1913 in Thamesville, Ontario. His father was the owner of the Thamesville Herald and later editor of the Renfrew Mercury. The family moved to Renfrew when Davies was 5, and later to Kingston where he attended high school. He received a BA in literature from the University of Oxford in 1938, after which he joined London’s Old Vic Theatre. There he met his future wife, Brenda Mathews, the company’s stage manager. Davies returned to Canada in 1940 and became literary editor of the popular Canadian magazine Saturday Night from 1940 to 1942, and again from 1953 to 1959. During this time, he earned a considerable reputation as a playwright and journalist. He began writing for the Peterborough Examiner, becoming editor of the paper in 1942, eventually acquiring partial ownership in 1946. He wrote a regular column for the Examiner entitled “The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks” (1943–53), in which he assumed the persona of an eighteenth-centurystyle wit commenting on Canadian politics and social life. These pieces were later published in a series of books, including The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947) and The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949). The culmination of Davies’s academic career came in 1960 when Vincent Massey, former Governor General of Canada, invited him to become the first master of Massey College at the University of Toronto. Davies accepted the post in 1961, which he held, alongside his appointment as professor of English and drama, until his retirement in 1981. Davies’s incisive depictions of Canadian social life are paired with his compelling treatments of human psychology, myth, and the subconscious. This focus characterizes the genre that became
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known as “Southern Ontario Gothic,” a term applied to the writings of Davies, Alice Munro, and Margaret Atwood, all of whom are fascinated by the apparent incommensurability of appearance and reality. As Clara Thomas describes Davies’s work, his “particular hallmark [is] the sense of the strange, the spiritual, and the occult being woven into the fabric of even the most ordinary-seeming of lives” (140). Of central concern in Davies’s writing is a coming to terms with the existence of evil – a theme he considers in Fifth Business (1970a) – as well as with the grandeur of human moral dilemmas. His interest in Jungian psychology and archetypal patterns overlaps with the critical views of Northrop Frye, who was his contemporary at the University of Toronto. Davies is also widely described as a satirist who mocked conventional Canadian proprieties in the tradition of Stephen Leacock (about whom he wrote a critical study in 1970). His insistence on rejecting conventional attitudes toward such things as religion, social manners, and sex is part of his larger endeavor to revel in the mysteries of the human spirit. In so doing, Davies saw himself to be criticizing Canadian petty moralities while revitalizing Canadian society and culture. Without doubt, Davies’s international reputation rests in his fiction. His early trio of satirical novels, known as “The Salterton Trilogy,” united by its setting in the university town of Salterton (loosely based on Kingston, Ontario), sends up Canadian provincialism. The first of the trilogy, Tempest-Tost (1951), tells a humorous story of the town’s production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Through the contrast between the magical world of the play and the mundane social hypocrisies and intrigues of the local townsfolk, a satire of human foibles and pretentions is staged within the microcosm of a small-town theatre. Leaven of Malice (1954), awarded the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humor in 1955, continues the story of several characters from the first novel, focusing on the relationship of two lovers, Solly Bridgetower and Pearl Vambrace. The fate of this couple is picked up in the final novel, A Mixture of Frailties (1958), in which Solly’s mother writes her son out of her will until he produces a son of his own. Meanwhile, the proceeds from the estate are used to fund a student to study in England, enabling Davies to construct a comedy of manners around English and Canadian cultural and social mores.
In the 1960s, Davies became heavily influenced by the psychological writings of Carl Jung. This interest informs all of his subsequent work, including “The Deptford Trilogy,” which uses unconscious archetypes as an important unifying theme. The first novel of the trilogy, Fifth Business, solidified Davies’s international reputation and is heralded as one of the best Canadian novels of the twentieth century. It tells the story of Dunstan Ramsay, a retired schoolmaster, who, after narrowly missing being struck by a rock hidden inside a snowball when he was a child, becomes obsessed with the fate of the woman who is hit by the snowball, Mary Dempster. Through his meditations on Mary, who as a result of the accident gives birth prematurely to a son and is eventually committed to an insane asylum, Dunstan undertakes research into the history of saints, convinced that Mary herself is a saint. Mary’s son, Paul, achieves success as a world famous magician, performing under the name Magnus Eisengrim. Ramsay’s contact with Paul alerts him to the destiny of the snowball thrower, Boy Staunton, who is found floating in Toronto harbor with the stone from the fateful snowball clenched between his teeth. The subsequent novel in the trilogy, The Manticore (1972), includes an extended Jungian analysis of one of its characters; it won Davies the Canadian Governor General’s Award. In the third, World of Wonders (1975), Ramsay is writing the biography of Eisengrim and thus learns the story of Paul Dempster’s life, from his sexual abuse in a two-bit carnival to his career as a brilliant master of illusion. The genius of the trilogy is the way its central characters are indelibly affected by a seemingly ordinary event; each work circles around the unexpected ramifications, and secrets, that emerge from the snowball incident. Davies’s lifelong interest in the interconnections between the rational and the invisible, truth and deception, life and art, achieved its most extended treatment in “The Cornish Trilogy,” which includes The Rebel Angels (1981), What’s Bred in the Bone (1985), and The Lyre of Orpheus (1988). The trilogy is set in the fictional town of Blairlogie, based on Davies’s childhood experiences in Renfrew. Like “The Deptford Trilogy,” these novels are replete with arcane knowledge and are concerned with themes of reality and illusion, particularly in relation to the role of art and the writing of biography. The Rebel Angels is a
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satire on university life and its associated intellectual and erotic obsessions, focusing on Simon Darcourt, an Anglican priest and professor of Greek, and Maria Theotoky, a graduate student at the university. The story opens with the unveiling of the will of famous art collector and forger Francis Cornish, though its focus is the history and workings of the scholarly profession. What’s Bred in the Bone, which was nominated for the Booker Prize, tells the story of Cornish, whose life is being researched by Darcourt but narrated by two contending spirits – the recording angel and the daimon who guide Cornish’s life. Central to the novel is Cornish’s experience as a restorer and painter in Nazi Germany and his involvement in an international plot to hoodwink the Nazis. In the final novel, The Lyre of Orpheus, three characters from What’s Bred are in charge of dispersing the funds of the Cornish foundation. The plot revolves around the staging of an opera by E. T. A. Hoffmann that has been funded by the foundation. As in Tempest-Tost, the story of the opera sheds light on the lives of the characters, and, like What’s Bred, the boundary between this world and the next is transgressed as the ghost of Hoffmann himself presides over the production. Davies died in 1995 before finishing the third novel of his last trilogy, which includes Murther and Walking Spirits (1991) and The Cunning Man (1994), both centered on post-World War II Toronto. In Murther, the dead Connor Gilmartin, precipitously murdered by his wife’s lover, is forced to attend a film festival and watch movies about his ancestors. The novel stages Gilmartin’s confrontation with the experience and destiny of his forebears in an elaborately framed story in which his ghost is haunted – by both his august ancestry and his New World inferiority. By acknowledging how his ancestors have shaped his identity in multiple contingent ways, Gilmartin is forced into an acceptance of what Judith Skelton Grant terms “reluctant Canadianism” (632). Davies’s exploration of the interface between psychology and literature reached its culmination in The Cunning Man (1994). Like many of his novels, this work is framed as a confessional retrospective in which the doctor-protagonist, Jonathan Hullah, tells the story of his medical career while learning how to treat both the body and the human spirit, in part through works of art and literature.
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Davies’s 1982 collection, High Spirits, gathers the ghost stories from Massey College’s annual Christmas “Gaudy Night” celebrations, which Davies wrote and recited each year from 1963 to 1980. The book makes use of the traditional ghost story genre, but contains humorous send-ups of pretentious college masters and Canadian historical figures. In many of the stories, Davies toys with the colonial connection between Canadian authors and their British predecessors. His perspective on the colonial cultural scene in Canada is difficult to sum up since he was often contradictory in his views. Although an Anglophile who loved British literary tradition and elite ritual, Davies was also vocal in his insistence that Canadian writers (and readers) had to break free from the cultural and psychological hold of Britain and create a distinct and venerable Canadian literature. In his view, it was a rejection of parochialism that would accomplish this feat. His sense that Canadians needed a dose of the invisible and the supernatural “to stave off that most dreadful of modern ailments, the Rational Rickets” (1982, 2), is evident throughout his work. Davies’s formidable intellectual range and incisive humor are also present in his essays and speeches from the 1970s and 1980s, gathered in One Half of Robertson Davies (1977), The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies (1979), and The Merry Heart (1996). SEE ALSO: Atwood, Margaret (WF); Canadian Fiction (WF); Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Leacock, Stephen (WF); Munro, Alice (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Davies, R. (1947). The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin. Davies, R. (1949). The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin. Davies, R. (1951). Tempest-Tost. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin. Davies, R. (1954). Leaven of Malice. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin. Davies, R. (1958). A Mixture of Frailties. Toronto: Macmillan. Davies, R. (1970a). Fifth Business. Toronto: Macmillan. Davies, R. (1970b). Stephen Leacock. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
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Davies, R. (1972). The Manticore. Toronto: Macmillan. Davies, R. (1975). World of Wonders. Toronto: Macmillan. Davies, R. (1977). One Half of Robertson Davies: Provocative Pronouncements on a Wide Range of Topics. Toronto: Macmillan. Davies, R. (1979). The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies (ed. Judith Skelton Grant). Toronto: Macmillan. Davies, R. (1981). The Rebel Angels. Toronto: Macmillan. Davies, R. (1982). High Spirits: A Collection of Ghost Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Davies, R. (1985). What’s Bred in the Bone. Toronto: Macmillan. Davies, R. (1988). The Lyre of Orpheus. Toronto: Macmillan. Davies, R. (1991). Murther and Walking Spirits. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Davies, R. (1994). The Cunning Man. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Davies, R. (1996). The Merry Heart: Selections 1980–1995. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Davis, J. M. (ed.) (1989). Conversations with Robertson Davies. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Diamond-Nigh, L. (1997). Robertson Davies: Life, Work, and Criticism. Toronto: York Press. Grant, J. Skelton (1994). Robertson Davies: Man of Myth. New York: Viking. Thomas, C. (1972). Our Nature – Our Voices: A Guidebook to English-Canadian Literature. Toronto: New Press.
de Lisser, Herbert G. LEAH READE ROSENBERG
Herbert G. de Lisser was Jamaica’s most prolific author and powerful journalist in the early twentieth century, a period that saw the decline of British power, the rise of Jamaican nationalism, and an expansion of US influence which fundamentally altered Jamaican society. Author of 23 novels, two travel books, and numerous novellas and short stories, he was the first to make Jamaican literature published in Jamaica a popular and financial success. His fiction was political and comprehensive, articulating his vision not only of contemporary change, but also of Jamaica’s history since European conquest. De Lisser began life as a member of the brown middle class. He was born in 1878 in Falmouth to Morrizana (nee Isaacs) and Herbert de Lisser, a journalist. His father’s death forced the young de
Lisser to join the workforce at 14. In 1904, after working as a proofreader and journalist, he became editor of Jamaica’s most influential newspaper, the Gleaner, a position he retained until 1942. His fiction was published first by the Gleaner and then in Planters’ Punch, the annual Christmas magazine he founded and edited. By serving for over two decades as director of the board of governors at the Institute of Jamaica, Jamaica’s most influential cultural institution, and as secretary of the Jamaica Imperial Association, which promoted Jamaican business interests in Britain, de Lisser exerted considerable cultural and political power on behalf of the Jamaican business elite. In the process, he joined the white elite and became a harsh critic of forces that threatened its power – the British colonial government, the working class, and Afro-Jamaican politicians. De Lisser wrote travel guides, social and political satire, and romances. His work is often considered imitative, but he profoundly transformed British genres and tropes to meet his political objectives: to legitimate the local elite, highlight the weakness of British colonists, and establish himself as equal to British men of letters. Travel writing was a consistently critical component of his journalism. His first book In Cuba and Jamaica, with Hints to Tourists (1910) adapted the dominant Victorian mode of representing the Caribbean, adopting the narrative technique and political authority of prominent British authors such as Charles Kingsley and James Anthony Froude. His first novel Jane (1913a), later published as Jane’s Career (1914), tells of a peasant’s migration to the city in early twentieth-century Jamaica. Its heroine illustrates the thesis of de Lisser’s Twentieth Century Jamaica (1913b): namely that Jamaica would eventually become a modern, industrial country as its peasantry became urban, moral, and upwardly mobile. Even as it expresses de Lisser’s early and relatively liberal politics, the novel ridicules trade unions and the aspirations of the working middle class, thus anticipating his later, more explicitly anti-nationalist fiction. Much of de Lisser’s fiction satirizes the middle class to which he originally belonged. For instance, The Rivals (1921) and Jane’s sequel Myrtle and Money (1941) highlight the petty rivalries of the middle classes and their obsession with
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class and color ranking. Under the Sun (1935) is a particularly comprehensive satire of Jamaica’s rigid and many-leveled social hierarchy. Closely related are de Lisser’s political satires, such as Triumphant Squalitone (1916), which lampoons the prospect of independence, and The Jamaica Nobility (1925), which ridicules Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association. De Lisser’s fourth novel, Revenge (1919), is the first of eight historical romances that reduce the defining events in Jamaican history to love stories and thereby obscure the history of Afro-Jamaican rebellion and political organization. Revenge depicts the Morant Bay Rebellion (1865) as a tragic romance in which the daughter of peasant leader Paul Bogle dies in her quest for an English planter’s love. Similar love stories overshadow subaltern resistance to colonial forces in Anacanoa (1936), which represents the Spanish conquest; The White Maroon (1938), depicting the English conquest of Jamaica; and Morgan’s Daughter (1930), which deals with the 1760 slave uprising known as Tacky’s rebellion. Most famously, The White Witch of Rose Hall (1929) transforms Jamaica’s largest slave rebellion, the Baptist War of 1832, into a romance between a white “voodoo priestess” and a weak-willed English planter. The White Witch was also the first of de Lisser’s sensationalist romances, which often appropriate and sensationalize US accounts of Haiti from the occupation (1915–34); the others include The Crocodiles (1932) and Poltergeist? (1933). Scholars have celebrated Jane as the first accurate depiction of the black working class in Jamaican literature. The White Witch of Rose Hall has become part of Jamaica’s national culture and its tourist industry. However, the majority of de Lisser’s oeuvre remains unknown and unavailable, and he has become a relatively minor figure in Caribbean literary studies because his conservative politics and aesthetics oppose the nationalist, anti-colonial, and pro-labor politics on which most Jamaican and Caribbean literary studies are founded. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Cobham-Sander, R. (1984). The Literary Side of H. G. de Lisser (1878–1944). Jamaica Journal, 17(4), 2–9. de Lisser, H. G. (1910). In Cuba and Jamaica, with Hints to Tourists. Kingston: Gleaner. de Lisser, H. G. (1913a). Jane. Kingston: Gleaner. de Lisser, H. G. (1913b). Twentieth Century Jamaica. Kingston: Jamaica Times Printery. de Lisser, H. G. (1916). Triumphant Squalitone: A Tropical Extravaganza. Kingston: Gleaner. de Lisser, H. G. (1919). Revenge. Kingston: Gleaner. de Lisser, H. G. (ed.) (1920–44). Planters’ Punch. Kingston: Gleaner. de Lisser, H. G. (1921). The Rivals. Planters’ Punch, 1(2). de Lisser, H. G. (1925). The Jamaica Nobility. Planters’ Punch, 1(6). de Lisser, H. G. (1929). The White Witch of Rosehall. London: Ernest Benn. de Lisser, H. G. (1930). Morgan’s Daughter. Planters’ Punch, 2(5). de Lisser, H. G. (1932). The Crocodiles. Planters’ Punch, 3(1). de Lisser, H. G. (1933). Poltergeist? Planters’ Punch, 3(2). de Lisser, H. G. (1936). Anacanoa. Planters’ Punch, 3(5). de Lisser, H. G. (1938). The White Maroon. Planters’ Punch, 4(1). de Lisser, H. G. (1941). Myrtle and Money. Planters’ Punch, 4(4). Morris, M. (1979). H. G. de Lisser: The First Competent Caribbean Novelist in English. Carib, 1, 18–26. Ramchand, K. (1970). The West Indian Novel and Its Background. London: Faber and Faber. Roberts, W. A. (1952). Six Great Jamaicans. Kingston: Pioneer.
Desai, Anita RAJESWARI MOHAN
One of the earliest Indian novelists writing in English to gain international acclaim, Anita Desai writes about the circumscribed lives of middleclass protagonists, often focusing on their attempts to negotiate the instability and promise of social change, family turmoil, travel, immigration, and displacement. Over her prolific career she has developed a literary aesthetic that has gradually shifted from the social realism typical of the first generation of South Asian English novelists toward a narrative mode better adapted
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to her interest in the complicated emotional lives of her characters. Anita Desai was born on June 24, 1937 to a German mother and a Bengali father, and spent her childhood in Delhi during the tumultuous days of the decolonization and partition of India, events that impressed upon her that people bear the imprint of history, even if they don’t seem particularly aware of it. While this feature defines many of her characters, Desai also brings to her fiction a bi-focal perspective from her family background, feeling about India as an Indian, but thinking of it as an outsider (Bliss 522). Unlike many prominent contemporary South Asian writers, Desai has spent the majority of her life in India and has, since 1986, divided her time between India and the UK initially and then between India and the US, where she has taught at several institutions. Desai has won numerous awards including India’s foremost literary prize, the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 1978, and the national honor, the Padma Shri, in 1990. Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984), and Fasting, Feasting (1999) were shortlisted for Britain’s Booker Prize. Less well known than her fiction are her compelling book reviews and piercing cultural commentaries, which have appeared regularly in prominent magazines in India and abroad. Desai’s novels offer finely spun accounts of the inner lives of ordinary characters trapped in families whose respectable middle-class lives are dominated by feckless and authoritarian parents or husbands. Often structured around protagonists thinking back on their lives, her novels plumb the wrenching effects of memory and history on the daily lives of characters who are invariably overwhelmed by life, unfulfilled in their relationships, browbeaten by their families, or marginalized in their societies. Desai explains that she chooses such characters because they “go against the current” (Bliss 522) of social norms, and she usually wins them the reader’s sympathy for their unrecognized, often futile, attempts to resist the forces curbing them and for their odd acts of dignity and compassion. More importantly, their off-center perspectives, when seen in context, yield insights into the paralyzing tangles of middle-class existence in India. By situating her characters’ struggles against a backdrop of events or discourses of nationalist significance, Desai
also brings into focus the failure of nationalism to give all people the true rights of citizenship. In her non-fiction, she explicitly targets religious intolerance and moral hypocrisy in Indian culture. Unlike writers who vaunt literature’s importance in drawing attention to injustice, Desai is typically reticent to make political claims for her fiction, suggesting instead that her novels are “a lament, a protest, a statement” about human evil rather than a call to action (Bliss 532). Believing that an author can be a social critic only unconsciously, she insists that if a writer uncompromisingly represents her characters and their world the social criticism will inevitably become evident. So it is that her fine eye for subtle gradations allows her to convey significant but often overlooked differences in class and generation that shape the ways different characters experience and address their social positions as wives in thankless and difficult marriages, as in Cry, the Peacock (1963). In novels such as Bye-Bye, Blackbird (1971), Clear Light of Day, In Custody, and Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988), she gently opens up politically charged categories such as Indian, European, Muslim, immigrant, foreigner, man, and woman to show their inherent instability even as they determine people’s lives. In Bye-Bye, Blackbird, Baumgartner’s Bombay, Journey to Ithaca (1995), and Fasting, Feasting, she complicates and undermines the strict opposition between the metropolitan, Western center and the underdeveloped Indian periphery upon which so much early postcolonial criticism has turned. These concerns are so integral to Desai’s vision that even her children’s novel, The Village by the Sea (1982), depicts the disruption of rural life by industrialization, and the lure and peril of the ensuing migration to the big city. All too often Desai’s characters find that the choices they make in their bid for personal fulfillment are defined and restricted by patriarchal family structures. This element in her fiction has led critics to hail her as a feminist pioneer in Indian literature (Jussawalla & Dasenbrock 158). Desai herself has expressed marked ambivalence about this attribution, asserting that she simply tries “to get at the truth” (Robinson 81) and citing novels such as Cry, the Peacock, Voices in the City (1968), and Where Shall We Go This Summer?
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DESAI, ANITA
in which the self-destructive actions of female characters merely express disappointment and longing for a different life. Nevertheless, her novels repeatedly turn on the violence that gravitates toward women in patriarchal society. In Fire on the Mountain (1977), Clear Light of Day, and Fasting, Feasting, for instance, she makes visible not only the enmeshing family structures of patriarchal opportunism and exploitation that entrap female characters, but also the attitudes ensuring their consent to what they sometimes recognize as oppressive practices and disabling beliefs. Her later fiction broadens the scope of these concerns to show how men’s potential is equally stunted by the prejudices and restrictions of a patriarchal society. In her non-fiction, Desai takes a more explicit stand on the difficulties with which women writers have to contend. In the 1980s she lamented the absence of a tradition of women writers who questioned and challenged Indian patriarchy (1983, 56). This lack, she argues, led to a “moping” style of writing in her own early years. In a later essay, “A Secret Connivance,” she joins the discourse of Indian feminism, and has since written directly about the injustices of gender arrangements. Desai conveys these matters with understated but cutting irony, orchestrating imagery and symbolism to build up complexly layered pictures of her subjects. In the first section of Fasting, Feasting, for instance, food serves as the organizing motif as the minutiae of daily menus and relentless demands for refreshments become the means by which the parents keep their daughter from having her own life. When another daughter escapes this routine through marriage, it is only to be drawn into a life of consumption and status consciousness that is no less inane. The novel’s second section offers a counterpoint by presenting food as a metaphor for the alienation felt by an Indian immigrant in the US while simultaneously depicting the neurosis of a suburban American family, the Pattons, who demonstrate the crippling web of control and resistance that is spun out around food through the mother’s compulsive grocery shopping, the father’s insistence on grilling steak every evening, and their teenage daughter’s eating disorder. Such moments are balanced by the lyrical grace of Desai’s descriptions of landscape, be it the neighborhoods of Old Delhi, the streets of
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Bombay, or the woods of western Massachusetts. Inspired by Japanese and modern poetry’s ability to convey the essence of a moment of feeling, she evokes place in palpable detail which hauntingly represents the psychic terrain of her characters. At the same time, her vivid sense of place foregrounds the sedimentation of history, both personal and communal, in any landscape. Desai’s fiction typically sustains an attention to time, memory, and history through a narrative structure organized around her characters’ introspective flights, which both confine them in their solipsistic worlds and give them a space of unchallenged authority. Claiming as her major influences Emily Bront€e, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Yasunari Kawabata, among others, Desai writes novels that move between external narration with limited omniscience, interior monologue, and free indirect discourse usually organized around one or more centers of consciousness. The resulting complexly layered narratives keep the focus squarely on her protagonists’ apprehension of their lives. The short stories collected in Games at Twilight and Other Stories (1978) and Diamond Dust (2000a) showcase Desai’s virtuosity in revealing the unappeased longings and defining resentments of her characters in an epiphanic flash. An aspect of Desai’s focus on characters’ interiority is the absence of resolution in her narratives. While some of her novels end with the admittedly arbitrary ploy of violent death, they nevertheless lack closure. In novels after Clear Light of Day, compromise and resignation serve as the only resolution to her characters’ predicaments. Desai is explicit in her rejection of Western conventions and expectations of closure and resolution, arguing that the only fitting response to the human condition is to “hope for the strength to endure” (Robinson 82). A similar rejoinder to literary tradition plays out in her numerous allusions to canonical literary texts and popular culture, both Western and Indian. Frequently, her characters’ immersion in the world of literature endows them with a delicacy of perception that, all too often, simultaneously renders them incapable of acting in the world. Desai’s attention to the small, telling details of individual psychology, the contradictions of a rapidly changing society, and the ironies of a culture increasing global in its scope have
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combined with her elegant narrative style to give us compelling novels about the everyday effects of tradition and history. SEE ALSO: Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); James, Henry (AF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Woolf, Virginia (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bliss, C. D. (1988). Against the Current: A Conversation with Anita Desai. Massachusetts Review, 29(3), 521–37. Desai, A. (1963). Cry, the Peacock. London: Peter Owen. Desai, A. (1968). Voices in the City. London: Peter Owen. Desai, A. (1971). Bye-Bye, Blackbird. New Delhi: Hind Pocket Books. Desai, A. (1974). The Peacock Garden. Bombay: India Book House Education Trust. Desai, A. (1975). Where Shall We Go This Summer? Delhi: Vikas. Desai, A. (1976). Cat on a Houseboat. Bombay: Orient Longman. Desai, A. (1977). Fire on the Mountain. London: Heinemann. Desai, A. (1978). Games at Twilight and Other Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Desai, A. (1980). Clear Light of Day. London: Penguin. Desai, A. (1982). The Village by the Sea: An Indian Family Story. London: Heinemann. Desai, A. (1983). Indian Women Writers. In M. Butcher (ed.), The Eye of the Beholder: Indian Writing in English. London: Commonwealth Institute, pp. 54–8. Desai, A. (1984). In Custody. London: Heinemann. Desai, A. (1988). Baumgartner’s Bombay. New York: Knopf. Desai, A. (1990). A Secret Connivance. Times Literary Supplement, pp. 972, 976 (Sept. 14). Desai, A. (1991). India: The Seed of Destruction. New York Review of Books, p. 4 (June 27). Desai, A. (1995). Journey to Ithaca. London: Heinemann. Desai, A. (1999). Fasting, Feasting. London: Chatto and Windus. Desai, A. (2000a). Diamond Dust. New York: Houghton. Desai, A. (2000b). What is Indian Literature? In J. Paine (ed.), The Poetry of Our World. New York: HarperCollins, pp. 393–6.
Desai, A. (2003). The Rise of (Indian) Modernism. In K. Heinzelman (ed.), Make It New: The Rise of Modernism. Austin, TX: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, pp. 14–15. Desai, A. (2004). The Zigzag Way. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Jussawalla, F. & Dasenbrock, R. W. (1992). Anita Desai. In Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 156–79. Kohli, D. & Just, M. M. (2008). Anita Desai: Critical Perspectives. New Delhi: Pencraft International. Pandit, L. (1995). A Sense of Detail and a Sense of Order: Anita Desai. In P. C. Hogan & L. Pandit (eds.), Literary India: Comparative Studies in Aesthetics, Colonialism, and Culture. Albany: SUNY Press, pp. 153–72. Ram, A. (1983). Interviews with Indian English Writers. Calcutta: Writers Workshop. Robinson, A. (1996). Anita Desai. In S. Griffiths (ed.), Beyond the Glass Ceiling. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 76–82. Srivastava, R. K. (ed.) (1984). Perspectives on Anita Desai. Ghaziabad: Vimal Prakashan. Yaqin, A. (2005). The Communalization and Disintegration of Urdu in Anita Desai’s In Custody. In P. Morey & A. Tickell (eds.), Alternative Indias: Writing, Nation and Communalism. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 89–114.
Desani, G. V. AMARDEEP SINGH
Govind Vishnoodas Desani, who published as G. V. Desani, is best known as the author of a highly unusual novel, All about H. Hatterr (1948), written at the tail end of British colonialism in India. While it was never a commercial success, the novel was appreciated by Western critics such as T. S. Eliot as an example of a virtuosic experimental modernist text by an Indian author. Born in Kenya in 1909, Desani spent his early years in northern India. According to his biographer, Molly Ramanujam, he was expelled from an English-language school as a teenager, and ran away from home twice. At the age of 16, he gathered enough money to buy passage to England for a brief visit. He returned to England for the second time in 1935 and, despite having no university-level education, was widely in demand as a lecturer. In 1936, Desani became a radio
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broadcaster for the BBC, and he remained in England during the war years, doing freelance journalism and writing what would become Hatterr. Two years after the novel appeared, Desani published Hali, a short devotional prose poem which might be read as a repudiation of the anti-religious and anti-serious Hatterr. To writer and critic Salman Rushdie, Hatterr is fundamentally a late colonial satire that, in his phrase, is the “first genuine effort to go beyond the Englishness of the English language” (16). Hatterr is an affectionate parody of Indian English, of the slightly erratic speaking habits of Englishmedium-educated Indians under the auspices of British colonialism. The novel also parodies Hindu religious figures and, more generally, religious conversion narratives, though in 1978, years after Hatterr’s first publication, Desani published an essay suggesting that the novel contained a sincere Hindu religious dimension as well. A third target of the satire is the Western literary reader, parodied in the novel’s preface as “Betty Bloomsbohemia,” who approaches the novel with a particular set of Orientalist expectations for a novel by an Indian author. This opening parody reemerges periodically in the text through parenthetical second-person asides directed at the reader. Conceptually, Hatterr may be read as a powerful early instance of self-conscious literary and linguistic hybridity, eschewing both overt mimicry of British literary style and nationalist selfassertion. Srinivas Aravamudan has explained the title of Hatterr as both “a metonym of British colonial authority, alluding as it does to the idea of the topiwalla” and as an “obvious reference to the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland” (127). The novel is an instance of modern picaresque with an extremely broad range of allusions to earlier picaresque texts including Apuleius’ The Golden Ass and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, as well as parodic allusions to canonical authors and texts including Shakespeare, William Langland, Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, and the anonymous Everyman. Desani’s career path is thus radically different from contemporaries such as Mulk Raj Anand, Nirad Chaudhuri, and Raja Rao, who also traveled in the West. He remained completely aloof from politics, either nationalist or Anglophile, and did not affiliate himself with any literary circles or
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movements. Rather, in 1952, Desani returned to India and went into total religious seclusion for more than 10 years, during which time he wrote nothing at all. Beginning around 1963, he started publishing new stories in the Illustrated Weekly of India, the largest English-language weekly magazine in India. Between 1966 and 1967, he wrote an unsigned weekly column for the same magazine called “Very High and Very Low,” often focusing on religious issues, but the waggish “Hatterr” voice also began to re-emerge with polyglossic jokes, rambling anecdotes, myriad fictive interlocutors, and a general literary voice and attitude resembling his earlier Hatterr. In 1969, Desani left India for good and took up a position teaching philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin. While Desani published little fully original or new material after leaving India, he did not stop writing; rather, he dedicated himself to adding extensive new sections to his two major literary works, Hatterr and Hali, as well as to revising the existing sections. He published a third edition of All about H. Hatterr in 1970, with a laudatory preface by Anthony Burgess, as well as a fourth, final revision of the novel in 1986. Hali and Collected Stories appeared in 1991, and contained a further revised version of Hali, as well as reprints of many of the stories Desani had written for the Illustrated Weekly in the 1960s. Desani died in Texas in 2001. SEE ALSO: Anand, Mulk Raj (WF); Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Joyce, James (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF); Rao, Raja (WF); Rushdie, Salman (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Aravamudan, S. (2006). Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Desani, G. V. (1948). All about H. Hatterr. London: Aldor. Desani, G. V. (1950). Hali. London: Saturn. Desani, G. V. (1978). Difficulties of Communicating an Oriental to a Western Audience. In C. D. Narasimhaiah (ed.), Awakened Conscience: Studies in Commonwealth Literature. New Delhi: Sterling, pp. 401–8.
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Desani, G. V. (1986). All about H. Hatterr, 4th edn. New York: McPherson. Desani, G. V. (1991). Hali and Collected Stories. New York: McPherson. Mandy, C. R. (1964). All about G. V. Desani. Illustrated Weekly of India, pp. 42–3 (June 7). Naik, M. K. (1987). The Method in the Madness: All about All about H. Hatterr. Studies in Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sterling pp. 104–18. Ramanujan, M. (1984). G. V. Desani: The Writer and His World. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann. Rushdie, S. (1997). Introduction. In S. Rushdie & E. West (eds.), Mirrorwork: Fifty Years of Indian Writing. New York: pp. vii–xx.
Detective/Crime Fiction KENNETH STRONGMAN
Crime fiction, also known as detective fiction, is a major genre of twentieth-century world fiction in terms of number of titles, sales, and variety, though some critics view it as a poor cousin of general fiction. However, during the last 30 or 40 years a large body of critical literature has grown up around crime fiction, and it has begun to acquire an academic imprimatur. Perhaps because of sales, critical interest, and forays into the genre by some writers of “literary” fiction, the boundaries between crime and general fiction have become blurred. In some cases, such blurring might be better described as a transcending of boundaries as crime fiction writers consider things social and cultural as well as criminal. Crime fiction may also transcend traditional national and cultural boundaries, as, for example, in A Shadow of Myself (2001) by the black British novelist Mike Phillips, in which English, German, and African cultures each play their part in a multigenerational narrative. Defining crime fiction is therefore no easy matter. Add to this the problems of defining “postcolonial” – the predominant rubric under which world fiction is now studied – and the difficulties multiply. These matters are discussed in interesting detail in The Post-Colonial Detective (2001), edited by Ed Christian, and Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective (2006), edited by Christine Matzke and Susanne M€ uhleisen. Also very instructive is Ruth Morse’s article “Racination and Ratiocination: PostColonial Crime” (2005). As Morse points out,
crime fiction necessarily involves imitation (of other crime writers and of the national and international imperatives of what is being written). And while postcolonial writing, broadly speaking, emerges from or represents marginalized groups, the detectives and criminals featured in crime fiction also typically come from the margins of their societies. Christian locates the postcolonial detective in relation to four criteria. First, the postcolonial detective is not always the creation of a postcolonial writer; the British writer H. R. F. Keating, for example, created his Bombay detective character Inspector Ghote before he had even visited India. Second, there are many detective novels set in nonWestern countries that are not postcolonial by any definition; several of Agatha Christie’s novels (such as Death on the Nile) would fall into this category. Third and more positively, truly postcolonial detectives reside in the countries being portrayed and are marginalized through having a style of detection that is influenced both by their culture and that of the colonizers – a style that might lead others to discourage them from their investigations. An example of this is Arthur Upfield’s Australian part-Aboriginal detective Napoleon Bonaparte, who typically has to work with an English legal system while using traditional Aboriginal methods of detection. Fourth, the postcolonial detective might be quick to see contradictions and tensions in the society (e.g., between the colonizer and the colonized), thus helping the reader to understand that society. Walter Mosley’s black Los Angeles amateur detective Easy Rawlins exemplifies this perceptiveness in stories such as “Devil in a Blue Dress” (1990). Another way of characterizing the postcolonial detective is as the ethnic sleuth, to borrow a term from Matzke and M€ uhleisen. In this context, “ethnic” has sometimes been equated with “postcolonial” and simply means outside the mainstream. The mainstream is defined largely by the hard-boiled American tradition (beginning with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett) and the English “country house” tradition (Agatha Christie, Michael Innes). Frequently, the ethnic sleuth struggles with the challenges to life that are found in multicultural societies, including Western ones, and many examples of ethnic sleuths can be found in American fiction. In novels such as Cinnamon Kiss (2005), Walter
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DETECTIVE/CRIME FICTION
Mosley’s Easy Rawlins exemplifies the postcolonial, ethnic detective as subversive and counter to the prevailing tradition in his society and even in his own subgroup. An interesting question is whether or not Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski fits this category. Although she is not outside the ethnic mainstream per se, she does belong to a subordinate group (women), struggles with the challenge of her gender, and in the role of detective is clearly subversive – not only because she is a woman but also, ironically, because she is “hard-boiled.” A second question that this type of analysis prompts is whether or not the writer who creates an ethnic detective has to be ethnic. Keating did well enough with Inspector Ghote before he visited India, as did Tony Hillerman with his Navajo detectives and Upfield with Napoleon Bonaparte. These writers do not share their ethnicity with their heroes. However, their characters do not have the authenticity of Mosley’s Easy Rawlins, or of the Afrikaner lieutenant Tromp Kramer and the Zulu detective Mickey Zondi in James McClure’s South African police procedurals. Postcolonial crime writers commonly address the difficulties of detecting in societies that have been influenced – or tainted – by the crime and punishment traditions of the colonizing country, as Christian notes. The ethnic detective must therefore negotiate a path between his or her knowledge and traditional (Western) methods of detection. Upfield’s Napoleon Bonaparte struggles with this. The ethnic detective is also frequently shown to be trying to regain power that was lost through colonization, as Hillerman’s Navajos do. Language can be a marker of this struggle, and many crime novelists from postcolonial countries write in their indigenous languages. Typically they fight for acceptance because they are not translated into English, the predominant language of crime fiction, and do not sell well – unless, ironically, they are translated into English or French. Crime fiction by postcolonial authors writing in their own languages is, therefore, itself marginalized, not unlike early Western crime fiction. An interesting version of this problem is apparent in the crime novels of black British author Courttia Newland, beginning with The Scholar (1997). Newland’s fiction is set among young blacks in contemporary London and uses the vernacular of its place, time, and social group; to
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a reader not belonging to that group, the language may present a barrier. His work, like most postcolonial crime fiction, takes on a hybrid form. As Christian notes, postcolonial crime writers must combine Western conventions and traditions of crime fiction (without which sales would be minimal) with the cultural particularities of the society in which it is set. Morse makes the cogent point that “the discourse of detection is not that of post-colonial theory” (81). Although it can be argued that all writers of crime fiction have written from and about the social margins, the early days of crime writing were abundant with national and racial stereotypes: of the British (by Ngaio Marsh and Agatha Christie), of Americans (Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett), and of the French and Belgians (Maurice LeBlanc and Christie). Postcolonial theory’s emphasis on place (see Ashcroft et al. 8–11) does, however, intersect with crime fiction, which represents people and activities within a particular time and place. Indeed, fictional detectives are often keenly committed to their places, as Paretsky’s Warshawski is to Chicago and Peter Temple’s Jack Irish is to Melbourne. More generally, this means that whether the detective is professional (as in the police procedural) or amateur (the paid or unpaid private eye), the style of justice of the society in which the action takes place has to be seen by the reader as appropriate and the plot’s rendering of it believable. As a result, detection in a science fiction setting is less than compelling, because it does not have the context of a real-world system of justice, law, and ethics; the societal rules can be whatever the writer determines, the result being curiously unsatisfying. As Christian argues, the postcolonial detective not only occupies the space between two cultures, the colonizer and the colonized, but indeed might said to be that space. The postcolonial detective can oppress others by using traditional police methods, while simultaneously resisting oppression by asserting the (non-mainstream) mores of his own culture. In this context, the postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha makes the well-observed comment that the mimicry of the colonizers by the colonized can become mockery as the colonized become more sophisticated (see pp. 85–92). He sees a strengthening of both peoples through the process of hybridization. The
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postcolonial detective has to observe both cultures and forge a way through them, a way that achieves the desired goals within the plot and that makes sense to and adds to the understanding of the reader. Thematically, postcolonial crime fiction often centers on an essential ambiguity and distrust of order in society, as in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), where almost everything is not as it seems. To take an obvious example of the marrying of traditional crime fiction with its postcolonial variety, postcolonial “mean streets” can be found in Peter Temple’s Melbourne, Peter Corris’s Sydney, and Eric Wright’s Toronto; traditionally, such mean streets were walked down by Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and later by Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Other examples of postcolonial crime fiction include Sujata Massey’s Japanese American crime novels, the Botswana fiction of Alexander McCall Smith, and Wessell Ebersohn’s crime fiction set in the last 15 years of South African apartheid. In Canada, the part-Cherokee literary author Thomas King has written crime novels under the pseudonym Hartley Goodweather, featuring the Native investigator Thumps DreadfulWater. There is also Robert G. Barrett’s Australian pulp fiction, with Les Norton as a crude, workingclass private investigator, the whole being replete with misleading stereotypes, not unlike Agatha Christie’s novels. Postcolonial crime and detective fiction highlights the interplay between the colonized and colonizing societies that is the lot of the postcolonial detective and demonstrates the ways in which he or she has to come to terms with this when considering the means, motives, and opportunities of the criminal. To read such fiction is necessarily to gain insight into the postcolonial condition. SEE ALSO: Border Fictions (AF); Noir Fiction (AF); Mystery/Detective/ Crime Fiction (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTING READINGS Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H. (1989). The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in PostColonial Literatures. London: Routledge.
Bhabha, H. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Christian, E. (ed.) (2001). The Post-Colonial Detective. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Matzke, C., & Muhleisen, S. (eds.) (2006). Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Morse, R. (2005). Racination and Ratiocination: PostColonial Crime. European Review, 13(1), 79–89.
Duggan, Maurice IAN RICHARDS
Maurice Duggan is famous for his short stories and for helping introduce Joycean modernist techniques into New Zealand literature. He ranks with Katherine Mansfield and Frank Sargeson among New Zealand’s greatest literary stylists. Since novels were only sporadically produced in mid-twentieth-century New Zealand, the short story at that time was considered the mainstay of local fiction. Duggan was born in Auckland on November 25, 1922. His father was an Irish immigrant who managed an Auckland department store, and his mother was New Zealand-born but also of Irish extraction. Duggan had three sisters and also a half-brother from his father’s previous marriage. His mother’s sudden death in 1930 and his father’s third marriage led to tensions within the family, all of which were explored in Duggan’s early fiction. He wrote a series of semiautobiographical stories about the Lenihan family that he hoped to link together into a novel, as Katherine Mansfield had hoped to do with her Karori stories. Like Mansfield, he failed in this. Duggan never succeeded in publishing a novel. In 1935 Duggan’s father moved with his family to rural Paeroa. Duggan returned to Auckland a year later to attend Sacred Heart College, but his formal education lasted only nine months. He worked at odd jobs, but with the amputation of his left leg because of acute osteomyelitis in 1940, he discovered a desire to write. The amputation also prevented Duggan from serving in World War II. Instead, in early 1944, he made contact with Sargeson, then New Zealand’s most famous writer, at his small house in Auckland. Sargeson became Duggan’s mentor and introduced him to other writers on Auckland’s North Shore, notably Greville Texidor and John Reece Cole. These
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DUGGAN, MAURICE
writers, along with Keith Sinclair and Kendrick Smithyman, helped form an influential group of literati in New Zealand. Duggan married Barbara Platts in 1946; they had one child, Nicholas, in 1954. The couple eventually built a house in Auckland where Duggan lived on and off for the rest of his life. With Sargeson’s support, Duggan’s writing almost immediately showed a sophistication that was to mark his entire oeuvre. His approach contained an implicit rejection of Sargeson’s flatly New Zealand-colloquial, social-realist style, which had become mainstream and widely imitated. Duggan’s attention to language made his work heavily poetic. “Six Place Names and a Girl,” a series of short, evocative paragraphs describing areas near Paeroa and the feelings of a runaway boy, proved a breakthrough. It was published in Charles Brasch’s magazine Landfall in 1949. Landfall’s appearance from 1947 provided an important incentive for New Zealand writers and an outlet for their writing. Much of Duggan’s later work was first published in its pages. In 1950 Duggan and Barbara traveled to England for over two years, and there he wrote many of the stories eventually published in his first volume of short fiction, Immanuel’s Land (1956). Duggan contracted tuberculosis in late 1952 and had to return to New Zealand; though he continued writing, he spent much of the remainder of the decade recuperating. Immanuel’s Land proved an auspicious debut. In 1958 Duggan wrote a children’s book, Falter Tom and the Water Boy, which was published in Britain and the United States and has become a minor classic. He also began, with “The Wits of Willie Graves,” to move from semiautobiographical stories to the formally complex style of his maturity. In 1960 Duggan received the Burns Fellowship, established at Otago University in Dunedin to allow full-time writing for one year. During his year he wrote the Beckett-influenced novella “Riley’s Handbook,” and many of the stories in his next collection. One of these, “Along Rideout Road That Summer,” was published in Landfall in 1963 and was widely admired for its comic brio and mix of high and low language. It describes a summer’s dalliance on a Paeroa farm between a young Pakeha (European) male and his more sexually experienced and mature Maori girlfriend. The story is often regarded as
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announcing New Zealand literature’s final break with the social-realist tradition. Duggan’s second collection, Summer in the Gravel Pit (1965), was published to acclaim in Britain and New Zealand. Returning to Auckland in 1961, Duggan began a career as an advertising copywriter, which absorbed most of his creative energies. His rise was meteoric and he became creative director of the firm J. Inglis Wright by 1966. In 1970 he published his final collection, O’Leary’s Orchard, consisting of three novellas. Of these, “Riley’s Handbook,” the rant of a dying man who escapes into a new, harsher personality, was well regarded, but “O’Leary’s Orchard,” about a man and a young woman who both seek to expunge earlier relationships through their love affair, displayed a level of complexity that taxed the reading public. While working in advertising Duggan gradually succumbed to alcoholism, and though he was appointed to the company’s board of directors in 1971, he left 14 months later because of his drinking. Duggan spent 1973 in nightmarish conditions at Oakley Mental Hospital, but managed to give up alcohol. However, in late 1973 he learned that he had cancer. In his final year Duggan managed to write one more story, “The Magsman Miscellany,” published posthumously in Islands magazine in 1975. With its cryptic references to earlier stories, “The Magsman Miscellany” was regarded as heralding New Zealand literature’s shift toward postmodernism. Duggan died in Auckland on December 11, 1974. SEE ALSO: Frame, Janet (WF); Joyce, James (BIF); Mansfield, Katherine (WF); New Zealand Fiction (WF); Sargeson, Frank (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Duggan, M. (1956). Immanuel’s Land. Auckland: Pilgrim. Duggan, M. (1958). Falter Tom and the Water Boy. Hamilton: Paul’s Book Arcade. Duggan, M. (1965). Summer in the Gravel Pit. Auckland: Blackwood and Janet Paul. Duggan, M. (1970). O’Leary’s Orchard. Christchurch: Caxton. Duggan, M. (1974). The Fabulous McFanes and Other Children’s Stories. Queen Charlotte Sound: Cape Catley.
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Duggan, M. (2001). A Voice for the Minotaur: Selected Poems. Auckland: Holloway. Richards, I. (1997). To Bed at Noon: The Life and Art of Maurice Duggan. Auckland: Auckland University Press. Stead, C. K. (ed.) (1981). Collected Stories: Maurice Duggan. Auckland: Auckland University Press.
Duncan, Sara Jeannette JANICE FIAMENGO
In the novels, short stories, travel accounts, and journalism that she published over 30 years, Sara Jeannette Duncan was predominantly a social satirist. In her most popular work, the satire is comic and forgiving; in her mature fiction, which explored the themes of modern womanhood and imperial politics, her Horatian perspective is darkened by mordant irony and an emphasis on failed ideals. A Canadian-born writer who adopted an international perspective and did most of her work while living in India (with extended visits to London), Duncan produced a varied output of 22 books united by an interest in representative national types and in the conflict between personal desire and social duty. Duncan was born on December 22, 1861, in Brantford, Canada West (now Ontario), to a Scottish father and an Irish mother. Abandoning her early desire to become a visual artist, she turned to writing after a brief career as a schoolteacher. In 1885, she made her name when she was hired as the literary reviewer for the Washington Post; in the following year, she became the first woman to work full-time in a Canadian newspaper office, that of the Toronto Globe. Here, as well as at The Week and the Montreal Star, she established her flair for sketching witty characters and scenes and making pert observations on social and political issues. Tiring of journalism’s exhausting pace and limited rewards, she left Canada in 1888 to travel the world with a fellow journalist, Lily Lewis, using the material thus gained to publish her fictionalized account A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World by Ourselves (1890). Its vivid narrative of two ingenues abroad, observing the cultural peculiarities of foreign lands and exposing their own prejudices and assumptions, made
it a popular and critical success. Attempting to capitalize on the flexible formula, Duncan published a number of novels, including the sketchbased An American Girl in London (1891), in which an observant narrator experiences a series of comic encounters in a foreign setting. She was particularly successful in mining her experience as a newlywed in India (having met and married Everard Cotes, a museum official with the colonial administration) in the deftly humorous The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib (1893); and she maintained the formula well into her later career, using it effectively in her witty tale of cultural contrasts Cousin Cinderella: A Canadian Girl in London (1908). A more reflective tone characterizes On the Other Side of the Latch (1901), an autobiographical narrative of a summer in Simla, in which Duncan analyzes her life in British India. Humor was always a staple of Duncan’s fiction, but her major works also drew on pathos and melodrama. Such is the case with A Daughter of To-Day (1894), her examination of the freedoms and perils of modern womanhood. In this novel, a self-confident and consciously self-creating “new woman,” Elfrida Bell, makes her way as a journalist in London, but commits suicide after a series of devastating miscalculations in love and career. It is not clear whether the heroine’s death is intended as a condemnation of her dramatic unconventionality or an outraged illustration of the killing force of Old World conventions. Ten years later, Duncan gave her less unconventional heroine, Advena Murchison, a happier ending in The Imperialist (1904), a novel about political and romantic idealism. Advena’s fidelity to ideals is rewarded through a comic deus ex machina plot twist, but the hero, Lorne Murchison, fails almost as bitterly as Elfrida because of the extravagance of his political vision, which does not find favor with the hard-headed electors of Elgin. What begins as a nostalgically affectionate story of small-town Ontario becomes a decisively critical portrait of colonial complacency and parochialism. Failed ideals are also explored in the subtle stories of The Pool in the Desert (1903). Some of Duncan’s most complex portraits emerge in the Anglo-Indian novels that followed The Imperialist. In Set in Authority (1906) and The Burnt Offering (1909), Duncan concerns herself with the moral issues surrounding the British
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DUNCAN, SARA JEANNETTE
imperial presence. Written during a period of imperial crisis and increasingly militant Indian nationalism, the novels focus on racial conflict and injustice, revealing the failure of governors to understand the governed and the chasm separating members of the so-called imperial family. Duncan’s representations are steeped in late imperial assumptions about the Oriental mind, yet her consistent exposure of white prejudice and ignorance reveals her awareness that clear vision is not available to anyone: all are bound within their own traditions of thought, walled off from their fellows by the barriers of race. Before her death in 1922, Duncan turned away from serious examinations of empire with conventional novels in which, as in His Royal Happiness (1914), she returned to the romance of contrasting national types. She also wrote some unsuccessful plays. Best known for The Imperialist, Duncan is a difficult author because of the ironies and topicality of many of her works; however, her analyses of social nuance and cultural difference give her writing an enduring interest. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Dean, M. (1991). A Different Point of View: Sara Jeannette Duncan Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Duncan, S. J. (1890). A Social Departure. New York: Appleton. Duncan, S. J. (1891). An American Girl in London. New York: Appleton. Duncan, S. J. (1893). The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib. London: Chatto and Windus. Duncan, S. J. (1894). A Daughter of To-Day. London: Chatto and Windus. Duncan, S. J. (1901). On the Other Side of the Latch. London: Methuen. Duncan, S. J. (1903). The Pool in the Desert. London: Methuen. Duncan, S. J. (1904). The Imperialist. Toronto: Copp Clark. Duncan, S. J. (1906). Set in Authority. New York: Doubleday, Page. Duncan, S. J. (1908). Cousin Cinderella. London: Methuen. Duncan, S. J. (1909). The Burnt Offering. London: Methuen. Duncan, S. J. (1914). His Royal Happiness. New York: Appleton. Fowler, M. (1983). Redney: A Life of Sara Jeannette Duncan. Toronto: Anansi. Tausky, T. E. (1980). Sara Jeannette Duncan: Novelist of Empire. Port Credit, ON: P. D. Meany.
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E East African Fiction EVAN MWANGI
Critics and historians of African literature use the term “East Africa” heuristically to describe a diverse geopolitical entity that covers Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Somalia, and sometimes Ethiopia and Eritrea. Fiction from this area is as diverse as the demographic and linguistic characteristics of each county, encompassing a wide range of aesthetic and political backgrounds. Published both by small local firms and by multinational presses at home and abroad, the fiction appears not only in English but also in indigenous languages, especially Kiswahili and Amharic. Even the English-language fiction often assumes an audience conversant with local languages, with characters and narrators implicitly speaking in a particular local language that has been “translated” into English. White writing by settlers and explorers dominated the first third of the century and reached its height in the 1950s. Male settler writers specialized in pseudo-scientific memoirs that tended to justify whites’ occupation of Africa. Authors such as Charles Wilson, J. F. Lipscomb, William Baldwin, Ian Henderson, and Frank Kitson sought to show white settlers’ contribution to the development of East Africa and to dismiss nationalist liberation efforts. American Robert Ruark’s Something of Value (1955) was one of the most widely read accounts of the Mau Mau war of independence (1952–6). Although sympathetic toward Kenyans, the novel not only dwells on their supposedly backward practices but also
portrays the Mau Mau liberation movement as misguided, a perspective that would be challenged by later African writers like Kenyan Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o. Ruark’s other novel Uhuru (1962) has a similar theme but bemoans the loss of innocent pastoral life to encroaching modernity as Kenya enters the new era of uhuru (Swahili for “independence”). Ernest Hemingway’s short stories based on his journeys to East Africa, especially “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936) and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), contributed to a romantic image of the region as a site for adventure – especially hunting big game and flirting with innocent tribal girls. Hemingway’s fictional memoir True at First Light, published posthumously in 1999, offers a similarly idealized image. For their part, women settler writers exposed the empire’s masculinist underpinnings but also sometimes supported colonialism. Like Karen Blixen’s famous memoir of Kenya, Out of Africa (1933), the novels by settler women (such as Joy Adamson and Elspeth Huxley from Kenya) would be praised in Western venues for the reasons they were found to be offensive in Africa. By contrast, Kenyan Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, who arrived as a missionary in 1954, adroitly uses African culture and landscape to present the plight of women under colonialism and neocolonialism and to link the HIV/AIDS scourge to the neocolonial dilapidation of African institutions. Her most acclaimed novel is Coming to Birth (1986), about a rural girl whose life seems to parallel Kenya’s political developments. Acutely sensitive to African cultures, Macgoye so consistently rejected the privileges
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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EAST AFRICAN FICTION
that went with being white in Kenya that critics find it hard to classify her as a settler novelist. The major weakness in her writing is that the white woman is typically positioned as the savior of black female victims. Semiautobiographical and anthropological treatises by indigenous intellectuals such as Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya (1938), Mugo Gatheru’s A Child of Two Worlds (1964), and Tom Mboya’s Freedom and After (1963) were echoed in postcolonial fiction, especially because they valorized the local traditions that colonialism denigrated, capturing the dilemmas caused by African, Indian, and European interactions. They sought to correct the colonialist writers, whom they perceived as condescending and patronizing, if not outright racist. Kenyan Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o and Somali Nuruddin Farah are the most widely acclaimed fiction writers from East Africa. Ng~ ug~ı published the first East African novel in English by a black writer in 1964. Weep Not, Child portrayed from an adolescent character’s perspective the violence and anxieties of the fight for Kenyan independence in the 1950s. His The River Between (1965) is a realistic portrayal of the conflict between Africa’s precolonial traditions and modernity, covering such themes as alienation, controversies surrounding female circumcision in central Kenya in the 1930s, and the centrality of modern education in the fight for independence. Ng~ ug~ı’s later novels graphically capture his disillusionment with post-independence Africa, but they differ in the solutions they offer. Influenced by Frantz Fanon’s writings, A Grain of Wheat (1967) and Petals of Blood (1977) present Ng~ ug~ı’s disappointment with constitutional independence that is not accompanied by substantive improvement in material human existence. His subsequent novels were written in his native G~ık~ uy~ u language. Tending toward anti-realism and magic realism, they borrow heavily from oral methods of narration to portray the injustices in modern Kenya, including political corruption, gender violence, and exploitation. His G~ık~ uy~ u novels have been translated as Devil on the Cross (1982), Matigari (1988), and Wizard of the Crow (2007). Nuruddin Farah’s novels, which include three trilogies, explore the corruption and abuse of office by the authoritarian military regime of Siad
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Barre. Farah reveals parallels between the new governments and their European colonialist predecessors, and is one of the African male writers who displays the greatest sensitivity to gender issues, building the plots of his novels around strong women characters. His exploration of gender issues, including the practice of female circumcision, lacks Ng~ ug~ı’s ambivalence; in Sardines (1981), the characters discuss female circumcision with rare candor. Farah is best known for his sophisticated Maps (1986), a postmodern novel that expresses disillusionment with Somali nationalism. Tanzanian Canadian M. G. Vassanji is also highly acclaimed. Vassanji focuses on the experiences of South Asians in Africa and North America, exploring the interaction of Africans, Indians, and European colonialists and the role of memory in reconstructing the diasporic identity of immigrant groups. His most well-known work is his multigenerational debut novel, The Gunny Sack (1989), which won the regional Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book in 1990. Touting itself on the cover as “Africa’s answer to [Salman Rushdie’s] Midnight’s Children,” it examines themes of identity, displacement, and race relations while trying to preserve and recreate longsilenced oral histories and mythologies. Vassanji’s metafictional The Book of Secrets (1994), which won Canada’s first Giller Prize for fiction, traces the 75-year history of the people who possessed a British colonial administrator’s diary. The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003), another Giller Prize-winner, examines the fight for independence in Kenya and the subsequent corruption in the postcolonial nation. Vassanji’s work attempts both to correct Europeans’ racist images of Indians and to debunk stereotypes of Indians in fiction by indigenous African writers. The novel of post-independence political disillusionment was accompanied by the urban popular thriller. With little if any nostalgia for a lost village life, works in this category were written as crime and sex potboilers and portrayed the problems of merging urban centers, including slum life, prostitution, and rising crime rates. Kenyan David G. Maillu was particularly prolific, with his Comb Books publishing pocket-sized thrillers in the 1970s. Exploiting the coffee boom and the rising middle class, these novellas were, to the chagrin of critics, stylistically simplistic,
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EAST AFRICAN FICTION
melodramatic, and escapist in their presentation of relationships. Meja Mwangi, Thomas Akare, Charles Mangua, Mwangi Gicheru, and Mwangi Ruheni also produced commercially successful thrillers about the city. Of the urban writers, Meja Mwangi is most accomplished in his use of urban settings to tackle themes of poverty and alienation, especially in Kill Me Quick (1973) and The Cockroach Dance (1979). His later fiction offers frequent glimpses into rural life as it portrays the spread of HIV and interethnic tensions, especially in The Last Plague (2000) and Big Chiefs (2007) respectively. Kenya’s John Kiriamiti is the region’s leading crime fiction writer, infusing autobiographical narrations about his life as a criminal with humorous descriptions of the city. Monica Genya’s Links of a Chain (1996) seems to be a feminist response to Kiriamiti’s popular My Life in Crime (1984), avoiding the stereotypes of women that define Kiriamiti’s fiction. Henry ole Kulet’s popular but slow-paced novels portray the clash between Maasai culture and modernity, at times unabashedly siding with Western culture – even to the extent of tacitly endorsing the fiction of the nineteenth-century British writer Henry Rider Haggard, after whom he names his principal character, Henry, in his semiautobiographical debut novel Is It Possible? (1971). If in the 1970s the East African novel about colonialism and the independence struggle tended to idealize women by presenting the African nation as an ahistorical woman to be regained from rapacious colonialists, the urban novel by male writers often presented the modern African woman as a morally degenerate prostitute. Gender became a major theme in the 1980s with women writers such as Rebeka Njau (Kenya), Grace Ogot (Kenya), Margaret Ogola (Kenya), Mary Okurut (Uganda), Goretti Kyemuhendo (Uganda), Asenath Bole Odaga (Kenya), and Eliesh Lema (Tanzania) focusing on gender discrimination in post-independence Africa. Rather than condemn the prostitute as a symbol of urban decrepitude, women’s novels such as Okurut’s, Njau’s, and F. M. Genga-Idowu’s attempted to recuperate her as a figure of possible feminist liberation. Their fiction is largely focalized through modern female characters and focuses on women’s efforts to reclaim their humanity in a male-dominated society, treating such themes as
predatory romantic relationships and struggles against poverty and HIV/AIDS. Except for Rebeka Njau, who explores same-sex relations in Ripples in the Pool (1975), the feminism of East African fiction is largely heterosexual, with the most influential woman writer being Grace Ogot. Ogot was one of the first black African women to publish a novel, Promised Land (1966), a tragic story about the problems modernization has brought in its wake among the Luo people of the Lake Victoria region, who are forced to migrate to Tanzania in search of farmland. The novel in East Africa is largely realist, but postmodern narration based on phantasmagorical oral literature and employing magic realism has emerged since the mid-1980s to help the writers avoid censorship and to address traumatic topics such as state-sponsored violence. Military and civilian dictatorships, grand corruption, and the civil wars that have plagued some countries since the 1970s continue to preoccupy writers such as Farah, Ng~ ug~ı, and Moses Isegawa. In Abyssinian Chronicles (2000) and Snakepit (2005), Isegawa captures in stark prose the horrors of Idi Amin’s dictatorship in Uganda. Emergent themes by both male and female writers include the African diaspora and other races’ experience in Africa. Writers with remarkable novels in this category include Vassanji and Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania/UK). Genocide and ethnic violence have inspired a number of works, including the Ugandan Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Secrets No More (1999), about the Rwanda genocide of the 1990s. The short story emerges from folk oral literary tradition, with writers such as Ogot, especially in her collection Land without Thunder (1968), and Ng~ ug~ı, in Secret Lives (1975), tapping from oral traditions to tackle modern themes. Urban problems and disillusionment with the postindependence situation are major themes in the stories of Leonard Kibera and his brother Sam Kahiga in the acclaimed collection Potent Ash (1968). In the collection Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor and Other Stories (1993), Ethiopian Hama Tuma exploits the rich African folkloric traditions to satirize dictatorships. Some stories in Vassanji’s When She Was Queen (2005) borrow from Indian mythology to address gender concerns among immigrant Indians in East Africa.
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EAST ASIAN FICTION
The short story has remained an important genre through which upcoming writers reach out to global audiences. Kenyans Binyavanga Wainaina and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor won the Caine Prize for short fiction (in 2002 and 2003 respectively) for stories that treated themes of identity, migration, and civil war. Ugandan Monica Arac de Nyeko won the award in 2007 with “Jambula Tree,” a story about teenage love and community. Other women writers such as Doreen Baingana (Uganda) and Muthoni Garland (Kenya) have been shortlisted for the award, considered one of the most prestigious in Africa. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (WF); Detective/Crime Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the African Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF); Southern African Fiction (WF); West African Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Gikandi, S. (ed.) (2003). Encyclopedia of African Literature. New York: Routledge. Gikandi, S., & Mwangi, E. (2007). The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945. New York: Columbia University Press. Griffiths, G. (2000). African Literatures in English – East and West. Harlow: Longman. Irele, A. (2004). The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Killam, G. D. (ed.) (1984). The Writing of East and Central Africa. London: Heinemann. Kurtz, J. R. (1998). Urban Obsessions, Urban Fears: The Postcolonial Kenyan Novel. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Lihamba, A., Moyo,F. L.,Mulokozi, M.M., Shitemi, N. L., & Yahya-Othman, S. (eds.) (2007). Women Writing Africa: The Eastern Region. New York: Feminist Press. Owomoyela, O. (ed.) (1993). A History of TwentiethCentury African Literatures. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
East Asian Fiction PING-HUI LIAO
In recent decades, many East Asian novelists have made their names in the English-speaking world.
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Works by Teresa Cha, Ha Jin, Kazuo Ishiguro, Timothy Mo, and others are often considered representative of the previously neglected voices of Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Ha Jin, for example, has written extensively on life within and outside China. His Waiting (1999) and War Trash (2004) both won the PEN/Faulkner Award; The Writer as Migrant (2008) offers revealing accounts of his literary career. Anchee Min, a survivor of the Cultural Revolution and, like Ha Jin, an emigrant to the US, has produced several narratives (Red Azalea, 1994; Becoming Madame Mao, 2001; and Empress Orchid, 2004) that raised controversy for their portrayal of lesbian relationships or their sympathetic treatment of the lives of Jiang Ching and Empress Cixi. As an expatriate, Ha Jin is more frequently considered Asian American than East Asian, and it is unfortunate that twentieth-century Asian literature most often catches the attention of Western readers when written in English, since “major” authors in Asian countries tend to write in their native languages. Indeed, when Eileen Zhang, one of China’s leading fiction writers, tried in the 1970s to rewrite her novels in English, they met with a lukewarm reception. To fully appreciate fictions from East Asia as part of the emergent world literature, English-language readers should read works in translation. East Asian novelists write in response to the region’s multiple layers of colonialism and modernity as introduced by the Dutch (or Portuguese), reinforced by the British (or Japanese), and then incorporatedintothepost-ColdWarpoliticaleconomy by the American empire; these concerns are complicated by ethnic strife and new modes of cultural reproduction. As they draw on regional and local cultural dynamics, East Asian writers also appropriate techniques and motifs from other expressivetraditions,includingminorityorgayrights, postcolonial critique, magic realism, Christian humanism, science fiction, travel narrative, and ecofeminism. Trauma, especially as a result of rapid changes in the urban landscape and lifestyles, dominates many literary imaginations. Anyi Wang, who, along with Yan Mo, Tong Su, and Hua Yu, receives acclaims internationally, reflects on the postsocialist desire to narrate the dangers and rewards of living in a city like Shanghai. While Wang is lyrically nostalgic about the city, particularly in
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her masterpiece Song of Everlasting Sorrow (1996), Pingwa Jia’s novel of the postrevolutionary urban literati’s dissipated life and loss, Abandoned Capital (1993), renders the city and its future more gloomily. New social imaginaries perpetuated by bio-engineering, Internet technology, transnational capital networks, global diaspora, and climate change provide conceptual frameworks and themes for some contemporary writers; others explore sexual fantasies and gender identity in times of difficult transition. Tienwen Zhu’s Notes of a Desolate Man (2000) is most remarkable in this respect. On the monstrosity of the Revolution and its use and abuse of history, Chinese novelists living in China develop rather different interpretive accounts than do those in exile. The Nobel laureate Xingjian Kao notably reveals the hardship and absurdity of human conditions under the horrendous purge initiated by Chairman Mao. In Confessions (2007), Zhengguo Kang recounts the miseries of an innocent man in Communist China. Younger Chinese writers such as Bai Lin seem to have moved beyond the trauma and memory stage; they give sensuous, sensible, and cynical accounts of the everyday life, teasing out the warring forces of socialism and capitalism, hope and fear, decadence and struggle as they unfold in a not quite post-Communist state that has nevertheless undergone rapid change and reform. The Chinese reading public may have been demoralized by the expanding market economy, but it has also been energized by new forms and means of expression such as the Internet chat room, blogging, and text messaging. Contemporary Taiwan literature is more diverse, with inputs from Japanese modernism, American postmodernism, and Chinese nationalism. Writers such as Zhenho Wang, Chunming Huang, Qao Li, and Shitao Ye are often labeled as “nativists”; however, their fictions cut across ethnicity and history. “Nativist” literature raises consciousness of reclaiming local place identities in reaction to American and Japanese neocolonialism and helps push Taiwan toward democratization. First- and second-generation mainlander Chinese writers are more concerned with the predicament of national culture: novelists such as Dacun Zhang, Tienxin Zhu, and Yijun Luo elaborate allegorically on relations between family and state, constantly drawing on
individual and collective memory. Sexual fictions by Ang Li, especially Butcher’s Wife (1995), challenge patriarchal structures of interests, power, and value. Gay and lesbian writers like Dawei Ji and Miaojin Qiu subvert heteronormative traditions. Japan has produced two Nobel Prize laureates – Yasunari Kawabata (1968) and Kenzaburo Oe (1994) – and has many other worthy candidates. Works by such prominent and prolific writers as Natsume Soseki, Junichiro Tanizaki, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Eiji Yoshikawa, Osamu Dazai, Ango Sakaguchi, Nubuo Kojima, Kobo Abe, Yukio Mishima, Kenji Nakagami, and in particular Haruki Murakami, have been translated into various languages. These authors write on a rich diversity of subjects, often noted for nuanced detail, penetrating insight, nightmarish vision, gloomy wit, brilliant fantasy, and even obsession with suicide, as in the case of Mishima. Several of their works have been adapted for film or animation. Ryu Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto have won international acclaim for their piercing portraits of disaffected or exhausted Japanese youth, highlighting their promiscuity, drug use, melancholia, and frustration. From the beginning, Korean writers have been preoccupied with national predicaments, people, and class issues. With the South and North divided since the Korean War (1950–3), the national trauma has produced a lasting impact on the literary imagination, recoded as agony and discontent in fiction by Won-il Kim (Sunset, 1978) and Sang-guk Chon (Abe’s Family, 1980). Farmers, laborers, and people living in the outskirts of the city are main topics for Korean writers such as Ch’Song-jun Yi (Your Heaven, 1976; Cruel City, 1978) and Jong-hui O (Garden of Childhood, 1981). The late Kyung-ni Park, who died at 81 in 2008 and was awarded South Korea’s top medal posthumously, is a major figure. Her epic, 16volume novel The Land (Toji, 1969–84) is set against the turbulent history of Korea from the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth century, with hundreds of characters from across the Korean peninsula. With its vivid style and heroes struggling to rescue Korean history and dignity from foreign imperial forces, The Land helped make Park the most respected writer of her time, with dozens of novels and three poetry collections. Other Korean writers are celebrated for portraying
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EKWENSI, CYPRIAN
ordinary lives; of these, Young-ung Bang, Sokyong Hwang, Munyol Yi, Heaon-jong Yu, Humyong Yun are the most prolific and influential. SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Southeast Asian Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Hong, Z. (2009). A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature. Leiden: Brill. Kojin, K. (1993). Origins of Modern Japanese Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lee, P. H. (2004). A History of Korean Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wang, D. D., & Rojas, C. (eds.) (2006). Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ekwensi, Cyprian JOSHUA D. PRESCOTT
The Nigerian novelist and short story writer Cyprian Ekwensi, often called the “Nigerian Defoe,” was celebrated for his versatility as a writer, particularly for his ability to portray contemporary urban life in Nigeria in straightforward and engaging prose. Ekwensi’s contribution to early Nigerian literature is surpassed only by that of his two contemporaries, Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. Born on September 26, 1921 in Minna, northern Nigeria, Ekwensi completed his secondary education at the Government College in Ibadan, and then chose to study at Ibadan’s School of Forestry, taking a job as a forestry officer in 1945. While observing the natural surroundings within which he worked, Ekwensi decided to try writing, and his earliest stories all take as their setting lush, natural forestlands. Two years later, he accepted a teaching position at Igbobi College; he began broadcasting a short story each week on Radio Nigeria and his program quickly became popular, garnering him widespread recognition under the program’s title, “Your Favorite Story Teller.” He then made a career change in 1949, studying at London’s Chelsea School of Pharmacy on a scholarship. After returning to Nigeria, he worked as a pharmacist, but soon returned to broadcasting,
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accepting a position as head of broadcasting features for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. Ekwensi remained in Nigeria for the rest of his life, working in broadcasting but also in public service as Biafran chairman for external publicity during the Biafran War and later for the East Central State Library Board. Ekwensi’s first collection, Ikolo the Wrestler and Other Ibo Tales (1947), contains 24 strongly didactic, thematically driven narratives. Based on the Igbo story of Ikolo, a hunter and fighter who, previously unbeaten by any creature or spirit, is handily defeated by his own spirit, the collection stresses the need to respect historically erected boundaries – human and animal, human and spirit – and the tension between oral history and written word. Later story collections include The Boa Suitor (1949), Rain Maker and Other Stories (1965), Lokotown and Other Stories (1966), and Restless City and Christmas Gold (1975). It was his novel People of the City (1954), however, published four years before Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, that launched Ekwensi onto the international literary scene. The story of a crime reporter for a Lagos-based newspaper, the novel details in picaresque form the realities of urban life and the pitfalls of the “attractive” city center – materialism, bribery and corruption, sexual indulgence, and poor business relations. Jagua Nana (1961b) takes as its setting the streets of Lagos and focuses on the life of Jagua: as a 40-year-old prostitute, self-conscious of her aging physical appeal, Jagua finds comfort in Freddie, a teacher, and works tirelessly to retain his affection. Ekwensi once again explores the decadence of the modern city, but the novel’s dualistic use of Standard English and pidgin makes it more successful artistically. The novel remains his most popular and his most controversial work, having been attacked by church organizations and women’s unions for its sexually explicit content, as well as being banned by educational institutions. Burning Grass (1961a) was inspired by a Fulani family with whom Ekwensi lived during his forestry days. Leaving the city for the rural plains, the novel explores the life of Mai Sunsaye, a popular village chief struck with “sokugo,” a disease that constrains its victim to wander without purpose. His family is forced to adjust to both the consequences of Sunsaye’s illness and the integration of a slave girl, Fatimeh, into their family. With
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Beautiful Feathers (1963), however, Ekwensi returned to questions of political power and the character of the city. Wilson Iyari, a pharmacist with political ambitions, and whose children are named after celebrated anti-colonial leaders, struggles to reconcile his professional and political responsibilities with those as a husband and father. The novel thus explores the Igbo proverb from which it borrows its title: a man unable to command respect in his home is like a bird – beautiful in appearance but ordinary in character. Critics have noted that Beautiful Feathers demonstrates considerable improvement in the quality of Ekwensi’s writing, stressing his new-found ability to balance plot with thematic exploration, and his skill in effectively integrating narrative components into a single, complete structure. Survive the Peace (1976) explores Ekwensi’s personal political sympathies by detailing the story of James Odugo, a radio journalist, as he attempts to make sense of his life following the Nigerian–Biafran War. Ekwensi also published a large body of children’s literature, using this medium to disseminate contemporary African writing and thought to a younger audience. Frustrated by the continued use of British literature as primary educational texts, Ekwensi’s children’s writing focuses on the Nigerian child in Nigerian society, acting as a bridge between contemporary writing and the world of folklore and folktales. Included among his children’s books are The Drummer Boy (1960a), Passport of Mallam Ilia (1960b), Trouble in Form Six (1966c), and Juju Rock (1966a). Ekwensi became a fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters in 2006. He died in 2007. SEE ALSO: Achebe, Chinua (WF); Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Soyinka, Wole (WF); West African Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ekwensi, C. (1947). Ikolo the Wrestler and Other Ibo Tales. London: Thomas Nelson. Ekwensi, C. (1949). The Boa Suitor. London: Thomas Nelson. Ekwensi, C. (1954). People of the City. London: Andrew Dakers. Ekwensi, C. (1960a). The Drummer Boy. Nairobi: East African Educational.
Ekwensi, C. (1960b). Passport of Mallam Ilia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ekwensi, C. (1961a). Burning Grass. London: Heinemann. Ekwensi, C. (1961b). Jagua Nana. London: Hutchinson. Ekwensi, C. (1963). Beautiful Feathers. London: Hutchinson. Ekwensi, C. (1965). Rain Maker and Other Stories. Lagos: African Universities Press. Ekwensi, C. (1966a). Juju Rock. Lagos: African Universities Press. Ekwensi, C. (1966b). Lokotown and Other Stories. London: Heinemann Educational. Ekwensi, C. (1966c). Trouble in Form Six. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ekwensi, C. (1975). Restless City and Christmas Gold. London: Heinemann. Ekwensi, C. (1976). Survive the Peace. London: Heinemann. Emenyonu, E. (1974). Cyprian Ekwensi. London: Evans Bros. Okonkwo, J. (1976). Ekwensi and Modern Nigerian Culture. Ariel, 7(2), 32–45.
Emecheta, Buchi SUSAN ALICE FISCHER
Nigerian British author Buchi Emecheta’s large body of work centers on themes related to survival in the face of abusive power. Examining colonial indoctrination into the ideology of British “superiority,” her novels condemn the legacy of colonialism in Nigeria and the racism Africans encounter in Britain. Just as intently, she questions traditional African practices that devalue and subjugate women. Emecheta was born Florence Onye Buchi Emecheta in the village of Yaba, near Lagos, Nigeria on July 21, 1944 of Igbo parentage. In her autobiography, Head above Water (1986a), she describes her mother as a slave girl who freed herself only to be shackled again by her culture and Christianity. Her father died when she was young. Emecheta won a scholarship to the Methodist Girls High School in Lagos, married, had two children, and began to work. In 1962, she followed her student husband to Britain, where they found cramped and run-down lodgings in north London at a time when many would not rent to black people. She worked in a library, had more children and dreamed of becoming a writer.
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Her fierce determination to achieve that end is all the more striking for the obstacles placed in her path. Indeed, as Emecheta says in her autobiography, her survival is something of a “miracle.” Not only did she deal with the racism that rendered her a “second-class citizen,” but her husband began to take his own failures out on her, burning the manuscript of the first novel she wrote, which she resurrected later as The Bride Price (1976). Almost 22 and pregnant with her fifth child, Emecheta left the marriage, which had become abusive, and found council housing in north London. As a single parent, she received an honors degree in sociology from the University of London and worked as a teacher and a youth worker. Her first novel was serialized in the New Statesman before being published as In the Ditch (1972). In 1980, she returned to Nigeria for the first time in close to two decades. Also in the early 1980s, she and her son started a small Londonbased publishing company called Ogwugwu Afor, through which she has published some of her own work. As Emecheta told New York Times reporter C. Gerald Fraser in 1990, the impetus came from finding that her publisher had cut an 86-page chapter in her novel Destination Biafra (1982a), on the 1967–70 Nigerian Civil War, without discussing it with her. The chapter was largely based on undercover research she conducted while working as a cleaner at Sandhurst, Britain’s Royal Military Academy. The first book her press published was Double Yoke (1982b), which did particularly well, a fact she attributes to her children’s distribution efforts throughout the country as well as to favorable reviews internationally (Fraser 1990). Emecheta’s prolific writing career emerges from a relentless will for survival of her chi, or spirit, as she describes being silenced at various levels: as an undervalued girl in colonial Nigeria and as a young woman abused by her husband and excluded by racism in Britain. Emecheta’s body of work parallels not only her struggle to survive against such odds, but also her evolving relation to Nigeria and Britain, the two countries in which she has spent her life. While her early novels are set in Britain, she then turns to the African context, focusing on the position of women in traditional society as well as on the destructive legacy of colonialism. Her most recent novels return to the Western context as she
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redefines African diasporic identity. Emecheta has also written essays, children’s fiction, and television plays. Chapters of her struggle to survive the move to Britain, her marriage and single parenthood on a council estate, as well as her nascent writing career are chronicled in Head above Water (1986) and figure prominently in her first novels, Second-Class Citizen (1974) and its sequel (though published earlier), In the Ditch. Second-Class Citizen relates Adah’s journey from childhood in Nigeria through her decision to follow her husband to Britain, where the snowcovered docks she views from the ship’s deck symbolize the frigid reception she will receive. Adah’s experience in her marriage parallels her author’s early years in London, and the novel ends with Adah’s decision to leave the marriage. In the Ditch finds Adah living in Pussy-Cat Mansions, a dilapidated council estate that houses “problem families.” Despite appalling conditions, Adah finds a sense of community with other women on the estate, something she will miss when they are all separately rehoused, even as she looks forward to a better life. Emecheta’s African novels are diverse in scope, but generally focus on the themes of women’s inequality and on colonialism and its aftermath, including the situation in postcolonial Nigeria, with its government corruption and failing infrastructure. The Bride Price and The Slave Girl (1977) highlight the injustices that come from calculating young women’s worth in monetary terms. The ironically titled The Joys of Motherhood (1979a) relates the struggles of an Ibo woman, Nnu Ego, mother of nine, and explores family relations and customs in colonial Nigeria. Nnu Ego is so successful at overcoming hardship and putting her children through school that they ultimately leave for the city or for universities abroad and forget their mother. The novel foreshadows the changes in Nigeria after British rule, with Nnu Ego’s children representing the rising elite and Nnu Ego wishing she had cultivated friendships with other women rather than focusing solely on her children. With The Moonlight Bride (1980a), Emecheta provides young adult readers with an understanding of traditional African culture, while Destination Biafra focuses on the Nigerian Civil War. Double Yoke draws in part on Emecheta’s experience of teaching at the
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University of Calabar in 1980–1. In the framing narrative, a female lecturer of creative writing, a “been-to” (i.e., someone who has been to Britain) asks her students to write a story, and the main story is narrated by one of her Nigerian students. In The Rape of Shavi (1983), Emecheta returns to war, this time an imagined nuclear blast threatening Europe which leads a group of Europeans to flee to Africa, where they land in a village untouched by colonialism. The title refers both to the literal rape of an African woman by a Westerner and to the West’s depredation of Africa. Emecheta’s most recent novels return to Britain, and while continuing to explore the issues that have dominated her work thus far – the legacy of colonialism and women’s inequality in traditional African culture – here she redefines what it means to be African or black in Britain. With Gwendolen (1989; published as The Family in the United States), Emecheta adds a Caribbean dimension to her work. Gwendolen leaves Jamaica to join her parents in Britain, where her father preys upon her sexually. Critics such as Omar Sougou have compared the novel to Joan Riley’s The Unbelonging (1985), also about an incestuous relationship, and have noted that in distancing the incest plot from Africa, Emecheta highlights the legacy of devastation wreaked upon family life by the Middle Passage, slavery, and the diaspora. In Kehinde (1994), the eponymous protagonist reconciles the contrary pulls of Nigeria and Britain, particularly as regards women. Like many other writers of migration, Emecheta draws upon the trope of the twin to symbolize this duality. Kehinde’s feeling that she must live for her dead twin, Taiwo, partly influences her decision to leave London for Nigeria. Finding that her husband has taken another wife, Kehinde rejects traditional expectations in favor of her own agency. Returning to London, she feels she is finally “home” and begins a relationship with a Jamaican man, suggesting that, though still Nigerian, she has cast her lot with other black Britons. In The New Tribe, the black male protagonist, Chester, who has been raised by white parents in England, journeys to Africa in search of belonging, only to realize that his vision of Nigeria is imaginary. Ultimately, he will agree with his girlfriend that “We don’t belong in Africa, we’re British. Black British maybe, but this is our home now” (2000, 113). He belongs to a “new tribe” of black Britons who are part African, part
Western: symbolically, Chester’s father turns out to be African American, and thus marked by the history of Africans in the West, and Chester ultimately recognizes that the pervasive white English culture in which he lives has shaped him as well. While Emecheta (1988) rejects the label of “feminist” (because of its Western derivation) in favor of Afrocentric womanism, her work nonetheless condemns patriarchy as much as it does racism, classism, and colonialism. Sougou suggests that Emecheta’s experience of writing from both an African and a Western perspective means that her narrative “is double-voiced, both castigating and condoning, affiliating itself with yet dissociating itself from the dominant ideology of patriarchy and the colonial culture” (59–60). Emecheta’s vast body of work has been well received, and she is considered one of Africa’s major female authors, though she has been criticized for bringing a Westernized sensibility to African subjects. Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi suggests she is less popular in Nigeria than in the West. Her work has been translated widely, and some of her work has appeared on the BBC. She has held numerous visiting positions at universities in the United States. Her awards include the New Statesman Jock Campbell Award for The Slave Girl and an honorary doctorate from Fairleigh Dickinson University (1992). SEE ALSO: Black British Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); London in Fiction (BIF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the African Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Riley, Joan (WF); West African Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Chukukere, G. C. (1995). Gender Voices and Choices: Redefining Women in Contemporary African Fiction. Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension. Emecheta, B. (1972). In the Ditch. London: Barrie and Jenkins. Emecheta, B. (1974). Second-Class Citizen. London: Allison and Busby. Emecheta, B. (1976). The Bride Price: A Novel. London: Allison and Busby. Emecheta, B. (1977). The Slave Girl. London: Allison and Busby.
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Emecheta, B. (1979a). The Joys of Motherhood. London: Allison and Busby. Emecheta, B. (1979b). Titch the Cat. London: Allison and Busby. Emecheta, B. (1980a). The Moonlight Bride. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Ibadan: Ibadan University Press. Emecheta, B. (1980b). Nowhere to Play. London: Allison and Busby. Emecheta, B. (1980c). The Wrestling Match. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Ibadan: Ibadan University Press. Emecheta, B. (1982a). Destination Biafra. London: Allison and Busby. Emecheta, B. (1982b). Double Yoke. London: Ogwugwu Afor. Emecheta, B. (1982c). Naira Power. London: Macmillan. Emecheta, B. (1983). The Rape of Shavi. London: Ogwugwu Afor. Emecheta, B. (1986a). Head above Water: An Autobiography. London: Ogwugwu Afor. Emecheta, B. (1986b). A Kind of Marriage. London: Macmillan. Emecheta, B. (1988). Feminism with a Small “F”! In K. H. Petersen (ed.), Criticism and Ideology: Second African Writers’ Conference, Stockholm, 1986, Seminar Proceedings no. 20. Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, pp. 173–85. Emecheta, B. (1989). Gwendolen. London: Collins. Emecheta, B. (1994). Kehinde. London: Heinemann. Emecheta, B. (2000). The New Tribe. Oxford: Heinemann Educational. Fishburn, K. (1995). Reading Buchi Emecheta: CrossCultural Conversations. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Fraser, C. G. (1990). Writer, Her Dream Fulfilled, Seeks to Link Two Worlds. New York Times (June 2). At www.nytimes.com, accessed Aug. 31, 2008. Kohrs-Amissah, E. (2002). Aspects of Feminism and Gender in the Novels of Three West African Women Writers (Aidoo, Emecheta, Darko). Heidelberg: Books on African Studies/Jerry Bedu-Addo. Murray, M., & Emecheta, B. (1981). Our Own Freedom. London: Sheba Feminist Press. Ogunyemi, C. O. (1996). Africa Wo/man Palava: The Nigerian Novel by Women. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Osa, O. (1995). African Children’s and Youth Literature. New York: Twayne. Pichler, S. (2001). Buchi Emecheta’s “London Novels”: An Intercultural Approach. Trier, Germany: WVT, Wissenschaftlicher. Sougou, O. (2002). Writing across Cultures: Gender Politics and Difference in the Fiction of Buchi Emecheta. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Umeh, M. (ed.) (1996). Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
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Uraizee, J. (2000). This is No Place for a Woman: Nadine Gordimer, Buchi Emecheta, Nayantara Saghal, and the Politics of Gender. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
English Studies, the Academy, and Fiction ARCHANA RAMPURE
English Studies is the broad disciplinary grouping that encompasses all literary and cultural production in the English language – all forms of literature, certainly, but also literary theory and often even non-literary forms of cultural production such as film and television. The discipline is staffed by members of the professoriate who make up “the Academy,” a self-regulating group which also includes noted writers, literary publishers, and other literary opinion makers such as reviewers. While there is nothing official about it (unlike L’Academie fran¸caise, responsible for ruling on the French language), the uncompromising singularity of the term “Academy” acknowledges its power in adjudicating the canon. The canon of texts that comprise the objects of study in English Studies – what is most often read and taught and studied and written about – is (more or less) selected by the Academy. The Academy does evolve, if slowly: people retire, once junior graduate students become faculty members, and the institutional interests of departments of English Studies shift (often, at the behest of academic administrators). Over the twentieth century, the English canon has changed dramatically in an attempt to take into account questions of politics as well as aesthetics. In the context of World Literature and its subfield World Fiction, it could be said that the main project of the introduction of this subject into the bastion of English Studies has been to remake the discipline in the light of critical theory – especially of postcolonialism. Where postcolonial theory provides a framework for what Robert Young calls a “more engaged politics with objectives of social justice and equality . . . inspired by memories of resistance,” World Literature often provides the literary (and cultural) texts for this study (166). As grand as postcolonialism’s purpose is and infinite as this literature appears,
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there are some limiting parameters. Although fiction is the most widely read and studied postcolonial genre, World Fiction written in English is nonetheless an altogether smaller sampling than all World Literature, which at its broadest includes other languages and genres. Fiction identified as British, Irish, or American (and thus more likely to be part of the traditional canon) may also be exempt – because the word “World” when used to delimit English-language literature or fiction connotes texts that do not originate in the United Kingdom or the United States. In general, then, and not excluding many exceptions, since the “origin” of writing is often the subject of debate, English-language fiction produced in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean (mostly but not exclusively in nations once colonized by Britain) and in the former settler colonies of Canada, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand may be termed “World Fiction in English.” The literary production of settler colonies has always been the subject of much debate – is it legitimately part of World Literature or should it be isolated in distinct national categories? Within Canada, for instance, national(ist) literatures are taught as distinctive courses, so departments of English offer classes on topics such as Early Canadian Fiction, Nineteenth-Century Canadian Poetry, or Contemporary Canadian Fiction. The question then becomes whether such writing is also to be included in classes in World Literature or Postcolonial Fiction or, indeed, in genre courses. Further, what of courses taught in India or Australia or Britain? Where should departments of English Studies in these nations – where classes on Canadian Literature are rare – locate Canadian writing and the writing of other settler colonies? How should Canadian departments of English teach Australian literature? The teaching of national literatures is not confined only to settler colonies, of course. Historically, English Studies has been an educational project tied to both the imperial project and the large-scale propagation of imperial and national symbolic capital within the metropole. Teaching those classes of people who were not born or equipped to read the classics in their original languages to read and appreciate “good” or “moral” literature written in the English language was the goal of English Studies once it was institutionalized within England; outside
Britain, what began as a project of re-education aimed at the “natives” was transformed during the anti-colonial and postcolonial periods into a desire to inculcate in their citizens a national pride. So the historical canon of English literature (the so-called dead-white-male texts) came to be supplemented and supplanted over the twentieth century by new writing from the margins, which, together with rediscovered older narratives, form the basis of many new national literatures. English Studies as an academic discipline developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; literature in English has been a respectable university subject for barely a century. Andrew Delbanco notes that the first chair in English at Harvard was appointed in 1876 and that the English honors degree was established at Oxford only in 1894. But Gauri Viswanathan demonstrates that nearly 100 years before English literature was studied at Oxford, it was prescribed as the ideal medicine for the “natives” of India. The academic discipline of English has been complicit with imperialism from its birth. Indeed, until the radical changes of the 1950s onward, English remained a field with a canon designed to teach first “natives,” and then British women and the middle and working classes, how to remake themselves in the mold of the (masculine) British ruling class. Changes to the canon are most noticeable in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Politically, this era marked the decline in British (and European) colonial power: independence struggles in colonies in Africa and Asia came to fruition between the 1940s and 1960s, and new nation states were born. Culturally, this is the period when a large numbers of new writers emerged. These women and men wrote in English and are often seen by the Academy as representing their emerging nation states. Writers such as Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Anita Desai (India), Nadine Gordimer (South Africa), and V. S. Naipaul (Trinidad) all began to carve out their reputations as purveyors of a new and different kind of fiction in the 1950s and 1960s. But the alternative history of writing in English goes much further back than the twentieth century. As much as English was the language of British imperialism, and even as much literature in English continued to justify imperialism and colonialism, literary and cultural
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production in English has also long been a site for resistance. In 1789, for instance, a former slave published a fictionalized autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, in London. The book was an important fillip to the anti-slavery movement: more importantly, it is a celebration of resistance in print. A direct line may be traced from Equiano’s narrative to more recent works such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997). The material history of publication underlies the institutionalization of World Fiction. Equiano was exceptional for writing and publishing in the 1700s; Achebe’s writings began to appear in the mid twentieth century, when a new liberalism in the metropolitan publishing industry made it possible for writers from newly decolonizing spaces to find publishers in the West. These publishers then ensured that their books were distributed and reviewed in order to maximize their own investments. Roy’s novel is very much the cultural product of a time when literary production in English is a global phenomenon; indeed, the establishment of India Ink as a publishing house in India that specializes in unconventional fiction may be traced to her book. The material-historical process of publication is a significant narrative of the finding of “voice,” and it is through this that the Academy began to acquaint itself with fiction from outside the Western canon. Examples of publishing’s intervention in canon formation include Heinemann’s African Writers Series and Caribbean Writers Series (established in 1962 and 1970 respectively); literary publishers such as Andre Deutsch and Peter Owen also play a part in the process by which World Fiction becomes a staple of the Academy (see Low 2002). Like all histories, though, the imperial teleology of English Studies till the 1950s is not completely without contradictions. A. L. McLeod writes that one “crucial” event in the “development of Commonwealth Literature” is the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore in 1913. He suggests that Tagore had “demonstrated, in effect, that there was a new literature in English, one independent of British and American” (2). McLeod summarizes the transformations this literature goes through in the first half of the twentieth century:
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“for a time this new literature was referred to as Colonial literature; then . . . as Dominion literature,” before becoming Commonwealth Literature in the 1950s (2). “Commonwealth” – a problematic term given the imperial history of English Studies – is derived from the loose grouping of Britain’s former colonies. The largest subdisciplinary grouping within English Studies that is devoted to the study of World Fiction is ACLALS – the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. ACLALS has charter groups – some nationally organized, some regionally – that again echo this terminology: in Canada, CACLALS stands for the Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, while Europe has EACLALS and the East African organization is known as EAACLALS. ACLALS began at a conference organized at the University of Leeds in 1964 (with the hangover of Empire still very real). More interestingly, ACLALS “officially accredited to the Commonwealth” in 2005 (ACLALS website). Fifty-three countries, from Antigua to New Zealand to Zambia – all with some colonial connection to Britain – are part of the Commonwealth, which begs the question of writers whose home nations are not part of this collective. Where does a work such as Saudi Arabian author Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh (2007) fit, for instance, given that her homeland is not a part of the Commonwealth, though it does have a colonial past? But the alternative term “Postcolonial” raises other questions: what of English-language writing from never-colonized nations, such as Thailand or Ethiopia? The fights over nomenclature go to the heart of the relationship between English Studies and World Literature. World Literature written in English is still known by other names within the field: with the caveats above, Commonwealth Literature and Postcolonial Literature are still its two most common variants, with the latter ascendant. (Indeed, prominent journals in this field include the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Postcolonial Text; World Literature Written in English recently changed its name to the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.) While the term “Commonwealth” has drawn the most disapprobation, many of the criticisms aimed at it might be applied to the term “Postcolonial” with equal justice. Perhaps the most famous of these attacks
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is Salman Rushdie’s 1983 article “Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist.” Rushdie critiques the notion of the Commonwealth as a link between widely diverse writers; he defines it thus: “a body of writing created, I think, in the English language, by persons who are not themselves white Britons, or Irish, or citizens of the United States of America. I don’t know whether black Americans are citizens of this bizarre Commonwealth or not. Probably not” (63). Rushdie puts his finger on the question of the diasporic writer here: where to locate writers who reside in or are citizens of the West but who write about or with the style of where they were born or where their parents were born. Should Canadian departments of English teach Rohinton Mistry’s novel Such a Long Journey (1991) as Canadian or Indian or World fiction? Is Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) contemporary British fiction or Commonwealth fiction or Postcolonial fiction? It is set in the “postcolonial” Bengali community living in the East End of London as a result of British colonialism in South Asia, but what kind of a writer does it make her? British? Commonwealth? Postcolonial? What then to make of her second novel Alentejo Blue, set in rural Europe and not about the colonial history of England or the postcolonial history of Bangladesh but the politics of the twentieth century in Portugal? Does it come down to Ali’s Britishness (her citizenship), or birthplace (Dhaka), or parentage (Bangladeshi father and English mother)? This kind of search for a writer’s origin – implied in both the Commonwealth and the Postcolonial labels – are what Rushdie refers to as “the folly of trying to contain writers inside passports” (67). This question of authentically locating writers somewhere – anywhere? – has become such a rite of passage that writers such as the Australian Mudrooroo deliberately obfuscate their origins and mock the attempts of academics to pin them down and categorize them and their work. The other fear that Rushdie expresses is one that is, or should be, acknowledged within the Academy: for him, the use of the term Commonwealth Literature “permits academic institutions, publishers, critics and even readers to dump a large segment of English literature into a box and then more or less ignore it. At best, what is called ‘Commonwealth literature’ is positioned below English literature ‘proper’ – or, . . . it places
Eng. Lit. at the centre and the rest of the world at the periphery” (66). Changing the name from Commonwealth to Postcolonial to World does not address this literature’s marginal status visa-vis the traditional canon in most departments of English Studies in the world (no matter what they call themselves or where they are located). Typically, they will have course after course on “important” writers from the Western canon and in genres and periods of British and American literature, plus some on their own national literatures, but only a token offering on assorted other literatures. Depending on the location of the institution and the interests of the faculty, these classes may be geographical in focus (Caribbean Literature or South African Writing in English or New Indian Fiction) or genre-based (the Indian Novel and Postcolonial Drama), or they may be broad surveys: World Lit 1 and 2, for instance. There are institutional consequences to such marginalization: non-“core” courses are often not supported by tenure lines in departments for specialists in the field. Further, even where there are tenure lines in World Literature, faculty specializing in contemporary African writing may well be expected to teach classes on Asian writing or on settler colonial fiction. So, while a specialist in Renaissance drama would not be expected to teach Italian Renaissance poetry, faculty specializing in a writer or a theme or a national genre of World Literature are expected to be knowledgeable enough about all world literatures as to teach it at the undergraduate, and often at the graduate, level. In the end, such conditions of work within the Academy may make it impossible for its new incarnation of inclusivity to be a self-sustaining structure that engages the current historic moment. As Nelson and Watt warn, when corporate globalization has transformed all literarycultural production into profit-oriented “World Bank literature,” there will be no economic or intellectual space left for today’s “enriched and increasingly interdisciplinary literary culture” (93). They call for an examination of the interplay between neocolonial economics and transnational cultural production, rather than for an easy celebration of the conversion of the historically suspect terms Commonwealth and Postcolonial into the triumphal Transnational and Global – these being the newest names for World Literature.
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ENGLISH STUDIES, THE ACADEMY, AND FICTION
At heart, English Studies and the Academy have an ambivalent relationship with World Fiction, which is to be expected given the historical association of “English” with the pain and possibility of imperialism and colonialism. It is an open question as to whether the act of broadening English Studies to include World Fiction is an act of inclusion or an act of appropriation, whether is it about producing genuine transformation or just another exercise in the production of the Other in textual form – that imperialist process whose history has been traced in one of the foundational texts of postcolonialism, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). Academics who are engaged in this subject may find this ambivalence challenging: after all, they often are located on islands of personal and institutional privilege, reading, teaching, and researching the fiction of peoples without similar privileges along with their reactions and resistance to colonialisms, new and old. Such literary engagements on the part of academics specializing in World Literature may bring political advocacy and activism to English Studies as a discipline, activities that the Academy in general may understandably be cautious about but which cannot be avoided, given that the field of World Fiction raises such profound questions about historical and contemporary global structures of power. SEE ALSO: Critical Theory and Fiction (WF); Globalization and the Novel (BIF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS ACLALS website. At www.aclals.ulg.ac.be/ commonwealth.html, accessed Jan. 2, 2009. Berube, M. (1997). Employment of English: Theory, Jobs and the Future of English Studies. New York: New York University Press. Delbanco, A. (1999). Decline and Fall of Literature. New York Review of Books, 47(17), pp. 32–8. (Nov. 4). Equiano, O. (2003). Interesting Narrative and Other Writings [1789] (ed. V. Caretta). London: Penguin. Graff, G. (2007). Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Low, G. (2002). Finding the Center: Publishing Commonwealth Writing in London – The Case of Anglophone Caribbean Writing 1950–65. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 37(2), 21–38. McLeod, A. L. (2003). Introduction. In A. L. McLeod, (ed.), The Canon of Commonwealth Literature: Essays in Criticism. New Delhi: Sterling, pp. 1–16. Murray, H. (1996). Working in English: History, Institution, Resources. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Nelson, C., & Watt, S. (eds.) (2004). Office Hours: Activism and Change in the Academy. London: Routledge. Rushdie, S. (1991). Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist [1983]. In Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticisms, 1981–1991. London: Granta, pp. 61–70. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism: Western Representations of the Orient. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Scholes, R. (1998). The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline. New Haven: Yale University Press. Viswanathan, G. (1992). Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia University Press. Young, R. J. C. (2001). Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. London: Blackwell.
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F Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction JUDITH LEGGATT
The dividing lines between fantasy, science fiction, and speculative fiction are fluid. One way to distinguish between them is to say that science fiction speculates about the future, or scientific and social progress, or life on other planets, while fantasy speculates about mythic realms. Speculative fiction is most widely used as a blanket term that covers not only fantasy and science fiction, but also alternative histories – which speculate about the repercussions of a single change in our historical time line – and magic realism – which speculates about mythic realms as fantasy does, but which does not distinguish between fantastic and realist elements within a single work. While speculative fiction is usually associated with England and the United States, works in the genre were written in the “settler colonies” of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as early as the late nineteenth century. All three countries, especially Canada, have continued to make significant contributions to the genre throughout the twentieth century, and writers from South Asia, the Caribbean, and, to a lesser extent, Africa added important voices and new directions to the genre in the latter part of the century. Canadian speculative fiction was active throughout the twentieth century, and many mainstream literary Canadian writers contributed to the genre, including Sir Charles G. D. Roberts with In the Morning of Time (1919),
Stephen Leacock with The Iron Man and the Tin Woman, with Other Such Futurities (1929) and Afternoons in Utopia (1932), Hugh MacLennan with Voices in Time (1980), Phyllis Gotlieb with Sunburst (1964) and Son of the Morning and Other Stories (1983), Gwendolyn MacEwen with Noman (1972) and Noman’s Land (1985), and most notably Margaret Atwood with The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003). Despite (or perhaps because of) Atwood’s own well-publicized objections to the science fiction label, the former novel has reached the widest audience of any Canadian speculative fiction. It is a dystopian feminist novel set in a far future where sudden and devastating fertility problems have led to repressive and patriarchal societal changes, and where women are all in thrall to a fundamentalist male theocracy; it won the 1985 Governor General’s Literary Award and the inaugural Arthur C. Clarke Award, showing its appeal to both mainstream and science fiction literary communities. Important genre-identified contributors include A. E. Van Vogt, who was a mainstay of space opera in the golden age of science fiction; William Gibson, whose Neuromancer (1984) trilogy is arguably the definitive cyberpunk text; feminist science fiction writer Judith Merril, who, like Gibson, moved to Canada from the United States in 1968, and who contributed not only as a writer, but also as an editor and collector; and Spider Robinson, yet another American expatriate, whose optimism, even in post-apocalyptic texts such as Telempath (1976), is at odds with the dark tone of much other Canadian science fiction. Other significant additions to Canadian science
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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FANTASY, SCIENCE FICTION, AND SPECULATIVE FICTION
fiction include hard science fiction novels by Robert J. Sawyer and feminist short speculative stories by Candas Jane Dorsey. In the last decade of the twentieth century, First Nations Canadian writers began to experiment with the genre, often using it in allegorical ways. Squamish writer Gerry William’s 1994 The Black Ship, the first science fiction novel by a Native Canadian, uses a far distant world and two warring planets to explore the effects of residential schools through the story of Enid Blue Starbreaks, a Repletion who has been raised in a culture that has been attacking and subduing her people. Cherokee African Canadian writer Zainab Amadahy’s The Moons of Palmares (1997) demonstrates both the dangers and potentials of globalization by depicting the multiethnic planet of the title, at risk due to the mining of its moons by “The Consortium,” who sidestep the environmental and social concerns of the people in their quest for energy and profit. In Thomas King’s “How Corporal Colin Sterling Saved Blossom, Alberta, and Most of the Rest of the World as Well” (1993), Native people are rescued, or abducted, by blue coyotes who come in spaceships. Haisla writer Eden Robinson’s short story “Terminal Avenue” (1996) depicts a dystopian future in which the worst abuses of Canada’s Indian Act, such as the outlawing of indigenous religious and cultural practices, have been reinstated. Ottawa novelist Charles de Lint, a pioneer of the contemporary fantasy genre, best represents the genre in Canada. His 1984 debut novel Moonheart set the tone for his more than 60 books by placing fantasy within a contemporary urban setting. In the same year, Guy Gavriel Kay published The Summer Tree, the first book in his Fionavar Tapestry trilogy, which continues with The Wandering Fire (1986), winner of the Aurora Award in 1987, and The Darkest Road (1986). The trilogy depicts five young Canadians who are transplanted to another dimension by a mage. Unlike de Lint’s contemporary urban fantasy, Kay’s work is very much in the realm of high fantasy and is strongly influenced by J. R. R. Tolkien, whose work he helped edit. More in keeping with the contemporary fantasy tradition established by de Lint is Tanya Huff, whose work includes the Blood Books series, set in Toronto, which pairs a female private detective with failing eyesight with a romance-writing vampire.
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Much of the early speculative literature of Australia and New Zealand was utopian in nature; though most of this was written in the nineteenth century, it includes in the early twentieth century Godfrey Sweven’s Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles (1901) and Limanora: The Island of Progress (1903) from New Zealand, and in Australia A Woman of Mars; or, Australia’s Enfranchised Woman (1901) by Mrs. H. H. Ling, writing as Mary Ann Moore-Bentley. On the darker side, racial fears within early twentieth-century Australia translated into such dystopian fantasies as The Coloured Conquest (1904) by Thomas Roydhouse (writing as “Rata”), and The Australian Crisis (1909) by C. H. Kirmess, both of which posit invasions of Australia by Asians – a racism echoed, though ultimately rejected, in Earl Cox’s Out of the Silence (1925). A more thoughtful and inclusive novel is Archie Weller’s Land of the Golden Clouds (1998), which is set in a far future post-apocalyptic world where the devastations of nuclear winter are explained in mythological terms; people of different tribes and civilizations must work together to cross an irradiated Australia and defeat a common enemy. Other contributors to Australian science fiction include J. M. Walsh, who wrote early space operas; M. Barnard Eldershaw, the collaborative pseudonym of Marjorie Faith Barnard and Flora Sydney Patricia Eldershaw, whose 1947 political novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow looks back on early twentieth-century Australia from the twentyfourth century; A. Bertram Chandler, author of the Rim World series; Juvenile writer Lee Harding, best known for Displaced Person (1979); and Jack Wodhams, whose novel Ryn (1982) tells the story of black Zimbabwean man reborn as a white baby in a near future Australia. Important new names include Terry Dowling, Greg Egan, and Rosaleen Love. The two most important anthologists of Australian science fiction are John Baxter and Damien Broderick. New Zealand speculative fiction includes Janet Frame’s post-apocalyptic novel Intensive Care (1970) and fantasy The Carpathians (1988); C. K. Stead’s dystopian Smith’s Dream (1971); Colin Gibson’s The Pepper Leaf (1971), a nearfuture novel about vegetarian naturists’ attempt to prepare for nuclear catastrophe; Hugh Cook’s fantasy series Chronicles of an Age of Darkness; Phillip Mann’s several allegorical explorations of
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the human condition using speculative fiction techniques; Cherry Wilder’s Torin series, which explore the relationships between human explorers and the marsupial natives of the planet Torin; and Sandi Hall’s feminist novels The Godmothers (1982) and Wingwomen of Hera (1987). While fantastic literature has been part of the South Asian tradition for several centuries at least, and science fiction has been produced in the Indian subcontinent throughout the twentieth century, little of the latter is available in English. Uppinder Mehan notes that “Since one of the defining characteristics of science fiction is the centrality of science or technology, it is usually characterized as a ‘Western’ form” (54), and the writing produced in India has received little critical attention outside the subcontinent. The first English translation of some of that body of work did not occur until 1993, with It Happened Tomorrow: A Collection of 19 Select Science Fiction Stories from Various Indian Languages, edited by Bal Phondke. English-language writing from the continent has included speculative fiction. Notably, Salman Rushdie’s first novel, Grimus (1975), has a science fiction setting, in which there are an infinite number of different dimensions, and humans can visit different planets and versions of reality with the aid of a stone rose. Rushdie creates an alternative history in The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999), and several of the stories in East, West (1994) have speculative fiction elements, most obviously “Chekov and Zulu,” in which Rushdie aligns two Sikhs working for the Indian government in London, with two supporting characters from Star Trek. Several of his books also include fantasy elements; for example, his young adult novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) comments on the infamous fatwa through a fantastical allegory about the poisoning of the source of stories by Khattam-Shud. Bharati Mukherjee’s The Holder of the World (1993), Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), and Ruchir Joshi’s The Last Jet Engine Laugh (2001) are all novels set both in past and near-future Indias, showing the connections between the history and new directions of India. Many of Ashok Banker’s novels also have either science fiction or fantasy elements. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Africa was a common setting for speculative fiction novels such as those by Edgar Rice
Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard. Despite these works by foreign writers, and the fact that African American writers such as Samuel Delaney have been working in the genre since the middle of the twentieth century, it was not until the 1990s and 2000s that speculative fiction from the African diaspora began to receive significant critical attention. Sheree R. Thomas’s Dark Matter (2000) anthologies opened up the area, and gave an idea of the variety and volume of black contributions to the genre. Although the anthologies focus on African Americans, they also included Caribbean writers such as Nalo Hopkinson and Anthony Joseph, whose 2006 novel The African Origins of UFOs was excerpted in the first Dark Matter. Much of the impetus of Caribbean speculative fiction has come from the novelist and short story writer Nalo Hopkinson, who was born in Jamaica and raised in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Canada; her 1998 debut novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, combines Caribbean mythic elements with a setting in post-apocalyptic Toronto. Hopkinson’s second novel, Midnight Robber (2000), is set in the far future on a distant planet colonized by Caribbean people. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Hopkinson has turned to more fabulist literature, with fewer science fiction elements, in her novels The Salt Roads (2003) and The New Moon’s Arms (2007). Hopkinson makes a distinction between what she calls the “Northern” genres of fantasy and science fiction, which “come out of a rational and skeptical approach to the world” and thus must establish the veracity of the speculative elements within the realm of the text, and the “fabulist” fiction she collects in Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root (2000), which stems from a Caribbean tradition where “the irrational, the inexplicable, and the mysterious exist side by each with the daily events of life,” and where attempting to recast the irrational in rational terms is beside the point at best, and dangerous at worst (pp. xii–xiii). The collection is an attempt to marry the techniques, norms, and priorities of mainstream speculative fiction and Caribbean writing. The stories in the collection, which come from new voices and established Caribbean writers such as Wilson Harris, Jamaica Kinkaid, Olive Senior, and Kamau Brathwaite, move both traditions in new directions and illustrate the overlaps that already existed between the two categories of writing.
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FANTASY, SCIENCE FICTION, AND SPECULATIVE FICTION
While there is a significant body of Arab-language African science fiction, including work by the Egyptian writers Tawfiq al-Hakim and Mustafa Mahmud, and Libyan writer Yusuf al-Kuwayri, there is as yet little genre fiction written in English. The children’s novella Journey to Space (1980) by Flora Nwapa from Nigeria features an animated elevator that shoots two children into the sky and keeps them in suspended animation until two fairies help them to return to earth. Ghanaian writer J. O. Eshun’s The Adventures of Kapapa (1976) depicts a scientist who invents anti-gravity. South African writer Claude Nunes has three books: a short story collection Inherit the Earth (1966), and novels Recoil (1971, with Rhoda Nunes) and The Sky Trapeze (1980). Many of Ben Okri’s novels, including the Booker Prize-winning The Famished Road (1991), which is partially set in a world of those who have died and are waiting to be reborn, and Astonishing the Gods (1995), which includes an invisible world and an enchanted island quest narrative, have fantastical elements. Although she claims not to write in the science fiction genre, Henrietta Rose-Innes’s 2008 Caine Prize-winning story “Poison” has many speculative elements. The largest impetus to grow an African tradition of speculative fiction is the Science Fiction Club of South Africa (SFSA), which administers both Probe magazine and an annual short story competition. The apparently limited contributions to speculative fiction from Africa are, in part, a result of limiting definitions that prevent many speculative texts from around the world from being read through that lens. In postcolonial literature, many of the texts that have the characteristics of fantasy are classified as magic realism. For example, texts such as Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), with its controversial depiction of figures from Islamic mythology; Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water (1993), in which Native and Christian mythological realms coexist with contemporary Alberta; Patricia Grace’s Potiki (1986), which conflates its contemporary story with Maori mythology; Mudrooroo’s Master of the Ghost Dreaming (1991), in which the characters enter the Dreamtime and effect change in their physical world; and J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), which displaces the racial and cultural tensions of South Africa under apartheid to an unspecified time and location (to name just
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a few representative examples), are not generally thought of as fantasy texts outside speculative fiction circles, but they do contain many of the characteristics of the genre. The deliberate conflation of fantasy and realism is not uncommon in contemporary fantasy, which often introduces mythological elements into twentieth-century reality, and is marked by characters that question and resist, but are ultimately forced to accept, the idea that the mythic is real. In postcolonial fantasy, the simultaneity of the different worlds allows those worlds to comment on each other in a more immediate way than does the escapism that characterizes high fantasy. In addition, postcolonial speculative fiction unsettles Manichaean divisions between the rational and the superstitious, eliding the difference between science and religion as ways of constructing and understanding the world. Two predominant themes of science fiction are the exploration of “new worlds” and the resulting encounters between different species, which often stand in for the different races of earth. One of the precursors of the science fiction genres was early exploration narratives, both fiction and non-fiction. The space aliens of science fiction have much in common with the Lilliputians of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) or the strange beings that were assumed to inhabit any territory not regularly traveled by Europeans. Similarly, debates over the humanity of aliens, androids, and robots in science fiction parallel debates over whether Africans or Native North Americans had souls. In her introduction to So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, Nalo Hopkinson argues that “one of the most familiar memes of science fiction is that of going to foreign countries and colonizing the natives, and ... for many of us, that’s not a thrilling adventure story; it’s non-fiction, and we are on the wrong side of the strange-looking ship that appears out of nowhere” (Hopkinson & Mehan 7). Rather than rejecting the genre as irrevocably colonial, Hopkinson and other writers of color have used science fiction to tell the other side of the story. They “take the meme of colonizing the natives and, from the experience of the colonizee, critique it, pervert it, fuck with it, with irony, with anger, with humour, and also, with love and respect for the genre of science fiction that makes it possible to think about new ways of doing things” (9). As the twenty-first century unfolds, postcolonial
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writers from around the globe are taking up the various genres of speculative fiction, infusing them with their own cultural perspectives and making them truly international genres, no longer mainly British and American ones. SEE ALSO: Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); Fantasy Fiction (BIF); Indigenous Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF); Science Fiction (BIF); Speculative Fiction (AF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (BIF); Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Attebery, B. (1995). The Politics (If Any) of Fantasy. In R. A. Latham & R. A. Collins (eds.), Modes of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Twelfth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Westport, CT: Greenwood, pp. 1–13. Batty, N., & Markley, R. (eds.) (2002). 2001: A Postcolonial Odyssey [special issue]. Ariel, 33(1). Hopkinson, N. (ed.) (2000). Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction. Montpelier, VT: Invisible Cities. Hopkinson, N., & Mehan, U. (eds.) (2004). So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp. Leonard, E. (ed.) (1997). Into Darkness Peering: Race and Color in the Fantastic. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Mehan, U. (1998). The Domestication of Technology in Indian Science Fiction Short Stories. Foundation, 74, 54–66. Phondke, B. (ed.) (1993). It Happened Tomorrow: A Collection of 19 Select Science Fiction Stories from Various Indian Languages. New Delhi: National Book Trust. Robinson, E. (1998). “Terminal Avenue.” In D. D. Moses & T. Goldie (eds.), An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, 2nd edn. Toronto: Oxford University Press, pp. 469–74. Thomas, S. R. (ed.) (2000). Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. New York: Aspect.
Farah, Nuruddin R. JOHN WILLIAMS
Nuruddin Farah’s career offers a stunning dramatization of how the troubled processes of globalization and postcolonialism coincide with the local politics of language and tradition. Farah’s intimate
knowledge of the cultural and linguistic intricacies of postcolonial and neocolonial Africa comes by way of a complex and fascinating personal history. As a novelist and scholar, he has traveled the world, spending time in countless international locales and nearly a dozen African nations. For most of his career, he has been an author in exile, writing from afar about the political turmoil and cultural violence of his native Somalia. Farah’s approach has consistently been vividly historical and trenchantly non-partisan, carefully avoiding the dogmatic orthodoxies of both the Left and the Right. In Farah’s words, “The only thing one can do is to be aware and to struggle harder and harder against repression in whatever form it comes” (Moss 1828). Born on November 24, 1945 in the Italiancontrolled southern half of modern-day Somalia, Farah was fluent in spoken Somali by the age of 10 and could read four language scripts, including Amharic, Arabic, Roman (via English and Italian), and Cusmaniya (the eventual basis for official Somali orthography). At 13, he was reading Western classics by Dostoevsky and Hugo in English and Arabic translations. Like many Somalis who experienced the first nine years of Somali independence, Farah was initially optimistic about Siyad Barre’s Soviet-inspired revolutionary takeover in 1969. After returning from studying in India, Farah was invited by the Barre regime to “write something favorable about the revolution” (Farah 1988, 1596). The result was his 1969 play A Dagger in Vacuum, which was immediately denounced by government censors as “scandalously unrevolutionary” (Wright 2004, 10). His 1970 novel From a Crooked Rib (the first ever published by a Somali writer) detailsthe travailsofEbla,a womanwhoattempts to escape the tyrannical patriarchy of home life in the colonial1950s; it was similarlycondemned. In1973, when he published an extract from a short novel in his native tongue, his work was declared “seditious,” and by 1974 he decided to continue his work abroad. In 1976 a phone call warned him that his recently published novel A Naked Needle (1976), which portrays the zeal and optimism of the Somali revolution gradually dissolving into dictatorial corruption and bureaucratic messiness, had been condemned by the Barre dictatorship; returning home would mean risking a lengthy jail sentence. He has remained in exile ever since. In Italy, Farah began writing the first two volumes of Variations on the Theme of an
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FEMINISM AND FICTION
African Dictatorship, beginning with Sweet and Sour Milk (1979) and Sardines (1981), with the final volume, Close Sesame (1983), being completed in Germany. Containing some of Farah’s most vivid and powerful writing, the Dictatorship trilogy details the corruption of clan-based postcolonial leadership, demonstrating how traditional clan-centered values can become vehicles for tribal tyranny and corrupt nepotism. It also continues a recurrent theme in Farah’s writing: the rich and collective voice of the Somali oral tradition, with oral poets acting at times as “the mouthpiece of the clan” (Farah quoted in Wright 2004, 13) – a poetic tradition that can be used to cut across clan lines, while at other times reinforcing the reactionary abuses of centralized clan-based power. After the Dictatorship trilogy, Farah traveled and published widely. His Blood in the Sun trilogy included Maps (1986), written while in Nigeria and Gambia;Gifts(1992),writteninSudanandUganda; and Secrets (1998), written in Ethiopia and Nigeria. Of these, Maps has become the most famous and critically well received. Written in a strikingly lyrical, shifting voice, it tells the story of Askar, an orphan whose parents died before he was born (his mother in childbirth, and his father during the conflict that separated Somalia and Ethiopia in the mid-1970s). Many critics have noted the novel’s extremely complex and multidimensional weaving together of voices and multiple mythologies. In 1998, Farah received the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In his acceptance speech, he emphasized his own complicated colonial and postcolonial upbringing, exploring the links between his inherited multidimensional experience with language and his nation’s troubled history. In his only non-fiction work, Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora (2000), Farah further develops these intimate connections between personal narrative and postcolonial experience, reporting on a series of interviews he conducted with Somali refugees between 1991 and 1998. His recent novels Links (2003) and Knots (2007) emerge out of the painful revelations of these interviews, imagining the difficulty of the exile’s return to a homeland forever changed by corruption and violence. Critical attention to Farah’s work continues to grow, garnering comparisons to authors such as Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o and occasional rumors of a
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Nobel Prize nomination. His work, with its shifting and contradictory elements – their multivocal dimensions, their interweaving of the political, the religious, the gendered, and the domestic – has made important contributions to the larger traditions of international modernism and postcolonial writing. In imaginatively exploring Somalia’s turmoil, Farah is as vividly political as Chinua Achebe and as deft at exploring language and personal experience as Ng~ ug~ı. SEE ALSO: Achebe, Chinua (WF); East African Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the African Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Farah, N. (1970). From a Crooked Rib. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Farah, N. (1976). A Naked Needle. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Farah, N. (1979). Sweet and Sour Milk. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf. Farah, N. (1981). Sardines. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf. Farah, N. (1983). Close Sesame. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf. Farah, N. (1986). Maps. New York: Penguin. Farah, N. (1988). Why I Write. Third World Quarterly, 10(4), 1591–9. Farah, N. (1992). Gifts. New York: Arcade. Farah, N. (1998). Secrets. New York: Arcade. Farah, N. (2000). Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora. New York: Cassell. Farah, N. (2002). Celebrating Differences: The 1998 Neustadt Lecture. In Wright (2002), pp. 15–24. Farah, N. (2003). Links. New York: Riverhead. Farah, N. (2007). Knots. New York: Riverhead. Moss, R. (1986). Mapping the Psyche. West Africa, 3600, 1827–8. Wright, D. (ed.) (2002). Emerging Perspectives on Nuruddin Farah. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Wright, D. (2004). The Novels of Nuruddin Farah. Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies.
Feminism and Fiction KATHERINE MILLER
The ideals of feminism – political, economic, and social equality between men and women – have existed since Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication
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of the Rights of Woman (1792). Seeking the enfranchisement of women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, first-wave feminists fought for political equality. In mid-century, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949, trans. 1952) questioned the gender distinctions that left women second-class citizens. Second-wave feminism rose in the 1960s as women, inspired by the Civil Rights and anti-war movements, sought social, legal, and economic equality. In The Feminine Mystique (1963), Betty Friedan challenged women’s shackling to gender roles, and Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) examined mother–daughter relationships, demonstrating that patriarchal control is reproduced within the space of the family. Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) was the first major exploration of the “sexual politics of literature” (Kolodny 171). Elaine Showalter proposed a separate women’s canon in A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bront€e to Lessing (1977), while presses such as the Feminist Press and Virago were rediscovering and republishing forgotten texts by women. In the 30 years since, feminist literary criticism has evolved into “a complex and diverse set of discourses seeking to problematise the assumptions, not only of gender, but also of race, class and sexuality” (Plain & Sellers 102). Interdisciplinary approaches to feminist criticism often incorporated psychoanalytical insights. In France, feminist critics such as Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva proposed a specific type of female writing: l’ecriture feminine. Cixous’s call in “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975, trans. 1976) to “Write your self. Your body must be heard” (350) inspired non-linear writing by women writers. American psychoanalytical feminist criticism includes Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979) and Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley’s What is Feminism? (1986). The rise of third-wave feminism in the 1990s challenged the hegemonic assumptions of white, middle-class Western women in defining feminism as a universal concept. For many women, the term’s association with Western imperialism tarnishes it. Furthermore, the concept of gender itself has been challenged: working from de Beauvoir’s assertion that “One is not born but rather
becomes a woman,” Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) proposes that gender itself is a social construct and a form of performance. The “other” inherent within any identity of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation problematizes any notions of a universal feminist theory. Female roles – daughter, wife, mother – often define gendered identity. Early feminist works by Commonwealth writers focused on women’s struggles to define themselves apart from these roles. Sybylla, the protagonist in Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1901), rejects marriage as inimical to her self-identity. Mingling Marxist ideology with realism, another Australian writer, Katharine Susannah Prichard, created strong female characters who combine marriage, work, and political reform in the “Goldfields” trilogy: The Roaring Nineties (1946), Golden Miles (1948), and Winged Seeds (1950). In Australian Janette Turner Hospital’s The Ivory Swing (1982), Juliet, a wife and mother who accompanies her husband to India, confronts the social and cultural constraints of Indian women, leading her to question her own choice between career and motherhood. Canadian writers such as Ethel Wilson, Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, Carol Shields, and Margaret Atwood also question gender stereotyping. Challenging the confining role of wife, Maggie Lloyd, the central character in Wilson’s The Swamp Angel (1954), leaves her husband. In Laurence’s The Stone Angel (1964), Hagar chooses marriage as an escape from her patriarchal father, but is confined by the expectations of her husband and then her son. Del Jordan, the protagonist in Munro’s short story cycle Lives of Girls and Women (1971), chafes under social and familial restrictions. The multiplicity of female identity, as expressed through the roles of daughter, wife, mother, working woman, widow, and senior citizen, informs the life of Shields’s heroine, Daisy, in The Stone Diaries (1993). And whereas South Africa’s Doris Lessing presents a utopian vision of sexual roles in the speculative fiction The Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five (1970), The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Atwood’s dystopian vision of gendered identity, presents a society in which women are named for their roles: Aunts, Marthas, Wives, and Handmaids. The K€unstlerroman, the fictional life of the artist, finds feminist form in several women’s works.
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FEMINISM AND FICTION
From L. M. Montgomery’s young adult novels about a young writer – Emily of New Moon (1923), Emily Climbs (1925), and Emily’s Quest (1927) – to Laurence’s The Diviners (1974), many Canadian women writers have depicted a writer’s life.Atwood delineates the life ofa femalepainter in Cat’s Eye (1988). In Shields’s final novel, Unless (2002), which chronicles a mother’s attempt to rescue a daughter who has set out on a quest for “goodness,” the female writer chastises a male critic for his list of exclusively male authors, commenting that he makes women “serve an apprenticeship in self-denigration” (165). Anna Wulf, Lessing’s central character in the metafictional The Golden Notebook (1962), compartmentalizes her life and work into differently colored notebooks: an intertextual novel about Ella (yellow); memories of Africa (black); left-wing politics (red); and a diary (blue). Searching for unity, Anna combines her narratives in the golden notebook. Subversion of patriarchal control of female sexuality is another common feminist theme. Using a stream-of-consciousness technique, the expatriate New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield explores female isolation and sexuality in her short story collections: Bliss and Other Stories (1921) and The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922). The female protagonist in Nadine Gordimer’sA Sport of Nature (1987) transgresses racial sexual taboos in South Africa; themotherinHospital’sCharades(1988)isa sexually adventurous woman with 10children by 10 different men. Atwood’s The Robber Bride (1993) questions assumptions about female sexual power as Zenia, a “double-agent” in the gender wars, impacts the lives of three Toronto women. Canadian Aritha van Herk rewrites the picaresque in No Fixed Address: An Amorous Journey (1986), a recounting of the sexual adventures of a traveling underwear saleswoman. Revisiting patriarchal history, feminist authors have rewritten women into the stories where they were previously marginal. Atwood’s Alias Grace (1995) gives voice to Grace Marks, a nineteenthcentury woman accused of murdering her employer. Australian expatriate Daphne Marlatt also rewrites women into history in Ana Historic (1988). Using the technique of l’ecriture feminine, Marlatt weaves together three stories: her own mother’s struggle with depression and electroshock therapy in the 1950s; the undocumented life of Ana Richards, a Vancouver schoolteacher
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in the late nineteenth century; and the narrator’s own sexual awakening. Similarly, Canadian Jane Urquhart rewrites the lives of Emily Bront€e and the fictional nineteenth-century balloonist Arianna in Changing Heaven (1990). In Lilian’s Story (1985), Australian Kate Grenville tells the story of an oversize woman, Lilian Singer, who resists patriarchal control and social conventions to create her own life; Dark Places (1994), the companion novel, analyzes the perspective of Lilian’s incestuous father, Albion. Rewriting Charlotte Bront€e’s Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Dominican-born Jean Rhys tells the story from the perspective of Antoinette, the Creole heiress whom Mr. Rochester marries and then imprisons. Antoinette’s fortune, sanity, and even her identity (signified by a name change to Bertha) are stolen from her. Several Caribbean writers mingle postcolonial themes with feminist issues. Jamaica Kincaid’s first novel, Annie John (1983), documents a young woman’s progress from childhood to adulthood. Rejecting both the mother and the motherland (Antigua), Annie John moves from a Lacanian identification with the mother into a fully realized identity. In Lucy (1990) and The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), Kincaid further explores the tensions within the mother–daughter relationship. In Bread Out of Stone (1994), Dionne Brand argues that Caribbean women’s fiction focuses on mother–daughter relationships while ignoring women’s sexuality. Writing from a multiplicity of identities, Brand, a black lesbian Canadian of Trinidadian background, articulates the voice of the “other” in her fiction and poetry. Race, sexual orientation, and gender inform her In Another Place, Not Here (1996), the love story of two women, Elizete and Verlia, who battle sexual, political, and economic repression. Similarly, Jamaican Erna Brodber writes the gendered female body in Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (1980) and Myal (1988) as a site of racial and patriarchal control. Marginalized by race and gender and brutalized by her father within the patriarchal home, the central character in the Trinadian Canadian Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) reconstructs her identity through a form of l’ecriture feminine. African women writers address issues of motherhood, gender discrimination, and racial and cultural oppression in their texts. In Flora
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Nwapa’s Efuru (1966), the title character struggles to define her identity outside of her childlessness; in contrast, fellow Nigerian Buchi Emecheta’s protagonist in The Joys of Motherhood (1979) constructs her identity through motherhood. Socio-economic issues such as arranged marriage and polygamy inform several African texts, from Emecheta’s The Bride Price (1976) to Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes: A Love Story (1991). South Africa’s Nadine Gordimer tackles racial consciousness from the perspective of a white writer living under (and after) apartheid. In The Lying Days (1953), Gordimer shows the development of identity and a racial consciousness in a young woman; Burger’s Daughter (1979) examines the political responsibilities of the daughter of two political activists. Gendered identities also limit women’s lives in the novels of Indian writers such as Bharati Mukherjee, Anita Desai, and Arundhati Roy. Exploring the gender restrictions placed on women in a patriarchal society, Bharati Mukherjee’s first novel, Wife (1975), follows Dimple, a young Indian woman who, unable to live up to the idealized image of the Bengali wife, eventually murders her husband. Characters in several of Anita Desai’s novels struggle with the restrictive role of wife, including Maya in Cry, the Peacock (1963) and the aptly named Sita in Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975). Desai portrays contrasting approaches to gender roles through pairs of sisters in Clear Light of Day (1980) and Fasting, Feasting (1999). The female characters and children in Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) are imprisoned within homes where they suffer from patriarchal violence and social and economic exclusion. Seeking a path beyond similar restrictions, Mukherjee explores the fluidity of gender identity in Jasmine (1989), in which a young Indian widow moves through several name changes and incarnations of identity in her journey from India to the United States. In “Dancing through the Minefield” (1980), Annette Kolodny comments on the difficulty of “all efforts to define feminist literary criticism as either a coherent system or a unified set of methodologies” (171). Many women are unwilling to self-identify as feminist, given the myriad connotations attached to the word. Yet the term “postfeminism” suggests that gendered subjectivity does not exist. Until political, economic, and
social equality exists for all women, not just a privileged few, feminism and feminist fiction will continue to point the way toward social transformation. SEE ALSO: Critical Theory and Fiction (WF); Feminist Fiction (BIF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF, WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Cixous, H. (1975). The Laugh of the Medusa. In Warhol & Herndl, pp. 347–62. Conde, M., & Lonsdale, T. (eds.) (1999). Caribbean Women Writers: Fiction in English. New York: St. Martin’s. Ferrier, C. (ed.) (1985). Gender, Politics and Fiction: Twentieth Century Australian Women’s Novels. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Gupta, R. K. (2002). The Novels of Anita Desai: A Feminist Perspective. New Delhi: Atlantic. Kolodny, A. (1980). Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practices, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism. In Warhol & Herndl (1997), pp. 171–90. Nfah-Abbenyi, J. M. (1997). Gender in African Women’s Writing: Identity, Sexuality and Difference. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Plain, G., & Sellers, S. (eds.) (2007). A History of Feminist Literary Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shields, C. (2002). Unless. Toronto: Vintage. Showalter, E. (1977). A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bront€e to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sprague, C., & Tiger, V. (1986). Critical Essays on Doris Lessing. Boston: G. K. Hall. Stratton, F. (1994). Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender. New York: Routledge. Warhol, R. R., & Herndl, D. P. (eds.) (1997). Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Fernando, Lloyd M. Y. CHIU
Lloyd Fernando is a pioneering figure in Malaysian literature in English. His work is marked by a generous, inclusive humanism that transcends cultural, ethnic, and religious differences. His two novels and his collection of essays on literature
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FERNANDO, LLOYD
and culture, though not conceived as a single project, explore common themes of tolerance and mutual accommodation. Lloyd Fernando spent his early childhood in Sri Lanka, where he was born on May 31, 1926. At the age of 12 he emigrated to Singapore, then part of British Malaya. Fernando’s schooling was interrupted by the Japanese Occupation, a period in which he worked as a building laborer, trishaw rider, and apprentice mechanic to support himself and his family. After the war he entered the University of Singapore and graduated with double honors in philosophy and English. In 1964 Fernando obtained a PhD in English literature from the University of Leeds. He then returned to Malaysia and accepted a post in the English Department at the University of Malaya, and later became professor of English and head of department. During his tenure as head of English, Fernando actively supported the teaching of English literature and encouraged aspiring writers in English at a time when English was politically out of favor in Malaysia. His efforts to put Malaysian writing in English onto the wider anglophone literary scene produced a number of pioneering anthologies of poetry, fiction, and drama. In 1978, toward the end of a very successful academic career, Fernando retired from his professorship to study law at City University, London. On completion of the diploma in law, he set up a successful practice in Kuala Lumpur. He died on February 28, 2008. Fernando’s best-known work is Scorpion Orchid (1976), an ambitious novel with an idealistic vision of Singaporean nationhood. The novel employs modernist techniques of collage and juxtaposition to synthesize Western and Asian literary genres. Fernando inserts extracts from venerable Malay literary texts and other regional chronicles into a Bildungsroman plot to create a polyphonic narrative with two distinct but interlocking levels of narration. Set in Singapore in the mid-1950s, the primary narrative follows the development of four young men as they negotiate the racial riots that shatter their naive worldviews, sending each on a personal quest for an authentic identity. The ethnicities of the four represent the main constituent cultural groups of Singapore – Indian, Malay, Chinese, and Eurasian – and their personal quests are allegories of the nation’s search for an indigenous identity. The figurative dimension of the
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primary narrative is amplified in the secondary narrative of vignettes mostly extracted from Sejarah Melayu and Hikayat Abdullah, both cultural and literary landmarks in Malay historiography. By enacting a dialogue between Western and Asian literary traditions, Fernando attempts to forge in fiction an inclusive postcolonial identity that neither denies nor rejects the history of cross-cultural contacts that constitute the reality of the Malaysian nation. Scorpion Orchid ends on a note of optimism, suggesting the possibility of a national identity that can accommodate the diverse culture and history of a region that was once an important nexus of several empires. Green is the Colour (1993), Fernando’s second novel, is set in Malaysia immediately after the Sino-Malay race riots of May 13, 1969, a defining moment in the process of Malaysian national development. The novel explores the reign of terror of religious fundamentalists through the ill-fated cross-cultural romances of its four central characters, whose ethnicities (Malay, Chinese, and Indian) once again correspond to the main factions involved in the racial politics of Malaysia. The cross-ethnic pairing of the lovers in the novel symbolizes the ideal of a liberal, tolerant, multiracial harmony – an ideal that is thwarted with the defeat of the protagonists. Green is the Colour ends in a grim wave of inquisitions, persecutions, and torture administered by predacious officials. The drive for a culturally pure Islamic Malaysia is a pretext for the cruelest violations of the individual as the novel revisits the incendiary racial politics attending the birth of the nation to caution against extremist dogmatism. Cultures in Conflict (1986) is a collection of Fernando’s most notable critical essays on literature, language, and culture. The composition dates of the essays range from 1966 to 1982, with most dating from the 1970s. Topics range from James Joyce to the role of English in Asian literature and education. Fernando is a staunch defender of English and an advocate of adapting the language to the task of expressing the rich cultural heritage of Asia. SEE ALSO: English Studies, the Academy, and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Southeast Asian Fiction (WF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bennett, B. (ed.) (1993). Westerly Looks to Asia: A Selection from Westerly 1956–1992. Nedlands: Indian Ocean Centre for Peace Studies/Centre for Studies in Australian Literature, University of Western Australia. Fernando, L. (ed.) (1966a). Malaysian Poetry in English: A Retrospective Anthology. Kuala Lumpur: Department of English, University of Malaya. Fernando, L. (ed.) (1966b). Malaysian Short Stories in English: A Retrospective Anthology. Kuala Lumpur: Department of English, University of Malaya. Fernando, L. (ed.) (1968). Twenty-Two Malaysian Stories: An Anthology of Writing in English. Singapore: Heinemann Educational. Fernando, L. (ed.) (1972). New Drama, 1–2. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. Fernando, L. (1976). Scorpion Orchid. Singapore: Times. Fernando, L. (1977). New Women in the Late Victorian Novel. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Fernando, L. (ed.) (1981). Malaysian Short Stories. Kuala Lumpur: Heinemann Educational. Fernando, L. (1986). Cultures in Conflict: Essays on Literature and the English Language in South East Asia. Singapore: Graham Brash. Fernando, L. (1993). Green is the Colour. Singapore: Landmark. Merican, F. (2004). Voices of Many Worlds: Malaysian Literature in English. Singapore: Times. Mukherjee, D., Singh, K., & Quayum, M. A. (eds.) (2002). The Merlion and the Hibiscus: Contemporary Short Stories from Singapore and Malaysia. New Delhi: Penguin. Quayam, M. A., Talif, R., & Omar, N. (eds.) (2003). Petals of Hibiscus: A Representative Anthology of Malaysian Literature in English. Petaling Jaya: Pearson Malaysia.
Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives JOHN THIEME
Numerous novels and short stories from around the globe engage in dialogues with canonical English narratives. Prominent among these are responses to texts such as The Tempest, Robinson Crusoe, Heart of Darkness, and Othello that have been seen as particularly concerned with colonialism and “race.” However, the range of canonical
English narratives that have generated such dialogues extends far beyond works that are overtly about imperialism. Nineteenth-century novelists such as Jane Austen, the Bront€es, and Charles Dickens have also elicited numerous responses; early twentieth-century fiction that has prompted reactions from writers from very different backgrounds includes work by Rudyard Kipling, Katherine Mansfield, and Daphne du Maurier. In Roland Barthes’s words, “Any text is a new tissue of past citations” (quoted in Young 39), but the ways in which such citations operate vary considerably. In his poetic autobiography, Another Life (1973), the St. Lucian-born Derek Walcott describes himself as one of “Victoria’s orphans,” who “had entered the house of literature as a houseboy, / filched as the slum child stole, / As the young slave appropriated / those heirlooms temptingly left” (77). Though these words echo T. S. Eliot’s aphorism, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal” (182), they extend the notion of writing as theft to indicate the ambivalent relationship of colonial and postcolonial readers to the legacy of English cultural imperialism. They also suggest the extent to which Victorian culture was a particularly crucial element in the artistic formation of many colonial writers, even if it left them “orphans,” forced to steal the “Mother Country’s” “heirlooms.” In The World, The Text, and the Critic, Edward Said uses “the family metaphor of filial engenderment” to distinguish between two kinds of literary genealogies: filiative relationships and affiliative identifications (1984, 117). Filiative relationships involve an untroubled line of descent from a parent text or tradition; in affiliative identifications the bloodlines are less straightforward and the parent is either rejected or relocated in a more extended family. These alternatives provide a framework for distinguishing the kinds of interaction that texts written outside Britain establish with canonical English narratives, though the division between unquestioning filiation and elective affiliation is seldom clear-cut. One view of postcolonial rewritings of canonical English narratives has seen them as primarily oppositional and described them as “writing back” (Rushdie 1982; Ashcroft et al. 1989) and “counter-discourse” (Tiffin 1987); the term “contexts” has been used to suggest the twin possibilities of opposition and a broader range of
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FICTIONAL RESPONSES TO CANONICAL ENGLISH NARRATIVES
intertextual reference (Thieme 2001). Helen Tiffin suggests that counter-discourse is not “simply ‘writing back’ to an English canonical text, but to the whole of the discursive field within which such a text operate[s] in post-colonial worlds” (23). She follows Richard Terdiman’s view that, while dominant discourses may be challenged by counter-discursive practices, counter-discourse cannot offer “genuine revolution” (quoted in Tiffin 33), since the very act of responding to the hegemonic discourse makes it impossible for the postcolonial text to separate itself completely from that discourse’s conventions. However, the appropriation of canonical English texts outside Britain does not necessarily involve a counter-discursive strategy, and responses vary along a continuum that spans the extremes of imitative homage and adversarial writing back, though few can be neatly located at either pole. In societies where narrative was inextricably implicated in the work of Empire, the foreignness of classic English literature contributed to a sense of culture as happening elsewhere. V. S. Naipaul (1972) singles out Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” as a metonym for the extent to which English literature was an “alien mythology” in the Trinidad of his youth: “A pretty little flower, no doubt; but we had never seen it. Could the poem have any meaning for us?” (23). Lacking the political animus toward Britain of many of his Caribbean contemporaries, Naipaul nevertheless foregrounds the disjunction between the world of English literature and his own environment, explaining how he set about turning “Dickens’s rain and drizzle . . . into tropical downpours” (24). His response was, then, to attempt adaptation rather than adversarial writing back, but his comments nevertheless interrogate the relevance of English writing in the Caribbean. In contrast, the Barbadian novelist George Lamming may appear to be adopting an adversarial stance when, in his non-fiction study The Pleasures of Exile (1960), he follows such earlier commentators on The Tempest as O. Mannoni (1956 [1950]) and Frantz Fanon (1986 [1952]) in reading the play as a template for psychological aspects of the colonial encounter. However, Lamming’s discussion ranges beyond viewing Prospero and Caliban as types of the colonizer and colonized: he assigns a multiplicity of roles to Caliban and engages with several characters from
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Shakespeare’s last play. When he revisits archetypes from The Tempest in Water with Berries (1971), a novel set in Britain just after the end of Empire, Caliban is again a polymorphous figure, inhabiting the bodies of three Caribbean artists, who by virtue of their vocations are also Prosperos. They remain unable to escape racist construction, but in the mood of the period assert their unwillingness to continue to play their assigned roles in “the colonial pantomime” (Thieme 2001, 138) and ultimately prove to be as much shape-changing Ariels as Calibans or Prosperos. Numerous Canadian works, including fiction by Charles G. D. Roberts, Robertson Davies, Audrey Thomas, and Margaret Laurence, have also engaged with The Tempest. In Diana Brydon’s (1984) view they characteristically place more emphasis on Miranda than on Prospero or Caliban. Thus, in Laurence’s The Diviners (1974) the protagonist writes a novel that projects elements of her marriage to a patriarchal husband, who she feels has infantilized her, onto the Miranda–Prospero relationship. Robertson Davies’s Tempest-Tost (1951) pokes fun at a Canadian Little Theatre’s production of The Tempest, offering another interestingly skewed perspective on Shakespeare’s play by making its central character, an aging schoolteacher, a Gonzalo who has developed a late-flowering crush on Ariel. While the colonial motifs in The Tempest constitute an imaginative response to the first phase of European colonization of the Americas, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe can be read as an allegory of a later phase of mercantile expansionism. Crusoe’s desert island is a plantation society in microcosm, and Crusoe and his one-man labor force, Man Friday, have, like Prospero and Caliban, frequently been seen as bywords for colonizer and colonized. The Trinidadian-born Sam Selvon playfully reverses these stereotypes in his London-set novel, Moses Ascending (1975). The South African J. M. Coetzee offers his most sustained response to Defoe’s classic in Foe (1986), a postmodern novel which has “Cruso” die shortly after being rescued and his role as narrator usurped by a woman, Susan Barton, who writes her story in London, while seeking the aid of the fugitive author, Daniel Foe. In addition, Susan endeavors to emancipate a tongueless Friday, the origins of whose muteness are left unclear
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and who is never given a voice. The relativist narrative mode of Foe also interrogates the type of “realist” fiction, based on an illusion of verisimilitude, that Defoe is credited with having introduced into the English novel: numerous stories compete for authority and the apparent centrality of the relationship to Robinson Crusoe is destabilized when other Defoe narratives, notably Roxana, intrude into Susan’s account. As Walcott has pointed out (see Hamner 1993, 33–40), Crusoe is a protean, Adamic figure and reactions to Defoe’s novel extend far beyond its colonial concerns, though these frequently remain a subtext. Nineteenth-century responses that adapted Crusoe’s desert island situation to the predicament of settler communities include Catherine Parr Traill’s Canadian Crusoes (1852), which uses the trope of the castaway for a tale about children’s survival in the Canadian “wilderness,” and one of the early masterpieces of Australian fiction, Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life (1874). As John Clement Ball (2005) puts it, “part of the appeal of Crusoe’s novel has always been its audacious and optimistic distillation of colonial relations . . . into the story of a single man achieving peaceful dominion over a single island and, until quite late, a single male other” (88). Ball discusses two contemporary Canadian responses to the Crusoe figure: Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001), in which the castaway predicament is transformed into the story of a teenage boy’s struggle to survive on a lifeboat crossing the Pacific with a Royal Bengal tiger as his chief “other”; and Douglas Glover’s Elle (2003), in which an indigenous Friday becomes the main companion of a seventeenth-century Frenchwoman marooned in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness forms a triptych with The Tempest and Robinson Crusoe as works that have been seen as blueprints for colonial practices at particular historical moments. Chinua Achebe (1988) has attacked what he sees as the racism of Conrad’s novella, and this response clearly informs a passage in his novel Arrow of God (1974 [1964]), in which an insomniac English administrator realizes that the “distant throb” of the drums that he feels are ubiquitous in the African night may be a product of his “heatstricken brain” (30). However, as in Achebe’s earlier Things Fall Apart (1958), the novel’s main way of contesting Conrad’s perceived racism is
the construction of an alternative historiography, which uses local focalizers to represent Igbo society. The range of postcolonial responses to Conrad has, however, been extremely varied and other novelists, including Naipaul and Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o, have taken a more positive view of his critique of colonialism, in both Heart of Darkness and his fiction more generally. Naipaul (1980) has spoken of Conrad as his most important precursor, suggesting that the Polish writer’s lack of a sense of secure belonging and his relativistic vision made him a particularly acute commentator on the social and psychological turbulence of emerging modernity. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men (1967) can be read as a latter-day Nostromo, while A Bend in the River (1979) revisits the terrain of Heart of Darkness. Ng~ ug~ı has also acknowledged his debt to Conrad’s questioning approach, and his treatment of issues of heroism and betrayal during the Mau Mau freedom struggle in Kenya, in novels such as A Grain of Wheat (1967) and Petals of Blood (1977), is comparable with Lord Jim. Heart of Darkness has also influenced several novels in which a journey into a physical heartland, or through supposedly prehistoric terrain, becomes a trope for an inner psychological journey and often for an investigation of national identity. These include: two Patrick White novels that fictionalize episodes in nineteenth-century Australia history, Voss (1957) and A Fringe of Leaves (1976); Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock (1960), in which a crew representing Guyana’s various ethnic groups journeys into the country’s interior; and two Canadian novels that explore gender identity along with aspects of national and regional identity, Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972) and Robert Kroetsch’s Badlands (1975). Arun Joshi’s The Strange Case of Billy Biswas (1971) relates the narrator’s quest to find the eponymous Billy in a tribal area of India where he has gone missing, a quest that parallels Marlow’s journey to find Kurtz. Non-anglophone African novels that draw on Heart of Darkness include the Guinean-born Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King (1954; trans. 1956) and the Sudanese-born Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966; trans. 1969), which also draws on Othello, the Shakespeare play which, along with The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice,
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FICTIONAL RESPONSES TO CANONICAL ENGLISH NARRATIVES
has generated the most responses to his representation of “race” and alterity. Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood (1997) brings Othello and Shylock, racial outsiders in cosmopolitan Renaissance Venice, together in a novel that links them with Anne Frank’s story. Among nineteenth-century novelists, the Bront€es and Dickens have attracted particular attention from postcolonial writers. The Dominican-born Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) reclaims Bertha, the “madwoman in the attic” in Jane Eyre, from her ghostly role in Charlotte Bront€e’s novel. Rhys takes Bertha, renamed Antoinette, back to her Caribbean Creole origins, but avoids simply inverting the cultural binarism of Jane Eyre by making her Rochester character a prominent narrator. Bront€ean intertexts are also prominent in Naipaul’s novel Guerrillas (1975), which also alludes to John Richardson’s Clarissa and Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders. Maryse Conde’s Windward Heights (1995; trans. 1998) is a Guadeloupean Wuthering Heights. Canadian responses to the Bront€es have generally been more filiative. Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle (1976) includes parodies of English Romantic fiction, particularly Jane Eyre, in the “Costume Gothics” its narrator secretly writes. In Jane Urquhart’s Changing Heaven (1990), the protagonist has a youthful fixation with Emily Bront€e’s work, which offers a vision of romantic escape from the more mundane Canadian landscape. Great Expectations is the Dickens novel that has provoked most responses outside England, particularly in Australasia. Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997) offers variations on the story of the returned convict Magwitch, whose arrival back in England not only threatens the lifestyle of the Piplike gentleman he has created, but also leads to a series of encounters with a writer, who he feels is stealing his identity. The conclusion of Carey’s postmodern novel reverses the cultural pattern implicit in Great Expectations by stressing the positive potential of Australia as a working man’s paradise rather than an antipodean hell (White 1981), a view Dickens embodies in the fate of David Copperfield’s Mr. Micawber. In Elizabeth Jolley’s Miss Peabody’s Inheritance (1983), an English spinster who corresponds with an Australian lesbian novelist imagines Australia as a romantic outdoor environment that offers a com-
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plete contrast to her humdrum existence. In an ironic reversal of canonical presumptions about where culture is centered, Australia also becomes the site of literature, and when Miss Peabody finally journeys there, her Pip-like “inheritance” involves assuming the novelist’s work as a writer. In New Zealander Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2006), Mr. Watts, the last white man on an island in Papua New Guinea, teaches the island’s children during a political crisis and brings stability into their lives by reading them daily installments of Great Expectations. He thereby creates an imaginative universe that allows them to “escape” to Victorian England, while characters from Dickens seem to migrate into their world. Like Jack Maggs, Mister Pip offers numerous variations on Dickens’s novel, but whereas Carey’s story finally has an Australian agenda, Jones’s tale is primarily concerned with narrative’s capacity to convey its listeners into imaginative worlds; reading Dickens is complemented by the islanders’ stories of their everyday lives. Caryl Phillips draws on Austen’s Mansfield Park, a novel in which the wealth of the English country house is dependent on Caribbean slavery, in A State of Independence (1986). Laura Fish’s Strange Music (2008), which imagines episodes from the pre-Browning life of Elizabeth Barrett, exposes the iniquities of Jamaican plantation society. Responses to canonical twentiethcentury works include the Maori writer Witi Ihimaera’s short story collection Dear Miss Mansfield (1989), an ironic homage to his New Zealand-born compatriot Katherine Mansfield, in which the events of Mansfield stories such as “The Garden Party” are seen from very different viewpoints. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) offers a Kim-like encyclopedic vision of India, while also embracing several other Western intertexts, including Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and G€ unter Grass’s Tin Drum. Midnight’s Children also alludes to a broad range of other works, including The Ramayana, The Arabian Nights, and Gabriel Garcıa Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, to a point where its “tissue of past citations” makes it futile to attempt to position the novel in relation to any particular pre-text or parent tradition. Much the same is true of the less eclectic Bengali-born Sunetra Gupta’s novel A Sin of Colour (1999). Moving between Oxford and
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Calcutta, the novel takes its departure point from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca: like the eponymous dead first wife of du Maurier’s novel, one of the main characters appears to have drowned. This, though, is only one way in which Gupta appropriates aspects of Rebecca. She also tells the story of an Englishwoman taken to Bengal by an Indian husband who is infatuated with his elder brother’s wife – the Rebecca figure. Furthermore, the house in India is called Mandalay, which suggests du Maurier’s Manderley but also signifies a town geographically nearer Bengal, again highlighting the oblique relationship between Rebecca and its supposed derivative. The elements appropriated from du Maurier’s novels are intertwined with Bengali intertexts, notably from Tagore, while the title of the novel is taken from Hard Heart, a play by the English poet, George Barker. Gupta adopts influences at will, forming her own mongrelized tradition with little sense of a need to respect or dispute Rebecca. Like many other responses to canonical English narratives, A Sin of Colour resists easy interpretation through the lens of its relationship to a supposed parent text. Foe draws on multiple Defoe narratives; Jack Maggs responds to Dickens’s biography and several of his works other than Great Expectations; Wide Sargasso Sea expands beyond the parameters set by its relationship with Jane Eyre, incorporating elements from Rhys’s Dominican compatriot, Phyllis Allfrey’s novel The Orchid House (1953) and her own life. Responses to canonical narratives invariably send their readers back to the English “originals,” making them unstable objects that now demand to be reread through prisms suggested by their “contexts”. SEE ALSO: Colonial Fiction (BIF); Critical Theory and Fiction (WF); English Studies, the Academy, and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Achebe, C. (1974). Arrow of God [1964], 2nd edn. London: Heinemann. Achebe, C. (1988). Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965–1987. London: Heinemann.
Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H. (1989). The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge. Ball, J. C. (2005). Canadian Crusoes from Sea to Sea: The Oceanic Communities of Douglas Glover’s Elle and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. In C. Kanaganayakam (ed.), Moveable Margins: The Shifting Spaces of Canadian Literature. Toronto: TSAR, pp. 85–103. Brydon, D. (1984). Re-Writing the Tempest. WLWE 23(1), 75–88. Caminero-Santangelo, B. (2005). African Fiction and Joseph Conrad: Reading Postcolonial Intertextuality. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Eliot, T. S. (1932). Selected Essays, 1917–1932. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Fanon, F. (1986). Black Skin, White Masks (trans. C. L. Markmann). London: Pluto. (Original work published 1952.) Farn, R. (2005). Colonial and Postcolonial Rewritings of “Heart of Darkness”: A Century of Dialogue with Joseph Conrad. Boca Raton, FL: Dissertation.com. Green, M. (1990). The Robinson Crusoe Story. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Hamner, R. D. (ed.) (1990). Joseph Conrad: Third World Perspectives. Washington, DC: Three Continents. Hamner, R. D. (ed.) (1993). Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Washington, DC: Three Continents. Lamming, G. (1960). The Pleasures of Exile. London: Michael Joseph. Mannoni, O. (1956). Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (trans. P. Powesland). London: Methuen. (Original work published 1950.) Naipaul, V. S. (1972). The Overcrowded Barracoon. London: Deutsch. Naipaul, V. S. (1980). The Return of Eva Peron with the Killings in Trinidad. London: Deutsch. Rushdie, S. (1982). The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance. Times (July 3). Said, E. (1984). The World, the Text, and the Critic. London: Faber and Faber. Said, E. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus. Stoneman, P. (1996). Bront€e Transformations: The Cultural Dissemination of “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights.” Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Thieme, J. (1987). The Web of Tradition: Uses of Allusion in V. S. Naipaul’s Fiction. Mundelstrup: Dangaroo; London: Hansib. Thieme, J. (2001). Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon. London: Continuum. Tiffin, H. (1987). Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse. Kunapipi, 9(3), 17–34. Walcott, D. (1973). Another Life. London: Jonathan Cape.
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White, R. (1981). Inventing Australia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Young, R. (ed.) (1981). Untying the Text: A PostStructuralist Reader. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction MIGUEL MOTA
Film adaptations of literary texts can be traced back to the very early days of the commercial cinema, and countless numbers of twentieth-century works of world fiction in English have found themselves adapted and reproduced for the visual medium of film and, later, television. The literary and film industries have both undoubtedly benefited from this relationship between media; yet the affiliation, invested as it is in both aesthetic and economic considerations, has often also been highly fraught and contentious. The relationship has been necessarily symbiotic, and as such has been marked since its inception by complications arising from the collision between different ideological, cultural, and economic spaces. The earliest instance of a film adaptation of an English-language literary work outside Britain and the US can be found in Australia, where the practice can be traced back to the second feature film produced in that country, Robbery under Arms (1907; dir. Charles MacMahon), based on Rolf Boldrewood’s 1889 classic colonial novel. Indeed, during the silent film era, Australian filmmakers made consistent use of literary sources, with Robbery under Arms and Marcus Clarke’s 1874 penal novel, For the Term of His Natural Life, each being adapted several times. Other notable film adaptations during this early period included Raymond Longford’s film adaptations of Steele Rudd’s late nineteenth-century short stories as On Our Selection (1920) and New Selection (1921); and his classic 1919 silent film, The Sentimental Bloke, based on C. J. Dennis’s 1915 verse narrative, The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke. Early silent film producers in other colonial nations also made strategic use of literary sources, though perhaps not as prolifically. In Canada, Ernest Shipman directed a number of film adap-
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tations of popular pioneer novels in the early 1920s, the most notable perhaps being the 1919 silent film classic, Back to God’s Country, from a short story by the popular American writer James Oliver Curwood. In South Africa, an energetic silent film industry spearheaded by African Film Productions made occasional use of literary sources, as in King Solomon’s Mines (1918) and Allan Quatermain (1919), both based on H. Rider Haggard’s novels; or adaptations of John Buchan’s 1910 novel Prester John (1920), and Henry de Vere Stacpoole’s 1908 novel The Blue Lagoon (1923). The introduction of sound into film production did little to stem the number of adaptations of literary sources. In South Africa, the Afrikaner nationalist movement in the late 1930s sought to utilize the film industry as a medium of resistance against colonialism, though literary sources, when used, were largely Afrikaans. In English, notable examples include Katrina (1969), based on Basil Warner’s 1959 play Try for White. The 1980s witnessed a plethora of films based on earlier literary texts that were highly critical of apartheid and traditional representations of South African history: The Honey Bird (1980; dir. Alan Nathanson), based on a short story by Stuart Cloete; Jock of the Bushveld (1986; dir. Gray Hofmeyr), based on Percy Fitzpatrick’s 1907 novel; as well as Fiela’s Child (1987) and Circles in the Forest (1988), both directed by Regardt van den Bergh and based on works by Dalene Matthee. More recently, in 1995, Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country was readapted for the screen by director Darrell Roodt (a 1951 version had been directed by Zoltan Korda); and the film adaptation of J. M. Coetzee’s 1999 novel, Disgrace, directed by Anna Maria Monticelli, premiered at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival. In other British colonies in Africa, early attempts by Britain to establish a film industry through Colonial Film Units resulted largely in the production of propaganda films. Since then, the situation has varied across nations. Ghana, for example, saw little increase in the production of feature films even after independence. The creation of television programming in Nigeria, on the other hand, resulted in a much more active film industry. Notable films drawn from literary sources include Francis Oladele’s adaptation of Wole Soyinka’s play Kongi’s Harvest (1967), as
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well as his Bullfrog in the Sun (1972), based on Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). Other film adaptations of note include Ola Balogum’s Cry Freedom (1981), based on Meja Mwangi’s 1974 novel Carcase for Hounds; and Aiye (1979; dir. Ola Balogum), based on a play written by Chief Herbert Ogunde. In New Zealand, where film production was almost non-existent prior to the 1970s, film adaptations of literary works were especially prominent in the early days of a late-burgeoning industry in which the cultural capital of literary works was instrumental in getting films made. The mid1970s saw screen adaptations of short stories by Katherine Mansfield, John A. Lee, Maurice Duggan, Barry Crump, Maurice Shadbolt, and Witi Ihimaera produced for the “Winners and Losers” series on New Zealand television. And Ian Cross’s 1957 novel The God Boy was adapted for television in 1976. Television adaptations waned with the decrease in government support beginning in the 1980s, but some exceptions can still be found, such as, for example, Jane Campion’s 1990 internationally acclaimed TV adaptation of Janet Frame’s autobiography as An Angel at My Table. Notable film adaptations produced for theatrical release have included Sleeping Dogs (1977; dir. Ian Mune and Roger Donaldson), from C. K. Stead’s 1971 novel Smith’s Dream; A State of Siege (1978; dir. Timothy White and Vincent Ward), based on Frame’s 1966 novel; Other Halves (1984; dir. John Laing), adapted by Sue McCauley from the 1982 novel; and Came a Hot Friday (1985; dir. Ian Mune) from Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s 1964 novel. Other more recent examples include Once Were Warriors (1994; dir. Lee Tamahori), based on Alan Duff’s 1990 novel; and Niki Caro’s 2002 film Whale Rider, adapted from Witi Ihimaera’s 1987 novel of the same name. In neighboring Australia, the introduction of sound resulted initially in an increase in original screenplays and a move away from literary sources. This trend was relatively short-lived, though, and the 1950s saw a marked return to literary adaptations. Robbery under Arms was again adapted in 1957 by British director Leslie Norman, who would also adapt D’Arcy Niland’s The Shiralee that same year and Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in 1959. Other notable adaptations made during this period include Stanley Kramer’s film version of Nevil Shute’s On the
Beach (1959; remade for television in 2000); and Fred Zinnemann’s adaptation of Jon Cleary’s The Sundowners (1960). Australian fiction would continue to serve as fertile ground for filmmakers in the 1960s. Michael Powell directed versions of John O’Grady’s They’re a Weird Mob (1966) and Norman Lindsay’s Age of Consent (1969), and these would give way to some of the seminal adaptations made during the Australian film revival of the 1970s and 1980s, including Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 film of Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel Wake in Fright; Nicolas Roeg’s 1971 version of Vance Marshall’s 1959 novel Walkabout; and Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), based on Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel. Other significant literary works adapted for the screen during this vibrant period include: Thomas Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978; dir. Fred Schepisi); Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1979; dir. Gillian Armstrong); A. B. Patterson’s The Man from Snowy River (1982; dir. George Miller); and Christopher Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously (1982; dir. David Weir). Peter Carey’s first and third novels have also been adapted for film: Bliss was directed by Ray Lawrence in 1985 and Oscar and Lucinda by Gillian Armstrong in 1997. Thomas Keneally’s Booker Prize-winning novel Schindler’s Ark was famously adapted in 1993 by Steven Spielberg into Schindler’s List. More recent notable adaptations include Looking for Alibrandi (2000; dir. Kate Woods), based on the novel by Melina Marchetta; Rabbit-Proof Fence, Phillip Noyce’s 2002 adaptation of Doris Pilkington Garimara’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence; Candy (2006; dir. Neil Armfield), based on the novel by Luke Davies; and December Boys (2007; dir. Rod Hardy), from the novel by Michael Noonan. In Canada, where the film culture has from its infancy been subject to competing influences from the US and Britain, there is nevertheless a significant history of film adaptations of Canadian literary texts in English, much of it at first centered around the National Film Board (NFB) and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). When the NFB expanded its previous focus on documentaries by branching off into the making of fiction films in the 1960s, it began by adapting the short stories of such seminal English Canadian writers as W. O. Mitchell and Sinclair Ross, a practice that continued until the late 1990s. At the same time, once CBC’s
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FILM/TELEVISION ADAPTATION AND FICTION
television drama ceased largely to be broadcast live from the studio, it too drew on literary sources for such productions as The Whiteoaks of Jalna (1971–2), written for television by novelist Timothy Findley from the novels of Mazo de la Roche. Similarly, the 1980s saw highly successful adaptations of L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and other works by director Kevin Sullivan for the CBC. With the advent of increased federal government funding for private film production in the late 1960s, adaptations of literary texts continued to offer for some the best hopes of commercial success. Literary works adapted for the screen during this period included Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974; dir. Ted Kotcheff); Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes (1978; dir. Lionel Chetwynd); Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1981; dir. Claude Jutra); and Timothy Findley’s The Wars (1983; dir. Robin Phillips). The 1980s also saw an often fruitful integration of theatrical and television production and distribution that resulted, for example, in film adaptations of short stories marketed both for television and for educational settings. In this context, Toronto-based Atlantis Films adapted short stories by Callaghan, Richler, Ross, Hugh Garner, Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence, and others for the screen. As federal funding decreased during the 1990s and the NFB returned to its roots in documentary and animation, and as more recent cuts in government support threaten the existence of Canadian television drama, English Canadian literary works nevertheless continue to be broadly adapted, though often produced elsewhere or in co-production with other countries. Thus, the 1990 film adaptation of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is an American production scripted by Harold Pinter and directed by Volker Schl€ ondorff with an international cast; Rohinton Mistry’s 1991 novel Such a Long Journey was turned in 2000 into a British– Canadian co-production directed by Icelandic Canadian Sturla Gunnarsson; and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient was adapted in 1996 by the British director Anthony Minghella in a joint UK–USA–Italy production. Still, there are occasional exceptions to the above, as in Toronto director Bruce McDonald’s mock-documentary film adaptation of Vancouver writer Michael Turner’s novel Hard Core Logo, an independent Canadian production released in 1996.
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Numerous works of Indian English literature have also been adapted to film, though occasionally, as in the case of R. K. Narayan, the resulting film has been produced in another language such as Hindi. Narayan’s 1949 novel Mr. Sampath, for example, was adapted into two film versions by Vijay Anand in 1965, one in Hindi and another in English, the latter co-scripted by Pearl S. Buck. Adaptations of works from India or Pakistan originally written in English are relatively fewer in number then, though they certainly exist: Khushwant Singh’s 1956 novel Train to Pakistan was adapted by Pamela Rooks in 1997; and Deepa Mehta’s 1999 film Earth adapts Pakistani writer Bapsi Sidhwa’s 1988 novel Ice-Candy-Man (published in the US as Cracking India). Interestingly, Mehta’s later film Water (2005) was adapted into literary form by Sidhwa as Water: A Novel (2006). Though not Indian by birth or citizenship, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala might be included in this discussion on the basis of two of her novels based and written in India which she adapted to film in collaboration with the producer–director team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory: The Householder (1963) and Heat and Dust (1983). The highly prolific and commercially successful Merchant Ivory Productions would also adapt Anita Desai’s 1984 novel In Custody in 1993. More recent notable adaptations of Indian English literature include Chitralekha Banerjee Divakaruni’s 1997 novel The Mistress of Spies, adapted by Paul Mayeda Berges in 2005; and Vikas Swarup’s 2005 novel Q and A, directed by Danny Boyle and released in 2008 as the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire. English-language writers from the Caribbean have also seen their works adapted into film, though perhaps not as often as it might be hoped. The following are notable examples. Dominican novelist Phyllis Shand Allfrey’s The Orchid House (1953) was successfully produced as a TV miniseries for Britain’s Channel 4 in 1991. The white Trinidadian writer Ian McDonald saw his 1969 novel The Humming-Bird Tree adapted for television in a 1992 BBC production. Indo-Trinidadian Nobel Prize-winner V. S. Naipaul’s 1957 novel The Mystic Masseur was turned into a film directed by Ismail Merchant and scripted by British Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips in 2001. Guyanese writer E. R. Braithwaite’s 1959 novel To Sir, with Love became the memorable 1967 film
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directed by James Clavell and starring Sidney Poitier. And Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s classic 1966 response to Jane Eyre, was adapted twice, first as a theatrical film (1993; dir. John Duigan) and then as a television production for the BBC (2006; dir. Brendan Maher). The many directors and screenwriters responsible for these and other film and television adaptations of literary works are essentially translating a story told in one medium into one told in another, very different one, and various theoretical and cultural issues surround their discursive practice. The issue of “fidelity” to the “original” text is but one of a number of critical or ideological questions raised by the unique textual and cultural relationships produced by the act of adaptation. Significant too, of course, is the culture within which the adaptation is produced, disseminated, and consumed (an adaptation made in Hollywood for a mass viewing audience may function quite differently from one produced independently for, say, an avant-garde coterie or a more limited national or regional audience); the aims and values of the filmmakers (some adaptations may aim uncritically at a “faithful” representation of the literary text, while others may make the film a vehicle for a critique either of the ideological positions or values associated with the literary work being adapted or of twentiethcentury aesthetics or politics more generally); and even the cultural and economic capital of individual authors, actors, and/or directors (in which the cultural status of one or more of these may impose itself disproportionately on both the production and reception of the adaptation). However complex and variable the relationship between literary text and film adaptation, the issue of “fidelity,” the extent to which the film adaptation is “true” to the “original” literary work, has continued to haunt this area of cultural production. Though adaptations can potentially function as fruitful sites of comparative investigation into the discursive practices of both literary and film cultures, much commentary still remains mired, either explicitly or implicitly, in considerations of “fidelity,” thereby deferring ultimately, much to the consternation of many film scholars, to the authority, value, and prestige of the literary text. Of course, the very term “adaptation” assumes a certain artistic and cultural deference, if not subjection, of the later film to the earlier
literary work. Was the lukewarm critical response to Ismail Merchant and Caryl Phillips’s film of Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur due to some inherent failing in the film? Or was the adaptation always doomed to fall at least somewhat short of the original great literary Work of a great literary Author? Naipaul, of course, has the advantage of functioning as a significant cultural and historical icon across a wide array of discursive spaces. Recognized by many who may never have read his actual books, Naipaul, at least in the late twentieth century, might still have possessed enough cultural capital to outmaneuver Phillips and even Merchant, a film producer and director with significant cultural capital of his own. It should be clear from the above that even when remaining generally within the realm of “fidelity” studies, discussions of adaptation inevitably must grapple with some of the broader discursive practices raised by the relationships among the media and discourses in question. As early as 1984, Christopher Orr, citing Roland Barthes’s famous view of the text as “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture,” proposed a view of the film adaptation as Barthes’s “multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (146). Such a view, of course, posits both “original” text and adaptation as intertexts, and affords authority or privilege to neither. In his attempt to transcend the limitations of “fidelity” studies, Orr draws not only on Barthes but also on John Ellis, who in 1982 argued that the film adaptation should draw “upon the memory of the novel, a memory that can derive from actual reading, or, as is more likely with a classic of literature, a generally circulated cultural memory. . . . The successful adaptation is the one that is able to replace the memory of the novel” (3). By Ellis’s definition, then, the success of James Clavell’s To Sir, with Love, or Volker Schl€ ondorff’s The Handmaid’s Tale, or John Duigan’s Wide Sargasso Sea, or Gillian Armstrong’s Oscar and Lucinda will depend on each film’s ability to replace in the viewer the cultural memory of Braithwaite’s, Atwood’s, Rhys’s, and Carey’s novels. Clearly, the issue here becomes not so much “fidelity” to an original source as a struggle for a kind of jurisdiction over “cultural memory,” a struggle that is inevitably dependent on and subject to a wide array of cultural, historical,
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FINDLEY, TIMOTHY
economic, and political factors, and that seems particularly relevant in the context of postcolonial studies. SEE ALSO: Critical Theory and Fiction (WF); Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); The Film Industry and Fiction (BIF); Television and Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Aragay, M. (ed.) (2005). Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Barthes, R. (1977). The Death of the Author. In Image, Music, Text (trans. S. Heath). London: Fontana, pp. 142–48. Ellis, J. (1982). The Literary Adaptation: An Introduction. Screen, 23(1), 3–5. Kranz, D. L., & Mellerski, N. C. (eds.) (2008). In/ Fidelity: Essays on Film Adaptation. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Leitch, T. (2007). Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From “Gone with the Wind” to “The Passion of the Christ. ” Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. McFarlane, B. (1996). Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon. Naremore, J. (ed.) (2000). Film Adaptation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Orr, C. (1984). The Discourse on Adaptation: A Review. Wide Angle, 6(2), 72–6. Sanders, J. (2006). Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge. Stam, R., & and Raengo, A. (eds.) (2005). Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Welsh, J. M., & Lev, P. (eds.) (2007). The Literature/ Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow.
Findley, Timothy LORRAINE YORK
When Timothy Findley died in 2002, several tributes quoted his self-description as “a dedicated anti-fascist writer and thinker” (Benson 1986). And though this was clearly true, as evinced by his fictional portraits of the terrors of Nazi ideology in novels like The Butterfly Plague (1969) and Famous Last Words (1981), Findley’s label was accurate in a broader sense. His oeuvre – 10 novels, a novella, seven plays, three collections of stories, three autobiographical collections, and
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numerous television and radio scripts – was devoted to an exploration of the will to power and its costs. In a prose style that placed point-blank, emphatic statement next to passages of flowing, baroque theatricality, Findley produced a fiction of dramatic statement that captured many readers. His plays, though slower to win favor with audiences, culminated in the acclaimed productions of Elizabeth Rex (2003a) in the last two years of his life. Born in Toronto’s affluent Rosedale neighborhood on October 30, 1930, Findley never forgot the city’s Depression aura of declining gentility: its pressures, hypocrisies, and ruthlessness. It appears in many of his writings, from the fearful family that does not live on the “right side” of Yonge Street in “Stones” to the grasping family members jockeying for financial supremacy in Headhunter (1993). The young Findley felt increasingly alien in this milieu; though he was aware from childhood that his primary attraction was to men, his sexuality became the focus of harsh criticism once he reached adolescence. He further incurred his father’s ire by announcing that he wished to pursue a career in dance – a far cry from his grandfather’s position as president of MasseyHarris, the farm implements manufacturer, or his father’s profession as a stockbroker. At any rate, a fused disc put an end to those aspirations, and Findley turned to acting, which he saw as an alternate means of creating meaningful gesture. This career, too, came to an end, in spite of Findley’s participation in the Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s first season in 1953 and his touring with Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker in the United States and Britain the following year. It was while on tour that, on a friendly challenge, he showed a short story to the actress Ruth Gordon, who urged him to pursue a career in writing. Findley’s long writing career, like those of other Canadian writers of his generation, formed a narrative about the nature of publishing in Canada. His first two novels, The Last of the Crazy People (1967) and The Butterfly Plague, were rejected by Canadian publishers, and, once published elsewhere, received lukewarm reviews in his native country. Findley recalled that, at that time, the publisher Macmillan in Toronto sent mail to him care of his American publishers, unaware that he was living with his companion, Bill Whitehead,
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in the countryside nearby. All this would change in 1977, with the publication of The Wars, a novel about a young Canadian World War I soldier’s act of conscientious disobedience, which brought Findley the first of his Governor General’s Awards (Canada’s highest literary honor). During the 1970s, Canadians were directing renewed attention to their culture, in the wake of the celebrations marking the centennial of their confederation in 1967, and writers were beginning to reap the benefits of increased government funding under the auspices of the Canada Council for the Arts (founded in 1957). Findley won acclaim abroad with his novels Famous Last Words and Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984b) during the 1980s, a decade that saw a dramatic increase in the exporting of Canadian writing. In the last years of his life, he and Whitehead spent their summers in Stratford, Ontario, where Findley’s dramatic career had gained a foothold 40 years previously, and their winters in a small house near the village of Cotignac in France. It was there that he died of congestive heart failure in 2002. Findley’s early works were harshly criticized by Canadian reviewers for being derivative of American Southern Gothic writers such as Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers. His first novel, The Last of the Crazy People, set the stage in this regard: an oppressive summer, a cursed family, madness, an explosion of violence. The innocent child Hooker Winslow is moved, by a sequence of logical inferences, to commit what most would deem an unspeakable atrocity: the killing of family members. Reviewers at the time denied that such epic fatalism could unfold in a Canadian setting. Now, ironically, Findley’s early work is often credited as an early example of what has since been hailed as “Southern Ontario Gothic” in the work of writers such as Alice Munro, Jane Urquhart, and Graeme Gibson. Rather than being slavishly imitative, in The Last of the Crazy People and other early fictions like “Lemonade” and “About Effie,” Findley self-consciously performs Southern Gothic as an effort to uncover a language for the concerns that would absorb him for the rest of his career: the capacity of oppressive families to stifle natural desires and sacrifice their children on the altars of propriety; the madness that is often a form of unrecognized protest against that oppression; the regulation of sexualities.
Like The Wars, The Last of the Crazy People tended toward a fairly spare style of dramatic statement, often drawing upon the rhetorical power of short, stabbing sentences to convey the atrocities of power abused. With The Butterfly Plague, Findley immersed himself in a more baroque, consciously excessive style that would characterize his later works, beginning with Famous Last Words, and culminating in novels like the nightmarish Headhunter in 1993 and Pilgrim in 1999. In all of these works, Findley interweaves a large, nearly unwieldy cast of characters, often intertwining those who are purely fictional with others who are based, however fictionally, on historical figures. This mesh often suggests a net of intrigue, a suffocating fascistic “cabal” of interests: another murderous family, in effect. In the case of The Butterfly Plague, we once again have the oppressive patriarchal family, as captured in former Hollywood director George Damrosch’s denial of the hemophilia and gayness of his son, Adolphus/Dolly. Nazi Germany and Hollywood’s rage for perfection become intertwined in the story of this family, through the narrative of Dolly’s sister Ruth, a hemophiliac former Olympic swimmer who falls under the spell of her Nazi trainer. In this early fiction, too, Findley’s characteristic subversion of sexual regulation is already fully formed. He plays off Dolly’s shame at his unacknowledged sexuality against the gleeful disruption of sexual binaries in the figure of Octavius, whose camp performances as “Mother” before his mirror are a welcome source of sexual invention in a world of repressive denial. Clearly this is the forerunner of Findley’s much celebrated figure Lucy in Not Wanted on the Voyage: Lucifer performed in binary-bursting sexual kabuki as a seven-foot-tall, sexually indeterminate angel. The Wars, Findley’s breakthrough novel, for all its stylistic restraint, retains a fascination with repressive power mongering and sexual regulation. The “wars” to which the young Robert Ross commits himself become the parallel public enactment of repressive domestic orders. And one source of repression is compulsory heterosexuality; Ross, who shares the name of Oscar Wilde’s most faithful friend and former lover, finds himself alienated by the role of male warrior that he is conscripted into. As in Findley’s bravura retelling
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of the Noah story in Not Wanted, the rejection of the heterosexual warrior script is signaled by an alliance with the animal world; in this respect, Robert Ross is the forerunner of Findley’s sensitive revolutionary Ham in Not Wanted. When Findley’s Famous Last Words appeared in 1981, the academic community was caught up in the postmodern querying of monolithic historical narratives, and this novel seemed to partake of the zeitgeist. Once again mixing historical and fictional characters, Findley has two readers of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’s journals, Ezra Pound’s poetic creation, debate his conversion to fascism. Complicating some of his earlier fiction’s seeming dualism between the imaginative figure and the fascistic patriarch, Findley asks what happens when an artist, who should logically stand with the free-ranging imagination, embraces a fascism that seeks to curb human diversity. Findley’s later works reveal an intensification of his interest in the psyche, and in the dynamics of psychological analysis and madness. Headhunter, set in a futuristic Toronto, uncovers another murderous family: a patriarchal cabal of child abusers, abetted by the director of a prestigious psychological institute. The abuse of children parallels the draconian treatment of the institute’s patients. One of those patients, Lilah Kemp, is an authorial figure: her “madness” consists in conjuring characters from literary texts into her world – much as Findley has done in this richly intertextual novel. (Indeed, in one tongue-incheek sequence, we read the transcript of a therapy session with a certain “Findley,” a writer.) Moving from the future back into history in The Piano Man’s Daughter (1995), Findley returns to early twentieth-century Toronto, and another family tested by the challenges of human variability. Lily Kilworth, an unconventional, epileptic child, is another of Findley’s gifted mad seers, only in this novel the emphasis falls on integration rather than rejection; Charlie, her grown son, finally embraces her with pride. Findley’s plays explore much the same territory as his fiction: the redemptive nature of much of what is labeled madness, the suppression of diversity, the distorting role of power in public life. All of these concerns meld effectively in his late play, Elizabeth Rex (2003a), wherein Elizabeth and Shakespeare’s actors confront each other’s
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performative masks. One actor, a man noted for performing female roles, daringly chides the monarch for hiding her femininity much as he hides his masculinity on stage. Set on the night before Elizabeth’s lover Essex is to be executed, the actors use their unparalleled license to “speak truth to power,” daring even those who have power of life and death to practice reconciliation rather than banishment. Such was the creative aim of Timothy Findley himself. As he once reflected of his life’s work, “The subject here is all of us; all of us and reconciliation; all of us and reconciliation with who we are – the whole of who we are and what becomes of us when others break us into parts” (Findley 1987). SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Munro, Alice (WF); The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF); Urquhart, Jane (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bailey, A., & Grandy, K. (ed.) (1998). Paying Attention: Critical Essays on Timothy Findley. Toronto: ECW. (Reprint of Essays on Canadian Writing, 64.) Benson, E. (1986). Interview with Timothy Findley. World Literature Written in English, 26(1), 107–15. Findley, T. (1967). The Last of the Crazy People. London: Macdonald. Findley, T. (1969). The Butterfly Plague. New York: Viking. Findley, T. (1977a). Can You See Me Yet? Vancouver: Talonbooks. Findley, T. (1977b). The Wars. Toronto: Clarke Irwin. Findley, T. (1981). Famous Last Words. Toronto: Clarke Irwin. Findley, T. (1984a). Dinner Along the Amazon. Markham, ON: Penguin. Findley, T. (1984b). Not Wanted on the Voyage. Toronto: Viking. Findley, T. (1986). The Telling of Lies. Toronto: Penguin. Findley, T. (1987). My Final Hour: An Address to the Philosophy Society, Trent University, Monday, 26 Jan., 1987. Journal of Canadian Studies, 22(1), 5–16. Findley, T. (1988). Stones. Markham, ON: Penguin. Findley, T. (1990). Inside Memory: Pages from a Writer’s Workbook. Toronto: HarperCollins. Findley, T. (1993). Headhunter. Toronto: HarperCollins.
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Findley, T. (1994). The Trials of Ezra Pound. Winnipeg: Blizzard. Findley, T. (1995). The Piano Man’s Daughter. Toronto: HarperCollins. Findley, T. (1996). You Went Away. Toronto: HarperCollins. Findley, T. (1997). Dust to Dust. Toronto: HarperCollins. Findley, T. (1999). Pilgrim. Toronto: HarperColllins. Findley, T. (2001). Spadework. Toronto: HarperCollins. Findley, T. (2003a). Elizabeth Rex. Toronto: HarperCollins. Findley, T. (2003b). Journeyman: Travels with a Writer (ed. William Whitehead). Toronto: HarperFlamingo. Gabriel, B. (1995). Performing the Bent Text: Fascism and the Regulation of Sexualities in Timothy Findley’s The Butterfly Plague. English Studies in Canada, 21(2), 227–50. Grandy, K. (1998). Performed and Performing Selves in Findley’s Drama. Essays on Canadian Writing, 64, 181–200. Pennee, D. (1991). Moral Metafiction: Counterdiscourse in the Novels of Timothy Findley. Toronto: ECW. Phillips, R. (dir.) (1983). The Wars. Nielsen-Ferns and the National Film Board. Sullivan, K. (dir.) (2003). The Piano Man’s Daughter. Sullivan Entertainment.
Frame, Janet PATRICK EVANS
Janet Frame is remembered as New Zealand’s most idiosyncratic writer, producing novels, short stories, a children’s book, and poetry that won numerous awards and, in 2003, a shortlisting for the Nobel Prize; but she described herself, late in life, as her country’s greatest unread author. In the lengthening perspective of her work since her death in January 2004, she can be seen as a writer whose life story, fleetingly implicit in her earlier work but specifically explored in later autobiographical projects, gave at least as significant an account of her times as did those more infrequent parts of her art that seemed not to refer to it. In earlier phases of her career she represented something of her generation’s determined reaction to New Zealand’s insular cultural nationalism. Although she never stopped criticizing this insularity in her work, in later writing she became less obviously a frustrated provincial modernist and more nearly (although not completely or only) a
postmodernist writer who enjoyed playing games in fiction and poetry. In the end, she was her own brilliant work of art, renaming herself by deed poll in 1958 “Nene Janet Paterson Clutha” (after the Maori warrior Tamati Waka Nene), an artful construction for “Janet Frame” to hide behind, most particularly in her masterly three-volume An Autobiography (1989). Frame was born on August 28, 1924 in Dunedin, in New Zealand’s South Island; her mother had once served as a maid to Katherine Mansfield’s maternal grandparents. Her father was a railway fireman; in 1931 he returned to his hometown of Oamaru, 50 miles up the coast from Dunedin, with his wife and their five children (Myrtle, Janet, George, Isabel, and June). Janet was to stay in Oamaru for 12 formative years; for the rest of her life, after she left Oamaru for Dunedin, teachers college, and university early in 1943, it was to be (after Poe) her “Kingdom by the Sea.” This private, magical, unchanging imaginary realm she protected from prying journalists and literary critics throughout her life, and peopled with characters who were often family members and early acquaintances barely changed beyond their names but disguised by being asserted, always, as purely fictional. Her first published story, “University Entrance,” for example, presents a teenaged girl, as she herself had recently been, trying to get a small sum of money out of someone who seems much like the grumpy, unpredictable father of the later autobiography. The brief stories of The Lagoon: Stories (1951) circle around events that, years later, Michael King’s official biography Wrestling with the Angel (2000) would confirm as actually having taken place – the loss of her older sister Myrtle in 1937 and her younger sister Isabel 10 years later, both by drowning; the onset of her own mental illness and incarceration in psychiatric institutions that began in 1947 and ended only in early 1955; the fear, brought about by institutionalization, of a loss of identity and particularly of schizophrenia. Three decades later, she was still writing close to home: the last novel she published during her lifetime, The Carpathians (1988), is set in a town that can be traced on a map of Levin, the North Island community she lived near while writing, and has a reclusive writer like herself as its protagonist; her second posthumous publication, Towards Another Summer (2007), takes the
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reader back nearly half a century to a wintry, furtive visit Frame made to the Manchester home of the British writer Geoffrey Moorhouse. Never fully fictional, never fully acknowledged as a historical figure, Frame is as difficult to get near in her own writing as she is difficult to get away from. She always denied she wrote about herself or her own life at all. Frame’s long spell of almost continuous hospitalization over eight years from 1947 was her central experience. It involved more than 200 bouts of electro-convulsive therapy and a threat of a pre-frontal lobotomy that she claimed in her autobiography was avoided only when her winning the Hubert Church Memorial Award for The Lagoon persuaded the hospital’s superintendent to forbid the operation. Signing herself out in 1955 freed her to flee to Auckland’s subtropical climate, and particularly to the friendship of the distinguished fiction writer Frank Sargeson, who for over a year nurtured her and encouraged her writing. Her first extended prose publication, Owls Do Cry (1957), was written in five early months of that stay: neither it nor her next two publications were novels, as far as she was concerned, but rather “explorations” – of her first 30 years, as it turned out: her relationships within her family, her time in psychiatric hospitals, and her first – tremulous – visit overseas in mid-1956, to London. Together, for all her anti-formalist protestations, these three novels look very much like a trilogy devoted to her own family, fictionalized under the name of Withers – her own Portrait of the Artist, built around a protagonist who, throughout its course, changes names but not essential character. Owls Do Cry turns about the fact of Daphne Withers’s impending lobotomy, linked back imagistically to a rubbish fire in which an older sister has died and which is figured as the means by which a reductive, puritanical, and unimaginative society imposes its mindlessness on young children. The Withers family members are divided into Frame’s own version of the saved and the damned, with the inversion that it is society’s least valued members whom she most values: Daphne, of course, but also her brother Toby, caught between materialism and insight. It is the book’s greatest achievement that, through the passages of poetry that leaven its prose, the reader is encouraged to learn how to think figu-
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ratively and how the world of the symbolic imagination actually works. Faces in the Water (1961) is a less flamboyantly imaginative account of a young woman’s time in hospital from initial institutionalization through recovery, setback, further recovery, and further setback to a clearly ironic conclusion. Here, Istina Mavet is still obviously Daphne, who in turn is obviously the author, so to speak; and so is Zoe Bryce, protagonist of The Edge of the Alphabet (1962), last of the Withers trilogy, which brings back Toby from Owls Do Cry to duplicate Frame’s own brother George’s pursuit of her to London in 1957. Here, the redemptive power of art seems much more provisional and fragile, surviving in little more than an image Zoe makes out of twisted silver paper from a cigarette packet just before her death, a prosaic grail of sorts but a grail nonetheless. By the time this early trilogy was published, Frame was coming to the end of six years spent in London, Ibiza, and Andorra and an alteration of her perspective of the world that changed the tone of her subsequent work – all acknowledged as novels now, proper fictions in their own right, and with appropriately broader themes than her earlier writing shows. Though dissimilar in style and approach, Scented Gardens for the Blind (1963b) and The Adaptable Man (1965) both show their author’s new interest in the impact of modernity on the individual, particularly in that distinctive expression of modernity that hung over the northern hemisphere at the time: nuclear warfare. At the end of Scented Gardens, the circle of yellow flax that surrounds the fatal rubbish fire of Owls Do Cry, and which later implies the circle of fire in Daphne’s brain under electro-convulsive therapy, becomes a mushroom cloud. At the end of The Adaptable Man, it becomes a falling chandelier that kills or maims several characters seconds after it has been connected to the electricity that represents the arrival of modernity at a Sussex village. Intensive Care (1970) moves between memories of the Great War and the furnace – evoking Auschwitz – of a factory in which a main character works, and concludes with a version of the Nazis’ selection of Jews, called Naming Day and conducted in a New Zealand setting. Daughter Buffalo (1972) focuses on a New York doctor named Talbot Edelman who specializes in “death studies,” which involves collecting the brains of
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aborted fetuses and vivisecting his own pet dog till it dies, all in direct connection to his Jewish grandfather’s experience of suffering and humiliation. Living in the Maniototo (1979) portrays a similar figure who lives in Baltimore, modeled on Frame’s friend John Money, a sexologist at Johns Hopkins University. In all these works, echoes of the Nazi era in Europe overwhelm any New Zealand content. These novels all demonstrate what became the distinctive emphasis of Frame’s approach to the subject of Western modernity: in effect her addressing of Weber’s famous argument that modernity disenchanted the world. Increasingly, her work explored alternative ways of living, thinking, and writing by which the world around her might be made bearable or even transformed and redeemed. Throughout, she emphasizes the importance of the imagination in bringing such alternatives about. At one level, this involved reimagining the form she worked in, and with which she was never fully comfortable: hence a growing interest in metafiction and the game-novel – as early as The Edge of the Alphabet a patterning author called Thora Pattern keeps intruding past the more traditional narrative with unexplained marginal comments. In Scented Gardens she waits till near its explosive conclusion to reveal that its three apparent narrators, each of them seeking some pattern or connection that might explain their world, have all been imagined by the novel’s actual narrator, an aged autistic woman. The Adaptable Man is, famously, Frame’s response to a publisher who – naively – wanted a best-selling detective novel out of her: its victim and murderer are revealed straight away and Frame then goes off to pursue her real interests, the etymology of Old and Middle English and the impact of Western modernity on rural English life. And Daughter Buffalo is far more than has been portrayed so far, at one level a word game punning on “jewel,” “dual,” and “duel,” among other verbal groupings, and with a bizarre episode in which gay lovers adopt a buffalo at the local zoo. Living in the Maniototo is her masterwork in this vein, with characters supposedly dead coming back to life and others supposedly “real” turning out to be imaginary, as well as a character who disappears entirely from the text while scrubbing his bath with bleach. In The Carpathians, an astral body called the Memory Star swings too close to Earth
and sucks speech and memory from the town’s inhabitants. In these novels she seems determined to be as idiosyncratic and wildly imaginative as possible in order to counter the numbing rationalism around her. At another level, Frame sought to re-enchant her world more directly, with a spiritual if not necessarily an openly religious emphasis. The title of An Angel at My Table (1984), the second volume of her autobiographical trilogy, refers to Rilke’s redeeming Angel, which enters the world and transforms its everydayness into the kind of timeless paradise Frame’s art renders in the first volume, To the Is-Land (1982). In much of this autobiographical trilogy she explores aspects of the creative imagination and the relationship of the artist to her informing world, at the same time unfolding a sequence of images – of imposture, ventriloquism, clothing, weaving, and creating – that bind the long project from beginning to end. Central to this adventure in remembering is the stunt whereby she ties the “re-membering” of her older sister Myrtle (when Myrtle’s cropped-out arm is airbrushed back into a posthumous photograph) to the liberating acceptance that all “real” memories have an element of the factitious in them. The more vivid the remembered world she presents us and the more plausible and delightful it seems, the more we are reminded that it is a world transformed into an earthly paradise only by the heavenly magic of the Rilkean Artist herself. All Frame’s writing shows some interest in this need to re-enchant the world through the imagination. But her whereabouts at the time of writing always seemed to influence the emphasis and even the quality of her execution, such that her writing can be sorted into clear phases. If the Withers trilogy represents a kind of juvenilia and Scented Gardens and The Adaptable Man a European phase, a further phase began when she returned to New Zealand and Oamaru in 1963 following the death of her father. She brought with her the poetic, parabolic stories published as The Reservoir: Stories and Sketches (1963a) and Snowman, Snowman: Fables and Fantasies (1963c); but the fiction she wrote in the following three years – A State of Siege (1966), written in Auckland, and The Rainbirds (1968), written in Dunedin when she was the 1965 Burns Fellow – is diminished, more personal than her prior writing and most
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obviously without the earlier emphasis on the destructiveness of modernity. In A State of Siege, a retired art teacher becomes increasingly isolated in a small island cottage as an unknown assailant flings stones against her windows. In The Rainbirds, a man is hit by a car and killed but comes to life again and is treated as a pariah, in an obvious parable of her own alienation from materialistic mid-century New Zealand as someone who had lived close to death and to death-in-life. It was not until Frame began regularly escaping to North America in 1967 that her writing began to broaden back toward the larger and more humanitarian themes of her European fiction and enter a fresh phase, one that was to occupy her for two decades, in fiction that increasingly featured US settings and protagonists. Her sole published children’s book, Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun (1969a), belongs to this period as does Intensive Care; but Daughter Buffalo, Living in the Maniototo, and The Carpathians in effect form a closing trilogy of novels that reflect her fascination with North America, where she once described herself as being closest to the human condition as it has been lived in the twentieth century: an environment in which the fundamental processes of living and dying were less euphemized than in her own country, and in which she seems to have been more fully able to confront the Conradian question of how to be. It is too facile, given Frame’s interest in metafiction as early as The Adaptable Man, to describe these novels simply as introducing a postmodern mode to her writing. But there is undoubtedly a new freedom in them, a final liberation from any sense of obligation to the reader, and, indeed, a determination – born perhaps out of frustration with a too literal-minded local audience – to baffle and confuse them even more than she had done hitherto. Frame won a remarkable number of prizes: the Literary Fund awards for achievement in 1958 and 1970 and its Scholarship-in-Letters in 1964; the Hubert Church Award for The Lagoon in 1952 and Daughter Buffalo in 1973; the Wattie’s Book of the Year Award for the first and last volumes of her autobiography, in 1983 and 1985; a New Zealand Book Award for the second volume in 1984, and for Living in the Maniototo in 1980 and The Carpathians in 1989; in 1974 she was Katherine Mansfield Fellow at Menton; in May 1978 she was
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awarded an honorary doctorate by Otago University; in 1986 she was made a Commander of the British Empire, in 1984 the first recipient of the Turnovsky Prize for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts, and in 1988 the first Sargeson Fellow; in 1990 she became a member of the Order of New Zealand. In 1989 The Carpathians won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and her Nobel shortlisting in 2003 followed annual recommendations by the New Zealand branch of PEN from 1980. Frame’s writing has continued to appear after her death. Towards Another Summer, a novel probably written in the early 1960s, appeared in 2007, a year after The Goose Bath, a second collection of poems following A Pocket Mirror (1967). In June 2008, a hitherto unpublished 1964 story, “A Night at the Opera,” appeared in the New Yorker. As her executor continues to comb through her unpublished work, she will no doubt enhance the sense that Frame liked to foster, that in some way her writing was created independently of her, that she can somehow control the things that happen in the world even after she has left it. SEE ALSO: Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); New Zealand Fiction (WF); Realism/ Magic Realism (WF); Sargeson, Frank (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Campion, J. (dir.) (1990). An Angel at My Table. Hibiscus Films. Evans, P. (1977). Janet Frame. Boston: Twayne. Frame, J. (1946). University Entrance. Listener, p. 18 (Mar. 22). Frame, J. (1951). The Lagoon: Stories. Christchurch: Caxton. Frame, J. (1957). Owls Do Cry. Christchurch: Pegasus. Frame, J. (1961). Faces in the Water. Christchurch: Pegasus. Frame, J. (1962). The Edge of the Alphabet. Christchurch: Pegasus. Frame, J. (1963a). The Reservoir: Stories and Sketches. New York: George Braziller. Frame, J. (1963b). Scented Gardens for the Blind. Christchurch: Pegasus. Frame, J. (1963c). Snowman Snowman: Fables and Fantasies. New York: George Braziller. Frame, J. (1965). The Adaptable Man. Christchurch: Pegasus.
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Frame, J. (1966). A State of Siege. New York: George Braziller. Frame, J. (1967). The Pocket Mirror. New York: George Braziller. Frame, J. (1968). The Rainbirds. London: W. H. Allen. Frame, J. (1969a). Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun. New York: George Braziller. Frame, J. (1969b). Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room. New York: George Braziller. Frame, J. (1970). Intensive Care. New York: George Braziller. Frame, J. (1972). Daughter Buffalo. New York: George Braziller. Frame, J. (1979). Living in the Maniototo. New York: George Braziller. Frame, J. (1982). To the Is-Land. New York: George Braziller. Frame, J. (1983). You Are Now Entering the Human Heart. Wellington: Victoria University Press. Frame, J. (1984). An Angel at My Table. Auckland: Hutchinson. Frame, J. (1985). The Envoy from Mirror City. Auckland: Hutchinson. Frame, J. (1988). The Carpathians. Auckland: Century Hutchinson. Frame, J. (1989). An Autobiography. Auckland: Century Hutchinson. Frame, J. (2007). Towards Another Summer. Auckland: Random House. Frame, J. (2008). A Night at the Opera. New Yorker, pp. 64–7 (June 2). King, M. (2000). Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame. Auckland: Penguin. Oettli-Van Delden, S. (2003). Surfaces of Strangeness: Janet Frame and the Rhetoric of Madness. Wellington: Victoria University Press.
Franklin, Miles SYLVIA MARTIN
Miles Franklin wrote fiction over a vital period in Australia’s history, from federation to the mid twentieth century. Believing fervently in a distinctly Australian literature that would be led by women, she herself was a paradox: secretive and enigmatic, prickly and outspoken. Her writer colleague and first biographer, Marjorie Barnard, stated that “Miles writing is indivisible from Miles living” and that any account of her must present her life and writing “as one organic whole” (p. xv). The woman who wrote under a confusing array of pseudonyms, some of which were revealed only
through her papers after her death, remains an intriguing puzzle today. Born Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin on October 14, 1879 at Talbingo, rural New South Wales, Franklin attended a bush school after her family moved to a property near Goulburn when she was 10. Like many young women then, she did not attend secondary school, but nevertheless completed her first and most famous novel, My Brilliant Career (1901), at 19. Franklin’s preoccupation with the dual themes of feminism and nationalism are established in this lively story of a young woman growing up in the Australian bush. The traditional structure of the romance novel is subverted when the heroine, Sybylla Melvyn, refuses her eligible and handsome suitor and vows to become a writer, understanding marriage and career for a woman of her time to be mutually exclusive. Rejected by Angus and Robertson, the novel was eventually published in Edinburgh by Blackwood with the assistance of the Australian writer Henry Lawson, who edited it, deleted the question mark after “brilliant” that indicated the author’s ironic intent, and revealed that it was written by “a girl.” Franklin, who had sought to pose “as a bald-headed seer of the sterner sex” by adopting the name “Miles” (Webby, p. vii), was devastated; she was also horrified that the novel was wrongly perceived to be completely autobiographical, including the depiction of the heroine’s drunken father. Many female readers understood Sybylla’s predicament, and My Brilliant Career inspired a later generation of young women when made into a feature film by Gillian Armstrong in 1979, starring Judy Davis. The book’s sequel, My Career Goes Bung, was completed in 1902 but remained unpublished until 1946, and Franklin’s next novel, Some Everyday Folk and Dawn (1909), achieved little success. Armed with an introduction to compatriot feminist Alice Henry, Franklin sailed for the United States in 1906, working for the Women’s Trade Union League in Chicago and coediting its magazine Life and Labour. She remained an expatriate in the United States and then London, visiting Australia twice in the 1920s and finally returning home in 1933. While living in London during the 1920s Franklin wrote six novels under the pseudonym “Brent of Bin Bin.” Starting with the second, Up the Country (1928), her novels were published
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over the following three decades. The saga traces several generations of pioneering families in the region where Franklin was born, perpetuating an idealized view of an egalitarian settler society, albeit one in which women are portrayed as its underlying strength. It is a white Australia that Franklin represents, and her analysis of class is confined to comparing the pioneer stalwarts with the decadent aristocrats of England. Now posing successfully as a “bald-headed seer,” she revealed her identity only to selected friends such as the expatriate poet Mary Fullerton, who acted as her agent in London. Franklin’s last major novel was another pastoral work, the prize-winning All That Swagger (1936), published under her own name. She also wrote novels satirizing the English upper classes, including Bring the Monkey (1933) and Pioneers on Parade (1939). Several manuscripts found among her papers were published posthumously. Described as “contradictory and idiosyncratic” (Modjeska 156), Franklin labeled married women “charwomen,” yet she cared for her mother tirelessly in her final years. Sensitive about her country upbringing, she nevertheless extolled the life of the bush pioneers, and though defensive about her lack of education, she was active and influential in Australian literary and academic circles. Franklin was critical of her country’s parochialism yet a fierce nationalist, and she spent decades of her adult life as an expatriate in the very countries whose imperialism she deplored. Perhaps Franklin’s greatest legacy lies in her personal writing: her lively and witty correspondence and her diaries. An assiduous archivist not only of her own correspondence but also of the letters of a generation of literary figures, her extensive papers in the State Library of New South Wales are an invaluable resource for researchers in Australia’s literary and cultural history. Miles Franklin died in Sydney on September 19, 1954 and, according to her wishes, her ashes were scattered at her birthplace. Her name lives on through her bequest of the Miles Franklin Award, which remains Australia’s most prestigious literary prize. SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Film/Television
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Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Armstrong, G. (dir.) (1979). My Brilliant Career. Greater Union Organisation. Barnard, M. (1967). Miles Franklin: The Story of a Famous Australian. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Franklin, M. (1901). My Brilliant Career. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Franklin, M. (1909). Some Everyday Folk and Dawn. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Franklin, M. (1928). Up the Country. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Franklin, M. (1930). Ten Creek’s Run. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Franklin, M. (1931a). Back to Bool Bool. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Franklin, M. (1931b). Old Blastus of Bandicoot. London: Palmer. Franklin, M. (1933). Bring the Monkey. Sydney: Endeavour. Franklin, M. (1936). All That Swagger. Sydney: Bulletin. Franklin, M. (with Cusack, D.) (1939). Pioneers on Parade. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Franklin, M. (1946). My Career Goes Bung. Melbourne: Georgian House. Franklin, M. (1950). Prelude to Waking. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Franklin, M. (1954). Cockatoos. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Franklin, M. (1956). Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Martin, S. (2001). Passionate Friends: Mary Fullerton, Mabel Singleton and Miles Franklin. London: Onlywomen. Modjeska, D. (1981). Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925–1945. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Roe, J. (ed.) (1993). My Congenials: Miles Franklin and Friends in Letters. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Roe, J. (2008). Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography. Sydney: Fourth Estate. Webby, E. (1990). Introduction. In M. Franklin, My Brilliant Career; My Career Goes Bung. Sydney: Collins/Angus and Robertson, pp. v–xviii.
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G Gallant, Mavis MARTA DVORAK
Recognized internationally as one of the best short story writers in English, Canadian expatriate Mavis Gallant is the author of over 100 stories as well as novels, plays, and essays. She has won prestigious literary awards (the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix, the PEN/Nabokov Award, and the Prix Athanase-David) and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has a long history of publishing with the New Yorker, a special relationship that allowed her to write full-time well before her work received widespread critical attention. Gallant’s work shows how art can draw on displaced, double, or plural identities to find new angles on reality and generate radical reformulations of language, form, and ideas. Reading her fiction within overlapping aesthetic movements shows that her diverse roots and intercultural practices enable her to usher into Canada the discordance and de-centering of the modernist and postmodern movements. Gallant was born on August 11, 1922 in an anglophone enclave of Montreal, a divided city surrounded by the concentric circles of a Frenchspeaking province (Quebec) and an Englishspeaking continent. At age 4 her Protestant parents sent her to a convent boarding school run by French Canadian Catholic nuns. Her environment was split on multiple levels – linguistic, cultural, religious, and axiological – and this collision of worldviews triggered her writing by
helping fashion her interest in language and its relations with perception, imagination, and memory. After attending high school in New York, Gallant returned to Canada, eventually joining the staff of the Montreal Standard as a feature writer from 1944 to 1950. Her early articles prefigured the essays and reviews collected in Paris Notebooks (1986), which combine keen observation and razor-sharp wit with extensive knowledge of European and North American history, institutions, legislation, art, and customs. She produced a weekly column about radio plays and published interviews with international thinkers and artists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Hindemith, along with English Canadian and French Canadian writers from Hugh MacLennan and W. O. Mitchell to Gabrielle Roy. The three stories she published in the 1940s focused on the experiences of refugees, and this concern with cultural and spatial displacement would become a hallmark of her writing. Although she expatriated herself in 1950 and has resided in Paris ever since, it is the Montreal of her childhood and youth that Gallant retrieves and reconfigures in the “Linnet Muir” stories collected in Home Truths (1981). These six stories together form a story cycle, a genre revived by Gallant and subsequently by fellow Canadians Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence; they depict the development of the character and consciousness of Linnet Muir, but also explore the city and the nation. Operating within the K€unstlerroman tradition, the reconstruction of a lost city and way of life is told in the first person. The stories are split temporally but are linked by certain
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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protagonists, places, and events reiterated in multiple flashbacks and flash-forwards. Gallant superimposes the different temporalities of two subjects that are really one: an older narrating “I” and a younger narrated self. Simple retrospection is replaced by a spatial separation of moments in historical or existential time. In these stories, Gallant’s Montreal becomes a laboratory of global upheavals and societal mutations. In spite of its fragmented, episodic structure, the cycle is rooted in a realist tradition at the heart of much cultural production in Canada, a society fascinated by history and social observation and long renowned for the documentary aspects of its film, poetry, life writing, and historical or historiographic fiction. Consolidated by the autobiographical pact and a pretension of objectivity, the social, historical, and geographical details give the illusion of representing an identifiable, verifiable world – an illusion that lies at the heart of the realist aesthetic. Gallant focuses on the demarcation line – both ethno-cultural and economic – that split Montreal in two, thus reconfiguring the English/French rift that Hugh MacLennan had earlier identified in his novel Two Solitudes (1945). Yet she also depicts the English/ French and prosperous/poor divide as giving way to an unprecedented intermixing of ethnicities, languages, traditions, and values. As a young woman, Linnet is hired by a wartime agency, where the handicap of her gender is balanced by the scarcity of men, and she possesses the trump card of an Anglo-Saxon surname. Her colleagues resist social change, which “might mean improving people with funny names, letting them get uppity” (Gallant 1995, 247). Diverse linguistic, religious, and cultural communities collide in “Varieties of Exile,” in which Linnet retrospectively describes the flood of wartime refugees, whom her younger, idealistic self saw as “prophets of a new social order that was to consist of justice, equality, art, personal relations, courage, generosity” (261). Young Linnet loses interest in the foreigners when they lose their exoticism, and the shift is conveyed through a homely food trope: “A refugee eating cornflakes was of no further interest” (281). Gallant, who knew such expatriate modernists in Paris as Samuel Beckett, subscribes to their strategies of rupture, multiplicity, and flux, which trouble causality, point of view, voice, and time.
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Her polyphonic novella “The Pegnitz Junction” (1973) slides into a magic-realist mode in which the protagonist, Christine, functions like a radio receiver capturing the inner voices or thought waves of fellow passengers, anticipating Salman Rushdie’s telepathic Saleem in Midnight’s Children (1981). The voices and strands of intertext (allusions to Franz Kafka, notably) interweave in serialized segments in an uncanny blurring of the “real,” the imaginary, and the fictional. The descriptions of myriad characters jostling together are remarkably precise, and the intersection of ventriloquized subjectivities has been widely admired. Gallant’s multiple shifts in time and viewpoint have influenced writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, who admits to being deeply indebted to her work. The modernist movement, which arrived later in Canada than elsewhere and evolved almost imperceptibly into the postmodern, influenced writers who excelled in representing a recognizable world – among them Gallant and Mordecai Richler. Modernism, preoccupied with time and subjectivity, collided with realism. The Paris that Gallant settled in had long been the hub of a cultural parturition deriving from the epistemological and ontological crises that ushered in modernity. A remarkable relationship between the visual arts and literature had generated a revolution in practices of both production and reception, arguably triggered by the cubist rupture with traditional figuration and spatial perspective. Gallant’s earliest stories, such as “Jorinda and Jorindel” and “Up North,” written in the 1940s, are strongly suffused with deliberate blurring and confusion of dream and reality, myth and memory, experience and fantasy. Her later stories align themselves closely with the visual techniques of weighting carried out by modernist artists, whose departures from familiar realistic depictions often resulted in a reshaping perceived as deformation. Such skills of distortion are prerequisites for both visual and verbal caricature, and, unsurprisingly, Gallant is a remarkable ironist and satirist. Her play What Is To Be Done? (1983) castigates the dogmatism of both right and left, portraying the “Second Front” that harbored both Nazi sympathizers and idealistic Socialists during World War II. The dialogues illustrate Gallant’s trademark multivocality, in which an individual utterance houses and refracts the
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collective voices of diverse class and interest groups. Adept at genre blurring, Gallant shifts gears from narrative to non-narrative modes in her fiction, veering into thought-provoking essayistic passages. Indeed, her gift for metaphor, for making abstract ideas palpable, is discernible in her non-fiction, too. A remarkable essayist and discourse analyst, Gallant has tirelessly fought prejudice and sloppy thinking. She deconstructs manipulative rhetoric and discloses the veiled ideological biases embedded in apparently innocent structures such as binary juxtapositions. Her highly rhythmic structures mount and fall in controlled cadences in which lists end with a clinching simile, the concrete detail that deflates. Describing the wife of Nabokov’s “hapless, hopeless” hero of Transparent Things, she writes, “Armande is stupid, conceited, cold-hearted, and she snores like a bulldog” (1986, 201). She similarly satirizes British expatriates in postwar Spain in “By the Sea,” through a list whose juxtaposed items trivialize the grand through its contiguity with the trivial, thereby disclosing the shallowness of the character: “Mrs. Parsters . . . was attached to this English beachhead; here she had survived a husband, two dogs, and a war” (1996a, 179). In the 1950s, Gallant lived for months at a time in Spain, the south of France near Italy, and Germany, seeking the roots of fascism and determined to discover what made ordinary people’s behavior display a collective madness. The subsequent German stories were collected in The Pegnitz Junction. Spain was the setting for the semiautobiographical story “Senor Pinedo” and its portrait of a tranquil fascist functionary, and Gallant addresses the climate that supported Mussolini in “The Moslem Wife.” “The Four Seasons” also depicts a community of English expatriates in northern Italy during the unfurling of fascism and World War II, focusing on the Unwins and a young Italian girl they employ but conveniently forget to remunerate. The story is replete with structural, dramatic, and cosmic ironies, investigating unbalanced power relations and targeting a diasporic community sensitive only to its own interests and blindly bent on perceiving Mussolini as a peacemaker. The reader’s attention is directed to Carmela, the little Italian servant, as an exemplifying symbol of subservience. Gallant’s figuring performs several integrated and interacting func-
tions. The narrating voice states, “As for the Unwins, they were as used to Carmela as to the carpet” (Gallant 2006, 55). The equivalence of Carmela and carpet is buttressed through the sonorous link of full alliteration, which superimposes a pseudo-identity on highly disparate objects. These relations are culture-specific and time-locked, and paradoxically also cross-cultural and timeless: what Carmela is to the Unwins becomes what the Italians are to the English, or what the Jews are to the German Nazis, but also what the traditional rural community is to the middle class and the female to the male. By representing the cross-pollinations and complex cultural interconnections of modernity in mutation, Gallant’s work exemplifies how modernist and postmodern writing has participated in the politics of moving minds. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); Laurence, Margaret (WF); MacLennan, Hugh (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Munro, Alice (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF); Rushdie, Salman (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Besner, N. (1988). The Light of Imagination: Mavis Gallant’s Fiction. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Canadian Fiction Magazine (1978). Mavis Gallant [special issue], 28. C^ ote, N. & Sabor, P. (eds.) (2002). Varieties of Exile: New Essays on Mavis Gallant. New York: Peter Lang. Dvorak, M. (in press). Image and Page: Mavis Gallant’s (Post)Modernist Transmutations. In P. R. Gilbert & M. Santoro (eds.), Transatlantic Passages: Literary and Cultural Relations between Quebec and Francophone Europe. Essays on Canadian Writing (1990). Special Gallant Issue [special issue], 42. Gallant, M. (1956). The Other Paris. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Gallant, M. (1959). Green Water, Green Sky. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Gallant, M. (1964). My Heart is Broken: Eight Stories and a Short Novel. New York: Random House. Gallant, M. (1970). A Fairly Good Time. New York: Random House. Gallant, M. (1973). The Pegnitz Junction: A Novella and Five Short Stories. New York: Random House.
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GEE, MAURICE
Gallant, M. (1974). The End of the World and Other Stories. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Gallant, M. (1979). From the Fifteenth District: A Novella and Eight Short Stories. Toronto: Macmillan. Gallant, M. (1981). Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories. Toronto: Macmillan. Gallant, M. (1983). What Is To Be Done? Dunvegan, ON: Quadrant. Gallant, M. (1985). Overhead in a Balloon: Stories of Paris. Toronto: Macmillan. Gallant, M. (1986). Paris Notebooks: Essays and Reviews. Toronto: Macmillan. Gallant, M. (1988). In Transit. Markham, ON: Viking Penguin. Gallant, M. (1993). Across the Bridge. New York: Random House. Gallant, M. (1994). The Moslem Wife and Other Stories (ed. M. Richler). Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Gallant, M. (1996a). The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant. New York: Random House. Gallant, M. (1996b). The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant. London: Bloomsbury. Gallant, M. (2002). Paris Stories (ed. M. Ondaatje). New York: NYRB. Gallant, M. (2004a). Montreal Stories (ed. R. Banks). Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Gallant, M. (2004b). Varieties of Exile. New York: NYRB. Gallant, M. (2009a). The Cost of Living (ed. J. Lahiri). New York: NYRB. Gallant, M. (2009b). Going Ashore (ed. A. Manguel). Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Keefer, J. K. (1989). Reading Mavis Gallant. Toronto: Oxford University Press.
Gee, Maurice LAWRENCE JONES
In a prolific career of over 50 years, Maurice Gee has shown a consistent process of growth and development within and modification of an established tradition, the critical realism of such predecessors as Frank Sargeson. His fiction presents a full and insightful picture of New Zealand social life and individual New Zealanders since 1900, an often dark and violent picture, but viewed in all its historical, social, psychological, and ethical complexity from an inclusive humanist perspective, with a developing command of narrative technique equal to the vision. Gee was born in Whakatane, New Zealand on August 22, 1931 but spent most of his youth in
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Henderson, west of Auckland. He came from a writing family: his mother, Lyndahl, wrote fiction and children’s books, and her father, James Chapple, the radical clergyman who became the model for George Plumb in Gee’s best-known novel, Plumb (1978), published several books. After graduating from the University of Auckland in 1953, Gee began submitting short stories to literary periodicals and achieved publication by 1955. Over the next 10 years he served his literary apprenticeship while working as a teacher and in various casual jobs. In 1955–61 he published 11 short stories, only five of which he has collected. The anthologizing in England and New Zealand of the most successful of them, “The Losers” (1959), led to the publication of his first two novels in 1962 and 1965. In this early fiction he worked within the tradition of Sargeson and the “provincial” writers, focusing on the constricting effects of New Zealand’s secularized puritanism – both the rugby–beer–small-business male culture he depicted in The Big Season (1962) and the respectable middle-class puritan family he depicted in A Special Flower (1965). Dissatisfied both with his first novels and with aspects of his personal and professional life, Gee decided to train as a librarian and turn from the novel back to the short story until he was established. In the seven stories he published between 1966 and 1975 he developed considerably both in vision and narrative method. In such stories as “A Retired Life” (1969) and “The Hole in the Window” (1971), he focused on individual growth or the failure to grow in middle-aged or older protagonists attempting to face and deal with both their puritan past and their present place (or lack of place) in an increasingly post-puritan society. In doing so, he moved beyond his negative critique of puritanism to imply a humanist-existentialist ethic of self-knowledge and self-responsibility; at the same time, he developed a retrospective third-person point of view restricted to the consciousness of the protagonist to present that vision. In the two novels from this time, In My Father’s Den (1972) and Games of Choice (1976), Gee further developed and varied this vision and method. By 1976, when he gave up library work to become a full-time writer, Gee collected his best short stories in A Glorious Morning, Comrade and turned to an ambitious project he had postponed
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until he felt ready for it – a trilogy based on the experiences of three generations of his own extended family. In the first novel, Plumb, his developing ethical and social vision and his narrative technique came together with this rich subject matter to form the finest New Zealand realist novel to that time. To tell the story of Plumb’s heroic and sometimes misguided search for truth through a long life in a changing society, Gee developed a complex narrative method using a retrospective first-person point of view and a double time line: Plumb, an old man in the narrative present, looks back on his life and writes about it while interspersing into his narrative his account of what was happening in the developing present. This method results in three levels of awareness: that of Plumb the character in the past, that of Plumb the narrator developing in the present, and that of the implied author, a sympathetic yet critical understanding of Plumb’s life implicit in the whole. A fully rounded portrait of Plumb emerges – seen in his socio-historical context as an idealist with the courage to stand up for his beliefs and the honesty to modify them from experience, but also with a tragic blindness to their effect on his family. In Meg (1981), Gee used a slightly modified version of that method to have Plumb’s daughter Meg tell her story, achieving a different but equal success in presenting a developing, fully rounded character in her family context. In Sole Survivor (1983) he attempted – not with complete success – to modify the method by having Meg’s son Raymond Sole tell from his journalist’s perspective his own story and also, interwoven with it, the rise and fall of his cousin Duggie Plumb, a ruthlessly ambitious politician. When he was writing the Plumb trilogy (1976–83), Gee could remain a full-time writer only by supplementing his income through fiction for younger readers and scripts for television and film. In 1979–80 he published two brief stand-alone fantasies for younger readers and in 1982–5 his “O” trilogy of alternative-world fictions for young adults. He also wrote dialogue for television serials and then complete scripts for a police drama series and the film that was a spinoff from the series. In the years since Gee has continued along the same lines. Between 1986 and 1991 he published five realist thrillers for young adults (the first two also television serials), each taking place in a time
of social crisis – World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the 1951 Waterfront confrontation, the moral panics of the mid-1950s – while in 2007–8 he published the first two volumes of another alternative-world series for young adults, the “Salt” trilogy. Between 1986 and 1998 he published three first-person retrospective adult novels on the pattern of the Plumb novels: Prowlers (1987), a rich account of a scientist’s life; Going West (1992), modified from the model of Sole Survivor, with an archivist telling of his own life and of that of his best friend, a poet; and Live Bodies (1998), a Jewish immigrant’s account of his life in New Zealand since 1939. Complementing these full-life historical narratives, Gee developed a multifocus narrative model using a shifting third-person point of view to present three cross-sections of contemporary New Zealand life: The Burning Boy (1990), showing three differing but interrelated groups of people in Nelson undergoing sometimes violent experiences; Crime Story (1994), focusing on the effects of a violent crime on two diverse families in Wellington; and Loving Ways (1996), about the explosive reunion of a deeply divided family in Golden Bay. Since 2000, Gee has used variations and combinations of these two primary narrative models. In Ellie and the Shadow Man (2001) he alternated omniscient and restricted third-person points of view to tell of the 50-year development of a woman painter, while in The Scornful Moon (2003) he told the story of a complex set of scandals in Wellington in 1935 through an articulate but naively moralistic first-person narrator who fails to see what is happening until it blows up in his face. In Blindsight (2005) a woman scientist tells of her and her brother’s lives in an intentionally misleading way, hiding from the reader and herself until the end her crucial acts that had determined those lives. Since the publication of Plumb, Maurice Gee has received every award, prize, and honor that his country can bestow on a writer of fiction, an appropriate response to a body of work unmatched in New Zealand literature for the depth, breadth, and craftsmanship of its portraiture. SEE ALSO: Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); New Zealand Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF)
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GHOSE, ZULFIKAR
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Boyd, B. (1980–1). Maurice Gee: Ironies of Growth and Judgement. Islands 8, 268–81; 9, 136–60. Boyd, B. (1992). Maurice Gee [interview]. In E. Alley & M. Williams (eds.), In the Same Room: Conversations with New Zealand Writers. Auckland: Auckland University Press, pp. 159–74. Fox, A. (2008). The Ship of Dreams: Masculinity in Contemporary New Zealand Fiction. Dunedin: Otago University Press. Gee, M. (1962). The Big Season. London: Hutchinson. Gee, M. (1965). A Special Flower. London: Hutchinson. Gee, M. (1972). In My Father’s Den. London: Faber and Faber. Gee, M. (1976). Games of Choice. London: Faber and Faber. Gee, M. (1978). Plumb. London: Faber and Faber. Gee, M. (1981). Meg. London: Faber and Faber. Gee, M. (1982). The Halfmen of O. Auckland: Oxford University Press. Gee, M. (1983). Sole Survivor. London: Faber and Faber. Gee, M. (1986a). Collected Stories. Auckland: Penguin. Gee, M. (1986b). The Fire-Raiser. Auckland: Puffin/ Oxford University Press. Gee, M. (1987). Prowlers. London: Faber and Faber. Gee, M. (1990). The Burning Boy. Auckland: Viking. Gee, M. (1992). Going West. London: Faber and Faber. Gee, M. (1994). Crime Story. Auckland: Viking. Gee, M. (1996). Loving Ways. Auckland: Penguin. Gee, M. (1998). Live Bodies. Auckland: Penguin. Gee, M. (2001). Ellie and the Shadow Man. Auckland: Penguin. Gee, M. (2003). The Scornful Moon. Auckland: Penguin. Gee, M. (2005). Blindsight: A Novel. Auckland: Penguin. Gee, M. (2007). Salt. Auckland: Puffin. Jones, L. (1990). Barbed Wire and Mirrors: Essays on New Zealand Prose, 2nd edn. Dunedin: Otago University Press. Manhire, B. (1986). Maurice Gee. Auckland: Oxford University Press. Williams, M. (1990). Leaving the Highway: Six Contemporary New Zealand Novelists. Auckland: Auckland University Press.
Ghose, Zulfikar CHELVA KANAGANAYAKAM
In his critical work The Art of Creating Fiction (1991a), Zulfikar Ghose asserts that “Post-imperialist guilt is responsible for a lot of bad art that former imperialists dare not criticize” (154–5). Always skeptical about writing that is explicitly
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tendentious, Ghose, in his fiction, poetry, and criticism, has insistently demonstrated the need for readers to focus on language and form rather than message. In keeping with his dislike for flaunting a “postcolonial” identity, much of Ghose’s fiction does not locate itself in the Indian subcontinent where he was born and raised, or in Texas where he has lived for more than three decades. He remains, however, an intriguing and significant writer, as important for postcolonial studies as he is for contemporary literature. While it is possible to argue that Ghose has always been preoccupied with issues of identity, belonging, and migrancy, it is also true that Ghose struggles equally with language and form. Born on March 13, 1935 in Bombay in undivided India, Ghose grew up in Sialkot and in Bombay. His semiautobiographical work Confessions of a Native-Alien (1965) provides a valuable sense of what it meant to grow up in colonial India. After the partition of India in 1947, his family moved to Pakistan, and Ghose then left for England in 1952 to pursue further education. After studying at Sloane School in Chelsea, he took a degree in English and philosophy at the University of Keele. He began his writing career in 1964 with a collection of short stories (together with the well-known writer B. S. Johnson) titled Statement against Corpses (1964b), which was followed by a number of volumes of poetry and fiction. In addition to being very much a part of the literary scene in London, he worked as a correspondent for The Observer. In 1969 Ghose left for the United States to join the University of Texas at Austin as a professor of English, and since then he has lived in Austin with his wife, the Brazilian artist Helena de la Fontaine. Ghose’s first novel, The Contradictions (1966), is set in colonial India. His second, The Murder of Aziz Khan (1967b), is set in Pakistan and is written very much in the tradition of the realist novel. His most recent work, The Triple Mirror of the Self (1992), is partly set in India. While the formal structure of his recent novel is closer to magic realism, in terms of subject matter, these three novels, written over a period of almost 25 years, are concerned explicitly with postcolonial South Asia and depict individuals who are marginalized by class or religion. The novels he wrote in between, including his trilogy The Incredible Brazilian (1972a, 1975b, 1978b) and his best-known
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novels, A New History of Torments (1982) and Don Bueno (1983), reveal what would become his characteristic mode of locating his work in South America and adopting a fluid and experimental form. At his best, Ghose writes in a manner that offers the illusion of a realist narrative, but this realism is often no more than a ploy intended to draw the reader into the fictive world. Many of his novels are quest narratives that focus on individuals driven by some inner impulse to undertake a journey. The journey then becomes a framing device to explore, in mythical terms, the nature of displacement, and the struggle for identity. In Ghose’s work we also recognize a desire to create a language and structure capable of sustaining the complex and obsessive search for a satisfying conception of reality. The pervasive self-reflexivity of his writing is a result of this ongoing struggle with the form itself. A story such as “The Marble Dome” in his recent collection Veronica and the Gongora Passion (1998) is a clear example of the need to foreground a preoccupation with aesthetics while always being conscious of social and political context. Ghose’s poetry is crucial to understanding his concern with language, and his criticism, particularly The Fiction of Reality (1984a), remains the best guide to his fiction. Whether discussing Shakespeare or more recent figures such as D. H. Lawrence, he reiterates the need to move beyond biography and history to focus on aesthetics and literary tradition. In the process of distancing himself from popular postcolonial concerns, he has created a corpus that must be counted among the best in postcolonial literature. SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Johnson, B. S. (BIF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Pakistani Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Brouillette, S. (2007). Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ghose, Z. (1964a). The Loss of India. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Ghose, Z. (with Johnson, B. S.) (1964b). Statement against Corpses. London: Constable.
Ghose, Z. (1965). Confessions of a Native-Alien. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Ghose, Z. (1966). The Contradictions. London: Macmillan. Ghose, Z. (1967a). Jet from Orange. London: Macmillan. Ghose, Z. (1967b). The Murder of Aziz Khan. London: Macmillan. Ghose, Z. (1972a). The Incredible Brazilian: The Native. London: Macmillan. Ghose, Z. (1972b). The Violent West. London: Macmillan. Ghose, Z. (1975a). Crump’s Terms. London: Macmillan. Ghose, Z. (1975b). The Incredible Brazilian: The Beautiful Empire. London: Macmillan. Ghose, Z. (1978a). Hamlet, Prufrock and Language. London: Macmillan. Ghose, Z. (1978b). The Incredible Brazilian: A Different World. London: Macmillan. Ghose, Z. (1981). Hulme’s Investigations into the Bogart Script. Austin, TX: Curbstone. Ghose, Z. (1982). A New History of Torments. London: Hutchinson. Ghose, Z. (1983). Don Bueno. London: Hutchinson. Ghose, Z. (1984a). The Fiction of Reality. London: Macmillan. Ghose, Z. (1984b). A Memory of Asia. Austin, TX: Curbstone. Ghose, Z. (1986). Figures of Enchantment. London: Hutchinson. Ghose, Z. (1991a). The Art of Creating Fiction. London: Macmillan. Ghose, Z. (1991b). Selected Poems. Karachi: Oxford University Press. Ghose, Z. (1992). The Triple Mirror of the Self. London: Bloomsbury. Ghose, Z. (1993). Shakespeare’s Mortal Knowledge. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Ghose, Z. (1998). Veronica and the Gongora Passion. Toronto: TSAR. Kanaganayakam, C. (1993). Structures of Negation: The Writings of Zulfikar Ghose. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Ghosh, Amitav SHAO-PIN LUO
Amitav Ghosh occupies a unique place in international literature: his work spans continents and historical times as well as genres – fiction, travel writing, and journalism. What Ghosh accomplishes most significantly, whether in his fiction
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GHOSH, AMITAV
or non-fiction, are the twin tasks of “provincializing Europe” (Chakrabarty 3) and “imagining pluralized Asias” (Spivak 2). Ghosh’s work shifts the focus on Europe, or even Europe and its others, to the equal, parallel, and other narratives of human connections, such as those between India and Egypt and Mauritius, and between India and Burma, Malaya, and China. In examining the travel, trade, and coexistence among different peoples and the interconnectedness of different traditions in historical, “nonEuropean life-worlds” (Chakrabarty 20) before and after the advent of colonialism and imperialism, Ghosh demonstrates an interest in the complex entanglements of peoples, cultures, and histories rather than the construction of a monolingual, monolithic account of world history. Ghosh was born on July 11, 1956, in Calcutta, India, although his family came from Dhaka, in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. He studied in New Delhi before pursuing a doctorate in social anthropology at Oxford. He has taught and held visiting professorships at various universities in India and in the United States. A versatile writer, Ghosh has written on the book collections of his grandfather, the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali, the films of Satyajit Ray, the writing of Rabindranath Tagore, and on such wide-ranging contemporary political and cultural issues as the diaspora in Indian culture, the ethnography of international peacekeeping, and the “fundamentalist challenge.” His non-fiction writing, which is collected in four books – Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma (1998), Countdown (1999), The Imam and the Indian: Prose Pieces (2002), and Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times (2005) – bears an intricate intertextual relationship to his fiction. Some of his earlier articles, mostly published in ethnological and sociological journals and on topics ranging from the relations of envy in an Egyptian village to an Egyptian in Baghdad, provided the gestation for his work In an Antique Land (1992). The writing of his novel The Shadow Lines (1988) was partly triggered by the riots in Delhi in 1984, described in “The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi,” an essay first published in the New Yorker; other essays from the New Yorker such as “Burma” and “India’s Untold War of Independence” form the historical basis of parts of The Glass Palace (2000).
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Ghosh’s work has garnered acclaim around the world and won many awards, including the Prix Medicis etranger for The Circle of Reason (1986), the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Purashkar for The Shadow Lines, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction for The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), the Grand Prize for Fiction for The Glass Palace at the Frankfurt eBook Awards, and the Hutch Crossword Book Award for The Hungry Tide (2004). Sea of Poppies (2008c) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. However, in 2001, Ghosh, already a Eurasia regional winner, declined the nomination of The Glass Palace for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, noting in his letter to the Commonwealth Foundation that the term “Commonwealth literature” could only be a “misnomer, so long as it excludes the many languages that sustain the cultural and literary lives” of member countries (Ghosh 2008b). Ghosh has been associated with the Subaltern Studies Group, and his is an ethical, humane, and compassionate voice for the marginal and the marginalized, the displaced and dispossessed. Ghosh’s novels range from the picaresque, magic-realist The Circle of Reason, to the mystical science fiction The Calcutta Chromosome, to the poetic and heart-wrenching portrayal in The Hungry Tide of the Sundarbans, the immense archipelago of tiny islands in the Bay of Bengal. The Circle of Reason, in three parts, follows the adventures of one Alu, an orphan cum master weaver with a potato-shaped head, first to the village in East Bengal of his uncle, Balaram Bose, who is obsessed with, among other things, Louis Pasteur and the theories of purity and contamination; then to the Gulf emirate al-Ghazira and its diasporic group of transient laborers; and finally to an expatriate Indian community in El Qued on the northeastern edge of the Algerian Sahara. Even in this first novel, Ghosh was concerned with some of the major themes that were to develop in his later novels: the power of language and storytelling, the plight and fate of migrant workers, and the changing rituals and customs of diasporic communities. In The Calcutta Chromosome, against the story of Ronald Ross’s discovery of the malaria parasite, Ghosh tells a fantastic counter-science story of “fevers and delirium” surrounding an enigmatic subaltern figure Mangala, who, according to one of the characters, “had
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systematically interfered with Ronald Ross’s experiments to push malaria research in certain directions while leading it away from others” (1995, 36). The novel explores the relationship between knowledge and transformation and between the discourses of science and the mystical or the supernatural, and, most crucially, according to Claire Chambers, “allows Ghosh to make the important point that science, technology, and medicine were not conveyed to India by the British in a one-way process of transfer, but were in fact involved in a complex series of crosscultural exchanges, translations, and mutations” (58). The Hungry Tide follows the twin journeys in the Sundarbans of a marine biologist Piyali Roy in search of the Gangetic dolphin and a translator Kanai Dutt to inherit his uncle Nirmal’s memoirs. Through their encounters with a fisherman, Fokir, and the local community, they both learn about the mysteries not only of the delicate ecological balance of the region but also of the precarious and vulnerable lives of the displaced refugees and inhabitants of the islands. The Circle of Reason, The Calcutta Chromosome, and The Hungry Tide, though diverse in spatial and temporal framework, all explore Ghosh’s interest in reason and science, faith and folklore, as well as methods of knowledge and ways of knowing. A central metaphor in The Circle of Reason is weaving, which not only conveys the richly layered, criss-crossing way of storytelling that has become a signature of Ghosh’s writing, but also figures the cloth trade as an important symbol of interconnections between countries, continents, and cultures. The loom, he writes, “has never permitted the division of the world” because “All through those centuries cloth, in its richness and variety, bound the Mediterranean to Asia, India to Africa, the Arab world to Europe, in equal, bountiful trade” (1986, 56). This central theme is exemplified by The Shadow Lines and In an Antique Land. The Shadow Lines is a historical novel about the relations between an English and an Indian family across time and space. In this partition novel, about the division of India, albeit “an imagined sundering of links” (Wachtel 167), Ghosh explores the constructedness and arbitrariness of borders and boundaries while describing the violence and trauma caused by lines of division. The geographical lines that intersect Calcutta, Dhaka, and London inter-
weave in the novel with the intricate narrative lines that move backward and forward both temporally and spatially. Ghosh emphasizes the role of memory and imagination in the invention of stories and search for truth and history, finally demonstrating a belief in a syncretistic civilization in which distinct cultures and societies coexist in a world of exchange, accommodation, and compromise. This mixed civilization is superbly reflected in the cosmopolitan world of medieval trade illuminated in Ghosh’s ethnographical work In an Antique Land. Searching through the archives of the famous but dispersed Geniza of old Cairo for the almost forgotten story of a slave, Bomma, Ghosh charts the trade routes and cross-cultural networks between the ancient lands of Egypt and India, all the while commenting on the parallel contemporary realities of migratory labor in the Gulf. In his more recent works The Glass Palace and Sea of Poppies, Ghosh explores individual and familial predicaments against broad, sweeping historical events. The Glass Palace offers a panoramic view of twentieth-century South and Southeast Asia, mapping the ports and waterways that connect the cultures and colonial histories of Burma, Malaya, and India, through its portrayal of the intertwining political fates and commercial fortunes of four generations of two extended families. Sea of Poppies, the first of a projected trilogy, is a grand nautical narrative set against the backdrop of Britain’s Opium Wars with China in the nineteenth century. By tracking the trajectory of the Ibis, a former slave ship that is to be part of a fleet of opium transports, though first bound for the Mauritius islands with its cargo of convicts and indentured laborers, Ghosh portrays a diverse group of characters of different castes, class, and cultures whose destiny is closely entwined with that of the Empire. The novel displays Ghosh’s ability to juggle myriad interconnected stories of disguises and transformations as well as his linguistic dexterity – pidgin, Creole, and seafaring lingo abound in the novel, collected in “The Ibis Chrestomathy” (Ghosh 2008a). In remarkable detail, Ghosh’s writings about cloth and oil in The Circle of Reason, spices and sugar in In an Antique Land, timber and rubber in The Glass Palace, and now opium in Sea of Poppies, as well as his stories of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, of Mandalay and Manga-
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GIBSON, WILLIAM
lore, of the Ganges and the Irrawaddy, reflect not only “the intertwined and interdependent, and above all overlapping streams of historical experience” (Said 312) among peoples and places, but also the effects of migration and colonialism on all levels of society – princes and paupers, laborers and merchants, soldiers and artists, nationalists and idealists, servants and orphans. These texts explore most significantly the lived experiences of ordinary people who heroically adapt and improvise, struggle and survive, refuse to yield to the “nightmare of someone else’s imagining” (Ghosh 2000, 469), and form bonds of love, kinship, and friendship across borders and boundaries. In bringing forward a plurality of voices, languages, and narratives as well as a profusion of cultures, traditions, and geographies to demonstrate the many diverse ways people around the world communicate with and understand one another, Ghosh challenges the very Eurocentric systems of thought that have long dominated all other forms of knowledge and languages. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Realism/ Magic Realism (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS: Amitav Ghosh website: www.amitavghosh.com Bhatt, I., & Nityanandam, I. (eds.) (2001). The Fiction of Amitav Ghosh. New Delhi: Creative. Bose, B. (ed.) (2003). Amitav Ghosh: Critical Perspectives. New Delhi: Pencraft International. Chakrabarty, D. (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chambers, C. (2003). Postcolonial Science Fiction: Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 38(1), 57–72. Dhawan, R. K. (ed.) (1999). The Novels of Amitav Ghosh. New Delhi: Prestige. Ghosh, A. (1986). The Circle of Reason. London: Hamish Hamilton; New Delhi: Ravi Dayal. Ghosh, A. (1988). The Shadow Lines. London: Bloomsbury; New Delhi: Ravi Dayal. Ghosh, A. (1992). In an Antique Land. London: Granta; New Delhi: Ravi Dayal.
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Ghosh, A. (1995). The Calcutta Chromosome. London: Picador; New Delhi: Ravi Dayal. Ghosh, A. (1998). Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma. New Delhi: Ravi Dayal. Ghosh, A. (1999). Countdown. New Delhi: Ravi Dayal. Ghosh, A. (2000). The Glass Palace. London: HarperCollins; New Delhi: Ravi Dayal. Ghosh, A. (2002). The Imam and the Indian: Prose Pieces. New Delhi: Ravi Dayal/Permanent Black. Ghosh, A. (2004). The Hungry Tide. London: HarperCollins; New Delhi: Ravi Dayal. Ghosh, A. (2005). Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Ghosh, A. (2008a). The Ibis Chrestomathy. At www. amitavghosh.com/latest/ibis_chrestomathy.pdf, accessed Feb. 28, 2009. Ghosh, A. (2008b). Letter to the Commonwealth Foundation. At http://iaclals.8m.com/nl/01jul/ 01jul08.htm, accessed Dec. 10, 2008. Ghosh, A. (2008c). Sea of Poppies. London: John Murray; New Delhi: Penguin. Hawley, J. (2005). Amitav Ghosh: An Introduction. New Delhi: Foundation. Khair, T. (ed.) (2003). Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Companion. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Mondal, A. (2007). Amitav Ghosh. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Said, E. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf. Spivak, G. (2008). Other Asias. Oxford: Blackwell. Tiwari, S. (2003). Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Study. New Delhi: Atlantic. Wachtel, E. (1996). Amitav Ghosh. In More Writers and Company: New Conversations with CBC Radio’s Eleanor Wachtel. Toronto: Knopf, pp. 163–76.
Gibson, William BRECKEN ROSE HANCOCK
Since the publication of his first novel, Neuromancer (1984), William Gibson has been called a noir prophet, a computer prophet, a visionary, and the poet of cyberspace. Winning the Nebula, the Hugo, and the Philip K. Dick awards, Neuromancer established Gibson as a major writer of science fiction, but the novel’s larger influence on mainstream perceptions of technology also secured his position among the major fiction writers of the late twentieth century. Tightly written and eerily predictive of the ubiquitous rise of Web 2.0 culture, this debut novel remains his most groundbreaking and influential work.
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Born on March 17, 1948 in South Carolina, Gibson moved to Toronto at age 19, after being rejected from the Vietnam draft for declaring a penchant for mind-altering drugs. There he met his wife and the couple eventually moved to Vancouver, where he began writing after earning an English degree at the University of British Columbia in 1977. Although he retains dual citizenship, Gibson still lives in Vancouver and maintains that he has no intention of living in the United States again. His novels, however, continue to flirt with American identity as they predominantly feature American characters and incorporate American settings such as San Francisco and Oakland. While Gibson’s locations range from global to galactic, Canada has been left out until his most recent novel, Spook Country (2007), which ends in Vancouver. As a founding text of the cyberpunk genre, Neuromancer exposes readers to the potential exploitation of technology by society’s undesirables. In Gibson’s depiction of a computer-savvy underground, low-life coopts high tech and, beneath a facade of legitimate commerce, his cybercowboys, fences, and muscles-for-hire hustle for hardware, pharmaceuticals, data exchange, and body modifications. Manipulated by a self-aware artificial intelligence, his characters negotiate an international urban wasteland, shuttling between the landscape of poverty – scuzzy bars and capsule hotels – and the landscape of cushy (always corrupt) corporate employment – Italian-labeled clothing and high-rise Hiltons. With its panoply of technological wares, Neuromancer pushes toward a compact but kaleidoscopic aesthetic, using the fast-paced shorthand of film noir to convey technology’s power to remake society. Following Neuromancer, Gibson’s two other “Sprawl” novels, Count Zero (1986b) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), continue to unpack a world gripped by technological fervor. Gibson’s characters either bypass their monotonous dystopias by using “simstim” (a virtual reality version of reality TV) to access celebrity lives, or they buy into a complicated web of crime fed by an underground economy starving for cutting-edge novelty. Gibson’s near-future cityscapes are claustrophobic places where even the natural world must filter through technological metaphor: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” (1984, 3). Buzzing static – the
clash of invisible data transfer – whirrs in the background of Gibson’s worlds, coloring his cities a noisy, relentless gray. Despite the similarities between his work and that of Aldous Huxley, William S. Burroughs, and Philip K. Dick, Gibson distinguishes himself from his forerunners via an implicit “boredom with the Apocalypse” (Sterling 4). While his novels often highlight a certain desperate anomie among city dwellers, his work nonetheless features both the highs and lows of urbanity. His sentences, loaded with lyrical description, communicate the filth of the ubercity’s underbelly in exquisite detail. In Gibson’s texts, technology has not ruined humanity; he moralizes neither the rise of artificial intelligence nor the desire for body augmentation. Instead, both meat and machine negotiate uncertain terms of meaning and survival. Gibson perhaps most directly but unintentionally engages such tensions with Agrippa (1992), his autobiographical prose poem, which according to “urban legend” was published on a self-destructing disk, but which actually exists as a “ghost” text, appearing on Gibson’s official website and also floating online in pirated and mutated forms (Jirgens 1999). Gibson’s trademark structure moves disparate characters toward a common location where their interrelated subplots climax. His work is also recognized by its invented street jargon and technospeak, lingo so au courant that readers assume they have either heard it before or intuited it themselves. Gibson’s language radar has anticipated both small evolutions in dialect (he was the first writer to use “Google” as a verb) and gaping holes in technological terminology – evidenced by the rapid adoption of his coinage “cyberspace” into the popular lexicon after his story “Burning Chrome” appeared in Omni magazine in 1982. Both his use of language and his intuition for the trajectory of technology have allowed his writing to transcend the boundaries of genre. Specifically, his most recent books, Pattern Recognition (2003) and Spook Country, are mainstream bestsellers that move away from the traditional trappings of science fiction to take place in an alternative present. Still reeling from 9/11, this latest Gibson world is very much like our own, and while Gibson continues to invent technology and gadgets, he also references an array of relevant consumer products. He participates in the cyberspace
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he once predicted by doing his research online: “Googl[ing] the world of the novel” (Wired 2007) and simultaneously writing that world into being. SEE ALSO: Burroughs, William (AF); Canadian Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Dick, Philip K. (AF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Huxley, Aldous (BIF); Science Fiction (BIF); Speculative Fiction (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS: Gibson, W. (1984). Neuromancer. New York: Ace. Gibson, W. (1986a). Burning Chrome. New York: Arbor House. Gibson, W. (1986b). Count Zero. New York: Arbor House. Gibson, W. (1988). Mona Lisa Overdrive. New York: Bantam. Gibson, W. (1992). Agrippa (A Book of the Dead). At www.williamgibsonbooks.com/source/agrippa.asp, accessed Sept. 2, 2009. Gibson, W. (1993). Virtual Light. New York: Bantam. Gibson, W. (1995). Johnny Mnemonic. New York: Ace. Gibson, W. (1996). Idoru. New York: Putnam’s Sons. Gibson, W. (1999). All Tomorrow’s Parties. New York: Putnam’s Sons. Gibson, W. (2003). Pattern Recognition. New York: Putnam’s Sons. Gibson, W. (2007). Spook Country. New York: Putnam’s Sons. Gibson, W., & Sterling, B. (1991). The Difference Engine. New York: Bantam. Jirgens, K. E. (1999). An Eye on Tomorrow: Interview with William Gibson. Rampike, 11(1), 7–11. Sterling, B. (1986). Preface. In Gibson (1986), pp. 1–5. Wired (2007). Q&A: William Gibson Discusses Spook Country and Interactive Fiction. At www.wired.com/ culture/culturereviews/magazine/15-08/pl_print, accessed Jan. 9, 2009. Yoke, C. B., & Robinson, C. L. (eds.) (2007). The Cultural Influences of William Gibson, the “Father” of Cyberpunk Science Fiction Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen.
Gilroy, Beryl LYNNE MACEDO
A pioneering teacher, psychotherapist, writer, and novelist, Beryl Agatha Gilroy was born in British Guiana (now Guyana) on August 30, 1924.
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Her creative writing began when she was a child but, like many Caribbean writers, it was not until she moved to London in 1951 that her work was first published. Beginning with a series of groundbreaking textbooks for children and an autobiographical account of her teaching experiences in Britain, Gilroy went on to write short stories, poetry, and seven novels, all of which are characterized by her deep compassion for the underprivileged, the weak, and the oppressed. Gilroy enjoyed a somewhat unusual childhood, growing up largely under the care of her maternal grandmother who believed that children should be given space to develop before entering formal education. As a result, she did not start full-time schooling until the age of 12; she went on to train as a teacher in Georgetown, where she was awarded a British Guiana Teacher’s Certificate with first-class honors in 1945. Arriving in England six years later, Gilroy found that racism prevented her from working as a teacher, so she took on menial jobs while completing a diploma in child development at the University of London. She eventually found a teaching post, taught in several London schools before marrying, and then spent the next 12 years educating her two children at home while continuing her own higher education. During this time she also began to write and publish a series of educational books, firmly believing that “suitable texts can heal and educate emotions” (Anim-Addo 25). In 1965 Gilroy returned to teaching and subsequently became London’s first black head-teacher in 1969. Her acute observations of the pervasive nature of racism and the desperate need for radical changes in multicultural education are graphically captured in Black Teacher (1976). Her grandmother’s influence and her fond memories of the “emerald-time of youth” (Gilroy 1991a, 25)can be clearly traced throughout much of Gilroy’s fictional writing, most obviously in Sunlight on Sweet Water (1994), a collection of short stories and reminiscences about her Caribbean childhood experiences. Her novels largely deal with the two places that shaped her own personality – London and Guyana – and issues such as the loss of traditional values, exploitation of the weak, and the diasporic experience that were all close to her heart. Yet, despite being friends with published writers such as Andrew Salkey, George Lamming, and E. R. Braithwaite,
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Gilroy struggled initially to get her own fiction accepted: it was not until 1986 that her novel Frangipani House first appeared, despite winning a Greater London Council creative writing prize in 1982. Both Frangipani House and Boy-Sandwich (1989) are set in old people’s homes, in Guyana and London respectively, and the themes of vulnerability, lack of respect for the elderly, and the breakdown of family values predominate. Like some of her later novels, Boy-Sandwich is particularly concerned with the therapeutic effect of returning to the Caribbean, with Tyrone’s grandparents regaining a sense of identity after leaving a racist Britain to spend their final days back home. In Gather the Faces (1996a) and In Praise of Love and Children (1996b), Gilroy focuses on the alienation felt by her female protagonists, Marvella Payne and Melda Hayley, as they struggle with immigrant life in London. Both novels have strong psychological subtexts that compare their protagonists’ emotionally stunted lives in London with the communal warmth and sense of belonging characteristic of rural Guyana. The posthumously published work The Green Grass Tango (2001) explores diasporic Caribbean experiences through the character of Alfred Grayson, who for fear of discrimination hides his Barbadian origins throughout his working life as a civil servant in Britain. Apart from these five novels, all of which have contemporary settings, Gilroy also published two works of historical fiction – Stedman and Joanna: A Love in Bondage (1991b) and Inkle and Yarico (1996c). In both novels, Gilroy skillfully reinterprets traditional narratives of European men who entered into relationships and fathered children by “native” Caribbean women, yet ultimately betrayed them when the opportunity to return to their “own kind” arose. By reworking these tales from an alternative perspective, Gilroy not only shifts the balance of historical misrepresentation but also clearly exposes the falsity of racial stereotypes that underpinned such imperialistic thinking and behavior. At the time of her death, she was working on another historical novel, She Wore Silk (unpublished), which also had a black female character as its central protagonist. In recognition of both her writing and her outstanding work with immigrant and disadvantaged children, Gilroy was made a fellow of the
Institute of Education. She was also awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of London in 2000, shortly before her sudden death of a heart attack on April 4, 2001. SEE ALSO: Black British Fiction (WF); Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Lamming, George (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Salkey, Andrew (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Anim-Addo, J. (ed.) (1998). Leaves in the Wind: Collected Writings of Beryl Gilroy. London: Mango. Conde, M., & Lonsdale, T. (eds.) (1999). Caribbean Women Writers: Fiction in English. London: Macmillan. Gilroy, B. (1961). Blue Water Readers. London: Longman. Gilroy, B. (1962). Blue Water Readers’ Teacher’s Guide. London: Longman. Gilroy, B. (1967). Green and Gold Readers. London: Longman. Gilroy, B. (1971). Green and Gold Readers for Guyana. London: Longman. Gilroy, B. (1976). Black Teacher. London: Bogle L’Ouverture. Gilroy, B. (1978). Yellow Bird Readers. London: Heinemann. Gilroy, B. (1980). In for a Penny. London: Cassell. Gilroy, B. (1986). Frangipani House. London: Heinemann. Gilroy, B. (1989). Boy-Sandwich. London: Heinemann. Gilroy, B. (1991a). Echoes and Voices (Open-Heart Poetry). New York: Vantage. Gilroy, B. (1991b). Stedman and Joanna: A Love in Bondage. New York: Vantage. Gilroy, B. (1994). Sunlight on Sweet Water. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Gilroy, B. (1996a). Gather the Faces. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Gilroy, B. (1996b). In Praise of Love and Children. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Gilroy, B. (1996c). Inkle and Yariko. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Gilroy, B. (2001). The Green Grass Tango. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Gilroy, B. (2002). On Creativity, Autarchy and Memory. In J. Anim-Addo (ed.), Centre of Remembrance. London: Mango, pp. 113–20. Mordecai, P., & Wilson, B.(eds.) (1989). Her True-True Name. Oxford: Heinemann.
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GOONERATNE, YASMINE
Gooneratne, Yasmine HARSHANA RAMBUKWELLA
Yasmine Gooneratne’s writing is typified by a profoundly satiric worldview conveyed in a crisp and finely crafted style that addresses local and global themes. Gooneratne’s many roles as poet, novelist, biographer, social historian, and academic generate diverse voices that engage in a critical dialogue within her creative writing. As a South Asian writer and academic, Gooneratne’s writing has sought to explore the ideological tensions of how Asia and its cultures are represented in anglophone writing, while attending to the politics and poetics of her position as an English-language writer representing a non-anglophone culture. Born in 1935 in colonial Ceylon, Gooneratne attended the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka and became a renowned teacher there before migrating to Australia in 1972 for an academic position at Macquarie University. She received a DLitt from Macquarie and became an emeritus professor in 1999. Gooneratne was conferred the Order of Australia in 1990 for her services to literature. A well-known Jane Austen scholar, she has also published studies of Alexander Pope and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, as well as a scholarly edition of Leonard Woolf’s Village in the Jungle. Gooneratne’s early creative work was in poetry and helped form a distinctly Sri Lankan anglophone literary tradition. In collections such as Word, Bird, Motif (1971) and The Lizard’s Cry (1972), she explores the ironies and contradictions of a decolonizing society. Her poems experiment with form and language, consciously drawing upon local inspiration. The localizing impulse in Gooneratne’s writing is partly reflective of the marginality felt by English writers of the time and their need to defend their literary craft, indeed their anglophone cultural identity, against the cruder expressions of nativist nationalism. As Gooneratne notes in her memoir Relative Merits (1986), her departure to Australia was influenced by the political and cultural changes taking place in Sri Lanka at the time. Gooneratne’s first published prose work, A Change of Skies (1991b), emerges directly from her experience of migration and explores the complexities of an exilic consciousness. The text
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humorously encapsulates the migrant experience in a trajectory that moves from a limiting sense of cultural alienation to a more enabling multicultural imaginary that can accommodate the many identities of its two main characters as Asians and Australians. Bharat and Navaranjini MangalaDavasinha metamorphose into Barry and Jean Mundy under the assimilationist pressures of a largely Anglo-European Australia struggling to address its visible ethno-cultural diversity. But the ending allows the couple to triumph, with Bharat empowering new immigrants by teaching them English and Navaranjini’s fusion cuisine making her an Australian culinary icon. Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Change reveals migration to be a profoundly unsettling and educative process, as Bharat and Navaranjini confront their own class and race prejudices. The Pleasures of Conquest (1995) is an allegorical satire that explores the multidimensional nature of neocolonial exploitation, depicting the unequal power relations that persist between East and West. It is set in the surreal landscape of Amnesia, recognizable as postcolonial Sri Lanka but also representing an Asia increasingly integrated into global capital flows. Connections within the international publishing industry, the dominance of the English language, and cultural exploitation are focalized through celebrity American author Stella Mallinson’s project to translate and publish little-known Amnesian authors in the West. The novel suggests, however, that such exploitation is facilitated by local collaboration. Vacuous politicians and a hospitality industry eager to cater to Orientalist fantasies become willing accomplices in a “game of profitable mutual seduction” (389). Exploitation becomes gendered through acclaimed academic Phillip Destry’s intellectually and sexually exploitative relationship with an Australian Asian graduate student. While Pleasures also includes moments of resistance, overall it portrays an Asia caught within an overmastering imperial discourse that inhibits its possibilities for selfdetermination. Gooneratne’s scholarly research and creative writing achieve a notable cross-fertilization. Hazy moments in the historical record are often fictionalized and historical figures speculatively redrawn in her work. Sri Lanka and its troubled
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postcolonial history dominate Gooneratne’s latest novel The Sweet and Simple Kind (2006). The irony that characterizes her social vision is muted in this text as it confronts the crucial years of Sri Lanka’s decolonization. Many characters are based on historical figures from Relative Merits. The memoir’s oblique engagement with the majoritarian political legacies of Gooneratne’s ancestors from the powerful Dias-Bandaranaike family is replaced by an openly critical attitude in the fictional text. In essence a Bildungsroman, Sweet effectively utilizes the genre’s potential for socio-political commentary and indicts an oligarchic neocolonial elite that inherited power in Sri Lanka. With its abiding concern for Sri Lanka, Gooneratne’s writing engages with global themes that enlarge the horizons of Sri Lankan anglophone writing while also enriching Australian literature. Her deep sense of irony makes her work a critical but undogmatic reflection on the fragmentary experiences that characterize life in a globalizing world. SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Sri Lankan Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ahrens, R. (1999). Imperial Reflections in Yasmine Gooneratne’s Fiction. In D. Brendon & B. Gooneratne (eds.), Gladly Wolde She Lerne and Gladly Teche: Felicitation Volume for Professor Yasmine Gooneratne AO. D. Litt. London: Argus, pp. 1–9. Gooneratne, Y. (1971). Word, Bird, Motif: 53 Poems. Kandy: privately published. Gooneratne, Y. (1972). The Lizard’s Cry and Other Poems. Colombo: privately published. Gooneratne, Y. (1980). Diverse Inheritance: A Personal Perspective on Commonwealth Literature. Adelaide: Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English. Gooneratne, Y. (1986). Relative Merits: A Personal Memoir of the Bandaranaike Family of Sri Lanka. London: C. Hurst. Gooneratne, Y. (1991a). Celebrations and Departures: Selected Poems 1951–1991. Sydney: Wild and Woolley.
Gooneratne, Y. (1991b). A Change of Skies. London: Pan Macmillan. Gooneratne, Y. (1995). The Pleasures of Conquest. New Delhi: Penguin. Gooneratne, Y. (2006). The Sweet and Simple Kind. Colombo: Perera Hussein. Khan, A. (1996). Shadows of Imperfection [review of The Pleasures of Conquest]. Meanjin, 55(2), 358–61. Lokuge, C. (2000). “We Must Laugh at One Another, or Die”: Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies and South Asian Migrant Identities. In R. Crane & R. Manoharan (eds.), Shifting Continents, Colliding Cultures: Diaspora Writing of the Indian Subcontinent. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 17–34.
Goonewardene, James D. C. R. A. GOONETILLEKE
James Goonewardene is a pioneer writer of Sri Lanka’s post-independence era who made a notable contribution through his fiction as a both a social critic and an idealist. Born in Pannala, Sri Lanka, on May 15, 1921, he was a schoolteacher before he made a notable contribution to broadcasting in English, livening up the fare in the 1960s when English broadcasting was under threat from the ascendant vernacular languages. He began writing full-time in 1978 and, having married an Australian, could have emigrated, but as a staunch patriot he chose to remain. Goonewardene supported Punyakante Wijenaike, author of The Third Woman and Other Stories (1963) and a novel, The Waiting Earth (1966), by publishing A Quiet Place in 1968; between them they resuscitated Sri Lankan fiction in English at a time when none had been published for over a decade. Goonewardene’s novels are structured by an urban/rural dichotomy that conforms to Raymond Williams’s observations about the city and the country in English literature – the city being a place of “learning, communication, light” but also noise and personal ambition, whereas the country offers peace and virtue but also “backwardness, ignorance and limitation” (1). This binary is complicated by Goonewardene’s position as a writer in English in Sri Lanka at a time when the former colonizer’s language was subordinate to vernacular ones. It is strengthened, however, by common sense: in A Quiet Place, the hero, Abhaya, a victim of ennui
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and disappointed in the love of a “respectable” urban woman, seeks peace and contentment in a village, yet comes “to realize that the village no less than the city [is] full of cant and hypocrisy” (38). Goonewardene’s implied intention is to present a quest for lost innocence and truth, but the urban/ rural opposition in his work can seem simplistic and verging on the escapist. Indeed, his later novel, Dream Time River (1985b), deals largely with childhood experiences that come across as idyllic. The divisions upon which Goonewardene structures his work are particularly damaging in Call of the Kirala (1971), in which his urban hero, Vijaya, rejects the sensuality of town life but, upon making love to the rural heroine Menike on the bare ground in the open, the impression is precisely one of sensuality. Menike, like Nandini in A Quiet Place, is an idealized stereotype of rural femininity – beautiful and pure. The short story collection The Awakening of Doctor Kirthi (1976) is marked by disillusionment. The title story disproves the criticism made of Sri Lankan writers in English that they have not produced a sustained exploration of the world they know best – the world of the Englisheducated, English-speaking class – from the inside. Kirthi is important not only as a doctor battling inequities in the health services, but also as a representative intellectual who strives to maintain his ideals in the face of uncongenial conditions. When his son becomes a victim of inequities in the educational system, the doctor decides to emigrate, thus contributing to Sri Lanka’s brain drain. In Acid Bomb Explosion (1978) and its revised, expanded version An Asian Gambit (1985a), Goonewardne addresses the public drama of the Sinhalese youth insurgency of 1971. His political intention is linked to a characteristic theme and narrative pattern. Deva Sumanadasa is an artist who, finding urban society uncongenial and indifferent to “culture,” seeks peace and refuge in a small provincial town. When the insurgency erupts, the insurgents briefly gain control of the town. However, they are shown as naive, inept, and without mass support, while the police and army’s suppression of them is shown to be brutal. Goonewardene’s critical portrayal has a measure of historical truth, but his caricature of Hemapala, an insurgent leader, suggests both a conservative prejudice and the limitations of his art.
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In An Asian Gambit, Goonewardene takes liberties with history. He introduces a serious international factor that was hardly present at the time of the insurgency. Attempting some form of topicality, the epilogue introduces racial tensions absent during the 1971 insurgency. There was more than a suspicion that the later Sinhalese insurgents of the 1980s had links with the Tamil terrorists and that Tamil terrorism had connections with international terrorism. In presenting these aspects, Goonewardene’s novel reads like a failed thriller. One Mad Bid for Freedom (1990) is innovative in both form (semi-realistic, parable-like) and language (copious, hard-hitting, satiric). Its sometimes simplified view of contemporary Sri Lankan history (particularly the issues involved in the changing status of English and Sinhalese/ Tamil in 1956) is questionable, but its satire on the anglicized middle class and neo-nationalistic authoritarianism, together with the portrayal of the hero, Korala – a nationalist, environmentalist, and quirky genius whose withdrawal to a remote beach to escape a vicious system is seen as a fundamental quest for Truth – demonstrate the strength of Goonewardene’s convictions. His final novel, The Tribal Hangover (1995), marked a departure in Goonewardene’s fiction (but fit broader trends in Sri Lankan fiction of the 1990s) in reaching beyond Sri Lanka in its setting and concerns. Born in Sri Lanka and adopted by a German couple in Australia, Harindra is eventually discarded but, overcoming difficulties, he earns a doctorate and a university appointment. A typically idealized hero, Harindra embarks on the postcolonial search for roots, identity, and self-discovery in Sri Lanka. There he finds lost innocence in a beautiful woman and a legacy awaiting him, ensuring a happy (albeit contrived) ending. Goonewardene died in 1997. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Sri Lankan Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Goonetilleke, D. C. R. A. (2005). Sri Lankan English Literature and the Sri Lankan People 1917–2003. Colombo: Vijitha Yapa.
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Goonewardene, J. (1968). A Quiet Place. Colombo: K. V. G. de Silva. Goonewardene, J. (1971). Call of the Kirala. Colombo: Hansa. Goonewardene, J. (1976). The Awakening of Doctor Kirthi. Colombo: Lake House. Goonewardene, J. (1978). Acid Bomb Explosion. Colombo: privately published. Goonewardene, J. (1985a). An Asian Gambit. New Delhi: Navrang. Goonewardene, J. (1985b). Dream Time River. Colombo: Morris and Vaughton. Goonewardene, J. (1990). One Mad Bid for Freedom. New Delhi: Penguin. Goonewardene, J. (1995). The Tribal Hangover. New Delhi: Penguin. Salgado, M. (2006). Writing Sri Lanka. London: Routledge. Williams, R. (1993). The Country and the City. London: Hogarth.
Gordimer, Nadine ROWLAND SMITH
Nadine Gordimer is a Nobel Prize-winner and a preeminent intellectual figure in her native South Africa. Known as a writer of novels and short stories, she became increasingly important as a commentator on South African affairs through internationally published essays and articles during the period of white-controlled rule and the period of change following the release of Nelson Mandela and the election of a non-racial government. Gordimer was born on November 20, 1923 in Springs, a town close to Johannesburg. Her parents were Jewish immigrants to South Africa: her father was a watchmaker from Lithuania and her mother was born in England. She grew up in the small-town ethos of a segregated mining town. When she was 11, Gordimer’s mother took her out of school – alleging a heart ailment – and kept her at home, as a companion, until she was 16. She was taken to a private tutor for three hours a day, and accompanied her mother to tea parties and motherly gatherings; in the evenings she frequently accompanied both parents to dinner parties. Reading and writing became her sources of pleasure. Before being taken into her mother’s care she had attended a convent school, and she spent a year in a general program at the University
of the Witwatersrand in 1945. That was the extent of her formal education. In 1949 Gordimer married Gerald Gavron, and their daughter Oriane was born in 1950. The two were divorced in 1952, and in 1954 Gordimer married Reinhold Cassirer, an art dealer originally from Germany. Their son Hugo was born in 1955. Gordimer’s writing reflects the tensions of the life she observed in the apartheid state, during both its period of accelerated implementation following the electoral victory of the National Party in 1948 and the period of its replacement by an electoral system not limited by the race of the voter after the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990. Her early stories show the belittling effect on whites of the racial privileges of the age. The outwardly benign white protagonists, confronted with the domestic crises of black servants, the needs of itinerant black artisans, and even the desperation of itinerant street robbers, are shown to be emotional victims of their own set of privileges, which inhibit genuine response. In her first novel, The Lying Days (1953), Gordimer evokes the social-political scene of her own small-town origins and contact with the liberal ethos of one group of students at the University of the Witwatersrand. The protagonist attempts both to ignore the racial prejudices of the era and to interact with black contacts. Her sense that South Africa is a battleground from which she may want to escape is balanced at the end of the novel by her assertion she is not running away, but intent on “coming back.” In her fiction of the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, Gordimer constantly evokes both well-meaning attempts at interracial mixing in an officially separate society and their inevitable failure. A World of Strangers (1958), the short story collection Friday’s Footprint and Other Stories (1960), and Occasion for Loving (1963) all encapsulate the compromises and one-sidedness of white attempts to ignore both the official, legal rules and the enormous differences of opportunity and freedom in the apartheid state. The Sharpeville massacre of 1960 (in which members of a group of non-violent black protestors were shot down in large numbers by white police) was followed by a declared state of emergency, the arrest without charge of a large number of political figures, and an increasingly repressive series of security laws and rules. The black intellectual renaissance of the
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1950s was over, and with it the liberal racial mixing of that era. Gordimer’s fiction had shown the illusory quality of white fair-mindedness in the 1950s. Much of her subsequent work deals explicitly with the options for action in an increasingly authoritarian and militarized apartheid state. In The Late Bourgeois World (1966) the mood is darker, and the consequences of committed white action both tragic and ineffectual. The setting is no longer the world of well-meaning social gestures but one in which violent opposition to the state is examined through the lives of white liberals turned ineffectual saboteurs and more effective black saboteur combatants, personally elusive yet with real (often financial) demands on white support. A Guest of Honour (1971 [1970]) is set outside South Africa but continues the investigation of white action in an African setting. The English “guest” returns to the independent African country in which he had been a helpful administrator during the colonial era, recalled from the colony at the insistence of enraged white settlers. In the newly independent state the president, who has invited him back, becomes involved in a struggle with a local rival opposed to the new links to international capital. Once again Gordimer’s text investigates the extent to which white action is helpful in a black context. The English guest is killed in a random roadside attack. White political action has been ultimately unimportant, but the change in the white protagonist is seen as an inevitable part of commitment. Gordimer’s international reputation was clearly growing. In 1961, a year after its release, her Friday’s Footprint and Other Stories won the W. H. Smith Literary Award in the United Kingdom. A Guest of Honour won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the UK and the Central News Agency Literary Prize in South Africa. The Conservationist (1974) won the Booker-McConnell Prize in the United Kingdom and a second Central News Agency Literary Prize. In The Conservationist she returns to South Africa, but not to the white, English-speaking suburbs and their threatened good intentions. The protagonist, Mehring, is a realist, a city industrialist who has acquired a farm as a place to escape the stress of his competitive city life. He sees himself as one who is attached to his piece of land but without the qualms and self-righteous-
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ness he sees in the liberal delusions of his former mistress and the political views of his son. But Mehring’s sense of ownership is undermined not only by the constant presence of black laborers, but also by the discovery of an unidentifiable black corpse on the land itself. The white police bury the corpse in a shallow grave and depart. Now Mehring has a disturbingly alien presence actually in his land, as opposed to merely passing over it like the motley band of indigenous people. His sense of unease is heightened when the corpse is washed up by heavy rains and is once again on his territory. Emotionally uneasy, Mehring goes abroad to escape the anxieties of his countryestate fears. The aridity of his daily world of possessions and ownership has constantly been contrasted in the text with the natural reality of the land itself and the simple lives of the indigenous people who live on it. When the black people of the farm re-bury the nameless corpse, Gordimer conveys a sense of social harmony in the ceremony for the unknown man. Burger’s Daughter (1979) deals with a new view of the political struggle. The ineffectual fears and prejudices of the white characters on the surface of the land in The Conservationist are replaced by the presence in the text of both political engagement and the lingering tensions of inherent white privilege, even among the politically committed. The central character is the daughter of a well-known white communist who dies while still serving a life sentence in prison. After Lionel’s death, Rosa sets out to create her own identity beyond the South African world of political allegiance, commitment, and risk in which she has been willingly involved; she is sick of the endurance of pain and fear required by lives like those of her father. The contradictions between, on the one hand her inherited world of commitment and endurance, and on the other the privileged daily circumstances of being white drive her to leave Lionel’s world. She acquires a passport and moves to the south of France, where she lives a pleasant but relatively aimless private life that is disrupted on a visit to London when she meets an old childhood friend, the son of a black activist. In London the classic divisions of the inherited racial privileges and disadvantages of their native land reassert themselves. The black father of the former friend is now, unlike Lionel, forgotten. Rosa’s attempts to re-enter childhood intimacy are seen as
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condescending; his angry new status is that of a form of black consciousness that provokes her into an attack that further reveals her condescension. His bitterness and her guilt are crude examples of the impossibility of her continuing the easy, relatively trivial life of her French sojourn. Rosa returns to South Africa, understanding that she cannot defect. The novel ends with her in prison and the country embroiled in the 1976 Soweto uprising begun by black children protesting new apartheid schooling regulations. Addressing her dead father, Rosa thinks of the sublime qualities in his life, because he – like the black children in revolt – knew a form of elation. Burger’s Daughter is realistic, and its settings are recognizably part of the mood and aura of the era of composition. In the works written after that novel Gordimer frequently creates speculative plots dealing with imagined situations and contexts. There is the same local verisimilitude in descriptions and settings, but the events themselves, although closely observed, are placed in a future context. July’s People (1981) is set in an “interregnum”: an imagined time of increasing turmoil as a revolutionary war grips South Africa. That predicted scene of the collapse of established apartheid control is used to illustrate the coincident collapse of white moral authority. A white couple leaves their Johannesburg home as the urban war reaches their area. With their children and the black servant, July, they flee to July’s small black village. In that new context, the children adapt easily to their restricted circumstances. The father tries to retain the symbols of his former white identity, but crucial items like his shotgun and the family vehicle become increasingly communal. It is the liberal and formerly benign white mistress who has most difficulty adapting to the new relationship with July, the faithful house servant who, she finally realizes, has an identity quite different from the one she had created for him. This discovery – that July’s evaluation of himself is independent of her – materializes in an angry exchange when he speaks back to her not in her language but in his, which she cannot understand. The cultural authority of the old regime – along with the identities it has supported – has collapsed. In Something Out There, a collection of short stories published in 1984, Gordimer continues her trend of examining possibilities for a turbu-
lent South African world, and in the novel A Sport of Nature (1987) she imagines both a finally liberated country in the south and the liberating actions of the white South African protagonist, married first to an African National Congress official, who is assassinated, and then to an African general in an imagined African state. The tone of this later fiction has changed from that of Gordimer’s early and middle period. In later works she constantly suggests the compromising nature of liberal values in the corrupt world of an apartheid South Africa ruled by force. For example, in A Sport of Nature the protagonist, Hillela, is both effective in the public realm and at the same time self-assured and committed to action at any cost. This combination is politically successful but at times unsettling. The tone changes as Gordimer shifts from an examination of the personal costs in white liberal reactions to a more detached representation of the attitudes that make political change occur. Nelson Mandela was released in 1990 and negotiations began to produce a new constitution. In this period of change the personal truths Gordimer investigated throughout the apartheid era and the complexity of reactions against white rule are no longer her main concern. In Jump and Other Stories (1991), many of the stories are pointed examples of the current situation; others depict the stresses of the period of change. In the novel My Son’s Story (1990) the protagonists are mainly non-white, and the novel explores the nature of the determined political role of such political activists. None to Accompany Me (1994) deals with the effectiveness of the newly political wife of a long-serving male activist in the Movement. And as the struggle is taken over by newcomers, Vera Stark, a white lawyer working on resettlement of previously evicted black residents, decides to leave her former home and live as a tenant with a black colleague. The explicit symbolism of such a phrase is typical of the emblematic element in Gordimer’s later work. Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, and that international recognition coincided with the opening up of legitimate negotiation on the form of the new South African state. Gordimer depicts the problems of random violence and crime as the new society throws off the authoritarian aura of the white regime but inherits the major inequities of the
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past. The House Gun (1998) acknowledges the new regime’s inheritance of a violent legacy. A white couple struggles to accommodate the trial and conviction of their son, who has shot his former homosexual lover after the lover slept with the son’s current female partner. The middle-class parents find themselves in a situation similar to that of countless black parents with children on trial and in prison. In Writing and Being (1995), which collects her 1994 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, Gordimer points to the need to understand the era of apartheid in order to understand the present. In The Pickup (2001), the racially mixed world of the trendy young is explicitly part of the new South Africa. The protagonist, enjoying the social freedoms denied by the laws of the previous generation, has her life altered by meeting an illegal Arab immigrant who – after repairing her car – is admitted to her cafe world. She marries Abdul and is surprised at his positive reaction to her influential circle of relatives and friends. She joins him in his deportation to his desert homeland, where she finds a sense of community and identity that prevents her from joining her husband in his search, ultimately successful, for immigrant status in the West. She prefers life in the desert to another round of humiliating, immigrant dirty work for Abdul in the United States. The Pickup is stark in its use of the liberated white South African scene as a viewpoint – through a privileged white person – on the international plight of immigrants from the developing world. Gordimer’s most recent work takes the history of the struggle for change in South Africa as a given and depicts the human complexities in the new state with a more detached perspective than that of the texts dealing with the apartheid state. At the same time the prose is frequently more condensed than in the classic apartheid texts. Loot and Other Stories (2003) contains a mixture of stories set in and outside South Africa, and in Get a Life (2005) the new, multiracial society is merely a fact of the South African scene. The issues dealt with in the novel are environmental. Personal health threatened by radioactive treatment is the central issue in the first part of the book, and in the second the health of the environment, threatened by development projects of many kinds, becomes the main concern. Gordimer’s style is more choric in this novel than in her previous work as she links
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the personal threat of the opening with the environmental threats of the second part of the book. The latest collection of short stories, Beethoven was One-Sixteenth Black (2007), has little of the direct political commentary of Gordimer’s early and middle work. The characters in the fiction deal with personal and emotional issues in recognizable situations but are treated in terms of conflict, love, and desire. Although intrinsically part of the scene, the major political changes in South Africa are not the central feature of her latest work. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (WF); Coetzee, J. M. (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF); Southern African Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Clingman, S. (1992). The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Gordimer, N. (1953). The Lying Days. London: Gollancz. Gordimer, N. (1958). A World of Strangers. London: Gollancz. Gordimer, N. (1960). Friday’s Footprint and Other Stories. London: Gollancz. Gordimer, N. (1963). Occasion for Loving. London: Gollancz. Gordimer, N. (1966). The Late Bourgeois World. New York: Viking. Gordimer, N. (1971). A Guest of Honour [1970]. London: Jonathan Cape. Gordimer, N. (1974). The Conservationist. London: Jonathan Cape. Gordimer, N. (1979). Burger’s Daughter. London: Jonathan Cape. Gordimer, N. (1981). July’s People. New York: Viking. Gordimer, N. (1984). Something Out There. London: Jonathan Cape. Gordimer, N. (1987). A Sport of Nature. London: Jonathan Cape. Gordimer, N. (1990). My Son’s Story. London: Bloomsbury. Gordimer, N. (1991). Jump and Other Stories. London: Bloomsbury. Gordimer, N. (1994). None to Accompany Me. London: Bloomsbury.
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Gordimer, N. (1995). Writing and Being. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gordimer, N. (1998). The House Gun. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Gordimer, N. (2001). The Pickup. London: Bloomsbury. Gordimer, N. (2003). Loot and Other Stories. London: Bloomsbury. Gordimer, N. (2005). Get a Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Gordimer, N. (2007). Beethoven was One-Sixteenth Black and Other Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. King, B. (ed.) (1993). The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer. London: Macmillan. Smith, R. (ed.) (1990). Critical Essays on Nadine Gordimer. Boston: Hall. Temple-Thurston, B. (1999). Nadine Gordimer Revisited. New York: Twayne. Wade, M. (1978). Nadine Gordimer. London: Evans.
Grace, Patricia MICHELLE KEOWN
Patricia Grace (of Ngati Toa, Ngati Raukawa, and Te Ati Awa tribal descent) is one of Aotearoa/New Zealand’s best-known and most prolific Maori writers. Born in Wellington on August 17, 1937 to a Pakeha (European) mother and a Maori father, Grace was at the forefront of a new tradition of Maori creative writing in English that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s, a period when large numbers of Maori were migrating from rural settlements to the Pakeha-dominated urban centers in search of employment and education opportunities. Grace began to write for publication in her mid-twenties and, along with several other emerging Maori writers (such as Witi Ihimaera), she began publishing individual pieces of short fiction in periodicals such as the New Zealand Listener and Te Ao Hou. Her debut short story collection Waiariki (the first book-length work of fiction by a Maori woman) was published in 1975, and since then she has produced six novels: Mutuwhenua (1978b), Potiki (1986), Cousins (1992), Baby NoEyes (1998), Dogside Story (2001), and Tu (2004); six short story collections: The Dream Sleepers (1980), Electric City and Other Stories (1987), Selected Stories (1991), The Sky People (1994b), Collected Stories (1994a), and Small Holes in the
Silence (2006); several children’s books; and nonfiction publications on Maori mythology and oratory. Much of Grace’s early work engages with issues explored by other Te Ao Hou authors of the 1950s and 1960s, referencing (in stories such as “Transition” and “And So I Go,” 1975) the immense social changes brought about by the postwar migration to the cities. Grace was also concerned with the politics of representation as a means of self-empowerment for Maori. In her 1975 short story “Parade,” for example, a Maori elder’s comment to a young Maori girl that “It is your job . . . [t]o show others who we are” becomes a manifesto for Grace’s role as a Maori writer, while her novel Mutuwhenua – which focuses upon a young Maori woman who marries a Pakeha – was written in part as a challenge to romantic and negative stereotypes of Maori produced in Pakeha literature (Grace 1978a, 80). While there is a clear counter-discursive agenda in these early works, from the publication of Potiki Grace’s work becomes more overtly inflected by the polemical energies of the Maori Renaissance, a politico-cultural movement that developed in the 1970s as a result of widespread concerns about the social pressures faced by urbanized Maori (such as racial discrimination, socio-political marginalization, and a loss of contact with “traditional” cultural practices). Potiki, and later novels such as Cousins and Baby No-Eyes, engage closely with two key issues of the Maori Renaissance: the alienation of Maori land, and the decline and recent revitalization of the Maori language. All three novels represent allegorical responses to high-profile land disputes between Maori and Pakeha, resonating with earlier short stories such as “Journey” (1980) and later novels such as Dogside Story, which similarly emphasize the importance of land to Maori, not only as a material source of sustenance, but also as a locus of personal, tribal, and mythopoeic identification (see Keown 2007, 142–3). Indeed, many of Grace’s narratives are deeply rooted in Maori mythology. In Potiki, for example, two of the central characters (Hemi and Roimata) are modeled upon Ranginui and Papat uanuku, the primal sky-father and earthmother, while another character, Toko, is based partly upon Maui (the demigod and trickster prominent in Maori and other Polynesian oral
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traditions). Grace further explores these and other “elemental” myths in later stories such as “Sun’s Marbles” (in The Sky People), which recounts Maui’s Promethean quest for fire and sunlight, and “Moon Story” (in Small Holes), which retells the legend of a woman who rashly insults the goddess of the moon. Grace’s work is also strongly influenced by the dynamics of the Maori oral tradition more generally. Several of her novels feature multiple narrators whose collective utterances resemble the structures of whaikorero (communal speechmaking), and many of her narratives code-switch strategically between Maori and English, or transfer Maori grammatical patterns into English syntax, in acts of linguistic “deterritorialisation” (see Keown 2005). Grace is also skillful in creating idiolects specific to individuals and generational groups, and in using language to convey intense sensory detail, such as the horrors of war (in Tu), the vibrancy of color (in Baby No-Eyes), and the spatial novelties of overseas travel (in “The Kiss,” from Small Holes). Although many of Grace’s narratives engage with social injustice (particularly against Maori), they are also marked by a lively humor and an empathetic engagement with the intricacies of interpersonal relationships. Her books have won numerous awards at home and abroad, and in 2008 she was awarded the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature in recognition of her life’s work. SEE ALSO: Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Ihimaera, Witi (WF); Indigenous Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); New Zealand Fiction (WF); Politics/ Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Allen, C. (2004). Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grace, P. (1975). Waiariki and Other Stories. Auckland: Longman Paul. Grace, P. (1978a). The Maori in Literature. In M. King (ed.), Tihe Mauri Ora: Aspects of Maoritanga. Hong Kong: Methuen, pp. 80–3.
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Grace, P. (1978b). Mutuwhenua: The Moon Sleeps. Auckland: Penguin. Grace, P. (1986). Potiki. Auckland: Penguin. Grace, P. (1987). Electric City and Other Stories. Auckland: Penguin. Grace, P. (1991). Selected Stories. Auckland: Penguin. Grace, P. (1992). Cousins. Auckland: Penguin. Grace, P. (1994a). Collected Stories. Auckland: Penguin. Grace, P. (1994b). The Sky People. Auckland: Penguin. Grace, P. (1998). Baby No-Eyes. Auckland: Penguin. Grace, P. (2001). Dogside Story. Auckland: Penguin. Grace, P. (2004). Tu. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Grace, P. (2006). Small Holes in the Silence. Auckland: Penguin. Heim, O. (1993). Writing Along Broken Lines: Violence and Ethnicity in Contemporary Maori Fiction. Auckland: Auckland University Press. Keown, M. (2005). Postcolonial Pacific Writing: Representations of the Body. London: Routledge. Keown, M. (2007). Pacific Islands Writing: The Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Oceania. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McRae, J. (1992). Patricia Grace. In E. Alley and M. Williams (eds.), In the Same Room: Conversations with New Zealand Writers. Auckland: Auckland University Press.
Grenville, Kate SUE KOSSEW
Kate Grenville has, since her earliest publication in 1984 (the short story collection Bearded Ladies), become one of Australia’s best-known fiction writers nationally and internationally. She has published six novels, the two most recent of which have won major international prizes. After her first Gothic novella set in Italy, Dreamhouse (1987), her work has explored an evolving sense of being Australian. Her novels frequently challenge the epic ideals of what she has termed the “heroic parched outback,” subverting the version of Australian history that has privileged the typically male hero battling against the odds. This subversion often takes the form of a strong feminist theme that runs through her novels, in opposition to Australian masculinist national discourses. As a teacher of creative writing herself who has written and co-written books about the writing process, her novels have been somewhat experimental
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in form, often employing satire, irony, and competing points of view to create multidimensional narratives. Born in Sydney on October 14, 1950, Grenville completed a BA Honors degree in English literature in 1972 at Sydney University. After spending time in the 1970s in Europe, she went to the United States in 1980, undertaking a Masters degree in creative writing at the University of Colorado. During her time there, she wrote short stories later collected as Bearded Ladies and a novel later published as Dreamhouse. In 1983 she returned to Sydney (where she still lives) with an unfinished novel, Lilian’s Story, her first major work to receive public acclaim in the form of the 1984 Australian/Vogel National Literary Award for an unpublished novel by a young writer. Published in 1985, it was enthusiastically endorsed by Patrick White, who described it as transforming “an Australian myth into a dazzling fiction of universal appeal” (cited in Gleeson-White 313). Her next novel, Joan Makes History (1988), was commissioned by the Australian government as part of the bicentenary of European settlement. In rewriting key moments in Australian history from a woman’s point of view, Grenville was drawing attention to the way women “are still being written out of our culture.” In putting “the women back in,” Grenville provided an alternative to the heroic model of history that glorified only men’s deeds: “heroic deeds are actually no more or less heroic than staying home and washing socks” (Baker 127). This strongly feminist thematic concern with the lives of women is clearly evoked in Lilian’s Story, loosely based on Bea Miles, a notoriously eccentric “bag lady” who lived in Sydney from the 1930s to 1970s. A memorably transgressive character, Lilian seems to represent the rebellious and anti-authoritarian aspect of Australian identity. The novel can also be read as a postcolonial representation of the colonial relationship between Australia and England. Dark Places (1994; titled Albion’s Story in the US) is the “mirror image” sequel to Lilian’s Story, written from the perspective of Albion, Lilian’s authoritarian and abusive father. Read together, the two novels illuminate the ways gender roles can polarize and make victims of both men and women. Grenville’s The Idea of Perfection (1999) similarly
engages with the pressure to conform to gender and national stereotypes. Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2001, this more humorous novel, set in the fictional country town of Karakarook, is a wry satire of established myths about the Australian “bush” and its discourses of gendered nationalism that lay down strict rules for how to be Australian. The main themes of her work, including the recuperation of women’s stories, a redefinition of the heroic and of national identity, and uncovering silences about the past, have resulted in a strong engagement with the relationship between fiction and history. This is particularly apparent in her novel The Secret River (2005), which grew from her search for her own family history that coincided with a growing national rethinking of the relationship between settler and indigenous culture in contemporary Australia. Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award, as well as appearing on the 2006 Booker Prize shortlist, The Secret River explores ideas of colonial contact in the early years of settlement along the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales, a narrative that closely mirrors the story of Grenville’s own convict ancestor, Samuel Wiseman. Grenville has written extensively about her own writing method, in Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written (1993), where she writes about Lilian’s Story, and in her “writing memoir,” Searching for the Secret River (2006), which charts the writing process of that novel. Two other works, The Writing Book: A Workbook for Fiction Writers (1990) and Writing from Start to Finish: A Six-Step Guide (2001), provide advice for writers. Grenville’s novels have been translated into numerous languages, and both Lilian’s Story and Dreamhouse (as Traps) have been adapted as films. She is one of Australia’s most influential contemporary women writers, one whose finely crafted, often darkly humorous and readable novels also address important social and national issues. SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); White, Patrick (WF)
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GROVE, FREDERICK PHILIP
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Baker, C. (ed.) (1989). Yacker 3: Australian Writers Talk about Their Work. Sydney: Picador. Chan, P. (dir.) (1994). Traps. Filmopolis Pictures. Domaradzki, J. (dir.) (1995). Lilian’s Story. Movieco Australia. Gleeson-White, J. (2007). Australian Classics: Fifty Great Writers and Their Celebrated Works. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Grenville, K. (1984). Bearded Ladies. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Grenville, K. (1985). Lilian’s Story. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Grenville, K. (1987). Dreamhouse. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Grenville, K. (1988). Joan Makes History. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Grenville, K. (1990). The Writing Book: A Workbook for Fiction Writers. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Grenville, K. (1994). Dark Places. Sydney: Macmillan. (Published in US as Albion’s Story. New York: Harcourt Brace.) Grenville, K. (1999). The Idea of Perfection. Melbourne: Picador. Grenville, K. (2001). Writing from Start to Finish: A SixStep Guide. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Grenville, K. (2005). The Secret River. Melbourne: Text. Grenville, K. (2006). Searching for the Secret River. Melbourne: Text. Grenville, K., & Woolfe, S. (eds.) (1993). Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Grove, Frederick Philip LAURA MOSS
Frederick Philip Grove holds a place high in Canadian letters for the enduring relevance of his novels about immigrants’ lives on the prairies and for the sensational discovery of the fraudulence of his “autobiography.” Born Felix Paul Berthold Friedrich Greve on February 14, 1879 in Randomno, Prussia to German parents, Grove immigrated to Canada in 1912, changed his name (retaining his initials) and identity (claiming he was the son of a wealthy Swedish father and a cosmopolitan Scottish mother), and began writing about his new home. As with Canada’s other famous case of literary fraud, that of Grey Owl (Archie Belaney), Grove treated the young country as a blank slate on
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which to inscribe his story. It was over 20 years after his death in 1948 that Queen’s University professor and Grove biographer Douglas Spettigue discovered the “true” identity of this canonical writer. Even though Grove’s autobiography, In Search of Myself (1946), won the Governor General’s Award for non-fiction, Spettigue found it to be largely the fabrication of a man who had staged his own death in Germany to escape a crushing debt load and fled to the remote North American countryside. Klaus Martens and other literary detectives further uncovered the facts of Greve’s life in Germany. Prior to his arrival in Canada, Greve was a poet, dramatist, translator, and literary personality who had been jailed for fraud. Attracted to the turn-of-the-century aestheticist movement in Europe, Greve translated the works of Oscar Wilde, Gustave Flaubert, H. G. Wells, and Andre Gide; he also published his own neoromantic writing in German. In 1909, after faking suicide in Germany, he and his lover Elsa Endell tried farming in Kentucky but parted company two years later. Elsa ended up in New York where she joined the Bohemian writing scene and became the celebrated Dada artist and poet Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Grove moved to Manitoba and became an itinerant teacher and writer. In sharp contrast to the cosmopolitan spendthrift Greve, Grove was a somber figure who merged stories of betrayal and failure with beautiful descriptions of the stark prairie landscape. His first book in English, a selection of nature sketches and personal anecdotes entitled Over Prairie Trails (1922), breaks with the aestheticism of his European work in its realist detailing of commonplace objects and the geography of rural Manitoba. Other non-fiction works followed, including A Search for America (1927), which critic John Moss describes as the “social vision” of a continent where the “potential of Western civilization, released from the suffocating strictures of history, has been realized – and found wanting” (151). Finding an appreciative audience for this early Canadian work, Grove embarked on three highly successful cross-continental tours where, speaking as an immigrant, he argued passionately against assimilation. Along with Arthur Stringer (The Prairie Wife, 1915), Laura Goodman Salverson (The Viking
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Heart, 1923), Martha Ostenso (Wild Geese, 1925), Robert Stead (Grain, 1926), Sinclair Ross (As for Me and My House, 1941) and W. O. Mitchell (Who Has Seen the Wind, 1947), Grove explored the complexities of pioneer life in the new Canadian provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. His farm novels, Settlers of the Marsh (1925), Our Daily Bread (1928), The Yoke of Life (1930), and the epic Fruits of the Earth (1933), are considered classics of Canadian literature. Grove’s fiction explores the emotional and psychological impact of migration, settlement, and subsistence labor on his characters as he repeatedly probes the themes of betrayal and sacrifice, fate versus free will, human conflicts with nature, and environmental determinism. Unusual for the time, Grove places these central modernist concerns in a recognizable Canadian landscape. Tame by contemporary standards, his most robust novel, Settlers of the Marsh, was considered upon publication to be obscene and indecent. With moral rigidity and misguided dreams of prosperity, Swedish immigrant Niels Lindstedt builds a profitable farm but, frustrated by unrequited love, ends up marrying, and later murdering, another woman. Settlers was followed by several other less scandalous (but no less moral) works about settling a community, most notably the story of the promethean farmer Abe Spalding in Fruits of the Earth. Grove’s contribution to prairie literature lies in his placement of psychologically complex characters, often drawn from archetypes, in precise realistic descriptions of a stark environment. Although his fiction is considered among the most significant prairie realism in modern Canadian writing, it has also been criticized as overbearing, dark, and moralistic. Leaving Manitoba and the farm novel behind in his later years, Grove moved to Ontario to work for Graphic Publishers and to write the kinds of social commentary he had begun in A Search for America. He ended his career in Simcoe, Ontario, composing an apocalyptic industrial novel, The Master of the Mill (1944), and an allegorical satire, Consider Her Ways (1947), about a colony of ants that study human behavior. Few critics believe that these ambitious final works match his earlier ones. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF);
Mitchell, W. O. (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF); Ross, Sinclair (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Calder, A. (ed.) (2006). Settlers of the Marsh: A Critical Edition. Ottawa: Borealis. Eggleston, W. (1957). Frederick Philip Grove. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gammel, I. (1994). Sexualizing Power in Naturalism: Theodore Dreiser and Frederick Philip Grove. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. Grove, F. P. (1925). Settlers of the Marsh. Toronto: Ryerson. Grove, F. P. (1927). A Search for America. Ottawa: Graphic. Grove, F. P. (1928). Our Daily Bread. Toronto: Macmillan. Grove, F. P. (1930). The Yoke of Life. Toronto: Macmillan. Grove, F. P. (1933). Fruits of the Earth. Toronto: Dent. Grove, F. P. (1944). The Master of the Mill. Toronto: Macmillan. Grove, F. P. (1946). In Search of Myself. Toronto: Macmillan. Grove, F. P. (1947). Consider Her Ways. Toronto: Macmillan. Hjartarson, P. (1986). A Stranger to My Time: Essays by and about Frederick Philip Grove. Edmonton: NeWest. Martens, K. (2001). F. P. Grove in Europe and Canada. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. Moss, J. (1987). A Reader’s Guide to the Canadian Novel, 2nd edn. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Pacey, D. (1945). Frederick Philip Grove, Toronto: Ryerson. Spettigue, D. O. (1969). Frederick Philip Grove. Toronto: Copp Clark. Spettigue, D. O. (1973). FPG: The European Years. Ottawa: Oberon.
Gunesekera, Romesh SHARANYA JAYAWICKRAMA
Romesh Gunesekera’s fiction has been acclaimed for its evocations of the discontinuities of time and space, and for characters whose journeys make the boundaries between places and histories porous. His preoccupations with memory, geography, and dislocation suggest his affiliation with other contemporary authors of the South Asian
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diaspora who write of migrant experience and the types of creative and reconstructive vision it affords. Romesh Gunesekera was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) on February 26, 1954. After living in the Philippines as a teenager, he moved to England in 1971. While the places that shape his personal history appear in his short stories and novels, Gunesekera makes a distinction between writing “autobiographically” and “autogeographically.” Moreover, the trajectory of his career is also tied to the emergence of Sri Lankan literature in English in the international market during the 1980s and 1990s, which stems partly from the increasing popularity of Indian literature in English and the concurrent rise of postcolonial studies. The nine stories of Monkfish Moon (1992) are either set in Sri Lanka or concerned with Sri Lankans abroad, and explore history’s imprint upon the private lives of characters. In “Batik,” for example, ethnic violence in Sri Lanka interrupts the intimacy of a Tamil and Sinhala marriage in London. Gunesekera’s first novel Reef (1994), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is the story of Triton, a young boy who becomes a cook for Mister Salgado, an amateur marine biologist concerned with the island’s vanishing reef. Political tensions in Sri Lanka eventually lead Triton and Mister Salgado to emigrate to England, yet the narrative enacts a turning away from national conflict, articulating instead a cocooned world where the art of cooking and theorizing about the reef are greater preoccupations than current social and political events. Triton, however, is painted as a problematic character, and Gunesekera uses his changing consciousness to explore human relationships simmering under the heat of eroticized East–West relations, class-based social tensions, and the eruption of violence on an island whose fragility is evoked by the disintegrating reef. The Sandglass (1997) is, as its title suggests, structured around a metaphor of time. Chip, a Sri Lankan migrant in mid-1970s London, lodges with Pearl Ducal, whose death opens the narrative. When her son, Prins Ducal, arrives in London for her funeral, they recount the intertwined tales of two feuding families: the Ducals, a family hurrying up the social ladder, and the Vatunases, clinging hard to old money. Their enmity is born of conflict over a house ironically named Arcadia and reflects the larger struggle over political own-
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ership of the nation. While Prins tries to understand the mystery of his father’s death, Chip seeks ownership of the stories of family strife, economic corruption, and political struggle, hoping that these intrigues will somehow untangle the meaning of his own life. Each of Gunesekera’s works utilizes Sri Lanka as backdrop for what many suggest is the primary focus of his prose – the shaping of subtle observation into vivid, nearly palpable language and imagery, satiated with sensory impressions. The epigraph to Monkfish Moon provocatively states, “There are no monkfish in the ocean around Sri Lanka” (6), underscoring the characteristic contradictoriness of his work, which draws directly on place even as it refuses to be tied explicitly to the history or politics of it. In Heaven’s Edge (2002), Gunesekera moves into the future to an unnamed island, a dystopia where beauty veils violence and the excesses of the landscape heighten the brutality of its inhabitants. Marc leaves his London home to travel to the ancestral, warravaged island where he meets the subversive Uva, who inhabits the island’s few remaining safe spaces. Through the novel’s temporal and spatial dislocations, Gunesekera demotes the question of location and transforms the obliqueness of the “edge” into an imaginative equivalent of reality. These literary techniques deflect the attempt to read his novels as nostalgic and exoticized examples of imaginative return. Rather, they encourage engagement with the ways in which Gunesekera’s fictions explore the discontinuities between past and present. His most recent novel is The Match (2006), which once again uses the idea of journeying between past and present to explore a character’s consciousness. Sonny Fernando is drifting through life, paralyzed by a lack of purpose. The still center of his life is a memory from his teenage years: a cricket match organized in the Philippines as his father’s attempt to recreate a Sri Lankan migrant’s dream of home. This memory embodies Sonny’s perfect moment, and as the rest of his life unfolds he tries to recapture the fullness of being that he experienced during the match. The cricket match serves structural and thematic purposes in a novel that ends in 1996, the year that marked bombings in Colombo and the Sri Lankan cricket team’s World Cup victory – two events that have passed, with different connotations, into popular mythology. Once again entering
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into dialogue with the history of Sri Lanka, Gunesekera’s reflective and resonant prose explores, albeit rather obliquely, the implications of the private journey. SEE ALSO: Black British Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Sri Lankan Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Burnett, P. (1997). The Captives and the Lion’s Claw: Reading Romesh Gunesekera’s Monkfish Moon. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 32, 3–15. Davis, R. G. (1997). We are All Artists of Our Own Lives: A Conversation with Romesh Gunesekera. Miscelanea: A Journal of English and American Studies, 18, 43–54.
Davis, R. G. (1998). Myths of Childhood in Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef. Commonwealth Essays & Studies, 20(2), 14–25. Gunesekera, R. (1992). Monkfish Moon. London: Granta. Gunesekera, R. (1994). Reef. London: Granta. Gunesekera, R. (1998). The Sandglass. London: Granta. Gunesekera, R. (2002). Heaven’s Edge. London: Bloomsbury. Gunesekera, R. (2006). The Match. London: Bloomsbury. Mallot, J. E. (2007). We are Only What We Remember, Nothing More: History and Healing in Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 42, 83–98. Nasta, S. (2001). Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Perera, S. W. (2000). The Perils of Expatriation and a Heartless Paradise: Romesh Gunesekera’s The Sandglass. Commonwealth, 22(2) 93–106.
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H Harris, Wilson APARNA HALPE
Known for his radical mythopoesis and crosscultural vision, Wilson Harris remains one of the more daring exponents of the twentieth-century experimental novel. Rooted in a disavowal of the classical unity of narrative, Harris’s work provides complex psychological explorations of the legacies of colonialism and imperialism on environment and community by foregrounding the porous, “unfinished” nature of story. Theodore Wilson Harris was born on March 24, 1921 in New Amsterdam in what was then British Guiana. Of mixed ancestry that included a European, African, and Amerindian racial background and cultural heritage, Harris was educated at Queen’s College in Georgetown, Guyana, where he was initially exposed to the more canonical texts of the European literary tradition. Harris subsequently became a land surveyor and worked for the British government from 1942 to 1958. His experiences of the interior Guyanese landscape and topography were key influences on his writing and figure prominently in his fiction. Likewise, his engagement over extended periods of time with Amerindian peoples allowed for the absorption of their mythical systems, which Harris often uses as a counter-narrative to some of the “grand narratives” of the European literary tradition. Although Harris immigrated to England in 1959, where he continues to reside with his wife and fellow poet Margaret Harris, the Guyanese and Central American landscape, history, and myth provide a lasting source of inspiration that shapes his fictional oeuvre.
Harris began his writing career by publishing poems, critical essays, and pieces of fiction from 1945 to 1961 in Kyk-over-al, the West Indian journal founded and edited by Arthur Seymour. Before venturing into his long and distinguished career as a novelist, Harris published two volumes of poetry, Fetish (1951) and Eternity to Season (1952), under the pen name Kona Waruk. Significantly, the name invokes his early preoccupation with the role of rivers and mountains in the Guyanese imagination. The relationship between man and his environment became a unifying trope in his later fiction; Harris frequently elaborates on the symbiotic links between physical landscapes and the interior topographies of Guyanese social, cultural, and mythical systems. His early poetry anticipates several key themes and concerns that he continued to explore in his later fictional corpus. Thus, Harris’s preoccupation with revising and recalibrating classical mythology within the Caribbean context is present from the very inception of his career as a poet. Likewise, his concern with unities of man and man, man and cosmos, man and nature, and, most importantly, man and metaphor first appears in poems like “Troy” (1951). His later fiction is thus best read within the context of his early poetry. Harris’s experimental style arose directly from a desire to move beyond the novelistic practice of his contemporaries. In his collection of essays, Tradition, the Writer and Society (1967a), Harris identifies a concern with issues surrounding identity and the sense of racial and cultural dislocation as defining characteristics of the Caribbean novel. He argues, however, that the tendency of
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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Caribbean novelists to write within the inherited form of the European “novel of persuasion” (29) undermines the racial and cultural plurality that is integral to lived Caribbean experience. Harris identifies the compulsion of the region’s novelists to “make national and political and social simplifications of experience in the world at large today” (30) and resolutely eschews the temptation to construct narratives that provide cohesive visions of character and plot. This decentering and proliferation of meaning in his work often underscore his reputation as a “difficult” writer. Drawing on his experiences in the interior of Guyana as a metaphor for the interdependent and permeable nature of cycles of migration and colonization, Harris states that the Caribbean environment poses a fundamental question on the nature and meaning of conquest. Thus, he asks, “how can one begin to reconcile the broken parts of such an enormous heritage, especially when those broken parts appear very often like a grotesque series of adventures, volcanic in its precipitate effects as well as human in its vulnerable settlement?” (31). The fissures and gaps that are an integral part of Harris’s writing thus function like palimpsests through which the reader glimpses patterns of both previous and future breakages and linkages in a continuously evolving sense of story. Of key significance to Harris’s corpus of fiction are his theories on cross-cultural context, which he explores most comprehensively in his essay collection, The Womb of Space (1983). For Harris, the notion of a cross-cultural context functions through the awareness of a radical intertextuality that opens a creative space between narratives from seemingly disparate backgrounds. He maintains that “each work complexly and peculiarly revises another and is inwardly revised in turn in profound context” (127). It is this sense of “peculiar revision” that also defines Harris’s use of myth. Critics have noted his affinity to writers as diverse as William Blake, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Joseph Conrad whose individual mythopoetic visions were shaped by highly experimental notions of aesthetics. Likewise, Harris has been compared to other writers from the Caribbean and Latin America including Eduard Glissant, Alejo Carpentier, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite, writers whose use of myth provides a revisionist frame to colonial and post-
colonial histories. What sets Harris apart from other contemporary writers who employ myth (both in the Caribbean and elsewhere) is a highly individual and idiosyncratic mobilization of archetypal image within myth. Harris draws on an eclectic strand of intellectual influences that include Martin Buber’s sense of “dialectic” (1937), C. G. Jung’s theories on the “collective unconscious’ (1953), and Frances Yates’s work on the “arts of memory” (1966). His approach to myth invokes a sense of fractured archetype in which the partiality of any given mythical image evokes a creative space or bridge between diverse myths and histories, and the plurality of the Caribbean contemporary. Recurring archetypal images such as the “Carib bone flute,” the “carnival mask,” the “tree of life,” the “benevolent and judging muse,” and the “beggar” occur throughout his novels, typically framed within paradoxical mythical narratives that foreground a sense of internal ambivalence, self-interrogation, and revision. Harris’s fictional oeuvre can be divided into several key groupings. The first includes Palace of the Peacock (1960), The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962), and The Secret Ladder (1963), which were eventually published together as The Guyana Quartet (1985). These four novels center on figurative explorations of visionary interdependence between character and the Guyanese landscape. Space and time are constructed as overlapping categories in which the questing journey into physical interiorities forms a figurative parallel to the psychic journey of the Guyanese imagination. Heartland (1964) is a transitional novel that revives several characters of the Quartet but gestures to the various visions of the individual as a vessel of “community” that are elaborately worked out in his second group of novels. The Eye of the Scarecrow (1965), The Waiting Room (1967b), Tumatumari (1968), and Ascent to Omai (1970a) focus around characters whose internal spaces are peopled by adversarial figures whose stories possess and reshape the central protagonists’ narratives through alternate, oppositional revisions of key events in the plot. This second group of novels is followed by two volumes of short fiction: The Sleepers of Roraima (1970b) and The Age of Rainmakers (1971), in which Harris uses Amerindian myth as a revisionary device that foregrounds the
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submerged creative narratives within Caribbean history. These collections emphasize notions of resurrection and renewal that become key themes in Harris’s third group of novels. In this phase, which includes Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness (1977a), The Tree of the Sun (1978), and The Angel at the Gate (1982), he uses the K€unstlerroman as a unifying structural trope that outlines the relationship between arts of the imagination and the role of the artist as mystical subject and prophet within the narrative fabric of history. In The Carnival Trilogy (1993a), Harris explores the notion of reversal and rehearsal implicit in the reimagined carnivalesque world. With Resurrection at Sorrow Hill (1993b), he enters his fourth phase, exploring the subtle linkages between vanished civilizations and the seeming promise of immortality in contemporary narratives of science and technology. Foregrounding trickster-like protagonists who embody significant dualities such as life in death, Jonestown (1996), The Dark Jester (2001), The Mask of the Beggar (2003), and The Ghost of Memory (2006) offer complex, transformative myths of modernity born out of Harris’s understanding of the riddling, oracular nature of language. Harris has received several national and international honors, and he holds honorary doctorates from the University of the West Indies and the University of Liege. He has been a visiting professor and fellow at several universities, including the University of Toronto (1970), University of Texas at Austin (1972, 1980–2), and Aarhus University (1973). The lasting impact of Harris’s imaginative and stylistic experimentalism continues to shape and inform emerging writers from the Caribbean such as Fred D’Aguiar, Patrick Chamoiseau, Margaret Cesaire-Thompson, Pauline Melville, and Oonya Kempadoo. SEE ALSO: Black British Fiction (WF); Conrad, Joseph (BIF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Joyce, James (BIF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Adler, J. (1968). The Art of Wilson Harris. In I. Adler, (ed.) (2003), Exploring the “Palace of the Peacock”: Essays on Wilson Harris. Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, pp. 12–21. Buber, I. (1937). I and Thou (trans. R. G. Smith). Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark. (Original work published 1923.) Drake, S. (1986). Wilson Harris and the Modern Tradition: A New Architecture of the World. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Gilkes, M. (1975). Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Novel. London: Longman. Harris, W. (1960). Palace of the Peacock. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (1961). The Far Journey of Oudin. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (1962). The Whole Armour. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (1963). The Secret Ladder. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (1964). Heartland. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (1965). The Eye of the Scarecrow. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (1967a). Tradition, the Writer and Society. London: New Beacon. Harris, W. (1967b). The Waiting Room. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (1968). Tumatumari. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (1970a). Ascent to Omai. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (1970b). The Sleepers of Roraima: A Carib Trilogy. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (1971). The Age of Rainmakers. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (1972). Black Marsden. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (1975). Companions of the Day and Night. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (1977a). Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (1977b). Genesis of the Clowns. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (1978). The Tree of the Sun. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (1982). The Angel at the Gate. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (1983). The Womb of Space: The CrossCultural Imagination. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Harris, W. (1985). Carnival. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (1987). The Infinite Rehearsal. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (1990). The Four Banks of the River of Space. London: Faber and Faber.
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Harris, W. (1993a). The Carnival Trilogy. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (1993b). Resurrection at Sorrow Hill. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (1996). Jonestown. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (2001). The Dark Jester. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (2003). The Mask of the Beggar. London: Faber and Faber. Harris, W. (2006). The Ghost of Memory. London: Faber and Faber. Jung, C. G. (1953). Psychology and Alchemy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Maes-Jelinek, H. (2006). The Labyrinth of Universality: Wilson Harris’s Visionary Art of Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Petersen, K. H., & Rutherford, A. (eds.) (1975). Enigma of Values. Aarhus: Dangaroo. Ramchand, K. (1970). The West Indian Novel and Its Background. London: Faber and Faber. Tiffin, H. (1982). The Metaphor of Anancy in Caribbean Literature. In R. Sellick (ed.), Myth and Metaphor. Adelaide: Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English, pp. 15–52. Yates, F. (1966). The Art of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Head, Bessie HUMA IBRAHIM
Over two decades after her death, Bessie Head’s four novels, two histories, and one short story collection continue to be excavated for further levels of meaning by scholars both in her native South Africa and internationally. As an African woman writer and a feminist, Head has caught the imagination of readers both in and out of the academy, prompting discussions of her feminist inclinations and her deep concern with questions of gender and race in South Africa. Head was born on July 6, 1937 in an insane asylum in Pietermaritzburg to a white woman. As an infant, she was taken from her mother and sent to an Afrikaans family for possible adoption, but she ended up with a “colored” family where she grew up thinking that her foster mother was her biological mother. At 13, she was told that her real mother had recently committed suicide but had left her money for schooling. Although she did not attend university, she did complete her secondary education, which would have been prohibitive for a “colored” child without her small
inheritance. Head quickly developed great aspirations as a writer, working first as a journalist with Drum magazine. Since the apartheid government did not provide her with a passport, however, Head moved to Botswana under the slippery rubric of “voluntary exile” where she remained stateless until she was finally awarded citizenship. The apartheid ploy to get rid of South Africa’s most troublesome black writers was in full effect when she took herself and her young son out of what she called the apartheid system’s “culture of hate,” and she never returned. Head’s first novel, When Rain Clouds Gather (1969), centers around the ways refugees negotiate viable lives in their places of geographical immigration and how they can be of service to their adopted communities while adapting in unfamiliar surroundings. She develops characters that become a staple of her later novels: they are either well-meaning people who want to support their adopted communities socially and economically, or they represent forces of disruption and neglect of their fellow humans. In this first novel she privileges exiles, setting them above the native population in terms of their capacity to do good for their hosts. Her second novel, Maru (1971), emerges out of her very young son’s disturbing concern about belonging and identity. She had encouraged him, as a child who spoke Batswana, to identify with his playmates by suggesting he was one of them; but on beginning school he was abused, rather violently, by older boys for his pretensions in claiming to be like them. A distraught Head undertook to write a complex, fairytale-like novel about belonging, race, and nation. The novel’s greatest strengths are its haunting treatment of themes of class, race, and birth, and its brilliantly interwoven discourse of nation and minorities. Head uses the indigenous form of racism against the Khoisan, or Khoi Khoi peoples, cultivated by the Batswana as a way to expose complex and layered issues related to race and class. Her narrative voice assumes a vitality that allows her to talk about godliness in some of her characters, while still granting them their humanity. She suggests that being a despised minority gives one a unique insight into truth, unmatched by any other form of revelation – primarily as all of her characters were, in some way, marginalized by their societies. In Maru, Head further expands the idea of love
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between people of different social and tribal backgrounds, and the kind of understanding love can bring to their lives. A Question of Power (1974) is regarded as Head’s most complex work since it not only records a mental breakdown but also engages questions of insanity, power, good and evil, greed, and sexuality within the African milieu. Though it is clear that the protagonist, Elizabeth, is concerned with a very serious examination of human breaking points, she seems to be pulled out of this malaise through an ordinary human endeavor. Gardening, especially the hardy cape gooseberry from which she makes jam, becomes an iconic symbol of survival within the confines of an often debilitating exilic consciousness. The protagonist turns away from all that is ugly toward a community of work and leisure that sustains life in more illuminating ways than greed and power can. As in her other novels, solutions are grand but, once found, are profoundly simple. Honing her skills of character development and storytelling, Head evokes the complexity of multiple characters, whether or not they relate to the protagonist, without losing sight of the movement of the story. The novel ends with “a gesture of belonging” in the place of exile (206). Her fourth book, The Collector of Treasures (1977), is a collection of village tales. They vary in seriousness and depth, but what is most relevant about all of them is their ability to negotiate a dialogue among women across history and class. Head collected these tales, some of them rather harrowing stories of death, desperation, famine, and hunger, while living in Botswana, and she honed her talents as a storyteller by exploring often unmentionable subjects such as female sexuality. The only character Head censures is Garesego, in the title story, for his complete lack of compassion for his wife and children. Particularly striking is Head’s ability to discuss the most delicate aspects of betrayal in relationships. Again, solutions are absent, but Head’s theme of the importance of practicing “goodness” toward others is profound yet enormously simple. Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind (1981) and A Bewitched Crossroad (1984) are two histories Head wrote about her adopted Botswana. She brings a sense of wonder to the histories of precolonial life and pays tribute to the leadership of the Khamas – a government of finesse that,
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aware of colonial events in Angola and South Africa, prevented British colonialism. These histories are not merely tributes to her new country but also postcolonial re-visionings of precolonial and colonial history, with a deliberate intention to both reclaim and record a past that has been coopted by the colonial recording machinery. Head’s posthumous publications are a testimony to the growing interest in her work since her death in 1986. A Woman Alone (1990) and Tales of Tenderness and Power (1989) between them gather most of her unpublished shorter work (including a poem she wrote for the eminent South African poet Dennis Brutus) and reprint some previously published pieces. A Gesture of Belonging (1991) is a collection of letters she wrote to Randolph Vigne about both personal and professional matters. Head wrote voluminous letters to many people, often keeping copies, and recent work on her has taken account of these letters as research material. The Cardinals (1993), thought to be her first piece of long fiction, was dubbed her only South African work: it was presumably written while she was still there and overtly concerns life under the apartheid laws. The plot directly demands that its reader re-examine disconcerting social taboos. Incest, a phenomenon abhorred by most societies, is viewed through the lens of apartheid’s deliberate breakdown of families and is convincingly shown to be a far lesser evil than the Immorality Act. In this novella, a father and a daughter separated through the enforcement of apartheid family law find each other in startlingly unfilial ways in a society rife with segregation and hatred. Their “forbidden” act seems minor, almost a necessity for survival, compared to a society that not only sanctions but valorizes apartheid. Bessie Head is widely considered a challenging writer whose “texts frequently defy conclusive interpretation” and whose work “covertly develop[s] clues that prompt a broader exploration of seemingly clear-cut characters and themes” (Lewis 15). While her work received critical attention from white South African writers and critics during the apartheid regime, and increasingly from young black South African academics, it is now taught and studied all over the world. Several conferences and a festival have been dedicated to her work, which is recognized as forming
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part of an important body of postcolonial South African writing. SEE ALSO: Censorship and Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF); Southern African Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Eilerson, G. S. (1995). Bessie Head: Thunder behind Her Ears: Her Life and Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Head, B. (1969). When Rain Clouds Gather. London: Gollancz. Head, B. (1971). Maru. London: Gollancz. Head, B. (1974). A Question of Power. London: Davis-Poynter. Head, B. (1977). The Collector of Treasures, and Other Botswana Village Tales. London: Heinemann. Head, B. (1981). Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind. London: Heinemann. Head, B. (1984). A Bewitched Crossroad: An African Saga. Craighall: Ad. Donker. Head, B. (1989). Tales of Tenderness and Power. Craighall: Ad. Donker. Head, B. (1990). A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings. London: Heinemann. Head, B. (1993). The Cardinals, with Meditations and Short Stories. Cape Town: David Philip. Ibrahim, H. (1996). Bessie Head: Subversive Identities in Exile. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Ibrahim, H. (ed.) (2004). Emerging Perspectives on Bessie Head. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Lewis, D. (2007). Living on a Horizon. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Sample, M. (ed.) (2003). Critical Essays on Bessie Head. Westport, CT: Praeger. Vigne, R. (1991). A Gesture of Belonging: Letters from Bessie Head 1965–1979. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Heath, Roy CHIJI AKOMA
Roy Heath is one of the major chroniclers of twentieth-century Guyanese society in fiction. His novels reveal self-absorbed protagonists imbued with a capacity to strive, sometimes with
baffling histrionics, in the face of their predicaments. The social and economic forces that shape their world are subordinated to Heath’s enduring interest in plumbing his characters’ insecurities, fears, and ill-defined ambitions. Heath was born on August 13, 1926 in Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana). After high school in Georgetown, he worked as a treasury clerk in the colonial government, before leaving for London in 1951. He graduated with a BA in French from the University of London in 1956; he also studied law but did not pursue that profession. Interestingly, despite over 50 years of living in the UK, all his novels are set in Guyana. In his words, “I am not keen on writing about my experiences here [London] because I am still an immigrant. My consciousness was formed in Guyana” (Birbalsingh 68). In a short essay, “The Function of Myth,” Heath argued for the promotion of Guyanese folkloric traditions. Subsequently he published his first novel, A Man Come Home (1974), which, in addition to its depiction of urban poverty and dubious morality, invokes Fairmaid, a river goddess believed to accept the fortunes of willing men in exchange for exclusive relations with her. Death, decline, and psychosis are also prominent in Heath’s novels, one or more of which is experienced by almost all his protagonists or significant characters. The Guyanese colonial experience greatly impacts Heath’s artistic vision, for, according to him, growing up in a colonial society was “a kind of death” (Jussawalla & Dasenbrock 134). Indeed, Heath’s fiction is most significantly informed by what he calls “anxietylore” – the predominance of mythic figures in Guyanese folklore that inflict fear, disease, insanity, and death on a terrified people surrounded by impenetrable forests. With The Murderer (1978), winner of the 1978 Guardian Fiction Prize, he continues the deployment of mythic aesthetics as narrative paradigm. Galton Flood’s descent into madness is not merely a culmination of his frustration with social and emotional pressures; Heath casts Galton as a modern-day Bakoo, the little man in a bottle in Guyanese lore, whose unpredictable personality swings between havoc and fortune. A similar mythic undertone operates in the two novels Kwaku (1982) and its sequel The Ministry of Hope (1997). Kwaku’s opening sentence describes its
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HERBERT, XAVIER
protagonist as a man “who was reduced to a state of idiocy by intelligent men, but made a spontaneous recovery.” In depicting Kwaku’s improbable transformation from village idiot to successful healer, Heath imbues him with the cleverness of Anancy, the African Caribbean folk trickster figure, and the restless energy of Bakoo. In addition to privileging folkloric tropes, Heath’s writing reveals a keen interest in families and domesticity: husbands, wives, and lovers; mothers and their children; the erosion of domestic stability in the face of humiliating poverty. In his “Georgetown Trilogy,” comprising From the Heat of the Day (1979), One Generation (1981b), and Genetha (1981a), Heath charts the inexorable decline of the household of Sonny and Gladys Armstrong. Be it the rapid deterioration of Sonny and Gladys’s relationship after their wedding, or the waywardness of their children, the striking quality in the trilogy is the careful delineation of ordinary people caught in the crosscurrents of poor choices and fractured social structures. In Heath’s seventh novel, Orealla (1984), for instance, Ben’s desire to gain respectability and freedom is thwarted by social impositions based on his African ancestry and a stifling class system. With The Shadow Bride (1988), winner of the 1989 Guyana Prize for Literature, Heath turns his attention to the vicissitudes of an east Indian matriarch, Mrs. Singh, and her son Betta. As Mrs. Singh fights to maintain an untenable purity for her Indian culture and religion in a multiethnic Guyana, Heath reveals, through Betta, the abject poverty in which the workers live and the prevalence of deadly diseases among them. In 1990 Heath released his memoir, Shadows Round the Moon, which reveals more about his family than himself. Heath, who died on May 14, 2008, has received surprisingly little critical attention compared to his Caribbean contemporaries. Describing himself as “intensely Guyanese” (Birbalsingh 79), Heath is the consummate storyteller who, with unpretentious language and sympathetic outlook, captures the exuberant life of his people, beginning from the colonial 1920s to the quandary, turbulence, and promise of postcolonial times. SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/
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Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Akoma, C. (2007). Folklore in New World Black Fiction: Writing and the Oral Traditional Aesthetics. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Birbalsingh, F. (1996). Continuing Colonialism: Interview with Roy Heath. In F. Birbalsingh (ed.), Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English. New York: St. Martin’s, pp. 68–85. Heath, R. (1972). The Function of Myth. In A. Salkey (ed.), Caribbean Essays. London: Evans, pp. 86–94. Heath, R. (1974). A Man Come Home. London: Longman. Heath, R. (1978). The Murderer. London: Allison and Busby. Heath, R. (1979). From the Heat of the Day. London: Allison and Busby. Heath, R. (1981a). Genetha. London: Allison and Busby. Heath, R. (1981b). One Generation. London: Allison and Busby. Heath, R. (1982). Kwaku; or, The Man who Could Not Keep His Mouth Shut. London: Allison and Busby. Heath, R. (1984). Orealla. London: Allison and Busby. Heath, R. (1988). The Shadow Bride. London: Collins. Heath, R. (1990). Shadows Round the Moon: Caribbean Memoirs. London: Collins. Heath, R. (1993). Criticism in Art: A View from the Diaspora. Ariel, 24(1), 163–72. Heath, R. (1994). The Armstrong Trilogy: From the Heat of the Day; One Generation; Genetha. New York: Persea. Heath, R. (1997). The Ministry of Hope. New York: Marion Boyars. Jussawalla, F., & Dasenbrock, R. W. (1992). Interview with Roy Heath. In F. Jussuwalla & R. W. Dasenbrock (eds.), Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 117–39. Saakana, A. S. (1996). Colonization and the Destruction of the Mind: Psychosocial Issues of Race, Class, Religion & Sexuality in the Novels of Roy Heath. London: Karnak House.
Herbert, Xavier FRAN DE GROEN
Xavier Herbert’s reputation rests, not without controversy, on the vitality and intensity of his
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entropic vision of Australia’s impaired promise. His most successful works, Capricornia (1938), winner of the Sesquicentenary Novel Prize, and Poor Fellow My Country (1975), a Miles Franklin Award-winner, offer ironic revisions of the nineteenth-century pioneer saga that celebrated white settlement of the continent. Both revel in the richly comic (and tragic) eccentricities of their crowded multicultural cast of outback characters and seek to reconcile popular modes of melodrama and romance with serious polemical purposes. Herbert’s analysis of the Australian dilemma in relation to his “self-story” was nourished by his conflicted upbringing in Western Australia and his ambivalent frontier adventures. Born out of wedlock in 1901, the year of Australia’s federation, he came to identify the stigma of his illegitimacy with the “bastard” nation of Australia to which he combatively belonged. His quest for creative self-realization in ultra-masculine tropical Australia led him to casual work as a laborer near Cairns and at Adelaide River in 1927. This experience gave Herbert a visceral understanding of the violence and racism of social life in the Northern Territory and an amused appreciation of its exotic vitality. Further experiences as a government pharmacist in the British Solomon Islands Protectorate in 1928 and in Darwin in 1929 brought satirical insights into the world of imperial officials and the operations of colonialism that color Herbert’s critique of frontier Australia. In Capricornia and Poor Fellow My Country, Herbert individualized the “bastardry” of neocolonial Australia and the calamity of Aboriginal dispossession by showing what it meant to be a member of the Stolen Generation. Both novels feature the itinerant careers of misbegotten, mixed-race antiheroes threatened with statesanctioned removal to institutions committed to erasing their Aboriginal ties. In Capricornia, Norman (“No Name”) Shillingsworth suppresses his Aboriginal self in order to assume his white patrimony. His female counterpart, Tocky O’Cannon, pregnant with Shillingsworth’s child, dies a victim of his careless “white” disregard for her fate. Their fortunes are mirrored in darker tones in Poor Fellow My Country where half-caste apprentice shaman Prindy Delacy considers various paths to assimilation under the tutelage of a series of white mentors but prefers to follow his
“rown road” – his Aboriginal dreaming. At the novel’s tragic denouement, Prindy is killed when the tribal initiation ceremony is twice interrupted, first by his pregnant mixed-race child-bride, and second by his most persistent meddling benefactor, his white grandfather. The “illegitimate” status of the antihero (and of his numerous mixed-race replicates, male and female) often recurs as Herbert’s key emblem of the modern Australia’s neocolonial condition. Capricornia, alongside Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo (1929) and Brian Penton’s Landtakers (1934), belongs to the first wave of Australian novels to openly acknowledge that the shameful precondition for Australian nationhood was Aboriginal dispossession. Capricornia’s exuberant caricature, mordant irony, and the farce of its outrageous cartoon violence struck dissonant modernist notes in Australian fiction, clashing with the prevailing mode of journalistic realism and provoking misguided criticism of Herbert’s style. Together with destabilizing conflicts in his personal life in the early 1940s, this criticism eroded Herbert’s literary confidence. He spent several decades in the actual and metaphorical wilderness producing works designed to address the difficulties he encountered writing “Yellow Fellow,” the projected successor to Capricornia. These lesser works include Seven Emus (1959), a frontier tale of white chicanery and sacred Aboriginal “dreaming”; Soldiers’ Women (1961), an experimental novel about women on the urban Australian home front during the Pacific War; Larger than Life (1963b), a collection of popular short stories, many published before World War II; and the lively if unreliable autobiography Disturbing Element (1963a). Like his signature frontier sagas, these more varied but less effective works seek to resolve the conundrum of modern Australian identity by generating myths that align Herbert’s personal history with the nation’s. Herbert resurrected his abandoned frontier novel in 1964, reimagining it over a decade as an 850,000-word “Australian tragedy” that challenged the perseverance of critics. Poor Fellow My Country condemns the failure of the dream of the “True Commonwealth” in the hypocrisy of Australia’s continuing exploitation of the land and its indigenous custodians. Its complicated, cyclical narrative is principally set in a
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mythologized Northern Territory with short excursions to Sydney during the turbulent 1935–42 period. A brief epilogue set in the early 1970s denounces neocolonial Australia as a vassal state of America and prophesies nuclear cataclysm. Poor Fellow My Country’s vast, intricately plotted, highly charged storyline testified to the “prodigal vitality” of Herbert’s melodramatic imagination, which led a rival to dub him “Australia Prolix” and Vance Palmer more generously to diagnose his “large chaotic world of jetting imagination” (de Groen 124–5) as the source of his power and his creative difficulties. Having completed a draft of a long but unpublishable autobiographical narrative, Herbert died on November 10, 1984 in Alice Springs. His ambition to write a kind of encyclopedic melodrama distilled from his personal life may be why his readership remains predominantly national. His frontier sagas’ continuing relevance, however, is paid tribute in Baz Luhrmann’s ambitious, excessive blockbuster film Australia (2008) – influenced by Herbert in theme, settings, and characters, and featuring a horse named Capricornia. SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Prichard, Katharine Susannah (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Clancy, L. (1981). Xavier Herbert. Boston: Twayne. de Groen, F. (1998). Xavier Herbert. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. de Groen, F., & Hergenhan, L. (eds.) (2002). Xavier Herbert Letters. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Healy, J. J. (1978). Literature and the Aborigine in Australia. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Herbert, X. (1938). Capricornia. Sydney: Publicist. Herbert, X. (1959). Seven Emus. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Herbert, X. (1961). Soldiers’ Women. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Herbert, X. (1963a). Disturbing Element. Melbourne: Cheshire. Herbert, X. (1963b). Larger than Life. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Herbert, X. (1975). Poor Fellow My Country. Sydney: Collins.
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Heseltine, H. (1973). Xavier Herbert. Melbourne: Oxford. Luhrmann, B. (dir.) (2008). Australia. Twentieth Century Fox. McDougall, R. (ed.) (1990). South of Capricornia: Short Stories 1925–1934 by Xavier Herbert. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Monahan, S. (2003). A Long and Winding Road: Xavier Herbert’s Literary Journey. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press.
Historical Fiction JOHN CLEMENT BALL
Historical fiction, and especially the historical novel, is a prominent genre of twentieth-century world literature whose appeal among writers and readers shows no signs of waning in the twentyfirst. Its origins in English-language literature are commonly identified with the early nineteenthcentury historical novels of Sir Walter Scott on one side of the Atlantic and James Fenimore Cooper on the other. In the twentieth century, particularly in nations with histories of colonial invasion and administration, of displacement and resettlement, of resistance and decolonization, writers’ imaginative engagement with the often traumatic and unsettling past has been important to the development of national identity and collective self-understanding. Frequently set during periods of significant political, social, and cultural change or crisis – for instance, first contact between indigenous and European peoples, anti-colonial or slave rebellions, civil and world wars, transition to self-rule – historical fiction from the postcolonial world traces the effects of these public events on the fortunes of fictional characters conceived of as typical of their time and place; it may also include representations of historical personages, whether under their real names or allegorically transformed and reconstituted. A traditional view of the historical novel is that it endeavors to reflect the past “as it was.” However, the referential assumption underlying that aim was deliberately thrown into doubt by many late twentieth-century historical novels, particularly those postmodern works of “historiographic metafiction” (Hutcheon, p. ix) that self-reflexively question their own ability to truly know and
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objectively represent the past. Since Europeans largely controlled the discursive representation and interpretation of their colonized people’s history, the epistemologically and aesthetically driven impulses to complicate the relations between story and history have been powerful within postcolonial literatures as well. Nonetheless, the desire to correct misrepresentations and fill in gaps in the written record prompts writers to hang onto a traditional referential desire to tell their own stories – to narrate their people’s history, if not “as it was,” at least as they (rather than the colonizers) see it. In the words of the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, his purpose in writing Things Fall Apart (1958), his tragic novel of an Igbo village infiltrated by English missionaries and administrators, was “to teach my readers that their past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them” (30). Achebe’s pioneering novel – published on the brink of Nigeria’s independence and followed by Arrow of God (1964), set a generation later when colonial rule was firmly established – has a subject (first contact) and a resistant, revisionist impulse shared by subsequent African novelists who consider comparable periods in their own national pasts. Ngu~gi~ wa Thiong’o’s The River Between (1965), for instance, shows how rivalries between neighboring Kenyan villages were exacerbated by the arrival of Christian missionaries. The Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera revisits the Shona Rebellion of 1896–7 in Nehanda (1993), a fictional, feminist-inflected portrait of the female spirit medium who helped lead this early anticolonial movement and became an inspiration to later generations of black Rhodesian nationalists. In Wild Conquest (1950), Peter Abrahams looks at Boer migration into the South African interior, and the resulting Afrikaner nationalist myth of the Great Trek, from a black South African point of view. Similarly, in Australia and New Zealand, indigenous views of early contact can be found in novels such as Mudrooroo’s Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (1983), a tragicomic satire of the destruction wrought by a bumbling missionary (the historical George Robinson) in nineteenthcentury Tasmania, or Witi Ihimaera’s The Matriarch (1986), about Maori resistance to colonial incursions in New Zealand.
Indeed, in New Zealand, Australia, and fellow settler-invader colony Canada, early indigenous-European meetings, and the resulting misunderstandings and conflicts, have been sympathetically explored by many novelists of European descent as well. Beginning with Season of the Jew in 1986, New Zealand’s Maurice Shadbolt published three novels on the same subject as Ihimaera’s novel – settler–Maori wars of the nineteenth century. Australia’s convict-colony origins have been depicted in several novels by Thomas Keneally, including The Playmaker (1987), and in Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005), with later (Victorian) phases of exploration and settlement evocatively captured in Patrick White’s Voss (1957), Tim Winton’s Shallows (1984), and David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon (1993), among others. Even when such novels render indigenous peoples as shadowy, threatening, unknown “others” beyond the fringes of incipient civilization (reflecting the settler’s views at the time), they expand and update such limited perspectives through their often complex and sympathetic treatment of themes of place and identity, and of power and violent loss. As such, like all historical fictions, they have one eye on how their representations of the past accrue meaning in the present – vividly demonstrated in Remembering Babylon when the novel’s midnineteenth-century narrative of the changeling “black whitefellar” Gemmy Fairley is, in the final chapter, fast-forwarded to a vision of the place of “others” in the Australian polity during World War I and, implicitly, at its time of publication, not long after the 1988 bicentennial brought highprofile recognition to indigeneity and history. (Interestingly, 50 years before that anniversary, Australia’s sesquicentennial saw the publication of Xavier Herbert’s epic novel Capricornia, which also addresses in-betweenness and dispossession through a character divided between white and Aboriginal identities.) Iconic historical figures feature in some of these Australian fictions – the German explorer Ludwig Leichhardt becomes White’s Voss, and Grenville’s convict ancestor becomes The Secret River’s William Thornhill – as well as others such as White’s A Fringe of Leaves (1976), about the shipwrecked Eliza Fraser’s Aboriginal encounters, and Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), which gives a distinctive textual voice to
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HISTORICAL FICTION
the legendary outlaw Ned Kelly. The rebellious, fiercely individualistic streak that runs through the protagonists of many of these Australian historical novels – and others such as Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972) – indicates one way the genre can reflect and reinforce a national self-image: in this case, of Australia as the home of a proudly defiant and independent people. In Canada, historical novelists have frequently engaged with mythic national icons, including the Arctic explorer John Franklin (in Mordecai Richler’s Solomon Gursky was Here, 1989, and Rudy Wiebe’s A Discovery of Strangers, 1994), and the indigenous leaders Big Bear and Louis Riel (in Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear, 1973, and The Scorched Wood People, 1977). Addressing more recent Canadian history, Wayne Johnston has, in The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998), fictionalized the life of Joey Smallwood, the colorful Newfoundland premier who ushered the island into confederation in 1949. Less well-known historical figures are featured in such novels as Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1995), about the nineteenth-century accused murderess Grace Marks, Douglas Glover’s Elle (2003), about a sixteenth-century Frenchwoman stranded on an island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and Jane Urquhart’s The Stone Carvers (2001), whose protagonist is Walter Allward, creator of the Vimy Memorial which commemorates Canada’s World War I dead. The twentieth century’s great wars have prompted some of Canadian and Australian authors’ finest historical fictions. The importance of World War I to the self-fashioning of these young nations is captured in Timothy Findley’s The Wars (1977) and Malouf’s The Great World (1990), two prominent novels that capture the private intimacies as well as the public events of wars fought far from their respective home fronts; Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992) does likewise for World War II. One battle that was fought on the home front involved the dispossession and internment of Japanese Canadians as enemy aliens in western Canada during World War II, a previously marginalized history vividly rendered in Joy Kogawa’s novel Obasan (1981), which in subsequent years helped both to bring about a government apology and redress for the victims and, more broadly, to enhance Canadians’
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growing sense of their multicultural identity. The two World Wars’ varied effects on other colonial home fronts are evident in some important fictions from other former colonies. M. G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets (1994), for instance, shows how German–British enmity in World War I divided families and turned shopkeepers into spies across the border between Kenya and German East Africa. Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988) follows a young Jewish man’s flight from Nazi Germany to India just before World War II, and Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988) traces intricate relations between distant families, cities, and events during and after World War II; all three novels stress the contingency of borders and of national identities. Trinidad’s use as an American army base in the second war features prominently in V. S. Naipaul’s work. But in the three large regions of Africa, South Asia, and the West Indies, historical fiction has been more often concerned with the effects on individuals and collective identities of more local and national upheavals: slavery and its discontents; anti-colonial campaigns; and, in the post-independence period, moments of instability such as coups, civil wars, border conflicts, and states of emergency. In Africa, for instance, Nigeria’s Biafran War (1967–70) has recently been vividly and empathetically revisited by an author born several years after it ended: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). The losses and gains of Kenya’s Mau Mau Uprising in the 1950s, and the moral choices its violent divisions between black and white entailed, are explored in Ngu~gi~’s Weep Not, Child (1964) and A Grain of Wheat (1967), and later, from the outsider’s perspective of an Indian East African, in Vassanji’s The InBetween World of Vikram Lall (2003). In the Indian subcontinent, where the historical novel has been a dominant genre, the tumultuous events of the twentieth century have been fodder for some of its most notable English-language fiction. India’s fractious independence movement is represented allegorically (with intertextual reference to the Mahabharata epic) in Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel (1989) and, in a more conventionally realist rendering, in Manohar Malgonkar’s A Bend in the Ganges (1964), which ends at the moment of independence in 1947. That moment, the partition of India and
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Pakistan, and the ensuing religious factionalism that uprooted families, turned peaceable neighbors into mortal enemies, and cost thousands of innocent lives, dominates such novels as Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956), set in a Punjabi border village, and Bapsy Sidhwa’s IceCandy-Man (aka Cracking India) (1988), set in Lahore. The partition riots also feature in a moving early chapter of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995), whose main historical subject is India’s Emergency of 1975–7, told through the struggles of strangers brought together in Bombay. The Emergency marks the end-point of the panoramic, century-spanning narrative of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), India’s best-known and most acclaimed historical novel, which begins in 1915 in the independence movement’s early years and engages major events in India’s twentieth-century political history to 1978 through its narrator’s allegorical mirroring of them in his own tumultuous life. Rushdie’s magic-realist novel is paradigmatic of late twentieth-century historical fiction in its self-conscious foregrounding of the subjective process of remembering and recording the past – and the precariously unified narrative that results. It also exemplifies Fredric Jameson’s controversial claim that “all Third-World cultural productions,” especially novels, “necessarily” take the form of “national allegories” (69); while many exceptions to this blanket rule can be found, Rushdie’s text is clearly not one of them. In other novels, Rushdie casts a critical eye on the political elites of Pakistan (Shame, 1983), Kashmir (Shalimar the Clown, 2005), and both Renaissance Italy and Mughal India (The Enchantress of Florence, 2008). Sri Lanka’s distant past is the subject of Rosalind Mendis’s Nandhimitra: A Story of Ancient Ceylon (1952), published soon after independence, while the 1971 youth insurgency has inspired several later novels, including Ediriwira Sarachchandra’s Curfew and a Full Moon and James Goonewardene’s Acid Bomb Explosion, both published in 1978. Elsewhere in Asia, F. Sionil Jose’s Rosales Saga is a five-volume epic on Philippine history, focusing on class struggle and political corruption, which he began in the early 1960s, while Malaysia’s Lloyd Fernando, against the backdrop of race riots in 1950s Singapore and late-1960s Malaysia respectively, treats themes of national identity and religious and
ethnic difference in Scorpion Orchid (1976) and Green is the Colour (1993). Outside the colonial–postcolonial purview, Chinese writers in English have been drawn to post-revolution subjects such as the Korean War, in Ha Jin’s novel War Trash (2004), and the Cultural Revolution, in Anchee Min’s Red Azalea (1994) and subsequent novels; Min’s historical interests extend back to the nineteenth century, and the political machinations of the Empress Dowager Cixi, in Empress Orchid (2004) and Last Empress (2007). Since historical fiction often wrings meaning from a people’s most traumatic past experiences, it is not surprising that West Indian writers have privileged slavery and its aftermath as subjects. H. G. de Lisser’s early historical romance The White Witch of Rose Hall, published in 1929, is set during a Jamaican slave rebellion a century earlier. Rebellious female slaves are also at the center of Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts (1997), about the notorious Zong slave-drowning incident of 1781, and Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999), which begins with a mass suicide led by a female slave in 1824. David Dabydeen revisits the slave era in A Harlot’s Progress (1999), whose protagonist tells his story, in a conspicuously unreliable fashion, to abolitionists in eighteenth-century London; the early history of indenture, which replaced slavery after emancipation, is the subject of Dabydeen’s The Counting House (1996). While Beryl Gilroy’s Inkle and Yarico (1996) addresses European– Amerindian relations during the plantation era, George Lamming’s Natives of My Person (1971) harks back to early seventeenth-century settlement of the region. A large swath of time is covered in V. S. Reid’s novel New Day (1949), whose octogenarian narrator, John Campbell, covers nearly a century of Jamaican history in which he was directly involved, from the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion (when he was 8 years old) to independence in 1944. For Reid, the subject of nation building that so many historical fictions treat implicitly is placed front and center, firmly attached to the Campbell family saga. Important West Indian historical novels set in the first half of the twentieth century include Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), the story of a Trinidadian Indian Everyman’s lifelong struggle for independence, Erna Brodber’s Myal (1988), about spirit thievery and resistance in Jamaica, and Austin
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HISTORICAL FICTION
Clarke’s The Polished Hoe (2002), in which an elderly female servant confesses to murdering a plantation manager. One of the most famous West Indian historical novels, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), is set in Jamaica and Dominica just after the end of slavery; its intertextual, revisionist engagement with Charlotte Bront€e’s Jane Eyre puts it in company of a select group of prominent historical novels from around the postcolonial world that have offered contemporary perspectives on issues of race, nationality, power, and culture that are latent in certain canonical narratives through their most subordinated, oppressed characters (here Rochester’s “mad” colonial wife Bertha). Most notably, the South African J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) metafictionally revisits Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and his character Friday, Peter Carey gives a distinctly Australian spin to Dickens’s Great Expectations and his transported convict Magwitch in Jack Maggs (1997), and India’s Bharati Mukherjee breathes new life into Hester Prynne and other characters from Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (itself a historical novel) in Holder of the World (1993). Mukherjee’s idiosyncratic book is both a historical fiction and a speculative, futuristic one, as is fellow Indian expatriate Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), set variously in a near-future New York City, 1990s Calcutta, and a late nineteenth-century India in which a secret society guides the European “discovery” of how malaria is transmitted. As the Canadian critic Herb Wyile has argued, historical fictions are necessarily speculative insofar as they represent a past that is, by definition, not readily accessible; “instead of exhibiting retrospective certainty,” he writes, they are forced to speculate (p. xii). Because historians of both nonfictional and fictional persuasions share a common reliance on narrative to make meaning from the past (as Hayden White has influentially argued), because an incomplete archive of texts and oral stories that have survived from the past is our main source of knowledge about it, and because in the wake of structuralism and poststructuralism a semiotic gap between words and their referents must be recognized, historical fiction is increasingly inclined to foreground its own imperfect, partial conditions of creation through subjective and self-contradictory narrators, fragmented and
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multiply sourced narratives, and overt distortions and yawning gaps. While such metafictional novels (including above-mentioned works by Rushdie, Dabydeen, Kogawa, Wiebe, Vassanji, Carey, Coetzee, and others) may convey a postmodern skepticism toward history and historiography itself, the genre’s close ties to the nation (even among expatriate and diasporic writers), and the relative newness of postcolonial histories and literatures vis-a-vis those of Europe, keeps the referential impulse strong. As a haunting refrain in Brodber’s Myal puts it, “The half has never been told” (65). Many historical fictions are motivated by their authors’ belief that a formerly colonized people’s past has been represented partially (in both senses of the word): that a key to collective self-understanding, not to mention prime raw material for engaging stories, lies in the experiences of those outside the historian’s traditional focus on elites – the subalterns and slaves, women and children, peasants and other ordinary people caught up in historical forces they have little hope of influencing. SEE ALSO: Critical Fiction (BIF); Critical Theory and Fiction (WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Historical Fiction (BIF); Historiographic Metafiction (AF); Politics/ Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Southeast Asian Fiction (WF); Southern African Fiction (WF); Speculative Fiction (AF); Sri Lankan Fiction (WF); West African Fiction (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Achebe, C. (1988). Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965–1987. London: Heinemann. Boehmer, E. (2005). Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brodber, E. (1988). Myal. London: New Beacon. Jameson, F. (1986). Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism. Social Text, 15, 65–88. Hutcheon, L. (1988). A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge. Lukacs, G. (1983). The Historical Novel [1962]. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
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White, H. (1987). The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wyile, H. (2003). Speculative Fictions: Contemporary Canadian Novelists and the Writing of History. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Hodgins, Jack LINDA M. MORRA
Canadian writer Jack Hodgins evokes the local and the regional in his fiction; however, many of his characters are wanderers whose restlessness is curbed only by their return home to Vancouver Island, where most of his fiction is set, and their reconciliation with those left behind. Sometimes that return is fraught with apprehension, impeded by the distance generated by time, space, and conflict, but his protagonists often learn to connect with others again by revivifying collective memory and shared experiences. Hodgins thus attempts to strike a balance (and explore the tensions) between the cosmopolitan and the local. Although he specializes in conventional literary forms – the realist novel and short story – his characters are compelling, comic, and at times downright eccentric. Hodgins was born on October 3, 1938 in Comox, British Columbia, the landscape that serves as the imaginative context for much of his work. Vancouver Island remains his literal home – like many of his characters, he regularly returns to the place where he was raised. Although he left the hamlet of Merville to attend the University of British Columbia, where he completed a Bachelor of Education in 1961, he returned directly thereafter to Vancouver Island to teach high school in Nanaimo. Eighteen years later he relinquished that position to become a full-time writer. Hodgins has taken up the position of writer-in-residence at various universities across Canada, including Simon Fraser University (1977) and the University of Ottawa (1979–80 and 1981–3), and has given public lectures in countries such as Spain, Japan, Ireland, and Australia; he returned to Vancouver Island in 1983 to teach creative writing at the University of Victoria, from which he retired in 2002. The stories in his first publication, Spit Delaney’s Island (1976a), winner of the BC Book
Prize, faithfully represent West Coast geography – from fir trees to the Island highway to local cafes – as they simultaneously explore the lives of people who find themselves confronted by moments of great emotional and psychological intensity. The titular character, Spit Delaney, for example, is in the throes of a divorce precipitated by cataclysmic changes occurring elsewhere in his life; in “After the Season,” even after boasting that “no one could touch him,” the wandering Mr. Grey stumbles upon and is profoundly affected by the “mating ritual” of local inhabitants Morgan and Hallie. This collection was followed by another two, The Barclay Family Theatre (1981) and Damage Done by the Storm (2004). Hodgins has also produced seven novels. The Invention of the World (1977), which won the Gibson’s First Novel Award, and The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne (1979), which won a Governor General’s Award, are considered his most formally innovative novels in their use of magic realism. Resurrection, set in the mill town of Port Annie, tracks the life of Bourne, whose gifts of poetry and healing are resurrected by a sea nymph. The Invention relays the story of Donal Keneally, whose historic attempts to form a religious colony on Vancouver Island are later explored by Maggie Kyle as the possible source of her own origins. Returning home and searching for origins preoccupy characters in later novels: in The Honorary Patron (1987), which won a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Professor Jeffrey Crane comes back to Vancouver Island to host his hometown’s Shakespeare festival; in Broken Ground (1998a), Matt Pearson’s traumatic familial loss in Portuguese Creek reactivates an earlier war trauma that obliges him to leave, until he finally returns to its reaches to experience personal wholeness and forgiveness; the protagonist of Distance (2003) returns home to northern Vancouver Island because his father is dying. To reconcile with his father, an irresponsible alcoholic, however, he embarks on an epic journey to find his mother, who deserted him when he was a child, and thereafter returns to find his place again within his former community. Aside from his novels, Hodgins has also published a popular handbook to writing fiction, A Passion for Narrative (1993), one children’s book, Left Behind in Squabble Bay (1998), which traces how a young boy is initially eschewed and
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HOSAIN, ATTIA
then accepted by the community, and Over Forty in Broken Hill (1992). The latter, a source for other literary works including Distance, tracks his experiences in the Australian outback. For such contributions, Hodgins was awarded the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence and the Terasen Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. His work consistently showcases heroes whose “ever returning” journeys reflect the search for origins and the desire to begin anew. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Hannan, A. (ed.) (2008). Jack Hodgins: Essays on His Works. Toronto: Guernica. Hodgins, J. (1975). The Frontier Experience. Toronto: Macmillan. Hodgins, J. (1976a). Spit Delaney’s Island: Selected Stories. Toronto: Macmillan. Hodgins, J. (1976b). The West Coast Experience. Toronto: Macmillan. Hodgins, J. (1977). The Invention of the World: A Novel. Toronto: Macmillan. Hodgins, J. (1979). The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne; or A Word or Two on Those Port Annie Miracles. Toronto: Macmillan. Hodgins, J. (1981). The Barclay Family Theatre. Toronto: Macmillan. Hodgins, J. (1983). Beginnings: Samplings from a Long Apprenticeship: Novels which were Imagined, Written, Re-Written, Submitted, Rejected, Abandoned, and Supplanted. Toronto: Grand Union. Hodgins, J. (1987). The Honorary Patron. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Hodgins, J. (1990). Innocent Cities. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Hodgins, J. (1992). Over 40 in Broken Hill: Unusual Encounters in the Australian Outback. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Hodgins, J. (1993). A Passion for Narrative: A Guide for Writing Fiction. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Hodgins, J. (1995). The Macken Charm: A Novel. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Hodgins, J. (1998a). Broken Ground. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Hodgins, J. (1998b). Left Behind in Squabble Bay. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Hodgins, J. (2003). Distance: A Novel. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
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Hodgins, J. (2004). Damage Done by the Storm: Stories. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Hodgins, J., & New, W. H. (1972). Voice and Vision. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Jeffrey, D. (1989). Jack Hodgins and His Works. Toronto: ECW. Struthers, J. R. (1996). On Coasts of Eternity: Jack Hodgins’ Fictional Universe. Lantzville, BC: Oolichan.
Hosain, Attia KHURRAM N. KHURSHID
Attia Hosain (1913–98) is one of India’s foremost female English-language fiction writers of the twentieth century. Her writing is informed by the tensions between the cultures of India and the West, and the changing political and social landscape of pre-independence India. Hosain was born in Lucknow, India, in 1913. Her family belonged to Oudh’s feudal aristocracy, an elite group of landholders that enjoyed the patronage of the British government. Hosain’s father had been educated at Cambridge and London’s Middle Temple, and her mother belonged to a family of distinguished intellectuals. She learned Persian, Arabic, and Urdu at home, and received an English liberal education at Lucknow’s Isabella Thoburn College. Her writing career started in the 1930s when she began to publish in The Pioneer and The Statesman, leading English-language newspapers of British India. Around the same time, she was influenced by the left-wing ideas of the Progressive Writers’ Movement, a group of leading Indian writers of the period. Hosain was also drawn to the Indian Freedom Movement and the nationalism of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Early in 1947, she moved to England with her husband, who was working for the Indian High Commission in London. When partition came later in the same year, she chose to stay on in England instead of moving to India or opting for Pakistan. In England Hosain worked as journalist, broadcaster, and writer, hosted a program on BBC’s Eastern Service, and appeared on television and in the West End theatre. Although she made England her home, she never severed ties with her own culture, and her nostalgia for her Indian past was always poignant. She once said, “One is a stranger everywhere in the deeper area of one’s mind and
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spirit, except where one was born and brought up” (Desai, p. xiii). In 1953, Hosain published Phoenix Fled, a slim volume of short stories, elegant vignettes that traverse the cultural, political, and economic spectrum of pre-partition India. Phoenix Fled is remarkable for its representation of marginalized social groups, including women, domestic servants, prostitutes, and untouchables, which are drawn with deep compassion and insight. Hosain obliquely approaches the theme of India’s partition in two stories, “After the Storm” and “Phoenix Fled,” in which the violence and bloodshed of partition are filtered respectively through the fragmented and suppressed memory of a young child, and the clouded perceptions of an old woman. This understated evocation succeeds in conveying the complexity of emotions that the trauma of partition promptes in many Indian psyches. A number of stories explore the plight of married women caught in a patriarchal society, which places custom and tradition above human happiness. The complexity of the East–West encounter is also a recurrent theme. In “The First Party,” the shy wife of an anglicized Indian is unable to blend into his circle of superficially Westernized friends, where the women are “grotesque mimics” of their English counterparts, and their speech is a “bilingual patchwork” (21). Hosain presents a moving portrayal of the lives of domestic servants, spotlighting the insidious class divisions of Indian society, and the dignity and goodness of the poor in the face of hardship. Phoenix Fled also unmasks with refined irony the pseudo-intellectual armchair liberals of Indian society, and Indian officials who behave like the departed colonists, revealing the fine gradations and many fissures of class, economic, political, and religious identity in Indian society. Mulk Raj Anand described Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column as “one of the most sensitive novels in Indian English writing” (p. xi). Published in 1961 and set between 1932 and 1952 in Lucknow, the novel traces the development of its heroine from childhood to maturity, against a rich backdrop of Lucknow’s exquisite aristocratic culture as well as the social and political upheavals that marked this period in Indian history. Orphaned at a young age, Laila is brought up in the elite and tradition-bound feudal household of her grandfather. Hosain conjures up in vivid detail
the warmth and intimacy of a large joint family household inhabited by cousins, aunts, uncles, guests, and servants. After her grandfather’s death, his British-educated son allows Laila a college education, and relaxes the traditional decorum of gender segregation in the household. While her aunt and cousin adopt mimic Western identities, Laila searches for an authentic self that would meaningfully synthesize the contesting influences of tradition and modernity. She eventually rebels against patriarchal authority and Indian society’s rigid class hierarchy by choosing her own husband, a man who belongs to a lower social rank than her family. With the turmoil of Partition and independence, Lucknow’s old feudal order is shaken and the family disintegrates, some of its members migrating to Pakistan. An indictment of patriarchy, feudalism, and Partition, Hosain’s novel also “recasts and renegotiates Indian nationalism,” presenting an alternative view of the nation from the unique subject position of its female protagonist (Needham 99). Hosain’s text also provides an insider’s perspective on the “purdah culture of Muslims in northern India,” suggesting that even when women remove the physical veil, an epistemological veil may still remain (Palkar 110). Attia Hosain is one of the pioneers of Indian and Pakistani English fiction. She died in London on January 25, 1998; an unfinished novel and her diaries are yet unpublished, housed in the Attia Hosain Trust at Newnham College, Cambridge. SEE ALSO: Anand, Mulk Raj (WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Pakistani Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Anand, M. R. (1979). Attia Hosain: A Profile. In A. Hosain, Sunlight on a Broken Column. New Delhi: Arnold, pp. iii–xvi. Desai, A. (1988). Introduction. In A. Hosain, Phoenix Fled. London: Virago, pp. vii–xxi. Hosain, A. (1953). Phoenix Fled. London: Virago. Hosain, A. (1961). Sunlight on a Broken Column. New Delhi: Penguin. Kaul, R. K., & Jain, J. (2001). Attia Hosain: A Diptych Volume. Jaipur: Rawat.
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HOSPITAL, JANETTE TURNER
Needham, A. D. (1993). Multiple Forms of National Belonging: Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column. Modern Fiction Studies, 39(1), pp. 93–111. Palkar, S. (1996). Beyond Purdah: Sunlight on a Broken Column. In J. Jain, & A. Amin (eds.), Margins of Erasure: Purdah in the Subcontinental Novel. New Delhi: Sterling, pp. 106–18.
Hospital, Janette Turner DAVID CALLAHAN
The novels and short stories of Janette Turner Hospital combine high-spirited attention to the challenge of representation with an investigation of the complexity and range of references available to the dislocated, all articulated through a prose style that is as sumptuous as it is selfconsciously playful. These interests are further inflected by a focus on violence of various sorts and how we deal with it, both when we are confronted by violence and when we need to talk about it. Hospital was born in Melbourne on November 12, 1942 and moved to Brisbane in 1950. She associates herself intensely with subtropical Queensland, despite the numerous moves that her life has involved. After leaving for the United States in 1967, Hospital has lived principally in Boston, Kingston (Ontario), Kerala (India) and, since 1999, in Columbia (South Carolina). She has returned frequently to Australia, and also spent lengthy periods in France and England. Hospital’s first book, The Ivory Swing, won Canada’s prestigious Seal Books First Novel Award in 1982 with a depiction of a Canadian woman and her family in India, along with her constant struggle to define the limits between appreciation of the local culture and the ethical principles that cannot be sacrificed to cultural difference, especially those concerning the relation of women to power in Kerala and Canada. The Tiger in the Tiger Pit (1983) deals with family tensions in Massachusetts, and again male power comes under scrutiny, this time in a less linear narrative in which different points of view gradually construct and decompose family histories. It was with Borderline (1985) that Hospital revealed an ambition and a range of interests that suggested major stature. From its electrifying opening page until its puzzling end, the novel is
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a complex intellectual thriller that is also a dizzying examination of the contract between writer and reader, a meditation on the power and limitations of art in general, and a teasing enactment of the ambiguous operations of memory. Charades (1988) is another tour de force in which the search for a father in Boston and Toronto becomes the revelation of Charade’s three “mothers” back in Australia, through the different ways of reconstructing origins enacted by theoretical physics and family history. Charade echoes Scheherazade as she entrances a physics professor with her mixture of sexual forwardness, surprising juxtapositions, and puzzling indeterminacy. The Last Magician (1992) presents an even headier mixture of narrative challenges to the reader in its examination of the possibilities of representation in a world where those in power attempt to marginalize those they have decided belong in the grimy Sydney underworld called The Quarry. The novel contains a pungent condemnation of the arbitrating class while offering versions of creative responses to the controlling mechanisms of official histories. It also includes an intense and harrowing depiction of the operation of children’s social hierarchies. Inland Australia is the backdrop for Oyster (1996), in which the rural suspicion of outsiders becomes intertwined with the apocalyptic hysteria of fire-and-brimstone Christianity and the paranoid tyranny of a hypocritical cult leader, to the point where the community destroys itself, implicitly leaving the land for the Aborigines who were displaced originally. Begun before 2001, Due Preparations for the Plague (2003a) deals with the repercussions of a terrorist event that is set in motion by American intelligence and then gets out of control. The Plague, the event’s code name, also evokes the contemporary spread of official paranoia in which everybody becomes an object of suspicion and control. The novel chronicles the efforts of individuals to see that the official story does not prevail, and again the ability of human beings to tell stories in limiting situations is affirmed. Orpheus Lost (2007) continues with these interests via its interweaving of the interpretative protocols of music, mathematics, codes, and decoding in a tale of a mathematics postgraduate in Boston and her Jewish-Hungarian Australian musician partner who attempts to reconnect with his
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Lebanese father via music, only for both of them to be caught up in the alternative codes of jihad and American intelligence. All of these issues, both thematic and representational, feature brilliantly in her three books of short stories. Dislocations (1986) tends to focus on types of cultural, class, or imaginative dislocation and the opportunities they offer, in Canada, Australia, and the US. Isobars (1990) focuses mostly on violence and the politics of witness that affect the paradoxical and incomplete but often creative ways we deal with it, while North of Nowhere, South of Loss (2003b) evokes the ontological conundrums generated by our existence in memory, as well as the incomplete bargains we make with time and morality, although all of Hospital’s interests can be found in each volume. At first associated with the increased attention paid to writers from Canada and Australia, Hospital’s interests lie more broadly in the pleasures and dangers of representation, often in conjunction with the questions, pain, or opportunities thrown up by displacement or violence. Always aiming at the big questions, her by turns sonorous and playful prose has concentrated more recently on the US, where many of those questions are asked and answered in ways that reverberate globally. SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); Canadian Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Callahan, D. (2009). Rainforest Narratives: The Work of Janette Turner Hospital. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Critique (2007). Essays about Janette Turner Hospital [special issue], 48(4). Samuels, S. (ed.) (1998). Janette Turner Hospital. London: Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies. Hospital, J. Turner (1982). The Ivory Swing. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Hospital, J. Turner (1983). The Tiger in the Tiger Pit. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Hospital, J. Turner (1985). Borderline. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Hospital, J. Turner (1986). Dislocations. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
Hospital, J. Turner (1988). Charades. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Hospital, J. Turner (1990). Isobars. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Hospital, J. Turner (1992). The Last Magician. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Hospital, J. Turner (1996). Oyster. Sydney: Knopf. Hospital, J. Turner (2003a). Due Preparations for the Plague. Sydney: Fourth Estate. Hospital, J. Turner (2003b). North of Nowhere, South of Loss. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Hospital, J. Turner (2007). Orpheus Lost. Sydney: Fourth Estate.
Hulme, Keri ANTJE M. RAUWERDA
Novelist, poet, and short story writer Keri Hulme won the Booker Prize in 1985 for The Bone People, a novel that had already won the 1984 Mobil Pegasus Award (allocated to Maori fiction that year) and the 1984 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction. The novel proved to be significant in opening international eyes to Maori writing, but it also became a locus for critical consideration of what constitutes Maoriness (of Hulme’s eight great-grandparents only one is Maori), as well as of the possibilities for integrating Maori and Pakeha (white) histories in the culture of contemporary New Zealand. Hulme, the eldest of six children, was born on March 9, 1947 in Christchurch to a father who was a first-generation New Zealander from Lancashire and a mother who was part Orkney Scots and part Maori (Kai Tahu, Kati Mamoe). Hulme settled in to her writing career after trying her hand at tobacco picking, law (at Canterbury University), fishing, cooking fish and chips, and TV production, among other things. She now writes, paints, beachcombs, fishes, hunts for mushrooms, and lives in a house she built herself – all on the coast in Okarito, a place that connects her to her own history (her family vacationed there when she was a child) and the Maori heritage with which she identifies so strongly. Hulme’s passion for coastal landscapes, and their Maori significance, appears in most of her writing; it is vividly commemorated in Homeplaces (1989), in which Hulme’s stories appear alongside Robin Morrison’s photographs. In Hulme’s collections of shorter writing, poetry and prose are often mingled. In The
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Silences Between (Moeraki Conversations) (1982), The Windeater/Te Kaihau (1987), Strands (1992), and Stonefish (2004), she is faithful to certain recurrent themes: “fishing” for spiritual and cultural sustenance as well as actual food; the tension between life lived alone and connections to family and heritage; the insights provided by alcohol, dreams, and ghosts; Maori mythology played out in contemporary contexts; and experimentation with language itself (she dissects English, engages words and their multiple meanings, and includes Maori vocabulary). Hulme repeatedly returns to her “Winesongs” in both poems and prose. Similarly, her characters and ideas sometimes take shape in one work and surface in more detail later. For instance, The Windeater/Te Kaihau includes a story in which Hulme describes the parents of Simon (the Pakeha boy in The Bone People); The Silences Between contains a poem that explicitly describes Simon (“He Moemoea”) as well as one that describes the connection between bones and Maori heritage (“Silence . . . on another marae”). The latter therefore intimates one meaning behind the title of The Bone People: how one finds the heritage of a culture – its lost bones – when that culture has been so damaged by colonialism. Her 1985 poem sequence Lost Possessions is a notable departure from her other work in its chronicling of the experiences of a university lecturer kidnapped and held in confinement until, presumably, he dies (though even here one sees Hulme’s interest in contrasting aloneness with family integration). Among her stories and poems, The Bone People (1985a) stands out as Hulme’s longest and most influential work. (Her novel-in-progress “Bait,” which has been anticipated since 1992, and its twin “On the Shadow Side,” may match it in both regards if Hulme’s slowness in writing them is anything to go by: she took 12 years to write the much acclaimed Bone People.) In The Bone People, Hulme uses language to position her novel at the postcolonial intersection of Maoriness and Englishness; through the mingling of languages she suggests possibilities for reconciling divergent cultures and decentering the oppressive power of Pakeha colonialism (and here, as in collections like Stonefish, a glossary is provided). Her text is also interwoven with Maori myth. In fact, The Bone People has been celebrated for its presentation of traditional Maori stories in the form of
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European epic. In addition, despite Kerewin Holmes’s self-professed sexlessness and reclusiveness (both features which have invited comparisons with Hulme herself), the novel characterizes Holmes as a strong female hero. However, it has also met with more concerned responses to the violence Simon endures (being beaten nearly to death by Joe, his Maori foster-father). Even though The Bone People ends positively with a reunion, the question remains: how much healing (of the boy and of the rift between Maori and Pakeha) has taken place? SEE ALSO: Indigenous Fiction (WF); New Zealand Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Dever, M. (1989). Violence as Lingua Franca: Keri Hulme’s The Bone People. World Literature Written in English, 29(2), 23–35. Fee, M. (1989). Why C. K. Stead Didn’t Like Keri Hulme’s The Bone People: Who Can Write as Other? Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada, 1, 11–32. Henke, S. (2006). Constructing the Female Hero: Keri Hulme’s The Bone People. In B. Bennett & D. Haskell (eds.), Myths, Heroes and Anti-Heroes: Essays on the Literature and Culture of the Asia-Pacific Region. Perth: University of Western Australia, pp. 89–97. Hulme, K. (1982). The Silences Between (Moeraki Conversations). Auckland: Auckland University Press. Hulme, K. (1985a). The Bone People. London: Picador. Hulme, K. (1985b). Lost Possessions. Victoria: Victoria University Press. Hulme, K. (1987). The Windeater/Te Kaihau. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Hulme, K. (1989). Homeplaces (photos by R. Morrison). London: Hodder and Stoughton. Hulme, K. (1992). Strands. Auckland: Auckland University Press. Hulme, K. (2004). Stonefish. Wellington: Huia. O’Brien, S. (1990). Raising Silent Voices: The Role of the Silent Child in an Imaginary Life and the Bone People. SPAN, 30, 79–91. Rauwerda, A. M. (2005). White Whipping Boy: Simon in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 40(2), 23–42. Stead, C. K. (1985). Keri Hulme’s The Bone People and the Pegasus Award for Maori Literature. Ariel, 16(4), 101–8.
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Wilentz, G. (1995). Instruments of Change: Healing Cultural Dis-Ease in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People. Literature and Medicine, 14(1), 127–45.
Humor and Satire ALISON TORON
Humor and satire are highly subjective and culturally contingent modes of discourse; they depend largely on context and reception in specific discursive communities for their effect. Although satire and humor are not inherently subversive or inherently liberating, and indeed may be used to reinforce the established order (as in the case of a racist or sexist joke), twentieth-century authors have often relied on their radical possibilities. Their ability to challenge the status quo and dismantle hierarchies while avoiding a direct, full-frontal attack has made satire and humor appropriate venues for such oppositional literary and political movements as postcolonialism, feminism, anti-racism, socialism, and queer activism. Much twentieth-century fiction that has at its core a critique of the ideologies of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality uses humor as a kind of double-edged discourse whereby seemingly light exchanges paradoxically allow more serious subjects to be discussed. Because humor and satire are too diverse to be defined within generic conventions, and because they often appear in literature that is not wholly humorous or satirical, they are best understood as distinct literary modes of representation working within genres such as the novel rather than as discrete genres with recognizable formal features. While they often intersect – satire is frequently humorous, but humor is not always satiric – each has its own conventions, strategies, and intentions. Humor may evoke laughter or amusement through the juxtaposition of incongruous elements, or through the exaggeration or transformation of accepted knowledge. Satire mocks individuals, institutions, and ideas usually associated with power and influence; in so doing, satirists reveal vice and folly. Satire is often seen to have a corrective purpose, exposing the shortcomings of people and societies so that their flaws can be amended. It uses a variety of tools to achieve its ends, including humor, irony, word play, puns, hyperbole, distortion, and oxymoron. Yet despite
their sometimes serious objectives, both satire and humor are often pleasurable elements of literary works. Some commentators claim that the popularity of satire declined drastically in the twentieth century, partly because of the kind of moral relativism that prevents the unambiguous critiques of social deviance that were possible in the ancient Roman milieu of Horace and Juvenal, or in the eighteenth century – both great ages of satire. However, satire dominated numerous literary works in the twentieth century; satirical elements often appeared in novels, short stories, plays, and poems. Arthur Pollard’s (1970) claim that satire always has an identifiable victim has been criticized by those who see twentiethcentury satire as open-ended rather than a direct attack on targets; Dustin Griffin (1994) stresses satire’s ambivalence, pointing out that satire tends to ask more questions than it answers and arguing that it is a form of inquiry that remains silent regarding its effect on political or social norms. Irony, also an open-ended form, is a frequent weapon of the satirist. Linda Hutcheon (1994) has astutely analyzed irony as an interpretive gap, where the space between what is said and what is unsaid becomes rife with the possibilities of new and unexpected meanings. Irony is not always amusing, but humor is often ironic. Like irony and satire, humor is often found in literary texts that are not exclusively humorous. Whereas theories of satire and irony abound, humor is notoriously difficult to define and remains an under-theorized topic in literary studies. As John Morreall (1987) succinctly summarizes in his introduction to The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, in the past, theories of humor have ranged from theories of superiority (e.g., Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Hobbes) to relief (e.g., Herbert Spencer and Sigmund Freud) to incongruity (e.g., Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Søren Kierkegaard). These theories refer to laughter as scorn, as venting of excess energy, and as clashing of expectations, respectively. Morreall himself argues that laughter results from a pleasant psychological shift or sudden change in perspective. In her influential book Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse, Susan Purdie (1993) understands the joke as a way to both establish and transgress boundaries. The
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ability to engage confidently in this discourse is thus crucial to one’s ability to function in a society. Humor and satire’s politically subversive potential make them particularly salient in countries with a history of colonialism. Postcolonial themes and concerns such as marginalization, hybridity, othering, diasporic identities, mimicry, and “writing back” find clever expression in humorous and satirical texts by postcolonial writers. Postcolonial humor exposes the contingency of any kind of power by making its agents objects of ridicule. Rather than nostalgically pining for an unattainable past, postcolonial satire exposes and protests against oppressive historical conditions and their contemporary consequences. Satire plays a large role in postcolonial fiction because both share oppositional goals; satire is often seen as a tool to free readers and audiences from Eurocentric epistemology and ideology through its openly critical stance and direct engagement with the world. Satire from colonies of invasion such as India, Nigeria, or Trinidad tends to be more overt and virulent in its critique of historical and ongoing oppressions, while settler-invader colonies such as Canada, Australia, and South Africa have a more ambivalent relationship to their imperial centers. Canada produced increasingly prominent and internationally recognized fiction in the twentieth century, in which humor and satire play a large part. Stephen Leacock has long been considered the archetypal Canadian humorist; works such as Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) have influenced generations of humorists and satirists. His high burlesque style – writing about insignificant subjects in an elevated way – accentuates the triviality of his subject matter. Leacock’s gentle and affectionate satire reveals the follies of smalltown life, with its lack of privacy and bumbling public figures, but also accepts these shortcomings because the alternative – cold, anonymous urban existence – is considered far worse. The Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour is awarded annually to a Canadian humorist, honoring both Leacock’s legacy and humor’s prominence in Canadian fiction. Other well-known Canadian male writers who use humor and/or satire include W. O. Mitchell, Mordecai Richler, and Robert Kroetsch. Mitchell’s much loved novel Who Has Seen the Wind (1947) and his long-running CBC
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radio series Jake and the Kid (1950–6) evoke the beauty of the Canadian prairies while humorously mapping the foibles of his unique and flawed characters. From the perspective of the working-class Jewish minority in Montreal, Richler lampoons WASP sensibilities and virulently satirizes falsity and pretension of various sorts. Cocksure (1968) attacks a soulless and morally bankrupt entertainment industry and yearns for a firm moral code. St. Urbain’s Horseman (1971) and Joshua Then and Now (1980) satirize the mores of upper-class Montreal society and its Jewish ghetto. Sharing Richler’s distinct sense of place, Robert Kroetsch humorously gives voice to the Canadian prairies, particularly in The Studhorse Man (1969), Gone Indian (1973), and What the Crow Said (1973). Bawdy, raucous, and exuberantly postmodern, these novels parody literary genres such as the western and the quest narrative, often employing hyperbole and word play. Margaret Atwood, arguably Canada’s most internationally respected author, is renowned for her razor-sharp wit; like other Canadian women fiction writers, she uses humor to challenge hierarchies. With a unique combination of parody, satire, humor, and irony, Atwood deconstructs the sexual politics between men and women, decries the inequities in global power politics, and laments human-led destruction of the natural world. The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is a dystopian satire of both ultra-conservative religious fundamentalism and extreme views of gender, imagining a world in which women are valued only for their ability to reproduce. Dry humor and virulent satire enable Atwood to explore the intersection of feminist and environmentalist discourses in her other speculative fiction, Oryx and Crake (2003), which connects the sexual exploitation of young girls to the reckless use of genetic engineering. Like Atwood, Carol Shields uses humor and satire in ways that alternate between laughter and indignation. The Pulitzer Prize-winning The Stone Diaries (1993) uses techniques borrowed from autobiography (photographs, family trees, descriptions of births, marriages, and deaths) to humorously celebrate the ordinary in women’s lives. Alice Munro shares this eye for detail; like Leacock and Robertson Davies, Canada’s most famous short story writer is renowned for her often humorous depictions of everyday life in rural Ontario. Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women
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(1971) parodies the Bildungsroman through its subversion of the form; Munro’s text is marked by major events in Del Jordan’s life, but they are often presented satirically, such as when Del performs a barking seal imitation at the moment of seduction with an older man. Like women writers who critique gender discrimination, many Aboriginal writers in Canada use humor and satire to depict the experiences of marginalized peoples. Eden Robinson, for instance, uses stereotypes to undermine assumptions about Native peoples in her satirical novel Monkey Beach (2000). Thomas King combines his insider knowledge of indigenous communities with his mastery of critical theory to create literary hybrids that blend the oral tradition and the written word in clever and innovative ways. Green Grass, Running Water (1993), for instance, employs a trickster figure, parodies the western genre, and puns on the names of Christopher Columbus’s ships; the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria become a Nissan, a Pinto, and a Karmann Gia, thereby destabilizing the historical importance given to Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World. Non-Aboriginal writers such as Wayne Johnston also use the position of marginalized communities within the nation to undermine power structures. The humorous and satiric voice of an entirely fictional character effectively hijacks Johnston’s narrative of a reallife Newfoundland premier’s rise to power in The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998). Like Canada, Australia and New Zealand are settler-invader colonies that have produced many writers who use satire and humor to distance themselves from the colonial center while maintaining ties to its literary tradition. Miles Franklin’s autobiographical novel My Brilliant Career (1901) mobilizes irony and tongue-incheek humor to subvert the generic expectation that autobiographies be told in a linear manner and courtship plots resolve with marriage. Peter Carey, one of Australia’s most successful novelists, skillfully evokes (post)colonial meanings through his subtle use of humorous metaphor. In Oscar and Lucinda (1988), clergyman Oscar Hopkins attempts to transport a glass church through the nineteenth-century Australian bush. As Elleke Boehmer points out, “The fragility and preposterous incongruity of this object reflect the ambition, artifice, and invasive profligacy of
the colonial mission of which Oscar composes a small part” (16). Patrick White favors satire, particularly in his novels of the 1960s, Riders in the Chariot (1961) and The Solid Mandala (1966), which condemn consumerism and middle-class morality in Australia’s postwar suburban landscape. Thea Astley also satirizes middle-class complacency as well as gender biases in her novels; works such as The Acolyte (1972) undermine the prominence given to writers and other “great men” of Australia. In The Carpathians (1988), Janet Frame ridicules the New Zealand Tourist Board for exploiting the Maori legend of the Memory Flower to attract visitors. Her satiric effects are multiplied and complicated by the many texts within texts that Frame employs within the frame of her novel. Satirical novels dealing with Aboriginal themes tend to take a more hardline approach, understandably given the history of oppression and outright genocide against Aboriginal people. Mudrooroo’s satirical postcolonial novel Dr. Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (1983) takes aim at the colonizers who destroyed the indigenous population of Tasmania. One of the text’s most obvious satiric targets is Robinson, the wellmeaning missionary who represents the triple power of race, religion, and colonialism. Satire and humor from colonies of invasion often take an angrier and more overtly oppositional tone that directly addresses questions of colonial power, resistance, and complicity. In the West Indies, H. G. de Lisser’s early twentiethcentury political satire is generally seen as socially conservative in its disapproval of mixed-race relationships. V. S. Naipaul is considered to have inherited de Lisser’s satiric bite; although he rejects the “satirist” label, his prose style and his tendency to look at his society with an unflinching – and sometimes unkind – eye have cemented his status as a foremost practitioner of satire. Naipaul’s harsh critiques of West Indians, and of the postcolonial world generally, have prompted some scholars to accuse him of internalized racism. His early novels such as The Suffrage of Elvira (1958) and A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) are both satiric and humorous; their humor arises from their vibrant depiction of Trinidadian life and the gap between aspiration and achievement that they see as innate to the region. Later, The Mimic Men (1967) satirized
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what Naipaul saw as the failings of postcolonial politics with more bitterness and less compassion. Sam Selvon has also famously explored the lives of non-white individuals in unwelcoming milieus; novels such as The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Moses Ascending (1975) humorously and satirically portray the exploits of expatriate West Indians in London. Selvon criticizes the racism and dislocation experienced by non-whites in the mother country while at the same time painting hilarious portraits of individual migrants. In African literature, humor is less prevalent, but satire is often used to expose both the legacies of colonial oppression and internal social ills. Chinua Achebe exposes the corrupting effects of flawed systems on individuals in his most satiric novel, A Man of the People (1966), which takes aim at neocolonialism in Nigeria while also chastising the Igbo community for falling prey to the corrupting effects of power. A satirist equal in stature to Achebe is Wole Soyinka. Although best known as a dramatist, Soyinka has written successful novels; The Interpreters (1965) examines the political dilemmas faced by the youth of Soyinka’s generation shortly after Nigeria’s independence. T. M. Aluko of Nigeria satirizes Western control of African resources in his novel One Man, One Matchet (1964) by using a cocoa plantation as an ideological battleground. Ayi Kwei Armah explores the theme of postcolonial disillusionment in his novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), creating a scathing critique of materialism and the betrayal of community by unscrupulous Ghanaian politicians hungry for power. Fellow Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo also condemns social inequity in her fiction, but her satire includes a gendered component that exposes women’s doubly precarious position in postcolonial African society. A staunch Marxist, Ngu~gi~ wa Thiong’o also satirizes the recreation of a ruling class in African society. His novels A Grain of Wheat (1967) and Devil on the Cross (1982) both condemn, using different literary conventions, the emergence of a neocolonial ruling elite in Kenya. In India, R. K. Narayan’s The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961) narrates the humorous story of a bully attempting to exert his will over a mildmannered protagonist, allegorically representing India’s struggle against the colonizing West. Rohinton Mistry, an inheritor of Narayan’s understatedly clever rhetorical style, also often
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recounts the struggles of a good Everyman confronting a corrupt and cruel world; in Such a Long Journey (1991) and A Fine Balance (1995), Mistry demonstrates a compassionate view of India’s Parsi community even as he recounts their foibles. India’s leading satirist is Salman Rushdie, who combines comic hopefulness with brooding despair as he explores questions of postcolonial identity. His exuberant, highly acclaimed magicrealist novel Midnight’s Children (1981) follows the major events in twentieth-century Indian history through the voice of Saleem Sinai, a telepathic “midnight’s child” born at the moment of India’s independence and partition. A hybrid of forms that revels in its excess, the novel is a comic epic that utilizes both satire (of major political figures such as Indira Gandhi) and humor (ranging from clever word play to slapstick) to suggest that India’s complexity always exceeds what is said about it. In his allegorical novel Shame (1983), Rushdie turned his unflinching gaze to Pakistan, where the political period between the late 1960s and early 1980s become fodder for Rushdie’s most sustained satire, exposing Pakistan’s ruling class and its violent authoritarianism. The Satanic Verses (1988) demonstrates the very real dangers of political satire. The novel’s representations of Islam prompted accusations of blasphemy, culminating in Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issuing a fatwa against Rushdie. The “Rushdie affair,” while generating intense public debate about free speech, religious faith, and authorial intention, also represents an extreme moment in which metaphorical weapons were met by physical weapons – the pen by the sword – thus demonstrating the very real powers of satire. Inheriting Rushdie’s magic realism and penchant for intertextuality is India’s Arundhati Roy, whose novel The God of Small Things (1997) revolves around a set of repeated images and unique linguistic creations, creating a distinctive fragmented style that finds humor amid virulent critiques of caste and gender inequality. Like the Singaporean writer Catherine Lim, Roy writes about forbidden love as a way to represent larger social inequalities, combining humor and serious social criticism to powerful effect. SEE ALSO: Censorship and Fiction (WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Indigenous Fiction (WF);
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Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ball, J. C. (2003). Satire and the Postcolonial Novel: V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie. New York: Routledge. Barreca, R. (ed.) (1992). New Perspectives on Women and Comedy. Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach. Boehmer, E. (1995). Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Connery, B. A., & Combe, K. (eds.) (1995). Theorizing Satire: Essays in Literary Criticism. New York: St. Martin’s. Critcheley, S. (2002). On Humor. London: Routledge. Dvorak, M. (2006). Margaret Atwood’s Humor. In C. A. Howells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 114–29. Elliot, R. C. (1960). The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Euba, F. (1989). Archetypes, Imprecators, and Victims of Fate: Origins and Developments of Satire in Black Drama. New York: Greenwood. Griffin, D. (1994). Satire: A Critical Reintroduction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Hutcheon, L. (1994). Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Practice of Irony. New York: Routledge. Morreall, J. (ed.) (1987). The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. Albany: SUNY Press. Ngu~gi~ wa, Thiong’o (1972). Wole Soyinka, Aluko and the Satirical Voice. In Ngu~gi~ (ed.), Homecoming: Essays on African Literature, Culture and Politics. New York: Lawrence Hill, pp. 55–66. Paulson, R. (ed.) (1971). Satire: Modern Essays in Criticism. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Pollard, A. (1970). Satire. London: Methuen. Purdie, S. (1993). Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Reichl, S., & Stein, M. (2005). Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Taylor, D. H. (ed.) (2006). Me Funny. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre. Test, G. (1991). Satire: Spirit and Art. Tampa: University of South Florida Press.
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I Ihimaera, Witi JUNIPER ELLIS
Witi Ihimaera’s 1973 novel Tangi launched him as the first published Maori novelist and received New Zealand’s premier book award, the Wattie/ Montana Book of the Year. Ihimaera’s publications include nine novels, six short story collections, a play, three children’s books, and six edited volumes of Maori writing. Central to his writing is a living storehouse of traditions including tribal affiliations with the Te Whanau-a-Kai, Te Aitanga-a-Mahaki, Rongowhakaata, and Ngati Porou people. Ihimaera, also known as Witi Ihimaera Smiler, is one of the most prominent Maori writers and one of only two three-time winners of the Wattie/Montana Award. Ihimaera was born on February 7, 1944 in Gisborne, New Zealand. After working as a newspaper writer, he completed a bachelor’s degree at Victoria University in 1971. Tangi caught the eye of New Zealand’s prime minister and helped inaugurate Ihimaera’s 16-year career as a diplomat. Since 1990 he has taught at Auckland University. Ihimaera’s work is founded on a vital sense of place. His early books – such as Tangi, the short story collection Pounamu, Pounamu (1972), and the novel Whanau (1974) – present lyrical narrative mappings of ancestral lands, of genealogy, and of cosmology. The sacred meeting house Rongopai, the village Waituhi, and the town Gisborne form the backbone of these early celebrations of Maori culture and strength. These books offer affectionate portraits of quirky recurring characters, as does the later Bulibasha: King of
the Gypsies (1994), which presents an exuberant, often comic rivalry between families in Waituhi. Ihimaera’s later works present Maori history with an increasing sense of urgency. The Matriarch, winner of Ihimaera’s second Wattie/Montana Award, uses a second-person narrative to confront Pakeha, or European-descended, readers. Drawing upon sources such as newspaper accounts, written and oral histories, myths, prayers, chants, and songs, The Matriarch rewrites New Zealand history, decentering Pakeha perspectives and focusing on Maori resistance in nineteenth-century colonial New Zealand wars, as well as other settings. Historical figures including parliamentarian Wi Pere and millenarian prophet Te Kooti assume starring roles in staking Maori claims to their homelands. Both The Matriarch (1986) and its sequel, The Dream Swimmer (1997), emphasize the spiritual and political claims Maori have to the land. The families Ihimaera portrays communicate with one another across generations, using stories, myths, and dreams to transmit sacred knowledge. The characters then bear an ancestral charge to reclaim land that was alienated illegally. This call for solidarity recurs in thirtieth-anniversary rewrites of Ihimaera’s first three books: Pounamu, Pounamu (2003), Whanau II (2004), and Tangi and its sequel, The Return (published as The Rope of Man, 2005). The new versions emphasize historical and personal trauma and urge the righting of wrongs through such narratives and by renewing legal claims to the land. While celebrating Maori traditions, Ihimaera also shows how women, gays, and lesbians have
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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not always been granted the respect they warrant. In The Matriarch, Artemis Riripeti Mahana must fight for the right to speak on a traditional marae, or meeting place. Yet Ihimaera’s women often embody the tribe’s strength and identity. Nights in the Gardens of Spain (1995) focuses on a Pakeha father who has two daughters and whose sexuality is very explicitly gay. It also features a character, referred to as The Noble Savage, who is both Maori and gay, and who forms a partnership with a Maori woman in order to continue their family lines. The Uncle’s Story (2000a) presents two gay Maori men who face being ostracized by their families because of their sexuality. In these books, Ihimaera creates an alternative genealogy, offering a powerful and generative lineage for a gay tribe. His female characters, too, help preserve a distinctly Maori future that encompasses all New Zealand. Ihimaera’s work connects the material and the mythic. The Whale Rider (1987), for instance, presents a young girl whose connection to an ancestral male figure allows her to save sacred whales and rescue her people. (One of his most admired texts, it was made into an internationally acclaimed film in 2002, directed by Niki Caro.) Sky Dancer (2003) depicts an epic battle between land birds and sea birds, which may also be read as an extended parable about resistance to colonization. Guardians who have kept traditions alive allow the land birds to save their territory from deadly invasions. The play Woman Far Walking (2000b) portrays a character named Te Tiriti o Waitangi Mahana, who was born in 1840, the year the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, and is alive in the year 2000. The character’s memories thus span the life of the New Zealand nation, establishing themes central to Ihimaera’s work: that past, present, and future interconnect; and that time and place, and the sacred and the ordinary, exist in a continuum and cannot be separated from one another. SEE ALSO: Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Indigenous Fiction (WF); New Zealand Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF); South Pacific Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Caro, N. (dir.) (2002). The Whale Rider. South Pacific Pictures. Ellis, J. (1999). The Singing Word: An Interview with Witi Ihimaera. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 34(1), 169–182. Ihimaera, W. (1972). Pounamu, Pounamu. Auckland: Heinemann. Ihimaera, W. (1973). Tangi. Auckland: Heinemann Reed. Ihimaera, W. (1974). Whanau. Auckland: Heinemann Reed. Ihimaera, W. (1977). The New Net Goes Fishing. Auckland: Heinemann. Ihimaera, W. (1986). The Matriarch. Auckland: Heinemann. Ihimaera, W. (1987). The Whale Rider. Auckland: Reed. Ihimaera, W. (1989). Dear Miss Mansfield. Auckland: Viking. Ihimaera, W. (1991). A Maori Perspective. Journal of New Zealand Literature, 9, 53–4. Ihimaera, W. (1994). Bulibasha: King of the Gypsies. Auckland: Penguin. Ihimaera, W. (1995). Nights in the Gardens of Spain. Auckland: Secker and Warburg. Ihimaera, W. (1997). The Dream Swimmer. Auckland: Penguin. Ihimaera, W. (2000a). The Uncle’s Story. Auckland: Penguin. Ihimaera, W. (2000b). Woman Far Walking. Wellington: Huia. Ihimaera, W. (2003). Sky Dancer. Auckland: Penguin. Ihimaera, W. (2005). The Rope of Man. Auckland: Reed. Keown, M. (2007). Pacific Islands Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Millar, P. (1998). Ihimaera, Witi. In R. Robinson & N. Wattie (eds.), Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature. Auckland: Oxford University Press, pp. 254–6. Ojinmah, U. (1993). Witi Ihimaera: A Changing Vision. Dunedin: University of Otago Press.
Indian Fiction HARISH TRIVEDI
The novel in India was born in the latter half of the nineteenth century, supposedly in direct imitation of the Western models of the genre with which Indians became acquainted following the introduction of colonial English education. But this common formulation elides the vital fact that numerous indigenous works of prose
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INDIAN FICTION
narrative had existed in India ever since the interwoven Panchatantra stories (c. third century BC; translated into English 1570), and the highly sophisticated novel-length narrative Kadambari (c. AD 650), both in Sanskrit. These have continued to be foundational influences, as have the qissa and the dastan, Perso-Arabic forms of narrative that came to India in the medieval period with the Muslim rulers. Thus, when English-educated Indians began to write a new kind of narrative under Western influence, they often produced works in fascinating hybrid forms that were initially regarded as failed or imperfect novels. Even now, Indian novels continue to be generically different from Western novels in some vital respects; for example, not many are centered on the theme of a love relationship between a man and a woman, and several display a different sense of closure. Further, though numerous Indians have read Western literature voraciously, what they have gone on to write is a literature of their own, and usually not in English but in an Indian language. More than 90 percent of all Indian novels are now published in one or other of the 24 major Indian languages (as noted by the Sahitya Akademi, the Indian National Academy of Letters). Indian fiction in English, the subject of this entry, comprises only the (globally visible) tip of the iceberg. The development of the Indian novel in English may be divided into three historical phases, over a time span that could be called the long twentieth century. The initial phase lasted from the fitful beginnings in 1864 (apart from a couple of protonovels published in 1835 and 1845) up to 1934, during which period no more than 46 novels seem to have been published in all, by nearly as many casual authors (see Mund 164–72; Mukherjee 2000, 27–9). The second phase, from 1935 to 1979, witnessed several novelists each producing a substantial body of work, though the novel in English remained a little-regarded component of Indian literature. The third and current phase, dating from the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), marks a new epoch in which more Indians wrote fiction in English than ever before and to unprecedented international acclaim, so that the Indian novel in English has finally “come into its own in a postcolonial dispensation and globalized economy” (Mukherjee 2006, 631).
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The first two Indian attempts at writing fiction in English were remarkable for expressing strong nationalist, anti-British sentiments and for envisioning a future when India would fight for freedom and attain it. Kylas Chunder Dutt’s “A Journal of Forty Eight Hours of the Year 1945” (1835) had British characters named Lord Fell Butcher and Colonel John Blood-Thirsty and an English-educated Indian called Bhoobun Mohan (meaning World-Enchanter), who led a rebellion that ended in his defeat and beheading. In Soshee Chunder Dutt’s “The Republic of Orissa: A Page from the Annals of the Twentieth Century” (1845), a rebellion against the British was led by the chief of a tribe and resulted in independence being won by the eponymous province on January 13, 1922. A novel following a more conventional domestic pattern was Rajmohan’s Wife (1864), featuring a liberated middle-class heroine and illicit passion and love intrigue. It was the only novel in English by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, one of India’s first university graduates, who wrote 14 more novels in Bengali and is acclaimed as the founder of the Indian novel and a precursor of Indian nationalism. Of the several tract-like tales of Christian proselytizing, perhaps the most sympathetically conflicted was Saguna: A Story of Native Christian Life (serialized 1888–90) by Krupabai Satthianadhan, daughter of an Indian Christian priest. With the next notable novelist, K. S. Venkataramani, Indian English literature entered a new and very different age, for both his novels were inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s nationalist message: rural upliftment in Murugan the Tiller (1927) and austere home-spun self-reliance in Kandan the Patriot (1932). The second phase of the Indian novel in English began in the mid-1930s with the coincidental publication close together of the first works of what is now regarded as its founding trinity: Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935), R. K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends (1935), and Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938). As it happened, these longlived and prolific contemporaries were entirely different from one another in both theme and style. Anand wrote of subaltern characters from a materialist, Marxist point of view, with pungently earthy phrases from Panjabi and Hindi in literal English translation lending spice and color to his narration. Narayan, who set nearly all his fiction
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in a dusty small town named Malgudi in south India, created mild, gentle protagonists whose conscience-stricken and largely ineffectual conduct in the face of unforeseen challenges only enhanced the reader’s sense of their moral worth and charm, and of the comic inscrutability of human existence. Narayan wrote in a deceptively simple and unmarked style that seemed to come so naturally to him that few readers have stopped to notice its little oddities and unconscious Indianisms; he remains the most widely read, discussed, and highly regarded of his generation of writers and, within India, probably of all Indian writers in English (see Riemenschneider 2005). Raja Rao, after setting Kanthapura in a remote and apparently unchanging village which is nevertheless transformed out of existence by the impact of Gandhian nationalism, moved on to impart to the theme of the East–West encounter, which others had depicted in its social and cultural aspects, a distinctly metaphysical dimension, through emotional engagement and conflict between cosmopolitan characters whose English came punctuated with French and Sanskrit. Between them, these three great novelists enriched the genre in substantially complementary ways, with Anand’s radical championing of social and economic causes, Narayan’s unpretentious, profound vision of Middle India (which has often been called quintessential), and Rao’s exploration of the philosophical dimensions of life. Several younger novelists launched their careers in the 1950s and 1960s, each taking up some social or political aspect of the newly independent nation. Bhabani Bhattacharya wrote of famine in So Many Hungers (1947) and of avarice and superstition in A Goddess Named Gold (1960), and Manohar Malgonkar, rather more engagingly, of both the non-violent and violent strands of Indian nationalism in A Bend in the Ganges (1964) and of the “Mutiny” of 1857 in The Devil’s Wind (1972). Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956) was a vivid account of the sectarian carnage that accompanied partition, while Attia Hosain, in Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), offered a Muslim view of the nationalist struggle for independence that culminated in partition, thus taking forward Ahmed Ali’s earlier depiction of a largely feudal Muslim society. Nayantara Sahgal’s A Situation in New Delhi (1977) had a readily identifiable political cast and milieu,
whereas her Rich Like Us (1985) was political in a deeper oppositional sense. Anita Desai in Cry, the Peacock (1963) and Clear Light of Day (1980) created women protagonists hemmed in and anguished by social constraints as well as the intense demands of their own sensitivity, while Arun Joshi’s male protagonists – foreign-educated and well-off but still alienated and discontented – included the eponymous hero of The Strange Case of Billy Biswas (1971), a Columbia-trained anthropologist who decides to lose himself among the tribals he is researching. Kamala Markandaya, who married an Englishman and moved to England shortly after India’s independence, wrote of rural Indian poverty in Nectar in a Sieve (1954), of an interracial marriage in Some Inner Fury (1955), and of a discontented exile in London in The Nowhere Man (1972). However, none of these works or writers were particularly exciting or significant, and by the end of the 1970s, the Indian novel in English seemed to some observers to have run its course, with no major talents arising to match the generation of Anand, Narayan, and Rao. But then came Rushdie, and the whole paradigm changed. He appeared to his Western readers to be narrating the postcolonial Indian nation, no less, with a magic realism made stylistically delectable by his confidently “chutneyfied” English. More significant than the intrinsic merit of his looselimbed and provisionally plotted novels has been his historical importance as the first Indian writer in English to have won international acclaim and financial rewards, which in turn have attracted a large number of younger novelists, the Midnight’s Children’s children, to follow in his wake. The most artistically accomplished of these contemporary writers is probably Vikram Seth, whose three novels are set in three different countries. His A Suitable Boy (1994) presents the most extensive and intimate view of Nehruvian India, with a distinctly un-Western and unromantic concept of love triumphing in the end. Amitav Ghosh is a bit of a “university wit,” with his deeply researched and elegantly plotted narratives exploring various issues and periods of (post)colonial Indian, Bangladeshi, and Burmese history. Arundhati Roy’s single novel so far, The God of Small Things (1997), sought to de-exoticize local Indian happenings in an innovative if
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INDIGENOUS FICTION
self-indulgent style, while Rohinton Mistry, living in Canada, has evoked in unremitting detail such aspects of Parsi life in Bombay in Such a Long Journey (1991) and Family Matters (2002) as constitute a realistically exotic Indian miserabilia. In contrast to these diasporic writers with global thematic concerns, there are a number of more homespun novelists who are read and appreciated in India without making much impact abroad, such as Shashi Deshpande, Githa Hariharan, Neelum Saran Gour, and Kaveri Nambisan. And this is not even to mention a whole galaxy of great novelists in the Indian languages, read in vast numbers by the Indian public and in the Indian classrooms (and taught in translation in some universities abroad), who have nevertheless been eclipsed by the new global hegemony of those who write and read only in English. From being an unlikely ultra-colonial delicate plant that seemed bound to wither away shortly after independence, Indian fiction in English has grown to be the most widely visible and highlighted segment of Indian literature abroad. It is written in the language of the former colonizer, a collaborationist creative act that John Updike said “enlists” the writers “in a foreign if not enemy camp” (cited and discussed in Trivedi 71–2). A substantial part of it is produced by writers who live abroad and who are criticized within India for their elitist bias, lack of authenticity and marketable exoticization. Derided by one Indian critic as “the waffle of the toffs” (Prabha 2000), their work is read by a far larger and more appreciative readership abroad, to whom it seems in the main addressed, and is feted with Western awards and royalties on a global scale. Altogether, it constitutes a paradoxical postcolonial triumph and seems comparable to no other body of literature in the world. SEE ALSO: Black British Fiction (WF); Canadian Fiction (WF); Censorship and Fiction (WF); Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Pakistani Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF); Southeast Asian Fiction (WF); Sri Lankan Fiction (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Das, S. K. (1991). A History of Indian Literature 1800–1910: Western Impact, Indian Response. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Iyengar, K. R. S., & Nandkumar, P. (1985). Indian Writing in English, 5th edn. New Delhi: Sterling. Mukherjee, M. (2000). The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mukherjee, M. (2006). Epic and Novel in India: A Tangled Genealogy. In F. Moretti (ed.), The Novel, vol. 1: History, Geography, and Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mund, S. K. (1997). The Indian Novel in English: Its Birth and Development. New Delhi: Prachi Prakashan. Naik, M. K. (1981). A History of Indian Writing in English. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Naik, M. K., & Narayan, S. A. (2001). Indian English Literature 1980–2000: A Critical Survey. New Delhi: Pencraft International. Prabha, M. (2000). The Waffle of the Toffs: A SocioCultural Critique of Indian Writing in English. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Riemenschneider, D. (2005). The Indian Novel in English: Its Critical Discourse 1934–2004. Jaipur: Rawat. Trivedi, H. (1999). Salman the Funtoosh: Magic Bilingualism in Midnight’s Children. In M. Mukherjee (ed.), Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children”: A Book of Readings. Delhi: Pencraft International, pp. 69–95.
Indigenous Fiction DEANNA REDER AND JENNIFER KELLY
While storytelling has been a cultural cornerstone to the various Indigenous peoples of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, their narrative cultural practices (e.g., orature, birch bark scrolls, petroglyphs) are rarely considered to be “fiction,” a category that generally refers to novels and short stories, both of which developed out of EuroAmerican literary history. While Indigenous authors have readily adopted these genres and integrated them into their respective traditions, the history of Indigenous fiction is not just the story of this integration; it also involves Indigenous authors’ varying (and often limited) opportunities to publish their work, depending on the political climate of the time and the expectations of their readership.
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In Canada, for example, Mohawk poet E. Pauline Johnson, who performed across North America from 1892 until 1909, was also a short story writer who published in boys’ magazines and women’s journals. Part of her appeal was that she was considered the sentimental and exotic voice of a “vanishing race.” After her death in 1913 her work fell out of favor, as did the opportunities for Indigenous authors to publish fiction. For example, from the 1920s until the 1960s, Cree author and Anglican cleric Edward Ahenakew’s Old Keyam stories were repeatedly rejected by publishers. After his death they were finally published in the same volume as his 1925 interviews with Cree Chief Thunderchild, entitled Voices of the Plains Cree (1973). Not until the Okanagan Indian band established Theytus Books was the first Canadian novel by an Indigenous author published: Okanagan author Jeannette Armstrong’s Slash (1983), about an Indigenous man’s experience of the social and political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. In the same year a small Metis press released In Search of April Raintree by Metis author Beatrice Culleton (now Mosionier) about the struggle for identity by two sisters raised in the foster-care system. Its popularity – it sold over 82,000 copies in its first nine years – was a windfall for Pemmican Publications, allowing the press to release Honour the Sun (1987) by Ruby Slipperjack (Anishinabe), a novel structured as the diary entries of a young girl. These three texts have been alternately critiqued for their supposedly inelegant writing and praised for the power of their stories and unique epistemological vantage points. While the 1980s and 1990s Native theatre scene in Toronto, and simultaneously, the interactions at international conferences between feminists and Indigenous activists such as Lee Maracle and Jeannette Armstrong, fostered new talent, the most important development to support fiction writing was the establishment of the En’owkin School of Writing in Kelowna, British Columbia in 1989. From 1990 to 2003 En’owkin’s Gatherings, an annual anthology of poetry and nonfiction prose, provided the first publishing opportunity for many Indigenous writers whose work has since become synonymous with Canadian Indigenous fiction. The last decade of the twentieth century was an era of first (and often second) novels. For exam-
ple, Thomas King (Cherokee) published Medicine River (1989), a story of a Blackfoot photographer’s return home for his mother’s funeral, and Green Grass, Running Water (1993), in which four sacred figures from Indigenous origin stories arrive on a Blackfoot reserve during a Sun Dance in an effort to stop the construction of a dam. Lee Maracle (Coast Salish) released Sundogs (1992) and then the more famous Ravensong (1993), about a Coast Salish community in the 1950s coping with yet another epidemic since contact. Richard Van Camp (Dogrib) published The Lesser Blessed (1996) and Richard Wagamese (Anishinabe) wrote Keeper ’n Me (1994), both about young men dealing with trauma. Wagamese subsequently wrote A Quality of Light (1997), Dream Wheels (2006) and Ragged Company (2008), as well as two memoirs. Influential on this emerging field has been An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English (1992), edited by Daniel David Moses (Delaware) and Terry Goldie; published by Oxford University Press, it became the standard textbook for university classes and established a canon for this new field. A third edition was issued in 2005. While many books reached large readerships, this often depends on the resources of their publishing house to bring them to the attention of the general public. Both Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998) by Tomson Highway (Cree) and Monkey Beach (2000) by Eden Robinson (Haisla) examine the legacy of residential school abuse; both were published by major houses and are now widely read on university literature courses. However, even though Dene author Robert Alexie’s Porcupines and China Dolls (2002) is focused on a similar theme and had positive reviews, shortly after its release the publisher went bankrupt, making the book difficult to obtain until Theytus re-released it in 2009. Work by Joseph Boyden, who lives in New Orleans but has Metis roots, has also received acclaim. Viking and Penguin published Boyden’s Three Day Road (2005) and Through Black Spruce (2008), the latter winning the prestigious Giller Prize. However, Jeannette Armstrong’s Whispering in Shadows (2000), a rebuke for the damage to Indigenous communities and the environment by globalization, is rarely the subject of critical discussion. And the first science fiction novel by a Canadian Indigenous author, Black Ship: Enid Blue Starbreaks
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(1994) by Gerry William (Secwepmec) disappeared into obscurity. The best-known Indigenous short story collections are generally those published by major houses, whether it be the hilariously provocative One Good Story That One (1993) by Thomas King or Robinson’s compellingly chilling Traplines (1996). Yet short story collections put out by smaller presses, like Richard Van Camp’s Angel Wing Splash Pattern (2002), from Kegedonce, are slowly gaining more attention in the university classroom. New collections, like Metis author Cherie Dimaline’s Red Rooms (2007) and Anishinabe author Lesley Belleau’s Colour of Dried Bones (2008) are marked by sensuality, possibly influenced by a campaign initiated by Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm (Anishinabe) to encourage the writing of international indigenous erotica that culminated in a collection she edited, Without Reservation (2003). Popular culture has also been influential on Indigenous fiction in Canada: University of Toronto professor Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee) recently released, through Kegedonce, a fantasy trilogy, The Way of Thorn and Thunder (2005–7), which rethinks Cherokee concepts of history and gender identity. Also, Drew Hayden Taylor’s young adult novel The Night Wanderer (2007) blends Anishinabe concepts with vampire stories. In Australia, indigenous resiliency and resistance to the destructive impacts of colonization, including concerns with language, identity, rights, and land – for Australia has no treaty – often comprise the subject matter of Indigenous fiction. In her multiple award-winning novel Carpentaria (2006), Alexis Wright explores land rights and environmental destruction in smalltown Queensland. Wright’s Plains of Promise (1997), Kim Scott’s True Country (1993) and Benang (1999), Doris (Garimara) Pilkington’s Caprice: A Stockman’s Daughter (2002), and Lisa Behrendt’s Home (2004) all explore the impacts of assimilation policies, which were underpinned by the dispossession of Indigenous territory and culminated in the traumatic Stolen Generations; Herb Wharton’s Unbranded (1992) exposes exploitation of Indigenous men’s labor in the pastoral industry, while Sam Watson’s stunning The Kadaitcha Sung (1990) locates colonization as but one event within expansive, inclusive forces of Indigenous epis-
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temologies. Urban concerns of race and class are addressed in Archie Weller’s Day of the Dog (1981), John Muk Muk Burke’s Bridge of Triangles (1994), and Melissa Lucashenko’s Steam Pigs (1997) and Hard Yards (2001). Indigenous activism has resulted in improved participation in academic and literary publishing, especially the University of Queensland, Fremantle, and Aboriginal Studies Presses, and the Indigenous-operated Magabala Books. It has also led to increasingly diverse fiction in multiple genres: critic and novelist Anita Heiss followed her Dhuuluu-Yala/To Talk Straight: Publishing Aboriginal Literature (2003) with the popular “chick-lit” novel, Not Finding Mr. Right (2007); Philip McLaren followed his historical novel on frontier violence, Sweet Water – Stolen Land (1993), with crime fiction, including Murder in Utopia (2008); Weller’s Land of the Golden Clouds (1998) is a futuristic fantasy set on an irradiated continent; Lucashenko’s first teen novel is the fantasy Killing Darcy (1998). Vivienne Cleven’s novel Bitin’ Back (2001), about small-town prejudices faced by a male athlete turned crossdresser, and Gayle Kenney’s road-trip stories in Me, Antman, and Fleabag (2007), draw on humor. Short-fiction collections include Tara June Winch’s Swallow the Air (2006), Wharton’s Where Ya Been, Mate? (1996) and “Imba” (Listen): Tell You a Story (2003), combining life-storytelling and poetry, as do the many works of Alf Taylor (including Long Time Now, 2001). Anthologies include the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature (2008), edited by Anita Heiss and Peter Winter, and Fresh Cuttings: A Celebration of Fiction and Poetry from UQP’s Black Writing Series (2003). In Aotearoa/New Zealand, the bilingual Treaty of Waitangi (1840) conferred within dominant discourses a legitimacy to the Maori language, oral traditions, and inherent relationships to place – including whenua (land/place), whakapapa (genealogy and identity), te reo (language), and mana (spirit), all informing various struggles for land, sea, and other rights. Maori-language newspapers, both government-run and independent, appeared as early as the 1850s, creating some opportunity for Maori self-representation in a range of genres (letters, genealogies, histories, and stories). In the 1950s, periodicals such as the Maori Affairs Department’s bilingual Te Ao Hou (1952–76; available online), Landfall, Islands, and
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The Listener began publishing Maori writing regularly. In the 1970s, Maori activism – the 1975 Land March, and the Te Reo Maori revitalization movement – and the leadership of Hone Tuwhare, Patricia Grace, and Witi Ihimaera (whose writing careers span nearly five decades) converged in the publication of a number of key fictional texts in English: Ihimaera’s story collection Pounamu, Pounamu (1972) and novel Tangi (1973); Grace’s collection Waiariki (1975) and novel Mutuwhenua: The Moon Sleeps (1978); Pat Heretaunga Baker’s historical novel Behind the Tattooed Face (1975), set in pre-European contact Aotearoa; and Bruce Stewart’s novel Disorderly Girl (1980). In the 1980s, Maori fiction garnered increased international attention, with Grace’s Potiki (1986) and Ihimaera’s The Matriarch (1986), and the publication of Keri Hulme’s Booker Prize-winning The Bone People (1985). Short fiction published includes Hulme’s Windeater (1986), Apirana Taylor’s He Rau Aroha: A Hundred Years of Love (1986) and Ki Te Ao (1990), Stewart’s Tama and Other Stories (1989), and Ngahuia Te Awekotuku’s Tahuri (1989), exploring lesbian and racial identities. Since the 1990s, internationally marketed film adaptations of Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors (1990) and Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider (1987) generated further interest in Maori fiction. Duff’s novel, the first in a trilogy exploring the impacts of poverty, urban alienation, and violence on Maori male identity – followed by What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? (1996) and Jake’s Long Shadow (2002) – may appear removed from Ihimaera’s focus on Maori language, ways of knowing, and place, but they are complementary in terms of the activism they invoke. Ihimaera published The Whale Rider in Maori, as Te Kaieke Tohora, in 1995; while perhaps overshadowed by the film, this edition speaks to the community’s commitment to te reo and adaptability in engaging the spectrum of cultural representation. The Maori publishing scene supports writing in English and Maori, particularly through Ihimaera’s five-volume Te Ao Marama series (Reed Publishing) and Huia Publishing’s awards for emerging Maori writers. Ihimaera has also edited significant anthologies: Into the Light
(1982), with D. S. Long, and Where’s Waari? A History of the Maori through the Short Story (2000). The number of writers and the genres they use and transform continues to grow: Taylor’s novel Tangi Aroha (1993) and Phil Kawana’s short story collections Dead Jazz Guys (1999) and Attack of the Skunk People (1999) explore urban Maori masculinity; Tuwhare’s Shape Shifter (1997) includes stories and poems; Ngahuia Te Awekotuku’s Ruahine: Mythic Women (2003) retells traditional stories about powerful Maori women. Other recent novels are set abroad: Grace’s Tu (2004) deals with men in the Maori Battalion of World War II; Duff’s Szabad (2001) is set in 1950s Budapest; and Ihimaera’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain (1995) furthers his exploration of gay and Maori identities. In the early twenty-first century, Indigenous fiction in Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/ New Zealand is marked by the struggles and successes of its predecessors, its rapidly expanding diversity of form and subject matter, its transformation of academic discourses and methodologies, and its insistence on the recognition of the continuance of Indigenous peoples’ ways of knowing and forms of representation. SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); Canadian Fiction (WF); Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); New Zealand Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Armstrong, J. (ed.) (1993). Looking at the Words of Our People: First Nations Analysis of Literature. Penticton, BC: Theytus. Heiss, A., & Minter, P. (2008). Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature. Crow’s Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin. (Published in Canada as Anthology of Australian Aboriginal Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press.) Ihimaera, I. (2000). Where’s Waari? A History of the Maori through the Short Story. Auckland: Reed.
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Moreton-Robinson, A. (2000). Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Moses, D. D., & Goldie, T. (2005). An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English [1992], 3rd edn. Toronto: Oxford University Press.
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Reder, D., & Morra, L. (eds.) (2010). Troubling Tricksters: Revisioning Critical Conversations. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books.
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J James, C. L. R. DONALD E. PEASE
C. L. R. James’s writings received little notice during his lifetime outside the Marxist groups with which he was involved. Following his death in 1989, however, his works became crucial benchmarks for scholars in the emergent fields of Cultural Studies, African American Studies, and Postcolonial Studies. The variety of genres he mastered – short story, novel, drama, the memoir, manifesto, historical narrative, newspaper column, journal, letter, philosophical treatise – and the multiple publics he addressed reveal the range and depth of James’s commitments. His various affiliations have challenged readers to engage multiple and often contradictory interpretive strategies in their efforts to endow his career with meaning and coherence. Cyril Lionel Robert James was born in Tunupuna, Trinidad on January 4, 1901. After graduation from Queen’s Royal College, he wrote short stories, biographical studies of Caribbean political leaders, and reports on cricket for the Port of Spain Gazette. James’s knowledge of cricket provided him with a visa and funding to move to England in 1932. During a six-year stay, he wrote on cricket for the Manchester Guardian and forged friendships with George Padmore, Claude McKay, Paul Robeson, and other founding members of the Pan-African movement, who, like James, used a Marxian analytic framework to explain how categories developed within the Western Enlightenment tradition were deployed to justify colonial conquest. In 1936, James published The Black
Jacobins, a magisterial account of the Haitian uprising of 1791 that examined the French Revolution from the perspective of the Caribbean region’s only successful slave revolt, promoting James’s belief that African people had been at the center of the western hemisphere’s most important social and political transformations. The following year, he published the first history of the Trotskyist movement, World Revolution 1917–1936. Before he established his reputation as a Marxian analyst, however, James was known as a groundbreaking novelist. In Minty Alley (1936b), as in his earlier short stories “La Divina Pastora” (1927) and “Triumph” (1929), James insisted that authentic Caribbean experience be grounded in the region’s historical and geographical context. Minty Alley is the story of Haynes, a young black, middle-class man who observes and becomes involved in the daily life of the ordinary people who live with him at 2 Minty Alley. James experiments with Haynes’s perspective in order to expose the colonial relations that structure his consciousness. The other inhabitants of 2 Minty Alley include the city’s porters, prostitutes, carter-men, washerwomen, and domestic servants who, unlike Haynes, were born into materially impoverished worlds from whose stultifying confines they actively seek escape. Indeed, the barrack yards in which they are holed up bear traces of the garrisons on sugar-producing plantations. James exposes Haynes’s power to define and speak for his fellow boarders as an integral part of colonial domination, which James correlates with colonized people’s inability to express their own subjectivity.
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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JIN, HA
Frequently reprinted in the UK, Minty Alley was only recently published in the United States. Though it is often hailed as an example of social realism, Minty Alley subverts many conventions of this genre. The Barbadian novelist and critic George Lamming has observed that one cannot comprehend Caribbean literary art without first reading Minty Alley, which he describes as central to the genealogy of Caribbean fiction. James traveled to the United States to organize black workers in 1938. Before his deportation in 1953, James wrote on movies, pulp fiction, soap operas, black Marxism, American history, and Herman Melville’s novels. Under the pseudonym of W. R. Johnson, James founded a group known as the Johnson-Forest Tendency. In the books that he published with this group – including the posthumously published American Civilization (1993) – he described American civilization as in crisis along a racial division that could be resolved only through a mass revolutionary movement. After the US deported him, James traveled back to England and wrote Facing Reality (1958). In 1958 he returned to Trinidad, renewing his ties with the Pan-African movement. James returned to Britain in 1960 and published his reflections on the centrality of the decolonization struggle to contemporary political movements in Modern Politics (1960). Three years later, he published his lifelong meditations on the role of cricket in that struggle in Beyond a Boundary (1963). From 1968 until his death in London in 1989, James published several more works of non-fiction and new introductions for some earlier books. Scholars attempting to conceptualize James’s intellectual trajectory within the available master narratives – Marxism, black emancipation, anti-colonialism – have inevitably encountered aspects of his thinking that undermine the patterns on which those narratives ground their explanations. Perhaps because it appealed to James’s contradictory political and cultural commitments through its principle of composition, Minty Alley has become a representative instance of this problem of classification. Over the last decade, the novel has, like James’s career, undergone a dramatic redefinition: from a textbook example of social realism to a challenging and innovative early contribution to postcolonial fiction.
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SEE ALSO: Lamming, George (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/ Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Buhle, P. (1988). The Artist as Revolutionary. London: Verso. Cudjoe, S. R., & Cain, W. E. (1995). C. L. R. James: His Intellectual Legacies. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Farred, G. (ed.) (1996). Rethinking C. L. R. James. Oxford: Blackwell. Grimshaw, A. (ed.) (1992). C. L. R. James Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. James, C. L. R. (1927). La Divina Pastora. Repr. in Grimshaw (1992), pp. 25–8. James, C. L. R. (1929). Triumph. Repr. in Grimshaw (1992), pp. 29–40. James, C. L. R. (1936a). The Black Jacobins: Toussaint l’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Dial. James, C. L. R. (1936b). Minty Alley. London: Secker and Warburg. James, C. L. R. (1937). World Revolution 1917–1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International. New York: Pioneer. James, C. L. R. (1993). American Civilization (ed. A. Grimshaw). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. James, C. L. R., Lee, G., & Castoriadis, C. (1958). Facing Reality. Detroit: Marty Glaberman. Lamming, G. (1960). The Pleasures of Exile. London: Michael Joseph. Pease, D. E. (2000). Doing Justice to C. L. R. James’s Mariners, Renegades and Castaways. Boundary 2, 27(2), 1–20. Said, E. W. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf. Worcester, K. (ed.) (1996). C. L. R. James: A Political Biography. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Jin, Ha ROCIO G. DAVIS
The lucid, elegant fiction of Ha Jin, most of which is set in the People’s Republic of China, explores the complex moral choices faced by ordinary people grappling with conflicts between traditional values, simple human desires, and party politics. Jin critiques the absurdity of political
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ideology and the viciousness of hate and revenge, showing how the collision of love and strict statelegislated morality can often have tragic results. Ha Jin (originally Xuefei Jin) was born on February 21, 1956 in Liaoning, China. He went to the United States in 1986 to pursue a PhD on modernist poetry at Brandeis University and decided to stay after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Currently professor of creative writing at Boston University, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005. Jin’s first book of poems, Between Silences (1990), set the stage for his literary production. He explains in the preface that he strove to describe the tragic events of modern Chinese history and to “speak for those unfortunate people who suffered, endured or perished at the bottom of life and who created the history and at the same time were fooled or ruined by it” (p. iii). His other poetry collections are Facing Shadows (1996) and Wreckage (2001). The relationship between power and language is an underlying theme in Jin’s fiction, and his characters must often disregard the truth about their feelings or experiences in order to support the discourse of their society’s dominant ideology to ensure their own survival. The stories in Ocean of Words (1996b), set in the early 1970s along the China/Russia border, show characters struggling to make sense of party politics and indoctrination while retaining their humanity. Under the Red Flag (1997) portrays responses to the social changes introduced by the Cultural Revolution, including a rhetoric that justified prejudice or revenge. It won the Flannery O’Connor Award and Georgia Author of the Year Award. The collection The Bridegroom (2000a), which won the Asian American Literary Award and the Townsend Prize, is set in Muji City in the 1980s. Here, characters experience the difficult transition from orthodox Maoist policies to a more liberal socialism, hovering between the illusion of a change in the social justice system and frustration at government corruption. Jin’s first novel, In the Pond (1998), centers on an aspiring artist, Shao Bin, who works at a fertilizer plant to support his family. A series of critical cartoons drawn in retaliation for unjust measures taken against him eventually earns him promotion to the propaganda office, in a darkly humorous take on issues of social justice in the
communist context. His second novel, Waiting (1999), winner of the National Book Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, describes the 18 years that Lin Kong and Manna Wu, a doctor and nurse in Muji City, wait before Lin can divorce his wife, Shuyu, who lives in a rural village with his parents. Though they eventually marry, Shuyu reenters their lives to care for their twin sons, as it appears that Manna will die of heart disease. This bittersweet novel ends with the characters still waiting: for death, for liberation, for new possibilities. The Crazed (2002) is a more overtly political novel with little external action: Jian Wan, a PhD student and future son-in-law of Professor Yang, sits by his professor’s bedside after he has suffered a stroke. Yang’s delirious ramblings about his past – his suffering during the Cultural Revolution, his sexual liaisons, and frustrated ambitions – lead Jian to abandon his studies and join the march in Tiananmen Square. War Trash (2004), winner of a PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, is a historical novel whose protagonist, Yu Yuan, recalls the consequences of the choice between the communists and nationalists that he had had to make in a US POW camp during the Korean War. Jin shifts his attention to the Chinese immigrant experience in A Free Life (2007). Nan Wu moves to the US in the 1980s for graduate school, joined later by his wife and son. The novel describes Nan’s increasing ambivalence toward China and his frustration at having to work as a cook rather than write poetry, in contrast to his family’s growing independence. Interestingly, Jin incorporates, as an appendix, his protagonist’s poems, making the novel a fascinating exercise in diverse literary discourses. The essays in The Writer as Migrant (2008) examine Jin’s experience in the context of how other immigrant writers such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Conrad, and Vladimir Nabokov negotiated the connection between tradition and identity, the relation to one’s homeland, the question of audience, and the dilemma of choosing a literary language. Critical reception of Jin’s fiction has been generally positive; scholars and reviewers have noted the powerful way it explores conflicts between human aspirations and government control. His often cynical tone underlines the ways truth is revised to serve political purposes and
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JOAQUIN, NICK
reveals the absurdity of conforming to official discourse. Although his fiction is set mainly in China, its exploration of the struggle to affirm selfhood in a society that denies individuality transcends political or geographical borders. SEE ALSO: East Asian Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Jin, H. (1990). Between Silences: A Voice from China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jin, H. (1996a). Facing Shadows. New York: Hanging Loose. Jin, H. (1996b). Ocean of Words: Army Stories. Cambridge, MA: Zoland. Jin, H. (1997). Under the Red Flag. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Jin, H. (1998). In the Pond. Cambridge, MA: Zoland. Jin, H. (1999). Waiting. New York: Pantheon. Jin, H. (2000a). The Bridegroom. New York: Pantheon. Jin, H. (2000b). Quiet Desperation. New York: Pantheon. Jin, H. (2001). Wreckage. New York: Hanging Loose. Jin, H. (2002). The Crazed. New York: Pantheon. Jin, H. (2004). War Trash. New York: Pantheon. Jin, H. (2007). A Free Life. New York: Pantheon. Jin, H. (2008). The Writer as Migrant. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Parascandola, L. J. (2005). Love and Sex in a Totalitarian Society: An Exploration of Ha Jin and George Orwell. Studies in the Humanities, 32(1), 38–49.
Joaquin, Nick CHELVA KANAGANAYAKAM
Among the handful of Filipino writers who have made a significant contribution to the literary history of Philippine writing in English, Nick Joaquin is probably the most experimental, challenging, and certainly the most enigmatic. Born on May 4, 1917 in the Philippines, Joaquin was the son of well-educated parents. His father was a lawyer and his mother a teacher, but he himself resisted any sustained formal education. A voracious reader, he first became a journalist, reporting for the Free Press Magazine,
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and then began publishing fiction and poetry in the late 1940s. Four decades later Joaquin had published poetry, fiction, drama, essays, and biographies. The recognition he received in the Philippines included the Palanca Memorial Award, the National Artist Award, and the Ramon Magsaysay Award. He was also named a National Artist in 1976. Joaquin died in 2004. In the title essay of his collection Culture and History (1988), Joaquin claims, “Before 1521 we could have been anything and everything not Filipino; after 1565 we can be nothing but Filipino” (21). The entire essay, written with a strong sense of conviction about the nation and its history, offers a teleological and deterministic view of the past, of colonialism, and of the project of recuperating a Filipino history. The beginning of Spanish rule becomes for him an originary moment in Filipino culture. In some ways, his best-known books – The Woman with Two Navels (1961), The Portrait of the Artist as Filipino (1966), Caves and Shadows (1983), and his Collected Verse (1987) – are important interrogations of what it means to claim a Filipino identity. Two motifs run through all his works, one more controversial than the other. First, overtly in his poetry and more allusively in his fiction, Joaquin celebrates the figure of the Virgin Mother. Even his most secular literature is touched by a religious sensibility that is both personal and public. Second, he strongly advocates a reading of history that takes Spanish control of the land as a form of irreversible transformation. The precolonial is not recoverable and is therefore largely irrelevant in his writing. As a historian, Joaquin can be at times naive and simplistic; while his stances certainly account for the controversies he has generated, his convictions about cultural genealogy do not obscure the brilliance of his writing. The utopian element in his work is also partially Orientalist, but the multiplicity of his literary representation of contemporary and historical events introduces a much needed ambivalence and complexity. Beginning along the lines of a diasporic novel and locating itself in Hong Kong, The Woman with Two Navels quickly departs from the ostensible mode of realism to use a woman with two navels to examine the psychic fragmentation and splintered identity of the post-World War II generation of Filipinos. At its most obvious, the
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novel is about the legacy of Spanish and American occupation, but the novel is far more nuanced and dense than such a reading would suggest. Its larger concerns are philosophical, and the novel is preoccupied with issues of evil, sin, and redemption. The Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, in spite of its obvious reference to James Joyce, is very much a Filipino play, structured in a manner that foregrounds a dialogue with history, generations, guilt, and responsibility. Drawing on both classical mythology and contemporary events, Joaquin ensures that the play is as much about society as it is about the role of the artist. Central to it is consciousness of identity and the burden of history. The play was staged more than 50 times throughout the Philippines over a period of two years. His second novel, Caves and Shadows, adopts the mode of a detective novel, but its real preoccupation is with the interplay between the present and the past. The framework of classical and precolonial Filipino mythology enables a complex examination of what it means to claim a national identity in a country enduring the excesses of martial law. His poetry can be deeply conventional or overtly modern, but Joaquin always demonstrates an original voice, conscious of the need to shape poetry to reflect Filipino realities. He remains the only figure in Filipino literature to write in all three genres with equal facility and ease. Joaquin is also known for his biographies, his critical studies on such figures as Jose Rizal, his children’s stories, and his essays. The essays collected in Culture and History (1988) are particularly significant in the way they engage with issues that are both national and postcolonial. Unconcerned about the need to follow conventions or conform to current perspectives, he wrote in ways that were sometimes considered reactionary and ahistorical. While his understanding of history might well be idiosyncratic, there is very little doubt that, as a creative writer, he is among the best the Philippines has produced in the last several decades. SEE ALSO: Detective/Crime Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF); Southeast Asian Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Davis, R. G. (1996). Nick Joaquin’s The Woman who had Two Navels. Philippine Studies, 44(2), 257–69. de Quiros, C. (1978). The Gospel of History According to Nick Joaquin: An Appraisal. Manila Review, 4(1), 38–67. Hiquiana, A. M. (2001). A Study of Ideology in Nick Joaquin’s A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino: A Critical Discourse Analysis. Diliman Review, 49 (3–4), 3–21. Joaquin, N. (1952). Prose and Poems. Manila: Graphic House. Joaquin, N. (1961). The Woman with Two Navels. Manila: Bookmark. Joaquin, N. (1966). The Portrait of the Artist as Filipino. Manila: MCS Enterprises. Joaquin, N. (1972). Tropical Gothic. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Joaquin, N. (1981). The Ballad of the Five Battles. Manila: Arts Unlimited. Joaquin, N. (1983). Caves and Shadows. Manila: National Book Store. Joaquin, N. (1987). Collected Verse: Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press. Joaquin, N. (1988). Culture and History. Manila: Anvil. Joaquin, N. (1999). Manila, My Manila. Manila: Bookmark. San Juan, E., Jr. (1988). Subversions of Desire: Prolegomena to Nick Joaquin. Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press. San Juan, E., Jr. (1992). Reading the West/Writing the East: Studies in Comparative Literature and Culture. New York: Peter Lang.
Johnston, Wayne HEIDI BUTLER
Wayne Johnston’s novels, memoir, and short fiction have received international attention and generated controversy in his native Canada. From the humorous adventures of Bobby O’Malley to the desperate ambitions of Joe Smallwood, Johnston’s books are mainly set on the island of Newfoundland and focus on Newfoundlanders’ struggles with political, financial, and cultural hardships; generational division between male relatives is among his foremost themes. His books highlight the often difficult emotions that arise between fathers who struggle to define their familial and national roles, and sons who attempt to retain Newfoundland identities in unsettled times.
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Johnston’s work frequently examines history’s effects on Newfoundland identities. His protagonists, nearly all of whom are young men, often feel trapped by repressive family traditions and financial difficulties, and feel alternately obliged to serve and to escape their families. Johnston’s later fiction develops his early comic novels’ themes of haunting and family loyalty in order to depict Newfoundland’s colonial history and neocolonial challenges. The father–son relationships portrayed in the later works parallel Newfoundland’s struggles with contemporary global society. Father characters often perceive global politics and economics as abstract concepts that have little effect on daily life. Johnston’s son characters wish to belong both to their fathers’ worlds and to the emerging new world; as a consequence, they often feel trapped between the present and the past and have difficulty interacting with family members. Johnston frequently remarks on his inability to write about Newfoundland while living there. He was born on the island on May 22, 1958, and was raised in Goulds, Newfoundland by Arthur and Genevieve Johnston. After deciding against a career in medicine, Johnston received a BA in English from Memorial University in 1978. He spent the next two years working as a reporter for the St. John’s Daily News, but left journalism – and Newfoundland – to become a professional writer. While pursuing his MA in creative writing at the University of New Brunswick, he worked as poetry editor for The Fiddlehead literary magazine. After graduating, Johnston quickly published his first novel, The Story of Bobby O’Malley (1985). In this book, for which he won the W. H. Smith/ Books in Canada First Novel Award, Johnston comically depicts a young Newfoundland boy’s exploits with eccentric family members. In 1987, he published his second book, The Time of Their Lives, a darker novel that outlines the struggles confronting three generations of one Newfoundland family. This book was followed by Johnston’s widely loved The Divine Ryans (1990), which, like Bobby O’Malley, narrates the life of a young boy who contends with a comically dysfunctional family. Johnston was awarded the Atlantic Fiction Prize for The Divine Ryans, and wrote the screenplay for Stephen Reynolds’s film version of the novel (1999). The black comedy Human Amusements (1994) also received positive reviews. Like Johnston’s other early works, this novel concerns
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a young protagonist who is humiliated and angered by his changing body and chaotic family. Johnston’s more recent books retain some of his early novels’ humor, but their tone is considerably more serious. These books are all historical narratives that explore the development of Newfoundland identities during periods of political instability. Like most of Johnston’s later work, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998) combines dark humor with historical details. Based on the life of long-time Newfoundland premier Joe Smallwood, Colony was shortlisted for Canada’s two major fiction awards. Many Canadian critics censured Johnston’s treament of Newfoundland history in the novel, since he introduces fictional characters into a narrative that some people misguidedly read as an authoritative history of Newfoundland. As Newfoundland joined Confederation only in 1949, Johnston suggests that his historical alterations highlight the continued influence of Newfoundland’s colonial history on the province’s and its people’s development. In an interview with Andrew Pyper (1999), Johnston responds to his critics by suggesting that “it takes a leap not just of imagination but of selfconfidence to be able to read about your own history with fictional variations. . . . Some people don’t have that ability with Canada yet” (21). Canadian critics who enjoy Colony agree that fiction can often illuminate historical realities by changing historical facts. American readers also embraced Colony after it was featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, and the novel has been published internationally. The criticisms against Colony were not raised against Baltimore’s Mansion (1999). Johnston chronicles his earlier life in this memoir, in which he blends fiction and memory to describe his relationships with his father and grandfather. The memoir was critically acclaimed, and Johnston received the Charles Taylor Prize for creative nonfiction. Johnston’s next publication, the historical fiction The Navigator of New York (2002), follows a young Newfoundlander’s adventures with his biological father, explorer Frederick Cook. This book demonstrates Johnston’s interest in America’s increasing cultural and economic influence over Newfoundland. His most recent novel, The Custodian of Paradise (2006), features Johnston’s first woman protagonist. This sequel to Colony follows the protagonist’s search for her
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long lost father and for her place within a divided family. Johnston has also published several short fictions, including “The Montreal Canadians” and “Catechism,” which use humor to investigate Canadian and Newfoundland identities. In 2004, Johnston was awarded a distinguished chair in creative writing at Virginia’s Hollins University, and he currently divides his time between Roanoke and Toronto. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); Film/Television Adaptations and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Johnston, W. (1985). The Story of Bobby O’Malley. Ottawa: Oberon. Johnston, W. (1987). The Time of Their Lives. Ottawa: Oberon. Johnston, W. (1990). The Divine Ryans. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Johnston, W. (1994). Human Amusements. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Johnston, W. (1998). The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. Toronto: Knopf. Johnston, W. (1999). Baltimore’s Mansion. Toronto: Knopf. Johnston, W. (2002). The Navigator of New York. Toronto: Knopf. Johnston, W. (2006a). The Custodian of Paradise. Toronto: Knopf. Pyper, A. (1999). Wayne’s World. Quill and Quire, 65(11), 20–21. Reynolds, S. (dir.) (1999). The Divine Ryans. Enterprise Newfoundland. Wayne Johnston’s website. At www.waynejohnston.ca, accessed Nov. 10, 2008. Wyile, H. (2002). Speculative Fictions: Contemporary Canadian Novelists and the Writing of History. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Jolley, Elizabeth BARBARA MILECH AND BRIAN DIBBLE
Elizabeth Jolley, as Laurie Clancy has written, “had perhaps the most meteoric rise of any Australian writer in the last quarter of the twentieth century.” An unpublished writer in the UK, she published with increasing frequency after arriving in Australia in 1959, producing 15 novels and nine
books of essays, stories, radio plays, and poems between 1976 and 2006, winning every major Australian prize for fiction, including the Miles Franklin Award. Her civic honors included the Order of Australia and being declared an Australian National Living Treasure in 1997; her academic recognition included four honorary doctorates and a professorship in creative writing. Well before she died on February 13, 2007, she was regarded as one of Australia’s finest novelists – indeed, was often compared to Patrick White – and to many she was also Australia’s best-loved writer. Born Monica Elizabeth Knight on June 23, 1923 in Gravelly Hill, northeast of Birmingham, her parents were Wilfrid Knight, a science teacher/lay minister imprisoned as a conscientious objector during World War I, and Margarete Fehr Knight, a German teacher he married in postwar Vienna in 1922. It was an unhappy marriage: he was pious and unpretentious, she an agnostic soidisant baroness; he was a placating caretaker and she a demanding narcissist who maintained a decades-long relationship with an older, wealthy barrister (“Mr. Berrington” in Jolley’s essays and novels). Knight deified her long-suffering father, demonizing the mother who made him miserable. Surprisingly – or not – after attending a Quaker boarding school, while training as a nurse in the 1940s she formed a menage a trois with an older couple, Leonard Jolley and his wife Joyce, becoming pregnant by him. Leaving her course as a result, she then worked as a live-in domestic in Birmingham and as matron of a school in Hertfordshire before marrying Jolley in Edinburgh in 1952. He encouraged her to change her name to Elizabeth, and they moved from Glasgow to Perth, Western Australia, on his appointment as head librarian at the University of Western Australia. Jolley’s topics are longing/belonging, migration/homelessness, and lovelessness/loneliness, as in the first story she published, “A Hedge of Rosemary” (1967), where a lonely widower, unable to appreciate the alien beauty of Australia, longs for the chain-making areas of the Black Country. Her first book of stories, Five Acre Virgin (1976), is filled with such displaced “new Australians,” “Bill Sprockett’s Land” and “The Jarrah Thieves” emphasizing the consolation that owning land (belonging) provides.
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JOLLEY, ELIZABETH
Her first novel, Palomino (1980), is a roman a these that elaborates her constant thesis that it is better to be the lover than the beloved, and that the lover must exercise restraint. A lyric epistolary novel, Palomino was controversial for valorizing lesbian (intergenerational) love and depicting incest and perhaps murder. Her second-written and fifth-published novel, Milk and Honey (1984), is a gothic work dealing with intergenerational love, incest, adultery, and outright murder. The Newspaper of Claremont Street (1981), like Palomino and Milk and Honey, emphasizes the importance of owning land but, unlike them, uses Australian settings more comfortably. It introduces Margie Morris, called “Weekly” because, as a cleaning lady, she is a trusted gossip. Weekly is one of Jolley’s “comic” characters, though a serious one: choosing between bushland she buys and a woman she looks after but who threatens her possession and enjoyment of the land, Weekly allows Nastasya to die when she sinks into soft earth. The morbid tone of the earlier fiction is modulated in Jolley’s third, fourth, and sixth books by increasingly more endearing characters and inventive plots. Mr. Scobie’s Riddle (1983b) introduces the first of Jolley’s female pairs of larcenous take-charge women and hopeless/hapless offsiders who together run family-like institutions. In Scobie, Matron Hyacinth Price and Heather Hailey live above St. Christopher and St. Jude’s nursing home, emptying patients’ bank accounts and evading health and safety regulations while staff, patients, and outsiders run amok in the basement, the netherworld characters eventually winning the home from Price’s patient-brother in a card game. In Miss Peabody’s Inheritance (1983a), Dr./Miss Arabella Thorne and Miss Edgley overcharge boarding-school girls at Pine Heights, thereby financing annual Grinzing frolics in Austria with companion Matron Snowdon. And in Foxybaby (1985), Josephine Peycroft and Miss Paisley run their Better Body through the Arts course at Trinity College in the wheat belt, provisioning their students with lemon juice and lettuce leaves so that they will pay exorbitant after-hours prices for contraband fine wines and Chateaubriand. In all three novels, staff and their charges engage in myriad erotic activities, including gay, lesbian, and intergenerational sex. Their couplings recall Aristophanes’ myth of the
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first human beings in Plato’s Symposium, spheroid double-sided woman-woman, man-man, and woman-man creatures who are sliced in half by the gods when they storm the heavens. Regarded as an explanation of hetero-, gay and lesbian sexuality, the myth interested Jolley as a metaphor for love: her belief that people are driven by a need to love and be loved – in Aristophanes’ words, to be “wholly one” (Plato, 192d). In Jolley, comedic sexual antics are always an external indication of people’s internal need for intimacy. Beyond the comedy, each of these novels centers on rounder, more sympathetic characters – the saintly octogenarian Martin Scobie whose love for a young girl was once mistaken for pedophilia; naive middle-aged Dorothy Peabody whose epistolary relationship with Australian Diana Hopewell after reading Angels on Horseback, Hopewell’s soft-porn novel starring Thorne, Edgley, and Snowdon, leads Peabody to fantasize seeing all three in London streets; and spinster Alma Porch, whose accident on her way to workshop her draft novel, a Lolita-like tale about father-and-daughter incest, issues in the narrative. Scobie is carnivalesque, Peabody metafictional for its interplay between life and art, and Foxybaby metafictional for its Dantean interplay between life and dream. Jolley’s next novel, The Well (1986), is more masterly for having a fully rounded character in a plot that is neither a comedy of situation nor a metafiction. Hester Harper’s fate is driven by forces grounded in her own life story – her handicapped leg, her mother’s early death, her father’s impregnating the au pair girl Hester loved as her older sister/mother, and her eventual understanding that, all the while, her father’s elderly accountant loves her in protective ways. At 50 or 60 years old, Hester “adopts” Katherine, a 15year-old orphan, and sets out to refine her tastes in speech, music, and dance. It is an infatuation doomed by Hester’s lack of restraint; Katherine flees precisely at the moment Hester’s life savings are stolen. The Well’s success – it won the 1986 Miles Franklin Award, its film adaptation was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival – was followed by The Sugar Mother (1988). Hastily written to fulfill a commission for Australia’s 1988 bicentenary, its narrative, like Foxybaby’s, can be read as a dream sequence portraying an older professor involved in
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symbolic incest with his motherly neighbor’s daughter, who serves as the surrogate (“sugar”) mother of a child he hopes to give his doctor-wife when she returns from sabbatical. Touching in a pathetic way, Edwin Page is nonetheless too unsympathetic a character to elicit much concern for Jolley’s thesis about Eros’s power and the need for restraint in love. Jolley’s next publications were the Vera Wright trilogy – My Father’s Moon (1989), Cabin Fever (1990), and The Georges’ Wife (1993) – together a roman fleuve in which Vera Wright reflects on life in her families of origin and choice. It is tempting to imagine a Veronica Wright/Monica Knight identity, particularly since events and people reminiscent of Jolley’s life appear across the books, including a Quaker school, nurse training, work as a matron, Mr. Berrington, and a menage a trois. Written during Jolley’s sixties, the trilogy is autobiographical fiction, not so much documenting Jolley’s life as drawing closely on it to portray Vera ruminating on her life and discovering truths key to it. My Father’s Moon focuses especially on Vera’s early years and a father whose protective cherishing is conveyed (among other telling images) by sparks that fly from the heels of his boots as they walk together. Cabin Fever concerns the mother and Vera’s increasing awareness that the controlling, judgmental woman of her childhood is also a World War I bride whose disappointment with England and her marriage finds some redress in her relationship with Kenneth Berrington; that her mother’s “special friendship” somehow became the glue that held the family home together; that her own behavior, condemned by her mother, mimicked her mother’s; and that, if the mother could not forgive the daughter, the way out of the cycle of anger, hurt, and sorrow could be the daughter’s forgiving the mother. Collaterally, in The Georges’ Wife Vera learns from an older woman while sailing to Australia that “‘your father can’t accompany you all the way in your life’” (110–11), a lesson that may also apply to Mr. George, the older man Vera accompanies to Australia. In 1995 Drusilla Modjeska asked why the trilogy “has not been recommended to us . . . from the cover of Time magazine and every color supplement in the country” (15). Its achievement, she said, is “awesome.” From 1993 until her hospitalization in 2002 and death nearly five years later, Jolley produced a
varied and strong body of work: a coda to the Vera Wright trilogy (The Orchard Thieves, 1995), three further novels, an elegant diary of poems and observations, and four collections, edited by others, of short stories, essays, and radio plays. The novels are instructive for being of a piece with the Vera trilogy, and for their continued exploration of Jolley’s presiding themes. Orchard Thieves shows a grandmother’s realization that children cannot know how much their parents love them; Lovesong (1997) studies the loneliness and lovelessness of a prisoner re-entering society; An Accommodating Spouse (1999) parodies domesticity, a version of The Sugar Mother. And An Innocent Gentlemen (2001), Jolley’s last novel, is a sparely comedic and philosophic study of a menage a trois like that of her parents and those of her character Vera. It never makes clear which man – the husband, the lover, or the young man who molests the daughter – is innocent. Perhaps they all are, and Jolley remains non-judgmental to the end. In 2008 Penguin reissued the Vera trilogy in its Modern Classics Series, introduced by J. M. Coetzee, which suggests Elizabeth Jolley’s work will be read for the foreseeable future. SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF); Winton, Tim (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Clancy, L. (n.d.). Elizabeth Jolley. At http://biography. jrank.org/pages/4474/Jolley-Monica-Elizabeth.html, accessed Mar. 18, 2009. Dibble, B. (2008). Doing Life: A Biography of Elizabeth Jolley. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press. Jolley, E. (1976). Five Acre Virgin and Other Stories. Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre. Jolley, E. (1980). Palomino. Collingwood, Vic.: Outback. Jolley, E. (1981). The Newspaper of Claremont Street. Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre. Jolley, E. (1983a). Miss Peabody’s Inheritance. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Jolley, E. (1983b). Mr. Scobie’s Riddle. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin.
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Jolley, E. (1984). Milk and Honey. Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre. Jolley, E. (1985). Foxybaby. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Jolley, E. (1986). The Well. New York: Viking. Jolley, E. (1988). The Sugar Mother. Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre. Jolley, E. (1989). My Father’s Moon. New York: Viking. Jolley, E. (1990). Cabin Fever. New York: Viking. Jolley, E. (1992). Central Mischief: Elizabeth Jolley on Writing, Her Past and Herself (ed. C. Lurie). New York: Viking. Jolley, E. (1993). The Georges’ Wife. New York: Viking. Jolley, E. (1995). The Orchard Thieves. New York: Viking. Jolley, E. (1997). Lovesong. New York: Viking. Jolley, E. (1999). An Accommodating Spouse. New York: Viking. Jolley, E. (2001). An Innocent Gentleman. New York: Viking. Jolley, E. (2006). Learning to Dance: Elizabeth Jolley – Her Life and Works (ed. C. Lurie). New York: Viking. Modjeska, D. (1995). Extra to Real Life. Australian Book Review, pp. 15–16 (Apr.).
Jose, F. Sionil ISAGANI R. CRUZ
Born on December 3, 1924 in the northern island of Luzon in the Philippines and still writing past the age of 80, Francisco Sionil Jose has been translated into more than 24 languages and is perhaps the best-known contemporary Philippine writer in the world. Although his native language is Ilocano/Iluko (the third most widely spoken language in the Philippines, next to Filipino/Tagalog and Cebuano), Jose writes novels, short stories, and essays in a language imposed on the country by its colonizer, the United States, during the first half of the twentieth century. Intensely pro-Filipino and pro-poor, but unable to write except in the language of a wealthy foreign colonizer, Jose peoples his fiction with characters in conflict with themselves. Very often, a Jose character is Filipino by birth or blood, but has lived abroad for a considerable time and returns home to find that Philippine reality remains defined primarily by age-old class conflict. An avowed disciple of the nineteenth-century Philippine writer Jose Rizal, who wrote two novels that inspired the Philippine Revolution against Spain (its colonizer since the sixteenth century),
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Jose models many of his characters on Rizal’s main hero – a character who returns to save his country but fails. Jose was also heavily influenced by novels he read during his poverty-stricken childhood, including Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Willa Cather’s My Antonia. In his later works, after having established the Philippine Center of International PEN, Jose attempts to employ more modern literary techniques, though with little success. Jose is most successful when he writes the type of nineteenth-century realism that Rizal popularized. Beyond his writing, Jose paid tribute to Rizal by naming his bookshop and publishing house Solidaridad and the periodical he once edited Solidarity, after the Spanish periodical La Solidaridad to which Rizal contributed. Jose’s main achievement lies in a series of novels covering nearly the whole of Philippine history. Known collectively as the “Rosales Saga,” Po-on (1984), Tree (1977), The Pretenders (1962), My Brother, My Executioner (1973), and Mass (1979) – here listed chronologically by period of setting – follow the lives of poor individuals and families struggling against exploitative landlords and corrupt government officials. Drawing heavily on a vernacular literary tradition that stereotypes the poor as good and the rich as evil, Jose creates memorable characters that reappear under various names (or sometimes with the same names) in different novels, even those not belonging to the saga. In his work Sherds (2007a), for example, a professor of pottery takes in a female apprentice, who turns out to be a member of a peasant movement fighting against the professor’s family. This kind of inevitable class contradiction forms a constant theme in Jose’s work. Similar conflicts dealing with family or personal relationships and social or ideological movements occur in most of the earlier novels and short stories. Among the most moving of the novels is Mass, where an exasperated hero joins rebel groups after having exhausted all other avenues for reform, including illegal action. Although neither Marxist nor progressive, Jose’s fiction provokes anger at the injustices inherent in a class system supported by foreign colonizers. In most of his fiction, Jose moves the plot forward with ease through strong characters and dramatic scenes. To non-Filipino readers, his use
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of Philippine English (a variety of American English borrowing heavily from Philippine languages for structure, vocabulary, and idioms) may constitute a barrier to understanding. Such readers are advised to read the Random House editions of the novels, which have been edited for greater accessibility to non-Filipino audiences. Jose has won several prizes, including the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts in 1980 and the Philippine National Artist Award in 2001. He has continued into his eighties to write energetically about his work and his views on Filipino literature more generally. In a typical column in the Philippine Star in 2008 he wrote, “We will infuse our literature with what we are, our gonads, the odors of our bodies and the verdure of our land. We will write as Filipinos, free from the influences of our colonizers, from the canons they imposed on us. In this way, we will not be swept under by the dulcet enticements of McDonald’s, Toyota and Harry Potter. It is the Filipinoness, this particularity which will identify us, from which the universal begins” (Jose 2008). SEE ALSO: Cather, Willa (AF); The City in Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Southeast Asian Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bernard, M. (ed.) (1991). Conversations with F. Sionil Jose. Quezon City: Vera-Reyes. Jose, F. (1962). The Pretenders. Manila: Solidaridad. Jose, F. (1973). My Brother, My Executioner. Quezon City: New Day. Jose, F. (1977). Tree. Manila: Solidaridad. Jose, F. (1979). Mass. Manila: Solidaridad. Jose, F. (1980). Waywaya and Other Short Stories from the Philippines. Hong Kong: Heinemann. Jose, F. (1984). Po-on. Manila: Solidaridad. Jose, F. (1991). Gagamba: The Spider Man. Manila: Solidaridad. Jose, F. (1992). Three Filipino Women. New York: Random House. Jose, F. (1993). Viajero. Manila: Solidaridad. Jose, F. (1996). Sins. New York: Random House. Jose, F. (1998a). Dusk. New York: Random House. Jose, F. (1998b). In Search of the Word: Selected Essays of F. Sionil Jose. Manila: De La Salle University Press.
Jose, F. (1998c). Puppy Love and Other Short Stories. Manila: Solidaridad. Jose, F. (1999a). Don Vicente: Two Novels. New York: Random House. Jose, F. (1999b). We Filipinos: Our Moral Malaise, Our Heroic Heritage. Manila: Solidaridad. Jose, F. (2000). The Samsons: Two Novels in the Rosales Saga. New York: Random House. Jose, F. (2001). Ben Singkol. Manila: Solidaridad. Jose, F. (2005). Termites in the Sala, Heroes in the Attic: Why We Are Poor. Manila: Solidaridad. Jose, F. (2006). This I Believe: Gleanings from a Life in Literature. Manila: Solidaridad. Jose, F. (2007a). Sherds. Manila: Solidaridad. Jose, F. (2007b). Vibora! Manila: Solidaridad. Jose, F. (2008). Should Our Writers Globalize? Philippine Star (Dec. 8). At www.philstar.com/ Article.aspx?ArticleId¼422017&publicationSub CategoryId¼79, accessed Dec 8, 2008. Morales, A. (ed.) (1989). F. Sionil Jose and His Fiction. Quezon City: Vera-Reyes. Thumboo, E. (ed.) (2005). Frankie Sionil Jose: A Tribute. Singapore: Times Academic.
Joshi, Arun R. K. DHAWAN
Arun Joshi is one of the most significant Indian English novelists of the late twentieth century. While he wrote only five novels and a dozen short stories, the complexity of thought and the depth of the issues his work explores have intrigued modern readers and scholars alike. For Joshi, fiction is neither a source of entertainment nor an instrument for publicizing a set of ideas. As a writer, he addresses alienation and the labyrinth of life; his fictional world reveals man confronted by the self and the inscrutable questions of his existence. The kernel of Joshi’s vision is an awareness of human rootlessness and the anxiety that results. Born in Benares (now Varanasi) in 1939, Joshi obtained degrees in engineering from the University of Kansas and in industrial management from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1957 he worked in an American mental hospital where his uncle was a psychiatrist who treated schizophrenics. This experience left a strong impression on the young and sensitive Joshi, and the inner life of his protagonists consequently takes place within the underworld of a soul divided against itself.
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Much of the experience conveyed in his novels flows from Joshi’s memories of his early years in the US. In 1981, he won the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award for his outstanding contribution to Indian English literature. His achievements as a writer were foreshortened by his death in 1993. Joshi made his debut in fiction with The Foreigner (1968), a novel written in the form of “things past” that concerns an individual’s loneliness and anguish in the wake of his estrangement from his environment and his true self. It relates how Sindi Oberoi, an expatriate Indian, suffers in his quest to discover the meaning and purpose of his life. The title invites comparison with Albert Camus’s The Outsider; like Camus’s Meursault, Sindi is devoid of emotion and has no respect for society or religion. Life has led him to London, Boston, and New Delhi, but he has remained a foreigner everywhere. In a telling phrase, Sindi describes his whole life as being “alone in the darkness” (189). Unlike Camus’s novel, The Foreigner ends on a positive note; Sindi progresses from alienation to involvement, whereas detachment is woven inextricably into the very texture of Meursault’s being. As he attempted to plumb man’s perennial dilemmas, Joshi was influenced not only by existentialist writers such as Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, but also by the philosophy of the great Indian sacred book, the Bhagavadgita. Joshi’s second novel, The Strange Case of Billy Biswas (1971), addresses a conflict between more basic but greater forces – civilization and primitive life. The novel explores the total alienation of the protagonist Billy Biswas from the modern bourgeois society of India. The novel’s narrator, Romi, a friend of Billy Biswas whom he had met as a student in New York, recounts Billy’s tale from the perspective of a witness. From an early age Billy feels concerned with eternal questions such “Who was I? Where had I come from?” (120). The Apprentice (1974), a confessional novel cast in the form of a dramatic monologue, is a telling commentary on the decaying values of a degenerating civilization. Like Billy Biswas, the narrative proceeds chronologically, with sporadic flashbacks. Ratan Rathor, the protagonist and narrator, becomes a victim of corruption in a metropolitan society during the war between India and China. A misfit in the modern world, he had to betray his true self to eke out a living in a corrupt society. As a result, he has neglected India’s rich heritage and
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not created the new order that he once envisaged. The novelist pins his hopes on the new generation and the novel ends on a note of affirmation. The Last Labyrinth (1981) focuses on Som Bhaskar, a Western-educated wealthy industrialist who relates the events of his life in flashback. The novel is essentially a tale of two cities, Bombay and Benares – one symbolizing a Western, rational, mechanical culture, the other an Eastern, occult-centered existence. Som goes in search of new experiences, whether they be in business or fornication, but, far from attaining a sense of fulfillment, he experiences a terrible sense of emptiness both within and without: “It is the voids of the world, more than its objects, that bother me” (47). While Joshi’s earlier heroes progress from alienation to existential affirmation, Som fails to resolve his dilemmas or to discover the meaning of life. Joshi’s last novel, The City and the River (1990), both continues and departs from his earlier endeavors. The preoccupation with individual existential predicaments has widened to a concern with the socio-political and existential crisis of urban people in general. More optimistic than before, Joshi does not deny the existence of evil but reassures readers that it cannot last forever since new beginnings are always possible. The novel is a political satire that follows the mythical narrative pattern of a story within a story, told by a wise teacher to his keen disciple in preparation for a quest. The novels of Joshi’s last phase, like the stories collected in The Survivor (1976), develop the metaphysical and epistemological beliefs that had been implicit in his early fiction and demonstrate his existential affirmation. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (WF); Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS: Dhawan, R. K. (1986). The Fictional World of Arun Joshi. New Delhi: Classical. Dhawan, R. K. (1992). The Novels of Arun Joshi. New Delhi: Prestige. Ghosh, T. K. (1996). Arun Joshi’s Fiction: The Labyrinth of Life. New Delhi: Prestige.
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Joshi, A. (1968). The Foreigner. Delhi: Hind Pocket Books. Joshi, A. (1971). The Strange Case of Billy Biswas. New Delhi: Orient. Joshi, A. (1974). The Apprentice. New Delhi: Orient. Joshi, A. (1976). The Survivor. New Delhi: Sterling. Joshi, A. (1981). The Last Labyrinth. New Delhi: Orient. Joshi, A. (1990). The City and the River. New Delhi: Vision.
Jussawalla, F., & Dasenbrock, R. W. (1992). Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonized World. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Kumar, S. (2003). The Novels of Arun Joshi. New Delhi: Atlantic. Prasad, H. M. (1985). Arun Joshi. New Delhi: Heinemann.
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K Keneally, Thomas TRACY WARE
Thomas Keneally is a prolific and popular author of fiction and history, much of it about his native Australia. Convinced that history “is a parable for the present” (1975a, 29), he is best known for his historical novels. Two of his earliest novels, Bring Larks and Heroes and Three Cheers for the Paraclete, received the Miles Franklin Award for the best Australian fiction of the year, while three subsequent and very diverse novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize: The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972; filmed by Fred Schepisi in 1978), about the persecution and murderous rampage of the son of an Aboriginal mother and a white father; Gossip from the Forest (1975b), about the signing of the armistice at the end of World War I; and Confederates, about the American Civil War. In 1982 he won the Booker for his meticulously researched Schindler’s Ark (filmed as the Academy Award-winning Schindler’s List by Steven Spielberg in 1993), about an epicurean German businessman who saved the lives of more than 1,000 of his Jewish workers during the Holocaust. Keneally has spent time in England and the United States, but he lives in and writes mostly about Australia, and he is a strong republican. He received a New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award in 2008. Keneally was born on October 7, 1935 in Sydney, where his family returned in 1942 after seven years in the north coast of New South Wales. His enduring interests in war originated in the stories that he heard from uncles who had been wounded or gassed in World War I, and
from his father’s service in the Australian Air Force in World War II. In Homebush Boy: A Memoir (1995a), he writes of his youthful admiration for the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and his uneasy discovery after reading Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter that modern literature was not always approved by the Catholic authorities. To the surprise of his family, he decided in 1952 to train for the priesthood, but after “something very close to a crack-up,” he left the seminary in 1960 just before being ordained. “I had the sort of absolutist tendencies which led me to become a writer, I suppose,” he told Ray Willibanks, and so he turned to writing “almost immediately” (Willibanks 132). His first novel, The Place at Whitton (1964), is a mystery in which the murderer is one of the men studying at a monastery to become a priest, while his peers try to cope with the strain. Confronted with one who believes that he communes with Joan of Arc, Father Onions responds, “The glory of the Church is mysticism, but the secret of the Church is administration” (101). Here is the birth of one of Keneally’s great themes: the fate of the good but wayward individual in such overwhelming institutions as the church and the army. In his fourth novel, Three Cheers for the Paraclete (1968), Keneally writes with more sympathy of the religious life that he abandoned. The story of Father James Maitland’s struggle to balance his priestly duties with the humanism that leads him to quote the likes of Nietzsche and Pound in his sermons, it displays what Graham Greene calls (on the back of the Penguin edition) “the rather awful comedy inherent in a priest’s life.” When asked by his superiors to comment on an unsettling book
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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called The Meanings of God, Maitland fails to admit that he wrote it under a pseudonym, thereby compounding his error. When he is punished for having avoided Catholic censorship, he consoles himself by remembering that none of the book’s Catholic reviewers found it heretical. Finally he realizes that he is “an institutional being” (233) who must find a way to adjust to the church that he does not want to leave. In Blood Red, Sister Rose (1974), his eighth novel, Keneally combines his interest in Catholic history with his growing interest in war. Jehanne (as he calls Joan of Arc) and her key adviser Yolande, queen of Sicily, duchess of Anjou, and mother-in-law of Charles VII, are the strongest female characters in Keneally’s predominantly masculine early work. Not afraid to stage-manage the miraculous, the indomitable Yolande arranges funds for Jehanne’s staff and for the Orleans expedition and ensures that Jehanne is successfully examined at Poitiers. In this way, Keneally differs from previous versions of the legend, which tend to contrast Joan with the powerful men that surround her. By depicting her as dependent on Yolande, Keneally neither refutes nor endorses Jehanne’s claims to supernatural inspiration. He leaves the reader to weigh the secular, occult, and Christian explanations of this mysterious woman. Keneally established his reputation with his third novel, Bring Larks and Heroes (1967), the first of several depictions of Australian’s convictcolony beginnings. The protagonist is Corporal Halloran, a conscientious soldier who is torn between his oath to serve George III and his growing recognition of the colonial adminstration’s cruelty and injustice. When Ewers, a transplanted forger, is charged with rape, Halloran tries to exonerate him by revealing that he is a eunuch, but Major Sabian is unmoved, and Ewers is hanged. After vivid scenes of flogging and suffering, Halloran and his secret bride are hanged for their roles in an attempted rebellion. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), based on the Governor brothers’ murders in 1900, also ends with the protagonist’s hanging, after he and his brother are tracked down for several murders of unsympathetically depicted whites. Jimmie’s arrest coincides with Australian federation (1901), and so his hanging is delayed because it would be “too indicative of what had been sup-
pressed in the country’s making” (177). Keneally later admitted that “If the novel has a fault it is the young man’s tendency to make the settlers appear as malicious as I could make them” (Willibanks 141), but critics have been more troubled by his claims for his understanding of Aboriginal psychology. A Victim of the Aurora (1977) is the story of a murder on the New British South Polar Expedition of 1910. Anthony Piers, the 92-yearold narrator, remembers his colleagues, one of them a murderer, as “Men of their age – sublime and ridiculous” (209). After Confederates (1979), Keneally moved away from the violence and “alienation” (Willibanks 134) of his early works. A turning point comes in The Cut-Rate Kingdom (1980), in which Prime Minister Johnny Mulhall (based on John Curtin) succeeds in keeping his wartime commitments to Australia’s imperious allies without alienating too many of his Labor Party followers. In 1980, Keneally met Leopold Pfefferberg, the first of the 50 Schindler survivors whom he interviewed for Schindler’s Ark (1982). Collectively they provided extraordinary memories of the enigmatic Oskar Schindler, who could not have saved them if he had not dined and drunk with Nazis who must have appalled him. Nonetheless, Schindler enjoyed his wealth, liquor, and mistresses. As he explains in the preface, Keneally’s response to the challenge of writing about such a subject was to use the techniques of the novel to tell a true story. The book’s success is indicated by both the Booker Prize and the millions of copies that were sold, but some critics have been uneasy with the prefatory claim and with Keneally’s general unwillingness to foreground his own perspective or otherwise qualify his historical understanding (Quartermaine 61–77). As Peter Pierce observes, Keneally is a “conservative” historical novelist who is more inclined to respect than to question his sources (33). Writing in 1995, Pierce argues that Keneally shifts “from a tragic to a benign view of the European settlement of Australia” (10). Thus The Playmaker (1987) returns to the world of Bring Larks and Heroes but in a comic mode, as Keneally imagines the first Australian production of a play (George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer) in 1789. He timed the book to coincide with the Australian bicentennial; by contrast, Patrick
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White deliberately avoided publication that year (Quartermaine 78). Flying Hero Class (1991) revises The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith by showing that today’s Aborigines resist the stereotypes that once seemed so fierce. A River Town (1995b), which Keneally planned as the first part of a trilogy that might become his major work, returns to the time and place of his grandparents (Willibanks 142). The protagonist is Tim Shea, a storekeeper in Kempsey, New South Wales, at the end of the nineteenth century. When his Catholic compassion antagonizes his community, his customers abandon him and his debts accumulate. Through good luck, he escapes the plague, recovers financially, and wins back his customers. With all Kempsey’s faults, “democracy did break out everywhere and wasn’t punished like at home” (98). The novels since 1995 are less benign. The most ambitious, Bettany’s Book (2000), sets contemporary Australia against the crisis in Darfur, while also contrasting Australia past and present. This long novel is one of Keneally’s most formally complex, in that much of the narrative is given in an exchange of letters between two sisters, an Australian film producer and a worker for an Australian relief agency in the Sudan. Their correspondence involves the journal of their great-grandfather Jonathan Bettany, a nineteenth-century sheep farmer, and letters from the Jewish convict who became his second wife. His account of the difficulties of pioneer life overlaps with the Australian sections of The Great Shame: A Story of the Irish in the Old World and the New (1998), a massive history of the Irish diaspora. The Tyrant’s Novel (2003) concerns the unhappy fate of a writer under the control of a tyrant in an unnamed country that resembles Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Keneally returned to Australian subjects in The Commonwealth of Thieves: The Sydney Experiment (2005), a history of the first four years of the convict colony, and The Widow and Her Hero (2007), a novel about the enduring influence of World War II. After more than four decades, he retains his interest in ambitious narratives and commanding perspectives. SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF);
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Greene, Graham (BIF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); White, Patrick (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Keneally, T. (1964). The Place at Whitton. London: Cassell. Keneally, T. (1967). Bring Larks and Heroes. Melbourne: Cassell. Keneally, T. (1968). Three Cheers for the Paraclete. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Keneally, T. (1972). The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Keneally, T. (1974). Blood Red, Sister Rose. London: Collins. Keneally, T. (1975a). Doing Research for Historical Novels. Australian Author, 7(1), 27–9. Keneally, T. (1975b). Gossip from the Forest. London: Collins. Keneally, T. (1977). A Victim of the Aurora. London: Collins. Keneally, T. (1979). Confederates. London: Collins. Keneally, T. (1980). The Cut-Rate Kingdom [special issue of Bulletin]. (Published as a book by London: Allen Lane 1984.) Keneally, T. (1982). Schindler’s Ark. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Keneally, T. (1987). The Playmaker. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Keneally, T. (1991). Flying Hero Class. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Keneally, T. (1995a). Homebush Boy: A Memoir. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Keneally, T. (1995b). A River Town. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Keneally, T. (1998). The Great Shame: A Story of the Irish in the Old World and the New. London: Chatto and Windus. Keneally, T. (2000). Bettany’s Book. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Keneally, T. (2003). The Tyrant’s Novel. Melbourne: Random House. Keneally, T. (2005). The Commonwealth of Thieves: The Sydney Experiment. Melbourne: Random House. Keneally, T. (2007). The Widow and Her Hero. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Pierce, P. (1995). Australian Melodramas: Thomas Keneally’s Fiction. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Quartermaine, P. (1991). Thomas Keneally. London: Edward Arnold. Schepisi, F. (dir.) (1978). The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Film House.
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Spielberg, S. (dir.) (1993). Schindler’s List. Universal Pictures. Willibanks, R. (1991). Interview with Thomas Keneally. Australian Voices: Writers and Their Work. Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 128–42.
Kincaid, Jamaica MOIRA FERGUSON
Jamaica Kincaid writes about the formation of a pre- and postcolonial female subjectivity, and about the quest for personal and political identity. These issues intertwine in her writing with the influence of colonization on the psychic and material life of people in her native Antigua, with motherhood and colonialism as a twinned negotiation. Her pithy, resonant, original, often lyrical voice evokes a world of natural beauty irreversibly contaminated by colonialism. She says, “I never give up thinking about the way I came into the world, how my ancestors came from Africa to the West Indies as slaves. I just never forget it. It’s like a big wave that’s still pulsing” (Garis 42). Born on May 25, 1949 in St John’s, Antigua to a Dominican mother, Annie Richardson, and Roderick Potter, a taxi driver, the young Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson thought of her stepfather, David Drew, a carpenter and cabinet-maker, as her “real” father. Her maternal grandmother was a Carib Indian from land peasant stock. The births of her three brothers, Joseph, Dalma, and Devon, caused a permanent fracture in Kincaid’s relationship with Annie Drew, her mother. After leaving Antigua at 17, she worked as a nanny in Scarsdale, New York, then for three years as an au pair in New York City. She took classes in photography and worked as a secretary; she subsequently won a scholarship to Franconia College, New Hampshire, but returned to New York without graduating and worked as a receptionist. Her first publications were articles in the magazine Ingenue. In 1973, Richardson decided to pursue freelance writing, changing her name to Jamaica Kincaid to avoid notice by family and friends back home: “No one in the history of the place I come from wrote. I was afraid they would laugh at me” (Yaccino 2008). She wanted a name, she explained later, that combined a Scottish surname with a Caribbean island. Through a writer for
the New Yorker whom she knew, she met the magazine’s renowned editor, William Shawn, who admired her original voice and hired her in 1976; she wrote columns for the “Talk of the Town” section until 1985. In 1978, the New Yorker published Kincaid’s first piece of fiction, “Girl.” Having married Shawn’s son Allen, a composer and music professor in 1984, Kincaid gave birth to a daughter, Annie, the following year, and a son, Harold, four years later. The collection Talk Stories (2000) traces the evolution of her “Talk of the Town” contributions, which yoked a Caribbean outlook with an anti-colonial sensibility. At the Bottom of the River (1983b), Kincaid’s first full-length fiction, consists of 10 chronologically disconnected tableaux, each describing a child growing up in a world where psychological, physical, and political tyrannies occur every day, with little escape outside the imagination. The pieces feature recurring, occasionally overlapping topics, from the mother–daughter dyad in the much anthologized opening vignette, “Girl,” through the ontological abyss of “Blackness,” to self-reconciliation, self-knowledge, and an entry into light in the eponymous, epiphanic final section. Operating within an economy of loss (of primal love, for instance), the narrator begins to reconstitute her world and construct more fluid boundaries. In Kincaid’s best-known novel, Annie John (1983a), shortlisted for the 1985 Ritz Paris Hemingway Award, the protagonist lives through a series of encounters involving the doubled mother of family and colonization. Her anger toward this figure highlights the colonial contamination of Antiguan daily life, and the ensuing rupture in the mother–daughter relationship breeds resentment and alienation. Her progress toward maturity and her highly attuned anti-colonial instinct find apt expression in her childlike but sophisticated reaction to Christopher Columbus’s presence in her history textbook. Annie John’s unwillingness to separate from her mother collides constantly with the mother’s desire to teach her daughter independence. At the end, Annie takes control as she walks toward the harbor to embark on a journey to New York, softly intoning the incantatory “My name is Annie John” as the ship slips through the water. Kincaid herself left Antigua in 1966 and maintained a voluntary exile for 20 years. On her
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return, the island’s deterioration shocked her into penning the polemic A Small Place (1988), in which the narrator constructs herself as the “other” of hegemonic, colonial violence. Her diatribe includes a graphic description of sewage leaking into the Caribbean Sea, in which blithely naive tourists swim daily. Tourists are morally culpable, she proclaims, mocking their unconsciously racist discourse. This frontal attack on Antigua’s key industry attracted polarized responses: many readers admired her harsh honesty, but the Antiguan government pronounced Kincaid persona non grata. A section about governmental misrule indicts the distribution of food contaminated by radiation and the shipping of arms to apartheid South Africa. She implores black Antiguans to resist their exploitation, urging them to critique, rather than simply accept, their degraded living conditions and to denounce their historically neglected social services. Lucy (1990) could pass as Annie John’s sequel. Lucy arrives in New York to work as an au pair to the family of Mariah and Lewis. Although earnestly well meaning, her employers and their coterie act as if no power dynamic operates between the haves and have-nots in everyday life. By contrast, Lucy relishes undermining a received metropolitan order in which, predictably, gender relations, sexuality, and blatant bias textually intertwine. The novel contains thinly disguised portraits of some well-known people Kincaid met during her au pair years, some of whom registered strong objections to such practices. About the same time, Kincaid had begun to write a New Yorker column discussing links between horticulture and imperialism, focusing on gardening. This interest complements a consistent attention to nature in her fiction. The eponymous heroine in Lucy, for example, fulminates against “Daffodils,” William Wordsworth’s poem and b^ete noire of many Caribbean authors, for typifying the nationalist/racist bias of the British educational system. Accordingly, Lucy detests the flowers while the American “Pollyanna” Mariah finds them beautiful. Six years later, Kincaid returns to familiar ground with a novel about relationships, arrestingly entitled The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Familiar tropes of loneliness and fear mark the
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life of the protagonist, Xuela Claudette Richardson, daughter of a half-Scottish father and a Carib mother who died at her birth, whereupon Xuela’s father leaves her with his laundress. Beyond that loss lies the narrator’s fulfilled intention to bear no child. As her biological-psychological lineage terminates, Xuela self-resurrects as “a new person.” Emotionally anaesthetized, she savors her capacity, in mid-intercourse, to appraise proletarian and bourgeois lovers in objective, bystander mode. Her self- and sexual awareness seem even more obsessive than Annie John’s and Lucy’s. Xuela’s fear of her father in Autobiography links topically with Kincaid’s protagonist in Mr. Potter (2002), in which a daughter imagines the taxidriver father whom she never knew. In both books, the protagonist textually embodies parents about whom she could only wonder. Paradoxically vulnerable and tough, these voiceclaiming narrators populate a world fraught with frustration, abandonment, and irresponsible male sexuality. As before, the mother figure represents an angry, personal mother and a savage colonialism, and the protagonist wages a fierce inner battle. In January 1996, Kincaid’s youngest brother, Devon, died after a protracted struggle against AIDS. Still focused on her earlier life and relationships in the Caribbean, Kincaid’s My Brother (1997) is a memoir that resurrects grudges she continues to hold against her biological mother. But negative musings aside, when Kincaid arrives in Antigua with AZT and other medicines and finds Devon in a run-down, under-equipped hospital, she sets about finding the local specialist in HIV/AIDS, and ends up attending one of his HIV seminars to learn more about her brother’s condition. Yet bringing Devon to the US, where he could be appropriately treated, lies beyond her emotional capacity: “I can’t,” she confesses, in response to the doctor’s request, “take this strange, careless person into the hard-earned order of my life” (49). Kincaid also mentions another brother, Dalma, who lives in the back garden because of tension with his mother; nature and the garden offer him a treasured solitude. Later, in the New Yorker-spawned collection My Favourite Plant: Writers and Gardeners on the Plants They Love (1998), various friends and gardeners of Kincaid’s acquaintance describe their favorite plant and how it attained that status.
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The column notwithstanding, My Favourite Plant heralds a new phase in Kincaid’s writings of full-length works featuring gardens, plants, and all things horticultural. My Garden (1999) cemented the shift of interest that originated in her New Yorker columns. An autobiography of sorts, it charmingly documents Kincaid’s initiation into the delights of gardening from her early days in Antigua. Metaphorically she returns home, but this time with a globally oriented rather than a family-based anger. She remains preoccupied with self-determination, identity, feelings, solitude, keen observation, and beauty. Sharing the soft suspense of her novels, these choric “gardening texts” continue her philosophical and political critiques but alter the point of entry for delivering them, as if Kincaid has acknowledged or surrendered to her metaphorical DNA. Like the notorious mother that marks so much of her work, she has discovered that she cannot exist outside the boundaries of a colonial upbringing and that ontologically she is her writing. Having triumphantly transferred her daughterhood, she can now simultaneously purge herself of the anger she feels toward her biological mother and her colonized island. In 2005 Kincaid published an edited essay collection entitled Best American Travel Writing 2005 (2005b), and Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya (2005a), the latter a striking contrast to A Small Place in its perspectives on place and tourism. In Among Flowers, Kincaid records in minute detail her adventures with a small group of sturdy seed merchants and gardeners as they navigate the Himalayas at staggeringly high altitudes in search of unusual, possibly unique tropical seeds. Her love of gardening has shifted into a realm of quasi-tourism coupled with professional activism. The potentially dangerous expedition showcases the group’s psychological and physical courage – not even a twice-sprained ankle fazes Kincaid. Curiously, however, there is very little mention of the local porters who facilitate this journey of discovery and carry the group’s substantial luggage. Kincaid’s See Now Then (forthcoming) chronicles the lives of the Sweet family in North Bennington, Vermont, where she, Allen Shawn – from whom she is now divorced – and their children lived for many years. Kincaid has received numerous awards and several honorary degrees
from US colleges and universities. Since 1993, she has been a visiting lecturer at Harvard University, and in 2004 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. SEE ALSO: Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/ Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bonetti, K. (1993). An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid. Missouri Review, 15, 325–40. Bouson, J. B. (2005). Jamaica Kincaid: Writing Memory, Writing Back to the Mother. Albany: SUNY Press. Ferguson, M. (1994a). Interview with Jamaica Kincaid. Kenyon Review, 16(1), 163–88. Ferguson, M. (1994b). Jamaica Kincaid: Where the Land Meets the Body. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Garis, L. (1990). Through West Indian Eyes. New York Times Magazine, pp. 42–4 70, 78, 80, 91 (Oct. 4). Kincaid, J. (1978). At the Bottom of the River. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kincaid, J. (1983). Annie John. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kincaid, J. (1988). A Small Place. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kincaid, J. (1990). Lucy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kincaid, J. (1996). The Autobiography of My Mother. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kincaid, J. (1997). My Brother. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kincaid, J. (ed.) (1998). My Favorite Plant: Writers and Gardeners on the Plants They Love. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kincaid, J. (1999). My Garden Book. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kincaid, J. (2000). Talk Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kincaid, J. (2005a). Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya. Washington, DC: National Geographic. Kincaid, J. (ed.) (2005b). Best American Travel Writing 2005. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Kincaid, J., & Arwan, R. (eds.) (1995). The Best American Essays. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
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Paravisini-Gebert, L. (1999). Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Parvisini-Gebert, L., & Torres-Seda, O. (eds.) (1993). Caribbean Women Novelists. Westport, CT: Greenwood, pp. 185–92. Simmons, D. (1994). Jamaica Kincaid. New York: Twayne. Yaccino, S. (2008). Caribbean Author Discusses Books, Life. At www.columbiachronicle.com/ Paper/Campus.Php?Id¼2892, accessed Mar. 9, 2009.
King, Thomas JENNIFER ANDREWS
Thomas King is a versatile writer who explores the complexities of being Native and Canadian in his novels, short stories, essays, and children’s books. Each of King’s novels centers on a Native North American community, humorously examining the relationships among multiple generations of Aboriginals and, on occasion, their interactions with non-Natives, who often perpetuate absurd stereotypes about Indigenous peoples. Born in Sacramento, California on April 24, 1943 to a Cherokee father and a Greek mother, King was abandoned by his father and raised by his mother in California, who cultivated King’s knowledge of his Cherokee heritage through frequent trips to Oklahoma to visit paternal relatives. He has worked in the academy since 1972 when he became director of native studies at the University of Utah, and has subsequently taught native studies at the University of Lethbridge (1979–89), American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota (1989–95), and creative writing at the University of Guelph (since 1995). Having lived on both sides of the Canadian/American border, King is acutely aware of the complexities this line presents for Native peoples, whose tribal lands often straddle it. His first novel, Medicine River (1990b), traces the return of a Native photographer, Will, to the Alberta reserve of his childhood for his mother’s funeral, and his subsequent decision to stay, aided by the trickster figure Harlen Bigbear. Over time, Will comes to terms with his outsider position, and with the legacy of his white father (who abandoned the family when Will was young) by bonding with the baby of a local accountant,
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Louise Heavyman, and by starting a photography business on the reserve. In keeping with King’s concept of “associational literature,” outlined in his groundbreaking essay “Godzilla vs. PostColonial,” where he insists that Native literatures need to be understood as different from postcolonial works because they did not rely upon the arrival of Europeans in North America, the plot of Medicine River focuses on the significance of community to Aboriginals. Resisting easy conclusions or judgments, the novel instead asserts the vitality and intricacy of Native cultures and identities today. King’s second novel, the Governor General’s Award-nominated Green Grass, Running Water (1993a), is his most complex to date, with a circular structure that frames multiple stories of contemporary political conflict and daily life on the reserve with the Aboriginal trickster figure Coyote’s multiple accounts of the world’s creation. Green Grass depicts the efforts of five Blackfoot men and women to hold onto reserve lands near Blossom, Alberta that have been chosen by the provincial government for the construction of a dam and cottages. They hope instead to profit from the tourists who visit the reserve, and to preserve a sense of selfhood rooted in Native traditions and beliefs. King also alludes widely to British, American, and Canadian literary works, including Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Melville’s Moby-Dick, and Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage, as well as key figures and events from Canadian and American history and politics. Also in 1993, King published One Good Story, That One (1993b), a collection of 10 short stories that combine oral storytelling techniques with a comic idiom, including the often anthologized “Borders.” Narrated by a Blackfoot boy who, with his mother, gets stuck at the Canada/US border en route to visiting his sister in Utah, the story explores the tensions between tribal and state definitions of nationalism in a humorous yet pointed manner. Set on a Native reserve that straddles the border, Truth and Bright Water (1999) is King’s darkest novel. It is narrated by Tecumseh, an Aboriginal boy working over a summer for a famous Native art restorer and trickster figure, Monroe Swimmer, who has returned to the reserve to claim the prairies for his ancestors.
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Tecumseh’s emerging pride in his heritage is juxtaposed by the grim home life of his friend and relative, Lum, who, beaten by his abusive father and haunted by the death of his mother, commits suicide by jumping off a half-built bridge linking Canada and the US. Like Green Grass, Truth and Bright Water relies heavily on puns, historical allusions (including the legacy of Tecumseh, the Shawnee war chief and pan-tribal leader), and the parodic reworking of mass culture icons such as Marilyn Monroe to criticize the power accorded to Eurocentric worldviews. King has written several acclaimed children’s books and is an accomplished photographer who has exhibited his work internationally. He also created, wrote, and starred in The Dead Dog Cafe Comedy Hour, a popular Canadian radio show from 1995 to 2001. He has most recently taken his fiction in a new direction by publishing two mystery novels under the pseudonym Hartley Goodweather. DreadfulWater Shows Up (2002) and The Red Power Murders (2006) combine aspects of the hard-boiled detective formula with stories of life on a Native reserve through the character of Thumps DreadfulWater, an ex-cop turned professional photographer. The DreadfulWater series combines fast-paced action, gentle humor, and sharp irony. King’s works continue to trace the complexities of being Aboriginal from a wide range of viewpoints, employing humor, satire, and irony to present innovative representations of Native North Americans. SEE ALSO: Border Fictions (AF); Canadian Fiction (WF); Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); Detective/Crime Fiction (WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Indigenous Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Andrews, J. (1999). Border Trickery and Dog Bones: A Conversation with Thomas King. Studies in Canadian Literature, 24(2), 161–85. Andrews, J. Davidson, A., & Walton, P. L. (2003). Border Crossings: Thomas King’s Cultural Inversions. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Canadian Literature (1999). On Thomas King [special issue], 161–2. King, T. (1990a). Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial. World Literature Written in English, 30, 10–16. King, T. (1990b). Medicine River. Markham, ON: Viking. King, T. (1992). A Coyote Columbus Story. Toronto: Groundwood. King, T. (1993a). Green Grass, Running Water. Toronto: HarperCollins. King, T. (1993b). One Good Story, That One. Toronto: HarperCollins. King, T. (1998). Coyote Sings to the Moon. Toronto: Key Porter. King, T. (1999). Truth and Bright Water. Toronto: HarperCollins. King, T. [as Goodweather, H.] (2002). DreadfulWater Shows Up. Toronto: HarperCollins. King, T. (2003). The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: Anansi. King, T. (2004). Coyote’s New Suit. Toronto: Key Porter. King, T. [as Goodweather, H.] (2006). The Red Power Murders: A DreadfulWater Mystery. Toronto: HarperCollins. Rooke, C. (1990). Interview with Tom King. World Literature Written in English, 30, 62–76.
Kogawa, Joy SHEENA WILSON
Novelist, poet, and activist Joy Kogawa was one of the first visible minority writers whose work joined the Canadian literary canon. As a Japanese Canadian woman she is often seen to be writing from the ethno-cultural margins, despite the enormous popular and critical success of her first novel, Obasan (1981). Thematically, Kogawa’s writing concentrates on the struggles of characters located on the cultural peripheries, including ethnic others, women, activists, the homeless, and the mentally ill. Joy Nozomi Kogawa (nee Nakayama) was born to Japanese immigrants in Vancouver on June 6, 1935. Her father was an Anglican minister and her mother taught kindergarten. Her early childhood revolved around the church community and her home at 1450 West 64th Avenue in Vancouver, which is now preserved as a historic site and cultural center. It is also the Vancouver home of the fictional Naomi Nakane in Obasan and is
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featured in Kogawa’s children’s book Naomi’s Tree (2008). When she was 6, Kogawa’s family was displaced as part of the Canadian government’s wartime “evacuation” of Japanese Canadians from the west coast. The word “evacuation,” used officially at the time, has since been recuperated by Japanese Canadians to encompass their experiences during and after the war: relocation to road camps and farms in the interior; internment, dispossession, repatriation/deportation, and dispersal; banishment from the west coast until 1949; and ultimately assimilation. These events inform Kogawa’s writing and activism. Other realities her work reflects include her attempts to balance a tumultuous inner life, particularly concerns about the nature of good versus evil; life as a wife and mother; the complexities of being a visible minority; the turbulent realities of her family history; her social responsibility toward the underprivileged; and her involvement in the 1980s redress campaign, which sought an apology and compensation for the wartime and postwar treatment of Japanese Canadians. Kogawa began writing what she has called religious poetry with The Splintered Moon (1967). However, it was Obasan, a poetic, semiautobiographical fiction, that established her national and international reputation. Published a decade after the implementation of Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s multicultural vision for Canada, Obasan was the first novel to address Japanese Canadians’ wartime experiences. It became the cultural reference for their evacuation from the west coast and brought attention to the redress movement; indeed, at the official apology in 1988, it was quoted by government and opposition leaders. Obasan is a narrative of human rights abuses and historical racism that challenges myths of Canadian nationhood. It traces Naomi’s remembrance of the Kato-Nakane family history, which revolves around both the evacuation and the bombing of Nagasaki from the narrative vantage point of 1972. Narrated by Naomi as both a 36year-old woman reconstructing her memories and as a young child, it acknowledges the fallibility of textual representations of history. The novel also emphasizes the heterogeneity of Japanese Canadian communities and their experiences: something the homogenizing critical reception
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risks neutralizing. Stephen, for example, rejects his Japanese Canadian identity and is “always uncomfortable when anything is ‘too Japanese’” (217). This response contrasts with Aunt Emily’s embrace of her identity, although she considers herself and all Japanese Canadians predominantly Canadian. The Issei (first-generation) characters, Obasan and Uncle, find Emily and other Nisei (second-generation) very un-Japanese. Through a polyphonic narrative, Kogawa exposes the media misrepresentation of Japanese Canadian history by inserting newspaper articles and headlines that falsely contextualize photographs. The novel’s predominantly Judeo-Christian perspective enables it to resonate with Canadian readers’ notions of forgiveness and acceptance, which allow for a space of negotiation where Japanese Canadian evacuation can be recuperated into the canon. Kogawa rewrote Obasan as a children’s novel called Naomi’s Road (1986a, 1986b), which was later expanded and published in Japanese as Naomi no Michi (1988). A longer, newly illustrated English version came out in 2005. Kogawa’s second adult novel, Itsuka (1992), the semiautobiographical sequel to Obasan, addresses the author’s participation in the redress campaign. Thirteen years later, Emily Kato (2005) reimagines that first novel: characters and events are transformed by a post-2001 perspective, and the similarities between World War II and twentyfirst-century Canadian realities are blatantly identified. Kogawa suggests that history can teach us much about the possible ramifications of post9/11 governments’ actions for individuals, communities, and Canada as a whole. While Kogawa is best known for Obasan and Itsuka, she maintains that The Rain Ascends (1995) is her most important work. The narrative revolves around Millicent Shelby’s struggle to address the knowledge that her aging father, an Anglican minister, is a charismatic man who has performed compassionate acts of human service but also victimized young boys. The narrative does not easily allow readers to classify Charles Shelby as a monster, which would deny the complexity of our humanity that encompasses good and evil. Kogawa has received numerous literary awards in Canada, collected honorary degrees, and was named a Member of the Order of Canada in 1986.
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In 2008 she was awarded the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award, and since 2004 Vancouver has celebrated November 6 as Joy Kogawa Day. She remains humbly dedicated to activist causes, to writing, and to elucidating complex realities and lives. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Davidson, A. (1993). Writing against the Silence: Joy Kogawa’s “Obasan.” Toronto: ECW. Kogawa, J. (1967). The Splintered Moon. Fredericton: University of New Brunswick Press. Kogawa, J. (1974). A Choice of Dreams. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Kogawa, J. (1977). Jericho Road. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Kogawa, J. (1981). Obasan. Toronto: Penguin. Kogawa, J. (1985). Woman in the Woods. Oakville, ON: Mosaic. Kogawa, J. (1986a). Naomi’s Road (illus. M. Gould). Toronto: Stoddart. Kogawa, J. (1986b). Naomi’s Road (illus. R. Ohi). Markham, ON: Fitzhenry and Whiteside. Kogawa, J. (1988). Naomi no Michi (trans. M. Asami). Tokyo: Shogakkan. Kogawa, J. (1989). Is There a Just Cause? In J. Williamson & D. Gorham (eds.), Up and Doing: Canadian Women and Peace. London: Women’s Press, pp. 157–62. Kogawa, J. (1992). Itsuka. Toronto: Viking. Kogawa, J. (1995). The Rain Ascends. Toronto: Knopf. Kogawa, J. (2003). A Garden of Anchors: Selected Poems. Oakville, ON: Mosaic. Kogawa, J. (2005). Emily Kato. Toronto: Penguin. Kogawa, J. (2008). Naomi’s Tree (illus. R. Ohi). Markham, ON: Fitzhenry and Whiteside. Miki, R. (1998). Broken Entries: Race, Subjectivity, Writing. Toronto: Mercury. Wilson, S. (ed.) (in press). Joy Kogawa: Essays on Her Works. Toronto: Guernica.
Kroetsch, Robert FRANK DAVEY
Arguably the most persistently innovative Canadian poet-novelist of the last century, Robert
Kroetsch has also made determinative contributions to Canadian literary theory – earning from critic Linda Hutcheon the sobriquet “Mr. Canadian Postmodern” (160). He was born on June 26, 1927 in Heisler, Alberta, and studied at the University of Alberta, McGill University, Middlebury College (Vermont), and the University of Iowa. His work as both poet and novelist has been so substantial that it remains unclear which has been the greater contribution. Although his ambitions to become a novelist reach back to his student years at Alberta and McGill, the foundation of his career were his years teaching at the State University of New York at Binghamton (1962–73), where he collaborated with William Spanos in 1970 in founding Boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature. Kroetsch and Spanos defined their “postmodernism” in the context of Continental modernism, existentialism, structuralism, and phenomenology, emphasizing in particular the anti-essentialism of existentialism and the consequent need for what they called un-naming and de-centering. Kroetsch’s first published novel was But We Are Exiles (1965). While this was a solemn and rather conventional narrative of sexual betrayal, it also introduced several of the motifs of Kroetsch’s subsequent fiction – an absurd quest by water, land, or air; a gigantically proportioned Canadian landscape, and an unresolvable contrast between obsessed, proactive characters and reflective or reactive ones. Kroetsch’s novels have partly alternated between making one or the other of these the narrative focalizer, and have often used the contrast between the two to suggest the inadequacies of written representations. Much more characteristic of his later fiction was his second novel, The Words of My Roaring (1966), in which a young Rabelaisian undertaker accidentally defeats the town doctor in a provincial election by impulsively promising a drought-ending rain. The comic deployment of structuralism that underpins this novel – youth and age, undertaker and doctor, orality and literacy, drought and rain, and leading characters who are both doubles and opposites of each other – continues in the Governor General’s Award-winning The Studhorse Man (1969), Gone Indian (1973), Badlands (1975a), and What the Crow Said (1978), and is also evident in the more complex Alibi (1983a) and The Puppeteer (1992), novels that construct contrasting
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identities for similar sets of characters. Kroetsch’s most recent novel, The Man from the Creeks (1998), echoes his first by returning to the river voyage and the Canadian Arctic. Most of these novels interrogate inherited concepts of masculinity, usually by locating them within specific parts of Canadian history, and humorously express nostalgia for the supposed “certainties” of earlier, even preliterate, times. The Studhorse Man tells the comic story of a man obsessed with preserving an equine bloodline in Alberta farmlands that were being mechanized just after World War I; Gone Indian presents a white American doctoral student who dreams of acquiring a “frontier” identity on the Canadian prairie, and envies the Englishman Archie Belaney who had managed to become the Canadian “Grey Owl” 50 years before; Badlands invents an equally obsessed amateur paleontologist whose ruthlessness enables him to make major finds during the early twentieth-century rush to explore southern Alberta’s “beds” of dinosaur bones. Their stories are ones of sexual misidentifications – with a stallion, the “mystical” Indian, or a massive reptilian bone – in a world in which there are no firm identities. The Man from the Creeks reimagines the manic quests of the 1890s Yukon gold rush through the eyes of characters borrowed from Robert Service’s “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” most of whom for Kroetsch fatally identify their sexualities with the acquisition of gold. The superficialities that the novel reveals in Service’s famous poem signal the mistrust of language that is a repeated motif of all Kroetsch’s novels – the graduate student of Gone Indian prefers the uncertainties of death to the constructs produced by academic research; the paleontologist’s daughter joyously discards his self-serving journals at the conclusion of Badlands; Alibi’s protagonist Dorf despairs, at the end of that novel, that he could ever “perfectly” represent his own story, any more than he could have a perfect orgasm or a perfect relationship with a woman. Everything he achieves is an “alibi” – an approximation of what he had imagined he had desired. The Puppeteer is constructed of conflicting narrations, plots that repeat or parallel each other but rarely connect, and motifs that gesture toward probable but not necessary meanings; together these produce a formally entertaining tour
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de force – a work that is less about its characters than about the unsettling limitations of the conventions of fiction. Although less well known than his fiction, Kroetsch’s poetry and theories of poetry have to date been more influential within Canadian writing. Much of his poetry has been book-length conceptual poems in which the material form of the book is a part of the composition. Many of these have been books about books, or books that both “double” and counter an earlier, usually non-literary, title. This doubling has much the same effect as the doubling of characters in his novels; both create irresolvable contrasts between literary and the non-literary, between representation and the unrepresentable. The first of these doubling poems was The Ledger (1975b), which begins with two pages from a ledger kept by the poet’s grandfather in the 1880s, and is written in two contrasting columns in an explicit imitation of double-entry bookkeeping. The most widely circulated has been Seed Catalogue (1977), in which Kroetsch’s inquiry into the question “How do you grow a poet?” is interwoven with excerpts from an early twentieth-century seed catalogue that “poetically” extols the virtues of the cabbage, squash, and other seeds it offers. The cover design of the 1979 edition simulated that of a historic seed catalogue. The most recent is The Hornbooks of Rita K (2001), in which not only does his own book counterpoint the fictional “hornbooks” of the title, but “Rita K” functions as a feminist double to “Robert K.” The Ledger and Seed Catalogue were included in Kroetsch’s collected editions, published under the titles Field Notes: 1–8 A Continuing Poem: The Collected Poetry of Robert Kroetsch (1981b) and Completed Field Notes: The Long Poems of Robert Kroetsch (1989a), titles that again effectively double the text by assigning it to two genres. To accompany these, Kroetsch published the poem-essay “For Play and Entrance: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem” (1981c), which has become one of the most cited texts in Canadian criticism and has been credited, along with Michael Ondaatje’s The Long Poem Anthology (1979), for the unusual prominence the long poem enjoys in late twentieth-century Canadian writing. Most of Kroetsch’s manifestolike essays, collected as a special issue of the journal Open Letter in 1983 and republished by
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Oxford University Press as The Lovely Treachery of Words (1989b), are written in a similar non-linear juxtapositional style. Kroetsch has been unusually forthcoming among Canadian writers in his theorizing of Canadian literary history, Canadian culture, the literary uses of critical theory, and the philosophical grounds of his own work. After publishing What the Crow Said, he published under the title The Crow Journals (1980) the diary he had kept while writing the novel. In 1982 he allowed himself to be the focus of a searching book-length interview by critics Shirley Neuman and Robert Wilson on his uses and interpretations of poststructuralist theory, published as Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch. More recently he has published the autobiographical A Likely Story: The Writing Life (1995) and, with John Lent, Abundance: The Mackie House Conversations about the Writing Life (2007). Although Kroetsch’s writing is founded on internationally circulating critical theory, especially on Barthesian structuralism and Foucauldian theories of cultural archaeology, it has vigorously resisted the de-territorializing influences of both nationalism and globalization. The author of an early self-identifying essay “On Being an Alberta Writer” has set his novels and poems almost entirely in Canada’s prairie provinces and Arctic territories and populated them with eccentric rather than romantically attractive characters. Seed Catalogue, with its refusal of the cultural authority of the Parthenon and Chartres Cathedral, of “the Seine, the Rhine, the Danube, the Tiber and/the Thames” (1977, 29) in favor of comically quaint local referents, can be read as declaring a cultural decentering that is foundational to his writing. The variety of Kroetsch’s writings together with their provocative uses of critical theory have attracted numerous critical responses, from Susan Rudy Dorscht’s admiring Women, Reading, Kroetsch (1991) to Dianne Tiefensee’s openly hostile The Old Dualities: Deconstructing Robert Kroetsch and His Critics (1994). The best introductions to his writing remain Peter Thomas’s Robert Kroetsch (1980) and the proceedings of the Niederbronn, France, conference, Kroetsch at Niederbronn, published as a special issue of Open Letter (Davey 1996). SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); Critical Theory and Fiction (WF); Fictional Responses
to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF); Postmodernist Fiction (AF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Davey, F. (ed.) (1996). Kroetsch at Niederbronn [special issue]. Open Letter, 9(5–6). Dorscht, S. R. (1991). Women, Reading, Kroetsch: Telling the Difference. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Fogel, S. (1984). “I See England I See France”: Robert Kroetsch’s Alibi. Studies in Canadian Literature, 9(2), 233–240. Hutcheon, L. (1988). The Canadian Postmodern. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Kroetsch, R. (1965). But We Are Exiles. Toronto: Macmillan. Kroetsch, R. (1966). The Words of My Roaring. Toronto: Macmillan. Kroetsch, R. (1968). Alberta. Toronto: Macmillan. Kroetsch, R. (1969). The Studhorse Man. London: Macdonald. Kroetsch, R. (1973). Gone Indian. Toronto: New Press. Kroetsch, R. (1975a). Badlands. Toronto: New Press. Kroetsch, R. (1975b). The Ledger. Coldstream, ON: Brick/Nairn. Kroetsch, R. (1976). The Stone Hammer Poems, 1960–1975. Nanaimo, BC: Oolichan. Kroetsch, R. (1977). Seed Catalogue. Winnipeg: Turnstone. Kroetsch, R. (1978). What the Crow Said. Don Mills, ON: General. Kroetsch, R. (1979). The Sad Phoenician. Toronto: Coach House. Kroetsch, R. (1980). The Crow Journals. Edmonton: NeWest. Kroetsch, R. (1981a). The Criminal Intensities of Love as Paradise. Lantzville, BC: Oolichan. Kroetsch, R. (1981b). Field Notes: 1–8 A Continuing Poem: The Collected Poetry of Robert Kroetsch. Don Mills, ON: General. Kroetsch, R. (1981c). For Play and Entrance: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem. Dandelion, 8(1), 74, 76–7. Kroetsch, R. (1983a). Alibi. Toronto: Beaufort. Kroetsch, R. (1983b). Essays (ed. F. Davey & bpNichol) [special issue]. Open Letter, 5(4). Kroetsch, R. (1983c). Letters to Salonika. Toronto: Grand Union. Kroetsch, R. (1985). Advice to My Friends: A Continuing Poem. Don Mills, ON: Stoddart.
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Kroetsch, R. (1986). Excerpts from the Real World: A Prose Poem in Ten Parts. Lantzville, BC: Oolichan. Kroetsch, R. (1989a). Completed Field Notes: The Long Poems of Robert Kroetsch. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Kroetsch, R. (1989b). The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Kroetsch, R. (1992). The Puppeteer. Toronto: Random House. Kroetsch, R. (1995). A Likely Story: The Writing Life. Red Deer, AB: Red Deer College Press. Kroetsch, R. (1998). The Man from the Creeks. Toronto: Random House. Kroetsch, R. (1999). The New World and Finding It. Salt Spring Island, BC: Mother Tongue.
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Kroetsch, R. (2001). The Hornbooks of Rita K. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. Kroetsch, R. (2004). The Snowbird Poems. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. Kroetsch, R., & Lent, J. (2007). Abundance: The Mackie House Conversations about the Writing Life. Vernon, BC: Kalamalka. Kroetsch, R., Neuman, S., & Wilson, R. (1982). Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch. Edmonton: NeWest. Ondaatje, M. (ed.) (1979). The Long Poem Anthology. Toronto: Coach House. Thomas, P. (1980). Robert Kroetsch. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre. Tiefensee, D. (1994). The Old Dualities: Deconstructing Robert Kroetsch and His Critics. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
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L La Guma, Alex ROGER FIELD
Best known for his novels and short stories, Alex La Guma’s political profile – leading member of the South African Communist Party (SACP) and African National Congress (ANC), founding member of the South African Coloured Peoples Organisation (SACPO), defendant in the 1956–61 Treason Trial, detained without trial several times, banned and placed under house arrest – belies the diversity and complexity of his oeuvre. La Guma was born on February 26, 1925 in District Six, a vibrant slum on the edge of Cape Town’s business district. His father was a leading left-wing politician and activist between the 1920s and 1950s. In the late 1930s, La Guma’s childlike illustrations for poetry by Langston Hughes and Georgia Douglas Johnson in The Liberator, a short-lived publication of the National Liberation League of South Africa, brought him into contact with Harlem Renaissance writers, and in the early 1940s his father called for the emergence of colored novelists at a time when the local press encouraged aspiring colored writers to emulate Dumas and Pushkin. Like many black writers of the time, La Guma was a journalist before he became a novelist. His output was varied: standard news reports, satire, allegory, and a 37-week comic-strip story Little Libby (1959), which precedes the novella A Walk in the Night (1962) by three years. While his earliest prose fiction was set in and around District Six and displays the influence of American naturalism and popular culture, John Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath was a strong influence on And a Threefold Cord (1964). Parallels between the appalling conditions in Cape Town’s informal settlements during the winter months and the plight of migrant “Okies” in California during the Great Depression were doubtless overpowering. La Guma’s next two novels are more autobiographical. Set in the Roeland Street jail where he had been incarcerated, The Stone Country (1967) uses the dynamics of prison life to explore the limits and possibilities of political development among the most oppressed and marginalized. Begun in South Africa but completed during his exile first in Britain and later Cuba (1966–85), it marks a transition to fiction that places the liberation struggle and its activists and opponents center-stage. With its backdrop of the 1961 Sharpeville massacre and the apartheid regime’s shortlived confidence that it had dealt a killer blow to a weakened liberation movement, In the Fog of the Seasons’ End (1972) embraces underground political work in which La Guma had participated during his final years in South Africa and the beginning of the armed struggle. Early exile saw La Guma encounter many influences and undertake various endeavors beyond the writing of fiction. He produced 22 radio plays and programs, at least one of which attacked postindependence African leaders whose employment policies placed political affiliation over technical expertise. The exiled poet Mazisi Kunene, also the ANC’s chief representative in the UK at the time, directed him toward traditional art forms. This defense of an authentic popular expression contributed to his role as an ANC and SACP
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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spokesperson on cultural matters, and cemented his position in the Afro-Asian Writers Association, whose secretary general he became in 1979. Bans on La Guma’s work removed it from public circulation in South Africa between 1962 and the early 1990s. During the 1980s at universities elsewhere in Africa his novels were among the most widely studied. Whereas early commentators read his fiction through a combination of naturalism and politics, with the emergence of academic discourses attuned to a plurality of voices and inner contradiction, scholars and researchers have addressed his work from Bakhtinian and postcolonial perspectives, and drawn on his comic strips, radio plays, literary programs, reviews and articles on culture, unpublished poetry and drawings, and contributions under several pseudonyms to inform debates on the relationship between colored identity and political consciousness. La Guma’s views on race were a product of their time, contributing what Zo€e Wicomb calls “ethnographic self-fashioning” (92) through his early journalism and fiction. Influenced by thinking on coloredness dating back to the 1937 Wilcocks Commission, and by Soviet theory on national groups, he accepted the existence of coloreds as a definite cultural and racial group – its precise definition escaped him, as it did the liberation movement’s brightest minds – and attacked as “ultra-left” analyses that condemned coloredness as an apartheid construct. He rejected notions of white purity but could not apply this critique to those who saw themselves as ethnically “Indian” or “African.” La Guma’s last completed novel, Time of the Butcherbird (1979), provides a comprehensive picture of modern South Africa and a regime feeling the first political tremors of revived resistance precipitated by the collapse of Portuguese colonialism. Four years earlier, he wrote the travelogue A Soviet Journey (1975). Undoubtedly a work of political homage, its chief value lies in the ways La Guma used the genre to explore the influence of modernism on his last two published texts. Both draw heavily on Ernest Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. La Guma’s complicated debt to Hemingway suggests that toward the end of his life he struggled to synthesize the desire to write politically engaged fiction with forms of expression that would reflect
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on the writing process itself. When he died in 1985, he was the ANC’s chief representative for Central America and the Caribbean. SEE ALSO: Censorship and Fiction (WF); Critical Theory and Fiction (WF); Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the African Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF); Southern African Fiction (WF); Steinbeck, John (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Breidlid, A. (2002). Resistance and Consciousness in Kenya and South Africa. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Field, R. (2010). Alex La Guma: A Literary and Political Biography. Oxford: James Currey/Boydell and Brewer. La Guma, A. (1959). Liberation Chabalala: The World of Alex La Guma. Cape Town: Mayibuye. La Guma, A. (1962). A Walk in the Night. London: Heinemann. La Guma, A. (1964). And a Threefold Cord. London: Kliptown. La Guma, A. (1967). The Stone Country. London: Heinemann. La Guma, A. (1972). In the Fog of the Seasons’ End. London: Heinemann. La Guma, A. (1975). A Soviet Journey. Moscow: Progress. La Guma, A. (1979). Time of the Butcherbird. London: Heinemann. Wicomb, Z. (1998). Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa. In D. Attridge & R. Jolly (eds.), Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy 1970–1995. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 91–107. Yousaf, N. (2001). Alex La Guma: Politics and Resistance. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Lamming, George SUPRIYA M. NAIR
Barbadian George Lamming is one of the intellectual heavyweights of a formidable group of Caribbean writers and intellectuals that includes C. L. R. James, Wilson Harris, and V. S. Naipaul. Like most of them, he left for London in 1950 in
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what became a historic postwar migration from former British colonies of the English-speaking Caribbean. Lamming was among the first of this generation to raise issues and questions that resonate not just for the Caribbean but also for postcolonial literature and theory in general. In an early collection of essays, The Pleasures of Exile (1960a), he reinterpreted Shakespeare’s infamous savage, Caliban from The Tempest, as a demonized but heroic figure of anti-colonial resistance, and Prospero as the usurping imperialist who enslaved him and colonized his island. Lamming’s essays go on to explore the role of literature and the writer in politics, the pathos and privilege of exile, the ideological impact of colonial education, the alienation of the migrant intellectual, the significance of proletarian and peasant movements, the problems of ethnic strife in a multicultural society, and the embattled project of nation building in the devastating aftermath of colonial settlement, slavery, and indenture in the Caribbean. Lamming was born on June 8, 1927 in a village in Barbados, an island so colonially influenced it was called Little England. Although a child in the late 1930s when the Caribbean was galvanized into a widespread insurgency against the colonial plantocracy, Lamming was deeply influenced by the revolt of the masses. Challenging their invisibility in literature, the writer made landless peasants and the urban proletariat prominent subjects of his novels. If he tends occasionally to romanticize the “folk,” Lamming’s complex novels, with their frequently bleak endings, complicate his idealistic hopes for a better future. His fiction and non-fiction also attack the betrayal of national movements by the colonially educated middle classes. Lamming’s first novel, In the Castle of My Skin (1953), was widely acclaimed as an exemplary anti-colonial intervention. Exploring the villagers’ landlessness as an enforced condition of slave history, colonial racism, class inequality, and neocolonial treachery, the novel presents rural life from an imaginatively autobiographical perspective, including historical riots and strikes and personalities from Lamming’s own life. The period following Castle saw Lamming at the peak of his career, and four major works, including Pleasures, were published in the next seven years. His second novel, The Emigrants
(1954), explodes the myth of England as the mother country, showing instead how Caribbean immigrants were made to feel unwelcome and were forced to re-examine their identities as patriotic subjects of the British Commonwealth. The psychological effects of racism traumatize the immigrants, who react with often self-destructive violence – a frequent outcome in Lamming’s fiction. His subsequent novels, Of Age and Innocence (1958) and Season of Adventure (1960b), are set in the period of universal suffrage and independence. Characteristically, his portrayal of the nationalist movement is sobered by the failure of isolated intellectuals and by the inability of people from different ethnic backgrounds to work amicably together. Although frequently pessimistic, the novels manage to retain his troubled characters’ agency and their continued, if not always successful, resistance to historical constraints. Lamming’s final two novels, Water with Berries (1971) and Natives of My Person (1972), are neglected masterpieces. Borrowing the phrase “water with berries” from Caliban’s invective against Prospero in The Tempest, Lamming rewrites the Shakespearean drama and extends the revisionist analysis of colonial relationships he began in his earlier essays. Both Water and Natives considerably complicate the scathing attack on colonial arrogance in Lamming’s earlier novels. While his indictment continues here, he also presents the psychological effects of colonialism on its agents, suggesting it was not just the subject populations that suffered terrible consequences. By setting Natives allegorically in the initial period of seventeenth-century settlement, Lamming’s last novel so far returns to the beginning of colonial history, suggesting that the imperial project is not a chronologically tidy or limited sequence, but that it continues in the unequal development of former colonies and their dependence on metropolitan capital. While Lamming’s novels focus on Afro-Caribbean populations and primarily on male subjects, neither his novels nor his essays convey a narrow conception of national community. He remains deeply committed to the Caribbean, and since his return many years ago to Barbados he has been actively involved in the labor movement and the academic circuit. Although he has not published
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LAURENCE, MARGARET
any fiction since 1972, he continues to write and is an extremely knowledgeable critic and commentator on Caribbean political realities. SEE ALSO: Black British Fiction (WF); Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/ Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Forbes, C. (2005). From Nation to Diaspora: Samuel Selvon, George Lamming and the Cultural Performance of Gender. Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press. Lamming, G. (1953). In the Castle of My Skin. London: Michael Joseph. Lamming, G. (1954). The Emigrants. London: Michael Joseph. Lamming, G. (1958). Of Age and Innocence. London: Michael Joseph. Lamming, G. (1960a). The Pleasures of Exile. London: Michael Joseph. Lamming, G. (1960b). Season of Adventure. London: Michael Joseph. Lamming, G. (1971). Water with Berries. London: Longman Caribbean. Lamming, G. (1972). Natives of My Person. London: Longman Caribbean. Lamming, G. (1992). Conversations: Essays, Addresses and Interviews, 1953–1990 (ed. R. Drayton & Andaiye). London: Karia. Lamming, G. (1995). Coming, Coming Home: Conversations II. Philipsburg, St. Martin: House of Nehesi. Lamming, G. (2004). The Sovereignty of the Imagination. Kingston, Jamaica: Arawak. Nair, S. (1996). Caliban’s Curse: George Lamming and the Revisioning of History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Paquet, S. P. (1982). The Novels of George Lamming. London: Heinemann. Scott, D. (2002). The Sovereignty of the Imagination: An Interview with George Lamming. Small Axe, 12, 72–200. Silva, A. J. Simoes da (2000). The Luxury of Nationalist Despair: George Lamming’s Fiction as Decolonizing Project. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
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Laurence, Margaret CHRISTIAN RIEGEL
Margaret Laurence was one of the most loved novelists of her generation. She wrote, proudly, in the Canadian idiom, and she wrote of a smalltown experience that was specifically Manitoban but also applied generally to the whole nation. Her four Canadian novels and one short story cycle continue to be mainstays of Canadian literature, while her African works of fiction and non-fiction are considered important contributions to the understanding of colonial experience in Africa in the 1950s. She was a noted stylist who also managed to convey complex political concerns subtly. In her Canadian fiction, she was interested in the place of women in mid-century Canada, in how the social focus in the nation was shifting from a rural and small-town experience to an urban one, and more generally in the changes in Canada’s socio-cultural fabric that occurred leading up to and following the nation’s 1967 centenary. Her characters live in the fictional world of Manawaka, a town modeled on Neepawa, Manitoba, but they also migrate to Vancouver and Toronto, as well to London, England and rural Ontario, giving her social insights broad application. Laurence was born in Neepawa on July 18, 1926, and died on January 5, 1987, in Lakefield, Ontario. Of Scots Presbyterian and Anglo-Irish Methodist ancestry, Laurence often wrote of the constraints evident in small-town life, as well as of the difficulties women had in making lives for themselves in a restrictive social world. She saw her Canadian writing as emblematic of her time, a period when Canadians were becoming increasingly concerned with articulating a sense of nation through the exploration of ancestry and history. She notes in her essay “Sources” that her writing was an “attempt to assimilate the past, partly in order to be freed from it, partly in order to try to understand myself and perhaps those of my generation through seeing where we had come from” (1977, 12). Laurence lived in Winnipeg, British Somaliland, Ghana, Vancouver, and London, like her fictional characters, before making a permanent home in Lakefield. Laurence left Neepawa to attend university, earning a BA in English from United College
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(now part of the University of Winnipeg). It was in Winnipeg that she met her husband, Jack, with whom she moved, first to British Somaliland and later to Ghana, accompanying him in his work as an engineer for British colonial governments. At first Laurence wrote short stories based on her experiences in colonial Africa which appeared in various literary magazines and were then collected in The Tomorrow-Tamer (1963b). The stories in this volume and her first novel, This Side Jordan (1960), set in Ghana, portray a rapidly changing world shifting from colonial rule to independence. Her African and European characters struggle with the disillusionment that accompanies the changing social order. Laurence is critical of both colonizer and colonized, demonstrating a complex understanding of the dynamics of imperialist power structures and both those who are party to and those subject to them. Her African experience helped her to develop an understanding of what she termed “tribal life” which she later applied to her view of Canadian social organization. Though early works, the stories and novel are technically accomplished and stylistically sophisticated, foreshadowing the Canadian writing that was to bring her fame in her own country. Laurence’s time in Africa served as catalyst for a memoir, The Prophet’s Camel Bell (1963a), which details her Somaliland experiences as an optimistic and naive young Canadian hoping to improve the conditions of the people she encounters; it was based on journals she kept in the 1950s. Also originating from her African years is her first published book, A Tree for Poverty: Somali Poetry and Prose, released by the colonial protectorate in 1954, a collection of Somali poems and stories that she translated and transcribed. In 1968, she published Long Drums and Cannons, a critical study of Nigerian dramatists that received praise from Chinua Achebe. Laurence’s first novel in the Manawaka series, The Stone Angel (1964), was written in Vancouver and London against the backdrop of her failing marriage. At this point largely unknown as a writer, she achieved a measure of prominence with the publication of three books in 1963–4, by McClelland and Stewart (Canada), Knopf (New York), and Macmillan (London). Her publishers were confident that they had discovered a great talent, and their judgment was borne out by the reception of her work in Canada, though she
never had a great breakthrough internationally. Nevertheless, The Stone Angel was an immediate commercial success, bringing Laurence to the attention of a broad and appreciative audience and allowing her to consider writing as a career. The novel tells the story of Hagar Shipley from within her consciousness. Hagar is an old woman who, at the opening of the novel, is unaware that she is terminally ill but is beginning to feel the effects of her failing state. Laurence carries over from her African fiction the desire of her protagonists to articulate their past in order to make sense of their present, as well as the search for selfunderstanding. Over the course of the novel, Hagar moves from a misunderstanding of her anger about the life choices she has taken to a redemptive understanding of her own role in maintaining the state of her troubled relationship with her one surviving son. As with later novels, Hagar’s understanding of herself comes through honest self-examination and scrutiny of her actions, and by an assessment of the role of her socio-cultural upbringing in a world defined by the rigid rule of her father and his Victorian ethos. With her second Canadian novel, A Jest of God (1966), Laurence revisited the world of Manawaka as well as the focus on troubled familial relationships. This is a pattern that was to continue in all the books in the series. Again the story is told from the consciousness of her protagonist, Rachel Cameron. The novel is not narrated as such, but rather the reader sees through Rachel’s eyes, experiencing her own limited and limiting understanding of the world around her, as well as witnessing her severely self-critical inner voice. Rachel is a 34-year-old schoolteacher forced to return home from university to care for her aging mother after her father dies. A perpetual teenager under her mother’s reproachful, passive-aggressive ways, she breaks free from her constricted life only after taking responsibility for the state of her existence. She does so after her first romantic and sexual experience with an erstwhile schoolmate, and after confronting her conflicted relationship with her alcoholic father, now dead. Despite the narrative challenges that it presented to readers, as well as its emphasis on the inner life of a troubled woman, which male reviewers failed to appreciate, A Jest of God sold well and was awarded Canada’s highest literary honor, the Governor General’s Literary Award. The novel was also
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LAURENCE, MARGARET
filmed by Paul Newman in his directorial debut, titled Rachel, Rachel and starring Joanne Woodward. The film won several Golden Globes and was nominated for four Oscars. Like A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers (1969) explores the inner life of a female protagonist, this time a suburban housewife. The novel is partly an experiment in representing consciousness in narrative. Laurence’s original plan to present the text in multiple columns to reflect the multiple thoughts simultaneously occurring in her protagonist’s mind proved unwieldy and unmanageable, but she did manage to reflect the way in which human consciousness is constantly influenced by outside stimuli such as television, radio, and other visual media. As she notes in “Gadgetry or Growing: Form and Voice in the Novel,” “The main need was for some kind of form which would convey the sense of everything happening all at once, simultaneously” (1983, 86). As formally progressive and aesthetically daring as John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall, both published in the same year, the novel explores the complexities of domestic life in 1960s urban Canada. The protagonist, Stacey MacAindra, sister to A Jest of God’s Rachel Cameron, struggles in her role as wife and mother in a world that seems out of control, changing so rapidly that the average person cannot possibly keep up or cope with it. The novel references the horrors of the Vietnam War as well as the anonymity of city life. The war and the cityscape Stacey occupies are both equally on fire, threatening her existence. Stacey struggles to find her voice, and sense of self, battling her sense of inadequacy as a mother, alcohol dependency, and a husband who seems to have lost interest in emotional intimacy. Laurence’s interest in form and structure continues with A Bird in the House (1970). Not quite a collection of separate stories, nor fully a novel, the volume is best characterized as a short story cycle. Vanessa MacLeod, like the other protagonists, struggles with the constraints that small-town life have placed upon her, which are compounded by the conservative values that her tyrannical grandfather imposes upon his family. As with the other protagonists, Vanessa must discover her own voice to establish her identity against and in concert with the socio-cultural and religious context that have shaped her. She does so through her imaginative stories, which serve to
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order her life and help her to cope with the loss of her father when she was a child. Laurence introduces in A Bird in the House a metafictional contemplation that is a precursor to the more elaborate metafictional structure and thematics of her final novel, The Diviners. Vanessa, like the protagonist of The Diviners, is concerned with how creativity can become an outlet to cope with the pain of loss and of life. The notion that storytelling, and its overt contemplation, can be an effective tool to understand one’s life is central to The Diviners (1974). Laurence’s protagonist is a successful novelist who, over the course of the novel, writes the text that we read. The recitation of her life, beginning with the early death of her parents when she was a child, and moving through her experiences in small-town Manitoba and then into her adult life, serves for Morag Gunn as a mode of coping with and ordering the life she has led to date. Part fictional biography and part K€unstlerroman, The Diviners is generically the most ambitious of Laurence’s novels. In writing sympathetically, non-judgmentally, and without stereotyping First Nations issues, Laurence anticipates the concerns of colonialism and postcolonialism that became current a decade after the novel was published. SEE ALSO: Achebe, Chinua (WF); Canadian Fiction (WF); Censorship and Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Colonial Fiction (BIF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Gallant, Mavis (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Mitchell, W. O. (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Gunnars, K. (ed.) (1988). Crossing the River: Essays in Honour of Margaret Laurence. Winnipeg: Turnstone. King, J. (1974). Margaret Laurence: A Life. Toronto: Knopf. Laurence, M. (1954). A Tree for Poverty: Somali Poetry and Prose. Nairobi: Eagle. Laurence, M. (1960). This Side Jordan. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Laurence, M. (1963a). The Prophet’s Camel Bell. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Laurence, M. (1963b). The Tomorrow-Tamer. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Laurence, M. (1964). The Stone Angel. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
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Laurence, M. (1966). A Jest of God. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Laurence, M. (1968). Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists, 1952–1966. London: Macmillan. Laurence, M. (1969). The Fire-Dwellers. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Laurence, M. (1970). A Bird in the House. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Laurence, M. (1974). The Diviners. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Laurence, M. (1975). Heart of a Stranger. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Laurence, M. (1977). Sources. In W. H. New (ed.), Margaret Laurence: The Writer and Her Critics. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Laurence, M. (1983). Gadgetry or Growing: Form and Voice in the Novel. In G. Woodcock (ed.), A Place to Stand On: Essays by and about Margaret Laurence. Edmonton: NeWest, pp. 80–9. Newman, P. (dir.) (1968). Rachel, Rachel. Warner Brothers. Riegel, C. (ed.) (1997). Challenging Territory: The Writing of Margaret Laurence. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. Riegel, C. (2005). Writing Grief: Margaret Laurence and the Work of Mourning. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. Stovel, N. F. (2008). Divining Margaret Laurence: A Study of Her Complete Writings. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Verduyn, C. (ed.) (1988). Margaret Laurence: An Appreciation. Peterborough: Broadview.
Leacock, Stephen GERALD LYNCH
Stephen Leacock was the English-speaking world’s best-known writer of humorous fiction from 1910, the year he self-published Literary Lapses, until his death in 1944. He spent his working life as a professor of political economy at McGill University in Montreal, publishing widely in his discipline as well as in history, biography, literary criticism, and travel. But it is as a writer of comic fictions that Leacock came to international attention. And though the book of miscellaneous sketches was his preferred form, Leacock’s best fiction comprised the two short story cycles Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) and Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914).
Born December 30, 1869 at Swanmore, England, Leacock came to Canada as a child of 6, where the family farmed near Lake Simcoe, Ontario in straitened circumstances. His mother, with financial help from her family in England, ensured that Stephen and his brothers and sisters were properly educated at home and later (for the boys) at Upper Canada College. After receiving his PhD in political economy from the University of Chicago in 1903, he joined the faculty at McGill, where he remained for more than three decades, eventually becoming chair of the department. Leacock’s first short stories were published in the 1890s in such magazines as Grip and New York’s Truth. “My Financial Career” appeared in Life in 1895, and that classic treatment of the humor of discomfort provided the opening story of Literary Lapses. This book still displays some of his best work in the comic sketch: “BoardingHouse Geometry,” “The Awful Fate of Melpomenus Jones,” “Hoodoo McFiggin’s Christmas,” and “A, B, and C: The Human Element in Mathematics.” Leacock would continue to produce such gems, but his primary contribution to twentieth-century fiction will remain those companion volumes, Sunshine Sketches and Arcadian Adventures. As Mordecai Richler, Canada’s great comic novelist of the twentieth century, observed, the Sketches was “the first work to establish a Canadian voice” (p. xiii). Sunshine Sketches ends in a “Mausoleum Club,” Arcadian Adventures begins in one, and the two works can be read as an extended fiction that turns on the Sketches’ concluding “L’Envoi: The Train to Mariposa.” Both books humorously anatomize their subjects – respectively the small Canadian town and the big American city – portraying such fundamental social and cultural institutions as business, religion, marriage, and politics. But where the Sketches looks fondly and ironically to the past in the hope of recovering the communal values that characterized small-town Canada, the Adventures peers at the present (c.1914) to expose the rampant individualism and crass materialism that the practices of unrestrained capitalism had thrown up in the form of a modern metropolitan American plutocracy. “Mariposa” and “Plutoria” (the main commercial thoroughfare of the unnamed American city) can thus be seen to supply the two poles of
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Leacock’s fictional landscape. “Mariposa” is the ironized ideal community of the Canadian humanist and traditional Tory, the community eulogized for its diversity in unity yet viewed with an acknowledgment of human fallibility. “Plutoria” is the twentieth century, a negative exemplar of the coming metropolitan modernity’s individualism and materialism. What is worthwhile in “Mariposa” must be remembered forward if the extremes of mechanistic capitalism – “Plutoria” – are to be at least opposed or countered, if not defeated or avoided. Thus Leacock’s voluminous fictions can be located along a continuum between Mariposa and Plutoria, with some pieces being more “Mariposan” – imaginatively evocative of the Tory-humanist’s qualified ideal – but the majority being more “Plutorian” – satirically directed at the follies of modernity. As much as he was Canada’s Victorian-Edwardian man of letters, Leacock was also something of a bridging figure to the comic short story writers of the mid to late twentieth century. American humorists such as Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, S. J. Perleman, and Woody Allen have acknowledged their debt to Leacock. He serves as the most significant figure of continuity between nineteenth-century comic fiction and that of the twentieth century, especially in North America but also in England and elsewhere. In Canada his successors include Richler, Robertson Davies, and Eric Nicol. Even the most ardent Canadian nationalists may betray a colonial impressionability at the places Leacock’s name turns up – praised by Samuel Beckett and mentioned by Jorge Luis Borges as the only Canadian writer he knows, to name but two of the least likely. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); Davies, Robertson (WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Richler, Mordecai (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Cameron, D. (1967). Faces of Leacock. Toronto: Ryerson. Davies, R. (1970). Stephen Leacock. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Leacock, S. (1910). Literary Lapses. Montreal: Gazette Printing.
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Leacock, S. (1911). Nonsense Novels. London: John Lane. Leacock, S. (1912). Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. London: John Lane. Leacock, S. (1913). Behind the Beyond. London: John Lane. Leacock, S. (1914). Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich. London: John Lane. Leacock, S. (1915). Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy. London: John Lane. Leacock, S. (1916a). Essays and Literary Studies. London: John Lane. Leacock, S. (1916b). Further Foolishness: Sketches and Satires on the Follies of the Day. London: John Lane. Leacock, S. (1920). The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice. London: John Lane. Leacock, S. (1922). My Discovery of England. London: John Lane. Leacock, S. (1924). The Garden of Folly. London: John Lane. Leacock, S. (1926). Winnowed Wisdom. London: John Lane. Leacock, S. (1928). Short Circuits. London: John Lane. Leacock, S. (1937a). Humour and Humanity: An Introduction to the Study of Humour. London: Thornton Butterworth. Leacock, S. (1937b). My Discovery of the West: A Discussion of East and West in Canada. Boston: Hale, Cushman and Flint. Leacock, S. (1942). My Remarkable Uncle. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Leacock, S. (1945). Last Leaves. New York: Dodd, Mead. Legate, D. (1970). Stephen Leacock: A Biography. Toronto: Doubleday. Lynch, G. (1988). Stephen Leacock: Humour and Humanity. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Lynch, G. (ed.) (2002). Leacock on Life. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Richler, M. (2000). Introduction. In S. Leacock, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. London: Prion, pp. ix–xiii. Spadoni, C. (ed.) (1998). A Bibliography of Stephen Leacock. Toronto: ECW.
Lessing, Doris JOSNA REGE
Doris Lessing’s life and work span the major political events and cultural movements of the twentieth century. Her extensive body of writing encompasses two world wars; the rise and fall of fascism, communism, and apartheid; widespread
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decolonization; postcolonial migration; psychoanalysis; the nuclear age; the sexual revolution; the culture wars; late capitalism; terrorism; and environmental crisis. Its historical frame includes myth, chronicle, and prophecy, while its geographical purview extends over five continents and beyond, to outer and inner space. Lessing’s generic and stylistic range is equally expansive. At once a British, postcolonial, and world writer with a far-flung readership across the generations, Lessing is a truly global figure. Doris May Tayler was born on October 22, 1919 in Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran) to English parents. Her father, maimed and disillusioned by World War I, had left England and worked for the Imperial Bank of Persia until she was 5, when the family migrated to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Her father’s maize farm was never a commercial success and, by white Rhodesian standards, Lessing grew up in poverty, spending much time alone in the bush with her brother. The strong-willed young Doris clashed with her intelligent and unhappy mother, a wartime nurse who now focused her unfulfilled ambition on her children. Although she was a voracious reader, she dropped out of school at 13, and at 17 left home to work in Salisbury (now Harare). At 19, as another war loomed, she married Frank Wisdom; that marriage produced two children but did not last, and by 1945 she had left both husband and children. She soon became involved with a group of young communist intellectuals in the Left Book Club, where she met and married Gottfried Lessing, with whom she had one son, Peter. This marriage broke down in 1949, when the 29-yearold Mrs. Lessing, stultified by colonial life, sailed for England with Peter and the manuscript of her first novel. She has lived in London ever since, supporting herself continuously with her writing. Lessing is a prolific working writer. She has written more than 50 books, including a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction, drama, poetry, an opera libretto, and even the text for a graphic novel. Her numerous prizes have included the Somerset Maugham Award, the Prix Medicis etranger, the Mondello Prize, the Grinzane Cavour Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 1992 she declined the offer of Dame of the British Empire, explaining, “surely there is something unlikeable about a person, when old, accepting honours from an
institution she attacked when young?” (Adams 2008). In 1999, however, she accepted a Companion of Honour from Queen Elizabeth II “for conspicuous national service”; in 2001, a Companion of Literature from the Royal Society of Literature; and in 2007, the Nobel Prize in Literature. Lessing’s first novel, The Grass is Singing (1950), is a favorite among readers and critics. Beginning with the terse, coded language of a newspaper report on the murder of a white woman by her black “houseboy,” the novel unravels the tortured psyche of the dominant but extremely defensive white settler minority in Southern Rhodesia, exposing the pathology of colonialism and racial domination. Children of Violence (1952–69), Lessing’s epic five-novel autobiographical Bildungsroman, follows its protagonist Martha Quest from adolescence in the bush of 1930s Southern Rhodesia, through 1960s London, and finally to a postapocalyptic future. Martha’s life is overshadowed by war: World War I, which shattered her parents’ lives; World War II, which robbed her generation of its youth; and, after the atom bomb, the ever present threat of nuclear war. The first four novels – Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), and Landlocked (1965) – are set in Southern Africa, following Martha from adolescence to middle age as she breaks away from her mother’s controlling grip, establishes economic independence, marries, has two children, involves herself with communist intellectuals fiercely opposed to the color bar, divorces, remarries, has a third child, divorces her second husband and, as the fourth volume closes, boards a ship for London with her youngest son. In the fifth, The Four-Gated City (1969), set in London, Martha becomes a nurturer despite herself, and helplessly watches a new generation repeating outdated patterns of behavior. In the post-apocalyptic coda, prefiguring Lessing’s later “space fiction,” a small number of “new children” emerge whose heightened senses make them the guardians of their group of survivors. Under My Skin (1994), the first volume of Lessing’s autobiography, covers the period from earliest memories until her 1949 arrival in England, and Walking in the Shade (1997) covers the period between 1949 and 1962. While both volumes were well received, many readers found
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the fictional Martha Quest a more compelling figure than the “real” Doris. Lessing abandoned an initial plan to write a third volume and instead wrote The Sweetest Dream (2001), a fictional attempt to capture the contradictory spirit of the 1960s (author’s note). The Golden Notebook (1962a) is considered by many to be Lessing’s greatest work. In the introduction, she speaks of her effort to write “a novel which described the intellectual and moral climate” of her time even as it “assumed . . . that filter which is a woman’s way of looking at life” (p. xiv). Indeed, it captured the zeitgeist for many female readers who came of age during the 1960s sexual revolution. Characteristic of Lessing’s epic scope, Notebook encompasses war, communism, the rejection of Stalinism, McCarthyism and the Cold War, generational change, feminism, psychoanalysis, and mental breakdown – all from the perspective of a single mother attempting to overcome writer’s block and emotional dependence on male-dominated relationships. Lessing dismisses the “isms” of the novel’s subject matter, preferring to highlight its innovative structure as the embodiment of its central theme – the human tendency to compartmentalize reality. Notebook marked the beginning of Lessing’s engagement with Sufi mysticism. Her work has continued to develop Sufi concepts of love, detachment, and individual and collective transformation. In Notebook, Anna Wulf practices “the Game,” visualizing herself within ever larger frames, and simultaneously holding in her mind’s eye both the planet turning on its axis and herself sitting alone in her bedroom. In Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), the hospitalized protagonist, found raving and amnesiac, embarks on a mythic inner journey in which he understands the human race’s violence and destructiveness as a loss of collective consciousness. Lessing’s writing is not religious, however. Her voice has always remained skeptical and eminently rational, she has never espoused organized religion, and she continually challenges blind belief. The 1970s saw two more novels in which disintegration and breakdown lead to unexpected growth. The Summer before the Dark (1973) charts a middle-aged, middle-class wife and mother’s encounter with the stark cultural reality of aging for a woman. Far more experimental was The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974a), described by
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Lessing as “an attempt at autobiography.” In Memoirs, a nameless middle-aged narrator and her ward, the adolescent Emily, teach each other how to survive as a disintegrating bourgeois social order and urban retribalization eventually usher in new hope for transformation. Between 1979 and 1983, Lessing produced a second series of five novels, Canopus in Argos: Archives, the first and the tour de force being Re: Colonised Planet 5: Shikasta (1979). In this series, she extended the trajectory of Briefing and Memoirs to a new genre of “space fiction.” Drawing upon the Old Testament and other sacred texts, the series allegorically retells the human story as a struggle among the highly evolved Canopus, the bureaucratic Sirius, and the brutish Shammat for colonial control over the broken planet Shikasta. In Shikasta, the Canopean emissary Johor is born into a late twentieth-century human family. From this vantage point he can report on the planet’s condition from a detached yet compassionate perspective, as he has done repeatedly before. Lessing’s characteristic strategy in the series is to zoom out and back in, from macrocosm to microcosm, presenting human history in a dizzying sweep, then scrutinizing the dynamics of individual lives. Despite her cosmic scope, Lessing explores the critical significance of the individual within a larger collectivity; the “small personal voice” of her earlier fiction still matters. In the second novel of the series, The Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five (1980a), Lessing uses the allegory of marriage to illustrate the necessity of challenge and complementarity to human development. The marriage ordained between AlIth, queen of the peaceable but complacent Zone Three, and Ben Ata, king of the warlike but energetic Zone Four, restores balance to both couple and kingdom. Marital bliss is short-lived, however, as Ben Ata must marry the wild Queen of Zone Five and AlIth must climb to the rarefied heights of Zone Two, traveling the final stage of her life’s journey alone. The Sirian Experiments (1980b) is narrated by a dry bureaucrat who attempts to move Sirian colonial policy toward a more enlightened Canopean model, and in so doing falls afoul of her own administration. The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982) is set on a planet rapidly becoming uninhabitable as an ice age looms. Only one representative can survive, composed of people who must
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sacrifice their individual identities to preserve the best qualities of the planet. Finally, Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983) demonstrates Shammat’s manipulation of emotions through rhetoric, as Lessing devotes an entire novel to the power of language itself to corrupt and debase. Lessing sent two realistic novels to publishers in the early 1980s under the pseudonym Jane Somers. Her aim was to encourage new writers by drawing attention to biases of the publishing world. The novels, published to limited though respectable reviews, sold fewer than 5,000 copies each, proving Lessing’s point and embarrassing critics who had failed to recognize her distinctive prose. Jane Somers, first-person narrator of The Diary of a Good Neighbor (1983) and If the Old Could . . . (1984), is a well-heeled, middle-aged editor of a women’s fashion magazine who finds herself caring for her troubled teenage niece and a dying old woman, and then, in the second novel, falls in love with an older married man. After Lessing revealed Somers’s identity, the novels were reissued in one volume, The Diaries of Jane Somers (1984). She continued to explore aging – and notably, love and passion in old age – in Love, Again (1996), The Sweetest Dream (2001), and The Grandmothers (2003). Two of Lessing’s 1980s novels serve as cautionary tales: following a series of biographical vignettes in Shikasta which featured the profiles of individuals who turned to terrorism, The Good Terrorist (1985) is a prescient psychological study of an accidental terrorist, depicting the selfdeception of a young, middle-class woman in a household of squatters. The Fifth Child (1988) is a fable of the Thatcher era in which a young professional couple produces four perfect children but the fifth, Ben, is uncontrollable from the start. Ben derails his perfect family but, more importantly, finds himself an outcast from a society that cannot tolerate difference. In the sequel, Ben, in the World (2000), an adult Ben must try to make his way in a world where he is entirely alone. Lessing has also written numerous short stories, published in several collections. Her stories are known for their psychological analysis of power dynamics in human relationships (“One Off the Short List”), unashamed discussion of sexuality (“Each Other”), exposure of the destruc-
tiveness of social expectations, particularly for women (“To Room Nineteen”), and coming to terms with difficult truths (“Not a Very Nice Story”). Several explore reciprocal relationships between humans and animals (“An Old Woman and Her Cat”), depicting the animals with compassion yet refusing to anthropomorphize them. Many of Lessing’s early stories are set in Southern Africa and are collected in African Stories (1964). Her outspoken opposition to apartheid brought her “banned person” status in 1956, both in Rhodesia and South Africa. The respective bans were not lifted until Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980 and the end of South African apartheid in 1995. Going Home (1957) describes Lessing’s first trip back to Rhodesia in 1956, and African Laughter (1992) is her account of four visits to Zimbabwe in the 1980s and early 1990s after a 25-year exile. Most recently, portions of The Sweetest Dream (2001) are set in the thinly fictionalized postcolonial African republic of “Zimlia” and chart the corruption and betrayals of government officials. In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech Lessing said, “The storyteller is deep inside every one of us . . . It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative” (2007b). This figure has gained centrality in Lessing’s work as she draws increasingly from oral traditions and ancient texts, using the fable as a teaching story to encapsulate the accumulated wisdom of human civilization under threat. Her storyteller is often a detached, older narrator, a chronicler of collective memory, like the Roman senator of The Cleft (2007a), who struggles to break out of his own society’s frames of reference to imagine the ancient origins of the relationship between the sexes. Mara and Dann: An Adventure (1999) and its sequel The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2005) are cautionary, futuristic fables mapping primal human relationships and presaging the ravages of global climate change. Mara and her beloved younger brother Dann make a hazardous journey north through the continent of Ifrik, pressing on through waves of doomed and desperate refugees across a continent in which militarization, drought, disease, and global warming have destroyed centuries of civilization.
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LESSING, DORIS
Doris Lessing writes with passion and detachment, a penetrating intelligence, and a wry humor that abhors sentimentality. She has stretched the novel form and broken barriers of gender and genre. She dislikes political correctness and has never been afraid to speak her mind. Her interests – whether communism, sexuality, psychoanalysis, spirituality, ecology, or geopolitics – have always been ahead of the curve, and by the time they acquire mainstream status, she has moved on. Yet her themes and preoccupations have remained remarkably consistent: a frustration with the endless repetition of human behavior patterns, the struggle to liberate the self from these patterns, and the effort to understand and realize the individual’s relationship and responsibility to the whole. Lessing defies categorization and resists every label aside from that of writer. At 88, Lessing declared Alfred and Emily (2008) to be her last book. Interviewed after its publication, she observed, “I have done quite a good job of documenting a lot of our time, I think . . . You know, looking at it objectively, I’ve written one or two good books” (Barker 2008). In the second, autobiographical half of Alfred and Emily, she describes the enduring trauma of World War I for her parents and herself, a war that “squatted over my childhood . . . And here I still am, trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free” (p. xiii). In its first, fictional half, however, Doris Lessing imagines what each of her parents’ lives might have been like if that war had not occurred, thereby setting them – and perhaps herself – free at last. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Piercy, Marge (AF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF); Southern African Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Adams, S. (2008). Doris Lessing Rejected Top Honour for being “in the Name of a Non-Existent Empire” (Oct. 21). At www.telegraph.co.uk, accessed Apr. 15, 2009.
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Barker, V. (2008). Doris Lessing Revisits – and Rewrites – the Past (Oct. 4). At www.npr.org, accessed Mar. 9, 2009. Hanford, J. Doris Lessing: A Retrospective. At www. dorislessing.org, accessed Apr. 15, 2009. Lessing, D. (1950). The Grass is Singing. London: Michael Joseph. Lessing, D. (1952). Martha Quest. London: Michael Joseph. Lessing, D. (1953). Five: Short Novels. London: Michael Joseph. Lessing, D. (1954). A Proper Marriage. London: Michael Joseph. Lessing, D. (1957). Going Home. London: Michael Joseph. Lessing, D. (1958). A Ripple from the Storm. London: Michael Joseph. Lessing, D. (1960). In Pursuit of the English. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Lessing, D. (1962a). The Golden Notebook. London: Michael Joseph. Lessing, D. (1962b). Play with a Tiger. London: Michael Joseph. Lessing, D. (1964). African Stories. London: Michael Joseph. Lessing, D. (1965). Landlocked. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Lessing, D. (1967). Particularly Cats. London: Michael Joseph. Lessing, D. (1969). The Four-Gated City. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Lessing, D. (1971). Briefing for a Descent into Hell. London: Jonathan Cape. Lessing, D. (1973). The Summer before the Dark. London: Jonathan Cape. Lessing, D. (1974a). The Memoirs of a Survivor. London: Octagon. Lessing, D. (1974b). A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews (ed. P. Schlueter). New York: Knopf. Lessing, D. (1978a). The Temptation of Jack Orkney: Collected Stories, vol 2. London: Jonathan Cape. Lessing, D. (1978b). To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories, vol. 1. London: Jonathan Cape. Lessing, D. (1979). Re: Colonized Planet: Shikasta. London: Jonathan Cape. Lessing, D. (1980a). The Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five. London: Jonathan Cape. Lessing, D. (1980b). The Sirian Experiments. London: Jonathan Cape. Lessing, D. (1982). The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. London: Jonathan Cape. Lessing, D. (1983). Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire. London: Jonathan Cape.
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Lessing, D. (1984). The Diaries of Jane Somers. London: Michael Joseph. Lessing, D. (1985). The Good Terrorist. London: Jonathan Cape. Lessing, D. (1987). Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. London: Jonathan Cape. Lessing, D. (1988). The Fifth Child. London: Jonathan Cape. Lessing, D. (1992). African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe. New York: HarperCollins. Lessing, D. (1994). Under My Skin, vol. 1 of My Autobiography, to 1949. New York: HarperCollins. Lessing, D. (1996). Love, Again. New York: HarperCollins. Lessing, D. (1997). Walking in the Shade, vol. 2 of My Autobiography, 1949 to 1962. New York: HarperCollins. Lessing, D. (1999). Mara and Dann: An Adventure. London: HarperFlamingo. Lessing, D. (2000). Ben, in the World. New York: HarperCollins. Lessing, D. (2001). The Sweetest Dream. New York: HarperFlamingo. Lessing, D. (2003). The Grandmothers. London: HarperFlamingo. Lessing, D. (2005). The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog. London: HarperCollins. Lessing, D. (2007a). The Cleft. New York: HarperFlamingo. Lessing, D. (2007b). On Not Winning the Nobel Prize: Nobel Lecture. At http://nobelprize.org, accessed Apr. 15, 2009. Lessing, D. (2008). Alfred and Emily. New York: HarperCollins. Taylor, J. (ed.) (1982). Notebooks/Memoirs/Archives: Reading and Rereading Doris Lessing. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Lim, Catherine LIEW-GEOK LEONG
With eight collections of short fiction, five novels, one novella, two volumes of poetry, and several other books to her name, Catherine Lim is Singapore’s most prolific writer of fiction in English. Catherine Lim (nee Chew) Poh Imm was born on March 23, 1942 in Kulim, a small town in northern Malaya. Lim attended the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus in Kulim and then Bukit Mertajam for her primary and secondary school
education, and the Penang Free School (then Malaya’s premier English-medium school) for two years of pre-university education. After graduating in 1965 from the University of Malaya (Kuala Lumpur) where she read English literature, Lim, like many women of her generation, became a schoolteacher. She married a Singaporean in 1965 and continued teaching after moving to Singapore in 1969; she was divorced in 1983. In 1980 she became a curriculum specialist with the Ministry of Education. Subsequently, with a doctorate in Applied Linguistics, Lim became a lecturer at the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organisation’s Regional English Language Centre before retiring in 1992 to write full-time. Her first two collections of short fiction, Little Ironies: Stories of Singapore (1978) and Or Else, the Lightning God and Other Stories (1980), draw on traditional settings in Singapore and Malaysia. The Chinese preference for males is ironically played out in “Male Child” and “Father and Son,” while Chinese fears and superstitions about death underlie “Monster” and “The Bondmaid.” Stories like “Kenneth Jerome Rozario,” “The Letters,” and “Adeline Ng Ai Choo” dramatize relations between teachers and students. The friction between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law – endemic in traditional Chinese culture with its notions of filial piety – is portrayed in short stories like “Monster” (1978), “Last Wish” (1980), and “Or Else, the Lightning God” (1980). It provides the narrative center for Lim’s first novel, The Serpent’s Tooth (1982), which engages with the traditional/modern, East/West divide, manifested in the difficult relationship between an illiterate Chinese woman and her Christian, English-educated daughter-in-law. Moving away from the domestic and social, the ghostly presences in They Do Return (1983) and The Howling Silence: Tales of the Dead and Their Return (1999) define the realms of the supernatural embedded in the folk imagination of modern educated Singaporeans. These two collections of “ghost stories” explore the impact of the dead upon the living as well as of the living upon the dead. Love, a primary area of interest for Lim, is the narrative vehicle for The Shadow of a Shadow of a Dream: Love Stories of Singapore (1987) and Deadline for Love and Other Stories (1992a), two
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collections that address the predicaments and pressures of corrupt, convenient, random, and illicit relationships. A Leap of Love (2003a), originally an e-novel and recently adapted as a film, revolves around a promise made by a man, after an accidental date, to meet the woman every four years on February 29. Love’s Lonely Impulses (1992b), Lim’s first volume of poetry, not only deals with matters of love, but also provides vignettes of Singaporean life. The lighthearted and satirical Humoresque (2006) comprises 365 poems, so readers may be served a fresh dose of wit daily. The eight tales in O Singapore! Stories in Celebration (1989) paint an unflattering portrait of Lim’s adoptive country and its people. “Kiasuism: A Socio-Historical Cultural Perspective” proffers an anthropological explanation for a national trait – the fear of losing out to others. In “The Malady and the Cure,” Mr Sai Koh Phan (a Chinese rendition of “sycophant”) is so repressed in his own country that he has to move to Malaysia to be cured. Lim’s satirical eye is turned on herself in Meet Me on the Queen Elizabeth 2! (1993b), a collection about the foibles and fancies of passengers, crew, and author on board the ocean liner. To a large extent, Lim’s novels draw together – dramatically, melodramatically, and exotically – what her short stories have discretely treated: forbidden love; cultural mindsets and crosscultural tensions; complex, extended Chinese families; patriarchal paradigms and individual desires; vindictive curses; supernatural interventions; social and communal taboos; and the temptations and corruptions of the flesh. In Lim’s narrative territory, conflicts between the traditional (or pre-modern) and the modern or contemporary are continually played out. Her protagonists are strong-willed women who rebel against convention and tradition – one falls in love with the married master of a powerful family in The Bondmaid (1995); another has an affair with a French Catholic priest in The Teardrop Story Woman (1998). The affair between an already engaged university student and an outspoken American lecturer is the primary source of collision between East and West in Following the Wrong God Home (2001), while a scandalous subject, the love between a teenager and a man half a century older who already has three wives,
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gives The Song of Silver Frond (2003b) dramatic impetus. The Woman’s Book of Superlatives (1993c), Lim’s most explicitly feminist work, presents stories of women in Asia and Africa as victims of sexual and social abuse, like the child bride or the women who have been subject to genital mutilation to “protect” their sexuality. In Unhurried Thoughts at My Funeral (2005), the narrator takes an ironic, futuristic look at herself, dying and dead. Since the mid-1990s Lim has engaged the ruling People’s Action Party in political debate. In 1994, “The PAP and the People – A Great Affective Divide,” published in the Straits Times, discussed “an arrogant, high-handed and authoritarian government” and became a cause cele`bre. Lim wrote a less unflattering but still critical sequel, “PAP and the People: A Return of Disaffection?” in 2000. A third commentary, “An Open Letter to the Prime Minister,” about the need for political liberalization, was posted online when it was “rejected by the local newspapers” (2007). The recipient of the South East Asian Writers Award in 1999, Lim was conferred an honorary DLitt by Murdoch University, Australia, in 2000. In 2003, she was awarded France’s Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 2005, she was made an Ambassador to Copenhagen’s Hans Christian Andersen Foundation. SEE ALSO: Censorship and Fiction (WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Southeast Asian Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Klein, R. (ed.) (2001). Catherine Lim. Interlogue: Studies in Singapore Literature vol. 4: Interviews. Singapore: Ethos, pp. 154–77. Leong, L. G. (2002). Situating Gender, Evolving Identities: Women in Four Novels by Catherine Lim and Suchen Christine Lim. In Quayum & Wicks (2002b), pp. 241–51. Lim, C. (1978). Little Ironies: Stories of Singapore. Singapore: Heinemann. Lim, C. (1980). Or Else, the Lightning God and Other Stories. Singapore: Heinemann. Lim, C. (1982). The Serpent’s Tooth. Singapore: Times. Lim, C. (1983). They Do Return: Stories of the Supernatural. Singapore: Times.
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Lim, C. (1987). The Shadow of a Shadow of a Dream: Love Stories of Singapore. Singapore: Heinemann. Lim, C. (1989). O Singapore! Stories in Celebration. Singapore: Times. Lim, C. (1992a). Deadline for Love and Other Stories. Singapore: Heinemann. Lim, C. (1992b). Love’s Lonely Impulses. Singapore: Heinemann. Lim, C. (1993a). The Best of Catherine Lim. Singapore: Heinemann. Lim, C. (1993b). Meet Me on the Queen Elizabeth 2! Singapore: Heinemann. Lim, C. (1993c). The Woman’s Book of Superlatives. Singapore: Times. Lim, C. (1994). The PAP and the People – a Great Affective Divide. Straits Times, p. 34 (Sept. 3). Lim, C. (1995). The Bondmaid. Singapore: Catherine Lim Publishing. Lim, C. (1998). The Teardrop Story Woman. London: Orion. Lim, C. (1999). The Howling Silence: Tales of the Dead and Their Return. Singapore: Horizon. Lim, C. (2000). PAP and the People: A Return of Disaffection? Straits Times, p. 68 (Aug. 26). Lim, C. (2001). Following the Wrong God Home. London: Orion. Lim, C. (2002). The Writer Writing in English in Multiethnic Singapore: A Cultural Peril, a Cultural Promise. In Quayum & Wicks (2002b), pp. 345–52. Lim, C. (2003a). A Leap of Love. Singapore: Horizon. Lim, C. (2003b). The Song of Silver Frond. London: Orion. Lim, C. (2005). Unhurried Thoughts at My Funeral. Singapore: Horizon. Lim, C. (2006). Humoresque. Singapore: Horizon. Lim, C. (2007). An Open Letter to the Prime Minister. At http://catherinelim.sg/2007/11/04/an-openletter-to-the-prime-minister/, accessed Mar. 3, 2009. Lim, Y. (1999). Women in Bondage: The Stories of Catherine Lim. Singapore: Times. Quayam, M. A. (2007). Catherine Lim [interview]. In M. A. Quayam (ed.), Peninsular Muse: Interviews with Modern Malaysian and Singaporean Poets, Novelists and Dramatists. Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 107–21. Quayum, M., & Wicks, P. (2002a). Catherine Lim. In Quayum & Wicks (2002b), pp. 345–76. Quayum, M., & Wicks, P. (eds.) (2002b). Singaporean Literature in English: A Critical Reader. Serdang, Malaysia: Universiti Putra Malaysia Press. Smith, P. (1998). The Politics of Feminist Expression: An Essay on Catherine Lim’s The Teardrop Story
Woman. In K. Singh (ed.), Interlogue: Studies in Singapore Literature, vol. I: Fiction. Singapore: Ethos, pp. 55–62. Yeo, J. (dir.) (2008). The Leap Years. Mediacorp Raintree Pictures.
Lim, Suchen Christine JOHN EUSTACE
Suchen Christine Lim is a prominent Singaporean writer whose fiction negotiates the complex cultural and social milieus of Malaysia and Singapore. Though she was the inaugural winner of the Singapore Literature Prize in 1992 for the third of her four novels, Fistful of Colours (1993), she continues to receive rather sparse critical attention outside of the Malay archipelago. This critical neglect is most probably due to the relative marginality of Singapore and Malaysia in the ambit of postcolonial literary studies rather than to any defect in Lim’s style. Indeed, her engagement with the colonial and contemporary histories of Malaysia and Singapore – with the cultural exchanges and tensions between the countries’ Malay, Chinese, and Indian populations, and with gender relations within and between these cultural constituencies – make her fiction ideal fodder for critical scrutiny. Born on July 15, 1948, Lim spent her first six years living with her grandparents in Ipoh, Malaya, where she began her schooling in her mother tongue, Cantonese. The capital of the state of Perak and former tin-mining town would later be refashioned as Bandong for her fourth novel, A Bit of Earth (2000a). At 6, her mother wrested her away from her grandparents to Penang for an English education, enrolling her at the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus. When her mother divorced and moved to Singapore for work, Lim boarded with an aunt and her family in Penang and eventually in Alor Setar, Kedah, where she made many Malay friends and developed an affinity for Malay culture that would eventually emerge in her fiction. At 15, she joined her mother in Singapore, a country on the verge of independence, where she spent what she considers her most formative years. After completing her secondary education in a convent school, she read for a general degree in English and history
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LIM, SUCHEN CHRISTINE
at Singapore National University, graduating in 1972, before beginning a family and establishing a teaching career. She returned to SNU after a 10year hiatus to complete a thesis on Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior under the supervision of poet Edwin Thumboo, and, most importantly, to find time to work on her first novel, Rice Bowl, which was published in 1984. Shortly thereafter, she began work with the Ministry of Education on curriculum development. She remained there until 2003, when she resigned to dedicate herself to writing full-time. In many ways, Lim’s fiction can be read as a reaction to the vision and policies of Singapore’s longstanding prime minister, Lee Kwan Yew, and what she continues to see as the de facto dictatorship animating certain forms of social repression in the country. Rice Bowl, set in the late 1960s, explores the social and educational policies limiting free thought in the highly regulated and newly independent country. Her second novel, Gift from the Gods (1990), written in part because Lim was not ready to write the character of Suwen in her third novel, looks deeper into the history of Singapore and Malaysia, examining the lives of three generations of Singaporean women to explore female subjectivity in a country that privileges the masculine. Her most successful novel, Fistful of Colours (1993), broadens the historical exploration of female subjectivity and freedom, examining women from different ethnic communities and focusing on the challenges faced by the female artist. Lim’s most significant foray into colonial history and its legacy in Malaysia and Singapore comes in her historical epic, A Bit of Earth. Her most recent work, the short story collection The Lies that Build A Marriage (2007b), continues to challenge state and cultural regulation of individual lives, dealing sensitively with issues such as homosexuality, lesbianism, cross-dressing, and teenage pregnancy. It earned Lim another nomination for the Singapore Literature Prize. The opening piece in the collection, “The Morning After,” a semiautobiographical story about a homosexual son coming out to his mother, has been made into a short film for Singaporean television. Lim admits that working in curriculum development for the Ministry of Education, with its restrictions on literature dealing with politics, religion, sex, and non-standard English, influ-
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enced her to tackle all of these subjects in her fiction, which at times has created difficulties in finding publishers for her work. SEE ALSO: Feminism and Fiction (WF); Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Kingston, Maxine Hong (AF); Southeast Asian Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Koh, T. (1994). Sing to the Dawn: Novels in English by Singaporean Women. In T. B. Kintanar (ed.), Emergent Voices: Southeast Asian Women Novelists. Quezon City: University of Philippines Press, pp. 66–79. Lai, A. T. Y. (2002). Bell Jar: Within and Beyond Gender Representation by Post-Colonial Singapore and Hong Kong Writers. Jouvert, 7(1). At http://social. chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v7is1/lai.htm, accessed Oct. 7, 2008. Lim, S. C. (1984). Rice Bowl. Singapore: Times. Lim, S. C. (1990). Gift from the Gods. Singapore: Graham Brash. Lim, S. C. (1993). Fistful of Colours. Singapore: SNP. Lim, S. C. (1998). Bandong. In L. L. Geok, (ed.), More Than Half the Sky: Creative Writings by Thirty Singaporean Women. Singapore: Times. Lim, S. C. (2000a). A Bit of Earth. Singapore: Times Marshall-Cavendish. Lim, S. C. (2000b). Clash of the Clans. World Literature Today, 74(2), 302, 304. Lim, S. C. (2002). Two Brothers. In T. S. Yamada (ed.), Virtual Lotus: Modern Fiction of Southeast Asia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 130–36. Lim, S. C. (2005). Stories of the Overseas Chinese. Singapore: SNP. Lim, S. C. (2007a). Gloria. Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature, 1(1). At http:// asiatic.iium.edu.my/issue1/web/vol1no1/[s.story] SuchenLim.Gloria.pdf, accessed Oct. 7, 2008. Lim, S. C. (2007b). The Lies that Build a Marriage: Stories of the Unsung. Unsaid and Uncelebrated in Singapore. Singapore: Monsoon. Lim, S. C. (2008). Personal Interview with John Eustace [unpublished]. Singapore. Means, L. (1994). The Role of the Writer in Today’s Singapore: Voice of the Nation? Asian Survey: A Monthly Review of Contemporary Asian Affairs, 35(11), 962–73. Quayum, M. A. (2007). Suchen Christine Lim [interview]. In M. A. Quayum (ed.), Interviews with Modern Malaysian and Singaporean Poets, Novelists and Dramatists. Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 185–204.
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Quayum, M., & Wicks, P. (eds.) (2002). Singaporean Literature in English: A Critical Reader. Serdang, Malaysia: Universiti Putra Malaysia Press.
Lovelace, Earl SUPRIYA M. NAIR
Despite his impressive versatility and success, Earl Lovelace remains a surprisingly underrated writer, and only recently has sustained scholarship on his entire oeuvre been added to the previously scattered essays and articles on individual works. Some years younger than more internationally celebrated Caribbean authors such as George Lamming and V. S. Naipaul, Lovelace shares their major preoccupations. But Lovelace was one of the few of his generation who did not migrate northward to metropolitan countries; instead, he has lived in Trinidad for most of his life. This was most likely not a desirable choice at the time, but Lovelace would use it to pose a powerful counterpoint to the master narratives of exile and migration in anglophone Caribbean literature, even though his connection to the metropolis was sustained through publishing in London and academic activities in the United States. Lovelace was born on July 13, 1935 in Trinidad but spent much of his childhood in Tobago with his grandparents. Contrary to expectations, he failed the college exhibition examinations twice, and the crushing disappointment was to influence his critique of colonial education while simultaneously emphasizing its importance for upward social mobility. Lovelace went against the common lament of writers at the time – that to be a creative writer of any significance one must leave the Caribbean. He moved on to a wide range of experiences and contributions in Trinidad in the field of journalism, civil service, and education. He wrote poetry, novels, drama, short stories, and critical essays, all of which were deeply embedded in the cultural patterns, linguistic rhythms, eccentric characters, and political situations of Trinidad. While he is best known for his awardwinning novels, Lovelace’s other work is now gaining long-overdue recognition. Like many writers whose lives overlapped with the colonial and postcolonial phases of their national histories, Lovelace’s work sympatheti-
cally explores the legacies of slavery and indenture for multiple ethnic groups in the Caribbean. At the same time, he refuses to let native Trinidadians off the hook, expressing a passionate and committed critique of the failure of nationalist leadership, the coopting of a resistance tradition dating back to enslavement, the disavowal of class equality, the disintegration of communities, the internecine competitiveness of ethnic strife, the lack of political will, the mimicry of consumerist modern lifestyles, and the continued cultural and economic dependency on the West. Perhaps Lovelace’s most conspicuous achievements are his ability to draw vivid, individualized, unforgettable portraits of village life, to dramatize the often bizarre urban characters of Port of Spain (The Dragon Can’t Dance was adapted into a play in 1990), and to make readers care for these flawed human figures. In Lovelace’s rendering, Trinidad itself leaps into meaningful universal importance while retaining its singularly local identity. While Gods are Falling (1965), Lovelace’s first novel, begins with a dynamic that is almost a signature theme in Lovelace, the vitality of Port of Spain, with its vibrant expressive performances such as calypso, carnival, and steel-band, which contrast with its poverty, crime, and political paralysis. The religious implications of the title, despite its seeming cynicism, direct the redemptive denouement of the novel in which the central character, Walter Castle, casts off his distrust of the city, his nostalgic memories of rustic life, and his distance from inner-city neighbors to organize a civic movement for a safer and more compassionate community. The Schoolmaster (1968) explores the rustic patterns of life in Kumaca, an obscure Trinidadian village whose inhabitants believe that the building of a school will accelerate their entry into an encroaching and seemingly desirable modernity. The schoolmaster who comes to the village, however, demonstrates not just the promise of urban education, but also its perils as he impregnates a young girl, Christiana, who later tragically commits suicide, leading to the retributive murder of the schoolmaster. Lovelace’s most well-known novels, The Dragon Can’t Dance (1979) and The Wine of Astonishment (1982), introduce another of his major themes – the role of music, dance, religion, and other folk aesthetics in Trinidadian culture. Both Dragon and Wine
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LOVELACE, EARL
offer perhaps the most complex and sophisticated evocations in Trinidadian literature of carnival figures, calypsonians, banned (from 1917 to 1951) Shouter Baptist rituals of ecstatic worship, and badjohns and stickfighters, the rebellious urban and rural figures whose inability to accept the status quo often has tragic consequences. Salt (1996), Lovelace’s most recent novel and winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, refines his oral storytelling technique and presents a polyphonic narrative with multiple tones and voices, from the stately, rural French Creole tenor of The Schoolmaster and the intimate first-person account in Wine, to the Creole, barrack-yard rhythms of Dragon and the irreverent, Americanized twang of his short story, “Joebell and America.” Salt combines an ethical imperative focused on improving the plight of common Trinidadians with a passionate plea for not abandoning Trinidad which his plays, particularly Jestina’s Calypso (1984), also convey. Lovelace uses the controversial issue of reparation to articulate a shaky but hopeful future in which all Trinidadians can work for a more inclusive nation. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (WF); Lamming, George (WF); Naipaul, V. S. (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Selvon, Sam (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Aiyejina, F. (ed.) (2006). Earl Lovelace: A Special Issue. Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, 4(2). Lovelace, E. (1965). While Gods are Falling. London: Collins. Lovelace, E. (1968). The Schoolmaster. London: Collins. Lovelace, E. (1979). The Dragon Can’t Dance. London: Deutsch. Lovelace, E. (1982). The Wine of Astonishment. London: Deutsch. Lovelace, E. (1984). Jestina’s Calypso and Other Plays. London: Heinemann. Lovelace, E. (1988). A Brief Conversion and Other Stories. Oxford: Heinemann. Lovelace, E. (1996). Salt. London: Faber and Faber. Lovelace, E. (1998). The Emancipation-Jouvay Tradition and the Almost Loss of Pan. TDR, 42(4), 54–60. Lovelace, E. (2003). Growing in the Dark: Selected Essays (ed. Funso Aiyejina). San Juan, Trinidad: Lexicon. Lovelace, E. (2007). Calypso and the Bacchanal Connection. In S. P. Paquet, et al. (eds.), Music, Memory, Resistance: Calypso and the Caribbean Literary Imagination. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, pp. 139–50. Schwarz, B. (ed.) (2008). Caribbean Literature After Independence: The Case of Earl Lovelace. London: University of London, Institute for the Study of the Americas.
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M MacLennan, Hugh LAURA MOSS
From the publication of his first novel in 1941 until his death in 1990, Hugh MacLennan was regarded as one of the finest writers Canada had ever produced. His popularity stemmed from his timely grappling with Canada’s growing sense of itself as an emerging nation, his ability to bring Canadian geography to life, and his commitment to exposing the psychological and social consciousness of his characters. However, while some argued that MacLennan’s most powerful writing was that which unapologetically engaged nationalist themes in Canadian contexts, others saw this same commitment as parochial and agenda-driven. Indeed, throughout his writing life, MacLennan was adamant about the social role literature must play in nation building. Alongside Morley Callaghan, Sinclair Ross, and Ethel Wilson, MacLennan is recognized for the vital role he played in modernist Canadian fiction. Born on March 20, 1907 in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, and raised in Halifax, MacLennan attended Dalhousie University, Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, and Princeton University, where he received a PhD in classics in 1935. With no university able to hire him in the middle of the Depression, he taught at Lower Canada College in Montreal, and later spent many years teaching English at McGill University. Although MacLennan became one of the preeminent writers of his day, financial stability eluded him. In his famous essay “Boy Meets Girl in Winnipeg
and Who Cares?” (1960), he details the gamble writers take, given Canada’s small literate population, few local publishing outlets, long distances between urban centers making distribution costly, and lingering colonial mentality in which imported books dominated and Canadian writing was seen as inferior to American or British. To supplement his fiction writing, MacLennan regularly published essays in Canadian magazines and in his own esteemed essay collections, including the Governor General’s Award-winning Cross-Country (1949) and Thirty and Three (1954). During his studies at Oxford and Princeton, MacLennan unsuccessfully followed Ernest Hemingway as a modernist model when he attempted two novels about war and social change in America and Europe. Failing to find a publisher, and at the urging of his American-born novelist wife Dorothy Duncan, MacLennan decided to experiment with writing a story that dealt with “universalist” themes in a Canadian context but not in a regionalist manner. The result was his breakthrough work, Barometer Rising (1941), a retelling of the Ulysses story set against World War I and the explosion of a munitions ship in the Halifax harbor, which the young MacLennan had witnessed on December 6, 1917. His experiment with a specifically Canadian story paid off, winning him his first Governor General’s Award and a popular following. With the success of Barometer Rising, MacLennan announced that “Canadians are hungry for a spokesman” (Cameron 1981, 155) and obliged
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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MACLENNAN, HUGH
in the book for which he is best remembered today. Two Solitudes (1945) is an allegorical take on the longstanding tensions between French and English Canada. Indeed, the title is still used as a catchphrase to describe the nation’s problematic relationship with Quebec sovereigntists and nationalists. Set in rural Quebec and Montreal, this Bildungsroman follows the life of an emerging artist caught between the worlds of his English mother and his French father, delving deeply into class and religion cleavages. It became an immediate bestseller in Canada and abroad and garnered MacLennan’s second Governor General’s Award. Less successful but also given the Governor General’s Award, The Precipice (1948) juxtaposes American and Canadian society, politics, and culture as the characters move between Ontario, New York, and New Jersey. In Each Man’s Son (1951), MacLennan revisits Nova Scotia in the story of an 8-year-old boy, a professional boxer, a murdered mother, and a conflicted colliery doctor. MacLennan draws on his classical training to emulate Greek tragedy in this psychological study of love and betrayal. The Watch that Ends the Night (1959), considered by many the zenith of MacLennan’s career, depicts a psychologically complex trio of characters in Montreal: a dying woman, an Everyman, and an archetypal larger-than-life figure. MacLennan shifts his narrative between the 1930s and 1950s, criticizing the first era’s idealism and the second’s shallowness. Novelist Robertson Davies’s review echoes the glowing sentiments of the time: “He has gained a new mastery over the two strongest elements in his work: the storyteller and the self-explorer are one. The effect is virtually to double his stature” (Cameron 1988, 233). This novel became a bestseller and was widely translated. Drawing on MacLennan’s belief in the cyclical nature of history, the boy in Each Man’s Son becomes the adult protagonist in Return of the Sphinx (1967b) as the author again tackles generational conflict and social history. Published in the nation’s centennial year, it was viewed critically as another, less successful attempt at an allencompassing novel of Canada. MacLennan’s final novel, Voices in Time (1980) deviates from his past work. Set in a dystopian future Montreal after a devastating nuclear explosion, its central
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character must make sense of voices from the past captured in letters, diaries, tapes, and videotapes. The winner of numerous awards, Hugh MacLennan remains one of Canada’s most decorated, and finest, writers of fiction and non-fiction. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Cameron, E. (1981). Hugh MacLennan: A Writer’s Life. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Cameron, E. (1988). Hugh MacLennan. In W. H. New (ed.), Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 68: Canadian Writers, 1920–1959. Detroit: Gale, pp. 226–37. MacLennan, H. (1941). Barometer Rising. Toronto: Collins. MacLennan, H. (1945). Two Solitudes. Toronto: Collins. MacLennan, H. (1948). The Precipice. Toronto: Collins. MacLennan, H. (1949). Cross-Country. Toronto: Collins. MacLennan, H. (1951). Each Man’s Son. Toronto: Macmillan. MacLennan, H. (1954). Thirty and Three (ed. D. Duncan). Toronto: Macmillan. MacLennan, H. (1959). The Watch that Ends the Night. Toronto: Macmillan. MacLennan, H. (1960). Scotchman’s Return and Other Essays. Toronto: Macmillan. MacLennan, H. (1961). Seven Rivers of Canada. Toronto: Macmillan. MacLennan, H. (1967a). The Colour of Canada. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. MacLennan, H. (1967b). Return of the Sphinx. Toronto: Macmillan. MacLennan, H. (1980). Voices in Time. Toronto: Macmillan. MacLennan, H. (1984). On Being a Maritime Writer. Sackville, NB: Mount Allison University Press. MacLulich, T. D. (1983). Hugh MacLennan. Boston: Twayne. Tierney, F. (ed.) (1994). Hugh MacLennan. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.
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MacLeod, Alistair DAVID CREELMAN
Alistair MacLeod is one of the best-known writers to emerge from Maritime Canada in the late twentieth century. Often fatalistic and even tragic in tone, MacLeod’s fictions chronicle the contemporary individual’s search for a secure identity. Forgoing postmodernist techniques, he increasingly emphasizes the importance of community and clan connections within the Gaelic diaspora in a post-industrial era that makes such relationships difficult. MacLeod was born in North Battleford, Saskatchewan on July 20, 1936 and spent his childhood in a coalmining area of Alberta. In 1946, his family returned to their farm in Inverness County, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and after graduating from high school he remained in the Maritime region for another 10 years, working as a miner, a logger, and a country schoolteacher while pursuing further education. In the 1960s he completed his doctorate at the University of Notre Dame, taught in Indiana, and in 1969 moved to Ontario to become a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Windsor. Compared to that of some writers, his output has been small. His first book, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976), brought together the seven stories he had published since 1968. His second, As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (1986), comprised another seven stories. These two slim collections established MacLeod’s reputation as one of Canada’s best fiction writers, which was further enhanced with the publication of his novel, No Great Mischief, in 1999. After this enthusiastically received book won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, his earlier stories, plus two subsequent ones, were newly collected under the title Island (2000). Working in an accessible style and within the traditions of psychological realism, MacLeod develops complex depictions of his characters’ inner lives while simultaneously using naturalist conventions to detail the social conditions that shape their behavior. The resulting texts, marked by his lyrical and even poetic sensibility, provide sympathetic portraits of fully rounded characters who conduct often losing battles against the adversarial forces of nature, regional isolation, economic decline, and the alienation that characterized twentieth-century modernity. Readerly empathy
is deepened further by such late texts as “Vision,” “As Birds Bring Forth the Sun,” and No Great Mischief, in which MacLeod adopts traditional oral storytelling techniques to replicate an intimate listening community. In MacLeod’s fictions the central characters – usually young men struggling into adulthood – battle against forces that threaten to confine or extinguish them, including the beautiful but harsh natural environment of Cape Breton. Stormy seas batter the drowned body of a fisherman in “The Boat”; enraged dogs attack and kill an unwitting master in “As Birds Bring Forth the Sun”; and though a young boy survives a fall through rotten pack ice in “Winter Dog,” freezing waters swallow mother, father, and child to set in motion the central plot in No Great Mischief. The high unemployment and economic underdevelopment that characterize the region also limit the protagonists, forcing them into dangerous jobs as miners, fishers, or woodsmen, or compelling them to migrate to alienating urban centers. Conditions in Maritime hinterlands may be grim, but the loneliness of central Canadian cities is more injurious, and drives some characters, like Alex in “The Return,” to suicide. In the later fiction even history becomes a limiting force. In No Great Mischief and the story “Clearances,” characters feel they are not only being shaped by history but repeating it. MacLeod’s overarching theme is the realization that loss and alienation have increased as traditional communities have been undermined by the forces of modernity. Difficult as contemporary life may be, MacLeod’s fictions proffer a tentative security in particular circumstances. Though the protagonists in Lost Salt Gift are disturbed to learn how tightly bound they are by emotional, financial, and cultural contexts, MacLeod insists that they have choices, if only between unsatisfying options. He celebrates moments when individuals exercise their agency to fulfill familial or community responsibilities. In later fictions the centrality of collective memory is emphasized as alienated characters return to family or clan to anchor their identity. “The Closing Down of Summer” depicts a group of miners who comfort themselves by singing Gaelic folk songs. In No Great Mischief, the clan’s power as the central reservoir of identity is evident in the way individuals are tied to their physical and genetic heritage, their shared
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MAIS, ROGER
familial memory, and a deep spiritual, mystical bond to their ancestral Highland community in Scotland. Such ties can mitigate the most painful losses: Calum’s demise in No Great Mischief is tragic, but his integrity lends weight to the narrator’s assertion that “All of us are better when we’re loved” (283). Such links, by blood or memory, to the Gaelic diaspora generate an elegiac tone and a strong vein of nostalgia in MacLeod’s later texts. Critics have recognized MacLeod’s contribution to Maritime and Canadian literature, particularly as he has explored the impact of modernism, considered the importance of collective experience, and deepened the body of realist fiction in the region. The complexities of MacLeod’s representations of gender and the implications of his depictions of class and clan provide fertile ground for future criticism. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Berces, F. (1991). Existential Maritimer: Alistair MacLeod’s The Lost Salt Gift of Blood. Studies in Canadian Literature, 16(1), 114–28. Creelman, D. (2003). Setting in the East: Maritime Realist Fiction. Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press. Guilford, I. (ed.) (2001). Alistair Macleod: Essays on His Works. Toronto: Guernica. Hiscock, A. (2000). “The Inherited Life”: Alistair MacLeod and the Ends of History. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 35(2), 51–70. Kulyk Keefer, J. (1987). Under Eastern Eyes. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. MacLeod, A. (1976). The Lost Salt Gift of Blood. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. MacLeod, A. (1986). As Birds Bring Forth the Sun. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. MacLeod, A. (1999). No Great Mischief. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. MacLeod, A. (2000). Island. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Nicholson, C. (1985). Signatures of Time: Alistair MacLeod and His Short Stories. Canadian Literature, 107, 90–101.
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Mais, Roger LOUIS JAMES
Jamaican novelist Roger Mais forged his literary achievement in the heat of social unrest. His work follows that of Claude McKay and H. G. de Lisser in focusing on the lives of the common people. But, writing as Jamaica moved toward independence, Mais showed a new political awareness and a bolder innovation in literary technique. Fiercely independent himself, his work left a mark on both his society and its evolving literature. Later, his concern with his role as an artist was to lead him into exile and to explore symbolic modes of fiction. Born on August 11, 1905, the fair-skinned son of a well-to-do family, Mais appeared destined for a comfortable middle-class career. His sensibility was shaped by an idyllic childhood on an isolated Blue Mountain coffee estate where his mother implanted in him a deep love and knowledge of the Bible. He moved from high school education into the Jamaican Department of Education. Restless with desk work, Mais soon left, passing through a variety of occupations from farmer and insurance salesman to reporter-photographer for the island’s largest paper, the Daily Gleaner. A turning point came in 1938 when he supported Kingston workers rioting for better pay and conditions. He joined Norman Manley’s People’s National Party, agitating for universal adult suffrage and independence from Britain, and his stories and articles became the central feature for the party periodical Public Opinion. These culminated in August 14, 1944 with an editorial “Now we know,” attacking Winston Churchill’s commitment to continuing colonial imperialism, and Mais was jailed for six months for sedition. His devastating experience of Jamaican prison conditions and despair over the ruling Jamaica Labour Party drove him into seclusion. In 1949 his energies returned and he began writing plays on classical and biblical subjects that, though not performed, led him to experiment with prose fiction, combining the colloquial immediacy and formal structure of drama with the folk rhythms of jazz (see Brathwaite 1974). In 1953 Jonathan Cape published The Hills were Joyful Together, the abbreviated third part of a massive trilogy on the Jamaican peoples. The title, from a revivalist hymn based on Psalm 98, looks to the mountains
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that surround Kingston, intimating rural life and biblical innocence. Set in a Kingston “yard,” the novel is prefaced by a “cast list” of 30 inhabitants whose lives are played out in interrelated dramatic tableaux. These are linked by choric interludes setting the scene and commenting on the action, creating an overview in which individuals come second to community. Overcrowding intensifies passions into violence; crime offers the only opportunities for gain; and, in an indifferent universe, chance determines the results of human actions. Zephyr, a prostitute, is relatively secure, while Surjue, driven to take risks, is betrayed by an accomplice and imprisoned for robbery. The book’s second half moves between the parallel worlds of yard and jail, both created by the moral failure of Jamaican society. Desperate to return to Rema, his lover, Surjue attempts to escape prison: shot, he lies spread-eagled beneath the stars; meanwhile Rema, in crazed despair, is burning herself to death. Throughout the novel, intimations of human resilience and dignity persist, and brutality coexists with magnanimity. On the periphery Mais places figures of hope, including the back-to-Africa cultist Ras, defined by the mantra of the Rastafari brethren, “peace and love.” This character anticipates Brother Man (1954), published with Mais’s own powerful charcoal illustrations. It is set in a slum street rather than a claustrophobic yard, and Mais develops the fictional method of The Hills but with a small cast of characters, a tighter dramatic structure, and an eponymous hero with two names: Bra’ Man associates him with the Jamaican Rastafari cult’s gospel of love (although he is no longer a practicing Rastafarian), and John Power confirms his basic humanity. Falsely implicated in a murder by the jealous, mentally unstable Cordelia, he is attacked by a mob of those he has helped and left for dead. His body is recovered and tended through the night by Minette, a girl he has saved from destitution. As the dawn breaks, he recovers consciousness, sharing with Minette a radiant vision that sacrifice brings love and hope. Feeling he could not survive as an artist in Jamaica, Mais left for London. The cost of exile is intimated in Black Lightning (1955): set in Mais’s beloved Blue Mountains, it recounts the tragedy of Jake, a blacksmith-sculptor obsessed with his carving of the betrayed, blind, isolated Samson. When Jake is struck blind by lightning,
he recognizes that the statue embodies the failure of his own restless search for self-sufficiency, and he breaks his statue and commits suicide. His tragedy is in contrast to the accordion-playing Amos, a once-embittered hunchback whom Jake befriends, who finds happiness in the community. There is, however, nothing simple in the comparison since Jake’s quest is not egotism, but a burden imposed by his creative genius. His tragedy is the self-destruction implicit in the artist’s search for perfection. With Black Lightning Mais was moving in fresh directions. Living in Paris, he was befriended by the African American novelist Richard Wright, held an art exhibition, and began a new (unfinished) novel, In the Light of This Sun. But by then he had cancer, and he returned to Jamaica to die there on June 15, 1955. SEE ALSO: Censorship and Fiction (WF); de Lisser, Herbert G. (WF); McKay, Claude (AF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/ Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); West Indian Fiction (WF); Wright, Richard (AF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Brathwaite, E. (1974). Introduction. In R. Mais, Brother Man. London: Heinemann, pp. v–xxi. D’Costa, J. (1978). Roger Mais: “The Hills were Joyful Together” and “Brother Man.” London: Heinemann. Mais, R. (1953). The Hills were Joyful Together. London: Jonathan Cape. Mais, R. (1954). Brother Man. London: Jonathan Cape. Mais, R. (1955). Black Lightning. London: Jonathan Cape. Mais, R. (1986). “Listen, the Wind,” and Other Stories. Harlow: Longman. Morris, D. (1986). Roger Mais. In D. Cumber Dance (ed.), Fifty Caribbean Writers. New York: Greenwood, pp. 303–17. Ramchand, K. (1970). The West Indian Novel and Its Background. London: Faber and Faber.
Malgonkar, Manohar UMA PARAMESWARAN
Manohar Malgonkar, author of 26 works of fiction and history, is one of India’s most prolific writers in English. He is the also the longest-lived.
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MALGONKAR, MANOHAR
Born on July 12, 1913 near Belgaum in western India, he continued to live in the area until his death on June 14, 2010. Malgonkar grew up in a princely family and an elite culture. After graduating from Bombay University in 1937 with a degree in English and Sanskrit, he initially joined the government service. Before becoming a professional writer in his forties, he worked as a big-game hunting guide, an army officer, an executive at a tea plantation, and in politics. His fast-paced, action-filled fiction is known for its visually and aurally rich language. He conveys the sounds of trumpeting elephants and galloping horses in his historical novels, and vividly renders the details of his characters’ clothing and gestures. Primary influences on his style include Walter Scott and Ernest Hemingway; he has also mentioned the American novelist John P. Marquand as an inspiration. Malgonkar’s oeuvre includes historical studies, literary and espionage novels, short stories, journalism on historical topics, and collections of short creative vignettes first published in newspapers. He wrote four meticulously researched books of history about scions of great Maratha dynasties, but even volumes that do not deal with history per se – such as his story collections – carefully record and animate the times in which their action takes place. Many of his works draw on his experiences as a big-game hunter (he became a staunch conservationist after this phase), an army officer, and a historian. Distant Drum (1960) and Combat of Shadows (1962) are historical fictions that document social life in the Indian army and on British India’s tea plantations respectively. His four subsequent historical novels are Malgonkar’s weightiest contributions to literature. Each of them concerns what motivated a ruler or a kingdom to take the steps that shaped critical turns of history, and together they present the history of India from the mid nineteenth century to the 1970s. Often, he uses a first-person narrative so that, while being faithful to the facts of history, he can present his protagonists’ motivations and explore the psychological underpinnings of well-known historical events. The Devil’s Wind (1972), for instance, is the story of Peshwa Nana Saheb, which focuses on the part played by this “monster” (as the British called him) in the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. Malgonkar shows,
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through Nana Saheb’s views, the revolutionary ardor to oust the European invaders that led to massacres by both sides. The Princes (1963a), which takes place before and after India’s independence, suggests that the princes of India’s numerous kingdoms were left in limbo when the British left in 1947, stripped of all political power while the country was taken over by the politics of corruption at the hands of bourgeois upstarts. Abhay, prince of Begwad, both witnesses and participates in the tumultuous changes India’s rajahs and maharajahs experienced between 1940 and 1960. The wide social spectrum of this story conveys the loyalty of impoverished tribals and the opulence and intrigues of the royal court. A Bend in the Ganges (1964) is set in the same period but the characters are from the middle class, and the story is about the two predominant streams of the nationalist struggle: the Gandhian non-violent way and the way of violent revolution. The novel shows its protagonist, Gian Talwar, undergoing a process of initiation that ends, as the novel itself does, on the day of India’s independence. Cactus Country (1992) is a fine historical record of the splitting of Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh in 1971. It is depicted through the story of Lieutenant Aslam Chisti, Pakistan’s star cricketer, whose sport ambitions have to be sacrificed in the service of his country as it enters a civil war. The novel compares favorably with Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983), which deals with the same war. Where Rushdie eschews historical accuracy in favor of magic realism, Malgonkar’s narrative has the authenticity that comes from detailed historical research and a discerning eye for human foibles and aspirations. The Men who Killed Gandhi (1978c) is an insightful documentary account of the misguided idealism that motivated Nathuram Godse and his colleagues to undertake the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi for what they felt was his indulgence of Muslims and shortchanging of Hindus. Malgonkar conveys the irony that both the assassins and Gandhi himself were against the partition of British India advocated by the Muslim League during the final years of the independence struggle. Malgonkar’s expertise lies in his faithful chronicling of history, combined with his insightful
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rendering of human psychology and the sociological details that influence the shaping of history.
Malgonkar, M. (1992). Cactus Country. New York: Viking. Malgonkar, M. (1996). Dropping Names. New Delhi: Roli.
SEE ALSO: Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Historical Fiction (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Rushdie, Salman (WF)
Malouf, David DON RANDALL
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Dayananda, J. Y. (1975). Manohar Malgonkar. Boston: Twayne. Malgonkar, M. (1959). Life and Battles of Kanhoji Angrey. Bombay: Asia Publishing. Malgonkar, M. (1960). Distant Drum. Bombay: Asia Publishing. Malgonkar, M. (1962). Combat of Shadows. London: Hamish Hamilton. Malgonkar, M. (1963a). The Princes. New York: Viking. Malgonkar, M. (1963b). Puars of Dewas Senior. Bombay: Orient Longman. Malgonkar, M. (1964). A Bend in the Ganges. New York: Viking. Malgonkar, M. (1971a). Chatrapatis of Kolhapur. Bombay: Popular Prakashan. Malgonkar, M. (1971b). Spy in Amber. New Delhi: Hind Pocket Books. Malgonkar, M. (1972). The Devil’s Wind. New York: Viking. Malgonkar, M. (1974). A Toast in Warm Wine. Bombay: Orient. Malgonkar, M. (1975). Bombay Beware. Bombay: Orient. Malgonkar, M. (1977a). Dead and Living Cities. Bombay: Orient. Malgonkar, M. (1977b). Rumble Tumble. Bombay: Orient. Malgonkar, M. (1978a). Krishna Shah’s Shalimar. New Delhi: Vikas. Malgonkar, M. (1978b). Line of Mars. Bombay: Hind Pocket Books. Malgonkar, M. (1978c). The Men who Killed Gandhi. Madras: Macmillan. Malgonkar, M. (1978d). Open Season. Bombay: Orient. Malgonkar, M. (1980). Cue from the Inner Voice. New Delhi: Vikas. Malgonkar, M. (1982). Bandicoot Run. Bombay: Orient. Malgonkar, M. (1986). Garland Keepers. Bombay: Vision. Malgonkar, M. (1987). The Last Maharani of Gwalior. New York: SUNY Press. Malgonkar, M. (1990). Four Graves and Other Stories. New Delhi: Penguin.
David Malouf, born in Brisbane on March 20, 1934 to parents of Lebanese and English heritage, began his literary career as a poet in the early 1960s, eventually gaining high-profile recognition in the Australian literary and critical community with Neighbours in a Thicket (1974). Since 1975, Malouf has increasingly applied himself to the writing of prose fiction, winning international recognition with his second novel, An Imaginary Life (1978), before consolidating his status as a major anglophone author with his very successful sixth and seventh novels, The Great World (1990) and Remembering Babylon (1993). Malouf’s early and middle career was strongly marked by travel. Having studied language and literature, and initiated a teaching career, at the University of Queensland, he left Brisbane for Europe in 1959. Over a three-year period he took up various teaching assignments while residing in London. He then served as English master at St Anselm’s College in Birkenhead for five more years, before returning to Australia and settling in Sydney. In 1978, following the encouraging reception of An Imaginary Life, Malouf resigned his lectureship at the University of Sydney, returned to Europe, and became a full-time writer residing in a small Tuscan village. By the early 1980s he had established a divided residence, moving back and forth between Tuscany and Sydney – ultimately settling in Sydney in 1985. Malouf’s poetry, most of which had been published by 1980, is strongly marked by his European experience. Numerous poems are set in England, still more in Continental Europe. European locations also figure prominently in most of the novels, and in Malouf’s first volume of short stories, Antipodes (1985b). Despite the clear shift in focus from poetry to fiction, Malouf’s career reveals itself, upon examination, as remarkably cumulative and continuous. During his poetry-writing years, which span
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MALOUF, DAVID
the first two decades of his writing life, Malouf assembled many of the figures, images, topics, and concerns that he carried into his prose fiction career. Thus, in the poems of Neighbours in a Thicket (1974), elements that will characterize Malouf’s later prose compositions are already well developed: “Stooping to Drink” portrays the transformative, regenerative power of water, a prominent and recurring theme in the fictions; “An Ordinary Evening at Hamilton” ponders the borders and barriers in domestic space, which are so crucial to the composition of the prose autobiography 12 Edmondstone Street (1985a). Malouf’s first three novels are all narrated in the first person, a narrative mode that was used only selectively and intermittently in his subsequent fictions. The semiautobiographical Johnno (1975) is clearly a Bildungsroman, a novel about growing up, and less obviously a K€unstlerroman, a novel recounting an artist’s formation. The narrator Dante arrives at the brink of a writing career, having steered a difficult course between a forceful but too conventional father and a wildly contentious, but also challenging and inspiring long-time friend, Johnno. Intense relationships between male characters, a hallmark of Malouf’s fictional career, already manifest themselves strongly in his first novel. The psychology of exile is portrayed, and Malouf also shows significant capacity as a writer of place – Brisbane, in this case. An Imaginary Life (1978), which has received much more critical attention than his other early fictions, presents a fictional account of the Roman poet Ovid’s late-life exile in an outpost of the Augustan empire. This boldly imagined work articulates Malouf’s envisioning of the intimate relationship between identity and place; it also offers detailed representation of consciousness and its processes. Exploring Ovid’s relationship with a wild boy, “the Child,” the narrative emphasizes the role of the other as counterpoint and foil for individual subjectivity, and also the other’s importance as object of desire and a focus for the process of self-fashioning. This novel and the subsequent Child’s Play (1981) show that consciousness’s most crucial work is its ongoing struggle to place itself meaningfully within the world. An Imaginary Life also clearly enunciates, as Child’s Play does not, Malouf’s belief in the importance of self-overcoming, of the passage, spurred by the other’s intervention, into new
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states of being and new understandings of personal identity. At the same time, the 1978 novel provides the first detailed articulation of Malouf’s understanding of the experience of exile. Child’s Play is a postmodern allegorical tale set in 1970s Italy and is narrated by a young terrorist assigned to assassinate an internationally celebrated author. Malouf here gives his most focused attention to metatextual questions – those arising around authorship and text-making – although such concerns are already apparent in the first two novels. Malouf’s collection of autobiographical narratives, 12 Edmondstone Street, is his only subsequent substantial publication to make use of the first person throughout; however, the author very deliberately strains the relationship between the “I” that narrates and the past self that is narrated, thus revealing the limits of the firstperson mode even as he uses it. As he enters his novelistic mid-career, with Fly Away Peter (1982b) and the K€unstlerroman Harland’s Half Acre (1984), a shift in the author’s vision becomes apparent: the world-making power of the individual consciousness gives way to an understanding of consciousnesses as sites where worlds manifest and elaborate their meanings. Insight, as an often literal “looking into,” gains importance as a way of contacting and discovering an alternative world of experience, a distinct place of being. This notion of insight is most clearly enacted in Jim Saddler’s use of field glasses to gain intimate access to the worlds of birds in Fly Away Peter, though it is also very pertinent to the artistic becoming of the painter Frank Harland. Fly Away Peter and The Great World (1990) both narrate Australian participation in the world wars, and both do so to show important moments in the making of Australian national identity. The latter novel strongly emphasizes movement – between peacetime and war, between Australia and Asia, between urban and rural spaces, between different spaces of class and ethnicity, between public and private life. A novel of transactions, it exhibits ongoing negotiation of connectedness and separateness, intimacy and distance. Through the detailed development of the key character Digger Keen, history and memory, and their complex interrelations, receive more substantial treatment than in previous works. Malouf’s consciousness of the body, and his sense of embodied consciousness, become more
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prominent topics. An increased concern with mapping, and with words as mapping instruments, is evident. Remembering Babylon (1993) is the cornerstone of Malouf’s reputation. The novel brings to the fore the postcolonial aspects of the author’s vision and focuses attention intensely upon questions of nationhood: what is a nation, and how is it constituted; more particularly, what is Australia, and how did this settler colony remake itself as a modern nation? As the title suggests, the book strives to initiate a remembering, a profoundly ethical and instrumental process of memory, and also a re-collecting of that which has been dismembered. The work suggests that the making of modern Australia has entailed the exclusion of real and present elements, yet disavowed the dominant forces informing the nation’s self-imagining. The themes of belonging and exile are organized around the key character Gemmy Fairley, an English castaway boy who is adopted and raised by Aborigines before becoming, for a time, a marginal member of a northern Queensland settler community. Through their relationships with Gemmy, the novel’s other major characters transform, in various ways, their understandings of themselves and of Australia. The Conversations at Curlow Creek (1996) clearly follows from its distinguished predecessor. Whereas Remembering Babylon is principally focused upon the problem of apprehending and then learning to value difference, Conversations organizes itself much more around defamiliarizing the familiar, showing the gaps of darkness and strangeness that inform relationships of assumed intimacy, and examining the ensuing problem of self-knowledge. The novel begins with the premise that human beings tend to be “divided against” themselves, and that this divisiveness is marked by opposing movements, alternating or simultaneous, of desire and fear. Conversations narrates the deep ambivalence of a nineteenth-century Irish soldier called upon to oversee the tracking and ultimate extermination, in colonial Australia, of a gang of rebel bushrangers of Irish origins. The story ultimately exonerates, and also admires, the unceasingly divided human animal. Although Malouf’s principal importance for twentieth-century literature is as a novelist, the two most important publications of his twentyfirst-century career, Dream Stuff (2000) and Every
Move You Make (2006), have been short story collections. Whereas the earlier Antipodes presents a number of stories with European settings, stories from these two collections are set in Australia, with the question of Australian national identity coming strongly into view. Both collections meditate diversely on Australian nationhood by multiplying perspectives and situations; both are sharply focused on Australia’s geographical and sociocultural specificities. In all three short story collections the most consistently developed theme is coming of age, which some characters fail to achieve and which no character achieves easily. The stories that most clearly explore this key theme are, in Antipodes, “Southern Skies,” “Sorrows and Secrets,” and “Out of the Stream”; in Dream Stuff, “At Schindler’s,” “Night Training,” “Sally’s Story,” and “Dream Stuff”; in Every Move You Make, “The Valley of Lagoons,” “Every Move You Make,” “War Baby,” and “Elsewhere.” Malouf has won a great number of significant literary awards and prizes in Australia, beginning in 1974 with the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry and the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal (which he received again in 1982). In 1978, 1987, and 1993, he won the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award. In 1982, Fly Away Peter took the Age Book of the Year Award, while 1985 brought the Victorian Premier’s prize, for Antipodes, which also received the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction. With the publication of The Great World, Malouf began to build an impressive list of major international distinctions, beginning with the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Prix Femina etranger in 1990. Remembering Babylon was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; it won Malouf a second Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, a second Prix Femina etranger, the 1993 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the 1995 Prix Baudelaire, and the inaugural International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 1996. For career achievement, Malouf received in 2000 the University of Oklahoma’s Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Malouf has continued to be lauded in Australia, receiving among other distinctions the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Lannan Literary Award. Every Move You Make has garnered the Queensland Premier’s Steele Rudd Award, as well as Malouf’s second Age Book of the Year Award.
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MANIAM, K. S.
SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonalism and Fiction (WF)
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Randall, D. (2007). David Malouf. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Maniam, K. S. REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
ANDREW HOCK SOON NG
Indyk, I. (1993). David Malouf. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Malouf, D. (1974). Neighbours in a Thicket. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Malouf, D. (1975). Johnno. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Malouf, D. (1978). An Imaginary Life. London: Chatto and Windus. Malouf, D. (1980). First Things Last. London: Chatto and Windus. Malouf, D. (1981). Child’s Play. New York: George Braziller. Malouf, D. (1982a). Child’s Play with Eustace and the Prowler. London: Chatto and Windus. Malouf, D. (1982b). Fly Away Peter. London: Chatto and Windus. Malouf, D. (1984). Harland’s Half Acre. London: Chatto and Windus. Malouf, D. (1985a) 12 Edmondstone Street. London: Chatto and Windus. Malouf, D. (1985b). Antipodes. London: Chatto and Windus. Malouf, D. (1988). Blood Relations. Sydney: Currency. Malouf, D. (1990). The Great World. London: Chatto and Windus. Malouf, D. (1992). Poems 1959–89. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Malouf, D. (1993). Remembering Babylon. London: Chatto and Windus. Malouf, D. (1994). Selected Poems 1959–89. London: Chatto and Windus. Malouf, D. (1996). The Conversations at Curlow Creek. London: Chatto and Windus. Malouf, D. (1998). The Spirit of Place. Sydney: ABC Books. Malouf, D. (1999). Untold Tales. Sydney: Paper Bark. Malouf, D. (2000). Dream Stuff: Stories. London: Chatto and Windus. Malouf, D. (2003). Made in England: Australia’s British Inheritance. Quarterly Essay, 12, 1–66. Malouf, D. (2006). Every Move You Make. London: Chatto and Windus. Malouf, D. (2007). The Complete Stories. New York: Pantheon. Neilsen, P. (1990). Imagined Lives: A Study of David Malouf. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press.
K. S. Maniam, born Subramaniam Krishnan Maniam, is Malaysia’s most prolific anglophone writer. His oeuvre includes three novels, five collections of short stories, and two plays. Maniam was born in 1942 in Bedong, a small town in the state of Kedah, to a Tamil Hindu migrant family. His childhood is evocatively captured in his first novel The Return (1981), which resonantly evokes the drudgery of poverty, the everyday rituals and symbology of Hinduism that infuse his community’s identity, and the dilemma of diaspora. After completing his secondary schooling, Maniam worked as a student teacher before studying in England on a scholarship, receiving his Certificate of Education in 1964. Returning to Malaya, he taught in secondary schools in Kedah for several years before pursuing further education at the University of Malaya. There, he earned bachelor’s (1973) and master’s (1979) degrees, continuing as an English Department faculty member until his retirement in 1997. Although Maniam began writing in the 1960s, he achieved critical acclaim only with the publication of his first and most frequently studied book, The Return. The loosely autobiographical novel revolves around Ravi, whose despair over his migrant family’s poverty inflames his desire to master the English language as his way out of debilitating circumstances. The Return is a powerful testament to the plight of diasporic peoples trapped between the forces of modernization and assimilation, and the lure of tradition and nostalgia for the original homeland. Ravi’s attempt to escape social and economic deprivation at the expense of his familial ties and communal affiliations may be read variously as an act of betrayal, a metaphor for colonization, and a necessary amputation in order to achieve personal salvation. In a Far Country (1993), Maniam’s second novel, has a more experimental form than the straightforward, realist story line of The Return.
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The narrative charts the spiritual journey of Rajan, a businessman who decides to abandon his worldly success to contemplate the meaning of life. The reason for this choice is unclear, although there are hints that he has grown weary of the meaninglessness of his own life. Hinduism is more directly referenced here, and one of the novel’s most harrowing episodes is Rajan’s recollection of a goat sacrifice gone grotesquely awry. During his spiritual retirement (in his children’s playroom), Rajan is visited by memories of people struggling with their own spiritual voids. His spiritual journey is linked to the nation’s road to independence and forging of a multiracial identity, both of which are fraught with deception, betrayal, and loss. Believing that the key to overcoming his spiritual malaise is to hunt an elusive tiger in the jungle, Rajan eventually realizes that, under the weight of modernization and change, hunting as a way to find belonging is an empty fantasy. These two novels and the recently published Between Lives (2003) constitute a trilogy that portrays the (un)changing fortunes of the Indian diaspora in Malaysia and how, even after 50 years of independence, Malaysian Indians continue to face socio-economic disenfranchisement. These novels suggest that the country’s progress has forgotten one of its minority people. They capture the deep sense of longing felt by Hindus for a glorious past that is incommensurable with contemporary concerns such as adapting to rapid changes, considering the presence of other racial and religious groups, and challenging claims to purity by hybridizing identities. Similar themes are vividly captured in many of Maniam’s short stories, some of which expand on episodes in the novels. For example, his most frequently anthologized short story, “Haunting the Tiger” (1996), addresses the impossibility of ever “owning” the land to which one belongs, and “The Pelanduk” (1989) depicts the clash between tradition and modernity, pointedly criticizing a misguided sense of communalism that obstructs progress and assimilation with other racial groups. As a critic, Maniam understands that fiction may establish dichotomies that falsely lay blame on “others.” In his scholarly essays and stories, he often exposes the caste system still inherent in his community, which continues to divide Malaysia’s
Indian people. Maniam believes that unless such forms of unhelpful traditionalism are relinquished, Indians will continue to lag behind in the pursuit of knowledge, material success, and political presence. SEE ALSO: Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF); Southeast Asian Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Gabriel, S. P. (2005). Nation and Contestation in Malaysia: Diaspora and Myths of Belonging in the Narratives of K. S. Maniam. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 36(2), 235–48. Lim, D. (2005). The Infinite Longing for Home: Desire and the Nation in Selected Writings of Ben Okri and K. S. Maniam. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Lim, S. C. (1993). Gods who Fail: Ancestral Religions in the New Literatures in English from Malaysia and Singapore. Reprinted in Quayum & Wicks (2001), pp. 126–35. Maniam, K. S. (1981). The Return. London: Skoob. Maniam, K. S. (1983). Sensuous Horizons: The Stories and the Plays. London: Skoob. Maniam, K. S. (1987a). Fact into Fiction, Fiction into Fact: A Personal Reflection. Reprinted in Quayum & Wicks (2001), pp. 263–8. Maniam, K. S. (1987b). The Malaysian Novelist: Detachment or Spiritual Transcendence. Reprinted in Quayum & Wicks (2001), pp. 80–4. Maniam, K. S. (1989). Plot, the Aborting, Parablames and Other Stories. Kuala Lumpur: AMK Interaksi. Maniam, K. S. (1992). A Cultural Potpourri. CRNLE Reviews Journal, 1, 79–82. Maniam, K. S. (1993). In a Far Country. London: Skoob. Maniam, K. S. (1995). Arriving . . . and Other Stories. Singapore: Times. Maniam, K. S. (1996). Haunting the Tiger and Other Stories. London: Skoob. Maniam, K. S. (2003). Between Lives. Petaling Jaya: Maya. Quayum, M. A., & Wicks, P. C. (eds.) (2001). Malaysian Literature in English: A Critical Reader. Petaling Jaya: Longman. Tang, S. P. (1993). Ralph Ellison and K. S. Maniam: Ethnicity in America and Malaysia, Two Kinds of Invisibility. Reprinted in Quayum & Wicks (2001), pp. 276–89. Wicks, P. (2002). Diaspora and Identity in the Fiction of K. S. Maniam. Atlantic Literary Review, 3(4), 15–27.
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MANSFIELD, KATHERINE
Wilson, B. (2003). Memory, Myth, Exile: The Desire for Malaysian Belonging in K. S. Maniam’s The Return, “Hunting the Tiger,” and In a Far Country. Textual Practice, 17(2), 391–412.
Mansfield, Katherine WILLIAM NEW
Wellington-born, Katherine Mansfield published her major short stories in England, but her earliest sketches appeared in school magazines and small Australian periodicals. Praised and derided during her lifetime, she came to be recognized as New Zealand’s foremost writer historically, and as one of the world’s most influential, formally innovative English-language authors of short fiction – adept at crafting character, dialogue, time, symbol, and scene. Most of her stories, regularly represented in modernist and survey anthologies, have remained in print since their first publication. Mansfield (born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp on October 14, 1888) was the third of the six children of Annie Burnell (Dyer) and Harold Beauchamp, a banker: five girls (one dying in infancy) and one boy, Leslie, the youngest and Mansfield’s favorite. Kathleen (called “Kass”) adopted the pen-name “Katherine Mansfield” later, also using such pseudonyms as K. Bendall, Boris Petrovsky, and Lili Heron when writing reviews. Family names appear in several stories – including the name “Beauchamp,” anglicized as “Fairfield.” Yet Mansfield rebelled against her parents’ middleclass values, and (while she loved the environment) resented what she considered parochialism. After attending Queen’s College, London (1903–6), she returned to New Zealand, traveled in the interior of the North Island, and wrote a diary, later published as The Urewera Notebook. One of her most plotted stories, “The Woman at the Store,” also grew out of this journey. Fiercely intent upon a sophisticated literary career, however, she returned in 1908 to England, with her companion Ida Baker (whom Mansfield called “L.M.,” or “Lesley Moore”). Mansfield’s subsequent life reads like a film script. Pregnant in 1909 – likely with Garnet Trowell’s child – she married a singing teacher named George Bowden, left the marriage the next day, moved to Bavaria for six months, miscarried,
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read a translation of Anton Chekhov’s stories, and began to write satirical sketches of German life. These sketches (subsequently collected as In a German Pension) attracted the attention of Alfred Orage, who invited her to contribute to his London journal the New Age. A rival editor, John Middleton Murry, also sought out Mansfield, requesting a different kind of story for his journal Rhythm. Mansfield married Murry in 1918. Mutually needy, they quarreled frequently, over money and his infidelity. (She, too, had a brief affair, with the New Caledonia-born French writer Francis Carco, portrayed as a lecher in her story “Je ne parle pas fran¸cais” – to which Carco replied with his novel Les Innocents a year later.) In 1915, Mansfield’s brother Leslie was killed in France, a devastating loss that was to reshape her writing yet again, drawing her back to childhood settings. Mansfield and Murry were often invited to “Garsington,” the literary salon of Lady Ottoline Morell, where other guests included T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, and Virginia Woolf. Woolf’s letters would later reveal the tension between herself and Mansfield. They admired each other’s work, but were not companionable: “I was fascinated,” Woolf wrote to Vita Sackville-West, “and she respectful, only I thought her cheap, and she thought me priggish” – although, she added, Mansfield’s “sharpness and reality” were what she needed to offset her own “respectability” (Woolf 366). Eliot, writing more disparagingly to Ezra Pound, called Mansfield “dangerous,” given to “persistent and thickskinned toadiness” (Eliot 389, 392). She and Murry were closer friends with D. H. Lawrence. Diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1918, Mansfield left England for southern Europe. Treatments proving ineffectual, she died on January 9, 1923, still seeking a radical cure at the Gurdjieff Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Avon-Fontainebleau, near Paris. A period of intense writing nevertheless began while she stayed at a villa in Menton, France, in 1920. Her collections Bliss (1920) and The Garden Party (1922) were followed by posthumous volumes that Murry titled The Doves’ Nest and Something Childish (the latter titled The Little Girl in the US). All Murry’s editions – including the Journal (1927; reissued 1954 as “definitive”), the 1928–9 Letters (reselected 1951), and the 1939 Scrapbook – are flawed. Championing Mansfield’s
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reputation but protective of his own, Murry excised passages in the journal and letters that were unflattering to him. The strains in their marriage are captured in such stories as “Marriage a la Mode” – where the male characters appear insensitive and ineffectual – and expressed still more openly in Mansfield’s unexpurgated notebooks (ed. Margaret Scott, 1997) and letters (1984–2008). Editions of her dramatic sketches, poems, and critical writings also appeared in the 1980s. The first careful edition of her stories, Antony Alpers’ The Stories of Katherine Mansfield (1984), was succeeded by Vincent O’Sullivan’s 2005 selection. The early German sketches are among her least read, generally dismissed as apprentice work, though some stand out. In “Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding,” the unspoken distress of a married woman contrasts with the lurching insensitivities of her husband. In “The ChildWho-Was-Tired” – most famous because it led some critics to accuse Mansfield of plagiarizing Chekhov’s “Sleepyhead” – an exhausted nursemaid smothers a baby. From the charge of plagiarism derives the biographical narrative that Claire Tomalin tells, about a sleazy attempt to blackmail Mansfield. Other critics regard Mansfield’s story as a free adaptation – even a tribute – arguing that the rhetorical strategies in the two tales demonstrate differing centers of narrative concern, Chekhov revealing class distinctions but Mansfield objecting to conventional social constructions of women’s language. While the stories published in the New Age were generally parodic or theatrical, the insights expressed in “The Journey to Bruges” and other works led to the more elliptical character studies that would appear in Rhythm (1912–15): “An Indiscreet Journey,” “The Little Governess,” where travelers become victims of their own naivety. A still more nuanced unveiling of character distinguishes the several works now regarded as her masterpieces, written from 1917 on: “Je ne parle pas fran¸cais,” “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” “Prelude,” “At the Bay,” “The Doll’s House,” “The Garden Party,” “The Escape,” “The Fly,” “The Voyage” – which highlight deferential (often because isolated) women, adventurous and inquiring women, men with persistent power, and the irrationality of social hierarchies. “Prelude” (revised out of an earlier
manuscript entitled The Aloe, and first published separately at the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press) develops a strategy recurrent in her later work. By fragmenting narrative into scenes, adapting the technique of free indirect discourse, and relying on symbol and cinematic rhythm rather than plot, Mansfield used narrative form both to reveal story and to question long-held notions of personal security, social stability, and closure. Early critics suggested that the New Zealand stories construct an idyllic vision of her childhood; closer attention reveals something different. One story tells of the effects of colonial class distinctions. Others dramatize the interconnected aspirations within the Fairfield family: the father’s preoccupation with work, the mother’s uneasiness about child-bearing, the aunt’s thwarted sexuality, the three daughters’ emerging personalities. Underlying all of the stories lies the issue of free choice. “The Garden Party” focuses on the daughter, Laura Sheridan. The Fairfield stories feature the “middle daughter,” Kezia. In “A Doll’s House,” Kezia seemingly breaks the family rules by letting the “lower-class” Kelvey girls through the gate to look at her toy household; and Laura, against her mother’s wishes, visits the family of a workman who has been killed while the Sheridan party is being arranged. In neither case does the action resolve a social disparity, but in both instances the narratives disturb illusions. Laura’s brother only seems to have the last word. The younger Kelvey girl, though not allowed to touch, is allowed to see. Mansfield’s anger avoids both parody and preachiness; it champions fairness instead. One remarkable feature of her continuing reputation is the degree to which Mansfield reappears as a figure in other writers’ works. Early on, Lawrence had characterized Mansfield somewhat acerbically as the character Gudrun in his novel Women in Love. In Point Counter Point, Huxley dismissed Mansfield as a mere sentimentalist. Mansfield did indeed sometimes drift close to mawkishness – a trait she criticized, in her notebooks, even in herself – but Huxley’s target was Murry’s “cult” of Mansfield in the years after her death. More sympathetically, Canadian author Janice Kulyk Keefer’s novel Thieves adapts the plagiarism story, and several New Zealand playwrights – Vincent O’Sullivan, Alma De
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MANSFIELD, KATHERINE
Groen, Cathy Downes, Brian McNeil – dramatize her marriage and death. Other writers use fiction reconstructively, as C. K. Stead in his novel, The End of the Century at the End of the World, where “Mansfield” fabricates her own death and lives into the future. Witi Ihimaera, in Dear Miss Mansfield, recasts from a Maori perspective several Mansfield stories – among them “The Doll’s House,” “The Garden Party” – honoring Mansfield but also accentuating what her stories (and conventional nationalist rhetoric) ignore. The standard biographies of Mansfield remain those by Alpers (1954) and Boddy (1988). Tomalin (1987) and Hankin (1983) adopt more psychoanalytic approaches to the life and work. Critical surveys include a book by Hanson and Gurr (1981); articles on selected texts appear in anthologies edited by Bardolph (1997), Michel & Dupuis (1989), and Robinson (1994). Kaplan (1991) studies modernist expression, and New (1999) analyzes Mansfield’s stylistic practice. Feminist criticism elucidates Mansfield’s stories in still other ways, as in books by Burgan (1994), Fullbrook (1986), Murray (1990), and ParkinGounelas (1991), which study in detail such subjects as gender and illness, sexuality, body image, body language, and identity politics. Mansfield’s papers are primarily held at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington and the Newberry Library in Chicago. The Katherine Mansfield Birthplace House (Te Puakitanga) in Thorndon, Wellington, is now restored as a National Heritage site.
SEE ALSO: Feminism and Fiction (WF); Huxley, Aldous (BIF); Ihimaera, Witi (WF); Lawrence, D. H. (BIF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); New Zealand Fiction (WF); Woolf, Virginia (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Alpers, A. (1954). Katherine Mansfield: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape. Bardolph, J. (ed.) (1997). Katherine Mansfield/Hanif Kureishi [special issue]. Commonwealth: Essays and Studies SP 4. Boddy, G. (1988). Katherine Mansfield: The Woman and the Writer. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin.
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Burgan, M. (1994). Illness, Gender, and Writing: The Case of Katherine Mansfield. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Eliot, T. S. (1988). The Letters of T. S. Eliot; vol. I (ed. V. Eliot). London: Faber and Faber. Fullbrook, K. (1986). Katherine Mansfield. Brighton: Harvester. Hankin, C. (1983). Katherine Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories. London: Macmillan. Hanson, C. & Gurr, A. (1981). Katherine Mansfield. London: Macmillan. Kaplan, S. J. (1991). Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kirkpatrick, B. J. (1989). A Bibliography of Katherine Mansfield. Oxford: Clarendon. Mansfield, K. (1911). In a German Pension. London: Stephen Swift. Mansfield, K. (1918). Prelude. London: Hogarth. Mansfield, K. (1920). Bliss and Other Stories. London: Constable. Mansfield, K. (1922). The Garden Party and Other Stories. London: Constable. Mansfield, K. (1923). The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories (ed. J. M. Murry). London: Constable. Mansfield, K. (1924). Something Childish and Other Stories (ed. J. M. Murry). London: Constable. Mansfield, K. (1930). The Aloe (ed. V. O’Sullivan). London: Constable. Mansfield, K. (1977). Katherine Mansfield: Publications in Australia, 1907–1909 (ed. J. E. Stone). Sydney: Wentworth. Mansfield, K. (1978). The Urewera Notebook (ed. I. Gordon). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mansfield, K. (1984a, 1987, 1993, 1996, 2008). The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, vol. 1: 1903–1917; vol. 2: 1918–September 1919; vol. 3: 1919–1920; vol. 4: 1920–1921; vol. 5: 1922 (ed. V. O’Sullivan & M. Scott). Oxford: Clarendon. Mansfield, K. (1984b). The Stories of Katherine Mansfield (ed. A. Alpers). Auckland: Oxford University Press. Mansfield, K. (1988). The Poems of Katherine Mansfield (ed. V. O’Sullivan). Auckland: Oxford University Press. Mansfield, K. (1997). The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks. 2 vols. (ed. M. Scott). Auckland: Lincoln University Press/Daphne Brasell/Whitireia. Mansfield, K. (2005). Katherine Mansfield’s Selected Short Stories (ed. V. O’Sullivan,). New York: Norton. Michel, P., & Dupuis, M. (eds.) (1989). The Fine Instrument: Essays on Katherine Mansfield. Sydney: Dangaroo.
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Murray, H. (1990). Double Lives: Women in the Stories of Katherine Mansfield. Dunedin: University of Otago Press. New, W. H. (1999). Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Parkin-Gounelas, R. (1991). Fictions of the Female Self: Charlotte Bront€e, Olive Schreiner, Katherine Mansfield. London: Macmillan. Robinson, R. (ed.) (1994). Katherine Mansfield: In from the Margin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Tomalin, C. (1987). Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life. London: Viking. Woolf, V. (1978). A Reflection of the Other: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4: 1929–1931 (ed. N. Nicholson). London: Hogarth.
Maracle, Lee CHERYL SUZACK
Lee Maracle burst onto the Canadian literary scene with her autobiographical novel Bobbi Lee, Indian Rebel (1975), and she continues to be an important political and literary voice. Her work transcends geographical and historical boundaries to express the plight of Indigenous women and children, the histories of colonialism and struggles for decolonization by Indigenous communities, and the spiritual and aesthetic sensibilities of her Salish ancestry. Maracle’s writing is often polemical, using character development and plot to engage directly with her reader’s assumptions about Indigenous peoples’ experiences of racism and colonialism, yet her work is also enlivened by the core tenets of orality and transformation that inhere in Indigenous storytelling traditions. Through the integration of political, aesthetic, and spiritual elements, her writing expresses the force and value of literary sovereignty by demonstrating how an Indigenous worldview integrates self, family, community, and culture to decolonizing ends. Her writing is importantly situated alongside that of a generation of Canadian authors, including Jeannette Armstrong, Beth Brant, Maria Campbell, and Beatrice Culleton Mosionier, who have refashioned Indigenous writing in order to formalize and define their activist aesthetics and politics. Maracle was born on July 2, 1950 in a village north of Vancouver and grew up on the North Shore mud flats. One of seven children, she
formed an attachment to writing at an early age and was strongly influenced by her great-grandmother (Fee & Gunew 208). She travelled extensively in her youth, taking part in protests and anti-war demonstrations as well as the Red Power and Black Power movements. Many of these early experiences are documented in Bobbi Lee, Indian Rebel, which traces the development of her political consciousness. She studied at Vancouver Community College and Simon Fraser University, and was a founding member of the En’owkin International School of Writing in Penticton, British Columbia. She has held distinguished professorships at the University of Waterloo and Western Washington University. She is now an associate professor of English at the University of Toronto and writer-in-residence at First Nations House. Maracle has published four novels, two collected works of short stories, a collection of poetry, and several collaborative anthologies, including We Get Our Living Like Milk from the Land, which provides an historical overview of the Okanagan Nation from its creation stories to contemporary times, and My Home as I Remember (1999), an anthology of writing and artwork that expresses Native women’s associations of home through connections between memory, culture, and community. Widely anthologized herself, Maracle also wrote the first text by a Native woman to explore the intersections between liberation struggles and women’s empowerment – I am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism (1996). Maracle’s literary works explore the relationship between feminine consciousness and creativity. One of her best-known novels, Ravensong (1993), transforms the female K€unstlerroman to redefine the portrait of the artist as a young woman, who in this case must overcome the mediating effects of a colonial culture that separates her from her tribal inheritances through a race consciousness that privileges poverty, illness, disease, and death. The protagonist’s attempt to restore her community inheritances situates Maracle’s engagement with literary decolonization as an unfinished practice that requires a return to storytelling traditions. Maracle’s defense of these traditions and of Indigenous peoples’ rights to protect them from appropriation and misinformation has brought international attention to these issues (Emberley 94).
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MARECHERA, DAMBUDZO
In addition to critical work addressing the themes of decolonization (1994), Maracle’s novel Sundogs (1992) demonstrates her literary preoccupation with personal and community survival. Her protagonist, Marianne, undertakes this struggle against the backdrop of historical events such as Canada’s late-1980s constitutional debates and its sometimes violent conflicts with Indigenous peoples. Her protagonist’s dystopic vision alters as she gains inspiration from her family’s struggles and begins shedding stereotypes about Native social life through her own activism. Maracle’s wider concerns with cultural revival, often explored through her protagonist’s journey toward self-discovery, political consciousness, and women’s empowerment, are pervasive themes in her writing. Sundogs, like Daughters are Forever (2002a) and the young adult fiction Will’s Garden (2002b), conveys Maracle’s commitment to liberation struggle through creative expression. It also demonstrates her wider critique of colonial education’s narrow and prescriptive treatment of Indigenous peoples, which in her view reductively subordinates Indigenous knowledge to Western standards (1994, 7). Her project of restoring credibility to Indigenous intellectual traditions emphasizes the continuities among generations in the formation of Indigenous consciousness and epistemology. Maracle describes the ethical vision of her writing and teaching as oriented toward “peel[ing] back” layers of consciousness in order to arrive at the center where “peace through recognition lies” (2007, para. 12). Maracle’s work has been foundational to the field of Canadian Indigenous writing and to promoting a tribal-centered and feminist consciousness in the study of Indigenous literatures. Her contributions through writing, activism, and teaching have furthered the goals of intellectual decolonization for Indigenous communities in Canada. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Indigenous Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Armstrong, J., Derickson, D., Maracle, L., & Young-Ing, G. (1994). We Get Our Living Like Milk from the Land. Penticton, BC: Theytus.
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Emberley, J. (1993). Thresholds of Difference: Feminist Critique, Native Women’s Writings, Postcolonial Theory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Fee, M., & Gunew, S. (2004). From Discomfort to Enlightenment: An Interview with Lee Maracle. Essays on Canadian Writing, 83, 206–21. Maracle, L. (1975). Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel. Toronto: Women’s Press. Maracle, L. (1990). Sojourner’s Truth & Other Stories. Vancouver: Press Gang. Maracle, L. (1992). Sundogs. Penticton, BC: Theytus. Maracle, L. (1993). Ravensong: A Novel. Vancouver: Press Gang. Maracle, L. (1994). Oratory: Coming to Theory. Essays on Canadian Writing, 54, 7–10. Maracle, L. (1996). I am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism. Vancouver: Press Gang. Maracle, L. (1999). Sojourners and Sundogs: First Nations Fiction. Vancouver: Press Gang. Maracle, L. (2000). Bent Box. Penticton, BC: Theytus. Maracle, L. (2002a). Daughters are Forever. Vancouver: Polestar. Maracle, L. (2002b). Will’s Garden. Penticton, BC: Theytus. Maracle, L. (2007). Some Words on Study as a Process of Discovery. At www.transcanadas.ca/ transcanada1/maracle.shtml, accessed Feb. 27, 2009. Maracle, L., & Laronde, S. (eds.) (1999). My Home as I Remember. Toronto: Natural Heritage.
Marechera, Dambudzo ANNIE GAGIANO
Dambudzo Marechera is one of the major innovators in African English-language writing. He has remained almost as controversial a figure as he became with the publication of his initial collection The House of Hunger (1978), but Marechera’s radical anti-establishment conduct was an expression of a sophisticated and deeply held belief about the need to resist “slow brain death” (quoted in Veit-Wild 1992, 40), to which most people (in his view) subject themselves by living lives of social conformity. His visceral, surreal descriptions, irreverent humor, scatological diction, and scathing political criticism of all power-mongers have retained their biting force and have inspired a succeeding generation of writers. Born on June 4, 1952 in Vengere township near Rusape in Rhodesia, Marechera was the third of
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nine children. His father’s death when Dambudzo was 14 and the subsequent loss of their family home caused him to develop a stutter. Growing up among the racially segregated, colonized poor, Marechera understood the repressed fury and localized violence of ghetto life and considered it to be the major inspiration of his work, although he thought of becoming a writer only upon discovering that other Africans (such as Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o) had authored novels. His intellectual giftedness was quickly evident and earned him grants. Resistance to colonial control intensified in the 1960s, and in his second year Marechera was expelled from the University of Rhodesia for his leading role in a major protest march. Although he transferred to Oxford on a scholarship, his anarchic ways got him expelled there too, and thereafter he stayed with friends or squatted. Having returned to (now independent) Zimbabwe in 1982, he became the typewriting author on the park bench. An AIDS sufferer, Marechera died in Harare on August 18, 1987 of pulmonary collapse. Marechera admired European modernist authors such as James Joyce and Franz Kafka, the American Beat authors, and a host of Russian writers. Despite damaging criticism and resistance to his supposedly “un-African” style, he was preoccupied throughout his writing career with the dilemmas confronting contemporary Africans – racism, exile, biculturalism, and postcolonial political repression. All his insights were hard-won, but his concerns, although profoundly existentialist, were never merely selfish for Marechera conveyed the ideal of the critically outspoken citizen in all his writings. The House of Hunger (1978), a collection consisting of a novella and a number of shorter stories and sketches, made Marechera co-winner of the prestigious Guardian Fiction Prize. Written after he was sent down from Oxford, the title piece is set in Rhodesia, the “uncertain country” that left blacks full of nothing but “soul-hunger” (92, 1), prey to racist exclusion erupting against victimization in drunken brawls, sex, and domestic violence. His ironic analyses of these appalling conditions make Marechera’s writing as sophisticated as it is accusatory. The novel Black Sunlight (1980) was published in Britain in the face of serious resistance from its initial (African) readers to its complicated plot, intellectual language, and
indefinable setting within which the activities of a small group of anarchists are depicted. Marechera insisted that the setting was Zimbabwe (and left clues in the text indicating it), although the complex themes simultaneously interrogate the self-contradictions of anarchism and the need to resist and violently shatter all institutional systems. Black Sunlight was initially banned in Zimbabwe on the grounds of alleged obscenity and cultural irrelevance, but the ban was retracted under pressure from Marechera’s champions. His Mindblast; or, The Definitive Buddy (1984) was extremely popular in Zimbabwe, in which he boldly confronts and castigates postcolonial repression, both social and intellectual, lacing the writing with a wryly unselfrighteous, mocking humor. The Black Insider (1990), a novel of debate set in a crumbling Arts Faculty where a diverse group takes refuge against plague and war, brilliantly discusses issues of language and power, strongly inflected by African experiences such as European exile. Written while Marechera was in Britain, it was published posthumously. It was edited by Flora Veit-Wild, his loyal friend and most important champion, who also edited his two other posthumous publications: the poetry collection Cemetery of Mind (1992) and a final short story collection, Scrapiron Blues (1994), which addresses the liberation war, its social aftermath, and the damaged psyches and postwar survival struggles of Zimbabweans. Marechera was, in addition to his influential position as poet and author, a fine literary critic and accomplished social analyst (see VeitWild 1992). SEE ALSO: Censorship and Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Queer/ Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF); Southern African Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Buuck, D. (1997). African Doppelg€anger: Hybridity and Identity in the World of Dambudzo Marechera. Research in African Literatures, 28(2), 118–31. Gagiano, A. (2000). Achebe, Head, Marechera: On Power and Change in Africa. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
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Gagiano, A. (2005). Marechera’s Wordhorde and the Scrapiron of War. In R. Muponde & R. Primorac (eds.), Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture. Harare: Weaver, pp. 41–54. Holst Petersen, K. (1988). An Articulate Anger: Dambudzo Marechera, 1952–1987. Sydney: Dangaroo. Marechera, D. (1978). The House of Hunger. London: Heinemann. Marechera, D. (1980). Black Sunlight. London: Heinemann. Marechera, D. (1984). Mindblast; or, The Definitive Buddy. Harare: College Press. Marechera, D. (1990). The Black Insider. Harare: Baobab. Marechera, D. (1992). Cemetery of Mind. Harare: Baobab. Marechera, D. (1994). Scrapiron Blues. Harare: Baobab. Pattison, D. (2001). No Room for Cowardice: A View of the Life and Times of Dambudzo Marechera. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Primorac, R. (2007). The Place of Tears: The Novel and Politics in Modern Zimbabwe. London: Tauris Academic Studies. Quayson, A. (2004). Symbolization Compulsion: Testing a Psychoanalytic Category on Postcolonial African Literature. University of Toronto Quarterly, 73(2), 754–72. Seda, O. S. (2008). Fourth Dimension: Dambudzo Marechera as a Dramatist – An Analysis of Two Plays. Matatu, 34, 147–58. Vambe, M. (2000). Dambudzo Marechera’s Black Sunlight: Carnivalesque and the Subversion of Nationalist Discourse. Journal of Literary Studies, 16(3/4), 76–89. Veit-Wild, F. (1992). Dambudzo Marechera: A Source Book on His Life and Work. London: Hans Zell. Veit-Wild, F. (2006). Writing Madness: Borderlines of the Body in African Literature. Oxford: James Currey. Veit-Wild, F., & Chennells, A. (eds.) (1999). Emerging Perspectives on Dambudzo Marechera. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Markandaya, Kamala UMA PARAMESWARAN
Kamala Markandaya stands at the head of two literary traditions. With such writers as Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, and Manohar Malgonkar, she is among the first generation of Indo-English writers born at the height of the British Raj in India. Her narratives show the tension of the
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love–hate relationship between the British and the Indian elite more clearly than those of any other writer, and demand to be read not merely as postcolonial expressions of oppression and victimization but as instances of the ambivalence the West Indian poet Derek Walcott has powerfully articulated as the colonial predicament: “Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? . . . how choose / Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?” (Walcott 18). Markandaya is also one of the first generation of Indian diasporic writers, alongside Attia Hosain, Raja Rao, and Balachandra Rajan. Between 1954 and 1982, she published on average one novel every three years with reputed publishers in England and the US. Few details are known about Markandaya’s personal life, which she kept very private. She was born into a well-established Brahmin family, the Purnaiyas, in Chimakurti, a small town in Mysore state, on June 23, 1924. One family member was a dewan in the court of the maharaja of Mysore, and her father was a senior officer in the railways. She began a history degree at the University of Madras in 1940 but curtailed it to work as a journalist and then social worker from 1940 to 1947. In 1948, she left India for England; the same year she married Bertrand Taylor, an Englishman, and lived a quiet life in London until her death on May 16, 2004. They had a daughter, Kim, in 1957, and her husband died in 1986. The name Markandaya, her pseudonym, is taken from her mother’s family name. Although she lived in Britain for 56 years, no obituary writer or critic has called Markandaya a British novelist, referring to her instead as an Indian or Indo-British writer. Such non-recognition is expressed by her character Srinivas in The Nowhere Man (1972), an immigrant of 40 years in England; he proudly says, “This is my country now” (60), but when racist riots break out in 1968 and immigrants are taunted to go back to their own countries, he feels he belongs nowhere. The same claim denied him was also denied his creator, though later diasporic characters and writers have enjoyed such recognition. Markandaya’s prose style is chiseled in its crisp clarity, and her plots delineate everyday aspects in the lives of common people. In each novel she takes a subset of Indian society, with a protagonist representing a particular social or professional group, and brings out its aspirations and
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shortcomings. The plots of her early novels move at a sure and steady pace, without political or philosophical digressions. Their architectonic structure favors symmetry and balance: for every storm of nature, there is a period of plenitude; relationships move in cresting waves of joy alternating with the ebbing of betrayal. Symbols and metaphors are established early in the novel and carried through to the end. In the later novels, these patterns are more complex, showing the author’s increasing maturity. Of her 11 novels, the first, Nectar in a Sieve (1954), is her best known; it was translated into 17 languages within a decade of its publication. Set in rural India of the 1940s, it portrays Rukmani, a peasant woman, being repeatedly beaten down by Nature’s droughts and storms, but rising up each time. However, when the winds of change bring a tannery to the outskirts of the village, the forces of industrialization are too strong for sheer hard work and fortitude to overcome. The novel touches on many themes of Indian life: as her daughter is driven by starvation into prostitution, moneylenders suck dry the peasants, and modernity destroys the old ways, in each instance acceptance rather than confrontation resolves the tension. Some Inner Fury (1955) is closer to Markandaya’s own family background – upper middle class and anglicized. The story is set against the struggle for independence, with Mira’s brother Kit being an officer in the British civil service, her brother Govind a nationalist, and her lover Richard Marlowe an honorable Englishman. Mira’s position, caught between lover, brothers, and country, is representative of the warring ideologies of the times and her personal happiness is sacrificed as the British and Indians vent their antagonisms. A Silence of Desire (1960), one of her most successful novels, explores the unarticulated tensions in a traditional marriage. Dandekar and Sarojini love each other but fail to communicate: Sarojini seeks to cure her cancer through a faith healer, while Dandekar is lost in his suspicions of her and his own infidelities. This novel is presented through the eyes of Dandekar, who like many of Markandaya’s male characters is sensitive and introspective. The theme of spirituality is further explored in Possession (1963). As in the first novel, the simple
peasant life is extolled; after an idealized village childhood, Valmiki leaves his spiritual mentor, Swami, when Lady Caroline Bell lures him away to England to nurture his artistic talent. This novel, more than any other, can be read as a postcolonial text, suggesting that Indo-British relationships have not changed since colonial times. Markandaya’s Englishwomen are usually self-centered, mean-spirited, and imperious, like Caroline Bell, who is possessive of Valmiki’s art, talents, and soul. She takes what she wants, tramples on people who are in her way, and discards those she has squeezed dry. After writing about a lower-middle-class urban protagonist, a tailor, in A Handful of Rice (1966), Markandaya again takes up the theme of IndoBritish relationships at a personal and a collective level in The Coffer Dams (1969). As in A Silence of Desire, equal forces are pitted against each other – spirituality and materialism, scientific and non-scientific sources of knowledge, faith, and rationality. Howard Clinton can be seen in several ways. He is an imperialist and personification of industrialization, imposing his will on a colony (though in a post-independence setting) and exploiting its natural resources without any compunction. He is also the opposite of tribal Bashiam, and the two can be seen to represent the encounter between “civilized” and “primitive” forces. This empire builder, an engineer who deals with cement and concrete, is made in the image of Ayn Rand heroes: a paradoxically selfless egomaniac who pursues perfection in his work and pays a heavy price for it. The Coffer Dams shows a distinct turning point in Markandaya’s prose style. In place of the correct simplicity of the earlier novels is a language rich in overtones and undertones that plumbs the emotional workings of the characters. In 1972, Markandaya published another important novel, The Nowhere Man. It is the story of Srinivas, an immigrant to England in the 1920s, who sacrifices a son to England’s war and, living in London in the late 1960s, becomes a victim of racism. In this, she precedes Rushdie’s racism episodes in The Satanic Verses (1988) by 16 years. Markandaya can be seen as a pioneer writer of diasporic realities, forcefully delineating not only racism but other traumas to which non-white immigrants are subjected – educational qualifications that are not accredited, expectations of the
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host culture, the chasm of communication between immigrant generations, and the conflicts of cultural values and needless cultural baggage. But as always, a more positive side of the British is also represented, in the humane and idealistic Dr. Radcliffe. The Nowhere Man was received with stony silence on its release, which is perhaps why Markandaya returned to Indian themes. Two Virgins (1973), a story of two sisters, could well have been written much earlier. The Golden Honeycomb (1977) is a more textured novel, weaving in and out of the opulent court of Devapur, which is a microcosm of a larger macrocosm, corresponding to the position of princely kingdoms vis-a-vis the British crown. Like Santha Rama Rau’s Remember the House (1956) and Manohar Malgonkar’s The Princes (1963), this novel recreates the pomp and pageantry of princely kingdoms under the British Raj. Here Markandaya becomes a stronger critic of the selfish machinations of the Raj, portraying every action of the British agent as calculated to ensure total subservience from the princes and their subjects. Pleasure City was published in 1982 in England and in 1983 in the United States under the title Shalimar. Just as Markandaya was a step ahead of the feminist revolution in Two Virgins, she is a step ahead in awareness of neo-imperialists’ commercialization of the forests and beaches of the world. Located near the Marabar Caves of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), Shalimar is an opulent pleasure paradise catering to the very rich, a garish parody of Emperor Shah Jehan’s Shalimar Gardens. The overtone of lesbianism in Two Virgins is repeated in the homosexual tension between Tully and Rikki, and shows Markandaya’s quiet assertion of the importance and potency of the human body. After Shalimar came a long hiatus; her last novel, Bombay Tiger (2008), was published posthumously. The first draft was ready by 1988, but her long-time publisher John Day had ceased publication, and the literary landscape had changed so drastically since Rushdie’s advent that Markandaya’s mellifluous prose style and slow narrative pace were not what publishers wanted. As in other novels, she has characters that start off together in the same environment but follow different choices. Gopal Gokhale and Narahari Rao grow up as friends and rivals in the same
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village under the tutelage of Pandit Pandey, whose spirit hovers over them long after they move to Bombay to make their fortune. Their teacher’s pithy explanation of how India was taken over by the British bit by bit is “Their greed, our stupidity” (17). Ganguli distorts it to “Our greed, their stupidity” and builds his empire on foreign investors’ gullibility and his exploitation of anything that will promote his ruthless vision. Markandaya’s canvas – big, bad, world-class Bombay – is too large for her delicate brush, and Ganguli is not shown to be as ruthless as he is said to be. The novel does not have any realistic love relationships, and Markandaya’s forte has always been the depiction of those tenuous threads of connection and inarticulation that exist between people. While the decision to publish it arguably does a disservice to Markandaya’s fine repertoire of 10 novels, posterity will surely choose to keep Nectar in a Sieve as a classic, such novels as The Coffer Dams and The Nowhere Man as fine examples of her oeuvre, and perhaps resurrect A Silence of Desire. Though each of her novels was widely reviewed in major newspapers and literary journals, serious criticism of Markandaya’s work is scant. It was her misfortune to have been publishing her fiction when substantial postcolonial criticism had not yet started and to have been judged by contemporary expectations when such studies did emerge. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Malgonkar, Manohar (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Almeida, R. (2000). Originality and Imitation: Indianness in the Novels of Kamala Markandaya. New Delhi: Rawat. Dhawan, R. K. (ed.) (1993). Indian Women Novelists. 3 vols. New Delhi: Prestige. Markandaya, K. (1954). Nectar in a Sieve. London: Putnam. Markandaya, K. (1955). Some Inner Fury. London: Putnam.
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Markandaya, K. (1960). A Silence of Desire. New York: John Day. Markandaya, K. (1963). Possession. New York: John Day. Markandaya, K. (1966). A Handful of Rice. New York: John Day. Markandaya, K. (1969). The Coffer Dams. New York: John Day. Markandaya, K. (1972). The Nowhere Man. New York: John Day. Markandaya, K. (1973). Two Virgins. New York; John Day. Markandaya, K. (1977). The Golden Honeycomb. New York: Thomas Crowell. Markandaya, K. (1982). Pleasure City. London: Chatto and Windus. (Published in US as Shalimar, 1983.) Markandaya, K. (2008). Bombay Tiger. New Delhi: Penguin/Viking. Parameswaran, U. (2000). Kamala Markandaya. Jaipur: Rawat. Rao, A. V. K. (1997). Kamala Markandaya: A Critical Study of Her Novels 1954–1982. New Delhi: B. R. Publishing. Walcott, D. (1986). A Far Cry from Africa [1962]. In Collected Poems 1948–1984. New York: Noonday, pp. 17–18.
Marlatt, Daphne BEVERLEY CURRAN
In a long and still important interview with George Bowering from the 1970s, the Canadian poet and fiction writer Daphne Marlatt explains, “All my poetics are, is connections” (Bowering 32). This description continues to apply to her writing project and how she lets meaning drift, merges genres, and seeks out readers in her efforts to weave her way into the world. Marlatt, a selfdescribed local, west coast writer, has an abiding interest in place; her sense of what it means to be present and at home is crucially linked to an “immigrant imagination.” Born in Melbourne, Australia on July 11, 1942, Marlatt was raised in Penang, Malaysia until age 9, when her family moved to Canada. In north Vancouver, Marlatt found her “foreign” (British English) lexicon a liability; becoming aware of herself as many selves and the place she occupied as multidimensional, she began to grasp the mutable nature of the world and language and the ways writing could help her find belonging. At
the University of British Columbia, she explored the etymological roots of words and traced slippages in use and meaning – a central concern of her writing. In 1963, Marlatt became involved in TISH, a group of self-consciously west coast-identified writers influenced by the Black Mountain poets. After leaving Vancouver for Bloomington, Indiana, she turned to the fairy tale and wrote Frames of a Story (1968). Both Frames and leaf leaf/s (1969) offer early titular hints of a praxis concerned with how scripts contain and deceive, and how language shapes the ways we live with and in the world. Although she returned to Vancouver in 1968–9, Marlatt’s Vancouver Poems (1972) were largely written in Wisconsin; prompted by nostalgia, her imaginative sense of place was honed by absence. In Vancouver Poems, Marlatt unearths the “buried” history of Vancouver, and her excavations of collective memory continue in the long poem Steveston (1974), which weaves documentary interview fragments of individual life stories into a discernible social design of dispossession and exploitation of human and natural resources. A collaborative project with photographer Robert Minden, Steveston grew out of a series of interviews with 12 Japanese Canadian residents of Steveston, British Columbia – people whose lives had been brutally interrupted by the uprooting and internment after Pearl Harbor. The distinctive long line of Steveston comes from Marlatt’s attention to the Fraser River as a powerful and female somatic presence, evoking the interbeing of mother and child, and the interdependency of the eco-system. In the coming decades, this consciousness would be rewritten as a lesbian poetics of erotic and ecological attraction. In 1981, Marlatt started rethinking her relationship to language as a woman. Inspired by the theoretical energy of feminist writers and critics from Quebec, she wrote “musing with mothertongue” (1982), her first attempt to illuminate her poetics with feminist theory and instigate an erotic interaction between the woman writing and the woman reading. The idea of theory growing out of women’s writing and inscribed within it led to editorial and creative collaborations with other feminists. In Salvage (1991), she returned to Steveston to rewrite those poems “on that edge where a feminist consciousness floods the structures of patriarchal thought.”
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MELVILLE, PAULINE
Marlatt’s poetics fully apply to her trilogy of poetic novels Ana Historic (1988), Taken (1996), and The Given (2008), which are intimate engagements that seek connections with the woman reader. Each is an iteration of a lesbian daughter’s relationship with the mother she knew and imagined. In Ana Historic, Marlatt tells the story of an unhappy woman who, while doing archival work for her husband, starts writing her own story. Imaginatively restoring women erased from the history of Vancouver opens up the possibility of admitting lesbian love into the protagonist’s own life. Taken (1996) tempers the optimism of Ana Historic’s “coming out” story with a pensive awareness of women’s complicity in perpetuating constraining social scripts, and how these can be played out in lesbian relationships. It locates the story of lovers growing apart within a broad history of a world at war. In The Given (2008), Marlatt writes about a daughter seeking the meaning of her mother’s death as part of the story of Vancouver. Again she twins photographic precision in her writing with an awareness that memory changes and deteriorates almost immediately. The writing of The Given was interrupted by work on The Gull (2006), the first Noh play by a Canadian writer. In both works, Marlatt seeks a textual spaciousness to approach notions of life and death, and to see “the extensiveness of that cloth of connectedness we are woven into” (1998, 127). SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); Canadian Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bowering, G. (1979). Given This Body: An Interview with Daphne Marlatt. Open Letter, 4(3), 32–88. Marlatt, D. (1968). Frames of a Story. Toronto: Ryerson. Marlatt, D. (1969). leaf leaf/s. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow. Marlatt, D. (1972). Vancouver Poems. Toronto: Coach House. Marlatt, D. (ed.) (1975). Steveston Recollected: A Japanese-Canadian History. Victoria: Provincial Archives of British Columbia. Marlatt, D. (1977). Zocalo. Toronto: Coach House. Marlatt, D. (1980a). Net Work: Selected Writing (ed. F. Wah). Vancouver: Talonbooks.
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Marlatt, D. (1980b). What Matters: Writing 1968–70. Toronto: Coach House. Marlatt, D. (1983). How Hug a Stone. Winnipeg: Turnstone. Marlatt, D. (1984). Touch to My Tongue. Edmonton: Longspoon. Marlatt, D. (1988). Ana Historic: A Novel. Toronto: Coach House. Marlatt, D. (1991). Salvage. Red Deer, AB: Red Deer College Press. Marlatt, D. (1993). Ghost Works. Edmonton: NeWest. Marlatt, D. (1996). Taken. Concord, ON: Anansi. Marlatt, D. (1998). Readings from the Labyrinth. Edmonton: NeWest. Marlatt, D. (2001). This Tremor Love Is. Vancouver: Talonbooks. Marlatt, D. (2006) The Gull (Kamome). Journal of the Noh Research Archives (Musashino University, Tokyo), 18, 8–29. Marlatt, D. (2008). The Given. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Marlatt, D., & Minden, R. (1974). Steveston. Vancouver: Talonbooks. Marlatt, D., & Warland, B. (1988). Double Negative. Charlottetown, PE: Gynergy. Marlatt, D., & Warland, B. (1994). Two Women in a Birth. Toronto: Guernica. Wah, F. (1980). Introduction. In Marlatt (1980a), pp. 7–20.
Melville, Pauline SUSAN ALICE FISCHER
Writer and actress Pauline Melville is the author of two collections of short stories, Shape-Shifter (1990) and The Migration of Ghosts (1998), and the novel The Ventriloquist’s Tale (1997a). Born in Guyana in 1948 of a white, Anglo-Saxon English mother and a father of mixed African, Amerindian, and European heritage, Melville has lived part of her life in Guyana but mostly in Britain. Of her background, she writes, “White present, black past, a good position for breaking down preconceptions, stirring up doubt, rattling judgements, shifting boundaries and unfixing fixities. I am also well-placed to survey the ludicrous” (1992, 740). This shifting sense of identity allows both a nuanced politics and an element of the absurd to emerge clearly in her fiction.
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Melville’s geographical mobility is mirrored in her work by a propensity to slide between the realistic and the magical, the mundane and the mythical. She has written that from fellow Guyanese writer Wilson Harris “I have learned that nationalism is not necessarily important for the creative artist. He gave me confidence in the idea that my imagination can be my homeland and that it can be fed from many sources” (1997b, 50). Indeed, this sense of an imaginary homeland without borders pervades Melville’s work. Her award-winning first collection, ShapeShifter, displays her impressive range. In “I Do Not Take Messages from Dead People,” the theme of shifting identities is apparent as the main character, Shakespeare McNab, draws upon the trickster figure in an attempt to regain the favor of the vice president whom he has insulted. In “The Iron and the Radio Have Gone,” Molly Summers, a white British teacher who has gone to London “to work for, understand and promote the culture of the oppressed races in England,” seizes upon an opportunity to visit the Caribbean, where the most shocking sight is that of a white beggar, shifting as it does her perception of privilege and difference. Some stories veer away from the rational, finding their logic in “limbo states” between reality and dream, as in “The Girl with the Celestial Limb,” about a young woman with a paralyzing fear of infinity who ultimately mutates into a series of geometrical shapes until she vanishes into abstraction. This tendency toward magic realism continues with the 12 stories in The Migration of Ghosts, set in various European and South American locales and again narrated in various voices. The “ghosts” represent the blurring of arbitrary boundaries between reason and magic, masquerade and reality, life and death. In “Lucifer’s Shank,” life is merely a “mask,” dropping off to reveal death lurking as “a smudge, indefinable, a mystery” (83–4). In “Provenance of a Face,” a mime silently expresses the horror of the Holocaust in ways that words cannot, while in “The President’s Exile” a corrupt South American president haunts his country after death. Part of the tragedy of colonialism in “The Parrot and Descartes” is the destruction of “the unity between magic and science” (109); here a mythical voice emerges, foreshadowing the narrator in The Ventriloquist’s
Tale and creating a playful reading of European– South American relations. Called a “self-consciously postcolonial text” by Albert Braz (17), The Ventriloquist’s Tale focuses on parallel stories of forbidden passion while examining cultural beliefs concerning separation and mixing. The novel is a carefully constructed series of stories within stories, each layer adding to the questioning of cultural norms and assumptions. The prologue and epilogue frame the story through the use of a mythical (and very funny) narrator who is a self-described ventriloquist. The present-day story relays the affair between a Guyanese man of mixed Amerindian descent and an English Jewish woman who has come to do research on Evelyn Waugh’s journey to Guyana. As the man’s family history unfolds, involving an incestuous relationship between a brother and sister, this tale in turn alludes to the traditional Amerindian explanation of the eclipse as a merging between brother and sister, moon and sun. The story draws on Melville’s own family history and on Waugh’s account of his 92 days in British Guiana and Brazil. Robert Ness, discussing the relationship between these texts, writes that “Her object is not to praise one culture at the expense of another, nor to oppose the magical world of the Wapisiana against the rationalist world of the Europeans – that would be too easy. Rather, she dwells on the mutual incomprehension that makes relations between cultures both necessary and extremely difficult” (51). The titles of Melville’s books highlight her thematic interests. Her tales often deal with characters who have migrated, particularly between Guyana and England, and also with the ghosts of their former lives. Migrants become shapeshifters as they adapt to different environments, and ventriloquism suggests the need to operate in languages and cultures other than one’s own in the aftermath of colonialism. Melville’s work has received widespread international acclaim. Shape-Shifter won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Macmillan Silver Pen Award, and the Guardian Fiction Prize; The Ventriloquist’s Tale was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and won the Whitbread First Novel Award. SEE ALSO: Black British Fiction (WF); Harris, Wilson (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of
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MIGRATION, DIASPORA, AND EXILE IN FICTION
the West Indian/Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Realism/ Magic Realism (WF); Waugh, Evelyn (BIF); West Indian Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Braz, A. (2007). Mutilated Selves: Pauline Melville, Mario de Andrade, and the Troubling Hybrid. Mosaic, 40(4), 17–34. Harris, W. (1996). The Open Door. Journal of Modern Literature, 20(1), 7–12. Melville, P. (1990). Shape-Shifter. London: Women’s Press. Melville, P. (1992). Beyond the Pale. In M. Busby (ed.), Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present. New York: Pantheon, pp. 739–43. Melville, P. (1997a). The Ventriloquist’s Tale. London: Bloomsbury. Melville, P. (1997b). Wilson Harris “In the Forests of the Night.” Review of Contemporary Fiction, 17(2), 50–2. Melville, P. (1998). The Migration of Ghosts. London: Bloomsbury. Melville, P. (2007). Afterword. In E. Waugh, NinetyTwo Days: Travels in Guiana and Brazil. London: Serif, pp. 204–14. Ness, R. (2007). “Not His Sort of Story”: Evelyn Waugh and Pauline Melville in Guyana. Ariel, 38(4), 51–67. Proctor, J. (2002). Pauline Melville: Critical Perspective. At www.contemporarywriters.com, accessed 31 Aug 2008.
Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction € HEIKE HARTING
The terms “migration,” “diaspora,” and “exile” operate variously as thematic, theoretical, historical, social, and critical categories for reading twentieth-century world fiction in English. Their meanings overlap to a degree, since all three terms are concerned with the cultural and political representation of individuals or groups that, by force, necessity, or volition, move across given national, geographical, and psychological borders. On many occasions, narratives of diaspora, exile, and migration rethink and reimagine the foundational character and legitimacy of such concepts as identity, history, memory, and place.
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Thematically, these narratives explore traditional and contemporary notions of home and homelessness, displacement, cultural and national belonging and unbelonging. Historically, they reflect the massive movements of migration that mark the twentieth century and were caused by the break-up of the European empires and the changing geopolitics of now independent former colonies, as well as the rise of globalization. Works of fiction as varied as Mavis Gallant’s short stories and Romesh Gunesekera’s novels can be affiliated with one or more of these terms and events. However, diaspora, migration, and exile can be unwieldy or imprecise categories of cultural critique, often serving as interchangeable or blanket terms covering the extremely varied effects of large-scale movements of people as a result of decolonization and neocolonialism, civil and global warfare, poverty, dispossession, political violence, modernization, urbanization, or environmental catastrophes. Contemporary postcolonial writers, critics, and intellectuals therefore increasingly insist on more distinct usages of these terms and call, moreover, for a careful reading of the ways in which matters of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, and class inflect the meaning of each of them in different narrative contexts. This insistence seeks to establish how these interrelated concepts work together and to support contemporary constructions of cultural identity and difference, nation formation, and practices of global citizenship on their own terms. Yet, the particularity of these terms remains frequently overshadowed by their shared dominant biblical genealogy. In third sermon of in the book of Deuteronomy, Moses warns the people of Israel that those who will not obey God’s laws will be “scatter[ed] . . . among all people, from the one end of the earth even unto the other; and there [they shall] serve other gods, which neither thou nor thy fathers have known, even wood and stone” (28:64). Read etymologically, diaspora refers to the Greek word speiro, meaning “the scattering of seeds,” and the preposition dia (“over”). To be scattered by force, then, is to be removed from an original or promised homeland and, thus, to be thrown into a state of diasporic exile, a terrifying punishment that entails perpetual wandering and migration, which, in turn, alters the social behavior, cultural and moral practices, and affective constitution of the exiled
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subjects. In fact, diasporic exile as described in Deuteronomy induces a state of nervous restlessness, mental and physical unease, “doubt [and] fear” (28:66), insecurity, a “trembling heart, and failing eyes, and sorrow of mind” (28:65). It also brings about both the fragmentation of what appeared to be a previously cohesive group into a state of social and political vulnerability and the longing for wholeness. In its literary articulations, the state of exile or banishment is often accompanied by a nostalgic yearning for a return to one’s native homeland, an origin the exile retrospectively tends to romanticize as a place frozen in time, which can lead to further disillusion upon return. What remains pertinent to the literary representation of exile is its affective structure and logic: the profound feeling of loss and homelessness. Yet, while the Homeric epics mythologize the experience of exile as a journey of heroic redemption and return, modern and late modern writers such as James Joyce, George Lamming, Jean Rhys, and Derek Walcott emphasized the ambiguities and historically nuanced experiences of exile. In Voyage in the Dark (1969 [1934]), Rhys’s early autobiographical novel of migration from the Caribbean to London, Anna Morgan, the narrator, notices that her arrival in England felt “as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again” (7). On the one hand, the opening of the novel promises a modernist narrative of exile as the possibility of a new beginning beyond the confines of history. On the other hand, it signals a rupture in Anna’s emotional constitution and identity. The latter is increasingly shaped by her sense of cultural difference, displacement, and homelessness. The novel’s representation of exile is suspended between the two metaphors of rebirth and abortion. Rhys’s use of metaphor draws attention to the contiguity between modernist and postcolonial narratives of identity and exile, while the particular choice of metaphor stresses the social inequities of power to which the female exile from the colonial periphery is subjected. The metaphor of cultural or spiritual rebirth is a conventional trope through which to dramatize the transformative effects of migration and exile and is also common in the fiction of Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, and Salman Rushdie. The trope of abortion, however, shows the
ways in which exile is physically and materially experienced as both a wound, literally inscribed on the body, and a melancholic journey toward death. More importantly, it signifies a particularly gendered experience of exile, namely one of loss and sexual exploitation. Indeed, the trauma of being exiled from their land and body and mother tongue, and, subsequently, of being caught in structures of poverty, racial apartheid, and sexual violence constitutes the protagonists’ experience of exile in the fiction and poetry of such black writers as Bessie Head (e.g., A Question of Power, 1974), Joan Riley (The Unbelonging, 1985), Ben Okri (Incidents at the Shrine, 1986), Buchi Emecheta (Second-Class Citizen, 1974), Tsitsi Dangarembga (Nervous Conditions, 1989), and Dionne Brand (Sans Souci and Other Stories, 1988). As theme and fictional subgenre, exile occupies a central if not defining position in pre- and postWorld War II writing. Although critics tend to distinguish between voluntary exile (often associated with the literary community of American expatriates in Paris between the World Wars) and, variously, internal, religious, sexual, political, and cultural exile, in the fiction of many postcolonial writers these forms of exile frequently overlap and constitute a complex response to the experience of colonialism, empire, and its aftermath. In both his fiction and critical work, the Barbadian George Lamming recognizes that “to be an exile is to be alive” (24). At the same time, exile figures as a contradictory state replete with “complications,” especially “when the exile is . . . of colonial orientation” (24). Uprooted by the machinations of imperial trade and “exiled from his own name” (15), history, culture, country, and language, the colonial exile has no choice but to migrate. Once relocated to the metropolitan center, she is forced to experience herself through a binary relationship of self and other. Indeed, subjected to discriminatory representations and the racism of white mainstream society, the exile sees herself as other and remains torn between poles of belonging and unbelonging, here and there, margin and center, all of them reinforcing the perpetual postponement of arrival, understood as the development of a sense of home that can accommodate cultural multiplicity and contradiction. Early works by Lamming (The Emigrants, 1954), Sam Selvon (The Lonely Londoners, 1956), Ama Ata
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MIGRATION, DIASPORA, AND EXILE IN FICTION
Aidoo (Our Sister Killjoy, 1977), and Austin Clarke (The Meeting Point, 1967), provide extended mediations on the contradictions of exile in the urban spaces of London or Toronto, focusing on the psychological and cultural effects of systemic racism suffered by colonial exiles and their need to adapt to an environment that categorically rejects them. Here, narrative fragmentation and linguistic experiments with creolized English signal less the postmodern condition of the exile than his or her cultural displacement, communal location, and aptitude for survival. For many post-World War II writers of the former British Empire, the form and experience of exile and migration that most accurately describes their own situation and that of their fictional characters is poignantly articulated in Edward Said’s influential essay “Reflections on Exile” (2001). Said insists that exile exists in a dialectical relationship with the concept of the nation, which occupies a central position in migrant and diasporic fiction. The dialectic of nation and exile operates through what Charles Taylor calls “the politics of recognition,” which influence the exile’s inclusion within or exclusion from a more or less cohesive national identity in his or her new environment. The nation state can offer no resolution to the pains of exile or the exiled person’s “discontinuous state of being” (Said 177). Instead, the exile dreams of remaking the broken fabric of her or his community into a “new whole” (177), which can lead to the imposition of an exclusionary group identity, a tendency that the Tanzanian Canadian writer M. G. Vassanji has critically explored in his fiction. But, as Said points out, the exile is also imbued with an “originality of vision” (186) that recognizes the provisional nature of home and the plurality of cultures. In its most optimistic configuration, exile constitutes a “nomadic” (186) or, in the words of the Guyanese writer Wilson Harris, a “cross-cultural” state of being and imagining that can unsettle cultural and political norms (241). Unlike the idea of exile, the most widely used notions of migration in literary criticism lack the former’s immediacy and implied political violence. Migration commonly refers to the movement – not the scattering – of people from one country to another and the concomitant conflicts of belonging, although Shalini Puri (2003) has recently noted the importance of representations
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of migration within particular regions in postcolonial (and particularly Caribbean) writing. Migration, however, is a controversial term because it privileges mobile subjects over those unable to leave their land of origin and furthermore implies their entitlement to return. As a term that covers the making of transnational and hybrid cultural identities, migration plays a central role in the works of such major writers as, among others, Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses, 1988), Bharati Mukherjee (Jasmine, 1989), V. S. Naipaul (The Enigma of Arrival, 1987), Neil Bissoondath (A Casual Brutality, 1988), and Jamaica Kincaid (Lucy, 1990). As Rushdie explains in his pivotal collection of essays Imaginary Homelands (1991), migration constitutes a double process of severance from one’s homeland and of being “borne across the world” (17). In this process of individual and cultural translation, time and place become opaque, interrupted, and distorted, so that history gives rise to memory, certainty to uncertainty, identity to metaphor, and “actual cities” to “imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind” (10). Therefore, what is lost can no longer be reclaimed as authentic, and the migrant writer is confronted with the narrative reinvention of the world, which is both a postmodern and a postcolonial project. The migrant, then, is a metaphorically and literally “translated” (17) subject, endowed with a dual or “stereoscopic vision” (19) and engaged in a “struggle of memory against forgetting” and power (14). Indeed, as Rushdie emphasizes, migration is a universal condition, and the “migrant intellect roots itself in itself, in its own capacity for imagining and reimagining the world” (280). Interestingly, Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses portrays the ways in which history bestows upon the migrant a fixed (and typically unflattering) role in the social and political imaginary of the metropolitan society, creating a sense of profound physical, intellectual, and linguistic alienation. The novel’s representation of the migrant’s condition is less festive than that offered in Rushdie’s essays. In fact, as the profession of one of the novel’s protagonists implies – and as is also suggested in Pauline Melville’s fiction – the migrant is a cultural ventriloquist caught in metaphors not of his own making. Nevertheless, Rushdie’s vision of migration remains a solitary and individualistic vision with little room for collective agency or the historical transformation
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of communities. In a different context, however, migration can also signal a state of escape, survival, and change. In the field of black women’s studies, migration connotes a complex network of material and symbolic detours and relocations through which to trigger rituals of cultural healing. A key novel in this context is Kincaid’s Lucy, in which the migrant experience shapes the novel’s genre as a Bildungsroman and, thematically, affords Lucy a historical and personal distance from her native Caribbean island and controlling mother. Although migration instills contradictory desires and notions of belonging, it also enables Lucy to recuperate a sense of herself as an artist. As both a literary trope and material experience, migration thus challenges notions of cultural authenticity, foregrounding the ways in which identities emerge instead through the complex politics of representation. Although the idea of diaspora is not new, its current popularity in the social sciences and humanities is a relatively recent phenomenon, commonly associated with the inaugural issue of the journal Diaspora, published in 1991. If exile and migration are concepts of identity dialectically tethered to dominant notions of the nation state, the idea of diaspora refers to postnational and transnational concepts of identity. It negotiates the human and cultural consequences of the failure of nation states in the wake of globalization and the aftermath of imperialism. Critics generally distinguish between older formations of diaspora, including the Jewish, Armenian, Palestinian, and African diasporas, and the new, transnational ones, including the South Asian and East Asian diasporas. This division, however, highlights a predicament. On one hand, diaspora denotes the global scattering of a group that identifies itself not exclusively through its homeland but, as dramatized in the fiction of Amitav Ghosh (The Shadow Lines, 1988) and M. G. Vassanji (No New Land, 1991), through a shared cultural imaginary, historical traumas, narratives of survival, and new forms of communication and community building. Thus, diaspora risks being idealized as the paradigmatic social and cultural condition of globalization. On the other hand, each diaspora is shaped by its particular geography, culture, and history, and thus articulates its own claims to political and national autonomy.
In contemporary fiction, the notion of diaspora can be applied as both a descriptive term (Cohen 1997) and a category of cultural knowledge production (Brah 1996). The descriptive use of diaspora stresses the symbolic and literal significance of an ancestral home, the unifying force of a collective memory, and the nostalgic longing for a return to an increasingly elusive homeland. It thus harbors the reactionary potential of diasporas and the danger of a simplified narrative of diasporic identity based on an “absolutist approach to ‘race’ and ethnicity” (Gilroy 1993, 98). Hanif Kureishi’s short stories (e.g., “My Son the Fanatic,” 1994) and novels (The Buddha of Suburbia, 1990) exemplify the contradictions of diaspora as they engage with two very different dangers: the rise of fundamentalist diasporic identities, and the coopting of diasporic communities into the nation state’s “sedative” politics of multiculturalism (Kamboureli 82). As a category of cultural critique, the term “diaspora” functions as a theoretical concept and narrative strategy through which can be seen the historical continuities and ruptures in the making of social, cultural, and national space. In this context, the critical work of Stuart Hall, James Clifford, Homi Bhabha, Rey Chow, R. Radhakrishnan, Smaro Kamboureli, Lisa Lowe, and Paul Gilroy has been particularly influential. Despite some theoretical differences, all of these critics understand diaspora as an unfinished process of historical detours, connections, and differences between various cultures and experiences of displacement. They emphasize that diaspora “is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of “identity” which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity” (Hall 244). Writers such as Dionne Brand (At the Full and Change of the Moon, 1999), Zadie Smith (White Teeth, 2000), Michael Ondaatje (Anil’s Ghost, 2000), and David Dabydeen (The Intended, 1991) have provided nuanced portraits of the experience of diaspora, including its inflection with queer longings and genealogical unmoorings. They unfailingly insist that the state of cultural hybridity encompasses a painful desire for an impossible wholeness and is fractured by historical and sexual violence and racism. Their fiction also examines the disruptive histories – slavery and indenture, the conquest of the
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MILLER, ALEX
Americas, the European Enlightenment – that haunt their characters’ diasporic presents and determine how the dialectic of “roots” and “routes” structures their lives. Although the phenomenon of diaspora is often wrongly conflated with the particular experience of African peoples, the concept’s impetus toward reimagining modernity itself and breaking the traditional and seemingly natural bond between “place, location, and consciousness” (Gilroy 2000, 123) has been instrumental to writers of various diasporas. In this light, diaspora has been productive and enabled writers to explore the proximity rather than distance between different groups of violently dispersed peoples. SEE ALSO: Black British Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Critical Theory and Fiction (WF); English Studies, the Academy, and Fiction (WF); Globalization and the Novel (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of the African Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Brah, A. (1996). Cartographies of Diaspora. London: Routledge. Braidotti, R. (1992). The Exile, the Nomad and the Migrant. Women’s Studies International Forum, 15(1), 7–10. Brown-Guillory, E. (2006). Middle Passages and the Healing Place of History: Migration and Identity in Black Women’s Literature. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Chambers, I. (1994). Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London: Routledge. Chow, R. (1993). Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention on Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Clifford, J. (1997). Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cohen, R. (1997). Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Seattle: Washington University Press. Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gilroy, P. (2000). Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Gurr, A. (1981). Writers in Exile: The Identity of Home in Modern Literature. Brighton: Harvester. Hall, S. (2003). Cultural Identity and Diaspora. In J. E. Braziel & A. Mannur (eds.), Theorizing Diaspora. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 233–46. Harris, W. (1999). Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination (ed. A. Bundy). London: Routledge. Kamboureli, S. (2000). Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press. King, R., Connell, J., & White, P. (1995). Writing across Worlds: Literature and Migration. London: Routledge. Lamming, G. (1960). The Pleasures of Exile. London: Michael Joseph. Mishra, V. (2007). The Literature of the Indian Diaspora. London: Routledge. Naficy, H. (1999). Home, Exile, Homeland. London: Routledge. Puri, S. (ed.) (2003). Marginal Migrations: The Circulation of Cultures within the Caribbean. Oxford: Macmillan Caribbean. Radhakrishnan, R. (1996). Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rhys, J. (1969). Voyage in the Dark [1934]. London: Deutsch. Rushdie, S. (1991). Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Granta. Said, E. (2001). Reflections on Exile. In Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays. London: Granta, pp. 173–86. Taylor, C. (1992). Multiculturalism and the “Politics of Recognition”. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Miller, Alex LYN JACOBS
Alexander McPhee Miller is an award-winning Australian writer whose fictions investigate life and art, landscapes, and immigrant and crosscultural experience. His eight novels are diverse in complexity, style, and setting (England, Australia, China); the lovers, artists, and truth-seekers he writes about are affected by migrancy, memory and loss, as well as transformative empowerment. Miller’s literary influences include Oscar Wilde, Patrick White, George Eliot, Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Antonin Artaud, but his life has also been vitally formative.
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Miller was born in London on December 27, 1936 to an Irish mother and Scottish father. He left west England at 17 to work as a stockman on cattle stations in Queensland, Australia. He attained a degree in history and English from the University of Melbourne, a diploma of education, and, between 1965 and 1975, was involved in seminal theatre projects in Melbourne (Anthill and Melbourne Writers’ Theatre in the 1980s). His employment as a teacher and art dealer subsidized his early writing, and he now lives and writes full-time in Castlemaine, a country town in Victoria. He has won the Miles Franklin Award twice, for The Ancestor Game (1992) and Journey to the Stone Country (2002). Although The Ancestor Game’s intricate design commanded attention, The Sitters (1995), a finely focused, delicately nuanced novel about the relations between life and art, remains the author’s favorite (Pierce 305). Miller’s first novel, The Tivington Nott (1989), is a dynamic account of a struggle of wills between an English farmer (and hunter) and his farmhand, a skilled horse whisperer whose interest in the natural world is a solace in an otherwise brutal existence. The nott – a stag born without horns – threatens the order of things, rather like the farmhand who, in the mad chase of the hunt, becomes the rider his “master” attempts to be. In a more lyrical mode, Watching the Climbers on the Mountain (1988) is a tragedy triggered by the arrival on a remote station of a migrant youth who becomes the focus of the family’s desires. The themes canvassed here – of intellectual and sexual isolation, identity and alienation – recur in later work. The Ancestor Game’s prismatic depiction of three generations’ exilic experience deals with gold-rush days in early twentieth-century Melbourne and also with China in 1927, the Shanghai siege of 1937, and the interlinked lives of three modern-day Australians. The stories of Steven, Lang, and Gertrude precipitate reconstructions of parental histories in this labyrinthine narrative: letters, diaries, paintings, and testimonies relativize the past as the trio finds that to belong somewhere totally is to lose one’s freedom. Miller considers Chinese and Aboriginal ancestral mores, colonization, borders between reality and dream, history and fiction, and art that opens pathways to new worlds. In a multicultural nation
with a predominantly immigrant population, this finely rendered exploration of independence and lineage is significant. Portraiture is commonly conceived as representative art, but the artist-narrators of The Sitters and Prochownik’s Dream (2005) define it as an art of “misrepresentation,” deemed successful only when informing visions remain undisclosed. In the former, an aging artist’s refusal to paint his family shadows efforts to capture the likeness of the sitter, who has also forsaken familial expectations. An Escher-like ambiguity prevails when the artist, now resident in the sitter’s family home, locates his subject but elides explanation of their relationship. In Prochownik’s Dream, a refusal to portray relatives is again linked with the burden of fulfilling others’ dreams, but here Joycean desires to fly beyond commitment are transformed as family becomes the sought-after subject. In Conditions of Faith (2000), a would-be historian refuses ascribed roles by pursuing a research vocation beyond her tempestuous marriage, motherhood, and prior subservience to patriarchal demands. The passage (and costs) of Emily Stanton’s liberation – from dutiful Australian daughter to Parisian wife with a secret sexual life to independent scholar challenging Christian orthodoxies in Tunisia – embraces an analysis of gender and social conventions in the 1920s and beyond. Miller’s work frequently testifies to the competitive demands of life and art. Journey to the Stone Country and Landscape of Farewell (2007) illustrate the crippling dangers of silence. As a duty to his dead wife, a suicidal professor, Max Otto, delivers an ill-prepared lecture on “The Persistence of the Phenomenon of Massacre in Human Society” (11). Criticism from an Indigenous Australian professor, Vita McLelland, elicits an apology and, subsequently, unexpected renewal via a journey to remote physical and emotional landscapes. Vita’s uncle, Dougald Gnapun, and Max are both burdened by their father’s stories: unresolved questions about European wartime actions parallel suppressions imposed by atrocities in colonial Australia. A joint project, a transcription of the “other-side” of a massacre, brings reconciliation. In Journey, a woman fleeing a failed marriage returns to childhood territory where access to Indigenous realities alters perceptions of her own and the country’s past. Like Kate Grenville and Kim Scott,
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MIN, ANCHEE
Miller sensitively reassesses Indigenous history and Australian legacies in his fiction. The journey from the robust evocation of an English environment in The Tivington Nott to the meditative identification with Australian place and people in Landscape of Farewell reflects Miller’s ongoing engagement with fiction, history, philosophy, and art. SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); Beckett, Samuel (BIF); Grenville, Kate (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Joyce, James (BIF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Scott, Kim (WF); White, Patrick (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource. At www.austlit.edu.au, accessed Jan. 13, 2010. Jacobs, L. (1994). Ancestral Furies: The Fiction of Beth Yahp, Ding Xiaoqi and Alex Miller. New Literatures Review, 28–9, 153–64. Miller, A. (1988). Watching the Climbers on the Mountain. Sydney: Pan. Miller, A. (1989). The Tivington Nott. London: Robert Hale. Miller, A. (1992). The Ancestor Game. Melbourne: Penguin. Miller, A. (1993). Chasing My Tale. Kunapipi, 15(3), 1–6. Miller, A. (1995). The Sitters. Melbourne: Penguin. Miller, A. (2000). Conditions of Faith. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Miller, A. (2002). Journey to the Stone Country. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Miller, A. (2005). Prochownik’s Dream. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Miller, A. (2006). Ringroad. Southerly, 66(2), 145–51. Miller, A. (2007). Landscape of Farewell. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Pierce, P. (2004). The Solitariness of Alex Miller. Australian Literary Studies, 21(3), 299–311. Rowe, K. (1994). Interview with Alex Miller. Melbourne: Appleseed.
Min, Anchee SHUNZHU WANG
Anchee Min’s works attempt to rewrite the existing narratives of Chinese history by “locating in that history the positive presence of sexuality,
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especially women’s sexuality” (Hayot 618). Some critics, particularly in the West, applaud Min’s sexualization of Chinese history as a passionate feminist discourse that gives voice to women who were directly and intimately involved in the making of that history; others, especially Chinese and Chinese American critics, are disturbed by what they see as Min’s willingness to cater to Western readers’ tastes and her simplistic interpretation and reproduction of Eurocentric views of China. Born in Shanghai on January 14, 1957, Min’s early education comprised primarily the teachings of Mao, and her role models were the tough heroines of Madam Mao’s revolutionary operas. At 17, she was among millions of students relocated to the countryside, where they were supposed to form a new generation of educated peasants. While working at her semi-military relocation camp, she fell in love with the female commander of her unit and was miserably entrapped in a forbidden relationship. Later, she was “discovered” by the Shanghai Film Studio and starred in Red Azalea, a propaganda film about Madam Mao’s life. It was never produced, for soon after Mao’s death in 1976, Madam Mao was arrested and sentenced to death. Min became a political outcast until she left for the United States in 1984. She earned her MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1991 and now lives in Los Angeles with her second husband and a daughter from an earlier marriage. Min’s first book, Red Azalea (1994), a fictionalized autobiography focusing on her traumatized adolescence during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a period of political absurdity and sexual repression, was named a New York Times Notable Book and became a national bestseller in 1995, with movie rights sold to Hollywood. Despite its immediate market success, it did not attract serious critical attention until much later, with many critics arguing that its popularity in the West relied on its reaffirmation of “the Oriental construction of China” (Schell 104). If the Eurocentric notion of freedom in America as an antidote to the repression in China is only implied in Red Azalea, it comes to the forefront in Katherine (1995), a novel about cultural clashes between an energetic, innocent, and warmhearted American girl teaching English in China and her cold, manipulative Chinese
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students, who are traumatized and disillusioned by the Cultural Revolution and admit that Katherine’s mere presence makes them see how “deformed” they are (12). In Wild Ginger (2002), Min comments again on questions of cultural freedom through a love story set during the Cultural Revolution. Maple, an outsider at school, forms a bond with Wild Ginger, a newcomer from a family of low sociopolitical status. Wild Ginger’s desperate attempt to resolve the conflict between her political desire to be acknowledged as a Maoist, and her physical desire for a boy both she and Maple love, inadvertently and inevitably transform their mutual trust and friendship into betrayal and revenge. As if Red Azalea, Katherine, and Wild Ginger did not cause enough controversy, Min further provoked Chinese moral sensitivities in her three historical fictions, audaciously challenging established narratives about the two most powerful and notorious women in recent Chinese history – the last empress Dowager Cixi (Tsu Hsi) and Madam Mao, Jiang Qing (Ching). Madam Mao is almost universally known in China as a power-hungry “white-boned demon” who orchestrated bloody violence and persecutions during the Cultural Revolution. Min acknowledges Madam Mao’s reputation as “heartless and purely evil,” adding, “I couldn’t bring myself to justify the lives she had taken during the Great Cultural Revolution” (Siciliano 2000). In Becoming Madam Mao (2000), however, Min focuses on her human side, giving her a voice as a beautiful passionate lover, a desperate abandoned wife, and a caring mother. Like Madam Mao, Dowager Cixi is also perceived as evil, and as directly responsible for the downfall of the Qing empire. In Empress Orchid (2004) and Last Empress (2007), Min tells the story of an innocent country girl transformed by circumstances into a wise but reluctantly powerful empress. She resorts to seduction, intrigue, and murder, but does so to ensure her own and the empire’s survival. With a constant, sometimes confusing narrative shift between first and third person, Min repeats the message that both Madam Mao and Dowager Ci Xi are victims of circumstances and the patriarchal system, not just victimizers. While Min’s works have had great market success, critical reception is polarized. Some cele-
brate her eroticized revision of Chinese history as refreshing and liberating; others reject it as morally “disturbing” (Xu 174) or as “imprecise and confusing” (Schell 282). Min’s fiction also highlights complex and interrelated issues concerning immigrant writers and the production, consumption, and reception of transnational literature, including the writer’s residency in the adoptive country and real or imagined censorship back home. SEE ALSO: East Asian Fiction (WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Hayot, E. (2006). Immigrating Fictions: Unfailing Mediation in Dictee and Becoming Madam Mao. Contemporary Literature, 47(4), 601–35. Lai, A. T. (2006). Images of Theatre and Theatricality in Anchee Min’s Works. Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies, 36(2), 543–82. Min, A. (1994). Red Azalea. New York: Pantheon. Min, A. (1995). Katherine. New York: Riverhead. Min, A. (2000). Becoming Madam Mao. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Min, A. (2002). Wild Ginger. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Min, A. (2004). Empress Orchid. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Min, A. (2007). Last Empress. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Schell, O. (1994). Stolen Kisses [revision of Red Azalea]. Vogue, 184(3), 282–3. Siciliano, J. (2000). Interview with Anchee Min. At www.bookreporter.com/authors/au-min-anchee. asp, accessed May 19, 2009. Somerson, W. (1998). Under the Mosquito Net: Space and Sexuality in Red Azalea. College Literature, 24(1), 98–115. Wang, S. (2000). Anchee Min. In E. S. Nelson (ed.), Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood, pp. 214–18. Xu, B. (2004). A Face that Grows into a Mask: A Symptomatic Reading of Anchee Min’s Red Azalea. MELUS, 29(2), 157–80. Yue, M. B. (2005). Nostalgia for the Future: Cultural Revolution Memory in Two Transnational Chinese Narratives. China Review, 5(2), 43–63.
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MISTRY, ROHINTON
Mistry, Rohinton LAURA A. PEARSON
Rohinton Mistry’s evocative and layered fiction has received widespread attention since he published his first two short stories – “One Sunday” and “Auspicious Occasion” – in the early 1980s. His writing focuses on the minority Parsi community in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, and occasionally on Parsi migrants to Canada. His tragicomic postcolonial fictions attend to recurrent themes of the oppression of the weak at the hands of the influential, and people torn between old and new ways. Born in Bombay on July 3, 1952, Mistry emigrated in 1975 to join his fiancee, Freny Elavia, in Toronto; they married later that year. After a short period of unemployment and adjustment to Canada, and in spite of having a BSc in mathematics and economics from the University of Bombay, Mistry took a position as a clerk and accountant at a Canadian bank, where he worked from 1975 to 1985. In 1978 he undertook part-time studies at the University of Toronto, where he completed his second bachelor’s degree in English and philosophy in 1982 and began writing more seriously. That early writing led to back-to-back first prizes in the university’s Hart House Literary Contest (1983 and 1984) for his first two short stories. In 1985 he won the annual Contributor’s Prize from Canadian Fiction Magazine and was awarded a grant by the Canada Council for the Arts, enabling him to write full-time. Two years later he published his first collection of short stories, Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987). Since then he has published “The More Important Things,” in Canadian Fiction Magazine (1989), three award-winning novels, Such a Long Journey (1991), A Fine Balance (1995), and Family Matters (2002), and his most recent work of short fiction, The Scream (2008), was issued as a standalone book. Eleven short stories comprise Tales from Firozsha Baag, interlinked by their focus on the occupants of (or emigrants from) a Bombay apartment complex predominantly inhabited by Parsis. Several characters assume recurring roles as they attempt to negotiate the heterogeneous functions of life in this Baag-cum-stage and beyond. Kersi Boyce, Jehangir Bulsara (Bulsara
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Bookworm), and Nariman Hansotia are notable for their multiple appearances and their storytellers’ voices. Also memorable are several peripheral characters, such as Najamai with her precious fridge (the only one in Firozsha Baag) and her potent arm that beckons Khorshedbai’s fate in “The Paying Guests.” When, in “The Ghost of Firozsha Baag,” Jacqueline bemoans her changed name to Jaakaylee because “Old bai took English words and made them Parsi words” (44), Mistry hints at the implications of complex cross-cultural transformations – this name changing has consequences for the reconciliation of the past and the present and is a recurring motif throughout his books. Several exchanges illuminate particularities of discrimination, such as the word “ghati” (used to denote non-Parsi Indians), or “blackie” (referring to the Goan Jaakaylee). Other cultural differences, between Eastern and Western-style toilets for example (in “Squatter”), create physical difficulties and scatological humor that enables Mistry to gently satirize Canada’s multicultural policies. In “Lend Me Your Light,” Kersi’s identification with the Greek mythic figure Tiresias – who “throb[s] between two lives, humbled by the ambiguities and dichotomies confronting [him]” (192) – reinforces the multiple identities of diasporic peoples and alludes to Mistry’s own experiences as an Indian Canadian Parsi. In the words of one critic, Mistry’s continuing commitment to polyphonic narrative, to the “non-essentialist cultural politics of diaspora” and to questioning the notion of home, “undermines the nationalist narrative of Canada” as well as the dominant idea of “Hindu India” (Gabriel 27–9). Although Mistry writes about a threatened Parsi culture, he also maintains that he does not write with a didactic agenda: “I don’t think I have a message,” he says in a 1989 interview; “One must write for the sake of writing, to create good literature . . . The other things follow in a very natural way. I grew up in Bombay. Now I am here. I’m a writer. I am determined to write good literature . . . But to write well, I must write about what I know best. In that way, I automatically speak for my ‘tribe’” (Hancock 145). Mistry’s first novel, Such a Long Journey, winner of Canada’s Governor General’s Award, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, the Smithbooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award,
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and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is set in Bombay, and, like the stories in Firozsha Baag, centers on a Parsi apartment complex – the Khodadad Building. This novel portrays Gustad Noble, a hardworking bank clerk, and his family’s struggle as their lives become indirectly related to the 1971 Pakistani civil war which led to the creation of Bangladesh and in which India became involved. Against this tumultuous backdrop, at a time of shortages, rationing, and scandals, Gustad becomes entangled in a dangerous political network through his associations with Major Jimmy Bilimoria. The goings-on at the Khodadad Building form the other interwoven subplots, such as Dilnavas Noble’s wish to repair the relationship between her eldest son, Sorab, and her husband, Gustad. These familial episodes – including worries about financial resources and the health of their sick daughter, Roshan – form the texture of the novel’s present, while interactions with friends and neighbors, such as the lonely and mystical Miss Kutpitia, the declining Dinshawji, and the mentally challenged Tehmul, complement the main characters’ struggles, adding to the nexus of comedic and tragic plots that contextualize Gustad’s long journey toward his final symbolic action of the book – the removal of blackout paper from his apartment windows. Mistry’s fiction is influenced by both British and Indian literary and narrative traditions, and critics have found much to explore in his (neo-)realist texts. More than one scholar has linked his fictions to that of Charles Dickens, Mulk Raj Anand, and R. K. Narayan. Other likenesses and points of departure have been suggested through association with authors such as V. S. Naipaul, Bharati Mukherjee, Arundhati Roy, M. G. Vassanji, and Neil Bissoondath, among others. Mistry’s thematic and socio-political interests in humanism, race, gender, caste, and class are emphasized most prominently by the seemingly unlikely coming together of the four main characters in A Fine Balance, who inhabit a cosmopolitan city by the sea (implicitly Bombay) during India’s period of emergency rule from 1975 to 1977. Winner of Canada’s Giller Prize, a second Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize – as well as being shortlisted for the Booker Prize and named an Oprah’s Book
Club selection, which boosted sales by a reputed 500,000 copies – A Fine Balance explicitly addresses the politically corrupt climate of the Emergency period and the implications of a statement frequently uttered by a character known as Beggarmaster: “Life does not guarantee happiness” (541). Continuing to explore the intersections of circumstance and fate, Mistry tells the story of a Parsi widow, Dina Dalal, a college student, Maneck Kohla, and two Hindu cobblers turned tailors, uncle and nephew Ishvar and Om Darji, who all vie for their own independence and place in the face of recurring adversity. Dina, Maneck, Ishvar, and Om are each remarkably transformed by the end of the novel: Dina loses her economic battle and is forced to return to live in her abusive brother’s home; Maneck’s anguish drives him to commit suicide; and Ishvar and Om are physically incapacitated, falling victims to caste prejudices, recalling Narayan’s (Om’s father’s) prophetic words, “Years pass, and nothing changes” (172). Mistry conveys the diverse energies of the kaleidoscopic city and its inhabitants with stylistic juxtaposition and inversion, infusing the narrative with thematically significant images: “a brown moth arrived to keep its assignation with the light,” “try[ing] to beat its fragile wings through the lamp glass” (172). Throughout the novel, both Beggarmaster and the proofreader/ lawyer, Vasantrao Valmik, repeat the titular metaphor of balance: for Beggarmaster, a funeral pyre is “a completeness, a calmness, a perfect balance between life and death” (616); for Vasantrao, “You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair” (279). Mistry explores this “balance” through a combination of satire, comedy, grotesquery, and an inevitable pathos that begins with the novel’s epigraph (from Honore de Balzac’s Le Pere Goriot: “this tragedy is not a fiction. All is true”). Another tragedy of a sort, Family Matters centers on a retired English professor, Nariman Vakeel, his discordant stepchildren, Jal and Coomy, his dutiful daughter Roxanna and son-in-law Yezad, and their children, Murad and Jehangir. Winner of the Kiriyama Prize for fiction and of a Canadian Authors Association Literary Award, and also a Booker nominee, the novel is set in 1990s Bombay and engages themes of aging, corporeal illness, dignity, and neglect as 79-year-
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MITCHELL, W. O.
old Nariman’s broken ankle begins a process of deterioration associated with the onset of Parkinson’s disease. As Mistry chronicles Nariman’s sickness and the domestic calamities that occur (and are devised) between Jal and Coomy’s home at Chateau Felicity and Roxanna and Yezad’s at Pleasant Villa, the notorious Shiv Sena Party becomes a target of Mistry’s burlesque humor, which unremittingly jabs at “nincompoops for leaders” (52). Continuing his project of fleshing out the consequences for the dispossessed, this time it is Nariman (another storyteller) who is unable to care for himself and is largely at the mercy of Roxanna and his grandsons. Overburdened by occupational and money worries (as is Roxanna with stretching the food and their cramped living space), Yezad renews his devotion to Zoroastrianism and the sanctuary of his fire temple. Mistry’s depiction of Yezad’s increasing religious orthodoxy, Coomy’s hypocrisy, Nariman’s past relationship with (non-Parsi) Lucy, and Murad’s wish to date a non-Parsi Maharashtrian provides insights into the quandaries of the Vakeels’ Parsi minority identity. The Scream may recall the wise-with-words and Parkinson-stricken protagonist of Family Matters; however, Mistry keeps its unnamed protagonist in the first person, leaving the character’s degree of delusional “imagination” unclear. The narrator decries a family that no longer understands him during a monologue that reveals his preoccupation with the sound of a helpless screamer outside the Bombay apartment. The elderly speaker addresses his readers with both humor and urgency, asking them to question his “subjugation” and isolation along with the wider context that exists outside on the streets: “I implore you,” he says, “Apathy is a sin” (32). Mistry’s most sympathetic characters struggle economically, personally, and politically, while delivering eloquent commentaries on the arbitrariness of empty policies and the dangers of corruption. Both The Scream and Family Matters bring issues of ageism to the forefront, reminding readers, without melodrama, that, in words from one of his earliest stories, the “patterns of life are selfish and unforgiving” (1987, 167). Mistry’s fiction resists placement in any purely realist or nationalist tradition, yet in an era of migration, displacement, and globalization, he writes of the complexity of the human condition. If, in the
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words of Beggarmaster, “Freaks, that’s what we are – all of us” (1995, 561), Mistry’s fiction insists that even freaks are deserving of dignity. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bharucha N. E. (2003). Rohinton Mistry: Ethnic Enclosures and Transcultural Spaces. Jaipur: Rawat. Bhuchar S., & Landon-Smith K. (dir.) (2006). A Fine Balance. London: Tamasha Theatre Company. Gabriel S. P. (2004). Interrogating Multiculturalism: Double Diaspora, Nation, and Re-Narration in Rohinton Mistry’s Canadian Tales. Canadian Literature, 181, 27–42. Genetsch M. (2007). The Texture of Identity: The Fiction of M. G. Vassanji, Neil Bissoondath, and Rohinton Mistry. Toronto: TSAR. Gunnarson S. (dir.) (1999). Such a Long Journey. Image Entertainment. Hancock G. (1989). An Interview with Rohinton Mistry. Canadian Fiction Magazine, 65, 143–50. Mistry R. (1987). Tales from Firozsha Baag. Markham, ON: Penguin. Mistry R. (1989). The More Important Things. Canadian Fiction Magazine, 65, 38–55. Mistry R. (1991). Such a Long Journey. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Mistry R. (1995). A Fine Balance. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Mistry R. (2002). Family Matters. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Mistry R. (2008). The Scream (illus. T. Urquhart). Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Morey P. (2004). Rohinton Mistry. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Mitchell, W. O. NEIL KALMAN BESNER
William Ormond Mitchell was Canada’s bestloved literary humorist in the second half of the twentieth century. He brought to Canadian letters a passionately Western Canadian sensibility and an infectious verve and irreverence that animated
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his fiction, drama, and radio plays (particularly the long-running and popular CBC Radio series, Jake and the Kid, 1950–6, reincarnated on television and in book form). By bridging popular and high culture, he became a populist literary icon. His best-known novel, Who Has Seen the Wind (1947), set in Crocus, a fictionalized Weyburn, Saskatchewan, recreates the traditional story of initiation on the prairies, while his many decades of performing and readings across the country and abroad established Mitchell’s distinctive voice and presence as uniquely Western Canadian. Mitchell also enjoyed a fabled career as a teacher of creative writing, particularly at the Banff School of Fine Arts in Alberta, where he directed the program for writers from 1975 to 1986, perfecting his “free fall” technique, encouraging his students to dream directly onto the page. Mitchell was born in Weyburn on March 13, 1914, and died in Calgary on February 25, 1998. He first became prominent with the publication of Who Has Seen the Wind, which in its opening epitomizes a way of seeing the prairie landscape as “the least common denominator of nature, the skeleton requirements simply, of land and sky – Saskatchewan prairie” (1947, 3). Mitchell depicts in plain and powerful language the passage of Brian O’Connal in the small town of Crocus from childhood into a more ambiguous state, always inflected with the spirit of place and with a reverence for life. The novel was made into a feature film (King 1977) which won the Paris Film Festival’s Grand Prix and was the highestgrossing Canadian film of the year; the book was reissued in a commemorative fiftieth-anniversary edition in 1997. Shortly after the unprecedented success of Who Has Seen the Wind, Mitchell and his wife Merna (who was to be his lifelong fiercest advocate) left their home in High River, Alberta, where he had been eking out a living as a freelance writer, and moved to Toronto to become fiction editor of Maclean’s magazine. Here Mitchell established himself as an editor and a mentor to Canadian writers such as Farley Mowat and Ernest Buckler; and, drawing on the stories about Jake that he had been publishing in Maclean’s since 1942, CBC Radio aired in June 1950 the first of about 250 episodes of Jake and the Kid, set again in smalltown Crocus. Jake, a homespun and self-dramatizing old codger, was performed by John Drainie,
who claimed that he modeled Jake on Mitchell himself; the Kid was another reincarnation of Brian O’Connal. Mitchell became an expert performer of his famous character in appearances across the country for decades after. Mitchell was always working on his fiction, even while writing his Jake and the Kid scripts, contributing features to Maclean’s and giving dramatic performances and readings; often, his stories would metamorphose into plays, radio scripts, and longer fictional pieces, as with the late 1940s story “The Black Bonspiel of Willie MacCrimmon,” which became a radio play (1950), a stage play (Mitchell’s most successful), a television screenplay, and finally a novella (1993). Like much of Mitchell’s work, the Bonspiel dramatizes a stark morality tale – here, the old Faustian myth of selling one’s soul to the Devil is given a prairie setting and flavor – all the while drawing pungently on Mitchell’s love for the prairie vernacular and for colorful characters. Among Mitchell’s better-known novels, The Kite (1962), like most of his fiction after Who Has Seen the Wind, had a mixed reception, with some readers, like Margaret Laurence, praising the novel’s major figure, Daddy Sherry, as “quite the best and most complete character Mitchell has yet created” and adding that she is “grateful for the existence of this one man, who strikes me as a genuine holy terror” (76). Other readers and critics were less impressed, with one reviewer complaining that the book was nothing more than “a collection of local color sketches” (Watt 401). In his more substantial novel The Vanishing Point (1973), which he worked at for over a decade, Mitchell explores his lifelong fascination with the Stoney Indians living on a reserve near his High River home; through his main white character Carlyle, and his Stoney character Archie Nicotine, among others, Mitchell explores the complexities attending his perennial hope for what he called “bridging” between characters and cultures. The Stoneys also informed the novel he worked on for over 20 years – The Alien – but never finished. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Laurence, Margaret (WF); Leacock, Stephen (WF)
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MITTELHOLZER, EDGAR
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS King, Allan (dir.) (1977). Who Has Seen the Wind. Souris River Films. Latham, D., & Latham, S. (eds.) (1997). Magic Lies: The Art of W. O. Mitchell. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Laurence, M. (1963). Holy Terror. Canadian Literature, 15, 76. Mitchell, B., & Mitchell, O. (1999). W.O.: The Life of W. O. Mitchell: Beginnings to “Who Has Seen the Wind, ” 1914–1947. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Mitchell, B., & Mitchell, O. (2005). Mitchell: The Life of W. O. Mitchell: The Years of Fame, 1948–1998. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Mitchell, W. O. (1947). Who Has Seen the Wind. Toronto: Macmillan. Mitchell, W. O. (1961). Jake and the Kid. Toronto: Macmillan. Mitchell, W. O. (1962). The Kite. Toronto: Macmillan. Mitchell, W. O. (1973). The Vanishing Point. Toronto: Macmillan. Mitchell, W. O. (1981). How I Spent My Summer Holidays. Toronto: Macmillan. Mitchell, W. O. (1982). Dramatic W. O. Mitchell. Toronto: Macmillan. Mitchell, W. O. (1984). Since Daisy Creek. Toronto: Macmillan. Mitchell, W. O. (1988). Ladybug Ladybug . . . Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Mitchell, W. O. (1989). According to Jake and the Kid. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Mitchell, W. O. (1990). Roses are Difficult Here. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Mitchell, W. O. (1992). For Art’s Sake. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Mitchell, W. O. (1993). The Black Bonspiel of Willie MacCrimmon. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Watt, F. W. (1962–3). Letters in Canada: Fiction. University of Toronto Quarterly, 32, 401.
Mittelholzer, Edgar LOUIS JAMES
Edgar Mittelholzer was the first Caribbean emigre to enter Britain to become a professional novelist. Never a “literary” writer, although outspoken and obsessed with his craft, his novels were written to sell and to entertain. His fiction was not the first to explore the history, topography, and social
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tensions of the Caribbean, but its diversity and volume make him a significant pioneer in the literary history of the region. Mittelholzer was born in New Amsterdam, Guyana (then British Guiana) on December 16, 1909. His father, a senior clerk and “confirmed Negrophobe,” proudly claimed ancestry back to an eighteenth-century Swiss German plantation manager and was horrified when his first son was born a “swarthy” genetic throwback. (Mittelholzer 1963, 17). Edgar grew up obsessed with miscegenation; seeking recognition from others, his writing became his weapon against a malign destiny. Rejected by publishers, he produced and sold Creole Chips (1937) himself. In 1941 Mittelholzer traveled to Trinidad, and his novel Corentyne Thunder was published in London that same year. In 1948 he moved to Britain. Most of his 22 novels are set in the Caribbean region, and range in genre across social realism, historical saga, and occult fantasy, to studies of morbid psychosis. Each illustrates Mittelholzer’s sensitivity to weather and to specific locales; many include supernatural phenomena. In Corentyne Thunder, the first published novel to portray East Indian peasants in the Caribbean, a courtroom drama comes second to the evocation of the brooding skyscapes of the Guyanese coastal plains, where the miserly Ramgollal and his daughters eke out a bare subsistence from the land. Despite their poverty, the peasants’ harmony with their environment stands in positive contrast to the light-skinned Geoffry Weldon, Mittelholzer’s alter ego, related by blood but tragically alienated by education and ambition. The Life and Death of Sylvia (1953), set in New Amsterdam, also reflects Mittelholzer’s personal predicament. Sylvia, the daughter of an English-born businessman and an Afro-Amerindian mother, becomes socially unprotected when her father dies. Although attractive, intelligent, and independent, her mixed blood denies her social status and inner identity: losing the will to live before she is 30, she dies of pneumonia. Mittelholzer’s sympathetic portrayal of Sylvia makes this one of his most appealing novels. A Morning at the Office (1950), written and set in Port of Spain, Trinidad, is Mittelholzer’s most original narrative. It meticulously charts four hours in the shipping firm Essential Products
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MITTELHOLZER, EDGAR
Ltd., whose 14 staff members represent a complex society finely graduated by color, class, culture, and education. Even the layout of the desks is hierarchical, with George Waley, the English manager, isolated behind a frosted glass door while Horace Xavier, the Afro-Caribbean office boy, has no desk at all – although his drive and intelligence presage his future advancement. Mittelholzer’s later residence in Barbados inspired three novels with contrasting perspectives set on the island: Of Trees and the Sea (1956); The Mad MacMullocks (1959); and Eltonsbrody (1960a). But he was drawn most strongly to the settlements of his own Guyanese heartland. Shadows Move among Them (1951) is a steamy fantasy set high up the Essequibo River, where, haunted by occult presences, the Reverend Gerald Harmston has life-and-death control over a bizarre community in which sexual freedom coexists with brutal punishments for contravening community rules. More focused, My Bones and My Flute (1955) tells of modern adventurers spectrally entangled in eighteenth-century plantation horror and is one of Mittleholzer’s most effective works. His most ambitious work was the Kaywana trilogy. In eighteenth-century Dutch Guiana, the Amerindian Kaywana bears sons by two successive Dutch lovers, founding an interbreeding dynasty of plantation owners who reflect the country’s evolution. Children of Kaywana (1952) is dominated by Henrickje, a brutal, atheistic matriarch who spares neither slaves nor her family, until she is hacked to death in the 1763 slave rebellion. Two generations later, in The Harrowing of Hubertus (1954), Hubertus Groenwegel struggles to reconcile sexual passion and moral responsibility. In Kaywana Blood (1958a), Dirk, an eighth-generation van Groenwegel, maintains the family dynasty as Guyana adopts universal suffrage in 1953. Caribbean historians have praised Mittelholzer’s extensive use of historical research. But it was his uninhibited portrayal of lust, cruelty, bizarre characters, and exotic situations that brought the trilogy a huge readership in England and America, marketed under varying titles in garish covers and typically advertised as “a witches’ brew of untamed sex and brutality.” Although he published a new novel annually, Mittelholzer’s fortunes declined in later years. Latticed Echoes (1960b) and Thunder Returning
(1961b), which experimentally structured narratives around Wagnerian leitmotifs, were deemed failures. The Piling of Clouds (1961a), in which a middle-aged friend of a family rapes and strangles their child, was first rejected as pornographic. Such subject matter reflected Mittlelholzer’s increasingly morbid view of society and alienated his readers. The references to suicide that recur throughout his fiction presaged his own death by fire on May 5, 1965. SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/ Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Birbalsingh, F. M. (1992). Edgar Mittelholzer. In B. Linfors & R. Sander (eds.), Twentieth-Century Caribbean and Black African Writers. Detroit: Gale, pp. 236–46. Chang, V. L. (1986). Edgar Mittelholzer. In D. C. Dance (ed.), Fifty Caribbean Writers. New York: Greenwood, pp. 325–40. Mittelholzer, E. (1941). Corentyne Thunder. London: Eyre and Spottiswood. Mittelholzer, E. (1950). A Morning at the Office. London: Hogarth. Mittelholzer, E. (1951). Shadows Move among Them. London: Nevill. Mittelholzer, E. (1952). Children of Kaywana. London: Nevill. Mittelholzer, E. (1953). The Life and Death of Sylvia. London: Secker and Warburg. Mittelholzer, E. (1954). The Harrowing of Hubertus. London: Secker and Warburg. Mittelholzer, E. (1955). My Bones and My Flute. London: Secker and Warburg. Mittelholzer, E. (1956). Of Trees and the Sea. London: Secker and Warburg. Mittelholzer, E. (1958a). Kaywana Blood. London: Secker and Warburg. Mittelholzer, E. (1958b). With a Carib Eye. London: Secker and Warburg. Mittelholzer, E. (1960a). Eltonsbrody. London: Secker and Warburg. Mittelholzer, E. (1960b). Latticed Echoes. London: Secker and Warburg. Mittelholzer, E. (1961a). The Piling of Clouds. London: Putnam. Mittelholzer, E. (1961b). Thunder Returning. London: Secker and Warburg.
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MONTGOMERY, L. M.
Mittelholzer, E. (1963). A Swarthy Boy. London: Putnam. Mittelholzer, J. (1983). The Idyll and the Warrior. Bim, 17, 33–89. Woodsley, H. Austin [Mittelholzer, E.] (1959). The Mad MacMullocks. London: Peter Owen.
Montgomery, L. M. FAYE HAMMILL
Anne of Green Gables (1908) is Canada’s bestknown book, and one of its most successful exports. It was L. M. Montgomery’s first novel, and when it became a major bestseller, her name gained international recognition. But Montgomery’s fame has always been contingent on the much greater renown of her character Anne Shirley: today, even the official Prince Edward Island car license plates proclaim the province “Home of Anne of Green Gables” rather than “Birthplace of L. M. Montgomery.” Montgomery tends to be categorized as a children’s author, since her novels usually center on youthful heroines and are especially popular with adolescent girls. Among adult readers, though, her reputation rests on a much broader base of literary production, including poetry and autobiography as well as fiction. Her extensive journal, published in five volumes between 1985 and 2004, is now acknowledged as one of her most important achievements, and has a rare value as a detailed and intimate record of a Canadian woman’s literary career. Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874–1942) grew up in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island. Her mother died in 1876, and her father moved away from the island and had little influence on his daughter’s life, except during the year she spent with him in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan (1890–1). She was brought up by her grandparents, descendants of an educated class of Scottish Presbyterian immigrants who had arrived in the 1770s. The family had, for several generations, been part of the island’s social and political elite, and they placed considerable emphasis on education, reading, and oral storytelling. Montgomery found the traditions of her family both enriching and restrictive, and the experiences of her girlhood are recorded directly in her early journals and indirectly in her most autobiographical novel, Emily of New Moon (1923).
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Montgomery took a teacher’s license in 1894 and started teaching in a rural school. During a year studying at Dalhousie University in Halifax (1895–6), she began contributing stories and poems to periodicals, and by 1898 she was earning enough from writing to support herself. She gave up teaching and returned to Cavendish to care for her widowed grandmother, a commitment that lasted 13 years (excepting a brief period working for the Halifax Daily Echo in 1901). In 1905, she wrote Anne of Green Gables. It was rejected by four publishers before being accepted by L. C. Page Company of Boston. Lewis Page made enormous profits from Anne and its seven sequels, but he exploited Montgomery through unfavorable contracts. His unauthorized publication of a collection of her short stories in 1920 led to a lengthy and distressing court case, which Montgomery finally won in 1929. In Anne of Green Gables, brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert request a boy from an orphanage to help with the work of their smallholding, Green Gables, in the village of Avonlea. They are dismayed when a girl is sent by mistake, but Matthew is so much charmed by Anne’s originality, liveliness, and affectionate temper that he persuades Marilla to keep her. The rest of the novel concerns Anne’s adventures, friendships, and mishaps, and it concludes with Matthew’s death and Anne’s decision to decline her college place and stay in Avonlea with Marilla. The themes of the isolation of an imaginative orphan in a practical, conservative family and community, and the gradual transformation of the community by the influence of the newcomer, were reworked in several of Montgomery’s later fictions. Because of her long period caring for her grandmother, Montgomery’s experience of marriage and motherhood was delayed. In 1911, following her grandmother’s death, she married the Reverend Ewan Macdonald and left her beloved island for an Ontario village, where her husband served as Presbyterian minister. Her two sons, Chester and Stuart, were born in 1912 and 1915. The marriage was a difficult one because Ewan suffered from religious melancholia, and also because of tensions between Montgomery’s professional success and her domestic identity as the minister’s wife.
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Under pressure from her publisher and readers, Montgomery continued producing books about Anne and her family up to 1939, but she interspersed them with other novels. These include the Emily trilogy (1923, 1925, 1927), The Story Girl (1911) and its sequel, The Golden Road (1913), Pat of Silver Bush (1933), Mistress Pat (1935), and Jane of Lantern Hill (1937). All have youthful heroines, though the later books in the Anne and Emily series follow the protagonists into adult life. Montgomery departed from this model in A Tangled Web (1931), a family melodrama centering on a disputed heirloom, and The Blue Castle (1926), a romance with a Muskoka, Ontario setting. All her books attracted substantial adult, as well as adolescent, audiences. The Emily trilogy is of particular significance, both as a K€unstlerroman and as a portrait of the Prince Edward Island of Montgomery’s youth. The narrative figures the island and its scenery as the inspiration for Emily’s writing, but sets this against the more receptive audiences and better publishing opportunities available in the United States. At a climactic point in the story, Emily chooses to remain on the island rather than moving to New York with the magazine editor Miss Royal. Thus she rejects not only the lure of America but also the transgressive, possibly lesbian, sexuality that is associated with Miss Royal. Heterosexual romance plots, on the other hand, repeatedly disrupt Emily’s trajectory as a writer. During her short-lived engagement to Dean Priest, she gives up writing altogether, burning her first novel because the jealous Dean pretends it is no good. She later publishes a less substantial, more comic novel, and settles down to marriage with her childhood friend Teddy. Over the course of her career, Montgomery published 22 novels and books of stories, as well as a collection of poetry, The Watchman (1916), and also contributed extensively to periodicals. Mary Henley Rubio calculates that she published more than 500 poems and more than 500 short stories in total. Since Montgomery’s death, much of this work has been collected in 10 anthologies of short stories and a further volume of poetry, and extensive selections from her letters and journals have also been published. Montgomery’s writing in all genres reveals her intense empathy with landscape and attachment to the local scenery of her home; indeed, all her
books (except The Blue Castle) are set in Prince Edward Island. Her descriptions of PEI are in some respects local and specific – that is, they include recognizable aspects of the island’s scenery and flora (orchards, lakes, seashore, fir, birches). But her landscapes are also idealized and luxuriant, colored by her heroines’ imaginative projections. In her journals, too, place becomes mythologized and heavily invested with personalized meanings. Following the extraordinary international success of Anne of Green Gables, Montgomery began to attract considerable media attention. In interviews and profile articles, journalists and publicists projected onto the author the qualities they discerned in the heroine, notably wholesomeness, youthful modesty, and identification with a rural environment. This image of Montgomery, and of Anne, was intimately connected with a conception of Canada, and specifically Prince Edward Island, as a refuge from the materialistic modernity of urban America. When the first of many film versions of the novel was made in 1919, however, Anne was reinvented as an American girl (played by Mary Miles Minter) and the landscapes were redolent of New England. Her move to Ontario meant that Montgomery lost the immediate influence of the island scenery but gained access to the cultural center that Toronto was rapidly becoming. During the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s, she witnessed the blossoming of Canadian literary culture and the establishment of new publishing firms, libraries, literary associations, awards, public lecture series, and periodicals. She was also an active participant, attending the inaugural meeting of the Canadian Authors’ Association in Toronto in 1921, writing letters and promotional articles for the first Canadian Book Week in the same year, and giving frequent readings and lectures to church groups, professional societies, and community clubs. She was also becoming aware of her growing value as a celebrity, and her revision and recopying of her journal attests to her consciousness of its likely value in the literary marketplace following her death. Yet despite – or perhaps because of – the adulation and popular acclaim she received during her lifetime, Montgomery never attracted serious critical respect. She was viewed with contempt by many members of the Canadian literary
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MONTGOMERY, L. M.
establishment: she had achieved the international recognition they had hoped for, but Anne of Green Gables by no means fitted the dominant concept of what the Great Canadian Novel should be. In the middle decades of the century, she was further marginalized by the rise of thematic criticism and its emphasis on motifs of survival in Canadian literature. It was impossible to fit Montgomery’s work into this paradigm. It was not until the 1980s and 1990s that Montgomery’s reputation began to be rehabilitated by feminist critics and revisionist Canadian literary historians. New critical readings have challenged the exclusive categorization of her as a children’s writer, and uncovered the complex and often dark meanings available beneath the surface of her sunny texts. She has also been reconsidered in the context of literary celebrity and studies of life writing. Montgomery’s work has retained its appeal to mainstream audiences into the twenty-first century, continuing to attract audiences internationally. Anne of Green Gables enjoys an especial popularity among Japanese adolescents, and has inspired a network of “Anne clubs” as well as a hugely successful animated television series Akage No An (“Red-Haired Anne”). In recent years, the Anne and Emily books have generated several major North American television series (see Lefebvre 2000 for a full list) as well as an array of spin-off products and a tourist industry centered on the author’s home. Popular cultural recreations of Avonlea, such as screen adaptations, theme parks, and the PEI tourist sites, present it as an idyllic pastoral location, and therefore diverge from the new emphases of academic research on Montgomery. At the same time, the popular cultural artifacts surrounding Anne and Avonlea form the subject of some of the most exciting current work by Montgomery scholars. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); Critical Theory and Fiction (WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Gammel I., & Epperly E. R. (eds.) (1999). L. M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
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Gammel I. (ed.) (2002). Making Avonlea: L. M. Montgomery and Popular Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gammel I. (ed.) (2005). The Intimate Life of L. M. Montgomery. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gammel I. (2008). Looking for Anne: How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed Up a Literary Classic. Toronto: Key Porter. L. M. Montgomery Research Group: http:// lmmresearch.org/ Lefebvre B. (2000). L. M. Montgomery: An Annotated Filmography. Canadian Children’s Literature, 99, 43–73. Lefebvre B. (ed.) (2004). Reassessments of L. M. Montgomery. [special issue]. Canadian Children’s Literature, 113–14. Montgomery L. M. (1908). Anne of Green Gables. Boston: L. C. Page. Montgomery L. M. (1909). Anne of Avonlea. Boston: L. C. Page. Montgomery L. M. (1911). The Story Girl. Boston: L. C. Page. Montgomery L. M. (1915). Anne of the Island. Boston: L. C. Page. Montgomery L. M. (1917). Anne’s House of Dreams. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Montgomery L. M. (1919). Rainbow Valley. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Montgomery L. M. (1921). Rilla of Ingleside. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Montgomery L. M. (1923). Emily of New Moon. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Montgomery L. M. (1925). Emily Climbs. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Montgomery L. M. (1926). The Blue Castle. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Montgomery L. M. (1927). Emily’s Quest. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Montgomery L. M. (1931). A Tangled Web. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Montgomery L. M. (1933). Pat of Silver Bush. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Montgomery L. M. (1936). Anne of Windy Poplars. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Montgomery L. M. (1937). Jane of Lantern Hill. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Montgomery L. M. (1939). Anne of Ingleside. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Montgomery L. M. (1985, 1987, 1992, 1998, 2004). The Selected Journals of L. M Montgomery. 5 vols. (ed. M. Rubio & E. Waterston). Toronto: Oxford University Press. Montgomery L. M. (1987). The Poetry of Lucy Maud Montgomery (ed. J. Ferns & K. McCabe). Markham, ON: Fitzhenry and Whiteside.
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Rubio M. H. (2008). Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings. Toronto: Doubleday. Rubio M., & Waterston E. (1995). Writing a Life: L. M. Montgomery. Toronto: ECW.
Moorhouse, Frank BRUCE BENNETT
Frank Moorhouse is an Australian chronicler and storyteller whose country-bred insights into place and community made him an ironic observer of city life in a new age of “liberation” from the late 1960s to the 1980s. Moorhouse’s coinage of “discontinuous fiction” for his books of loosely linked stories, fragments, headlines, and notices avoids the self-conscious effects of some postmodernists while employing their techniques. An early training in country town and city fringe journalism provided Moorhouse with disciplines of Hemingwayesque brevity. In the 1990s he began an extended historical trilogy of novels about individuals caught up in the intrigues of the interwar League of Nations. Born in Nowra, New South Wales on December 21, 1938, Moorhouse attended high school there before training as a cadet journalist on country newspapers and the Sydney Daily Telegraph. He began publishing in the literary journals Southerly and Westerly in the late 1950s, but as his stories became sexually explicit he published in men’s magazines and radical fringe publications. His first collection, Futility and Other Animals, was published in 1969. Moorhouse’s anthology of the 1970s, Days of Wine and Rage (1980), is a homage to Sydney, and the suburb where he had lived for 20 years, and where he observed the fading of old nationalistic images and a diversification of ways of being Australian. He once remarked that his preoccupations as a short story writer were both “formal, aesthetic” and “social, moral, political”: “I have in my work dialogues which are endless – dialogues with gender, with the notion of ‘commitment,’ with nationality with self – and with form” (1981, 222). As editor of a short story anthology, Moorhouse explains that he likes stories that are “an arrangement of fragments within a personal field, which have a carefully judged incompletion” and which have “a density of reference to the public world” (1983, 4–5).
Moorhouse’s second volume, The Americans, Baby (1972), explores clashes and rapprochements of Australians and Americans during the Vietnam protest years. Neither the American characters nor the Australians are heroic, or even good. They get drunk, give and take pleasure, and argue about first and last things. The arbitrating voice of a first-person narrator enters several stories, giving a recurrent sense of an “Australian” viewpoint, but nothing is fixed or final: this generation’s self-image is that they are open to experience, perhaps amoral. “The American Poet’s Visit” is a comic story whose half-drunk first-person narrator drolly observes his fellow Australians imitating the American visitors even as they try to be modern in their own way. Becker, a Coca-Cola executive from Atlanta, appears frequently in The Americans, Baby and subverts expectations by being more changed by Australians than they are by him. Contradictions and ambiguities abound and this volume, typically for Moorhouse, is open-ended. The title of his fifth volume, Tales of Mystery and Romance (1977), playfully echoes Poe while entering a late twentieth-century maze of labyrinths and minefields. The fleeting nature of modern urban living complicates intimate relationships and commitment in comic and poignant ways. Thus the narrator documents fragments of letters to an ex-wife about an attempted reunion. A relationship with a male friend involves a questioning of fashionable mysticism: the friend is a believer, the narrator a skeptic. This perhaps is the key to Moorhouse’s works: he remains the intelligent, questioning skeptic in the spirit of Montaigne, jousting with set beliefs or final meanings. Nevertheless in Forty-Seventeen (1988), a prelude to the League of Nations novels, the middle-aged Moorhouse figure reflects on “lost love” and a specific young woman with whom he had lived. Despite all disclaimers, he seeks the lost keys of romantic transcendence. The central character in Moorhouse’s League of Nations novels, Grand Days (1993) and Dark Palace (2000), is Edith Campbell Berry, an Australian who joins the League and becomes involved in its project of securing peace. Grand Days is a historical novel in the tradition of Stendhal and Zola, exploring the pitfalls and strange pleasures of working in a complex
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M P H A H L E L E , E S ’K I A
bureaucracy with Moorhouse’s signature irony and quizzical humor. No one writes more insightfully on the life of offices, agendas, meetings, and note taking than Moorhouse. The metaphor of crossing borders recurs in the sexual and emotional life of Edith and others; Moorhouse’s novel also reveals different levels at which “the spying game” is played out in Geneva and beyond. Grand Days is Moorhouse’s Daniel Deronda, taking the provincial mind into the great halls of European idealism and deception. Meticulous research in the Palais des Nations archives enables Moorhouse’s exuberant, transformative imagination to recreate the interwar era. Dark Palace, the sequel, shows Edith renewing her contract as a League of Nations officer in 1931, but a different mood prevails. Ideals begin to erode, confident certainties to crumble. Edith’s modern marriage with the transsexual Ambrose is fraught with uncertainty. Moorhouse’s explorations of sexuality, which had pushed boundaries of social acceptance in the 1970s and challenged Australian censors, are used here to probe difficult questions about the irrational, instinctual aspects of humans and their societies. When refugees from Nazi Germany arrive in Geneva and stories circulate about the persecution of homosexuals and Jews, the facade of German rationality starts to crumble. The third volume of Moorhouse’s trilogy is expected to return his protagonist to Australia’s “bush capital,” Canberra, in the postwar years, to another set of architectural, social, and psychological experiments. SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Postmodernist Fiction (BIF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bennett, B. (2002). Australian Short Fiction: A History. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Bennett, B., & Strauss, J. (eds.) (1998). The Oxford Literary History of Australia. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Moorhouse, F. (1969). Futility and Other Animals. Sydney: Gareth Powell. Moorhouse, F. (1972). The Americans, Baby. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
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Moorhouse, F. (1977). Tales of Mystery and Romance. London: Angus and Robertson. Moorhouse, F. (1980). Days of Wine and Rage. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin. Moorhouse, F. (1981). Author Statement. In The Contemporary Australian Short Story [special issue]. Australian Literary Studies, 10(2), 222. Moorhouse, F. (ed.) (1983). The State of the Art: The Mood of Contemporary Australia in Short Stories. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin. Moorhouse, F. (1988). Forty-Seventeen. Ringwood, Vic.: Viking. Moorhouse, F. (1993). Grand Days. Chippendale, NSW: Pan Macmillan. Moorhouse, F. (2000). Dark Palace. Milsons Point, NSW: Knopf. National Library of Australia (comp.) (2004). Frank Moorhouse: A Celebration. Canberra: National Library of Australia.
Mphahlele, Es’kia JAMES OGUDE
Although within South Africa Es’kia Mphahlele is widely known as an educator, community worker, and writer, internationally he is regarded as one of the leading black writers from South Africa. What sets him apart from writers of his generation is his skepticism toward instrumentalist ideologies that oversimplify humanity’s complex realities, including the apartheid experience under whose shadow he grew up. Born on December 17, 1919 in a black township outside Pretoria, Mphahlele moved to rural Northern Transvaal at the age of 5 to live with his paternal grandmother. Both places had a powerful impact on his life, and he vividly captures these early years in his first autobiographical writing, Down Second Avenue (1959). Mphahlele is best remembered for this and his other autobiographical book, Africa My Music (1984). Both works capture his experiences as a child and a professional under the shadow of apartheid. While Down Second Avenue is a sustained narrative of his life from age 5 until his exile in 1957, Africa My Music deals with his exile between 1957 and 1983 – a journey that took him to Nigeria, France, Kenya, Zambia, and the US. What is striking about his autobiographical narratives is their self-conscious attention to themselves as
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“verbal art” through a deliberate use of firstperson narrative, present tense, and streamof-consciousness form. Mphahlele uses a form that allows him both to textually repossess an earlier self and to reconstruct a coherent identity in an alienating context of apartheid and exile. He shows how autobiography reconstructs the self through selection and omission, through language and narrative. Yet what binds much of Mphahlele’s writing is what he calls “The tyranny of time, the tyranny of place”: “the muck and the smell of it, the fever and the fight, the cycles of decay and survival [and] a sense of history” (1984, 12–13). Down Second Avenue is a good example of this “tyranny,” with its graphic portrait of life in a black township and its remarkable stock characters, and with its compelling depiction of rural life and race politics as a black South African (variously as student, worker, professional teacher, writer, and journalist with Drum magazine) under the harsh conditions of apartheid. It also covers a brief period in exile when he leaves South Africa in 1957, having been barred from teaching for opposing the Bantu Education system. Details of Mphahlele’s exile form the raw subject of Africa My Music. A powerful exploration of exilic condition and its impact on the very basis of community, it captures the pain of exile as parents watch their elder son turn into a delinquent. Nevertheless, they find solace in people who have touched their lives and turned exile into a place to forge a new sense of community. The Wanderers (1971), a novel based on Mphahlele’s PhD work in creative writing at Denver University, records the tragic narrative of displacement and wanderlust that haunts South Africa. It is partly autobiographical as it not only seeks to draw attention to conditions of internal exile that apartheid created, but equally signals how similar conditions of dislocation follow South Africans beyond national borders. The tension between autobiographical fiction and fictional autobiography is most apparent in this work. In Chirundu (1979), Mphahlele examines the destruction of African humanism by colonial structures and the black elite through a vulgarization of African cultures. Like many novels from the second decade of independence, it rejects the basis of the post-independence nation state
crafted by the nationalist elite in Africa. The Central African state of Chirundu has been freed from colonial rule, and yet it exhibits all the trappings of neocolonial corruption, perpetrated by the black elite that has assumed power. Mphahlele highlights the collapse of humane values on the continent and calls for a rebirth founded on African humanism, a philosophy that runs through his major collection of essays: The African Image (1974 [1962]), Voices in the Whirlwind and Other Essays (1972), Es’kia (2002), and Es’kia Continued (2004). Chirundu is one of Mphahlele’s less successful fictions, lacking both the narrative coherence and sharp characterization that we find in his other works. Mphahlele’s writing career was launched through short stories, and he maintains that he began writing for the sheer joy of telling stories. The two major collections, Man Must Live and Other Stories (1947) and In Corner B and Other Stories (1967), contain stories rooted in Mphahlele’s life experience and what he calls the little dramas of his people. Man Must Live draws attention to the writer’s celebration of human resilience and the individual will to survive in the harsh environment that was apartheid, while In Corner B represents the ordinary and lighter side of his people with a style that is underpinned by humor, laughter, and satire grounded in the daily encounters of the black township people. Some of this satire is carried on in The Unbroken Song (1981), a collection most noted for the story “Mrs. Plum,” one of the finest narratives about South Africa’s white liberal psyche, explored from the point of view of a domestic worker, Karabo. Mphahlele passed away in his home in Limpopo province on October 27, 2008. SEE ALSO: Humor and Satire (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Southern African Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Manganyi, N. C. (1983). Exiles and Homecomings: A Biography of Es’kia Mphahlele. Johannesburg: Ravan. Mphahlele, E. (1947). Man Must Live and Other Stories. Cape Town: African Booksellers.
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MUDROOROO
Mphahlele, E. (1959). Down Second Avenue. London: Faber and Faber. Mphahlele, E. (1967). In Corner B and Other Stories. Nairobi: East African Publishing House. Mphahlele, E. (1971). The Wanderers. New York: Macmillan. Mphahlele, E. (1972). Voices in the Whirlwind and Other Essays. New York: Hill and Wang. Mphahlele, E. (1974). The African Image [1962], 2nd edn. London: Faber and Faber. Mphahlele, E. (1979). Chirundu. Johannesburg: Ravan. Mphahlele, E. (1981). The Unbroken Song. Johannesburg: Ravan. Mphahlele, E. (1984). Africa My Music. Johannesburg. Ravan. Mphahlele, E. (2002). Es’kia. Cape Town: Kwela. Mphahlele, E. (2004). Es’kia Continued. Johannesburg: Stainbank.
Mudrooroo MAUREEN CLARK
Australian author Mudrooroo Nyoongah (aka Colin Johnson, S. A. Jivaka, Mudrooroo Narogin, Mudrooroo) is a man of many names and literary talents. He is known mainly for his fiction, a postmodern form of political protest and cultural revival literature, but he has also published books of poetry and literary criticism. Some of his writing has been translated into Italian, German, Russian, and French. Mudrooroo is a follower of the Aboriginal oral tradition with a tendency toward the dialogic rather than the descriptive. He adopts a strategy of elusiveness in his writing to ensure as far as possible that his artistic product avoids categorization within a particular literary framework. Mudrooroo was born Colin Thomas Johnson on August 21, 1938. Although officially registered in nearby Narrogin, he was born in the Western Australia wheat-belt town of East Cuballing. He legally changed his name to Mudrooroo Nyoongah in 1988 as a political protest, but retained the nom de plume Narogin to denote his region of birth. Mudrooroo means paperbark in the Bibbulmun language, and Nyoongah is the Aboriginal tribal group with whom he still identifies. According to Australian birth registry records, however, Mudrooroo’s mother Elizabeth Johnson (nee Barron) was of Irish/English descent and his father Thomas’s family is Irish/African Amer-
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ican. Mudrooroo’s father died in June 1938, two months before his son was born. All documents relating to the author’s family heritage have been certified as “authentic” by the Western Australian Genealogical Society, which has formally recognized his biological family as direct descendants of Edward and Jane Barron, who arrived in Australia aboard HMAS Sulphur in 1829. There is now little doubt that the author’s ancestral legacy is African American/British and not Australian Aboriginal as he claimed (Clark 2007). Rather than diminishing the significance of Mudrooroo’s contribution to Australian literature, however, this information makes it possible to read his body of work in an exciting new way that takes the construction and meaning of personal and cultural identities in Australia into account. Mudrooroo’s writing is haunted by feelings of loss and abandonment, which may well be a consequence of a traumatic childhood and troubled teenage years spent in Australia’s welfare and penal institutions between 1947 and 1957. When discharged from Fremantle prison in 1957, he lived for some time in the home of the late Dame Mary Durack, an influential Australian novelist and poet who stimulated his interest in writing and subsequently became his patron. In the late 1950s he moved to Melbourne and worked with the Victorian public service, but he never lost touch with Durack. It was with her patronage that Wild Cat Falling, then hailed as the first novel written by an Aboriginal person, was published in 1965. The book has a strong autobiographical dimension that deals directly with the adverse affects of institutionalization on black Australian youth. After his novel’s publication, Mudrooroo left Australia to journey through Thailand and Malaysia to India. He later returned to India and spent a number of years studying and living as a Buddhist monk. After a gap of 14 years, Mudrooroo’s second novel Long Live Sandawara (1979) emerged, a savagely ironic and experimental text that jettisons linear narrative structures and reimagines the past in terms of the present by merging two distinct historical contexts: early Australian settlement and modern-day Perth. The novel is an attempt to construct a bridge between the worlds of the living and the dead – the past and the present. The text’s primary theme is not so much the harm already done in the course of Australia’s
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colonial history but rather the continuing failure of contemporary Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal regimes to provide remedies to help present generations overcome that harm. Sandawara was followed four years later by Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (1983), which some commentators consider Mudrooroo’s masterpiece. The novel deals imaginatively with one of the more catastrophic episodes of Australia’s recorded history – the attempted systematic extermination of Tasmania’s Indigenous inhabitants by early British colonial administrations. Here Mudrooroo deliberately restyles rather than rewrites previous interpretations of what was essentially a systematic program of cultural genocide that began in Tasmania in 1803. The narrative is distinguished by a sense of ironic restlessness to suggest that the violence that marked Australia’s colonial beginnings stains not only its past but also its present and its future. The years 1986 and 1988 respectively saw the publication of two volumes of poetry, The Song Circle of Jacky and Dalwurra, the Black Bittern. The former targets the injustices of the Australian penal system and, in particular, the high number of deaths among Aboriginal people held in custody. The latter again reflects the author’s continuing frustration at the lack of measurable progress toward the correction of injustices within Australia’s racist structure, which he describes in his long poem, “Perth Stained in Blackness: A Bicentennial Gift” (later renamed “Sunlight Spreadeagles Perth in Blackness: A Bicentennial Gift”) as “a wrecked black body swarming with white termites.” Doin Wildcat (1988b) is the second volume of the Wildcat trilogy, three different, often opposing and contradictory narratives involving the same institutionalized Aboriginal figure. The novel goes back to Wild Cat Falling to tell the story of writing the script for a film based on its events. Doin Wildcat can be read as an allegory for the lack of progress in the Aboriginal struggle for equal rights since the mid-1960s, as well as a comment on the continuing white stranglehold over cultural production in Australia, whether print or film. After 1988, Mudrooroo’s published work emerged at an accelerated pace. Writing from the Fringe: A Study of Modern Aboriginal Literature in
Australia (1990b) saw his entry into the field of critical analysis and established him as an authority on Indigenous writing. The book was generally well received, but a number of negative observations were also made regarding both its “Aboriginality” and the author’s tendency toward a rhetoric of cultural gatekeeping similar to that practiced by white society. Adam Shoemaker, for example, comments that at times Mudrooroo’s view of what constitutes Aboriginal writing “seems to fly perilously close to the cultural determinism which elsewhere he labors so hard to destroy” (1993, 88). Mudrooroo’s particularly harsh judgment of Aboriginal author Sally Morgan in relation to both her work and her identity is a case in point. The author’s little-known novella “Struggling” (1990a) revisits the world of disadvantaged urban Aboriginal youth expounded upon earlier in Long Live Sandawara. Continuing his tendency to write back to previous work, a second, much shorter bicentennial gift poem, renamed “Happy Birthday Australia – 1988” appears in the volume of poetry The Garden of Gethsemane (1991a), which (in 1992) won two Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. Also published in 1991, the novel Master of the Ghost Dreaming confirms the pattern of spiraling retrospective and returns to the escapades of the historical figure George Augustus Robinson, introduced in Doctor Wooreddy. The revisionist trend continues in Wildcat Screaming (1992), the third volume of the Wildcat trilogy, with the reappearance of an older but still angry Aboriginal protagonist. The novel reaches a new level of indictment of the racially biased judicial practices of white Australia in the early 1990s. Apart from the accolades Mudrooroo received for his literary output, 1992 was a turning point in his life. After 45 years of cultural and familial displacement, that year the author was reunited with members of his biological family. Nevertheless, he continued to write, publish, and identify as an Aboriginal person, effectively turning his back on his non-Indigenous relatives. Between 1992 and 1996, Mudrooroo’s published output was abundant and varied in both style and content. Significantly, it expressed anxieties about what he saw as white Australia’s disengagement from the realities of homegrown political and social problems in the postmodern era. In the experimental 1993 Mudrooroo/M€uller Project: A Theatrical
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Casebook, for example, he sees Australia as a kind of colonial theatre still connected to idealized imaginary beginnings. Mudrooroo’s sixth novel, The Kwinkan, was also published in 1993. The book is a satire of white anthropological “fact”gathering methods and moves beyond the borders of Australia to an imaginary Polynesian island – a first for Mudrooroo. The Kwinkan was soon followed by Aboriginal Mythology: An A–Z Spanning the History of the Australian Aboriginal Peoples from the Earliest Legends to the Present Day (1994). Then came Us Mob: History, Culture, Struggle: An Introduction to Indigenous Australia (1995) and a collection of poetry entitled Pacific Highway Boo-Blooz (1996). In April 1996, Mudrooroo was awarded the prestigious Ruth Adeney Koori Award for Aboriginal writing for Us Mob, and he remained a dominant figure in Aboriginal literature in Australia. But it was also in 1996 that the controversy surrounding his claim to Aboriginal heritage finally came out of the shadows. Possibly in response to what was then an unrelenting and no doubt embarrassing public questioning of his family background, he resigned his position at Western Australia’s Murdoch University. He then moved to Queensland where, in 1997, he produced a revised edition of Writing from the Fringe renamed The Indigenous Literature of Australia: Milli Milli Wangka. As a writer, Mudrooroo has demonstrated that he has few limitations. Where he disappoints, however, is in his failure to acknowledge the positive contribution of females, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, in weaving the Australian social fabric; he represents the place of women in the ever-changing Australian political environment as supportive at best and traitorous at worst. His last three novels, The Undying (1998), Underground (1999), and The Promised Land (2000), are testament to this limited view. Written in the fantastical Gothic mode, they are replete with metaphors of British imperialism as bloodthirsty and barbaric. Tellingly, he embodies his brutish, some might say misogynist, metaphors in an excessively violent female vampire, thus painting woman as the ultimate cause and regenerator of all man’s ills, past and present. Amid continuing controversy regarding his identity, Mudrooroo left Australia in 2001 and returned to India to pursue his Buddhist interests.
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At the time of writing he resides in Kathmandu, Nepal with his fifth wife and their young son. SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); English Studies, the Academy, and Fiction (WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Indigenous Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Some works listed under Mudrooroo were originally published under the name Colin Johnson, Mudrooroo Narogin, and Mudrooroo Nyoongah. Clark M. (2007). Mudrooroo: A Likely Story – Identity and Belonging in Postcolonial Australia. Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang. Mudrooroo (1965). Wild Cat Falling. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Mudrooroo (1979). Long Live Sandawara. Melbourne: Quartet. Mudrooroo (1983). Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World. Melbourne: Hyland House. Mudrooroo (1986). The Song Circle of Jacky and Selected Poems. Melbourne: Hyland House. Mudrooroo (1988a). Dalwurra, the Black Bittern: A Poem Cycle (ed. V. Brady & S. Miller). Nedlands WA: Centre for Studies in Australian Literature. Mudrooroo (1988b). Doin Wildcat: A Novel Koori Script as Constructed by Mudrooroo Narogin. Melbourne: Hyland House. Mudrooroo (1990a). Struggling. In J. Davis, S. Muecke, M. Narogin, & A. Shoemaker (eds.), Paperbark: A Collection of Black Australian Writings. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, pp. 199–290. Mudrooroo (1990b). Writing from the Fringe: A Study of Modern Aboriginal Literature in Australia. Melbourne: Hyland House. Mudrooroo (1991a). The Garden of Gethsemane: Poems from the Lost Decade. Melbourne: Hyland House. Mudrooroo (1991b). Master of the Ghost Dreaming. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Mudrooroo (1992). Wildcat Screaming. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Mudrooroo (1993). The Kwinkan. Sydney: HarperCollins. Mudrooroo (1994). Aboriginal Mythology: An A–Z Spanning the History of the Australian Aboriginal Peoples from the Earliest Legends to the Present Day. London: Aquarian.
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Mudrooroo (1995). Us Mob: History, Culture, Struggle: An Introduction to Indigenous Australia. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Mudrooroo (1996). Pacific Highway Boo-Blooz. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Mudrooroo (1997). The Indigenous Literature of Australia: Milli Milli Wangka. Melbourne: Hyland House. Mudrooroo (1998). The Undying. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Mudrooroo (1999). Underground. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Mudrooroo (2000). The Promised Land. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Oboe, A. (ed.) (2003). Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Shoemaker, A. (1993). Mudrooroo: A Critical Study. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Shoemaker, A. (2003). Mudrooroo and the Curse of Authenticity. Oboe (2003), 1–23.
Mukherjee, Bharati MITA BANERJEE
Bharati Mukherjee is an American writer of Indian origin whose work combines a highly ironic, understated prose style with recurring postcolonial motifs such as the impossibility of return, the ambivalence of cultural hybridity, and the power that can be born out of the pain of cultural uprootedness. Born on July 27, 1940 in Calcutta, Mukherjee received degrees from the universities of Calcutta and Baroda before going to the US to complete her education at the University of Iowa. It was through an encounter at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop that her life took a radical turn: “I fell in love with a fellow student named Clark Blaise, an American of Canadian origin, and impulsively married him during a lunch break in a lawyer’s office above a coffee shop. That act cut me off forever from the rules and ways of upper-middle-class life in Bengal, and hurled me into a New World life of scary improvisations and heady explorations” (1997a). This experience may be considered the nucleus of Mukherjee’s fiction. The “drama of self-transformation” (1997a) that she describes in her writing follows directly from her rejection of a rigidly defined life in India in favor of a New World identity.
Mukherjee has addressed her Indian upbringing throughout her fiction. Her background, as she has described it, is that of a member of the highly educated, middle-class elite whose postcolonial self-confidence is accompanied by an infallible sense of style. In The Tiger’s Daughter (1972), Tara Banerjee Cartwright has returned from America and, having longed for her Indian “home,” is struck by the Western decor of her family home: “Now she was home, surrounded by imported furniture . . . She was home in a class that lived by Victorian rules, changed decisively by the exuberance of the Hindu imagination” (42). Mukherjee has been quick to point out the irony of this Bengali Brahmin lifestyle, which her narratives portray as being always at one remove from the real India, even as the authenticity of the latter can never be fully comprehended or described by her fictional characters. This moment of estrangement, an aloofness verging on helplessness, is central to her work. In Desirable Daughters (2002), the protagonist’s sisters contemplate, from their Western-style high-rise apartment on Mumbai’s seaside, the gradual destruction of their families by the family servants; in The Tiger’s Daughter, wealthy young Brahmins sipping caffe lattes on the top of Calcutta’s CatelliContinental Hotel are at a loss to comprehend the mass uprising occurring directly below them. Even as some of Mukherjee’s writing takes up historical events such as the Marxist Naxalite uprising in Calcutta (portrayed in The Tiger’s Daughter), her concern is not historiographic. Unlike writers such as Michael Ondaatje who overtly engage in what Linda Hutcheon has called postmodern “historiographic metafiction,” Mukherjee takes an interest in historical events only to the degree that they impact on her protagonists’ lives. Her concern has been less with the writing of history than with establishing personal genealogies. Her female protagonists are united by their search for origins, the attempt to reconstruct family history, either through family archives as in The Tree Bride (2004), or through time travel as in The Holder of the World (1993). To the distance from India occasioned by caste is added a further layer in Mukherjee’s narratives: that of migration, which is often conveyed through the image of rebirth. Such rebirth, Mukherjee argues, is always violent and even, as Kristin Carter-Sanborn (1994) has described it,
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a deliberate murder of the self. An inquiry into the possibility of escape (from prejudice, social expectations, and the traditions instilled in female protagonists in their Indian youth) is also always central to Mukherjee’s fiction. In her most recent novels, starting with Leave It to Me (1997b) and continuing with Desirable Daughters, Mukherjee uses the image of adoption to capture the dilemma between escape and genetic or cultural determination. In Leave It to Me, the past forcefully reasserts itself in Debby DiMartino who, having been raised in an Italian American family, goes in search of her (Indian) roots, eventually finding a birth father who is both “polymorphous perverse” (106) and excessively violent. In Desirable Daughters, an adoptee who has taken on a high-caste identity wreaks havoc on the protagonist’s California home, crippling her computer specialist husband. Here, as elsewhere in Mukherjee’s fiction, the past has a tendency to reassert itself: there is no escape, only a temporary respite that, characteristically, can be achieved only through sheer acts of force. Resilience is a key feature of the immigrant experience; an immigrant, she writes in Leave It to Me, is a “cornered rat with options” (33). Unusual as this image may seem, it stresses the desperation that, for Mukherjee, is at the core of the attempt to sever the ties to one’s past, only to find oneself confronted with racism in the country to which one has migrated. Mukherjee has been as welcoming of the idea of the American “melting pot” as she has been critical of the Canadian cultural mosaic. Having lived with Blaise in Canada for 14 years in the 1970s and early 1980s, Mukherjee has described her relocation to the US as having provided an immediate sense of relief. In her essay “An Invisible Woman” (1981), Canada, particularly Toronto, is depicted as a place of deeply ingrained racism, where her self-perception as a middleclass professional was constantly at odds with the way she was treated – her individuality reduced to her immigrant experience. This “double vision” was what especially unnerved Mukherjee, making it impossible for her to continue living in Canada. From her perspective, the US was utterly different in its attitude toward immigration. There, she was simply “an immigrant, living in a continent of immigrants” (Alam 9). A photograph taken for a 1997 interview titled “American Dreamer”
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encapsulates this allegiance to the US as a nation. Emphasizing both her commitment to the American nation and her awareness of her roots, the photo depicts Mukherjee wrapped in an American flag, fashioned in the style of a sari. Mukherjee has affirmed her position as an American writer, not a postcolonial or an Asian American one: “I maintain that I am an American writer of Indian origin, not because I’m ashamed of my past . . . but because my whole adult life has been lived here, and I write about the people who are immigrants going through the process of making a home here . . . I write in the tradition of immigrant experience rather than nostalgia and expatriation” (quoted in Cowart 71–2). The stark contrast between cultural mosaic and melting pot, experienced by the author herself as the difference between Canada and the US, has caused a deep rift in Mukherjee’s oeuvre, which can accordingly be subdivided into three phases (see Alam 1996). While early works such as The Tiger’s Daughter stress the author’s attempt to come to terms with her Indian origins, her subsequent writing is characterized by her experience of racism in Canada. In this second period, novels such as Wife (1975) or short stories in her collection Darkness (1985), although set in the US, emphasize the trauma of immigrant experiences as female protagonists find themselves in limbo, suspended between traditions they can no longer capture and a country of sojourn that is unwelcoming. A sense of hopefulness permeates Mukherjee’s more recent work, inaugurating a third phase that could be said to begin with Jasmine (1989). In keeping with her commitment to American ideals, many of Mukherjee’s narratives allude to American literary genres or canonical texts. Jasmine – which remains Mukherjee’s most critically acclaimed novel to date – has been read as a frontier narrative, with the protagonist constantly moving westward and possibly finding personal fulfillment in California. Mukherjee’s settings have been likewise moved west, leaving behind a Midwest which, like Jasmine’s wheelchairbound former lover Bud Ripplemeyer, has become static. Harking back to American literary precedents, The Holder of the World (1993), Mukherjee’s least typical novel in terms of both style and narrative scope, alludes to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Mary
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Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682). A speculative historical fiction, The Holder of the World retells Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative from the point of view of Rebecca, a Puritan woman who falls in love with her Indian captor. Mukherjee’s fiction has been highly critical of an Indian tradition moored in the Hindu religion, which often leaves her characters feeling trapped. From a character in Wife who, stuck in a loveless marriage, aborts a child she does not want and murders a husband she does not love, to the mystic tale (in Desirable Daughters) of a young girl condemned by fate because her husband is bitten by a snake on the night of the wedding, these traditions are shown to be hostile toward women. Violence against women is a universal concern in Mukherjee’s fiction, allying immigrant women through common histories of oppression, and linking the plight of Indian immigrant women trapped in arranged marriages to that of Somalis subjected to female circumcision in their San Francisco home. While the misogyny of non-Western traditions figures prominently in Mukherjee’s work, she has also been quick to point out that female victimization may well be what unites Western and the non-Western cultures. In Jasmine, the subordination of women in the West is described through the practice of naming. Jyoti, or Jasmine, is renamed by each of her (Western) lovers, none of whom is comfortable with all facets of her identity. Names are also important in Mukherjee’s work, often referring to Hindu mythology (Ghosh-Schellhorn 478). Given its wide-ranging concerns, Mukherjee’s work has resisted a facile categorization as merely “postcolonial.” Her adamant refusal to be categorized under such a rubric has caused some critics to accuse her of “race treachery” (Mukherjee 1997a). Notably, Mukherjee was not included in Salman Rushdie’s Vintage Book of Indian Writing, 1947–1997, an anthology that included other North America expatriates such as Rohinton Mistry, Amitav Ghosh, and Vikram Chandra. It is her resistance to established channels of canonization, however, that may make Mukherjee one of the most interesting writers of postcolonial origin today. Her refusal to follow established lines or genres, or to cater to conventional motifs of postcolonial criticism, may point to the fault lines in postcolonial writing and theory today,
and in a politics of canonization that focuses too exclusively on an author’s cultural heritage or ethnic make-up. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Rushdie, Salman (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Alam, F. (1996). Bharati Mukherjee. New York: Twayne. Bahri, D., & Vasudeva, M. (eds.) (1996). Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Brewster, A. (1995). Literary Formations: Postcolonialism, Nationalism, Globalism. Carlton South: Melbourne University Press. Carter-Sanborn, K. (1994). We Murder Who We Were: Jasmine and the Violence of Identity. American Literature, 66(3), 573–93. Cowart, D. (2006). Trailing Clouds: Immigrant Fiction in Contemporary America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ghosh-Schellhorn, M. (2000). Bharati Mukherjee. In B. Engler & K. M€ uller (eds.), Metzler Lexikon Amerikanischer Autoren. Stuttgart: Metzler, pp. 478–9. Mukherjee, B. (1972). The Tiger’s Daughter. New York: Fawcett. Mukherjee, B. (1975). Wife. New York: Fawcett. Mukherjee, B. (1981). An Invisible Woman. Saturday Night, pp. 36–40 (March). Mukherjee, B. (1985). Darkness. New York: Penguin. Mukherjee, B. (1988). The Middleman and Other Stories. New York: Grove. Mukherjee, B. (1989). Jasmine. London: Penguin. Mukherjee, B. (1993). The Holder of the World. London: Virago. Mukherjee, B. (1997a). American Dreamer. Mother Jones Magazine. At www.motherjones.com/ commentary/columns/1997/01/mukherjee.html, accessed Nov. 25, 2008. Mukherjee, B. (1997b). Leave It to Me. Toronto: HarperCollins. Mukherjee, B. (2002). Desirable Daughters. New York: Hyperion. Mukherjee, B. (2004). The Tree Bride. New York: Hyperion. Mukherjee, B., & Blaise, C. (1977). Days and Nights in Calcutta. New York: Doubleday.
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Mukherjee, B., & Blaise, C. (1987). The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy. Markham, ON: Viking Penguin. Mukherjee, B., & Blaise, C. (1991). Political Culture and Leadership in India. New Delhi: Mittal. Mukherjee, B., & Blaise, C. (1992). Regionalism in Indian Perspective. Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi. Rushdie, S. (1991). Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991. London: Granta.
Munro, Alice NEIL KALMAN BESNER
During the four decades since her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Fiction, Alice Munro’s stories have been widely acclaimed as among the finest being written in the Englishspeaking world. To date, Munro has published 12 books of stories; like Mavis Gallant and Katherine Mansfield, she has concentrated her fictional powers on the short story, although she has also written story sequences, novellas, and books of linked stories. Many of her fictions draw on her family and her home territory of Huron County in southwestern Ontario, but Munro always reshapes this material to form stories populated by characters that both invoke and transform their autobiographical and geographical settings. Munro’s stories often engage readers first at an everyday surface level that then becomes a membrane: as Del Jordan, the narrator of Lives of Girls and Women (1971) puts it in a famous phrase, “People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable – deep caves paved over with kitchen linoleum” (249). This apparent paradox of contradictions converging to reveal the depths of her characters’ lives is emblematic of Munro’s fictional signature. Alice Laidlaw was born in Wingham, Ontario on July 10, 1931, growing up just outside of town on the fox farm her parents ran and which appears in her fiction early and late, as do evocations of her father, Robert Laidlaw, and her mother, Anne Chamney, who was stricken with Parkinson’s disease in 1943. In 1949 Alice left home for the University of Western Ontario; in 1951 she married James Munro and moved with him to Vancouver. She divorced and returned to Ontario in 1974, remarrying in 1976 and settling in Clinton, a town close to Wingham.
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Dance of the Happy Shades takes its title from one of the transformative episodes that signal the “unfathomable” often apparent near the surface of Munro’s stories: at an elderly piano teacher’s home, a girl plays a melody that lifts the summer afternoon from its banality into another, more imaginative realm, discomfiting to the parents but accepted quite naturally by the teacher. The collection’s opening story, “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” reveals to the young narrator the mysterious other life her father almost lived with another woman; “Thanks for the Ride,” with its starkly comical and poignant depiction of teenage sexual initiation, anticipates the more complex treatment of this theme in Munro’s next book, while “Boys and Girls,” one of her earliest explorations of gendered roles, anticipates Munro’s sustained inquiry into the constraints that shape women’s identities. Lives of Girls and Women (1971), often read as Munro’s closest attempt at a novel, is a book of linked stories tracing a girl’s development into a woman and a writer, and Munro’s fullest fictional recreation to date of parts of her own background. As Del Jordan recalls her childhood and family, her first apprehensions of mortality, and her growing experience of sexuality, the stories’ reach widens to explore the mysteries of fiction’s transformation of reality. Echoing a pronouncement of Del’s mother, the book’s title signals this recurrent theme in Munro’s fiction, and the fraught relations between Del and her mother anticipate the complex depictions in many other stories of mothers’ and daughters’ connections. The book was made into a CBC Television movie in 1994, directed by Ronald Wilson. The title story of Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), with its sinuous weaving across different times in the lives of Et and Char, sisters entwined in passionate and lifelong but barely acknowledged connections with men, provides a fine example of Munro’s developing powers to shape a plot to reveal the striking connection between casual and causal remark and gesture, deliberate motive and offhand remark. And the collection’s closing story, “The Ottawa Valley,” shows how Munro draws artfully on autobiographical conventions – confession, first-person narration, retrospection – first, to shape a story about a daughter’s memories of her mother, and then, characteristically, to name and to inquire
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into her own uses of this story: “The problem, the only problem, is my mother. And she is the one of course that I am trying to get; it is to reach her that this whole journey has been undertaken” (246). The year 1974 also saw Munro win the Canada–Australia Literary Prize. In 1977, a year before the publication of Munro’s next book, she published her first stories in the New Yorker; in the intervening years she has published over 50 stories there, most recently in 2009. The stories of Who Do You Think You Are? (1978, and another Governor General’s Award winner), like those of Lives of Girls and Women, center on a single character, Rose; but Rose is more many-layered than Del, and lives in a wider world that ranges beyond childhood into marriages, deceptions, and divorces. As Rose discovers and performs her various identities – a recurrent theme in Munro is the permeable border between acting a role and its substantive reality, as in the melodramatic but very real beating administered by Rose’s father in “Royal Beatings” – Rose’s several senses of herself increasingly imbue the book’s title with an irony that rubs against both the straightforward question posed about her identity and the more inflected questioning of her apparent presumption. The stories of The Moons of Jupiter (1982) are framed by two Munro constants: first, a style and syntax that are disarmingly straightforward and declarative, in the service of intricate plots shaped to disclose insights at once bared and veiled; and second, material drawn and shaped increasingly from family and generational histories that are both anatomized and laid to rest. The two linked opening stories, “Connection” and “Stone in the Field,” collectively titled “Chaddeleys and Flemings,” exemplify these qualities: as the stories reconstruct the mother’s and then the father’s side of the narrator’s family, readers discern, cumulatively, the lines of connection and of separation, of intimacy and of distance that knit the generations. And as in many Munro stories, the families recreated in these fictions appear legendary and remote as well as historical and immediate. The collection’s closing title story, with its intimate but matter-of-fact depiction of a daughter’s communion with her dying father, brings us back, more fully aware, to the book’s opening recreations of the same daughter and father.
The title story of The Progress of Love (1986), winner of a third Governor General’s Award, illustrates several other recurrent features of Munro’s fiction, as memories conflicting in their versions of the past trace intersecting arcs in the present, while the plot gathers its force by radiating outward from two crystallizing incidents. In this story, the two recollected episodes are from the narrator’s mother’s life; at the story’s opening, the daughter has just heard from her father that her mother has died, and the narrative circles back to the narrator’s childhood memory of frantically seeking someone to save her mother from hanging herself. The narration of the second episode – together with the first, it shows the ironic trajectory of the “progress of love” that informs this story – reveals the mother burning the money she has inherited from her father. Like many Munro fictions, “The Progress of Love” lays bare a primitive and enduring feeling – here, the corrosive effects of abiding resentment – but does so circumspectly, so that by story’s end the revelation surprises, but also seems natural and fitting. Two stories from Friend of My Youth (1990) – the title story, and “Meneseteung,” which is the indigenous name for a major river in southwestern Ontario – reveal the ongoing development of Munro’s historical reach in her fiction, both into her immediate family’s past and into the more remote history of her home region. “Friend of My Youth” is framed by the first-person narrator’s recollection of her recurring dreams of meeting her mother, miraculously released from the Parkinson’s that has so impaired her and finally killed her. But embedded within this frame is another, more harrowing story that recalls earlier Munro fictions such as “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You.” This story is grounded in the narrator’s mother’s memories of two sisters, Flora and Ellie, with whom she boarded for two years in their farmhouse, close to where she worked as a teacher before she got married. The sisters might seem at first reading to be restrained simply by their rigid Cameronian religious background, but that is only a thin layer covering over their repressed sexuality; as the sisters vie for the dark and silent Robert, the farmer who woos Flora but marries Ellie, the narrator recalls and relates her mother’s stories of this secluded trio – and of the avid nurse who buries Ellie only to steal Robert from Flora for a second time. Through the scrim
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MUNRO, ALICE
of her dream and her attendant strong feelings of loss over her mother, the narrator – like many Munro narrators, she is a writer, or aspires to be one – sees through to the kind of story she would have liked to have written about Flora, the survivor; but of course she has already given us the prelude, another whole story, filtered both through her mother’s recollections, and through her own loss and longing, so that the “Friend of My Youth” becomes not only Flora for her mother, but also, perhaps, her mother for her adult daughter. With “Meneseteung,” Munro takes us back to the mid nineteenth century and, for women certainly, the highly restricted and regulated world of small-town settlement in Ontario; more importantly, this story marks Munro’s boldest and most complex excursion into the past to this point in her career. The narrator – another writer – uses many kinds of historical material, including the local newspaper, the Vidette, which she quotes from, and the poems of the central character, Almeda Roth, a young woman left alone when her siblings die, then her mother, and finally her father. “Meda” lives in a house that fronts on the town’s respectable main street, but at the back looks out on shabby poverty and dangerous depravity; the two vistas merge one night when a woman is chased to Meda’s backyard and beaten. Almeda’s imaginative sensibility is unsettled by the spectacle of the woman, and her prospect of marrying a stolid and prosperous townsman permanently disrupted; in her conflicted character Munro reincarnates the tensions between the facades of propriety and violent desire that find their outward expression in the house’s two prospects. Finally the story itself becomes a poignant sign of the narrator’s own search for connection to this figure’s real life as she searches the town graveyard for her stone, wondering, in a typical Munro moment, if she has got anything in her story about Almeda right. In the several collections that have followed Friend of My Youth, Munro has begun to write longer stories, some of them actually novellas; among the best known of these is the title novella of The Love of a Good Woman (1998), winner of the Giller Prize in Canada and, in 1999, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in the US; Munro won the Giller again in 2004 for her collection Runaway, which also won the 2005
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Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. The settings of Munro’s stories have also begun to range more widely, but this novella returns again to southwestern Ontario, although its form – its 73 pages are explicitly divided into four numbered sections – represents another departure. Proceeding at a disarmingly leisurely pace, the novella gracefully knits its apparently disparate sections into a culminating revelation that turns on a woman’s decision whether to believe, or, if she believes it, to expose the story of a vengeful dying woman that would incriminate her widowed husband and turn a suicide into manslaughter. But what emerges more powerfully beneath that layer of intrigue is the more constant pulse of the novella, which reveals what “love” and a “good woman” might really entail. Munro’s story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” published in her 2001 collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, became the inspiration for Sarah Polley’s celebrated and award-winning film, Away from Her (2006); the story explores the effects of Alzheimer’s on a long-married couple. With some of the stories in her most recent book, The View from Castle Rock (2006), Munro might seem to have come full circle, although differently disposed, to the characters and venues of her earliest stories. But she has also extended her reach into her own ancestry. The stories of the first part of the collection are shaped more closely around her family’s history – here, most often, the Laidlaw side of the family, reaching back to the 1700s as she retraces her father’s Scots ancestry – but they also revisit and reshape other familiar material. The intriguing development is that while Munro is now writing closer than ever to the historical record, and exploring her own place in that record, she is also, and more explicitly than in earlier stories, “doing something closer to what a memoir does – exploring a life, my own life, but not in an austere or rigorously factual way,” as she puts it in the book’s foreword. The collection is divided into two parts: the first five stories, “No Advantages,” take us back to Scotland and thence to the family’s emigration to North America as they board ship in June of 1818. These stories are redolent with the kind of dialogue and detail that benefit, richly, from Munro’s research; she lived in Scotland for some months, near the Ettrick Valley, the hard-bitten and landlocked home of
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her ancestors, and she was “lucky,” she writes, that “every generation of our family seemed to produce somebody who went in for writing long, outspoken, sometimes outrageous letters, and detailed recollections.” The six stories of the second part, “Home,” bring us to more recognizable Munro characters and territory in southern Ontario, but as we revisit familiar scenes again, we see them differently, and, better, as if for the first time: the father’s fox-farming career, for example, earlier evoked in Lives of Girls and Women, or his last illness, earlier evoked in The Moons of Jupiter. The collection affirms, again, what Munro’s readers might have intuited from her earlier books of stories: there is everywhere a deeply felt sense of connection to the climate of feeling inhabited by her father – not only to his beliefs, which are rarely expressed and more often silent, but also to his habits of thought. In this collection, Munro follows that sense of connection more strongly and widely than she has before. It is a happy coincidence that The View from Castle Rock should have appeared so shortly after the first full Munro biography, Robert Thacker’s excellent Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives (2005). One – as a biography should – gives us Munro’s life in relation to her art. But this latest collection of stories – close as they are to Munro’s life and to the lives of her parents and grandparents, great-grandparents, and their forebears – gives us, as do so many of her stories, something more mysterious and enduring: her art in relation to her life. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Gallant, Mavis (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Mansfield, Katherine (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Besner, N. (1990). Introducing Alice Munro’s “Lives of Girls and Women”: A Reader’s Guide. Toronto: ECW. Blodgett, E. D. (1988). Alice Munro. Boston: Twayne. Carrington, I. (1989). Controlling the Uncontrollable: The Fiction of Alice Munro. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
Carscallen, J. (1993). The Other Country: Patterns in the Writing of Alice Munro. Toronto: ECW. Dahlie, H. (1984). Alice Munro and Her Works. Toronto: ECW. Heble, A. (1994). The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro’s Discourse of Absence. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. MacKendrick, L. (ed.) (1983). Probable Fictions: Alice Munro’s Narrative Acts. Toronto: ECW. MacKendrick, L. (1993). Some Other Reality: Alice Munro’s “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You.” Toronto: ECW. Martin, W. R. (1987). Alice Munro: Paradox and Parallel. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. Miller J. (ed.) (1984). The Art of Alice Munro: Saying the Unsayable. Waterloo: University of Waterloo Press. Munro, A. (1968). Dance of the Happy Shades. Toronto: Ryerson. Munro, A. (1971). Lives of Girls and Women. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Munro, A. (1974). Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: Thirteen Stories. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Munro, A. (1978). Who Do You Think You Are? Toronto: Macmillan. Munro, A. (1979). The Beggar Maid. New York: Knopf. Munro, A. (1982). The Moons of Jupiter. Toronto: Macmillan. Munro, A. (1986). The Progress of Love. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Munro, A. (1990). Friend of My Youth. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Munro, A. (1994). Open Secrets. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Munro, A. (1996). Selected Stories. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Munro, A. (1998). The Love of a Good Woman. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Munro, A. (2001). Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Munro, A. (2004). Runaway. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Munro, A. (2006). The View from Castle Rock. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Munro, S. (2001). Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Polley, S. (dir.) (2006). Away from Her. Capri. Rasporich, B. (1989). The Dance of the Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. Redekop, M. (1992). Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro. London: Routledge.
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Ross, C. S. (1992). Alice Munro: A Double Life. Toronto: ECW. Smythe, K. (1992). Figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Thacker, R. (2005). Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
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Wilson, R. (dir.) (1994). Lives of Girls and Women. CBC Television. York, L. (1988). The Other Side of Dailiness: Photography in the Works of Alice Munro, Timothy Findley, Michael Ondaatje, and Margaret Laurence. Toronto: ECW.
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N Naipaul, V. S. GILLIAN DOOLEY
Having devoted his life to writing, V. S. Naipaul won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He has brought his uncompromising gaze to bear upon many, often neglected, parts of the world, combining a steely vision with a capacity for compassion that does not sentimentalize poverty, glorify violence, or apologize for imperialism. He has resisted what he calls the corruption of causes and is proud of the fact that he has never been a spokesman for anything. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, at the time a British colony, on August 17, 1932. His parents were Hindu Indians, descended from indentured laborers brought to the Caribbean island to replace the slaves following abolition. The indentured labor scheme was little better than slavery, but Naipaul’s maternal grandfather, a pundit, was able to build a modest fortune by performing priestly duties. His father, born of desperately poor parents, was given an education by wealthy relatives and became a journalist. In a family that, despite its precarious financial situation, valued education, Naipaul excelled at school, winning one of four highly prized British government scholarships for overseas study. In 1950 he traveled to England to take up his place at Oxford University, where he studied English literature. Although Naipaul’s voice was idiosyncratic from the start, echoes and influences of other writers can be found in his work – Oscar Wilde’s paradoxes, for example, or Evelyn Waugh’s spare prose style. However, it is clear from Naipaul’s autobiographical writings that his major literary
influence was his father, Seepersad Naipaul, whose ambition to be more than a mere journalist, to be a writer, meant “to triumph over darkness” (Naipaul 1984, 32) – the darkness of the limited social and cultural world of colonial Trinidad and the chaos of communal life in a large extended family. Seepersad died at 46, having published only a few stories, but his driving ambition to write was passed on to his son. Another early influence was Charles Dickens, one of the few English writers Naipaul could make sense of as a child. As he explained in his essay “Conrad’s Darkness and Mine,” it took longer for him to appreciate that Joseph Conrad “had been everywhere before me. Not as a man with a cause, but a man offering . . . a vision of the world’s halfmade societies” (2003, 170). Following four disillusioning years at Oxford, Naipaul moved to London to set up as a writer. After some false starts he wrote Miguel Street (1959), a novel in the form of linked short stories set in Port of Spain, written in simple language from the point of view of a boy growing up and observing the foibles of the people around him. This was followed immediately by The Mystic Masseur, published (before Miguel Street) in 1957, a satirical novel about an opportunistic young man who becomes famous as a healer, a writer, and eventually a politician in Trinidad. Despite the satirical tone, The Mystic Masseur gives a sympathetic account of an ambitious but basically well-meaning young man making the most of extremely limited opportunities; in 2001 it was made into a film, directed by Ismail Merchant. The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), another satire, concerns an early Trinidad election, with
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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candidates vying to buy the votes of a cynical electorate. This novel was Naipaul’s only real attempt to write a narrative driven by plot rather than character, and, though entertaining, it does not succeed in creating the kind of dramatic tension characteristic of tightly plotted fiction. In these three early books Naipaul’s laconic humor and precise, understated prose style are already in evidence. This fruitful early period of fiction set in Trinidad culminated in the early masterpiece A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), a long novel loosely based on his father’s life that has been acclaimed as a classic of English literature. Taking his hero from birth to death, Naipaul creates a profound and poignant comedy from the deprivations, misfortunes, and achievements of Mr. Biswas and his children, especially his son Anand, who, like Naipaul himself, is the eldest son and second child. The house that Mr. Biswas eventually provides for his family, bought with borrowed money he will never be able to repay, is a powerful symbol of the difficulties and limitations of a ramshackle colonial society. However tenuous his hold on this house, it is the culmination of years of frustrated attempts to provide a home for his immediate family and escape the shame of communal living with his wife’s family, the Tulsis, with its hardship and cruelties. Naipaul now turned to non-fiction. The Premier of Trinidad, Eric Williams, suggested that he write a book about the Caribbean, and he agreed, with some reluctance: he was worried that writing non-fiction would spoil the subject matter for further fictional treatment. The resulting work was The Middle Passage (1962), the first of a series of travel narratives that have contributed perhaps even more than the novels to his reputation as a perceptive if subjective observer of the world outside the tourist’s milieu. Even in this first travel book, when he was feeling his way, he understood that it was essential to acknowledge his own presence in the book, to the extent of including his own uncertainties and rages, rather than making a pretense of objectivity. He knew he could not write with the magisterial assurance of previous travel books about the Caribbean written by Europeans seeing the region from the outside. This sense of personal identification with his subject matter is further complicated when he comes to his second travel book, An Area of
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Darkness (1964). Here he describes his first visit to India, his ancestral country but nevertheless alien to him; although it was an ancient and mythical place to his family, he was unprepared for India’s realities. During his year in India, Naipaul spent three months in a hotel in Srinigar, described with comic candor in three chapters of the book. While there, though he does not say so, he wrote his fifth novel, Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion (1963). This is the first book he had set in London, and the only book in which there were no nonEnglish characters. He later felt that it was a mistake to write as a third-person omniscient narrator without identifying himself as an outsider in English society, and he reworked some of the material in later works such as Half a Life (2001). This concern with the ethics of point of view has been a longstanding preoccupation in Naipaul’s work. His next book was another novel, The Mimic Men (1967b), written in the first person in the form of the mordant and elegiac memoirs of Ralph Singh, a disgraced West Indian politician in exile in London. Unlike Naipaul’s earlier books about the politics of the region, there is no overt satire, and little comedy, in The Mimic Men. In contrast, the novella A Flag on the Island, also published in 1967 in a book of the same name along with a selection of short stories, is almost violent in its satire of Caribbean society. From 1966 to 1968, Naipaul spent two years researching and writing a historical work about Trinidad, The Loss of El Dorado (1969). Having been commissioned to write the book, he found to his surprise that little had been written about Trinidad’s history and he had to piece together his narrative from archival material in England and Spain. With his novelist’s imagination, The Loss of El Dorado is far more than a historical account. His interest is in the historical figures and what drives them: the self-deception that so often leads to disaster. Several of these people reappear in A Way in the World (1994). Naipaul’s next project was the most unconventional of his fictions to date. In a Free State (1971), which won the Booker Prize, contains five sections: a prologue and epilogue purporting to be diary entries, two short stories, and the title piece, a novella set in Africa. The only continuity of plot, character, and setting between these sections of
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the book is that the diarist/narrator in the prologue and epilogue, who witnesses incidents of casual brutality among tourists toward local people and other travelers, appears to be the same person, perhaps Naipaul himself. The other three stories all feature characters in self-imposed exile from their native lands. In “One Out of Many” a domestic servant accompanies his master from Bombay to Washington, where he gains financial security but finds that life loses its meaning. In “Tell Me Who to Kill” the exile is a West Indian who has come to London to look after his younger brother. The younger brother, however, manages to adapt to English society while the narrator descends into insanity. The title story, narrated in the third person, concerns two white settlers traveling through Africa during a time of civil war, encountering such dereliction and violence that the safety of the compound, once reached, seems compromised. During the journey they reveal themselves in their conversation and actions as flawed and self-serving, despite their stated good intentions. In a Free State examines with subtlety the questions of freedom and responsibility among people set adrift from their origins. Naipaul’s next major book did not appear until 1975, although a collection of essays was published in 1972. Guerrillas (1975) was the novel that made Naipaul’s name in the United States. A taut and violent story of racial tension, rape, and murder on a fictional Caribbean island, it once again looks at the dangers encountered by visitors who meddle in the affairs of a society they only partly understand, whether they are well-meaning people trying to help or self-deceiving thrill-seekers. Naipaul has said of Guerrillas that its shock value is part of its success, and that he intended it as a moralistic work about people who make a game of the serious business of interfering in the lives of those less fortunate than themselves, secure in the belief that they can always escape. His next novel, A Bend in the River (1979), concerns a member of an East African Indian community, Salim, who leaves his troubled home town and moves inland to a town on the Congo River. A less violent and shocking novel than Guerrillas, with most of the violence described at a remove, A Bend in the River nevertheless engages with deeply disturbing themes of displacement and racial conflict. The town on the bend in the river undergoes wars and upheavals, while Salim
becomes involved with a European woman, the wife of a historian at the newly established university. The affair ends in violence, Salim’s business is taken over by incompetent Africans, and, after a short period in prison, he escapes down the river to an uncertain future in England. Following these three novels of the 1970s, Naipaul turned again to traveling. He had visited India during the Emergency of 1975 and written a short book, India: A Wounded Civilization (1977). He now embarked on a long journey through four Islamic countries, Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The resulting book was Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981). With his next book, Finding the Center (1984), Naipaul begins a preoccupation with his evolution as a writer that has persisted ever since. In the first part of the book, “Prologue to an Autobiography,” he writes of his early life and the beginnings of his writing career, recounting how the first sentence of Miguel Street was written. This was the breakthrough he had been waiting and hoping for, the key to a vein of material he had previously disregarded and which fed into his first four published books. That Naipaul had already been writing stories based on his Trinidad memories before this time is revealed in letters he wrote to his father during the early 1950s, published in 1999. However, this narrative of beginnings has attained an almost magical status with Naipaul. The legend continues in The Enigma of Arrival (1987), his next novel. The Enigma of Arrival reads like a memoir of 10 years living in the Wiltshire countryside, with a narrative of his journey from boyhood in Trinidad to the writing life in England. Nevertheless, Naipaul has explained that although the narrator is indeed himself, the book is fiction, and the other characters are constructions based only loosely upon the people he encountered during this time. Naipaul’s particular achievement in this book is to meditate upon his own place in this world, which despite his preconceptions turns out not to be a complete and integrated society but decaying and fragmented, populated with people who can be vulnerable, ignorant, or even deluded. These people are seen scrupulously through the point of view of the narrator, who does not know them well, and his oblique view of their lives is laced with his speculative musings. The language of the book is ruminative, full of echoes and repetitions,
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but also fascinated with itself: words themselves become part of the story. The Enigma of Arrival is a unique and personal book, a meditation on Naipaul’s own past and his place in this changing world. Two travel books followed: A Turn in the South (1989), in which Naipaul travels through the southern states of the United States, investigating race and religion in what he said was a new way, allowing himself to be guided more by the people he meets, and letting them speak for themselves. India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990) was the result of further travels in India, and is a more hopeful assessment of the country than his earlier books. He sees India’s violent and unstable present as a liberating, transitional stage that must be lived through before India can become a mature nation. In 1994, Naipaul published his most unusual book yet, A Way in the World. In some editions it is subtitled “A Sequence,” by Naipaul’s choice. Other editions have called it a novel. While much of the material is fictional, A Way in the World is an essay on history and travel using his own experience and that of other historical figures, sometimes in their own personae, at other times thinly disguised. Much of the material in A Way in the World is imaginatively reworked from The Loss of El Dorado. In Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998) he revisits the countries covered in Among the Believers. Further reflections on his writing career followed in the literary memoirs Reading and Writing: A Personal Account (2003) and A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling (2007). In between, Naipaul published two novels, more conventional in form than anything he has written since A Bend in the River. Half a Life (2001) and its sequel Magic Seeds (2004) tell the story of Willie Chandran, an Indian of mixed-caste background, who travels to England as a young man, and subsequently lives in Eastern Africa for a time before joining a guerrilla group in India. These books offer a bleak view of the contemporary world – encompassing Africa, India, and England – and of sexual relations and political activism. In A Writer’s People Naipaul writes, “All my life I have had to think about ways of looking and how they alter the configuration of the world” (2007, 2). Defining his point of view has been a matter of
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the greatest importance to Naipaul. He has never claimed objectivity: his view is subjective, even prejudiced, but scrupulously honest and independent. His refusal to accede to postcolonial or Marxist ideas of political redemption has drawn criticism from scholars and writers such as Edward Said, Rob Nixon, and Derek Walcott, who believe that his kind of trenchant criticism and satire is an unfair reaction to the efforts of emerging nations. Other critics argue that the value of Naipaul’s work lies in the painful honesty of his vision combined with the hard-won clarity of his prose. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (WF); Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); London in Fiction (BIF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/ Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Barnouw, D. (2003). Naipaul’s Strangers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dooley, G. (2006). V. S. Naipaul: Man and Writer. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. French, P. (2008). The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul. London: Picador. Jussawalla, F. (ed.) (1997). Conversations with V. S. Naipaul. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Merchant, I. (dir.) (2001). The Mystic Masseur. Merchant Ivory Films. Naipaul, V. S. (1957). The Mystic Masseur. London: Deutsch. Naipaul, V. S. (1958). The Suffrage of Elvira. London: Deutsch. Naipaul, V. S. (1959). Miguel Street. London: Deutsch. Naipaul, V. S. (1961). A House for Mr. Biswas. London: Deutsch. Naipaul, V. S. (1962). The Middle Passage. London: London: Deutsch. Naipaul, V. S. (1963). Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion. London: Deutsch. Naipaul, V. S. (1964). An Area of Darkness. London: Deutsch. Naipaul, V. S. (1967a). A Flag on the Island. London: Deutsch.
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Naipaul, V. S. (1967b). The Mimic Men. London: Deutsch. Naipaul, V. S. (1969). The Loss of El Dorado. London: Deutsch. Naipaul, V. S. (1971). In a Free State. London: Deutsch. Naipaul, V. S. (1975). Guerrillas. London: Deutsch. Naipaul, V. S. (1977). India: A Wounded Civilization. London: Deutsch. Naipaul, V. S. (1979). A Bend in the River. London: Deutsch. Naipaul, V. S. (1981). Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey. London: Deutsch. Naipaul, V. S. (1984). Finding the Centre. London: Deutsch. Naipaul, V. S. (1987). The Enigma of Arrival. London: Viking. Naipaul, V. S. (1989). A Turn in the South. London: Viking. Naipaul, V. S. (1990). India: A Million Mutinies Now. London: Heinemann. Naipaul, V. S. (1994). A Way in the World. London: Heinemann. Naipaul, V. S. (1998). Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples. London: Little, Brown. Naipaul, V. S. (1999). Letters between a Father and Son. London: Little, Brown. Naipaul, V. S. (2001). Half a Life. London: Picador. Naipaul, V. S. (2002). The Writer and the World: Essays. New York: Knopf. Naipaul, V. S. (2003). Literary Occasions: Essays. New York: Knopf. Naipaul, V. S. (2004). Magic Seeds. London: Picador. Naipaul, V. S. (2007). A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling. London: Picador.
Narayan, R. K. JOHN THIEME
Although significant Indian fiction in English by Bengali writers dates back to the nineteenth century, R. K. Narayan (Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayan Swami) is widely regarded as one of the founding figures of the Indian novel in English. Along with Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao, he came to the fore in the 1930s as one of the “Big Three” of anglophone Indian fiction who, thanks to British publication, helped to establish the genre internationally. His first novel, Swami and Friends (1935), was published in London with the assistance of Graham Greene, who became his lifelong friend and mentor, offering advice on all of his novels up to The Vendor of Sweets (1967).
Greene’s many tributes to Narayan include his often quoted comment, “Without him I could never have known what it is like to be Indian” (1980, p. v). He also described Narayan as an Indian Chekhov, a categorization that was subsequently repeatedly applied to him (Ram & Ram 188–92) to the point of becoming a cliche. In Greene’s view, Narayan’s Chekhovian quality lay in the ambivalence of his tone, in which “[s]adness and humor . . . go hand in hand like twins” (1980, p. x), and Narayan has often used irony as a vehicle for exposing the foibles of his small-town characters. It is, however, a view that only partly identifies the distinctive qualities of his fictional mode. His work also incorporates layers of Hindu myth and symbol, and its highly individual flavor emerges from its fusion of Westernized social comedy and traditional Indian fabulation. Born in Madras (now Chennai) on October 10, 1906, Narayan was brought up in the city and subsequently in Mysore, where his father was a headmaster. Though he lived in Mysore for most of his adult life, his final years were spent in Chennai; in the second half of his career he made several visits to the United States, where he was a visiting writer at various universities, including the University of Missouri in Kansas City and the University of Texas at Austin. He died in Chennai on May 13, 2001. Swami and Friends depicts an education and childhood in which Tamil and English are both powerful influences on the young protagonist’s development, and Narayan, who was trilingual, also speaking Kannada, drew inspiration from the literatures of both these languages. In his early fiction, Tamil influences are generally overshadowed by the pressure to tailor his material for an English readership; in mid-career, at a time when Hinduism was in vogue in the US, American publication allowed him freer rein to explore the Hindu side of his dual cultural inheritance – highlighted by his use of intertexts from the Sanskrit epics and the Puranas in novels such as The Guide (1958) and The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961), which are among his finest work. The title of Swami and Friends affords an example of how Narayan’s first novels were reshaped to suit perceptions about English tastes. It was chosen by Greene and the novel’s publisher, Hamish Hamilton, to echo Kipling’s Stalky & Co. (1899), and in some respects Swami can be seen as
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NARAYAN, R. K.
a south Indian equivalent of Kipling’s novel, in which the imperial ethic pervades the public school setting and, toward the end, it becomes explicit that the English school is a breeding ground for the future custodians of Empire. Narayan’s early reading included the Boy’s Own Paper, a periodical whose tales of derring-do and schoolboy life often promoted imperial ideals. But in crucial respects Swami departs from such attitudes, particularly in a scene in which Swami and his friends align themselves with the freedom struggle against the British by shouting Gandhian slogans and breaking window panes on a day of national protest. Throughout the novel, despite his lightness of touch, Narayan represents the school as a site of struggle and, while ostensibly operating within the conventions of English schoolboy fiction, subtly subverts them. Swami forms a loose trilogy with The Bachelor of Arts (1937) and The English Teacher (1945), which also focus on a young man’s development at various points in the colonial educational system. Narayan was deeply affected by the death, in 1939, of his young wife Rajam, whom he had wed in a “love marriage” and to whom he was devoted; the latter half of The English Teacher (published in the US as Grateful to Life and Death) contains an autobiographically based account of the hero’s attempts to make contact with his recently deceased wife through a medium. Narayan’s memoir My Days (1974a) and the definitive biography of his early years (Ram & Ram 1996) show how closely the novel’s events are based on his own experience. Published in the middle of this “trilogy,” The Dark Room (1938), in which a sensitive, independently minded woman finds herself unable to escape from a loveless marriage, has been seen as an early feminist text, though its sympathetic depiction of the protagonist is contrasted with a more hostile portrait of another “modern” woman, who has entered the world of work. In Swami and Friends, Narayan first created the small town of Malgudi, which was to provide the setting for all the novels he wrote during the next six decades. In My Days, he records how it suggested itself to his imagination: “Malgudi with its little railway station swam into view, all readymade, with a character called Swaminathan running down the platform peering into the faces of passengers, and grimacing at a bearded face”
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(79–80). Narayan took the view that people’s identities are firmly rooted in their backgrounds, and Malgudi is integral to his fiction, not only as a physical environment, but also as the focal point of his characters’ psychic geography. The traditional heart of the town, as characterized by the eponymous protagonist of The World of Nagaraj (1990), is a very narrowly demarcated “world,” and several of Narayan’s heroes, including Krishna in The English Teacher, Sriram in Waiting for the Mahatma (1955), and Jagan in The Vendor of Sweets are similarly unaware of what lies beyond the immediate parameters of Malgudi’s center. Although it is an invented place, Malgudi has frequently been identified with Mysore; asked about its relationship to actual places, Narayan gave varying responses at different points in his career. On one occasion he said that it was “nowhere” (Ram & Ram 106); on another, he commented, “All I can say is that it is imaginary and not to be found on any map (although the University of Chicago has published a literary atlas with a map of India indicating the location of Malgudi). If I explain that Malgudi is a small town in south India I shall only be expressing a half-truth, for the characteristics of Malgudi seem to me to be universal” (1984, 8). Often, however, he chose to emphasize the other side of the “halftruth” by insisting on the south Indian specificity of Malgudi, and his fictional town draws on aspects of Mysore, the Purasawalkam area of Madras where he grew up, and Coimbatore. Ultimately, though, the suggestion that Malgudi is “nowhere” should perhaps be taken most seriously, as it liberates the small town from fixed definition, recognizing the extent to which it provided Narayan with a space in which to explore his imaginative preoccupations, many of which are concerned with the changing role of the Brahmin caste in twentieth-century south India. Narayan’s finest novels are those of his middle period: Mr. Sampath (1949), The Financial Expert (1952), The Guide, The Man-Eater of Malgudi, The Vendor of Sweets, and The Painter of Signs (1976). They explore the conflicts that occur when seemingly settled Hindu values, personified by a Malgudi small businessman engaged in a Brahminical profession such as printing, are challenged by the incursions of an alien force. By the end the protagonist has usually managed to reestablish the order that characterized his life at the
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outset, but in the later novels of this period Narayan is less sanguine about Malgudi’s ability to withstand the encroachments of the outside world, as the pace of social change accelerates. Formally, these novels follow ostensibly the same pattern, subtly mixing social comedy and mythic fable and in so doing staging a dialectic similar to that expressed in their thematic conflicts. Waiting for the Mahatma, in which the Gandhian freedom struggle plays a part, has been seen as Narayan’s most political novel, but here too public issues are explored through the microcosm of personal relationships. Commenting on two of the novels from this period, Mr. Sampath and The Vendor of Sweets, V. S. Naipaul (1977) has described how, after having initially read Narayan as a writer of social comedies, he later came to view his novels as Hindu fables that dramatize a conflict between quietism and an impulse toward social action that is usually defeated. This assessment sums up both the central thematic conflict of these novels and identifies their central generic tension between Western and Hindu narrative modes. The mythic dimension comes to assume greater prominence than may initially seem to be the case, but arguably Naipaul is mistaken to see it as eclipsing the gently ironic comedy. Thus in The Man-Eater of Malgudi, the intrusions of a bullying taxidermist, Vasu – the eponymous man-eater – into the life of a passive Malgudi printer, Nataraj, are explained as an exemplification of the ancient story of the rakshasa (demon) Bhasmasura, a tale from the Puranas, which Narayan has retold in Gods, Demons and Others (1964). The suggestion is that the same archetypal conflicts recur across time and space, but this does not obviate the fact that the novel is rich in ironic commentary on the everyday world of its south Indian characters, and this element remains prominent to the end. During the second half of his life, when Narayan spent several periods at US universities, he was amused by American attempts to cast him in the role of a mystical Indian, an experience that he writes about in the title essay of Reluctant Guru (1974b). However, despite his ironic response to being stereotyped in this way, his writing around this time draws on classical Tamil literature more extensively than hitherto. During this period he produced Gods, Demons
and Others, a collection of ancient myths and legends, and his own retellings of Tamil versions of the Sanskrit epics, The Ramayana (1972) and The Mahabharata (1978). Written in the US, his novel The Guide tells the story of the transformation of a tourist guide into a holy man and may reflect his sense that the Western vogue for mystical Indianness legitimized his recourse to some of the earliest wellsprings of his imagination. So, just as Narayan’s early fiction was influenced by the anticipated English reception of his work, now his writing was partly colored by perceptions of the American market. At the same time, however, he continued to be attentive to his extensive Indian readership, printing editions of his novels from his own press, Indian Thought Publications. In the later novels of Narayan’s middle period there is a perceptible change in the geography of Malgudi, complemented by transformations in the protagonists’ responses to the intrusion of outside forces. As the town expands beyond its traditional commercial hub, Market Road, and its most prestigious residential location, Kabir Street, Narayan’s Brahmin protagonists find that their cognitive maps of their environment are challenged, and they increasingly have to contend with forces of modernity that interrogate their conservative worldviews. In The Painter of Signs, a novel set in 1972, the text moves beyond the narrowly circumscribed center of Malgudi. The eponymous hero, Raman, pursues his occupation in a house by the river, a short distance away from the town center, which he feels is becoming increasingly busy and uncongenial. He encounters modernity in the shape of a zealous young family planner, Daisy, whose Western name is an index of her distance from orthodox Hindu views of women’s roles. Raman assists her with her campaigning work in village India, much as an earlier Narayan protagonist, Sriram in Waiting for the Mahatma, follows a female Gandhian activist into mountain villages. As in the earlier novel, the main focus is on the challenge that a reforming social agenda offers to the hero’s mental equanimity, and Raman’s attraction to Daisy’s modernity is complemented by thoughts of moving away from his house by the river, either into the New Extension area of the town or by leaving Malgudi altogether. These, however, are no more than passing ideas and are quickly supplanted by a
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NARAYAN, R. K.
reaffirmation of his sense of belonging in the house where he lives with his aunt. However, for Raman there can be no uncomplicated continuation of what Naipaul has called the “old equilibrium” (1977, 13–36) of traditional south Indian Brahmin life. This worldview is personified by his aunt and when, feeling she has been replaced by Daisy, she departs for Benaras and Daisy, with whom the liminal Raman has entered into a loose form of marriage, also deserts him, he becomes the sole occupant of the house by the river. Raman experiences a double sense of loss: dispossessed of his older culture, he is also unable to enter the progressive modern world that Daisy represents. Malgudi in 1972 has become a bleaker place for the typical Narayan hero. Narayan’s final novels were A Tiger for Malgudi (1983), in which most of the story is told from the eponymous tiger’s point of view, and Talkative Man (1986) and The World of Nagaraj (1990), in both of which he displays a fascination with the sources and transmission of Indian storytelling, as exemplified by the figure of Narada, the tale-telling sage of classical Hindu discourse, who is burdened with the dubious gift of gossip. In his final extended work of prose fiction, the short novella The Grandmother’s Tale (1993a), Narayan deserted Malgudi to tell a story from his youth in a work that appears to mix fact and fiction. Narayan was also a prolific writer in genres other than the novel. His collections of short fiction, in which stories are often repeated, include An Astrologer’s Day (1947), Lawley Road (1956), A Horse and Two Goats (1970), Old and New (1981), and Under the Banyan Tree (1985). His non-fiction includes the travel books Mysore (1939) and The Emerald Route (1977) as well as My Days. His essays are collected in A Writer’s Nightmare (1988), A Story-Teller’s World (1989), and Salt and Sawdust (1993b). Indian Thought (1997) is a “miscellany” of pieces from a journal he edited during World War II, which includes his play Watchman of the Lake. SEE ALSO: Anand, Mulk Raj (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Greene, Graham (BIF); Humor and Satire (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Naipaul, V. S. (WF); Rao, Raja (WF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Chew, S. (1973). A Proper Detachment: The Novels of R. K. Narayan. In W. Walsh (ed.), Readings in Commonwealth Literature. Oxford: Clarendon, pp. 58–74. Greene, G. (1980). Introduction. In R. K. Narayan, The Bachelor of Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. v–x. Harrex, S. (1978). The Fire and the Offering: The English Language Novel of India, 1935–1970. Calcutta: Writers Workshop. Kain, G. (ed.) (1993). R. K. Narayan: Contemporary Critical Essays. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Kain, G. (2004). R. K. Narayan. In P. Piciucco (ed.), A Companion to Indian Fiction in English. New Delhi: Atlantic, pp. 1–31. Khair, T. (2001). Babu Fictions: Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Novels. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. McLeod, A. (ed.) (1994). R. K. Narayan: Critical Perspectives. New Delhi: Sterling. Mishra, P. (2003). R. K. Narayan. In A. Mehrotra (ed.), A History of Indian Literature in English. London: Hurst, pp. 193–208. Naipaul, V. S. (1977). India: A Wounded Civilization. London: Deutsch. Narayan, R. K. (1935). Swami and Friends. London: Hamish Hamilton. Narayan, R. K. (1937). The Bachelor of Arts. London: Nelson. Narayan, R. K. (1938). The Dark Room. London: Macmillan. Narayan, R. K. (1939). Mysore. Mysore: Government Press. Narayan, R. K. (1945). The English Teacher. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Narayan, R. K. (1947). An Astrologer’s Day and Other Stories. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Narayan, R. K. (1949). Mr. Sampath – The Printer of Malgudi. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Narayan, R. K. (1952). The Financial Expert. London: Methuen. Narayan, R. K. (1955). Waiting for the Mahatma. London: Methuen. Narayan, R. K. (1956). Lawley Road and Other Stories. Mysore: Indian Thought. Narayan, R. K. (1958). The Guide. London: Methuen. Narayan, R. K. (1961). The Man-Eater of Malgudi. London: Heinemann. Narayan, R. K. (1964). Gods, Demons and Others. New York: Viking. Narayan, R. K. (1967). The Vendor of Sweets. London: Bodley Head. Narayan, R. K. (1970). A Horse and Two Goats and Other Stories. London: Bodley Head.
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Narayan, R. K. (1972). The Ramayana: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic. New York: Viking. Narayan, R. K. (1974a). My Days: A Memoir. New York: Viking. Narayan, R. K. (1974b). Reluctant Guru. New Delhi: Orient. Narayan, R. K. (1976). The Painter of Signs. London: Heinemann. Narayan, R. K. (1977). The Emerald Route. Bangalore: Government of Karnataka. Narayan, R. K. (1978). The Mahabharata: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic. New York: Viking. Narayan, R. K. (1981). Old and New: Eighteen Short Stories. Mysore: Indian Thought. Narayan, R. K. (1983). A Tiger for Malgudi. London: Heinemann. Narayan, R. K. (1984). Malgudi Days. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Narayan, R. K. (1985). Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories. London: Heinemann. Narayan, R. K. (1986). Talkative Man. London: Heinemann. Narayan, R. K. (1988). A Writer’s Nightmare: Selected Essays 1958–1988. New Delhi: Penguin. Narayan, R. K. (1989). A Story-Teller’s World: Stories, Essay, Sketches. New Delhi: Penguin. Narayan, R. K. (1990). The World of Nagaraj. London: Heinemann. Narayan, R. K. (1993a). The Grandmother’s Tale: Three Novellas. London: Heinemann. Narayan, R. K. (1993b). Salt and Sawdust: Stories and Table-Talk. New Delhi: Penguin. Narayan, R. K. (1997). Indian Thought: A Miscellany. New Delhi: Penguin,. Ram, S., & Ram, N. (1996). R. K. Narayan: The Early Years: 1906–1945. New Delhi: Viking. Rao, R. (2004). R. K. Narayan. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Sankaran, C. (1993). The Myth Connection: The Use of Hindu Mythology in Some Novels of Raja Rao and R. K. Narayan. Ahmedabad: Allied. South Asian Review (2002). R. K. Narayan [special issue], 23(1). Thieme, J. (2007). R. K. Narayan. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Walsh, W. (1982). R. K. Narayan. London: Heinemann.
New Zealand Fiction LAWRENCE JONES
In 1900 New Zealand fiction was still a colonial transplant from Great Britain, adapting to a South
Pacific environment. Throughout the “late colonial” phase (c.1890–1935) the New Zealand novel was a minor adjunct of the English novel, mostly published in London and written for a primarily British audience. The New Zealand short story also used conventional English forms to present local materials, but was aimed at a more local reading public in New Zealand newspapers and New Zealand and Australian magazines. The novels and stories typically celebrated the colonizing endeavor to build what was often called “a better Britain of the Southern Seas.” Viewing that endeavor through a social Darwinist lens, the fiction also dealt with what was viewed as the necessary costs of “progress” – the destruction of much of the native forest to clear land for pasture and crops, the decimation or absorption of the Maori people and their culture, and the hardships and suffering of the early European (Pakeha) settlers. Significant late colonial novels of settlement included William Satchell’s melodramatic but questioning The Toll of the Bush (1905), Jane Mander’s soberly realistic Allen Adair (1925), and Edith Searle Grossmann’s more didactic and feminist The Heart of the Bush (1910). Important historical novels included Satchell’s epic of the New Zealand Wars, The Greenstone Door (1914), and Alan Mulgan’s panoramic picture of New Zealand life at the turn of the century, Spur of Morning (1934). Late colonial short fiction included Alfred A. Grace’s stories of Maori–Pakeha interaction in Tales of a Dying Race (1905), Blanche Baughan’s sketches of pioneer life in Brown Bread from a Colonial Oven (1912), and G. B. Lancaster’s Kiplingesque accounts of backcountry sheep and cattle station workers in Sons o’ Men (1904). The swan among these late colonial geese was the expatriated Katherine Mansfield, whose New Zealand stories moved from such dark and violent frontier-life stories as “The Woman at the Store” (1912) to her modernist masterpieces evoking the family life of her Wellington girlhood such as “Prelude” (1918) and “At the Bay” (1921). The writers of the “provincial” phase of New Zealand fiction (c.1932–65) were critical of their society as it moved into the Depression and then World War II. They rejected the literary and social views of their late colonial elders, focusing on their narrow conformity to puritanical social mores and their treatment of the Maori and the
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NEW ZEALAND FICTION
land as well as on their traditional literary modes and conventions. The makers of these writers’ preferred mode of critical realism were Frank Sargeson (1903–82) in his Andersonian stories of marginalized rural males such as “Old Man’s Story” (1945) and “The Making of a New Zealander” (1939), and John Mulgan (1911–45) in his darkly Hemingwayesque novel of such a man, Man Alone (1939). Other works of critical realism depict Maori life – early and rural in Roderick Finlayson’s stories in Brown Man’s Burden (1938), later and urban in Noel Hilliard’s naturalistic Maori Girl (1961) – or present dour pictures of small-town and urban family life, as in David Ballantyne’s The Cunninghams (1948), Bill Pearson’s Coal Flat (1963), Ian Cross’s The God Boy (1957), and the Joycean stories of Maurice Duggan. Darker and more inwardly focused portrayals of New Zealand provincial life and its effect on sensitive and nonconformist women can be found in such novels in the modernist-impressionist mode as Robin Hyde’s The Godwits Fly (1938), Janet Frame’s Owls Do Cry (1957), and Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s Spinster (1958). New Zealand fiction since 1965 has been influenced by a variety of changes. The traditional provincial puritan monoculture has evolved into a more complex society responding to the forces of consumerism, globalization, feminism, the sexual revolution, and the Maori renaissance. The place of the writer has moved from the margins toward the social center as an expanded cultural infrastructure has grown up, including prizes and awards, grants, residencies and fellowships, writing schools, and diverse indigenous publishing, film, and television industries. The result has been a much expanded literary output from a much larger and more diversified group of writers, many of them full-time professionals, depicting the past and present of their society from a less oppositional, more complex perspective than that of their provincial predecessors in a richer mix of fictional modes, ranging from the highly developed realism of Maurice Gee, the period’s finest novelist, and Owen Marshall, its finest short story writer, to the mix of metafiction with “faction” in C. K. Stead or with magic realism in the later Frame. The writers of this “post-provincial” period come from at least three literary generations: Frame and Sargeson both continued from the
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provincial period well into the post-provincial, while Gee, Stead, and Maurice Shadbolt began late in the provincial period and matured in the post-provincial and were joined in the 1970s and early 1980s by Marshall, Fiona Kidman, Vincent O’Sullivan, and the first significant Maori writers in English – Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace, and Keri Hulme. After 1985 such writers as Fiona Farrell, Elizabeth Knox, Barbara Anderson, Catherine Chidgey, Damien Wilkins, Alan Duff, and Lloyd Jones arrived on the scene. All of these writers worked both in the novel and in short fiction. Historical novels have been a feature of the period. The nineteenth-century New Zealand Wars have been depicted in Shadbolt’s trilogy – The Season of the Jew (1986), Monday’s Warriors (1990), and The House of Strife (1993) – from an ironic outsider’s perspective, and in Ihimaera’s The Matriarch (1986) from a Maori viewpoint. The sweep of the twentieth century has been depicted in Gee’s Plumb trilogy – Plumb (1978), Meg (1981), and Sole Survivor (1983), and in Grace’s Cousins (1992), each tracing a family through three generations. Other novels capture distinctive eras: in Stead’s All Visitors Ashore (1984), the literary-artistic-political early 1950s; in Jones’s The Book of Fame (2000), the 1905 All Blacks rugby tour of the United Kingdom; in Knox’s autobiographical The High Jump: A New Zealand Childhood (2000), growing up in the 1960s near Wellington. From the intense focus on a trio of west coast outsiders in Hulme’s The Bone People (1984) to the revealing cross-section of 1990s Wellington in Gee’s Crime Story (1994); from the exploration of the underside of Maori urban life in Duff’s Once Were Warriors (1990) to the ironic view of the staff of a Wellington girls’ school in Anderson’s Girls High (1990); and from the small-town everyday life in Marshall’s short stories to New Zealanders in the United States in Frame’s Living in the Maniototo (1979) and Wilkins’s The Fainter (2006), New Zealand fiction of the later twentieth century richly depicted the varied lives of contemporary New Zealanders. By 2000 New Zealand fiction had achieved its own complex identity. SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative
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~ ~I W A T H I O N G ’O N G UG
Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Indigenous Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF); South Pacific Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Evans, P. (1990). The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature. Auckland: Penguin. Hankin, C. (ed.) (1976). Critical Essays on the New Zealand Novel. Auckland: Heinemann Educational. Hankin, C. (ed.) (1982). Critical Essays on the New Zealand Short Story. Auckland: Heinemann Educational. Jones, J., & Jones, J. (1984). New Zealand Fiction. Boston: Twayne. New, W. H. (1987). Dreams of Speech and Violence: The Art of the Short Story in Canada and New Zealand. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sturm, T. (ed.) (1998). The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English, 2nd edn. Auckland: Oxford University Press.
Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o JAMES OGUDE
Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o is one of the most influential African writers today, not only for his creative work but also for his wide-ranging contributions on Africa’s cultural thought and political life. Indeed, the role of the writer in shaping the cultural and political life of his people has been an enduring theme in his works. As novelist, playwright, and thinker, Ng~ ug~ı has been concerned with the role of culture as a source of historical memory and as a weapon against all forms of oppressive regimes. But he has also showed how narrative, specifically imaginative literature, can be an agent of history and selfdefinition, an instrument for taming and naming one’s environment, and has explored literature’s role in the restoration of African communities dislocated by colonialism and by repressive postcolonial states. Ng~ ug~ı argues that colonial subjects were detached from the mainstream of history and that therefore their identity was shaped by forces alien to their local universe. The search for Africa’s
identity lay in a project to reassert a radical form of Africa’s historiography conceived from below. At the heart of Ng~ ug~ı’s restorative project is also his call for the return to roots and the privileging of ethnic languages in the production and consumption of local cultures. He argues that because only African languages have the capacity to recover those African cultures repressed by colonialism and to bear a national history and memory, and because literature as a cultural institution works through images and language embodied in the collective experience of a people, genuine national literature can flower only in local indigenous languages. Born January 5, 1938 in central Kenya, Ng~ ug~ı began his childhood education in a local mission school before joining a school founded by the G~ık~ uy~ u Kar~ıng’a (Pure) Education Association. He received his secondary education at Alliance High School, Kenya’s first full-fledged secondary school for African students, run by an alliance of Protestant denominations in Kenya. It was at Alliance that Ng~ ug~ı developed a complex religious awareness, which provided the basis of his intertextual use of the Bible and Christian mythology in his works. But his exposure to the English school syllabus also began here and was later reinforced when he moved to Makerere College for his university education. With its emphasis on English language and literature, Makerere influenced Ng~ ug~ı immensely. Indeed, it is in Penpoint, a journal founded in Makerere, that Ng~ ug~ı’s first writings were published. The influence of F. R. Leavis’s notion of the “great tradition,” which was the basis of literary education at Makerere, is evident in Ng~ ug~ı’s early writing. The idea of the writer as a medium and of writing as an unconscious act of imagination, which Ng~ ug~ı explores in Homecoming (1972), has its roots in the Makerere tradition. And yet, Ng~ ug~ı also grew up under the shadow of colonial tyranny and African struggles for uy~ u independence. His family and the greater G~ık~ community were dispossessed of their land, and it is not surprising that the metaphor of land alienation remains pivotal in virtually all of Ng~ ug~ı’s writing. He also witnessed the 1952–60 Emergency period in Kenya, marked by the Mau Mau war of resistance against land alienation and general British rule in Kenya. The significance of Mau Mau for Ng~ ug~ı as a writer and activist has
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~ ~I WA T H I O N G ’O N G UG
continued to grow and haunts each text he writes; many critics have argued that Ng~ ug~ı’s writings are often intrinsically linked with his biographical history – a painful memory of a violent past. Ng~ ug~ı himself writes, “The novelist is haunted by a sense of the past. His work is often an attempt to come to terms with ‘the thing that has been,’ a struggle as it were, to sensitively register his encounter with history, his people’s history” (1972, 39). Themes of dislocation, abandonment, and exile therefore dominate his works, set against a backdrop of repressive structures of control and imprisonment, albeit in different social and historical contexts. Ng~ ug~ı’s early novels are part of a group of foundational narratives in Africa that grapple with issues of national formation. They detail a reassertion of Africa’s history and resistance in the face of colonial hegemony. Themes of loss and redemption dominate The River Between (1965) and Weep Not, Child (1964), which are also infused with a strong sense of cultural nationalism and an anxiety about the intersections of tradition and modernity. The reassertion of Africa’s cultural agency in Ng~ ug~ı’s early work does not imply a return to the past, but a search for a synthesis between G~ık~ uy~ u beliefs and European systems – a project of reinvention and translation of culture into tools of liberation. The search for a syncretic culture is more poignant in The River Between – Ng~ ug~ı’s most eloquent portrayal of the confrontation between nascent G~ık~ uy~ u nationalism and the early imposition of British hegemony in central Kenya. Ng~ ug~ı explores the confrontation through the symbolism of geographical divisions and traditional rivalry between two ridges, Kameno and Makuyu. The geographical divides and historical rivalry of the communities are paradigmatic of the novel’s organization, both in thematic and structural terms. The intense struggle between the Christians and traditionalists (the Kiama) that surfaces with the arrival of Christian missionaries is fought along the lines of these old rivalries. The text details the struggle to control the hearts and minds of the G~ık~ uy~ u through a range of colonial institutions like the Christian churches and schools, and the local responses to them. River also anticipates a number of other issues dealing with power and leadership that Ng~ ug~ı takes up in his later novels; however, he is
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keen to show that leadership driven by selfinterest, such as Kabonyi’s, or simply not rooted in the beliefs of the people, such as Waiyaki’s, is bound to fail. It is in what critics have dubbed his Mau Mau novels, most notably Weep Not, Child and A Grain of Wheat (1967), that Ng~ ug~ı shows the full impact of colonial penetration into G~ık~ uy~ u land. They also best capture his traumatic past and the violent history that informs his early childhood. Of all Ng~ ug~ı’s works, these are the only two novels in which Mau Mau is not represented in heroic terms, but rather with some detachment and ambivalence. Ng~ ug~ı, whose family was directly involved in the Emergency, draws attention to both fear and doubt that Mau Mau generated on both sides of the divide – among the British colonialists and the ordinary G~ık~ uy~ u. Weep Not, Child, regarded by many as the novel that most parallels Ng~ ug~ı’s early childhood, is an autobiographical narrative that details the dilemma of a young man growing under the shadow of Mau Mau war and colonial tyranny. The life of the young protagonist, Njoroge, closely parallels Ng~ ug~ı’s: his family is dispossessed of their land and they are reduced to being squatters (ahoi) on the white man’s farm. Again, Njoroge, like Ng~ ug~ı, is torn between the Christian idealism acquired through mission education and his sympathies with the nationalist demand for land restitution. It is this text that best crystallizes the dilemma of Ng~ ug~ı as liberal humanist and devout Christian, shaped largely by colonial educational institutions in tension with his other self – the son of a landless G~ık~ uy~ u boy growing up in the shadow of colonialism. The text can also be read as dealing with the moral authority of Mau Mau and its contested histories. If the idea of loss is captured in the dark cloud of violence that hangs over the land, the possibility of restoration is explored through the life and romance of the young protagonists, Njoroge and Mwihaki. In Weep Not, Ng~ ug~ı presents us with a society in transition; it is in conflict and divided between the settler colonialists and the natives, the homeguards and the ahoi. Ng~ ug~ı’s unresolved dilemma is how to achieve restoration and gesture toward a unitary Kenyan nation when spaces created by the modernist drive, like the school, become suspect and inadequate in dealing with the current crisis.
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~ ~I W A T H I O N G ’O N G UG
A Grain of Wheat, generally regarded as Ng~ ug~ı’s most accomplished novel, attempts to resolve some of the dilemmas he raises in the early texts. Written less than four years after Kenya’s independence, it is both a novel of anticipation in its historical setting and one that draws attention to the present by interrogating the nationalists’ euphoria as they take over the new nation state. But it also gestures into the future in its thematic concerns and signals the possibility of betrayal of the ideals of national liberation. Like Weep Not, A Grain is rooted in the anti-colonial struggle, but shows a sharper clarity in its representation of the Mau Mau war, portrayed in the text as the main icon around which the national identity must be forged. In a typical nationalist idiom, Ng~ ug~ı is at pains to underscore the centrality of selfless sacrifice and unity for a better Kenya. The novel addresses themes of forgiveness, reconciliation, and human sympathy in the face of betrayal, chiefly in the symbolic relationship between Gikonyo and Mumbi. The power of this text resides in the complex manner in which it explores the moral choices that a war imposes on people. For example, most of the leading characters – Gikonyo and Mumbi, Mugo and General R. – finally realize that the calamity of the war is real; it has left an indelible mark on their psyche, and consequently everything else is seen through a filter of a disturbed mind. The possible lapse in historical memory that A Grain of Wheat anticipates is what Ng~ ug~ı dramatizes in his later novels such as Petals of Blood (1977), Devil on the Cross (1982), Matigari (1987), and Wizard of the Crow (2007). These works are distinct in how they attempt to disavow the nation state that has taken over power and independence. But it is in Petals of Blood that Ng~ ug~ı experiments with radical aesthetics and seeks to break from the blend of realism that had defined his early works. In Petals Ng~ ug~ı grapples with the failure of the neocolonial state and the crisis of the African revolution, or what Frantz Fanon had characterized as “pitfalls of national consciousness” (148). It is Ng~ ug~ı’s most eloquent critique of colonial modernity and its long-term ramifications on the political and moral economy of a postcolonial state. Significantly, soon after the publication of Petals, Ng~ ug~ı’s growing restlessness with the post-independence regimes would push him to write and produce (with Ng~ ug~ıwa M~ır~ı~ı),
a play in G~ık~ uy~ u titled Ngaahika Ndeenda: Ithaako ria Ngerekano (I Will Marry When I Want, 1982). Working directly with the peasants of his rural ug~ı provoked the anger village in Kamiriithu, Ng~ of the increasingly authoritarian Kenyatta regime and was detained without trial. In prison, Ng~ ug~ı’s aesthetic practice took a radical turn; he decided that he would no longer write in English, but would strive to promote the vernacular language of his people. Devil was written in Cell 16, Kam~ıt~ı Maximum Prison, and was followed by Matigari, written while Ng~ ug~ı was in exile in Britain. Both novels, originally composed in G~ık~ uy~ u, represent the imaginings of a writer under conditions of displacement and signal the devastating effects of writing under exilic conditions. They are daringly experimental and readily violate the traditional boundaries of the realist novel. In both texts, Ng~ ug~ı is preoccupied with issues of readership, language, and audience reception, hence the preponderance of parabolic language and the fantastic and sharp allegorical narrative style. Both are eloquent in their critique of neocolonial dependency and further the theme of betrayal that we find in the early texts to its logical extreme. In Devil, the protagonist, War~ı~ınga, has a repeated nightmare that white capitalists, the colonizing devils, are crucified on the cross (at independence) by the efforts of the masses. The Devil is then rescued by the local comprador and is restored to life (presumably in the form of colonialism). In return for this act of salvation, the devil fattens the bellies of his rescuers. The dream turns out to be true when a “Devil’s feast” is arranged by the local “parasites” to commemorate a visit of foreign guests – representatives of international capital from the West. Similarly in Matigari, Matigari’s house was taken by Settler Williams and thus becomes the major symbol of the continued presence of neocolonialism. When Matigari returns to recapture his house, he finds that the sons of Settler Williams and John Boy have inherited it. There is also the overwhelming theme of loss and return, which is raised sharply in Matigari, a name that means “the remnant who returns.” In these two texts Ng~ ug~ı highlights the idea that colonial power relations reproduce themselves in the postcolonial state in an almost linear fashion. Kenya’s political and economic predicament is
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~ ~I WA T H I O N G ’O N G UG
therefore linked to the continued manifestation of the colonial legacy, and a state of underdevelopment in which members of the comprador class are portrayed as puppets. They are said to “hand over the spoils to foreigners to do the sharing out, returning a little to us and exporting the rest to their own countries” (1982, 166). Ng~ ug~ı’s latest novel, Wizard of the Crow, is a radical development on some of the themes he ridicules in Devil and Matigari. Pushing the technique of rumor to levels of absurdity, Wizard works to ridicule absolute power and greed; it turns some of the ordinary people’s most commonplace narratives of indictment of authority, especially during the Moi era, into some of the most gripping representations of the banality of power in the postcolonial state. It is underpinned by wicked humor, a hilarious deployment of the fantastic, and a rare (for him) mode of magic realism, which has become a major mode of representation in contemporary African literature. Wizard offers a narrative driven by rumor, suspense, the implausible, and a remarkable caricature of rampant authority, reduced to its very essence, in an African state. Ng~ ug~ı’s early writings are heavily weighted toward fiction, and later ones lean toward non-fiction. In the 1960s and 1970s, which saw the publication of four novels, two plays, and a collection of short stories, Ng~ ug~ı produced only one volume of essays, Homecoming. But since his last major work of fiction in English, Petals of Blood (1977), Ng~ ug~ı has written a total of five collections of essays, including Writers in Politics (1981b), Barrel of a Pen (1983), and Decolonising the Mind (1986), as opposed to only three novels. The joy of reading Ng~ ug~ı’s essays is that they serve as a theoretical elaboration of themes and topics relevant to his fiction. If the essays in Writers in Politics and Barrel seeks to question the colonial traditions of English and Englishness inherited at independence, Decolonising the Mind (1986), and also Moving the Centre (1993), push this debate to its limits by insisting that Africa’s freedom lies in the articulation of a new idiom of nationalism that would liberate African identities from the prison-house of European languages and cultures. This project not only involves the privileging of Africanlanguages in the making of African cultures, but also the struggle for the realignment of global forces such that societies originally confined to the margins will
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gradually move to the center, existing as both consumers and producers of global culture. It is the denial of this cultural space by the postcolonial state’s tyranny and global imperialism that Ng~ ug~ı explores in his latest collection of essays, Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams (1998). Here, he argues that a culture of violence and silence has come to define the postcolonial state; the state’s desire to saturate the public space with its propaganda is counterpoised against a radically redemptive art seeking to erect a new regime of truth by reclaiming those spaces through the barrel of the pen. Whatever the ideological drifts and shifts in Ng~ ug~ı’s body of works, what is clear is that both his creative works and essays rest on a fundamental belief in the restorative agency embedded in all human cultures – the return of the other to the self, to create a humanistic wholeness and healing, and indeed a just society. SEE ALSO: Censorship and Fiction (WF); East African Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the African Diaspora (BIF); The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Cook, D., & Okenimpke, M. (1983). Ng~ug~ı wa Thiong’o: An Exploration of His Writings. London: Heinemann. Fanon, F. (1967). The Wretched of the Earth (trans. C. Farrington). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gikandi, S. (2000). Ng~ug~ı wa Thiong’o. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o (1964). Weep Not, Child. London: Heinemann. Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o (1965). The River Between. London: Heinemann. Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o (1967). A Grain of Wheat. London: Heinemann. Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o (1968). The Black Hermit: A Play. London: Heinemann. Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o (1970). This Time Tomorrow: Three Plays. Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau. Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o (1972). Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature and Politics. London: Heinemann. Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o (1975). Secret Lives. London: Heinemann.
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Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o (1977). Petals of Blood. London: Heinemann. Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o (1981a). Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary. London: Heinemann. Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o (1981b). Writers in Politics. London: Heinemann. Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o (1982). Devil on the Cross. London: Heinemann. Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o (1983). Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo-Colonial Kenya. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o (1986). Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey. Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o (1987). Matigari (trans. Wang~ ui wa Goro). Oxford: Heinemann. Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o (1993). Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. London: James Currey. Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o (1997). Writers in Politics: A Re-Engagement with Issues of Literature and Society. London: James Currey. Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o (1998). Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa. Oxford: Clarendon. Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o (2007). Wizard of the Crow. London: Harvill Secker. Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o & Mugo, M. (1976). The Trial of Dedan Kimathi. London: Heinemann. Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o & Ng~ ug~ı wa M~ır~ı~ı (1982). I Will Marry When I Want. London: Heinemann. Ogude, J. (1999). Ng~ugi~’s Novels and African History: Narrating the Nation. London: Pluto. Sicherman, C. (1989). Ng~ugi~ wa Thiong’o: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources 1957–1987. London: Hans Zell. Sicherman, C. (1999). Ng~ugi~ wa Thiong’o: The Making of a Rebel: A Source Book in Kenyan Literature and Resistance. London: Hans Zell. Williams, P. (1999). Ng~ugi~ wa Thiong’o. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Nkosi, Lewis LINDY STIEBEL
Lewis Nkosi’s influence as a writer and critic has been profound, both in Africa and abroad. However, given his at times harsh criticism of South African writing during the apartheid era, together with his exile from South Africa, his reputation within the country was for some time less secure than it was in America and Europe. His significance today stems from the fact that he is one of the few surviving members of the Drum genera-
tion of writers of the 1950s who continued to write throughout the apartheid and post-apartheid decades, recording and commenting upon an extraordinary period of South African history. Nkosi is also noted for using a wide variety of genres to express his forthright views: critical essays, short stories, plays, novels, poetry, and even a libretto. Born in Chesterville, a Durban black township, on December 5, 1936, Nkosi came from a working-class, female-headed family. He was educated in local schools, most notably an English-medium mission school in Eshowe. Following a stint as a manual laborer, Nkosi became a junior reporter on Ilange lase Natal newspaper. He soon moved to Johannesburg to work on Drum in 1956; though his time there was brief, it provided an intensely formative experience working with iconic black journalists such as Can Themba, Nat Nakasa, and Bloke Modisane. Nkosi was awarded a Nieman Fellowship to Harvard in 1961, but was granted only a one-way exit permit; this departure effectively initiated his life as an exile since re-entry to South Africa was forbidden. From the United States, he went to London in 1964, becoming literary editor of New African magazine from 1965 to 1968. He was granted British citizenship and earned an MA in English literature at the University of Sussex in 1976. Nkosi then embarked on an academic career that included tenures at universities in Africa, the US, and Europe. Since retirement from academic life, he has made Switzerland his base and is a soughtafter speaker on South African letters and politics. Nkosi first returned to South Africa in 1991 to attend the New Nation Writers Conference; his first South African passport was granted in 2003. He is a regular visitor to his home country, maintaining, “People of the diaspora have always had to know the road home; otherwise how will they know how they come to be where they are if they don’t know where they come from: their roots?” (Meyer 3). Unlike many black South African exiled writers of his generation, Nkosi flourished abroad, making his home in his writing, which typically focused on South Africa. Though his name was almost unheard in South Africa during apartheid, his profile has recently been raised with the publication of two novels (Underground People in 2002 and Mandela’s Ego in 2006), and the rerelease of Mating Birds (1983) in 2004.
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NWAPA, FLORA
Nkosi’s style is a distinctive one, at odds with much of the naturalist writing that characterized South African black protest fiction of the apartheid years. Influenced by the writing of William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce, Nkosi’s style is modernist, suggestive, and symbolic. His loyalty to form and to the stringent demands of a modernist conception of art is evident in his critical essays, gathered into three collections: Home and Exile (1965), The Transplanted Heart (1975), and Tasks and Masks (1981). One of his best-known essays, “Fiction by Black South Africans” from his first collection, captures Nkosi’s forthright voice and rigorous approach, in which he lambastes black writers for a lack of imagination, coupled with impoverished style, in their efforts to address the South African condition. His remarks predated debates on the limitations of protest writing initiated by Njabulo Ndebele and Albie Sachs in 1984 and 1990 respectively. Nkosi did not limit himself to a critique of others’ efforts, but began his own creative writing career with a play, The Rhythm of Violence (1964), which deals with interracial infatuation and revolution in Johannesburg during apartheid. Though other plays followed, notably “The Black Psychiatrist” (1994), it is in the novel that Nkosi’s creative efforts have been most noticed. His first published novel, Mating Birds, related through the eyes of a black man on trial for raping a white woman, was chosen by the New York Times as one of the top 100 books of 1986 and went on to win the PEN/Macmillan prize, and was widely reviewed. Commended for its boldness in exploring the viciousness of the apartheid ban on interracial sex, the novel has attracted the most critical attention of Nkosi’s writing. It is hard-hitting, imbued with the menace of “non-white boys in a black mutinous rage” (1986 [1983], 4). Underground People, which looks wryly at the double dealings of those involved in the freedom struggle, followed in 1993, originally published in Dutch as Der Vermissung. The English translation appeared in 2002. The narrative unfolds around two South African characters – one white, one black – whose parallel journeys through the South African political landscape inevitably coincide and collide. Nkosi’s latest novel, Mandela’s Ego (2006), involves a characteristic symbolic conceit – Nelson Mandela’s period of imprisonment parallels the protagonist’s loss of virility. On Mandela’s release,
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Dumisa is restored and the nation revives. In 2008, Nkosi received the Order of Ikhamanga from the president of South Africa for his services to literature. This marked a symbolic return to the country that, under apartheid, refused him re-entry, allowing only permanent departure. SEE ALSO: Faulkner, William (AF); Joyce, James (BIF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Modernist Fiction (AF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the African Diaspora (BIF); Southern African Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Meyer, S. (2004). Lewis Nkosi: Interviewed on Black Atlanticism and (Southern) African Writing. Current Writing, 16 (2), 121–30. Nkosi, L. (1964). The Rhythm of Violence. London: Oxford University Press. Nkosi, L. (1965). Home and Exile. London: Longman. Nkosi, L. (1975). The Transplanted Heart: Essays on South Africa. Benin City: Ethiope. Nkosi, L. (1981). Tasks and Masks: Themes and Styles of African Literature. Harlow: Longman. Nkosi, L. (1986). Mating Birds. New York: St. Martin’s. (First published Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1983.) Nkosi, L. (2002). Underground People. Cape Town: Kwela. Nkosi, L. (2006). Mandela’s Ego. Cape Town: Umuzi. Stiebel, L. & Gunner, L. (eds.) (2005). Still Beating the Drum: Critical Perspectives on Lewis Nkosi. New York: Rodopi.
Nwapa, Flora € € REZZAN KOCAONER SILKU
As the first Nigerian woman novelist to publish in English, Flora Nwapa brings a female perspective to such topics as poverty, illness, child deaths, and gender discrimination. Writing in the same milieu as Chinua Achebe, she addresses such culturally important subjects as dowry, women’s circumcision, husbands’ infidelity, women’s anguish due to infertility, war, education, and the conflict between tradition and innovation. Born in Ugwuta, Nigeria on January 13, 1931, Nwapa received her BA in English, history, and geography from University College, Ibadan in 1957, and studied education at the University of
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NWAPA, FLORA
Edinburgh before returning to Nigeria to teach at Queen’s School, Enugu in 1959. During the reconstruction period after the Nigerian Civil War, she became commissioner for health and social welfare and then commissioner for lands, survey and urban development in East Central State. As the first African woman entrepreneur in the publishing sector, Nwapa, with her husband Gogo Nwakuche, established Tana Press and Flora Nwapa Books in 1977. She wrote many novels, short stories, children’s books, plays, and essays, as well as a collection of poems. Nwapa’s novels function as historical and cultural records tracing the development of Nigerian women and the redefinition of gender roles from colonial to postcolonial times. Unlike her male contemporaries, who have been criticized for writing one-dimensional portraits of women, Nwapa’s heroines are strong, multidimensional characters who struggle against both colonial and patriarchal forces. Her first novel, Efuru (1966), tells the story of a woman in the patriarchal Igbo society of Ugwuta during the colonial period. Descended from a prosperous family, Efuru struggles hard to break with social conventions and take control of her life. In African tradition, however, a woman has no value unless she gives birth to a child. Disappointed in her two successive marriages, Efuru, a childless widow, worships a supernatural being, “The Woman of the Lake,” and dedicates her life to humanity. As it portrays women’s roles as mothers and wives, the novel sheds light on rituals, customs, and traditions of Nigerian society. Idu (1970) also takes place in Ugwuta and deals with marriage and motherhood, telling of a woman whose life is ruined after her husband’s unexpected death, because of the strict codes of patriarchal Nigerian society. Yet Idu, Nwapa’s heroine, prefers to die than yield to the tradition that compels her to marry her brother-in-law. Nwapa’s third novel, Never Again (1975), takes its subject matter from the 1967–70 Civil War. It depicts the hostility between Biafrans and Nigerians realistically, and is again set in Ugwuta. Nwapa’s protagonist, Kate, struggles to protect her family from invasion and starvation, helping with the evacuation of the town and trading to feed her family. Nwapa conveys the vanity that precipitates wars and emphasizes the benefits of women’s services to the nation during this period.
The setting of Nwapa’s later novels One is Enough (1981) and Women are Different (1986b) shifts from Ugwuta to Lagos, London, and Hamburg, as she broadens her perspective and displays her concern with universal issues. One is Enough elaborates on Nigeria’s postwar condition and the struggles of Nwapa’s female protagonist, Amaka, whose apparent infertility forces her to leave Onitsha to start a new life in Lagos. Amaka has an affair with a minister and gives birth to twin boys, but she declines to marry, instead pursuing her ideals as a successful businesswoman. In Women are Different, Nwapa addresses Nigeria’s social transformation and modernization through three Western-educated female protagonists. Although disillusioned by the traditional roles imposed upon them, they are portrayed as industrious, intelligent survivors. Failing in their relationship with men, they have no alternative but to improve themselves professionally and economically. Here Nwapa emphasizes education’s role in liberating African women from the manacles of double colonization. Her short story collections, such as This is Lagos (1971) and Wives at War (1980d), illuminate the problems of adolescence and child-rearing, the poor conditions of working-class Nigerians, and problems of corruption and language. Ozoemena in “The Delinquent Adults” (1971), for example, is deprived of her inheritance rights and has to marry her brother-in-law after the death of her husband. Nwapa compares and contrasts European and Nigerian customs, lifestyles, and languages, and uses both Yoruba and English in her fiction. She also elaborates on the theme of war in short stories like “Daddy, Don’t Strike the Match” (1980d). Nwapa has written several children’s books; didactic in nature, they frequently draw on folktales, proverbs, and other aspects of oral tradition. Her poetry is published in Cassava Song and Rice Song (1986a), which takes its title from the Igbos’ traditional “female” crops. After her death in 1993, Nwapa’s three plays, The First Lady, “Two Women in Conversation,” and “The Sychophants,” were published. Her final novel, The Lake Goddess, published posthumously in 1995, elaborates on the cultural myth of Uhamiri. SEE ALSO: Achebe, Chinua (WF); Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative
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NWAPA, FLORA
Fiction (WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF); West African Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Nwapa, F. (1966). Efuru. London: Heinemann. Nwapa, F. (1970). Idu. London: Heinemann. Nwapa, F. (1971). This is Lagos and Other Stories. Enugu: Nwamife. Nwapa, F. (1972). Emeka – Driver’s Guard. London: University of London Press. Nwapa, F. (1975). Never Again. Enugu: Nwamife. Nwapa, F. (1979). Mammywater. Enugu: Flora Nwapa Books. Nwapa, F. (1980a). The Adventures of Deke. Enugu: Flora Nwapa Books. Nwapa, F. (1980b). Journey to Space and Other Stories. Enugu: Flora Nwapa Books.
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Nwapa, F. (1980c). The Miracle Kittens. Enugu: Flora Nwapa Books. Nwapa, F. (1980d). Wives at War and Other Stories. Enugu: Tana. Nwapa, F. (1981). One is Enough. Enugu: Tana. Nwapa, F. (1986a). Cassava Song and Rice Song. Enugu: Tana. Nwapa, F. (1986b). Women are Different. Enugu: Tana. Nwapa, F. (1993a). The First Lady: A Play. Enugu: Tana. Nwapa, F. (1993b). The Sycophants. In Conversations: Plays. Enugu: Tana. Nwapa, F. (1993c). Two Women in Conversation. In Conversations: Plays. Enugu: Tana. Nwapa, F. (1995). The Lake Goddess. Lawrenceville, NJ: Africa World Press. Nzegwu, F. (2001). Love, Motherhood and the African Heritage: The Legacy of Flora Nwapa. Dakar: African Renaissance. Umeh, M. (ed.) (1998). Emerging Perspectives on Flora Nwapa: Critical and Theoretical Essays. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
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O Okara, Gabriel OBI MADUAKOR
Gabriel Okara belongs to the first generation of self-conscious artists who began shaping the language of English-language Nigerian poetry in the 1950s. From the Ijaw community in the Niger Delta region, where common speech itself is seen as poetic, Okara worked the musical cadence of his native tongue into his poetry and fiction. Born on April 24, 1921 in Rivers State, Okara was largely a self-made man who improved himself through private reading and tutoring. He began secondary school education in 1935, completing it after interruptions from World War II at Yaba Higher College in 1941. He worked for several years as a bookbinder in Enugu, reading widely in his spare time to prepare for a writing career. In 1960, he obtained a diploma in comparative journalism from Northwestern University in Illinois. During the Nigerian Civil War (1967–70), Okara joined fellow writer-intellectuals from Biafra (Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi, Nkem Nwankwo) who toured the United States to present the Biafran case. After the war, he held managerial positions in various federal and state government media corporations. He currently lives in retirement at Portharcourt, Rivers State. Okara is known for his poetry collection The Fisherman’s Invocation (1978) and his groundbreaking novel, The Voice (1964); he has also written children’s stories. The Fisherman’s Invocation brings together early poems from the 1950s and war poems written in the 1960s. “The Call of the River Nun” earned Okara widespread acclaim
with its incantatory rhythm, lulling music, and haunting nostalgia. Far from home and feeling enclosed by the urban environment, the speaker evokes deep nostalgia for the native river, figured as a nurturer of poetic creativity, where Okara played as a child. Arguably Okara’s most wellknown poem, “Piano and Drum” explores cultural conflict – the dilemma of the African intellectual torn between two worlds – as the drum evokes traditional life and the piano the modern. The poet clearly favors the simplicity of traditional life, which he returns to repeatedly. Okara’s poetry often explores the theme of creativity and the mystery of artistic creation. In “Mystic Drum,” for instance, Okara sees the African talking drum as a muse figure: as the drum beats, the poet is thrown into a fit of creative frenzy and the natural world begins a cosmic dance. Several poems address human destiny from a philosophical viewpoint, including “Spirit of the Wind” and “Were I to Choose.” The Biafran war poems introduce a public voice to Okara’s poetry. Although compelled by the national emergency to use poetry as an instrument of propaganda, public statement of even a quasipolitical nature is not Okara’s forte. The war poems lack the mystic undertone of his earlier poems, revealing a poet struggling to be himself and find his voice. Unlike his poetry, Okara’s novel, The Voice, had a mixed reception initially, even among Nigerian intellectuals. Reacting to the novel’s transliteration of an Ijaw speech idiom into English, one eminent critic of African literature dismissed it as “a gallant failure.” But its reputation was enhanced when Heinemann reissued the
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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OKRI, BEN
novel in 1970 in the African Writers Series, with an illuminating introduction by Arthur Ravenscroft. The curious language is now seen as a source of strength, and the work itself as an important document on political corruption in Nigeria. It belongs to the group of African novels designated by Ravenscroft (1969) elsewhere as “novels of disillusion.” The story of a radical intellectual challenging political authority, a theme raised later by many later writers influenced by Marxism, the novel makes its impact by its language of myth and ritual, and by the poetic introspections of the protagonist, Okolo. Okolo is driven by a strong sense of moral integrity to question and challenge his elders, having been brought up to always “the straight thing do and the straight thing talk” (1970, 106). He disrupts a gathering of the council of elders by asking them a soul-piercing question: have they got it? The “it” represents for Okolo what it takes to be a leader: that is, moral integrity, truth, and a sense justice and responsibility. He deliberately keeps the connotation of “it” undefined and indeterminate, making its impact all the more powerful. Okolo’s superior moral stance instills fear into the elders and he is banished from his community on pain of death, but he defies the order and returns to continue his search. However, in this hierarchical society, anyone who threatens to tease authority out of its snug security risks paying the ultimate penalty, and Okolo walks to his death bravely, seeing his martyrdom as a heroic sacrifice on behalf of truth. Here the novel’s ritual metaphor begins to unfold. Okolo is a ritual carrier and his quest a ritual journey, enacting, on close examination, the three-part structure that is basic to ritual symbolism: entry into darkness, ritual death, and rebirth. The motif of rebirth is subtly worked into the novel’s structure. At one point, Okolo decides he must plant his “teaching word” into the “inside” of the people for it to take root there and grow. That way, he reflects, it will not die. Okolo’s word lives on in his ever-increasing number of disciples. SEE ALSO: Achebe, Chinua (WF); Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); Ekwensi, Cyprian (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); West African Fiction (WF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Lindfors, B. (1974). An Interview with Gabriel Okara. Dem-Say: Interview with Eight Nigerian Writers. Austin: African and Afro-American Research Center, pp. 41–7. Maduakor, O. (1987). Gabriel Okara: Poet of the Mystic Inside. World Literature Today, 61, 41–5. Maduakor, O. (1993). Myth and Mysticism in Gabriel Okara’s The Voice. Commonwealth, 15, 58–64. Obiechina, E. (1972). Art and Artifice in Okara’s The Voice. Okike, 1, 23–33. Okara, G. (1964). The Voice. London: Deutsch. Okara, G. (1970). The Voice (intro. A. Ravenscroft). London: Heinemann Educational. Okara, G. (1978). The Fisherman’s Invocation. London: Heinemann. Ravenscroft, A. (1969). African Literature V: Novels of Disillusion. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 6, 120–37. Roscoe, A. (1971). Gabriel Okara. In Mother is Gold: A Study in West African Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 28–35. Shiarella, J. (1970). Gabriel Okara’s The Voice: A Study in the Poetic Novel. Black Orpheus, 2–6, 45–9.
Okri, Ben ANJALI GERA ROY
Without deviating from the path paved by an earlier nationalist generation, Booker Prize-winning Nigerian novelist, poet, and short story writer Ben Okri has given a new turn to African writing through his invention of an African magic realism. While often placed alongside magic realists such as Gabriel Garcıa Marquez and Salman Rushdie, his work differs by substituting for their parodic irony and satirical cynicism an unselfconscious respect for traditional belief systems as reflected in African myths and folktales and Amos Tutuola’s novels. Celebrated by some as a literary visionary and detested by others as pseudo-mystical, Okri combines metaphysical lyricism with scathing political analysis to communicate the bitter disillusionment of post-Civil War Nigeria. Born on March 15, 1959 in Minna, Nigeria, Okri moved between England and Nigeria before beginning his university education at the University of Essex. Having struggled for several years
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when his Nigerian government-sponsored scholarship dried up, he found employment as a radio broadcaster on the Network Africa program on the BBC World Service, and he edited poetry for West Africa magazine. Since then, he has received various awards and honors, has been a visiting writer-in-residence at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was awarded an OBE in 2001. Okri’s phrase “many rivers meet in me” (Jaggi 2007) accurately describes the multiple streams that feed his literary imagination: books from his father’s library of ancient Greek, French, English, Russian, and Chinese classics, as well as modern African literature. But his greatest influence, Okri says, came from the daily experience of watching “a heartbreaking procession of people” moving through his London-trained lawyer father’s house “seeking justice” (Jaggi 2007). If the education he received by living with the poor or as a young journalist in Lagos explains his empathy and pain for the “hard-done-by” who populate his writings, the animism of his forefathers, to which his Christian father returned, went into the making of his “universal spiritualism” (Jaggi 2007). He admits that Lagos, where he saw the possibilities of becoming a human being in a totally different way, has given him his aesthetic matrix. By the time Okri left Lagos he had already completed his first novel Flowers and Shadows (1980), a Bildungsroman set in Civil War-torn Nigeria; his second, The Landscapes Within (1981), was written in Essex. He first received critical attention after winning the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Africa for his poetry collection Incidents at the Shrine (1986). Okri followed Incidents with the story collection Stars of the Night Curfew (1988), which also addresses the Civil War, moving beyond the social realism of his first two novels to a new magic-realist style. Though his work has garnered prestigious awards, Okri is best known for The Famished Road (1991), winner of the 1991 Booker Prize. The novel deals with a spirit child, Azaro, who, moved by his mother’s entreaties, resists the pull of his spirit companions. Okri’s borrowing of the African concept of the abiku, the spirit child who dies and is reborn to the same mother, functions as a metaphor for the Nigerian nation. The novel also conveys the spatial geography of the forest, the road, and the bar in which the contestation between Western modernity and African
tradition occurs. In Songs of Enchantment (1993), a sequel to The Famished Road, Okri successfully creates a mythical country in which readers follow the adventures of the spirit child’s parents in the realm of the unreal. The third novel in the trilogy, Infinite Riches (1998), continues to draw criticism of its repetitive narrative style. Dangerous Love (1996) picks up the K€unstlerroman theme of The Landscapes Within (1981) in a love story with a subtext about political commitment and aesthetic freedom. In Star Book (2007), a text written in the tradition of fairytales with a dark underside, Okri again returns to issues of political allegiance. However, the growing abstraction of his “irritatingly pseudomystical New Age mode,” as Kwame Anthony Appiah puts it (148), has increasingly begun to annoy even Okri’s most fervent admirers. Besides fiction and poetry, Okri has published a volume of essays and one play. His lyrical prose flow effortlessly into his collection of poetry An African Elegy (1992) and his epic poem Mental Fight (1999). Despite their generic differences, Okri’s writings converge in their location of regenerative possibilities in the brutal African realities and in their narrative transformation of suffering into something sublime. The motif of loss that underlines his work, although specific to Africa, tells a universal tale demonstrating that magic realism, despite emerging from a specific socio-economic position, has a wider application. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the African Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF); Tutuola, Amos (WF); West African Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Appiah, A. K. (1992). “Spiritual Realism.” Nation, 255(4), 146–8. Cooper, B. (1998). Magic Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye. London: Routledge. Fraser, R. (2002). Ben Okri: Towards the Invisible City. Horndon: Northcote House. Jaggi, M. (2007). Free Spirit. Guardian, p. R12 (Aug. 11). At www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/ aug/11/fiction.benokri, accessed Dec. 5, 2008.
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ONDAATJE, MICHAEL
Maja-Pearce, A. (1992). A Mask Dancing: Nigerian Novelists of the Eighties. London: Hans Zell. Okri, B. (1980). Flowers and Shadows. London: Longman. Okri, B. (1981). The Landscapes Within. London: Longman. Okri, B. (1986) Incidents at the Shrine. London: Heinemann. Okri, B. (1988). Stars of the New Curfew. New York: Penguin. Okri, B. (1991). The Famished Road. London: Jonathan Cape. Okri, B. (1992). An African Elegy. London: Jonathan Cape. Okri, B. (1993). Songs of Enchantment. London: Jonathan Cape. Okri, B. (1995a). Astonishing the Gods. London: Phoenix House. Okri, B. (1995b). Birds of Heaven. London: Orion. Okri, B. (1996). Dangerous Love. London: Phoenix House. Okri, B. (1997). A Way of Being Free. London: Phoenix House. Okri, B. (1998). Infinite Riches. London: Phoenix House. Okri, B. (1999). Mental Fight. London: Phoenix House. Okri, B. (2002). In Arcadia. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Okri, B. (2007). Starbook. London: Rider. Okri, B. (2009). Tales of Freedom. London: Rider. Quayson, A. (1997). Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing: Rev. Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka and Ben Okri. Oxford: James Currey; Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Ondaatje, Michael DARRYL WHETTER
Michael Ondaatje writes fiction at the very center of global literary success and attention, yet does so with both a discontinuous, poetic style more generally admired by a smaller readership and a recurrent focus on marginalized characters and communities. His popularity as an internationally respected novelist follows his early work as a poet, work that influences his intensely imagistic novels with their centripetal, often polyphonic narration, metafictional translucency, and contrapuntal plots. Thematically, the novels attend to individual and systemic violence, the intersection of official and unofficial history, textuality,
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romance, and sexuality. His characters frequently migrate from one community (whether geographically or socially rooted) to another, reauthoring themselves in new places while their author builds non-linear, imbricated narratives. Born in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) on September 12, 1943, and emigrating first to England when he was 11 and then to Canada in 1962, each time leaving a family circle and seeking an education, Ondaatje has lived the itinerant life pursued by most of his characters. In interviews, he is conscious of what Salman Rushdie calls the “stereoscopic” perspective of the migrant writer: “I think my generation was the first of the real migrant tradition that you see in a number of writers of our time – Rushdie, Ishiguro, Ben Okri, Rohinton Mistry – writers leaving and not going back, but taking their country with them to a new place” (Bush 240). Ondaatje moved around within Canada while studying and teaching, eventually settling at Toronto’s York University as a professor. In addition to being emblematic of global literary trends, Ondaatje’s career is equally illustrative of the late twentieth-century evolution of Canadian literature. Ondaatje has repeatedly stated that his emigration to Canada was crucial to his becoming a writer, and he arrived as Canadian writers, publishers, and readers were beginning to explore domestic identities distinct from American and English influence. He has said, “As a writer I feel very Canadian. I became a writer here” (Wachtel 260). Ondaatje’s national and later international rise in popularity led a second wave of success for Canadian writers as he, Margaret Atwood, Rohinton Mistry, and others followed the international acceptance of Mordecai Richler and Mavis Gallant. The initial print run of Ondaatje’s 1967 debut The Dainty Monsters was a modest 500 copies; by the mid-1990s, following a popular, Academy Award-winning film adaptation and the first Booker Prize won by a Canadian, English-language sales of The English Patient were in the millions. Ondaatje wrote poetry for his first four books, although his third, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970a), began his overt fusion of poetry and prose (and won him his first Governor General’s Award for poetry). Considering line breaks alone, one can categorize The Collected Works as poetry and Ondaatje’s debut novel Coming through
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Slaughter (1976) as fiction, although the documentary touches and narrative arc in The Collected Works clearly lean toward fiction, while the imagistic tone and fragmentary structure of Slaughter have an obvious allegiance to poetry. His first book of selected poems, There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do (1979), won a second Governor General’s Award. Even more resistant to genre categorization is Running in the Family (1982), which blends travelogue (about his return to Sri Lanka as an adult) with autobiography, fiction, poetry, and photographs. Two more books of poetry followed before the pair of novels that elevated Ondaatje from national to international renown: In the Skin of a Lion (1987) and The English Patient (1992). Each of these novels was followed by a book of poems before his last two novels, Anil’s Ghost (2000) and Divisadero (2007), were published. Each of Ondaatje’s five novels concentrates on individuals finding, joining, and maintaining communities. With individuals or romantic couples in the foreground, these novels investigate the formation, legitimization, and evolution of communities in the narrative background, and do so across significant geographical landscapes. Coming through Slaughter is Ondaatje’s portrait of the pioneering jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden in an early twentieth-century New Orleans governed by systemic racism and sexual exploitation. In this historical landscape, one both captured and invented by an Ondaatje intrigued alternately by history and by the “well-told lies” he confesses to admiring (18), black musicians and sex-trade workers were shipped in to clubs that black patrons were forbidden to attend. Bolden’s refusal to enter the “wax history” of early musical recording exemplifies the novel’s pronounced concern with media and textuality (32). Emphatic within these textual strata of song lyrics, poems, set lists, interview transcripts, and letters are references to the actual historical photographs of brothel portraitist E. J. Bellocq and to The Cricket, a “scandal sheet” newspaper Ondaatje invents for Bolden. Although Slaughter fixates on Bolden, its shifting narrators and multiple perspectives anticipate Ondaatje’s move to more episodic novels with ensemble casts. While Slaughter is Ondaatje’s only novel with a character (Webb) that is a detective by profession, each of his novels clearly invokes the detective
genre, particularly the missing persons case. With In the Skin of a Lion, set in the Toronto of the 1920s and 1930s, a hunt for the millionaire Ambrose Small is one narrative thread in an episodic novel explicitly concerned with the role of underrecognized immigrant communities in Toronto’s urban coming of age. Textual records, chiefly newspaper and radio reports, attend to the disappearance of a millionaire or the planning and completion of Toronto’s Bloor Street Viaduct, yet the immigrant workers who risk their lives building the city do so without official memory. From its invocation of the Epic of Gilgamesh to its periodic references to heroes and heroines and a repeated plotline of isolation and adversity, the otherwise postmodern Skin maintains a pronounced interest in the traditional heroic pattern. Each of the main characters – laborer Patrick Lewis, thief David Caravaggio, acrobatic builder Nicholas Temelcoff, and activist Alice Gull – fulfills the heroic pattern of skill acquisition, travel, isolation, and testing. Ondaatje’s examination of exploitive politics and economics departs from the heroic pattern, however, by minimizing the communal appreciation of its heroes. With The English Patient, co-winner of the 1992 Booker Prize and winner of the Governor General’s Award for fiction, Ondaatje’s focus on the politics of records and record keeping shifts to the European exploration of the North African desert before and during World War II. By its close, a bombed villa in Tuscany becomes a convalescent home for four individuals expatriated by the war. The Hungarian explorer Almasy, falsely thought to be English, recovers from burns sustained while attempting to leave a desert that had become his adopted, spiritual home. The Canadian nurse Hana draws the Canadian thief turned spy Caravaggio to the villa (both characters recur from In the Skin of a Lion). Comparable to Almasy’s voluntary migration into the adopted homeland of the desert is the Indian sapper Kirpal Singh’s migration from India to England for military service. Leaving a colony increasingly committed to independence in favor of an England at war, Kip serves the imperial motherland as a sapper. By war’s end, working to rid Italy of bombs, his loyalties appear severely misplaced when he learns of the atomic bombing of a fellow Asian country. With Anil’s Ghost, Ondaatje’s career obsession with violence, missing persons, and politics
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ONDAATJE, MICHAEL
replace The English Patient’s international war with the separatist insurgency of his native Sri Lanka. Like Ondaatje, the forensic anthropologist Anil Tissera is a Westernized Sri Lankan who left the country for education and a career away. Returning to investigate human rights abuses, Anil works with government archaeologist Sarath Diyasena to identify the body of a skeleton she suspects was the victim of government-sponsored murder. Consciously or not, Anil’s Ghost addresses earlier criticism that Ondaatje hadn’t written enough about Sri Lanka’s protracted civil war. Affecting scenes here depict the kidnapping of doctors and each side of a three-party conflict (two terrorist groups and a nominal government) pooling their weapons orders to receive bulk discounts. Anil’s Ghost co-won Canada’s Giller Prize and won the Governor General’s Award for fiction, making Ondaatje the Canadian writer with the second highest number of Governor General’s Awards at four (surpassed only by Hugh MacLennan). Private and political pilgrimages continue into Ondaatje’s latest novel, Divisadero. Opening in rural California, this novel of geographically discrete but emotionally related story lines begins with a surrogate farm family consisting of a taciturn father, a biological daughter and an adopted one, and a hired hand. Ferocious domestic violence sends the hired hand into an underworld of professional gambling and one daughter into an academic life that ultimately takes her to rural France to investigate the (invented) poet Lucien Segura. Segura’s artistic ascendancy straddled the passage of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, and his contribution to World War I was as an underappreciated advocate for disease control. Similarly, each of the major characters in the novel also finds love to be infectious, if not lethal. In interviews and in his substantial editorial work, Ondaatje reveals himself to be an insatiable reader. His books include intertexts classical and modern, including Herodotus’s Histories in The English Patient and the Epic of Gilgamesh in Skin, as well as overt affection for writers as varied as John Berger, Stephen Crane, Rudyard Kipling, Vladimir Nabokov, and Annie Dillard. Most widely available of his various anthologies is From Ink Lake (1990), a book of Canadian fiction. Two
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compendia have emerged from his work at Brick magazine, including The Brick Reader (1991), which he coedited with his partner, the writer Linda Spalding. Other collaborative work includes an intriguing book-length meditation on editing entitled The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film (2002). That inquiry followed Ondaatje’s own filmmaking in the 1970s, the highlight of which is Sons of Captain Poetry (1970c), his portrait of fellow Canadian poet bpNichol. Popular with scholars and readers around the world, Michael Ondaatje has enjoyed a multigenre writing career emblematic of Canadian literature’s rise in international recognition and respect. Ondaatje ascended from an intimate national literary culture in the late 1960s to write internationally best-selling novels characterized by poetic language and equally sensitive to the politics of individuals and nations. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Detective/Crime Fiction (WF); Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF); Sri Lankan Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Barbour, D. (1993). Michael Ondaatje. New York: Twayne. Bush, C. (1994). Michael Ondaatje: An Interview. Essays on Canadian Writing, 53, 238–49. Minghella, A. (dir.) (1996). The English Patient. Miramax Films. Ondaatje, M. (1967). The Dainty Monsters. Toronto: Coach House. Ondaatje, M. (1970a). The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems. Toronto: Anansi. Ondaatje, M. (1970b). Leonard Cohen. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Ondaatje, M. (dir.) (1970c). Sons of Captain Poetry. Mongrel Films. Ondaatje, M. (ed.) (1971). The Broken Ark: A Book of Beasts. Ottawa: Oberon. Ondaatje, M. (1973). Rat Jelly. Toronto: Coach House. Ondaatje, M. (1976). Coming through Slaughter. Toronto: Anansi. Ondaatje, M. (ed.) (1977). Personal Fictions: Stories by Munro, Wiebe, Tomas, and Blaise. Toronto: Oxford University Press.
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Ondaatje, M. (1979). There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do: Poems 1963–1978. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Ondaatje, M. (1982). Running in the Family. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Ondaatje, M. (1987). In the Skin of a Lion. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Ondaatje, M. (ed.) (1990). From Ink Lake: Canadian Stories. Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys. Ondaatje, M. (1991). The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems. New York: Knopf. Ondaatje, M. (1992). The English Patient. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Ondaatje, M. (1998). Handwriting. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Ondaatje, M. (2000). Anil’s Ghost. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
Ondaatje, M. (2002). The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. Toronto: Vintage. Ondaatje, M. (2007). Divisadero. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Ondaatje, M., & Spalding, L. (eds.) (1991). The Brick Reader. Toronto: Coach House. Siemerling, W. (1994). Discoveries of the Other: Alterity in the Work of Leonard Cohen, Hubert Aquin, Michael Ondaatje, and Nicole Brossard. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Stanton, K. (2006). Cosmopolitan Fictions: Ethics, Politics, and Global Change in the Works of Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Jamaica Kincaid, and J. M. Coetzee. New York: Routledge. Wachtel, E. (1994). An Interview with Michael Ondaatje. Essays on Canadian Writing, 53, 250–61.
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P Pakistani Fiction MUNEEZA SHAMSIE
There has always been a tradition of Englishlanguage writing in Pakistan, but contemporary Pakistani English fiction is new. In 1947, when Pakistan was created by the partition of British India, its only eminent English-language novelist was Ahmed Ali. His classic Twilight in Delhi (1940) portrays life in traditional Delhi against the onslaught of Westernization and provides interesting contrasts with Sunlight on a Broken Column (1963), a requiem for Lucknow by the Indian writer, Attia Hosain. Ali’s innovative, stylized linguistic experiments foreshadow the more successful strategies of Hosain and Pakistanis Aamer Hussein and Kamila Shamsie to incorporate the literary elements of Urdu into English narrative. In the newly independent Pakistan, there was much debate over the validity of English, a colonial language, as a creative vehicle, since literature was regarded as an instrument of nation building. The first cohesive modern Pakistani novel in English was The Murder of Aziz Khan (1967), written by the expatriate Zulfikar Ghose in Britain; it revolved around the tussle between a traditional farmer and ruthless industrialists and remains Ghose’s only novel about Pakistan. He migrated to Texas in 1969 and translated his subcontinental experience into novels about his wife’s homeland in South America, including his acclaimed trilogy The Incredible Brazilian (1972–9), which spans three centuries. South Asia and South America both frame his novel The Triple Mirror of the Self (1992), a tale of exile,
exclusion, and quest across many continents. Similarly, the expatriate Adam Zameenzad wrote a first novel, The Thirteenth House (1987), about Pakistan; subsequent novels are set in other countries with echoes of his homeland, including My Friend Matt and Henna the Whore (1988), describing famine in Africa, and the intricate Cyrus, Cyrus (1990), about a man’s search for dignity and salvation across India, Pakistan, Britain, and America. By the late 1970s, Pakistani publishing was in crisis and Bapsi Sidhwa had to self-publish her first novel, The Crow Eaters (1979); but with its British publication in 1980, she became the first resident Pakistani English writer since Ahmed Ali to receive international recognition. It lampooned the erstwhile colonizers and colonized with a then rare ribaldry in subcontinental English literature, and it was the first major Englishlanguage novel about the minority Parsi community to which Sidhwa belongs. She portrays the circumscribed lives of women in all her novels, including The Bride (1982), The American Brat (1994), and Water (2006), a lyrical adaptation of Deepa Mehta’s film. Sidhwa’s third novel, IceCandy-Man (1988; published in the US as Cracking India, 1991) remains the only Pakistani English novel to center on the partition riots. Narrated by an English-speaking child, it was the first Pakistani narrative to employ the cadences of Pakistani English. The development of Pakistani English fiction by women coincided with a strong and politicized women’s movement protesting against Pakistan’s new “Islamization” laws discriminating against
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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women and minorities. A feminist consciousness permeates the work of novelist Rukhsana Ahmad in Britain, and the short story writers Talat Abbasi and Tahira Naqvi in the United States. Sara Suleri Goodyear pioneered the Pakistani English creative memoir, dividing chapters thematically. In Meatless Days (1989) she commemorates the lives of her sister and their Welsh-born mother, both killed in traffic accidents; Boys Will Be Boys (2004) is an elegy for her Pakistani journalist father. Midnight’s Children (1981), by the Indian expatriate Salman Rushdie, was the first novel to successfully release a hybrid subcontinental voice, and it continues to influence the region’s literature: the Pakistani Briton Suhayl Saadi incorporates English, Urdu, and Scottish in Psychoraag (2006). Rushdie’s Shame (1983), caricaturing General Zia ul-Haq’s military regime, foreshadows the Pakistani novelist Mohammed Hanif’s political satire of the same dictator in A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008). All Pakistani English writers chart a territory between two worlds. The half-American Daniyal Mueenuddin portrays rural Pakistan in In Other Rooms Other Wonders (2009). The British-born Hanif Kureishi has been shaped by his Pakistani inheritance too: his extensive work includes the novels The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and Black Album (1995), commenting on the exclusions faced by Asian Britons. To many diasporic writers, “home” is the trans-geographical land of storytelling. The expatriate Tariq Ali asserts his universalism in his historical novels – two about the fall of communism in Europe (1990, 1998) and four about the Muslim–Christian encounter in Spain, Palestine, Turkey, and Sicily respectively, including Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (1992) and A Sultan in Palermo (2005). Aamer Hussein, a Karachi-born Londoner, writes of migration and reclamation across several cultures in his six story collections, including A Mirror to the Sun (1993), Turquoise (2001), and Insomnia (2007). The distinguished Urdu writer, Abdullah Hussein, wrote an accomplished novel in English with Emigre Journeys (2000), which examines conflicts between firstand second-generation working-class Britons, a theme that Nadeem Aslam explores further in his poignant second novel Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), revolving around an honor killing in a poor Asian community in Britain.
Pakistan has few publishers of English fiction, but recent successes have encouraged new writing. The 1971 conflict that led to the separation of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) found expression in the novels of the new millennium, juxtaposing past and present: Kartography by Kamila Shamsie (2002), Noor by Sorayya Y. Khan (2003), The Age of Innocence by Moni Mohsin (2006), and Without Dreams by Shahbano Bilgrami (2007). Pakistan’s involvement in the anti-Soviet Afghan war and the ensuing violence, ethnic conflicts, political instability, and urban warfare of the 1990s also informs the work of young Pakistani English writers: Trespassing (2003) and The Geometry of God (2008) by Uzma Aslam Khan; In the City by the Sea (1998) and Broken Verses (2005) by Shamsie; and Moth Smoke by Mohsin Hamid (2000), set against the backdrop of Pakistan’s nuclear blasts. Increasingly sophisticated novels have also emerged examining the spread of extremism, ethnic conflict, and war in the post-9/11 context. In Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), a Princeton-educated Pakistani talks to an American stranger about capitalism, the United States, and 9/11. Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (2008), set in contemporary Afghanistan, encompasses a sweep of history to comment on war, violence, and growing fundamentalism. Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009) is a tale of wars, prejudices, and interconnectedness across the globe from World War II to Guantanamo Bay. Other critically acclaimed writers include Azhar Abidi, Musharraf Farooqi, Shandana Minhas, and Zeeba Sadiq. SEE ALSO: Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF); The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF); Sri Lankan Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Rahman, T. (1991). A History of Pakistan Literature in English. Lahore: Vanguard. Shamsie, M. (ed.) (1997). A Dragonfly in the Sun: An Anthology of Pakistani Writing in English. Karachi: Oxford University Press.
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PATON, ALAN
Shamsie, M. (ed.) (2008). And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women. New York: Feminist Press.
Paton, Alan SUSAN VANZANTEN
Alan Paton was the first South African writer to achieve international recognition. Cry, the Beloved Country (1948), his moving first novel, was published as the Afrikaner National Party came to power, and it provided English, American, and European readers with an eloquent introduction to apartheid’s horrors and signaled the beginning of a new era in South African literature. Born in Pietermaritzburg on January 11, 1903 in the British colony of Natal, Paton grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family of Scottish descent. At Natal University College, he studied science, wrote poetry, and participated in campus politics. He became a teacher at a rural Natal high school and joined the Anglican Church, of which he remained a devout, lifelong member. In 1935, Paton became principal at Diepkloof Reformatory School in Johannesburg, transforming the institution for black delinquents into a model of education and rehabilitation. His Diepkloof experiences informed much of Cry, the Beloved Country, written during an eight-month tour of penal institutions in Europe and North America. Until Paton’s novel, South African texts were seldom read outside of South Africa or a few college classrooms. Cry was the first popularly successful work of South African literature to depict the country’s social oppression realistically and to proclaim the need to work against such injustice. It launched the era of the great South African protest novel, which played a noteworthy role in raising world consciousness about the brutal conditions in South Africa. Whether the novel’s popularity was either politically effective or critically justified continues to be debated, but it remains one of the most widely known works of African literature. Scribner’s US edition of the novel, edited by Maxwell Perkins, sold out the day it was published, and when Paton died of throat cancer in Durban, South Africa, in 1988, Cry had sold over 15 million copies and been
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translated into more than 20 languages. Film versions appeared in 1951 and 1995, and the novel was the basis for a 1949 Broadway musical, Lost in the Stars, adapted by Maxwell Anderson with music by Kurt Weill. A simple story of a Zulu country priest named Kumalo who searches for his lost son in the corrupt world of Johannesburg, the novel recounts the dire effects of land erosion and the social problems created by massive immigration to the city. With the aid of a community of Anglican priests, Kumalo finds his son, only to learn that he has been sentenced to death for killing a white politician in a botched home robbery. Paton’s sympathetic handling of the social and economic forces that lie behind the murder, along with his depiction of the reconciliation between the fathers of the two men, made an ardent case for a political alternative to the apartheid machine then under construction. Employing sparse biblical prose, liturgical repetitions, a Greek chorus, and shifting points of view, the novel emphasized the need for personal repentance as a necessary forerunner to social change. Paton’s second novel, Too Late the Phalarope (1953), explores the effects of the South African Immorality Act, which banned interracial marriage and sex, in a story of a young Afrikaner policeman who falls into disgrace after sleeping with a black woman. Modeled on a Greek tragedy, it lyrically depicts Paton’s knowledge and love of the paradoxically lush and rugged South African landscape. In 1961 he published Tales from a Troubled Land, a collection of short stories similarly concerned with racism and injustice. With the passage of increasingly repressive laws and the forced resettlements caused by the Group Areas Act, Paton gave up fiction writing, apart from a few short stories, to engage in political activism for two decades. He played a major role in founding, leading, and financing the multiracial Liberal Party in 1953. Consequently, he was continually harassed by police, who confiscated his passport during the 1960 State of Emergency, preventing Paton from traveling abroad for 10 years. The Liberal Party had little success and was banned in 1968. Paton produced two biographies of moral exemplars: Hofmeyr (1964) recounts the life of politician Jan Hofmeyr, who lost the crucial
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1948 election to the Nationalists because of his liberal ideas; Apartheid and the Archbishop (1973) is the biography of Geoffrey Clayton, archbishop of Capetown and a forerunner of Bishop Desmond Tutu in his combination of spiritual leadership and political activism. Paton also wrote poetry with a satiric political edge, most of which was unpublished until the posthumous Songs of Africa: Collected Poems (1995) appeared. Paton’s autobiography, Towards the Mountain, was published in 1980, and he returned to fiction in his last work, Ah, but Your Land is Beautiful (1981). A blend of fact and fiction, it tells of the first 10 years of South African life under National Party rule and the Liberal Party’s attempts to fight apartheid. A second volume of autobiography, Journey Continued (1988), carried on Paton’s enduring theme of life as a spiritual pilgrimage in which all are called to oppose injustice. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (WF); Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Southern African Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Alexander, P. F. (1994). Alan Paton: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Callan, E. (1982). Alan Paton. Boston: Twayne. Korda, Z. (dir.) (1951). Cry, the Beloved Country. British Lion Films. Paton, A. (1948). Cry, the Beloved Country. New York: Scribner’s. Paton, A. (1953). Too Late the Phalarope. New York: Scribner’s. Paton, A. (1961). Tales from a Troubled Land. New York: Scribner’s. Paton, A. (1964). Hofmeyr. London: Oxford University Press. Paton, A. (1973). Apartheid and the Archbishop: The Life and Times of Geoffrey Clayton, Archbishop of Cape Town. New York: Scribner’s. Paton, A. (1980). Towards the Mountain. New York: Scribner’s. Paton, A. (1981). Ah, but Your Land is Beautiful. New York: Scribner’s. Paton, A. (1988). Journey Continued. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paton, A. (1995). Songs of Africa: Collected Poems of Alan Paton (ed. Peter Kohler). Durban: Gecko. Paton, A. (2008). The Hero of Curry Road. Cape Town: Umuzi.
Paton, A., & Anderson, M. (1950). Lost in the Stars. New York: Sloane Associates. Root, D. (dir.) (1995). Cry, the Beloved Country. Miramax Films.
Politics/Activism and Fiction PETER LEMAN
In an essay entitled “Literature as Cultural Opposition,” South African novelist Andre Brink observes that while the “political novel . . . is a very specific kind of novel” in the United States and Europe, in places like South Africa where “everything has a political implication,” it is virtually impossible for a novel to be anything but political (1996, 186–7). Using the analogy of a sliding scale between the two extremes of l’art pour l’art and litterature engagee, Brink suggests that a text or author’s degree of political engagement “would be determined simply by the point on that scale where one happens to find oneself at that given moment and/or by the manner in which the tension between the two extremes on the connecting line is activated” (187). Although it is, arguably, an oversimplification, Brink’s image of degrees of political engagement tied to particular temporal and political contexts is nevertheless useful for framing a discussion of the ways in which anglophone and postcolonial fiction in the twentieth century variously met with, responded to, forcefully opposed, and, at times, attempted to distance itself from the political. Brink’s image does point to an immediate difficulty, however – nearly all fiction produced in postcolonial contexts is, in some sense, political or has political implications, whether deliberate or not. However, a number of works and authors stand out in their engagements with the political, and those that push toward the extremes of Brink’s sliding scale most clearly demonstrate the complex potential and limitations of involving fiction in political activism or political activism in fiction. Two writers at the most politically active end of Brink’s scale are Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o and Wole Soyinka. Ng~ ug~ı is best known for his aggressive critiques of neocolonialism in Kenya and commitment to native African languages expressed in
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Decolonising the Mind (1986). His decision to write novels in G~ık~ uy~ u, his mother tongue, amounted to a political demonstration against the use of European languages by African writers; as a political act, this choice relates not solely to identity but to the question of audience, which is debated extensively among postcolonial writers and critics. Who comprises the audience of a novel written in English, in other words? And if the audience is primarily Western, what is the efficacy of that novel’s political message? For Ng~ ug~ı, choosing to write in G~ık~ uy~ u became a way of reaching the audience to whom his political critiques mattered most. Caitaani Mutharaba-ini (1980), for example, his first G~ık~ uy~ u novel, translated as Devil on the Cross (1982), not only reached a wide audience in Kenya, but portrays a protagonist’s gradual realization of the need for revolution, a narrative highly threatening to Daniel arap Moi’s regime at the time. Because of Ng~ ug~ı’s effectiveness in achieving activist objectives through his writing, the government responded in kind, famously detaining him without trial, banning many of his works, effectively forcing him into exile, and even attempting to arrest one of his characters, Matigari, whom the government took for a real person wandering the country in search of Truth and Justice. This kind of response – in the form of exile, imprisonment, or censorship – is not uncommon among writers committed to political activism. In West Africa, Wole Soyinka, among a number of prominent authors including fellow Nigerian Ken Saro-Wiwa, has fought vigorously against military leaders and dictators (Yakubu Gowon, Ibrahim Babangida, Sani Abacha) and various forms of oppression, using his writing as a crucial appendage to political struggle. Soyinka was arrested in 1967 and imprisoned for two years for opposing Gowon during the Biafran War, and in a preface to his subsequent prison memoir, The Man Died (1985 [1972]), he recognizes that language cannot by itself dismantle an oppressive regime. However, language does “contribute to the psychological reconstitution of public attitudes to forms of oppression,” helping “the political will [escape] paralysis” (pp. xiii–iv). This impulse is perhaps more evident in his drama and non-fiction, but Soyinka’s novel Season of Anomy (1973) draws upon the same experiences that led
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to his prison memoir and explores the individual psychological and communal effects of political oppression. Although the military regime in the novel is not defeated, Soyinka nevertheless registers the growing hope of effective resistance in the movement that, in the end, rescues Iriyise from prison. In 1998, Harry Kresler asked Soyinka directly how he reconciled his activism with his art. The author replied, “Oh, no division at all.” Instead, he explained, there are simply different types of artists – those who have a temperament toward art for its own sake and those for whom writing and activism are indistinguishable. Neither is more important than the other, although, he said, “sometimes I wish I were the other kind of artist.” Others who demonstrate different degrees of connection between fiction, specifically, and politics include Katharine Susannah Prichard and Mulk Raj Anand. In Australia, Prichard was a founding member of the Communist Party in 1920 and throughout her life used fiction to portray the social injustices suffered by the working class, women, and Aborigines. Her short story “N’Goola” (1959), for example, is one of the first critiques of the abduction and forced assimilation of “half-caste” Aboriginal children, and Prichard’s acclaimed novel Coonardoo (1929) depicts a taboo love affair between a white station master and an Aboriginal woman, finding in the illicit-love trope an effective means of transgressing and drawing attention to an oppressive racial ideology (as do some authors discussed below, such as Nadine Gordimer and Arundhati Roy). Despite uproar from conservative and imperialist audiences at the time, many, including literary critic Vance Palmer, considered Pritchard’s writings to have greatly altered Australian attitudes toward Aborigines. The prolific Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand also challenged oppressive social conventions at a time when, as with Prichard, such perspectives were uncommon and considered revolutionary. Anand was deeply sympathetic toward the lower castes and depicted their sufferings in a deliberately transgressive manner in his novels, which contributed to the formation of dalit literature, or the literary arm of the anti-caste movement. Anand felt it was the writer’s duty to help others “take part in the drama of revolt from which emerges the new society” (91), and the political
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force of his oeuvre was such that one commentator described him as “a social worker behind a mask” (Tandon 2006). In accomplishing this social work, Anand’s novels all follow a similar pattern: the main character experiences injustice and seeks to bring about change; the character’s inevitable failure then allows a “revolutionary hero” to demonstrate that a better life can come only if the present unjust order is annihilated (Bald 480). The repetition of this plot in novels such as Untouchable (1935) and The Sword and the Sickle (1942) suggests how crucial fiction was to Anand’s political objectives. By portraying characters whose predicaments brought into relief the injustices heaped upon lower castes, Anand challenged the complacency of those who failed to question social hierarchies and push for change, particularly the Indian intelligentsia. More recently, Dionne Brand has infused her novels with characters and themes that reflect her political values in terms of gender, race, and sexuality. Born in Trinidad and a resident of Canada since age 17, Brand has worked extensively for activist causes and organizations, including the Ontario Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and the Toronto Immigrant Women’s Centre. As a poet, much of her writing has been explicitly directed at political causes; Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (1984), for example, responded to the US invasion of Grenada. Her novels, however, are less responses to particular political events than explorations of the socio-political conditions and historical legacies that impede the full realization of personal, racial, and sexual identity. In Another Place, Not Here (1986), Brand’s first novel, depicts the romance between Elizete, a Caribbean sugar-cane worker, and Verlia, a Marxist labor organizer. As in many postcolonial novels, activism appears here through a character, Verlia; the intimate contact between her as a figure of possible political revolution and Elizete, a working-class, lesbian, and later illegal immigrant in Canada, opens up an imaginative space where both Elizete and the reader can, as Soyinka put it, escape the paralysis that inhibits the political will in cultures of oppression. There are many authors like Brand who similarly address political conditions and discourses in their work without necessarily having a specific and immediate activist agenda: Erna Brodber, Austin Clarke, and Jamaica Kincaid from the
Caribbean, for example; Dambudzo Marechera from Zimbabwe; and New Zealand novelist Patricia Grace, among many others. In terms of sexual politics, for example, Grace’s fellow Maori writer Witi Ihimaera explores queer themes in his novels Nights in the Gardens of Spain (1995) and The Uncle’s Story (2000), and is well known in the gay community for depicting the complexities of “coming out,” but he doesn’t necessarily write with an activist’s program in mind. In contrast, the Canadian writer Joy Kogawa has written novels such as Obasan (1981) with a specific, political motive – that of addressing and seeking redress for Japanese internment in Canada during World War II. While some authors fill the roles of activist and novelist simultaneously and, indeed, interchangeably, and while others allow their activist impulses to feed their creative work, still others struggle with the dual and at times conflicting responsibilities of the politically involved writer. Nadine Gordimer, for example, has one of world fiction’s most clearly activist trajectories in her career as a writer. In terms of Brink’s scale, Gordimer’s work is fully engaged with the political circumstances of her time, and throughout her career she has been continually preoccupied with the question of the writer’s role in the struggle for freedom. Given her extensive activity combating apartheid – including founding the Congress of South African Writers and testifying on behalf of 22 African National Congress members in the 1986 Delmas trial – it is possible to read many of Gordimer’s novels as politically concurrent with her activism. Occasion for Loving (1963), for example, confronts apartheid’s prohibition of interracial sexual relations by portraying an illicit love affair between a black man and a white woman; in The Late Bourgeois World (1966), a white woman whose activist exhusband commits suicide struggles to decide whether to become involved with the black nationalist movement; and following the Soweto Uprising, Gordimer wrote Burger’s Daughter (1979), about a woman’s attempt to come to terms with the death of her father, an anti-apartheid activist. However, the level of ambiguity in many of Gordimer’s characterizations, coupled with an emotional, intellectual, and moral complexity that makes her novels so successful as novels,
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complicates a view of them as activist in the sense of serving the objectives of a particular political cause. As is evident at least from Bourgeois and Burger’s, even her (primarily white) activist characters struggle to understand their place and responsibilities alongside black South Africans in political struggle. In The Essential Gesture (1988), Gordimer reflects extensively on the relationship between creativity and responsibility, ultimately insisting that it is not a writer’s purpose to adhere to and depict a particular political ideology, even if it is one that opposes injustice. For her, the more important task of the writer is to tell the truth: “The fact is, even on the side of the angels, a writer has to reserve the right to tell the truth as he sees it, in his own words, without being accused of letting the side down” (107). This commitment to the “truth” and high valuation of literary art is something with which many activist writers struggle, including Brink and even Prichard who, along with Gordimer, worry that literature subsumed within the political is little more than propaganda. (Indeed, George Orwell insisted that “all art is propaganda.”) They seem to suggest that, paradoxically, the more one employs fiction in a political cause, the less it is able to manifest those exceptional qualities (of representing the truth as one sees it, of exploring and containing ambiguity, of imagining the range of human experience and perception) that led to its being yoked to the political in the first place. Because of this dilemma, many authors attempt to preserve the integrity of both art and political activism by separating them. Catherine Lim’s notorious 1994 article “The PAP and the People – A Great Affective Divide,” for example, which criticizes the Singaporean government and initiated a harsh response, has little in common, politically, with her highly acclaimed fiction exploring women’s roles in traditional Chinese culture. A similar separation can be seen in the work of Indian novelist Arundhati Roy who, after the immense success of The God of Small Things (1997), quit writing fiction and devoted herself to social and environmental causes, leading grassroots campaigns in India against nuclear tests in 1998 and, among other things, protesting against the controversial Narmada Dam (a project also opposed by Roy’s fellow Indian novelist Salman Rushdie). She also published several collections of essays in which she forcefully comments on
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women’s rights, globalization, the Iraq War, freedom of speech, and other current issues. However, in 2007, a Reuters article announced, “Roy returns to fiction after activist decade.” The novelist and the activist, in other words, were for her two distinct roles, and to return to one would mean leaving the other. “In those ten years,” Roy says in the article, “I, along with many other people, have been part of really unmasking this process of corporate globalization. But now I feel the fundamental argument has been made, and I would stagnate as a writer if I carried on doing that” (Denyer 2007). Margaret Atwood is known for her cultural activism as a feminist, former president of PEN Canada, and outspoken critic of Toronto’s “megacity” development plan; however, she draws a line similar to Roy’s between art and politics. In a 1997 interview, Atwood said, “As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you’re going to be a second-rate artist” (Snell 1997). She goes on to acknowledge frequent “overlap” between the political and the aesthetic since ideas or experiences from one often make their way into the other, but ultimately for her they are separate activities, each with unique objectives: “when you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.” Despite this conscious separation, Atwood’s admission of overlap suggests that there is a sense in which many such authors’ supposedly apolitical novels are, in fact, deeply political. One critic claims that The Edible Woman (1969), for example, marked a point at which Atwood “began to use her writing as political, and explicitly feminist, activism” (Cooke 51). (Following this perspective, one could also argue that novels by politically minded writers such as Ama Ata Aidoo, Buchi Emecheta, and even Nuruddin Farah are instances of “feminist activism” in their portrayals of African women’s struggles.) The South African J. M. Coetzee has been criticized for his lack of political engagement during apartheid, but he nevertheless writes with a clear historical and political awareness and, according to Derek Attridge (2005), encourages a political and ethical response by providing readers an experience of otherness. Additionally, Coetzee’s
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political tendencies, however subdued in earlier novels, have emerged through his outspoken advocacy of animal rights, a preoccupation manifest in the novels Disgrace (1999) and Elizabeth Costello (2003). Similarly, despite Roy’s “departure” from fiction for activism after The God of Small Things, her vivid depiction of the intercaste love affair between Ammu and the paradigmatic absolute-other, the untouchable Velutha – in a scene that brought obscenity charges against Roy in 1997 – activated the tension between the two lines of Brink’s scale by imagining and publicly portraying the violation of a deeply entrenched social hierarchy. The novel reveals and seems to anticipate the political and transgressive sensibilities that drove Roy’s activist decade. SEE ALSO: Censorship and Fiction (WF); Critical Theory and Fiction (WF); English Studies, the Academy, and Fiction (WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Politics and the Novel (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF); Southern African Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Anand, M. R. (1957). Apology for Heroism: A Brief Autobiography of Ideas. Bombay: Kutub. Attridge, D. (2005). J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bald, S. R. (1974). Politics of a Revolutionary Elite: A Study of Mulk Raj Anand’s Novels. Modern Asian Studies, 8(4), 473–89. Barsamian, D. (2004). The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy. Cambridge: South End Press. Beasley, J. (1993). A Gallop of Fire: Katharine Susannah Prichard, on Guard for Humanity. Earlwood, NSW: Wedgetail. Boyers, R. (2005). The Dictator’s Dictation: The Politics of Novels and Novelists. New York: Columbia University Press. Brand, D. (1995). Bread Out of Stone: Recollections, Sex, Recognitions, Race, Dreaming, Politics. Toronto: Coach House. Brink, A. (1996). Reinventing a Continent: Writing and Politics in South Africa, 1982–1995. London: Secker and Warburg.
Cooke, N. (2004). Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Denyer, S. (2007). Roy Returns to Fiction after Activist Decade. At www.reuters.com/article/reutersEdge/ idUSSP24223420070213, accessed Mar. 16, 2009. Gordimer, N. (1988). The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics, and Places. London: Jonathan Cape. Harish, N. (1995). Politics as Fiction: The Novels of Ngugi wa Thiong’o. New Delhi: Creative. Kresler, H. (1998). Writing, Theater Arts, and Political Activism: Conversation with Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka. At http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/Elberg/ Soyinka/soyinka-con0.html, accessed Mar. 5, 2009. Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o (1982). Writers in Politics: Essays. London: Heinemann. Okome, O. (ed.) (2000). Before I am Hanged: Ken SaroWiwa, Literature, Politics, and Dissent. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Okonkwo, J. I. (1985). The Intellectual as Political Activist: A Character Type in Recent African Fiction. Nigeria Magazine, 53(4), 32–42. Prichard, K. S. (2000). Stories, Journalism, and Essays. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Roy, A. (2001). Power Politics. Cambridge: South End. Snell, M. (1997). Interview with Margaret Atwood. Mother Jones. At www.motherjones.com/media/ 1997/07/margaret-atwood, accessed Mar. 12, 2009. Soyinka, W. (1985). The Man Died: Prison Notes [1972]. London: Hutchinson/Arrow. Soyinka, W. (1993). Art, Dialogue, and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture. New York: Pantheon. Tandon, N. (2006). Mulk Raj Anand: A Social Worker behind a Mask. In B. R. Agrawal (ed.), Mulk Raj Anand. New Delhi: Atlantic, pp. 40–51.
Postcolonialism and Fiction JOHN MCLEOD
Postcolonialism is a term used to signify a large, varied, and interdisciplinary body of academic scholarship that is primarily concerned with the social and cultural impact of European colonialism and modes of resistance to it. Although “postcolonialism” might imply a coordinated or common approach by those who pursue it, the terrain of postcolonialism is much more diverse than the term might imply. There is much debate about the merits and debits of postcolonial scholarship, about whether or not postcolonialism meaningfully furthers the ongoing resistance to colonialism and its enduring political and
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imaginative legacies, and indeed about how to spell the term (with a hyphen, as in “postcolonialism,” or without?). To enter the field of postcolonialism is to enter a markedly contested area of academic study characterized by internal dissent, conflict, and lack of consensus. Yet nearly all postcolonial scholars, regardless of their intellectual position, are motivated by a common political and often moral objection to the advent of European colonialism at the dawn of modernity and to the geopolitical realities and modes of thought that have endured after formal colonization has ended in most of the once colonized world. Rather than celebrate the contemporary world order as one liberated from the divisive, exploitative, and often murderous operations of colonialism – which usually involved the settlement of foreign lands by European powers against the will of indigenous peoples – postcolonial scholars expose how the material and imaginative practices of colonialism have endured in the late twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. Prior to postcolonialism’s emergence as a key academic term in the 1980s, the study of colonialism, anti-colonial resistance, and decolonization was primarily the remit of disciplines such as economics, political studies, and area studies, often influenced by Marxist political philosophy and the Marxist-influenced nationalist independence movements in many once colonized locations (sub-Saharan Africa, for example). The term “postcolonial” then demarcated merely a recent era in international relations and in the life of once colonized locations. As Neil Lazarus describes it, by the early 1970s “postcolonial” was “a periodizing term, an historical and not an ideological concept. It bespoke no political desire or aspiration, looked forward to no particular social and political order” (2). We might say that before the 1980s, “postcolonial” functioned more like a noun than an adjective: it named a political or historical point of fact, an aspect of reality rather than a way of apprehending reality. This changed once the term was used to describe not a concrete set of facts or circumstances but a particular condition, a strategic way of thinking that did not simply emerge after decolonization but began during the period of colonization itself. Postcolonialism as we understand it today evolved rapidly in the 1980s for two related
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reasons: the impact of critical theory and the advent of a more “culturalist” approach in the academy to the seemingly concrete matters of history, politics, and society. Beginning in the late 1970s, several key intellectuals mobilized the insights of structuralist and poststructuralist critical theory, especially from francophone philosophers, in approaching colonialism and resistance. In different ways, they provocatively argued that modes of thinking and imagining were not of secondary importance to the fortunes of colonies but were actually fundamental to the machinery of colonialism. In his groundbreaking work Orientalism (1985 [1978]), Edward W. Said argued that the British and French colonization of the Middle East would not have been possible without the European creation of a complex web of knowledge about foreign lands. The production of this knowledge – in arts and sciences, from poetry to painting to philosophy to medicine – helped to intellectually and morally justify the dispossession and governance of colonized peoples, while sculpting a style of thinking that naturalized the perceived contrast between the rational, civilized, advanced West and the illogical, barbaric, backwards East or “Orient.” “Orientalism” was Said’s term for this style of thinking, which named something that didn’t actually exist. “It is not merely there,” he argued; rather, “the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West” (4, 5). Said’s argument drew upon three critical theorists. First, he was indebted to the work of Michel Foucault, who in Discipline and Punish (1977) and The History of Sexuality (1979) had argued that power was fundamentally discursive and therefore inseparable from the creation and pursuit of knowledge. Second, Said looked to Antonio Gramsci in describing Orientalism as a form of “hegemony,” a strategic and self-serving form of knowledge created by one class or group but disseminated to others as a natural or true image of reality. Third, Said was influenced by the Algerian-born French thinker Jacques Derrida’s argument that we cannot think about the world beyond the forms of knowledge we make about it – a point often crudely summarized by the maxim “There is nothing outside of the text.” Said’s preoccupation with the discursive footings of colonialism as a structure of power and
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mode of authority was shared by two postcolonial thinkers who had migrated to the West from India, Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. They helped establish postcolonialism as a familiar term, partly because (unlike Said) Bhabha and Spivak readily used the term “postcolonial” to signify a transformative mode of thought that challenges and moves beyond Orientalist or “colonialist” ways of understanding the world. In essays published in the 1980s and reprinted in his landmark book The Location of Culture (1994), Bhabha developed Said’s historically specific work into a more abstract schema of “colonial discourse,” often taking examples from the British colonial period in South Asia. Influenced by Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytically oriented theories of language, Bhabha argued that colonial discourse was as an ambivalent, highly unstable, and self-splitting phenomenon that could never hold in place what it most desired – a stable worldview in which colonizer and colonized were neatly differentiated and opposed. For Bhabha, postcolonialism both identified and valued the essential slipperiness and untidiness of discourse, rather than accepting the seemingly stable, totalizing, or “holistic” concepts at the fulcrum of European thought: civilization, identity, race, the nation, even modernity itself: “The postcolonial perspective resists the attempt at holistic forms of social explanation. It forces a recognition of the more complex cultural and political boundaries that exist on the cusp of these often opposed political spheres” (173). His postcolonialism named an entirely new way of thinking – liminal, unstable, post-logical – that challenged the ways knowledge had been conventionally formulated and pursued. Meanwhile, in her complex and often abstruse critical writings collected in books such as In Other Worlds (1988) and Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), Spivak pursued postcolonialism through Derrida’s thought. Just as Derridean deconstruction highlights the precariousness of all structures of thought that attempt to solidify particular value structures or binary oppositions, Spivak sought to expose colonialist modes of representation as, first, constitutive of Western philosophy and its envisioning of the world’s order; and, second, as inherently unstable and essentially questionable. For Spivak, too, the postcolonial critic was responsible for challenging
received knowledge about the world and negotiating new modes of thought. Together with Said, Bhabha’s and Spivak’s work firmly established postcolonialism as a field of study with distinct conceptual currency by the early 1990s. These critics have been hugely influential in characterizing postcolonial studies in general, but their work has also provoked three particular and enduring complaints about postcolonialism. First, much of their scholarship (especially Bhabha’s and Spivak’s) is written in an especially challenging fashion, at times bordering on the baffling and impenetrable, leading postcolonialism’s detractors to condemn it as elitist, hyper-theoretical, and drunk on jargon. Second, much postcolonial thinking questions not just those discourses that helped colonialism survive but also such key political resources of anticolonial dissidence as Marxism and anti-colonial nationalism. These are condemned as fatally compromised because they accept unthinkingly some key concepts of Western-derived politics and culture, and once colonized peoples are therefore seen to be trafficking in the very stable or “holistic” forms of knowledge and politics that subjected them in the first place. Unsurprisingly, some of postcolonialism’s fiercest critics have been Marxist scholars: Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory (1992), E. San Juan, Jr.’s Beyond Postcolonial Theory (1998), and Benita Parry’s Postcolonialism: A Materialist Critique (2004) object passionately to the dismissal of anti-colonial dissidence as intellectually suspect. Third, postcolonialism’s enthusiasm for critical theory has been denounced as a further turn to “culturalism” in academic thought, with issues of power and politics self-servingly considered primarily as matters of representation, discourse, and textuality. As James Procter defines it, “culturalism” denotes “the tendency to foreground and explore the central role of culture in maintenance of (neo-) colonial power and postcolonial dissidence” (173), but this foregrounding raises questions about postcolonialism’s perceived contempt for empiricism and cheerful exploration of the minutiae of discourse and language. Said, Bhabha, and Spivak trained as English literature scholars and draw frequently upon literary examples, so it is perhaps not surprising that they see colonialism and its legacies as centrally a matter of culture. Indeed, the
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POSTCOLONIALISM AND FICTION
development of postcolonialism is indebted to literary studies in the anglophone world, and the emergence of postcolonialism is firmly linked to the fortunes of literary fiction about colonization and its legacies, a relationship that has been mutually constitutive and beneficial. The emergence of new kinds of fiction and a fresh generation of English-language writers in the 1980s stimulated interest in postcolonial theory, while postcolonialism’s critical concerns and new lexis – with its emphasis on Orientalism, ambivalence, the subaltern, “writing back” – have made possible ways of naming and reading a distinct body of fiction as postcolonial. It is now not uncommon to study “postcolonial fiction” as a distinct subgenre, considered to possess its own particular poetics and set of concerns (see Fraser 2000). Postcolonial fiction as we understand it today has developed through three phases. The first includes twentieth-century writing before the late 1970s by authors from key locations of the British Commonwealth – Africa, Canada, the Caribbean, South Asia, and the South Pacific – which has been considered postcolonial only belatedly. Their fiction, which often portrayed the experiences of living in a country with a history (ongoing or recent) of British colonialism, sometimes had a distinct political agenda in challenging colonial ways of seeing with alternative, often indigenous-based forms of cultural knowledge, as in Chinua Achebe’s fable of Nigeria before and during colonialism, Things Fall Apart (1958). In other works the newly independent governments of former colonies were critically appraised, as in Ayi Kwei Armah’s coruscating critique of Ghanaian independence, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968). Still other writers depicted the vicissitudes of daily life with less concern for politics, as in V. S. Naipaul’s depiction of colonial Trinidad in Miguel Street (1959) and A House for Mr. Biswas (1961); some appeared more attuned to the imperious social and cultural attitudes of the British than the purview of the colonized. These texts were then read as part of a wider body of literary fiction named “Commonwealth literature”; and while local political issues were acknowledged as important, most Commonwealth critics were more concerned with the alleged universal qualities of form or theme that transcended vulgar history or politics; they therefore sought common ground among diverse
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Commonwealth writings and between them and British works. Only from the 1980s did this extensive archive of Commonwealth fiction become thought of as postcolonial, as it was rapidly re-evaluated in terms of postcolonialism’s broader remit to challenge colonialist or Orientalist modes of thought. At times this led to the radical reappraisal of writers from once colonized countries if they seemed not to support a postcolonial attitude or politics, as the example of Naipaul infamously evidenced. The second kind of postcolonial fiction emerged in tandem with the establishment of postcolonialism. Said, Bhabha, and Spivak were well educated, well-to-do migrants from the Middle East or South Asia to the US or Britain, and for some commentators it is no coincidence that postcolonialism seems especially interested in the migratory and cosmopolitan experiences of a privileged postcolonial intelligentsia. From the early 1980s a new generation of writers emerged – often Oxbridge-educated and relatively wealthy – who were migrants or children of migrants from the so-called Third World to the First, and whose innovative fictional endeavors appeared to make perfect sense when read through postcolonial lenses. A key example is Salman Rushdie, whose novel Midnight’s Children (1981) narrates the fortunes of twentieth-century India through the fantastical figure of Saleem Sinai, whose love of storytelling and questioning of received history seem more magical than realist – perfectly in tune with the antipathy for empiricism and holistic forms of social explanation detected within postcolonialism. As Rushdie explains in an important essay, his literary vision of India owed as much to his migration as a schoolboy from India to Britain as to oral forms of Indian storytelling or other indigenous cultural resources; migration enabled a particular way of seeing the world that scholars could explain through the newly minted vocabulary of postcolonialism – especially the fact that “those of us who [have migrated] have been forced by cultural displacement to accept the provisional nature of all truths” (12). Midnight’s Children anticipated a large body of fiction, distinctly metropolitan yet indebted to an experience of cultural plurality, that thematized the difficult experience of migration to or within Western nations, such as Timothy Mo’s novel of the Chinese in 1960s London, Sour Sweet (1982).
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Such texts often experimented with new fictional forms to express the migrant’s partial, plural vision of the world, as in Michael Ondaatje’s novel In The Skin of a Lion (1987), which begins with a quotation from John Berger: “Never again will a single story be told as if it is the only one” (Ondaatje, n.p.). This type of writing epitomized postcolonial fiction in its initial years and helped cement the widespread academic assumption that postcolonialism was a profoundly metropolitan and cosmopolitan endeavor. Rushdie himself produced the decade’s most enduring metropolitan postcolonial fiction, The Satanic Verses (1988), which expressed in its challenging, innovative form its attempt to repudiate received ways of understanding the world from the migrant’s perspective – although the dangers of critiquing inherited knowledge and belief were grimly underlined in the furore surrounding the book’s publication in the Islamic world. Since the early 1990s, in its third phase, postcolonial fiction has become firmly established as a robust category supported by a large literarycritical apparatus that includes conferences, scholarly books, and international journals. Some writers have pursued the critical investigation and evaluation of once colonized locations in their work, often engaging with predominant cultural myths or exploring the consequences of political change in the aftermath of colonialism. In his novels of Australia, Peter Carey has dealt with the settler nation’s contemporary condition in The Tax Inspector (1991) and the myths of its turbulent convict past in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). The South African J. M. Coetzee has offered challenging visions of apartheid’s aftermath in his award-winning book Disgrace (1999), while Rohinton Mistry offers a chilling narrative of the mid-1970s Indian Emergency (when democratic government was suspended) in A Fine Balance (1995). That said, while each of these novels can exemplify postcolonialism’s wider critical project in their challenges to received knowledge, there remains the danger that in reading them as such we impose upon them the political or ethical agenda of postcolonialism, and recently it has no longer been as easy as it was to assume a rapport between postcolonialism and fictional representations of colonialism, decolonization, and migration. Indeed, many writers
of so-called postcolonial fiction object to the term “postcolonial” because of its perceived restrictiveness. In addition, some postcolonial critics have become suspicious of the remarkable popularity of postcolonial fiction in the contemporary global marketplace, as evidenced by the number of postcolonial novels that win literary prizes such as Britain’s Man Booker Prize. As Graham Huggan argues in The Postcolonial Exotic (2001), the recent penchant for publishing and celebrating postcolonial fiction might actually work against the goals of postcolonialism by packaging postcolonial fiction as an exotic entertainment for First World consumers keen to sample a little foreign spice. The production of the “postcolonial exotic” may be the West’s attempt to defuse and contain the unruly consequences of postcolonial critique found in fictional texts, but it also calls into question the effectiveness of postcolonialism itself to effect meaningful change both within and beyond the rarefied academy. Furthermore, postcolonialism’s validity has been challenged by the emergence recently of fiction by Indigenous, Aboriginal, or First Nations peoples in the settler colonies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Fiction by figures such as the Maori writer Patricia Grace questions the applicability of metropolitan models of the postcolonial to certain cross-cultural conflicts, while inviting us to contemplate the extent to which the postcolonial rhetoric may conceal ongoing forms of colonial imagination and exploitation – not just between once colonized and metropolitan locations but within them too. It is crucial, therefore, to realize that literary fiction makes possible the means to investigate critically the shortcomings and blind spots of postcolonialism as a scholarly pursuit, just as much as it may prove “in practice” the objectives of postcolonialism as a transformative mode of thought. SEE ALSO: Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Critical Theory and Fiction (WF); English Studies, the Academy, and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the African Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF);
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PRICHARD, KATHARINE SUSANNAH
Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/ Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ahmad, A. (1992). In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso. Ashcroft, B. Griffiths, G. & Tiffin, H. (1989). The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge. Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Boehmer, E. (2005). Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (trans. A. Sheridan). London: Allen Lane. Foucault, M. (1979). The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (trans. R. Hurley). London: Allen Lane. Fraser, R. (2000). Lifting the Sentence: A Poetics of Postcolonial Fiction. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Huggan, G. (2001). The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge. Lazarus, N. (ed.) (2004). The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McLeod, J. (2000). Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ondaatje, M. (1987). In the Skin of a Lion. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Parry, B. (2004). Postcolonialism: A Materialist Critique. London: Routledge. Procter, J. (2007). Culturalist Formulations. In J. McLeod (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 173–80. Rushdie, S. (1991). Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Granta. Said, E. W. (1985). Orientalism. [1978] London: Penguin. Said, E. W. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus. San Juan, E. (1998). Beyond Postcolonial Theory. New York: St. Martin’s. Spivak, G. C. (1988). In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. London: Routledge. Spivak, G. C. (1993). Outside in the Teaching Machine. London: Routledge. Young, R. J. C. (2001). Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
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Prichard, Katharine Susannah DELYS BIRD
Katharine Susannah Prichard identified with Australia’s so-called democratic nationalist literary tradition, established by late nineteenth-century writers such as Henry Lawson, Bernard O’Dowd, and Joseph Furphy. When her first novel, The Pioneers (1915), was published in London it was received rapturously in Australia as the first truly Australian novel. Prichard’s output was enormous, including 13 novels, three collections of short fiction, and numerous other stories published in journals and newspapers, plus a fictionalized account of her childhood, an autobiography, two small collections of poetry, 13 plays (most unpublished), innumerable political speeches, statements, pamphlets and articles, and a polemical work, The Real Russia (1934), describing her state-sponsored visit to Russia in 1933. She was also a prodigious letter writer. Her work was widely translated, especially in the former Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries. Prichard was born in Levuka, Fiji on December 4, 1883, and died in Perth on October 2, 1969. Her family moved to Melbourne when she was 3, and she spent her adult life in Western Australia, settling with her husband, Captain Hugo (Jim) Throssell, on a small landholding in the hills outside Perth after their marriage in 1919. Prichard’s formal education was slight, but she was widely read in philosophy and English literature, as well as German and French literatures in their original languages. She became a journalist and twice worked overseas. Her pacifism was confirmed when one of her brothers was killed in World War I, and her long-held socialist beliefs found their formal expression as she joined the Communist Party when it was formed in Australia in 1920. She remained a staunch party member throughout her lifetime, believing that a socialist utopia would be achieved in Russia and eventually in Australia. She helped establish the Australian Writers’ League in 1934, was involved in the Movement against War and Fascism (MAWF) between the World Wars, joined the peace movement in the 1940s; and worked on behalf of women’s issues.
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Prichard’s passionate involvement in causes was matched by her intense nationalism, ardently expressed in her well-known essay “Australia (The Land I Love)” (2000, 69). She strove always to present a new Australia and a new kind of Australian, aligning herself and her work as realist against the “decadence” of literary modernism. Yet while Prichard’s denial of modernism is predictable, much of her writing, particularly the short fiction, uses modernist techniques. Many critics are divided in their assessment of her work; some value the romantic, vitalist aesthetic of her early work, influenced as it was by writers like Thomas Hardy and especially D. H. Lawrence and at its height in Working Bullocks (1926); others argue that her writing was greatest in the later novels, particularly the Goldfields trilogy, which had an overt Marxist ideology, comparing her with writers such as Gorki and de Maupassant whom Prichard admired. Intimate Strangers (1937), an underrated novel, participates in both these modes as it tells the contemporary story of an unsatisfactory urban marriage and a woman’s search for an independent life. She traveled widely in Western Australia, depending always on her own direct experience of different environments for her fiction. In it, the contradictions that marked her life are often evident. Women are characteristically depicted as stronger than males, who are weakened by exploitative work or the struggle against capitalism, but such women still find their greatest fulfillment in motherhood, while sexualized female characters must curb their instincts and frivolous women are condemned. Prichard was unusual among Australian writers, indeed most Australians at the time, in her treatment of racial politics and Aboriginal rights. The colonial devastation of Aboriginal cultures and miscegenation are central issues in the short novel, Coonardoo (1929), which has attracted more critical attention than any of her other writing. While race differences are often treated sentimentally – Coonardoo is depicted as an “essential woman” figure, with an instinctive understanding of and connection to the natural world – Prichard’s respect for Aboriginal people is always evident. A major play, Brumby Innes (1927) was not performed until 1972, perhaps because of its unvarnished presentation of white Australians’ brutal exploitation of Aborigines.
An increasing adherence to a strict socialist realist aesthetic is clearest in Prichard’s most ambitious work, the Goldfields trilogy: The Roaring Nineties (1946), Golden Miles (1948), and Winged Seeds (1950). Through the central figure of Sally Gough, together with her family and community, Prichard presents a social history of several generations of workers on the goldfields of Western Australia, from its pioneering days in the 1890s through two World Wars to the late 1940s when a capitalist economy had taken over the mining industry. Developing the twin themes of politics and love, Prichard explores most of her favorite causes and strongest beliefs. Prichard’s statement about the potential of Australian literature – “The specific contribution Australian writers can make to world literature is an Australian view of places, people, traditions and customs, manners and ideas” (“Some Perceptions and Aspirations,” 2000, 219) – encapsulates the significance of her work. SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Herbert, Xavier (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Lawrence, D. H. (BIF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Prichard, K. S. (1915). The Pioneers. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Prichard, K.S. (1926). Working Bullocks. London: Jonathan Cape. Prichard, K. S. (1928). The Wild Oats of Han. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Prichard, K. S. (1929). Coonardoo. London: Jonathan Cape. Prichard, K. S. (1931). Haxby’s Circus. London: Jonathan Cape. Prichard, K. S. (1937). Intimate Strangers. London: Jonathan Cape. Prichard, K. S. (1946). The Roaring Nineties. London: Jonathan Cape. Prichard, K. S. (1948). Golden Miles. London: Jonathan Cape. Prichard, K. S. (1950). Winged Seeds. Sydney: Australasian Publishing. Prichard, K. S. (1963). Child of the Hurricane: An Autobiography. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Prichard, K. S. (1974). Brumby Innes and Bid Me to Love. Sydney: Currency Methuen Drama.
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Prichard, K. S. (2000). Stories, Journalism and Essays (ed. D. Bird). St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press [includes comprehensive bibliography]. Throssell, R. (1975). Wild Weeds and Wind Flowers: The Life and Letters of Katharine Susannah Prichard. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
The Publishing Industry and Fiction SARAH BROUILLETTE
Two interconnected processes fundamentally reshaped English-language literary publishing during the twentieth century. On one hand the industry was globalized: companies set up branches and partnerships in anglophone markets first constituted under colonial conditions; and an increasing number of authors originating outside the US or UK were published in London or New York, nodes of access to the largest markets and to the institutions that bestow acclaim. On the other hand, aided by economic liberalization, the industry passed into corporate hands that reached for profit and publicity: small firms merged and were acquired by transnational media corporations or conglomerates; marketing became increasingly central to the work of producing and circulating new writing; and the distinct success of literary fiction meant fresh challenges to distinctions between elite culture and mass media content. Permitting some generalization, these intermingled shifts can be succinctly described. The fate of the Net Book Agreement (NBA) is suggestive. In force from the first day of 1900, the NBA prevented booksellers from offering discounts on prices set by publishers. Evidently willing to selfregulate, the parties involved recognized that sufficient capital had to be concentrated in editorial offices to allow for venture on worthy talent. But in 1995 the NBA was dissolved. Retailers, now mainly large bookstore chains, were no longer willing to allow others to dictate absolute pricing, and many publishers were ready to relinquish this power. Much had changed. Before World War II literary publishing was concentrated in the hands of elites – mostly white, male, and invested in the notion that their work involved intangible rewards. Key firms were only
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modestly profitable, and their identities derived from the interests of the editors who ran them. After 1945, concerned about US competition, and seeking ways to manage or benefit from the onset of decolonization, British publishers were encouraged to invigorate the export trade. The British Commonwealth Market Agreement, in place until 1976, meant they automatically retained rights to distribute works under contract throughout the Commonwealth. Many flourished in this climate. Heinemann Educational Books (HEB), for instance, opened branches in Australia, New Zealand, Africa, and Canada, among other locations. Along with Oxford University Press, Macmillan, and Longman, HEB ensured British firms cornered the lucrative market for affordable anglophone teaching texts. Its African Writers Series (1962–) was dominated by fiction, and in its first dozen years of operation the majority of its copies were sold to schools in Africa. Alan Hill, the man who conceived the series, had traveled throughout the continent and written dispatches for The Bookseller, the main trade journal, encouraging others to develop overseas opportunities. They clearly listened: in 1949 exports made up 29 percent of the value of British book sales; this figure reached 38 percent by 1959 and 47 percent by 1969 (Squires 2005, 180). Though books were occasionally produced overseas for those markets, and though local offices at times exercised a modicum of editorial control, most operations and profits returned to the hands of parent firms at their London headquarters. This remained true as the Western-based media giants, their global reach made possible by the British overseas trade, acquired these same companies as publishing wings. Meanwhile most overseas writers had a hard time securing sizable readerships. Publishing activity in Africa and the Caribbean, for instance, undercapitalized and oriented to the state-funded education sector, remained crippled by a limited literate leisured class and inadequate library services. The readership in South Asia was somewhat larger: before World War II Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand were both published in London (by Faber and Faber and Lawrence and Wishart respectively), but they could viably declare themselves more interested in Indian audiences than British (Ranasinha 26). Still, for much of the
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century, most authors recognized that they needed to publish in the West if they hoped to make a living by writing. After the war many writers often lived there in any case, as streams of migrants arrived in the colonial metropoles during these years. British publishers like Victor Gollancz, Andre Deutsch, and Chatto and Windus were enthusiastic about incorporating new voices. V. S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Chinua Achebe, Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o, Anita Desai, and Doris Lessing all published their first novels in London in the two decades after 1945. Emerging at the same time were hints of the industry’s consolidated corporate future. In the 1960s publishers proved attractive to firms like GE, IBM, and RCA, which hoped to control content that could be sold to the education sector in new electronic formats. However, these companies quickly found publishing houses to be a liability rather than an asset. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s American, British, and later European companies were buying and selling publishing imprints at a dizzying rate. It wasn’t until the 1990s that most publishing houses found themselves finally settled under the umbrellas of transnational media corporations (TNMCs), such as Bertelsmann, which owns Random House, or of conglomerates, such as Pearson, which combines oil and banking interests with its ownership of – among other media properties – Penguin, the Financial Times, and The Economist. By century’s end five dispersed transnational giants, Bertelsmann, Pearson, HarperCollins, Hodder Headline, and Hachette, controlled just over 50 percent of the anglophone market. The effects of this control are highly contested, but the dominant narrative within the industry itself, disseminated through professional associations and journals, laments a trend toward blockbusters: the repeated celebration and intensive marketing of predictably high-selling titles. Large publishing houses are now responsible to corporate shareholders; editors have little freedom to take chances with untried writers, nor can they preserve a backlist of slow-selling but respected titles. They may have more capital to offer large advances to select writers, but their choice of manuscripts is limited to those expected to sell well, and they concentrate on a few lead works per season. They produce print runs of a size incon-
ceivable to smaller firms, and they negotiate with chain bookstores – also products of industry corporatization – to market certain books in key retail areas. Books that don’t fly off the shelves are soon removed from them. It helps if an author is blessed with an interesting biography, good looks, and the social skills to speak about his or her work at reading festivals and on television during interviews, profiles, and prize ceremonies. Prized highearning writers become general social commentators or even global celebrities, while the rest are left struggling to make ends meet. At the end of the century, a survey of members of the Society of Authors revealed their average annual income to be £16,600; 75 percent gross under £20,000 and 46 percent under £5,000 (Pool 59). As their growing ranks intimate, in this milieu literary agents have particular importance. Agents understand how to market writers to appropriate publishers, and how to negotiate rights in multiple markets so as to maximize remuneration for their authors and themselves. Industry consolidation has tended to work in tandem with niche market fragmentation. As technologies like offset lithography and film- or computer-setting have replaced metal or rubber plates, smaller print runs have became more feasible. Management of distribution systems vastly improved after International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs) were introduced globally in 1967–8, allowing for bar-coding and making it easier to control stock, helped as well by tele- and then electronic ordering systems in place from the late 1970s. These technologies make it possible to cater to smaller portions of the reading public, while media synergy – cooperation among a corporation’s various subsidiaries – ensures opportunities for niche marketing. In this light, where the dissemination of an elite literary tradition remains a goal, it may be because a niche exists to make it financially viable. Its members’ specific tastes are easily gleaned through rationalized sales systems, and their characteristics – university education, aesthetic training, leisure time for reading, a willingness to buy pricier books, a desire to be distinguished from the masses – are appealed to through strategic target marketing. At the core of this group’s book-buying activity is literary fiction. A category distinguished by its particular look and vehicle (the B-format paper-
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THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND FICTION
back), it was the major success story of the 1980s and 1990s, as many titles were marketed as lead works and became bestsellers. Their circulation was secured by the proliferation of book clubs and of outlets for debate over, and rankings of, literary novels’ respective merits. The ceremony for the Booker Prize (now the Man Booker Prize) was first televised in 1976. In 1979 the literary journal Granta was launched, and it worked with the Book Marketing Council to publish the first “Best of Young British Novelists” list in 1983. The glut of competitive prizes and ranked lists, crucial to the marketing of literary fiction, concentrates readers’ attention – and spending – on a few star authors, while also guaranteeing that what is deemed “best” will soon be displaced by another product. Within this competitive system, where small press alternatives persist their role is often to discover talented authors, apprentice them to the profession, and provide them with the visibility that allows them to move on to contracts with larger firms. The writing careers that result are rarely a simple matter of permanent transit from the local to the global. In settler-invader countries with relatively developed readerships, such as Canada and Australia, smaller firms will position themselves as nation-building enterprises in order to secure government funding. They will highlight where their inability to finance their operations stems from the dominance of multinationals, and appeal to the state’s desire to secure a place for itself in global markets and imaginations. Ironically, when the multinationals acquire writers fostered by the small presses they too emphasize their national origins as a means of distinguishing their works within the market (MacSkimming 2003). As they spread offices and books across the globe they carefully promote just such a starred roster of distinct writers in order to appeal to disparate reading communities. More research is needed to uncover how such wide-scale changes have transformed the production and reception of literary texts. Particularly little is known about how literature’s content and meaning are affected by the industry’s reorganization. What existing studies do show is that under conditions of globalization and corporatization the category of fiction itself, along with the aesthetic more generally, has often become a site of vigorous contestation.
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Early in the century high modernism had fostered heightened consciousness of what distinguishes literature from other forms of expression. Writers like Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf redefined the novel in particular as a work of high art involving learned conventions and skilled craft. The first waves of migrant writers were greeted by a British readership at times unsure about how to place them in relation to their new-found sense of the genre’s status. London-based reviewers and editors often suggested – whether to deride or to celebrate – that what a writer had produced was more untrained anthropological narrative than fiction. The terms of this reception were sometimes patronizing, figuring the overseas writer as primitive or naive. Even their clearest backers were known to suggest that what made migrant writers great was what Henry Swanzy, a host of the BBC’s influential Caribbean Voices radio program, called “local color” (Low 2002, 30). In this context, what was particularly valued was work that seemed authentically different rather than that in which “foreign” elements were themselves evidently crafted and staged. A good case is Nigerian author AmosTutuola. He was himself interested in having the non-standard English in his first book, The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), corrected by his Faber and Faber editors. But for those ushering it into the London market its value derived from the author’s apparent lack of sophistication. Editors’ letters to Tutuola declare a preference for preserving some of what he himself took to be mistakes, since his deviance from the norm was what made his work attractive and marked it out as “authentically” African. In this sense, by leaving those errors in the composition, it was Faber and Faber that quite actively produced Tutuola as a native writer (Low 2006). After World War II writers from overseas found venues for their work, as well as networks of colleagues and reviewers, in new magazines (e.g., the London Magazine), radio shows (e.g., Third Programme and Caribbean Voices), and television (e.g., Channel 4), and their growing visibility eventually dovetailed with hard-won institutional support for the study and teaching of what came to be known, however contentiously, as Commonwealth literature. Still, many of these authors had reason to be uneasy about their habitation in Britain and their reliance on its book trade. They suffered racism and poverty, and
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some, subscribing to the notion that producing “real” art meant transcending the migrant’s particular experience, resented being linked to that world in the press. They faced a literary establishment that at times seemed nostalgic for Empire: worried about the American takeover of British publishing, and concerned with maintaining the enlightened British tradition as a primary edifice new voices could never fundamentally alter (though they should be grateful to contribute to it). It is no surprise, then, that several important novels of this period, including Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) and George Lamming’s The Emigrants (1954), refashion the longstanding modernist tropes of urban alienation and of the struggling artist in ways that reflect their authors’ ambivalence about their market positioning (Kalliney 96–7). Also subject to trenchant debate was the relationship between the particular and the universal, the local and the global. Witness the now standard cover blurb: it was under the influence of crossborder literary traffic that the convention of emphasizing a work’s simultaneous distinguishing local specificity and universal applicability developed. If capturing readers’ interests required producing stories set abroad, or ones tied to the writer’s unique biography or distant origins, a work was nonetheless required to be comprehended by disparate readerships as true to what they took to be general to human experience. “Local color” was considered desirable, but at the same time, no work that wanted to stake a claim to be art could afford to be grounded too much in the location from which the author emerged. Writers couldn’t help but be aware of and attuned to such expectations. Their editors, reviewers, and commentators debated how much untranslated non-English language could be allowed (usually very little) and what levels of description of non-English geography and society were appropriate (somewhat more). At the same time, authors often found themselves subject to particularly intense criticism when their works made their way back to the overseas milieus they relied on for material and marketability. Some West African writers, for instance, were accused of Eurocentrism when their work departed from longstanding local conventions of using narrative as a practical means of conveying clear lessons to readers (Newell 2006).
A final site of contestation was the intermingling of aesthetic and commercial values to which the triumph of literary fiction pointed. It was literary novels that were most often crisscrossing the popular and the elite, and some feared this meant that whatever was left of the literary, subsumed into a globally dispersed multicultural middlebrow culture, had become irrecoverably corrupted by marketing, commercialization and exoticization (Huggan 2001). Others took it as a sign that higher education had democratized elite taste, fostering appreciation for literature and desire for the kind of transfiguring experience that reading could be – a desire that, like the industry itself, crossed geographic and political boundaries, but one that nevertheless couldn’t be reduced to commerce. SEE ALSO: Awards and Prizes (WF); Censorship and Fiction (WF); Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); English Studies, the Academy, and Fiction (WF); Globalization and the Novel (BIF); The Publishing Industry: The Rise of the Paperback (BIF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bagdikian, B. (2004). The New Media Monopoly. Boston: Beacon. Brouillette, S. (2007). Postcolonial Writers in the Global LiteraryMarketplace.Basingstoke:PalgraveMacmillan. English, J. F. (2005). The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. English, J. F., & Frow, J. (2006). Literary Authorship and Celebrity Culture. In J. F. English (ed.), A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 39–57. Hemmungs Wirten, E. (2007). The Global Market 1970–2000: Producers. In S. Eliot & J. Rose (eds.), A Companion to the History of the Book. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 395–405. Huggan, G. (2001). The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge. Kalliney, P. (2007). Metropolitan Modernism and Its West Indian Interlocutors: 1950s London and the Emergence of Postcolonial Literature. PMLA, 122(1), 89–104. Long, E. (1992). The Cultural Meaning of Concentration in Publishing. In F. Kobrak & B. Luey (eds.), The Structure of International Publishing in the 1990s. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, pp. 93–117. Low, G. (2002). “Finding the Centre?” Publishing Commonwealth Writing in London: The Case of
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Anglophone Caribbean Writing 1950–65. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 37(2), 21–38. Low, G. (2006). The Natural Artist: Publishing Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard in Postwar Britain. Research in African Literatures, 37(4), 15–33. MacSkimming, R. (2003). The Perilous Trade: Publishing Canada’s Writers. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Newell, S. (2006). West African Literatures: Ways of Reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pool, Kate. (2000). Love, Not Money. Author, 111(2), 58–66. Ranasinha, R. (2007). South Asian Writers in TwentiethCentury Britain: Culture in Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Squires, C. (2005). Novelistic Production and the Publishing Industry in Britain and Ireland. In B. W. Shaffer (ed.), A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945–2000. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 177–93. Squires, C. (2007). Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Stevenson, R. (2004). Oxford English Literary History, vol. 12: 1960–2000: The Last of England? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Todd, R. (2006). Literary Fiction and the Book Trade. In J. F. English (ed.), A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 19–38.
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Q Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction CHERYL STOBIE
Over the twentieth century there was an increasing representation of queer/alternative sexualities in world fiction, dealing with such matters as homophobia, the normativity of heterosexuality, and gender issues. This burgeoning was made possible by the globalization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) studies. Latterly, representations of alternative sexualities in world fiction have highlighted the effects of colonialism on the construction of sexuality, expanded and nuanced ideas of contemporary sexuality as developed in the West, and reconstructed culturally specific sexualities. The word “queer” was originally used in the early twentieth century to refer pejoratively to people who were, or were suspected of being, homosexual, and this meaning still persists. From the 1960s on, gay and lesbian communities developed in the West, drawing inspiration from gay liberation and feminist scholarship. Some individuals later reclaimed the word “queer” as positive in two senses: as an umbrella term to refer to nonheterosexual people and as a movement beyond the identity politics of gay and lesbian studies, a shift that focused instead on questioning the notion of fixed sexual identities and the perception of heterosexuality as normative. Michel Foucault, Teresa de Lauretis, Gloria Anzaldua, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and Michael Warner contributed significantly to the development of queer theory from the 1970s to the 1990s.
While the term “queer” is a contested one in the West and in the postcolonial world, as defined and refined by queer theorists it has various advantages: it opposes the privileging of heterosexuality, sees sexuality as constructed, understands variant sexualities in specific cultural contexts, and simultaneously perceives differences between these local manifestations and similarities between them in a global context. This global queer theory attempts to be sensitive to specific cultural matrices of “queerness,” and academics from privileged societies are increasingly aware of the dangers of canonization and appropriation of queer literature from the postcolonial world. During the colonial encounter a range of indigenous sexual practices and identities were regulated, pathologized, and stigmatized by political and legal authorities as well as religious leaders within the Christian and Islamic traditions. In the postcolonial era these modified practices and identities still do not fit neatly into the Western LGBT paradigm. Homophobia is rife and state-sanctioned in many societies; in the case of Africa, for instance, the appellation “un-African” is used as a means of controlling variant sexualities, and punitive behavior includes beating, rape, and even murder. Fiction from postcolonial societies may be less explicit about sexualities than Western fiction; it may include homophobic judgments; and it may contain relatively veiled or coded references to queer sexuality. It may also appear courageous and fresh in its representation of fluid sexualities that do not conform to Western tropes such as the coming-out narrative. Because of prevalent gender inequality, women may publish less queer fiction than their male counterparts.
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QUEER/ALTERNATIVE SEXUALITIES IN FICTION
In Africa, many texts associate homosexuality with colonial exploitation, particularly but not only by the West. Kole Omotoso’s The Edifice (1971) draws parallels between the central character’s sexual abuse in a mission school and his desire to study in Britain, while Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons (1979) perceives the Arab colonization of Africa in terms of sexual corruption and economic plunder. A pejorative treatment of queer themes is widespread, but a novel such as Armah’s Why Are We So Blest? (1972) reveals the similarities between the oppressions experienced by gay and by black people. Yulissa Amadu Maddy’s No Past, No Present, No Future (1973) represents a character as ethically superior despite his homosexuality. Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy (1977) is a rare depiction of female desire, between a German and a Ghanaian woman. Bessie Head’s A Question of Power (1974) compares prejudices against homosexuality and racial alterity, but sexual difference is included in a hallucinatory maelstrom of horror. Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters (1965) reveals a character’s obsession with his race as a psychological displacement of his same-sex desires. Chris Dunton (1989) provides a good overview of queer literature in Africa. Drew Shaw (2005), in his discussion of queer representations by of Zimbabwean authors, points out that Dambudzo Marechera’s fiction is radical in illustrating the malleability of sexual identities and gender identification. In works such as Black Sunlight (1980) and Mindblast (1984), Marechera represents gay, lesbian, bisexual, and cross-dressing behaviors, and although his writing contains elements of masculine anxiety, the deeply personal queer depictions undermine heteronormativity and fixed identity categories. The development of South African queer/alternative writing is illustrated by the shift from the coded references made by William Plomer in the 1930s to increasingly explicit material toward the end of the century, by such authors as Stephen Gray, Damon Galgut, and Tatamkhulu Afrika. In addition to authors who are personally invested in queer issues, Nobel laureates Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee refer to these issues in works from their later periods such as Gordimer’s The House Gun (1998) and Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999). An interesting turn in the post-apartheid era is the
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handling of the trope of bisexuality, which opens up a potentially useful domain for considering sexuality and national identifications beyond the constraints of binary models (see Stobie 2007). Australian treatments of male same-sex desire written or set during the earlier phase of the twentieth century, such as Kenneth “Seaforth” Mackenzie’s The Young Desire It (1937), Randolph Stow’s The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1965), and David Malouf’s Johnno (1975), are often set in homosocial contexts and show the ambiguities of “mateship.” Nobel Prize-winner Patrick White, whose autobiography refers to his gay identity, most explicitly handles queer issues in The Twyborn Affair (1979). The protagonist metamorphoses from an ostensible woman living in Europe to a male Australian jackaroo, and finally to the madam of a brothel in London. The novel raises issues of transgender, bisexuality, and transgressive recreations of identity and national belonging. Authors airing gay themes in the 1980s and 1990s include Simon Payne, Nigel Krauth, Benedict Ciantar, and Dennis Altman. In the first half of the twentieth century, novels by Henry Handel Richardson (born Ethel Richardson) focused on women’s aspirations and were the forerunner of feminist and lesbian novels published in the latter part of the century, such as Elizabeth Riley’s All That False Instruction (1975), Beverley Farmer’s Alone (1980), Finola Moorhead’s Remember the Tarantella (1987), Mary Fallon’s Working Hot (1989), and Susan Hawthorne’s The Falling Woman (1992). New Zealand authors James Courage and Frank Sargeson addressed queer issues during the middle years of the century, and Peter Wells’s collection of short stories, Dangerous Desires (1991), dealing with the impact of AIDS, was received with acclaim in the later period. Witi Ihimaera’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain (1995) and The Uncle’s Story (2000) draw parallels between racism against Maoris and homophobia within the Maori community. Ngahuia Te Awekotuku’s Tahuri (1989) contains comingof-age stories about a young Maori woman’s discovery of her lesbian identity. Other novelists dealing with lesbian issues include Cathie Dunsford, Renee, and Beryl Fletcher. Two anthologies, The Exploding Frangipani (Dunsford & Hawthorne 1990) and Subversive Acts (Dunsford
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1991), contain the work of indigenous and other writers from New Zealand, Australia, and the Pacific Islands who focus on feminist and lesbian themes. Alternative modes of sexuality were historically incorporated in Pacific Island cultures, and literary depictions of sexuality are inclusive. Issues of decolonization are handled alongside personal issues regarding sexual identity, oppression, and agency; indigenous symbols such as ancient rock drawings may be used, and there are connections with the work of progressive Native American writers. The first novel with a lesbian theme to be published in Canada was Jane Rule’s Desert of the Heart (1964). This groundbreaking text recounts the developing relationship between a woman who is waiting for her divorce to become final and a younger woman. Rule, who authored seven novels, explored queer matters from a variety of perspectives and refused to be coopted into any orthodoxy. Another renowned work of hers is The Young in One Another’s Arms (1977). Daphne Marlatt’s novel Ana Historic (1988) has generated critical analysis of its explorations of gender, race, and sexuality in a (post)colonial context. Eva Zaremba, Marion Foster, and Candis Graham have also written fiction that explores lesbian themes. Dionne Brand, who was born in Trinidad, examines the experiences of black women, lesbians, and immigrants in her novels, poetry, and critical work. Another Canadian author of Caribbean origin who focuses on issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality is Makeda Silvera. Aboriginal writer Beth E. Brant’s work explores her identity as Mohawk and a lesbian. Queer themes also arise in the fiction of writers who do not identify as LGBT, such as “The Turkey Season” by Alice Munro (1980), or the beginning of The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (1992). Male queer-identified authors who deal with similar themes include Sinclair Ross (in As for Me and My House, 1941) and Timothy Findley (The Wars, 1977), as well as Scott Symons, David Watmough, Edward Phillips, Graham Jackson, David Carpenter, Will Aitkin, Peter McGehee, and Dennis Denisoff. Francophone authors Michel Tremblay and Nicole Brossard have made significant contributions to queer literature. Peter Dickinson (1999) and Terry Goldie (2003) have written book-length studies of queer writing in Canada.
Although E. M. Forster’s colonial-era novel A Passage to India (1924) has been read for its homosocial themes, on the Indian subcontinent the theme of queer attractions in anglophone fiction is rare. Exceptions are provided by Shobha De’s three novels published in the 1990s, which not unproblematically foreground lesbianism. Shyam Selvadurai, who now lives in Canada, has received acclaim for Funny Boy (1994), a narrative of growing up queer in Sri Lanka. Several diasporic authors, including Vikram Seth, Hanif Kureishi, and Sunita Namjoshi, explore queer themes with empathy. Rakesh Ratti’s anthology A Lotus of Another Color contains a range of gay and lesbian writing from across the South Asian diaspora. In Southeast Asia, Philippine society is accepting of queer behavior, and the fiction of Bienvenido Santos and Nick Joaquin is highly regarded, while anthologies of gay and lesbian fiction have also appeared. Filipino American authors who have made a mark include R. Zamora Linmark, Nice Rodriguez, and Jessica Hagedom. In the West Indies, as elsewhere, multiple identities and migrations make for complex interrogations of the personal and the political. An early fictional handling of same-sex attraction occurs in Andrew Salkey’s 1960 novel Escape to an Autumn Pavement, set in London. Anton Nimblett and Lawrence Scott treat similar themes in the later period. Patricia Powell in A Small Gathering of Bones thematizes the effects of HIV/AIDS. Audre Lorde and Michelle Cliff, both originally from Jamaica, have written novels about queer life in this region. Trinidadian Canadian Shani Mootoo’s novel Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) is set on a fictional Caribbean island. It problematizes heterosexuality, viewing it in conjunction with patriarchy, rape, incest, and pedophilia. The queer characters, because of their marginalization, have developed sensitivity, humaneness, and compassion. The most luminous love story in the novel is the blossoming relationship between a gay man who cross-dresses and a transgendered female-to-male character; although this is technically a heterosexual relationship it is thoroughly queer.
SEE ALSO: Critical Theory and Fiction (WF); Gender and the Novel (AF); Politics and the Novel (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF);
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Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (BIF); Queer Modernism (AF); REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Dickinson, P. (1999). Here is Queer: Nationalisms, Sexualities, and the Literatures of Canada Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Dunsford, C. (ed.) (1991). Subversive Acts: New Writing by New Zealand Women. Auckland: Penguin. Dunsford, C., & Hawthorne, S. (eds.) (1990). The Exploding Frangipani: Lesbian Writing from Australia and New Zealand. Auckland: New Women’s Press. Dunton, C. (1989). “Wheyting Be Dat?”: The Treatment of Homosexuality in African Literature. Research in African Literatures, 20(3), 422–48.
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glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture. At www.glbtq.com, accessed Dec. 16, 2009. Goldie, T. (2003). Pink Snow: Homotextual Possibilities in Canadian Fiction. Peterborough, ON: Broadview. Ratti, R. (ed.) (1993). A Lotus of Another Color: An Unfolding of the South Asian Gay and Lesbian Experience. Boston: Alyson. Shaw, D. (2005). Queer Inclinations and Representations: Dambudzo Marechera and Zimbabwean Literature. Matatu, 29–30, 89–111. Stobie, C. (2007). Somewhere in the Double Rainbow: Representations of Bisexuality in Post-Apartheid Novels. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.
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R Rao, Raja MAKARAND PARANJAPE
Raja Rao, one of the most important contributors to the development of the English novel in India, writes in an English that is uniquely Indian in style, tone, mood, and rhythm. Relying heavily on translation, quotation, and the use of Indian proverbs, idioms, and colloquial patterns, Rao manipulates vocabulary and syntax to enhance the Indian flavoring of his English and achieve a style that is nonetheless evocative and intelligible to non-Indian readers. Rao’s preeminence stems from the significance of his first novel, Kanthapura (1938). Published at a time when Indian English fiction was first gaining recognition – through novels such as Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935) and R. K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends (1935) – Rao’s coming-of-age tale was heralded as adventurous and provocative, and is now seen as a classic. Rao was born on November 8, 1908, the eldest son in a large and respected Brahmin family in Hassan, south India. His mother died when he was 4, and the absence of a mother figure and the sense of being an orphan influence his fiction. An early influence was his grandfather, from whom he imbibed his spiritual orientation. Although Rao lived abroad mostly (in France and the United States), his temperament and sensibility remained Indian, and he became a compulsive visitor of his native homeland, returning to India repeatedly for spiritual and cultural nourishment. In 1933, he visited an ashram in a quest for selfrealization, and in 1939, as his first marriage
disintegrated, he found himself back in India, his spiritual search renewed. Appearing to have given up writing, Rao visited a number of ashrams and religious teachers over the next few years, including Mahatma Gandhi. Around this time Rao became a public figure in India, active in several social and political causes. Along with Iqbal Singh he edited Changing India (1939), an anthology of modern Indian thought. He participated in the underground “Quit India” movement of 1942, boldly associating with a group of radical socialists. Rao has been considered a metaphysical novelist with primarily religious and philosophical concerns; his writing comprises an ongoing discussion of major systems of thought, chiefly Indian but also from other cultures. Formally, his novels are based on Indian models such as the Purana, the sthalakatha, and the beast fable. Yet Kanthapura shows a strong social engagement as it documents the progress of a non-violent Gandhian agitation against the British Empire in a remote south Indian village. The Serpent and the Rope (1960) and The Cat and Shakespeare (1965) are expositions of the ancient Indian philosophical outlook known as Advaita Vedanta, and Comrade Kirillov (1976) evaluates the efficacy of communism. The Chessmaster and His Moves (1988), the first novel in a trilogy, surpasses his earlier work in its attempt to probe the entirety of the modern human condition. Its highlight is an intense and revelatory dialogue between the Brahmin and the Rabbi as representatives of two ancient and contrasting perspectives on civilization.
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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Although Rao admits to Western influences, he regards literature as sadhana or spiritual discipline, and so his work is best understood as a part of the Indian tradition. From Kanthapura to Comrade Kirillov, his protagonists grapple with the same concerns: what is Truth – in the sense of transcendental reality and the absolute – and how does one find it? His novels thus become chronicles of this archetypal search. Kanthapura, for instance, is imbued with a religious spirit akin to that of the Puranas. Its epigraph, taken from the Bhagavadgita, is the famous explanation of incarnation: “Whensoever there is misery and ignorance, I come.” The avatar in Kanthapura is Gandhi who, although not a character, looms over the entire book. On the other hand, incarnation is not restricted to one Great Soul, Gandhi; rather, it extends into the village of Kanthapura itself, where Moorthy, the Brahmin leader of the villagers’ anti-colonial struggle, becomes the local manifestation of Gandhi and, by implication, of the latter’s path of non-violent struggle for justice. Kanthapura is a novel about a village rather than about a single individual; nevertheless, Moorthy is a prototypal Rao hero, both as a questing figure and as representative of a larger moral order. Equally interesting is Ratna, a child widow who takes over as the leader of the women’s wing of the political uprising, thus giving the novel a feminist dimension. Rao’s goal in Kanthapura is to capture the flavor and nuance of south Indian rural dialogue in English. The story is told by Achakka, a garrulous and gossipy old Brahmin widow, in long sentences that consist of several short ones joined by conjunctions and commas; the effect is one of breathless, rapid talking. Repetition is used to enhance the narrative’s colloquial flavor, as is translation from Kannada. Nicknames such as “Waterfall Venkamma,” “Nose-Scratching Nanjamma,” and “Cornerhouse Moorthy” are translated, and Kannada idioms and expressions are rendered into English: “You are a traitor to your salt-givers,” “The Don’t-Touch-theGovernment Campaign,” “Nobody will believe such a crow and sparrow story.” The overall effect is the transmutation of the entire ethos of another culture into English. Kanthapura, with its Kannadized English, anticipates the lofty Sankritized style of The Serpent and the Rope – Rao’s highest stylistic achievement.
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If Kanthapura is modeled on an Upapurana (minor Purana), The Serpent and the Rope is a kind of Maha Purana (major Purana) or epic: geographically, historically, philosophically, and formally. The novel includes a variety of settings, ranging from metropolitan Paris to Ramaswamy’s ancestral home in a south Indian village, and from Montpalais, Cambridge, and London to Indian locales such as Hyderabad, Delhi, Bombay, and Benaras. Rao delves into vast swathes of Indian history, from the invasion of the Aryans to the advent of British rule; he also explores European civilization, chiefly the somewhat obscure Albigensian heresy, and dabbles in Chinese, Middle Eastern, and other histories. These topics come under discussion as the protagonist, Rama, a historian by training, expounds his theories in conversations with other characters. Philosophically, the novel’s range is formidable in its discussion of a multitude of traditions including Hinduism, Buddhism, Catholicism, Islam, Taoism, Marxism, Darwinism, and Nazism. Rama’s path to Truth in the novel, unlike Moorthy’s Karma Yoga (the way of actions), is Jnana Yoga (the way of knowledge), also enunciated in the Bhagavadgita. Although he has accumulated knowledge, he still does not apprehend Truth clearly; like the deluded seeker in the fable, he mistakes the rope for the serpent, failing to see himself already united with Truth. Traditionally, a guru is necessary because only a guru can cure his delusion by demonstrating that what appears to be a serpent is really a rope. In the end, Rama resolves to seek his guru to be cured of his delusion. The Cat and Shakespeare, which Rao described as a metaphysical comedy, displays a strong influence from the earliest Indian writings, the Upanishads. The spiritual experiences of its narrator, Ramakrishna Pai, are reminiscent of passages describing the experience of the Infinite, and metaphysical speculations such as “Is there seeing first or the object first?” seem to be modeled on philosophical queries from the Upanishads. The major Western debt is to Shakespeare as a symbol for the universal: according to Rao, Shakespeare’s vision transcends duality and arrives at a unified view of the world. Allusions to Hamlet abound, culminating in an episode in which a cat is trapped in a large rat-trap.
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This scenario prompts Nair to parody a line from Hamlet: “A kitten sans cat, that is the question” (82). The Cat and Shakespeare is Rao’s sequel to The Serpent and the Rope in that it shows what happens after the guru has removed a seeker’s veil of illusion. Its theme may be summed up in Hamlet’s words to Horatio: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends / Rough-hew them how we will” (V. ii). Comrade Kirillov, written much earlier but published in English only in 1976, is generally recognized as Rao’s least ambitious novel. However, it does offer interesting discussions of communism, which add to its value as a social document and capture the life of Indian expatriate intellectuals between 1920 and 1950; it predicted the downfall of communism long before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disbanding of the USSR. Rao’s next novel, The Chessmaster and His Moves, is considered a major literary landmark and was awarded the Neustadt Prize. Here, Rao offers a particular version of Advaita that has its sources in the philosophical practice of Sri Ramana Maharshi combined with the sunyavada of the Buddhist philosopher, Nagarjuna. In Chessmaster, the dissolution of self, not the realization of self, is sought. Sivarama Sastri represents the power of negative dialectics: the attempt not to achieve something, but to vaporize one’s self into nothing. Rao’s familiar play with dichotomies – male and female, vowels and consonants, India and the West, Brahmin and Kshatriya, sage and saint, logic and devotion, truth and the world – all hinge on the opposition between zero and infinity. After Chessmaster, Rao published an extraordinary little book, On the Ganga Ghat (1989), a collection of 11 stories set in Benaras. In a note to the reader, Rao writes, “These stories are so structured that the whole book should be read as a single novel” (16). The ancient city emerges as the true hero of the narrative, finally standing for non-duality – the principle that overcomes death. But unlike elsewhere, death here is not just welcome, but auspicious – a release, a liberation, moksha. Mulk Raj Anand once said of Raja Rao, “It’s not enough to go on and on about Atman and Brahman, about the reality of Brahman and the illusion of the world; it won’t do to cling blindly to
Sankara’s advaita of the 9th century. Our problems are different. How do we solve them? Can Sankara’s answers serve us today?” (personal communication). To challenges that all human beings face, Rao’s answers point inward – from the exterior to the interior, from the world to the self. All of us, he suggests, must dissolve ourselves into the nothing from which the whole world was created. To put an end to ego-bound individuality is, for Rao, to solve once and for all the problem of humanity. Ultimately, however, Rao must be judged and understood as an artist, not a philosopher. In language, style, and theme, his work has consistently fulfilled the promise he made in his foreword to Kanthapura, which was to invent a new artistic medium that could express in English the complex and multilayered reality of India. SEE ALSO: Ali, Ahmed (WF); Anand, Mulk Raj (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Desani, G. V. (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Narayan, R. K. (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Hardgrave, R. L. (ed.) (1998). Word as Mantra: The Art of Raja Rao. New Delhi: Katha. Mittapalli, R., & Piciucco, P. P. (eds.) (2001). The Fiction of Raja Rao: Critical Studies. New Delhi: Atlantic. Naik, M. K. (1972). Raja Rao. New York: Twayne. Narasimhaiah, C. D. (1973). Raja Rao. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann. Narayan, S. A. (1998). Raja Rao: Man and His Works. New Delhi: Sterling. Niven, A. (1987). Truth within Fiction: A Study of Raja Rao’s “The Serpent and the Rope.” Calcutta: Writers Workshop. Paranjape, M. (ed.) (1998). The Best of Raja Rao. New Delhi: Katha. Rao, R. (1938). Kanthapura. London: Allen and Unwin. Rao, R. (1947). The Cow of the Barricades, and Other Stories. Bombay: Oxford University Press. Rao, R. (1960). The Serpent and the Rope. London: John Murray. Rao, R. (1965). The Cat and Shakespeare. New York: Macmillan. Rao, R. (1976). Comrade Kirillov. New Delhi: Orient. Rao, R. (1978). The Policeman and the Rose: Stories. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rao, R. (1988). The Chessmaster and His Moves. New Delhi: Vision.
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REALISM/MAGIC REALISM
Rao, R. (1989). On the Ganga Ghat. New Delhi: Vision. Rao, R. (1996). The Meaning of India. New Delhi: Vision. Rao, R. (1998). The Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi. New Delhi: Vision. Rao, R., & Singh, I. (eds.) (1939). Changing India: An Anthology. London: Allen and Unwin. Rao, R., & Singh, I. (eds.) (1948). Whither India? Bomba: Padma. Sharrad, P. (1987). Raja Rao and Cultural Tradition. New Delhi: Sterling.
Realism/Magic Realism NEIL TEN KORTENAAR
Critics generally acknowledge that postcolonial literature produced outside Europe and white North America has generated one literary mode not found previously elsewhere: magic realism. Magic realism combines fantasy and realism but does not treat the two as distinct realms – as, for instance, the Gothic does – but rather blurs the lines between them. The new mode is global in scope: Gabriel Garcıa Marquez from Colombia, Salman Rushdie from India, Ben Okri from Nigeria, and Toni Morrison, the African American novelist, all have written magic realism. As the name suggests, magic realism defines itself against realism, the mode associated with the novel as it developed in Europe (and especially France) during the nineteenth century. Realism emphasizes mimesis, the imitation of the world outside the text. It adheres to verisimilitude, a conformity to the ordinary and the probable, especially in terms of psychology, and values careful observation and the telling fact: for example, the small detail of a character’s home, dress, gait, or speech that reveals class and positioning within a web of social relations. What matters about a character is how he or she has been shaped by society. Elizabeth Ermarth (1983) has compared literary realism to pictorial realism, associated with the development of perspective in the Renaissance. Realism values an objectivity that is not to be confused with a bird’s-eye omniscience but rather reflects the understanding that every vantage point yields a particular perspective – that what one sees is a function of where one stands, but, conversely, that anyone standing in the same space would see the same thing. Realism suggests
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that everything is knowable by the triangulation of perspectives. Realism, which focuses not on heroes or nobility but on middle- or working-class life, is the culmination of a trend Erich Auerbach (1953) discerned in the Western literary tradition: to include ever more of the world as subject matter. Realist authors have trained their eye on levels of society hitherto thought unworthy of literature such as the factory, the mine, the office, and the brothel. Marxist critics such as Georg Lukacs (1971) have therefore regarded realism as the narrative expression of historical materialism. Realism has also inspired writers everywhere that colonialism brought exposure to European literature. In Latin America, Africa, India, China, Southeast Asia, and black America, the first novels, whether in European or vernacular languages, were realist in inspiration. The colonized found that they could bestow dignity on the world in which they lived by naming it, observing it closely, and recording the mundane and the seemingly non-literary. Because realism located the truth of society in the untouchable, the coolie, the slave, the criminal, and the colonized, it has served anti-colonial and subversive political purposes, as in the work of Mulk Raj Anand, Richard Wright, Alex La Guma, or Sembene Ousmane. Realism brings some things newly into focus (especially psychology and sociology), but it disallows other things (for instance, ghosts, oracles, and destinies contained in the blood). By suggesting that everything is secular and can be located on the universal calendar and on the world map, realism also implies that what it does not name does not exist: for instance, the kind of knowledge afforded by myth or by religion. The hegemony of realism (often linked to the hegemony of journalism and of history writing, which also rely on calendars and maps) has everywhere provoked literary reactions against it, including modernism, postmodernism, and, of course, magic realism. It is often argued that magic realism is well suited to the handling of materials from the so-called Third World, where colonialism has resulted in the juxtaposition of cultural frameworks with different origins. Where progress is not linear, the presence of imported objects, dress, and speech does not reveal truths about the state of society but rather feels simply ironic or absurd.
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By this reading, the magic in magic realism is indigenous, the realism is Western, and magic realism is the literary expression of cultural hybridity. There are problems, however, with such a critical account. The actual term “magic realism” first arose in a fine-art context in the 1920s among German expressionists. Magic realism from the Third World (or, alternatively, the Global South) bears a clear relation to European postmodernism. Rushdie’s epic novel of India, Midnight’s Children (1981), can be plotted almost chapter for chapter against G€ unter Grass’s German novel The Tin Drum (1962). Rushdie has also cited The Wizard of Oz and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1967) as influences. There are also problems with the suggestion that magic realism is essentially mimetic, that it presents the way the world feels to, say, Latin American or Indian peasants. In spite of what is commonly said about alignment of magic realism with a precolonial worldview, magic realism rarely has anything to do with the divine or the religious. Wilson Harris, Erna Brodber, and Wole Soyinka are authors interested in questions of the spirit, but they are not usually considered magic realists. Conversely, gods never appear in the mainstream of magic realism, in Garcıa Marquez, say, or Rushdie. The latter, in particular, deliberately debunks religion. In his novel The Satanic Verses (1988), the typical associations of magic and realism are reversed: magic is possible in twentieth-century London, but not in seventhcentury Arabia. The view that magic realism is suited to the Third World also fails to account for the ongoing attraction of realism, which continues to be the dominant mode in postcolonial literature, as seen in the work of V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Anita Desai, and Rohinton Mistry. Franco Moretti (1966) points out that Latin American and Indian magic realism is most popular among cosmopolitan reading audiences in Europe and North America. It is preferable to consider magic realism not as mimetic but as a style of narration. Magic realism is a literary tradition, and magic realists do not imitate the world so much as each other. (Realism itself is best understood as a literary tradition and not as objective mimesis.) The defining characteristic of magic realism is that it treats fantasy as if it were ordinary and unremarkable: that is, as if it formed part of consensual reality. Saleem Sinai,
the narrator of Midnight’s Children, characterizes his own style as “Matter of fact descriptions of the outre and bizarre, and their reverse, namely heightened, stylized versions of the everyday” (261). Treating the bizarre as if it were ordinary is part of a larger rhetorical principle: what Tzvetan Todorov (1975) has called the literalization of metaphor. An important source of the magic in magic realism derives from making common metaphors real on the literal level of narrative events. For instance, immigration to the New World may be said to require a leap of faith, and so in a moment of magic realism in Michael Ondaatje’s novel In the Skin of a Lion (1987) a nun is swept off a bridge and into the arms of a construction worker below. “If the fantastic constantly makes use of rhetorical figures,” writes Todorov, “it is because it originates in them. The supernatural is born of language, it is both its consequence and its proof” (82). If we consider magic realism a style, the emphasis falls on how language creates the world. Another source of the magic in magic realism is oral storytelling, especially folktales. Magic realism does not reflect the experience of peasants so much as the stories they tell. Garcıa Marquez imitated the stories told him by his grandmother. Orality is now part of the literary tradition: when Morrison turns to African American folk culture in Song of Solomon (1977), she is inspired by Garcıa Marquez’s example. Magic realism’s return to a kind of narration before realism reminds us that realism itself originally arose in Europe in opposition to romance. Romance as a mode conveys the sense that the self has an inherent value independent of social positioning, and that there is a right order to the unfolding of events. Like romance, the magic realism of Garcıa Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970), Midnight’s Children, Song of Solomon, and Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) emphasizes the source of identity in bloodlines and inheritance rather than in experience. Magic realism favors the multigenerational family saga, explores the existence that children have before they are even born, and employs the romance tropes of twins and doubles, incest, and displaced or secret identities that are eventually revealed. Benedict Anderson (1991) has argued that realism, by delimiting all aspects of society, including the lowliest, had the effect of defining
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REID, V. S.
society along national lines. Realist writers named the world within state boundaries, which everywhere proved the limits defining the career trajectories of a newly educated middle class. Magic realism, by contrast, restores the inherent strangeness of the nation state and thus has the effect of questioning the nationalist project. One Hundred Years of Solitude retells the story of national consolidation – the coming of the magistrate, the railway, the civil war, and the multinational fruit company – from the point of view of the resolutely unconsolidated village of Macondo, which has never learned to locate itself on the map of the nation. In The Famished Road, the narrator, Azaro, lives in an “abiku nation” that, like himself, is doomed repeatedly to die and be reborn. Neither Garcıa Marquez nor Okri ever names the nation. The Tin Drum is set in an East Prussia that no longer exists and from which all traces of Germany have been obliterated. Midnight’s Children, by contrast, is explicitly an allegory of Indian history in the twentieth century, but that history appears grotesque and unfamiliar. Realism, by implying that all human experience can be located on the same calendar and mapped using the same grid, does not, it is often felt, do justice to the extremity of violence and suffering and to the sheer absurdity of twentieth-century life. Grass felt that the experience of Nazism could be conveyed only by a mode that was as jarring and bewildering, but also as self-sufficient and internally logical, as Nazism itself. A common theme of magic realism is the oversized grotesqueness of Third World dictators, a magic that has less to do with tradition or folk culture than with the distinctly modern perversions that power assumes among those who are powerless on a world scale. The Cuban Alejo Carpentier originally coined the term lo real maravilloso to describe his narrative of Haitian history in The Kingdom of This World (1967). His novel Reasons of State (1976) and Garcıa Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) are about Caribbean dictators; Rushdie’s Shame (1983) is a satire on Pakistani politics in the era of Zia ul-Haq and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. In The Famished Road Azaro feels politicians are as mysterious and terrifying as any of the many-headed spirits he encounters. Magic realism constitutes a single tradition, but every author who writes it follows different rules. Garcıa Marquez’s Macondo, for instance, does
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not admit of metamorphosis, and it would not be possible there to wake up a giant insect, as in Kafka, or a devil as in The Satanic Verses. The distinctiveness of the great magic realists means that those who follow them always risk descending into parody. Indeed, the later work of Garcıa Marquez, Rushdie, or Okri sometimes feels like self-parody. SEE ALSO: Critical Theory and Fiction (WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); West African Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Auerbach, E. (1953). Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (trans. W. Trask). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cooper, B. (1998). Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye. London: Routledge. Ermarth, E. (1983). Realism and Consensus in the English Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lukacs, G. (1971). The Theory of the Novel (trans. A. Bostock). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Moretti, F. (1996). Modern Epic (trans. Q. Hoare). London: Verso. Rushdie, S. (1981). Midnight’s Children. New York: Knopf. Todorov, T. (1975). The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (trans. R. Howard). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Zamora, L. P., & Faris, W. (eds.) (1995). Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Reid, V. S. LYNNE MACEDO
Author, journalist, and historian, the Honourable Victor Stafford Reid was born in Kingston, Jamaica on May 1, 1913. Reid was among the first group of writers to emerge in the late 1930s when political and cultural awareness were first awakening in Jamaica, and all of his writing is marked by “that theme of struggle and resistance” (Baugh 2). Reid’s fictional output included three novels for adults and four children’s books, all of which demonstrate his abiding desire to reinstate
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pride in black culture and history. His final published work was a biography of Norman Washington Manley, The Horses of the Morning (1985). Reid grew up in Rae Town and was educated at Kingston Technical High School. After leaving school he worked at various jobs including editing the weekly newspaper the Public Opinion, before starting writing in the early 1940s. Later in life Reid held several governmental positions, including that of chairman of the Jamaican Trust Corporation, where he was instrumental in installing plaques to commemorate Jamaican folk heroes such as “Three-Finger Jack.” A highly respected figure in political and literary circles, Reid received many awards for his work including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the gold and silver Musgrave Medals, the Order of Jamaica (1980), and the Norman Manley Award for Excellence in Literature (1981). In 1942 Reid began researching material that culminated in his groundbreaking first novel New Day (1949). His inspiration came from a desire to move away from what he termed “old style” Jamaican writing as embodied in the works of H. G. de Lisser – author and (then) chief editor of the Daily Gleaner newspaper. Reid felt that such works portrayed black Jamaicans “in the worst possible light” (1987, 4), and set out to write an historical novel that would make them proud of their past. New Day focuses on the heroism of ordinary Jamaicans through the first-person narrative of John Campbell, who personally witnesses almost 80 years of Jamaican history, from the events leading up to the Morant Bay Rebellion in 1865, through to the eve of Constitution Day in 1944. Reid deliberately experimented with language in this novel, trying to represent the rhythms of Jamaican dialect in a way that could be understood by the reader, but his efforts resulted in a highly stylized form of speech: “Then how come now what Davie has said?” (1949, 31). He subsequently reworked this material into a simpler, Standard English format in Sixty-Five (1960), retelling the story of the Morant Bay Rebellion for a younger audience. While New Day was designed to explore the evolution of Jamaican society through the collective resistance of its people, his next novel, The Leopard (1958), is markedly different in scope and focus. Written in response to white propaganda
about the Mau Mau rebellion in 1950s Kenya, The Leopard is an almost allegorical work about colonial Africa with only three main characters – Nebu the freedom fighter, Toto his mulatto son, and Bwana Gibson the white landowner. Reid employs deceptively simple language in this deliberately short novel – “fighting hard not to use words of more than two syllables” (1987, 6) – to concentrate attention on the dramatic emotional crises that unfold as the wounded Nebu and his crippled son Toto journey together. Although it is a novel about racial conflict, the reader is distanced from the violence by Reid’s continual reminders that the human condition is the same for black and white alike. The Leopard is a pioneering book, not just for its literary qualities, but also as the first Caribbean novel to explore Africa outside of slavery, and to identify a shared experience in colonial relationships with Britain. Reid returned to Caribbean settings for each of his subsequent novels, all of which developed from his desire to preserve the oral history and folktales of Jamaica. Although less critically acclaimed than his earlier work, The Jamaicans (1976) was written because Reid feared that, without his intervention, “the oral history of Juan de Bolas would have been lost” (Cumber Dance 209). Apart from Sixty-Five, Reid also published three other books for children, all of which dealt with significant events from the times of slavery. Peter of Mount Ephraim (1971) examines the story of the Sharpe uprising in 1831, and both The Young Warriors (1967) and Nanny Town (1983) tell of the Maroons and their fight for independence. Although he traveled widely, Reid spent most of his life in Jamaica, researching the island’s history, and striving to publish books that presented the Jamaican past in a positive fashion. Through his subject matter and experimental use of form and language, he provided Jamaicans with a link to their African ancestors: “he was our griot, teaching us through his stories of our past” (Baugh 3). He was still experimenting with language, working on his own autobiography in poetic form, when he died on August 25, 1987. SEE ALSO: Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); de Lisser, Herbert G. (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF)
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RHYS, JEAN
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Baugh, E. (1987). Tribute to Vic Reid. Journal of West Indian Literature, 2 (1), 1–3. Cumber Dance, D. (1992). New World Adams. Leeds: Peepal Tree, pp. 206–16. Reid, V. S. (1949). New Day. New York: Knopf. Reid, V. S. (1958). The Leopard. London: Heinemann. Reid, V. S. (1960). Sixty-Five. London: Longmans, Green. Reid, V. S. (1967). The Young Warriors. London: Longman. Reid, V. S. (1971). Peter of Mount Ephraim. Kingston: Jamaica Publishing House. Reid, V. S. (1976). The Jamaicans. Kingston: Institute of Jamaica. Reid, V. S. (1983). Nanny Town. Kingston: Jamaica Publishing House. Reid, V. S. (1985). The Horses of the Morning. Kingston: Caribbean Authors. Reid, V. S. (1987). The Writer and His Work [edited transcript of a talk given at the Faculty of Arts, Mona Campus, University of the West Indies, May 1, 1986]. Journal of West Indian Literature, 2(1), 4–10. Reid, V. S. (1996). The Cultural Revolution in Jamaica After 1938 [1978]. In A. Donnell & S. Lawson Welch (eds.), The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature. London: Routledge, pp. 177–81.
Rhys, Jean ELAINE SAVORY
Jean Rhys wrote five novels and many short stories, beginning her career at the height of early modernism. Each of her texts is finely crafted down to the punctuation, and though she was once separately categorized as a modernist (in the European sense), a Caribbean writer, and a woman writer, it is now generally realized that her extraordinary skill at fiction reflects all these identities. Her life spanned the turn of the century, World Wars I and II, the Depression, the ending of the British Empire, significant immigration from former colonies into Britain, feminism, the US Civil Rights movement, and Black Power. In her fiction, she used many of these as contexts for individual experience, and mined her own experience (colonial Caribbean origin, gender, decades of poverty and struggle). She was born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams in Dominica, in the Caribbean, in 1890, though she lied about her age to early critics, subtracting four
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years. Her father was Welsh, a doctor who took a colonial position in Dominica and married into a prominent family that had belonged to the planter-slave-owning oligarchy. She was always an outsider. She resented being the fairest among her siblings and that Gwendolen means white in Welsh. She was raised white, Anglican, and English speaking in a culture where the majority were of African descent, spoke French Creole, and were Catholic. There was a powerful brown middle class with property and political power, unusual in the colonial Caribbean. Her interior life was complicated by the fact that she was abused as a young teenager by an elderly Englishman, a friend of her mother’s, who only touched her breast once but then spun elaborate tales of her sexual and emotional submission to him. Like many abused children, she kept this a secret, but eventually wrote about it in her notebooks and in a short story, called “Goodbye Marcus Goodbye Rose,” published in 1976, just three years before she died. The experience may also explain how she could create the disturbed sexuality often present in her work. At 16, she left for Britain to finish her schooling, then briefly attended drama school until her Dominican accent was found unsuitable. She refused to return home and became a chorus girl, called Ella Grey. Deeply hurt when the rich and cultivated man she adored ended their affair (1912), and dangerously adrift emotionally, she turned to writing in notebooks as a kind of therapy, but did not begin to write seriously until she went to Paris, after marrying journalist and art-dealer Jean Lenglet in 1919. Ella Lenglet loved Paris and spoke French with her husband, a language which is a key influence on her work. Their infant son, born 1920, died but a daughter, born 1922, survived: Rhys rarely wrote about parenting. In 1924, Lenglet was arrested for dubious art and currency dealings. Ella was without money in Paris, her daughter looked after by someone else. The eminent writer and literary impresario, Ford Madox Ford, became her lover and mentored her first volume of short stories, The Left Bank (1927), into print. Ford wrote a substantial if self-serving introduction to the collection, which she signed Jean Rhys. The love affair with Ford ended on a sour note, and the marriage to Lenglet was dissolved. In 1928, needing a literary agent in London, she met
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Leslie Tilden Smith, who became her second husband. Her first novel, Quartet (1928), was a highly polished rendition of the affaire Ford, in which the four main participants, Ella Lenglet, Ford, Ford’s companion Stella Bowen, and Jean Lenglet are fictionalized as Marya, Mr. and Mrs. Heidler, and Stefan, Marya’s husband. Ford and his supporters were not pleased, but Rhys was clearly a major new talent and was generally praised for her ability to use language and handle the novel form. However, many reviewers found her subject matter and treatment sordid and depressing. Rhys was far ahead of her time in portraying a female-centered world of sexual exploitation and emotional damage, in which money always caused stress and men had the upper hand. During her marriage to Smith, which lasted until his death in 1945, Rhys published three more novels, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939), as well as working on short fiction. Mackenzie concerns a young woman, Julia Martin, with a disastrous taste in lovers, and whose relations with her immediate family are fragile and tense. Voyage centers on a young woman from the Caribbean, Anna Morgan, a chorus girl in Britain who has a very damaging love affair with an older man, subsequently becomes a half-hearted call girl, and has an abortion. Rhys intended to have her die in the final pages, but her editor at Constable wanted a more hopeful ending. Midnight follows Sasha, a woman with a serious drinking problem through a period in Paris where she has an affectionate relationship with a gigolo and then destroys it out of sheer fear, finally having loveless sex with a sinister man who lives on the same floor. All of these novels were praised for their style, but many reviewers (and readers) were put off by their focus on women who break every rule of female propriety (and even of good common sense). There are definite similarities between Rhys’s first four protagonists, Marya, Julia, Anna, and Sasha. Their names noticeably echo each other, and they attract emotionally damaged men, have little ability to hold jobs, and are hopeless in the domestic realm – the chief site of middle-class female economic security at the time. They are always short of money, love the trappings of femininity, are scared of getting old, drink too
much and too often, and are mostly aware of their failings. Francis Wyndham, one of Rhys’s earliest and most devoted editors, suggested that they really were the same woman at different stages of life. But each novel has its own distinct atmosphere and each protagonist her own particular style. Mackenzie is set in Britain (which Rhys despised); Midnight is set in Paris. Voyage is as much about the Caribbean as Britain and was originally called “Two Tunes,” marking its binary structure. Whereas Anna is immature and uninterested in ideas, Sasha is a mordant, brilliantly adroit satirist and a mature intellectual (a cerebrale) who is clear-sighted about her faults and terrified of aging. Julia is the oddest and least attractive of Rhys’s protagonists: this is partly because Rhys alternates points of view, a technique she would put to great effect in her last novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Between 1939 and 1966, Rhys fell out of sight to the literary world, so much so that she was thought to have died, but was found because the BBC wanted to broadcast part of Midnight. Sargasso was thought for some time to be Rhys’s masterpiece, but though it is hauntingly romantic and very cleverly intertextual with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, to which it is an effective prequel, Midnight is brilliantly postmodern, extraordinary in 1939. In Sargasso, a white Creole widow with a Jamaican plantation, mother of Antoinette, marries a rich Englishman just after Emancipation. His desire to import labor may have encouraged an uprising of hostility among ex-slaves on the plantation: whatever the cause, the house is burned down, Antoinette’s brother dies, her mother goes mad, and later she loses her protective stepfather as well. She is then married off to a fortune-hunting younger son of an English family, the (unnamed) “Rochester” who ultimately confines her in England. Rhys boldly tells a good deal of the tale in the voice of “Rochester.” She demonstrates, as Shakespeare does in Richard III, Macbeth, and Othello, that personal insecurity and fear can make a person extremely cruel. In Rhys’s excellent short fiction, each word earns its place. Most pieces in her first collection are sketches in the French manner of the time rather than full stories. Some of her later stories are quite long and complicated, like “Temps
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RHYS, JEAN
Perdi,” and others are hauntingly brief, like “I Used to Live Here Once.” Ford complained that she did not portray place, but increasingly she employed actual street names and made them part of the emotional maelstrom under the surface of her main characters. She liked to complicate point of view as well as position and identity. She demonstrates how the powerful often get to control a story and how the powerless fight back. Her subversive women are entirely contemporary in their consciousness of gender, race, colonialism, and class. Her “victim” women are often passive-aggressive, even violent, to those they feel control them. Frantz Fanon spoke about the necessity of those abused by power to fight back with violence. In Voyage, Anna grinds the lit end of her cigarette into the palm of her disappointing lover, Walter. But Rhys’s women are also self-destructive, likely to lose any chance to make their lives easier. Rhys’s style has justifiably made her famous. As an apprentice writer, she learned from Ford to cut if in doubt, or to translate something into French to test its worth, and she always obsessed about word, sentence, paragraph, character formation, and narrative voice, even about the commas. She knew actual communication is very difficult, whether local or global. Midnight is her most developed comment on that problem, and her most explicitly multilingual text. She turned the most difficult of setbacks into challenges to be overcome. When Constable demanded that the ending of Voyage be more upbeat, she also trimmed Anna’s rather shapeless and at times redundant stream of consciousness during the aftermath of the abortion, and so distinctly improved the text. There has been much critical interest in Rhys, on the part of modernist, Caribbean, and feminist scholars (and those who combine all these perspectives), and despite Rhys’s proscription, a biography (Angier 1990). The adroit reader should be wary of the places where Angier turns to the fiction to explain the life: though Rhys did mine her life for raw material, she was a ruthless pursuer of fictional shape, and was not concerned with being faithful to her own experience. Rhys’s reputation with scholars and writers continues to rise, but readers also just enjoy her work, which was so far ahead of its time in its themes that it seems current today.
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SEE ALSO: Feminism and Fiction (WF); Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Ford, Ford Madox (BIF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Modernist Fiction (BIF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); West Indian Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Angier, C. (1990). Jean Rhys. Boston: Little, Brown. Emery, M. L. (1990). Jean Rhys at “World’s End”: Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile. Austin: University of Texas Press. Frickey, P. (ed.) (1990). Critical Perspectives on Jean Rhys. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Gregg, V. (1990). Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Harrison, N. (1988). Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women’s Text. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Howells, C. A. (1991). Jean Rhys. New York: St. Martin’s. Le Gallez, P. (1990). The Rhys Woman. New York: St. Martin’s. O’Connor, T. (1986). Jean Rhys: The West Indian Novels. New York: New York University Press. Rhys, J. (1927). The Left Bank and Other Stories. London: Jonathan Cape. Rhys, J. (1928). Quartet. New York: Carroll and Graf. Rhys, J. (1931). After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. New York Carroll and Graf. Rhys, J. (1934). Voyage in the Dark. New York: Norton. Rhys, J. (1939). Good Morning, Midnight. New York: Norton. Rhys, J. (1966). Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: Norton. Rhys, J. (1968). Tigers are Better-Looking. London: Deutsch. Rhys, J. (1976). Sleep It Off, Lady. New York: Harper and Row. Rhys, J. (1979). Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography. Berkeley: Donald S. Ellis. Rhys, J. (1987). The Collected Short Stories. New York: Norton. Savory, E. (1998). Jean Rhys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Savory, E. (2009). The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomas, S. (1999). The Worlding of Jean Rhys. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Wyndham, F., & Athill, D. (eds.) (1984). The Letters of Jean Rhys. New York: Viking Penguin.
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Richards, David Adams TONY TREMBLAY
The critical assessment of David Adams Richards’s fiction provides one of the best examples in Canada of the politics of literary reception, a politics unique to the country’s uneven and still tenuous federalism. The pretext of that reception holds that, as an Atlantic Canadian who is peripheral to the country’s industrial center, he occupies a space deeply encoded with nostalgias of the folk, specifically of agrarian romances of work, family, and faith. His natural comparators in this realm are eastern Canada’s best-loved regionalists – Lucy Maud Montgomery, Charles G. D. Roberts, and Ernest Buckler – each in different ways an adherent of the roman de la terre formula. Richards’s conscious rejection of “folk” representations and regional identification, however, has given rise to a body of work that is deliberately political in its response to distant critical authorities that perpetuate delimiting nostalgias of place. His work is therefore the ground across which different versions of Atlantic Canada’s socio-economic reality are frequently contested. While his readership is diverse and loyal, some of his critics have been unmerciful in attacking what they perceive as his coarsening of place. Born on October 17, 1950 into a middle-class Catholic family in the Protestant town of Newcastle (now Miramichi), New Brunswick, his upbringing amid the declining fortunes of a once booming, resource-industry town extinguished any romance he might have associated with place. Because his family owned the local movie theaters, their fortunes followed those of the townsfolk and slowly diminished with the advent of television. The theater also exposed him to narrative at an early age, a reason, perhaps, for the cinematic structure of his own fiction, most evident in For Those who Hunt the Wounded Down (1993), which was made into a TV film (Bailey 1996) shortly after he moved to Toronto, where he lived until 2009. Even more detrimental to his future as a writer was the circumstance of a premature birth that left him developmentally delayed for most of his early years. That disability, combined with a schooling steeped in communitarian Catholicism (the social
justice Catholicism of trade unionism and market cooperatives that dominated postwar eastern Canada), predisposed him to empathize with the underdog. That empathy is evident in his affection for working-class characters – men like Joe Walsh (from the Governor General’s Awardwinning Nights Below Station Street, 1988) and Ivan Basterache (Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace, 1990) – who are broken by work and dispirited by dismissive social mores. The trajectory of his work across 13 novels has shifted to accommodate his own voice in the changing fortunes of working-class men and women who are poorly served by a secular and self-interested social altruism that he views as intellectually dishonest. From evoking his characters’ private thoughts in limited, fragmented mosaics (Blood Ties, 1976, and Lives of Short Duration, 1981), he moved to a more deliberate exposure of social machinations in order to show the spiritual consequences that accrue when individual values are subsumed by collective New Age truths. His later work, best represented by the Giller Prize-winning Mercy among the Children (2000), is increasingly conservative and Christian in tone and outlook, adhering to the Tolstoyian principle that the individual must be everything or society is nothing. His intransigent defense of individual liberty and spiritual freedom has led to his becoming a vocal advocate, sometimes self-appointed, for those whose habits or choices controvert the fashionable (hunters, anti-abortionists, soldiers, rogues, and republicans). His equally pointed criticism of academics, feminists, and social liberals (wonderfully understated in Road to the Stilt House, 1985) reflects his distrust of a reformist enterprise that he considers more meddlesome than benevolent or enlightened. His unique talent is constructing a fully dimensioned spatial ethos – the hold of a ship carrying famine Irish into Miramichi Bay (River of the Brokenhearted, 2003) or the conditions of a logging camp in the dead of winter (The Friends of Meager Fortune, 2006) – where characters work out the particular fate that social circumstance and coercion determine. Power and its abuses are the dominant forces that work malevolently, though rarely orderly, in the background of all his mature work.
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RICHARDSON, HENRY HANDEL
SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Montgomery, L. M. (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Armstrong, C., & Wyile, H. (1997). Firing the Regional Can(n)on: Liberal Pluralism, Social Agency, and David Adams Richards’s Miramichi Trilogy. Studies in Canadian Literature, 22(1), 1–18. Bailey, N. (dir.) (1996). For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down. Credo Entertainment. Connor, W. (1986). The River in the Blood: Escape and Entrapment in the Fiction of David Adams Richards. World Literature Written in English, 26, 69–77. Furlong, K., & Kubaki, M. (dirs.) (1997). David Adams Richards: My Own Rivers. Sawyer Films. Mathews, L. (1995). David Adams Richards (1950–). In R. Lecker, J. David, & E. Quigley (eds.), Canadian Writers and Their Works: Fiction Series, vol. 12. Downsview, ON: ECW, pp. 185–254. Richards, D. A. (1974). The Coming of Winter. Ottawa: Oberon. Richards, D. A. (1976). Blood Ties. Ottawa: Oberon. Richards, D. A. (1978). Dancers at Night. Ottawa: Oberon. Richards, D. A. (1981). Lives of Short Duration. Ottawa: Oberon. Richards, D. A. (1985). Road to the Stilt House. Ottawa: Oberon. Richards, D. A. (1988). Nights Below Station Street. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Richards, D. A. (1990). Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Richards, D. A. (1993). For Those who Hunt the Wounded Down. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Richards, D. A. (1996). Hope in the Desperate Hour. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Richards, D. A. (1998). The Bay of Love and Sorrows. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Richards, D. A. (2000). Mercy among the Children. Toronto: Doubleday. Richards, D. A. (2003). River of the Brokenhearted. Toronto: Doubleday. Richards, D. A. (2006). The Friends of Meager Fortune. Toronto: Doubleday. Richards, D. A. (2008). The Lost Highway. Toronto: Doubleday. Tremblay, T. (ed.) (1998). David Adams Richards [special issue]. Pottersfield Portfolio, 19(1). Tremblay, T. (ed.) (2005). David Adams Richards: Essays on His Works. Toronto: Guernica.
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Tremblay, T. (2010). David Adams Richards of the Miramichi: A Biographical Introduction to His Work. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Richardson, Henry Handel CLIVE PROBYN
Henry Handel Richardson (Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson) wrote her novels, short stories, and music as an Australian expatriate, and although the style of her fiction responds to and belongs with the European tradition of literary realism (Flaubert, Zola, Stendhal), most of her subjects are not European. Her pseudonym and her residence in Germany and England occluded her identity and delayed her recognition in Australian literature: she was hardly known in her own country until the international success of Ultima Thule in 1929, which won her the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. She was born on January 3, 1870 at Blanche Terrace in what is now East Melbourne, the first of two daughters of Mary Bailey and Walter Lindesay Richardson, an Edinburgh-trained doctor drawn to emigration by news of the 1851 gold rush in Ballarat. Ethel and her sister Ada Lillian (Lil) received the best available education at the Presbyterian Ladies’ College, where Ethel excelled academically in English, history, and music. Walter’s death in 1879 prompted Mary to take her daughters to Germany to pursue their musical education, leaving Melbourne on August 3, 1888. Just as her second novel (The Getting of Wisdom, 1910) is based on her own adolescence in Victorian Melbourne, so her first novel (Maurice Guest, 1908) recasts her adult experience at the Leipzig Conservatorium for Music, where she studied piano. Maurice Guest analyzes the rapacious nature of musical genius, the tragedy of mediocrity, and a destructive eroticism in the international student community in Leipzig. Sexual preferences are discussed with an unusual frankness. In Dublin in December 1895, she married John George Robertson, a science graduate from Glasgow and a doctoral student of European literature. They shared interests in Wagner, Nietzsche, Georg Brandes, and Ibsen, and moved to England when Robertson was appointed professor of German and Scandinavian studies
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at London University. They visited Australia from August to November 1912, but otherwise England remained their home until Richardson (widowed in 1933) died in 1946. Richardson’s male pseudonym was a deliberate attempt to escape the public eye and the dismissive category “woman novelist.” Her secretary, companion, and executrix Olga Roncoroni always called her “Henry,” and although Richardson insisted on rigorously separating her private and public lives, her success as a writer made public appearances both undesirable and unavoidable. Each of her novels except the last is either set in Australia or has an Australian heroine. Her fiction is largely but not exclusively based on her own life or on the documented lives of others. Her great and distinctive achievement is the epic trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917, 1925, 1929), which presents the founding of the colony of Victoria – and to a lesser extent the founding of a nation – through a single family history and using her parents’ letters. Richardson’s characteristic tone is autumnal, ironic if not tragic, and her original intention had been to add a fourth volume, taking the Fortunes up to the Australian role in the Gallipoli disaster during World War I. The Getting of Wisdom was her favorite work, and it remains her best-known novel. It has been a fixture in the Australian literary canon since the 1960s, when it was adopted as a high school text, but without its Nietzsche epigraphs, which hinted that this was not intended as a novel for or about children but an ironic autobiographical critique, including the intense experience of homosexual attraction. Her short stories (notably “The Bathe,” “Two Hanged Women,” and “The Wrong Turning”) also deal with states of troubling sexual self-consciousness and the pains of transition and transgression. Her last and least popular novel, The Young Cosima, was published in 1939, just before the outbreak of war. Again, the bedrock of the fiction is documentary fact, but this time the historian outweighs the novelist’s interest in a woman’s quest for self-realization. It turns Du Moulin Eckart’s 1929 hagiography of Cosima LisztWagner into a complex study of a woman moving from bourgeois duty and marital self-sacrifice to the service of a ruthless but also transcendent genius, Richard Wagner.
Richardson has no romantic illusions, but a steely belief in impermanence and a troubled conviction that human destiny is a compound of self-delusion and idealism. Her husband believed that the character of Richard Mahony represented its author’s own yearning restlessness, which may also be glimpsed in her songs. She read Freud’s works in Germany long before their translation into English, and it is not surprising that her novels are each marked by an endless questioning of human desire. SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ackland, M. (2004). Henry Handel Richardson: A Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beresford, B. (dir.) (1977). The Getting of Wisdom. Southern Cross/AFC Victorian Film Corporation. Clark, A. (1990). Henry Handel Richardson: Fiction in the Making. Brookvale, NSW: Simon and Schuster. Clark, A. (2001). Finding Herself in Fiction: Henry Handel Richardson 1896–1910. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing. Green, D. (1973). Ulysses Bound: Henry Handel Richardson and Her Fiction. Canberra: Australian National University Press. McLeod, K. (1985). Henry Handel Richardson: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Palmer, N. (1950). Henry Handel Richardson: A Study. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Purdie, E., & Roncoroni, O. (eds.) (1957). Henry Handel Richardson: Some Personal Impressions. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Richardson, H. H. (1908). Maurice Guest. London: Heinemann. Richardson, H. H. (1910). The Getting of Wisdom. London: Heinemann. Richardson, H. H. (1917). The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. London: Heinemann. (Retrospectively retitled Australia Felix.) Richardson, H. H. (1925). The Way Home. London: Heinemann. Richardson, H. H. (1929). Ultima Thule. London: Heinemann. Richardson, H. H. (1934). The End of a Childhood and Other Stories. London: Heinemann. Richardson, H. H. (1939). The Young Cosima. London: Heinemann.
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RICHLER, MORDECAI
Richardson, H. H. (1948). Myself When Young. London: Heinemann. Richardson, H. H. (1999). Henry Handel Richardson: The Music. Melbourne: Marshall Hall Trust. Richardson, H. H. (2000). The Letters (ed. C. Probyn & B. Steele). 3 vols. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Probyn, M. (ed.) (2000). Marriage Lines: The Richardson Family Letters 1854–1877. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing. Vidor, C. (dir.) (1954). Rhapsody [film of Maurice Guest]. MGM.
Richler, Mordecai NORMAN RAVVIN
Mordecai Richler’s death on July 3, 2001 marked the end of an era in Canadian Jewish literary life. The major figures of the postwar era were by this point largely silent or gone, with the exception of Leonard Cohen, whose international renown as a singer and songwriter far outweighs his reputation as a novelist and poet. In his final years Richler attained major successes, including Canada’s Giller Prize for fiction for Barney’s Version in 1997, and the remarkable popularity of that novel in Italy, where the word Richleriano – denoting a certain knowing disregard for political correctness – entered the Italian vocabulary. Richler and his work became iconic, an ascendancy to national acclaim and popularity that represented a transformation of his reputation in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, when he published such major novels as St. Urbain’s Horseman (1971), Joshua Then and Now (1980), and Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989), alongside the provocative polemic Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country (1992). Despite winning three Governor General’s Awards – for St. Urbain’s in 1971, and for both Cocksure and Hunting Tigers under Glass in 1968 – Richler’s reception in Canada throughout this period was colored by responses to his early writings, whose particular brand of satiric humor alienated sections of his audience. Following the appearance of Richler’s autobiographical 1955 novel Son of a Smaller Hero, this alienation was most commonly expressed by his Jewish Montreal-based detractors, who felt exposed and ridiculed by Richler’s portrayal of them. And though critics and
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reviewers largely embraced his return to these themes in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959), this breakthrough book cemented the rift between writer and readers that would account for a longstanding love-hate relationship. Born on January 27, 1931 in Montreal, where he grew up, Richler in his early novels staked out a fictional framework based on key autobiographical experiences: his high school years in the 1940s; a desultory period at Montreal’s Sir George Williams University; and stints abroad, first in the early 1950s in Paris, and then, for nearly 30 years beginning in 1954, in London, where he and his wife Florence raised their five children. With hindsight, Son of a Smaller Hero and Apprenticeship can be seen as part of a broader immigrant literary tradition that would influence twentieth-century writing in the United States, England, and Canada. In this tradition the writer reflects on his or her home community’s newcomer status in light of its roots abroad, and alternately romanticizes, mythicizes, or lampoons efforts toward assimilation. Richler’s early approach to these themes is most evident – one might say most notably unworked-through – in Son of a Smaller Hero. Its introductory paragraphs proved influential in their depiction of the major Jewish urban center of Montreal, and were picked up by critics and reviewers alike: “The ghetto of Montreal has no real walls and no true dimensions. The walls are the habit of atavism and the dimensions are an illusion. But the ghetto exists all the same” (10). Richler was almost entirely unable to romanticize this material – what he dubbed the “diminishing end of the ghetto, on streets named St Urbain, St Dominique, Rachel, and City Hall” (10) – and he was not interested in mythicizing his Jewish immigrant ancestry. In an unusual passage in Son, its lead character, Noah Adler, finds himself cozily receiving Hasidic lore associated with his maternal grandfather: “Remember Noah?” his mother asks, “Remember the stories he used to tell?” (86). But lampoon and satire, the fun-making that came with flight, became the key means by which Richler, still in his twenties, confronted his roots and his identity as a writer. In Apprenticeship he deepened his depiction of Jewish themes, of the postwar urge to “make it,” and of the uneasy relationship between elite culture and ethnic up-and-comers. Duddy’s goals
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are ambiguous, and he derives real warmth and influence from his ancestry. The novel is at once comic and darkly probing, and its rich characterization and period detail were well served by Ted Kotcheff’s 1974 film adaptation, which Richler scripted. (Later films of Joshua Then and Now [Kotcheff 1985] and St. Urbain’s Horseman [Moss 2007] proved less convincing than the novels upon which they were based.) In his novels of the 1960s, The Incomparable Atuk (1963) and Cocksure (1968), Richler aimed his satiric skills at a host of targets, including indigenous art, the Toronto culture industry, and Hollywood excess. Here Richler set a tone that would underwrite much of his career and account for his public persona as a kicker of sacred cows, a hater of insider and elite groups, and a despiser of Canadian cultural nationalism. He expressed these views in part through his prolific journalistic output, as well as through his outspoken support for free trade with the United States and his disdain for a national culture supported by government granting programs. His role as provocateur was heightened by the publication of Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Based on a long piece published in the New Yorker, which lampooned the separatist Parti Quebecois and Quebec language laws enshrining the primacy of French, the book solidified Richler’s role as an Anglo b^ete noir par excellence in the eyes of both separatist and mainstream political forces in Quebec. On its publication, 25 prominent English-language intellectuals publicly proclaimed their goal of “distancing” themselves from Richler’s views on Quebec history and contemporary political life in an open letter to the Toronto Star (Kramer 331). Richler’s venture into professional punditry on the raucous Quebec political scene distracted him from the work of fiction. (He also took time to write three books for children, beginning in 1975 with Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang.) But regardless of his public embroilments, Richler’s major novels appeared roughly nine years apart: St. Urbain’s in 1971, Joshua in 1980, Solomon Gursky in 1989, and Barney’s Version in 1997. Each of these books returns to the originary neighborhood, to the primary experience of Jewish immigrant life, viewed at once satirically and wistfully by the Richler alter ego who stands in as narrator. It may be St. Urbain’s, the first of these variations on a theme, that retains the greatest
freshness and urgency. In a memorable passage the novel’s narrator, Jake Hersh, strives to charm his father with a recollection of “the old days, trying Tansky’s Cigar & Soda for size, evoking the summer shack in Shawbridge” along with “the first time they had been to the steam baths together” (274). St. Urbain’s contains Richler’s most sustained and serious investigation of the Holocaust, whereas in other works it tends to lurk as a source of black humor and one-liners. Take, for instance, the much quoted zinger of an opening from the essay “The Holocaust and After”: “The Germans are still an abomination to me. I do not mourn for Cologne, albeit decimated for no useful military purpose” (81). In Son Richler hints at the impact of Holocaust survivors on postwar Montreal, acknowledging the broader Jewish community’s unwillingness to integrate them. In St. Urbain’s, Jake Hersh is haunted by the postwar trials of Nazi perpetrators, as well as by the ease with which figures like Josef Mengele melted back into normal life, unpunished. The outcome is a meditation on the role of an inheritance of traumatic history by a generation of Jews too young to have experienced the war. Joshua presents a more intimate Montreal story, delving into the strained relations between Westmount anglophone elites and up-andcoming Jews, a theme Richler explored first in Apprenticeship. Joshua approaches this material through the prism of the main character’s companionable marriage to a senator’s daughter, and through the unlikely friendship of the senator – a paradigmatic Canadian power broker – with Joshua Shapiro’s rough-edged sharpie of a father. The novel also harkens back to Richler’s youthful travels in Spain, which he explored in his first novel, The Acrobats (1954). The Spanish Civil War would remain, throughout Richler’s career, a focus of heroic undertakings by a generation he was too young to join. Spain held a special allure as a landscape on which the twentieth-century disaster of fascism might have been averted. Solomon Gursky is sometimes viewed as Richler’s masterwork, as the novel that places him wholeheartedly in what might be called a postmodern or postcolonial context. It explores Canadian myths of the north (largely by way of sending them up), including the iconic Franklin Expedition, and it merges Jewish Canadian
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RICHLER, MORDECAI
history with mainstream history through the undertakings of the colorful Gursky family. This latter motif was new ground for Richler, and represents a rare occasion in the canon of major Canadian novels where national history is retold from a Jewish point of view. Even Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers (1966), which boldly reorders the idea of Canadian identity around Mohawk, gay, and female focal points, treats Jewishness obliquely. The more conventional Jewish thematics of Solomon Gursky derive from familiar Richler territory: a lightly fictionalized treatment of the Bronfman family’s rise from prairie hoteliers and booze runners to become the leading family of Montreal business and Jewish community elite. For non-Canadians, and even for non-Montrealers, this would not necessarily register as a roman-a-clef, though Jewish readers and anyone in the distillery business got the joke. The other buried biographical element in the novel is a biting portrayal of Canadian poet A. M. Klein as a paid flunky of the Gurskys. Klein, often referred to as the father of Canadian Jewish literature, is depicted as a poetaster and representative of the postwar Yiddish literati of Montreal who were swept from the scene as their language and culture declined in the wake of the Holocaust and postwar assimilation. This skewering of Klein was likely motivated by Richler’s feeling that his precursor had sold his poetic soul to Sam Bronfman in return for a speechwriter’s wage. But it might also be viewed as a part of Richler’s ongoing struggle with his ancestry, whether literary, national, or familial. Much of Richler’s output was marked by a contrarian stance: Son enacted a paradigmatic rejection of the traditional Jewish home; Atuk burlesqued Canadian pieties of local culture and lore. While the years Richler spent abroad in London reflected his decision that, to become the kind of writer he aspired to be, he needed to place himself in the European milieu, his return to Canada to stay in the summer of 1972 marked a turning point. It provided recognition that his best material was to be found where he had come from, a territory he would mine for the bulk of his career. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Film/Television
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Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Jewish Fiction (BIF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Cohen, L. (1966). Beautiful Losers. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Kotcheff, T. (dir.) (1974). The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. International Cinemedia Center. Kotcheff, T. (dir.) (1985). Joshua Then and Now. RSL Productions. Kramer, R. (2008). Mordecai Richler: Leaving St. Urbain. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Moss, P. (dir.) (2007). St. Urbain’s Horseman. CBC Television. New, W. H. (1966). The Apprenticeship of Discovery. Canadian Literature, 29, 18–33. Posner, M. (2004). The Last Honest Man: Mordecai Richler: An Oral Biography. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Ravvin, N. (1997). A House of Words: Jewish Writing, Identity and Memory. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Richler, M. (1954). The Acrobats. London: Deutsch. Richler, M. (1955). Son of a Smaller Hero. London: Deutsch. Richler, M. (1959). The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. London: Deutsch. Richler, M. (1963). The Incomparable Atuk. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Richler, M. (1968). Cocksure. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Richler, M. (1971). St. Urbain’s Horseman. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Richler, M. (1972). The Holocaust and After. In Shovelling Trouble. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, pp. 81–94. Richler, M. (1975). Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Richler, M. (1980). Joshua Then and Now. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Richler, M. (1989). Solomon Gursky Was Here. Markham, ON: Penguin. Richler, M. (1992). Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country. Toronto: Penguin. Richler, M. (1997). Barney’s Version. Toronto: Knopf. Tallman, W. (1960). Richler and the Faithless City. Canadian Literature, 3, 62–64. Tallman, W. (1966). Politics Neglected. Canadian Literature, 30, 77–79. Yanofsky, J. (2003). Mordecai and Me: An Appreciation of a Kind. Calgary: Red Deer.
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RILEY, JOAN
Riley, Joan SUSAN ALICE FISCHER
Joan Riley is the author of four novels and coeditor of the anthology Leave to Stay: Stories of Exile and Belonging (1996). She has also written poetry and plays, and some of her work has been anthologized and adapted for television and radio. Riley’s work is feminist as well as deeply concerned with the struggles black and working-class people endure in Britain and Jamaica. Riley was born in St. Mary, Jamaica in 1958, where she was raised in a large rural family and turned to reading to find refuge from poverty, violence, and what she has called the “extremes of religion and politics” (Perry 265). Migrating to the UK in 1976, Riley earned a scholarship and attended the universities of Sussex and London, receiving undergraduate and postgraduate degrees (Riley & Hussain 93). She has worked in London in social services, has taught writing, and does not attach herself to any particular literary tradition: “I’m an odd kind of Caribbean writer in the sense that I don’t come out of the rich, middleclass elite who are the traditional writers. . . . There’s never been a voice that’s been a poor voice, and I’ve never, ever seen myself reflected in Jamaican fiction” (Perry 264). Her work addresses the concerns of the voiceless, the overlooked, and outcast – “the unbelonging,” as the title of her first novel defines them. The Unbelonging (1985) traces the story of young Hyacinth, who is sent to England to join her father only to find that his experiences of racism in Britain have taken away his pride. He turns on Hyacinth, abusing her emotionally, physically, and sexually. To survive, Hyacinth escapes literally – by entering the foster-care system, where she continues to be maltreated – and figuratively – by retreating to the Jamaica ofher mind. In Waiting in the Twilight (1987), Riley shifts her focus to the much older Adella, a working-class Jamaican migrant in her late fifties who has lost everything after years of struggle in London: her house, her job, and, following a stroke, her mobility. She has also lost her husband to another woman, though she refuses to accept that the marriage is over. Like Hyacinth, Adella retreats into a world without temporal or spatial boundaries as she inhabits the past and awaits death.
Romance (1988) tells the story of two workingclass Guyanese sisters, Desiree and Verona, now in London. Verona overeats and escapes into romance novels to dull the pain and low selfesteem brought on by sexual abuse and discrimination at work. Abused by a black man as a child, she gravitates toward white men only to find them just as exploitative. Eventually falling for a young white writer, she fails to recognize that he finds her “exoticism” stimulating both sexually and creatively. Riley’s fourth novel, A Kindness to the Children (1992), is the only one to be set primarily in Jamaica. Just as she took England to task for the devastating effects of racism, classism, and sexism on migrants, here Riley shines a light on political and religious corruption in contemporary Jamaica, causing some Jamaicans to see the novel as a “betrayal” (Perry 264). It focuses on three Jamaican women whose lives are intertwined despite their different experiences – Sylvia has lived in London, Pearl in rural Jamaica, and Jean is caught between both places. While Sylvia’s journey ends ambiguously with her flight back to Britain and Jean’s story, brought on by sexual abuse, tragically ends in madness, Pearl emerges as “the potential the Caribbean overlooks” (Riley & Hussein 96). As Riley writes in the novel, “nothing will change in Jamaica, unless the women cause it” (310). Riley’s novels examine the social, economic, and political conditions that shape the lives of Caribbean migrants, particularly during the Thatcher years. While her vision can appear bleak, she offers small glimmers of hope. In Romance, with support from others, Verona learns to stand up for herself and look at reality, while Desiree works toward a better relationship with her husband. Because of her realism, Riley’s skill as a writer is often overlooked. She not only creates psychologically complex characters but also draws effectively on the cadences of spoken language, mixing standard English narration with dialect in the dialogue. SEE ALSO: Black British Fiction (WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Film/ Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West
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ROSS, SINCLAIR
Indian/Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Chancy, M. J. A. (1997). Searching for Safe Spaces: AfroCaribbean Women Writers in Exile. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Ellis, D. (2004). “Wives and Workers”: The Novels of Joan Riley. In E. Parker (ed.), Contemporary British Women Writers. Cambridge: Brewer, pp. 68–84. Gohrisch, J. (2001). Uncovering a Hidden Reality and Raising the Possibility of Change: Joan Riley’s Novels. In B. Neumeier (ed.), Engendering Realism and Post-Modernism: Contemporary Women Writers in Britain. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 279–89. Griffin, G. (1993). “Writing the Body”: Reading Joan Riley, Grace Nichols and Ntozake Shange. In G. Wisker (ed.), Black Women’s Writing. Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 19–42. McLeod, J. (2004). Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis. London: Routledge. Nasta, S. (ed.) (1992). Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Perry, D. (1993). Joan Riley. In Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out: Interviews. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 261–86. Riley, J. (1985). The Unbelonging. London: Women’s Press. Riley, J. (1987). Waiting in the Twilight. London: Women’s Press. Riley, J. (1988). Romance. London: Women’s Press. Riley, J. (1992). A Kindness to the Children. London: Women’s Press. Riley, J. (1994). Writing Reality in a Hostile Environment. Kunapipi, 16(1), 547–52. Riley, J. (1996a). The Mulberry Tree. In J. Riley & B. Wood (eds.), Leave to Stay: Stories of Exile and Belonging. London: Virago, pp. 77–84. Riley, J. (1996b). The River of Return. In J. Riley & B. Wood (eds.), Leave to Stay: Stories of Exile and Belonging. London: Virago, pp. 247–56. Riley, J., & Hussain, A. (2004). [Interview.] In S. Nasta (ed.), Writing across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk. London: Routledge, pp. 93–101. Sizemore, C. W. (2002). Negotiating Identities in Women’s Lives: English Postcolonial and Contemporary British Novels. Westport, CT: Greenwood, pp. 125–41.
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Ross, Sinclair ANDREW LESK
Sinclair Ross has never occupied the international literary imagination in the way fellow Canadians Alice Munro or Michael Ondaatje do; yet his ongoing significance (largely situated within university curricula) arises from his mythologizing of Canada as a malevolent north, hostile to and reflective of those who inhabit it. His rhythmic prose, located at the apex of Canadian modernism, concerns not merely the often aggressive antagonism of austere prairie conditions but also the combative intersections of gender and sexuality, and, in later efforts, violence and urban alienation, with its attendant withering of character. James Sinclair Ross was born in Shellbrook, Saskatchewan, on January 22, 1908. His early life was marked by the disaffection and psychological ignominy that forms the core of his best writing, his sensitivity to his environment being sharpened by a dour, Presbyterian mother who left her husband when Ross was 7. He pursued his schooling and his interests in music, eventually quitting school after Grade 11 to work as a bank teller in various small prairie towns and, eventually, Winnipeg, in 1933. Shortly after this last move, he began to publish. Ross’s early fiction examines the perils of thinking about gender in deterministic, binary fashions. In his first published story, “No Other Way” (1934), and throughout much of his prairie-based fiction, Ross depicts gender as finding its correlatives in nature – fertile man sows the land, fecund woman bears the fruit of the land – but men and women are conflicted in their roles by the superimposition of the social realm. Ross further explores these themes in other stories, notably “A Field of Wheat” (1935), “The Painted Door” (1939), “Cornet at Night” (1939), and “One’s a Heifer” (1944), all arguably the best of his short story writing. The centerpiece of Ross’s work, though, is his 1941 novel, As for Me and My House, which has garnered the most enduring critical attention. Written during his most accomplished period, the story of a frustrated minister and his wife drew meager sales and scant regard; it disappeared from view. For reasons that are still not fully understood, it was revived as a “Canadian classic” by McClelland and Stewart’s inaugural launch of its New Canadian Library in 1957. It has since never gone out of print.
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A novel written in the form of a diary by Mrs. Bentley, a pastor’s wife, the story concerns, largely, her questionable motives for continuing the marriage. The couple appear to exchange gender roles in private, while publicly following societal expectations, until their contempt for their ministry is discovered and they are forced to leave town. Ross combines an artful appreciation of the pathetic fallacy – the windswept, dry prairie resembles the Bentleys’ marriage – with the unreliable narrator. Ross’s book itself, then, negotiates between falsity and reality, as the Bentleys live out a series of crises in (self-)representation. Their inability to fulfill (hetero)normative roles suggests a perversion of the presumed natural realm. With his attention turning away from farmers, Ross’s later work more forcefully examines criminality and social aberration. It is difficult to avoid the surmise that Ross’s homosexuality, either repressed or furtive in its expression, found articulation both thematically and stylistically in his fiction: in the former instance, as the homoerotic nature of the some of the fictive male–male relationships; in the latter, as the literary allegorizing of these relationships. The assumption is that homosexual and literary deviance converge and result in (or find expression as) another form of deviance, that of criminality; and since Ross was a homosexual in a social milieu that medically and legally condemned such expression, it seems unsurprising that the (subconscious) depiction of his homosexuality in his writing would be conjoined with other forms of criminality. Ross’s subsequent works more comprehensively tackle the topic of triangulation. Significantly, the women in both The Well (1958) and Whir of Gold (1970) receive much more than just the cursory attention paid them in the short stories. The function of the women still appears to be far less important than that of the men since they complete the triangle and allow Ross to explore how the men deal with the “real business” of being the subjects and instigators of plot and narrative. In the two short stories that follow Whir of Gold, Ross abandons his examinations of the failure of homosocial triangles, but does not yet directly depict an unambiguous homosexual character – an act left for his last novel, Sawbones Memorial (1974). Furthermore, the murderous father of “The Flowers that Killed Him” (1972) might be, in some senses, homosexual; however,
a distinction must be made respecting the father’s evident ephebophilia, which converges with what might be homosexual desire. In the case of “Spike” (1967), George, another father, does not actively seek out the (older) teenaged boy he inadvertently picks up, but the story’s homoeroticism is nonetheless undeniable. Having lived in Spain and Greece after he retired from his day job, Ross returned to Canada in 1980, and died in 1996, of Parkinson’s disease. Though he published relatively little during his lifetime – he was never able to support himself through his writing – his work, and As for Me and My House in particular, has garnered substantial academic critical engagement. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Fraser, K. (1997). As for Me and My Body: A Memoir of Sinclair Ross. Toronto: ECW. Moss, J. (ed.) (1992). From the Heart of the Heartland: The Fiction of Sinclair Ross. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Ross, S. (1941). As for Me and My House. New York: Reynal. Ross, S. (1957). As for Me and My House. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Ross, S. (1958). The Well. Toronto: Macmillan. Ross, S. (1968). The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Ross, S. (1970). Whir of Gold. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Ross, S. (1974). Sawbones Memorial. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Ross, S. (1982). The Race and Other Stories (ed. L. McMullen). Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Stouck, D. (ed.) (1991). Sinclair Ross’s “As for Me and My House”: Five Decades of Criticism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Roy, Arundhati ALEX TICKELL
Arundhati Roy is best known for The God of Small Things (1997), her first and only novel to date. Drawing on Roy’s childhood in the southern
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Indian state of Kerala, and combining aspects of the fairy tale, pastoral lyric, tragedy, and political fable, the novel represents a milestone in the stylistic development of South Asian literature in English. Roy’s highly poetic language and the originality of her child-centered narrative perspective are memorable features of the work. Coinciding fortuitously with India’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations the year it was published, The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize, became an international bestseller, and has been translated into 18 languages. Suzanna Arundhati Roy was born on November 24, 1961, in the Indian state of Assam, to a Syrian Christian mother, the feminist activist and teacher Mary Roy, and a Bengali Hindu father. Roy’s parents divorced when she and her brother were very young, and she spent the rest of her childhood in her mother’s family home in the small town of Ayemenem (Aymanam) in Kerala. Educated in a school created by her mother, Roy later attended a boarding school in Tamil Nadu, and went on to study architecture in New Delhi. Roy began her writing career as a screenwriter for television documentaries and historical dramas, although her training as an architect has also been cited as an important influence on her fiction. She started her screenwriting work after meeting and collaborating with the filmmaker and environmentalist Pradeep Krishen on a historical TV drama, Bargad (The Banyan Tree). They later married. Roy’s most important early screenwriting project, however, was for another film, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1988), which was set in a Delhi architecture college, and presents a rough, incipient version of the themes of Roy’s later work, especially a suspicion of institutional power and a fascination with language. In The God of Small Things Roy uses a complex doubled time scheme to tell the story of a fateful romance between a high-caste Syrian Christian divorcee, Ammu, and a low-caste “untouchable” carpenter, Velutha. Narrated from the perspective of Ammu’s children, the novel shuffles in alternate chapter sections between the past (the late 1960s) and the present (the early 1990s) when the children are reunited in their family home. The tragic culmination of the forbidden romance, which ends in Velutha’s death in police custody
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and the death by drowning of the children’s cousin Sophie Mol, is presented as a past event that haunts and traumatizes the twinned protagonists as adults. Roy’s narrative deals with personal painful memory through a unique concentration on “little events, ordinary things” that trigger recollection, and the gradual “beachcombing” process by which remembered “small things” become “the bleached bones of a story” (Roy 1997, 32–3) is one of the triumphs of novel. Roy engages with several themes that arise from the novel’s postcolonial Indian setting: the dislocating effect of a colonial past on the twins’ family; the dangers of hybridity; the complicities of history and power; the failure of Kerala’s communist administration; and the changes wrought in south India by globalization, tourism, and industrial growth. Deeply lyrical and meticulously structured, Roy’s novel tests the limits of prose in its use of neologisms, repetitions, lists, and capitalizations. Her fiction is also remarkably cinematic in its visual acuity, its fascination with talismanic objects, and its memorable set pieces. Since publishing the novel, Roy has turned from fiction to political journalism – lending support to environmental, anti-globalization, and anti-war movements both in India and internationally. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous newspapers and journals and have been published as The Cost of Living (1999), Power Politics (2001), The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2002) and The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire (2004a). Roy has repeatedly defended her new role as a human-rights campaigner and essayist by questioning the differentiation between fiction and non-fiction, stating that both are equally viable modes of truth-telling. If there is a principle that links The God of Small Things with Roy’s later essays and journalism it is the ability to make connections and challenge the boundaries between the powerful and the powerless, by envisaging the world from multiple perspectives across these boundaries. All of Roy’s work develops an “aesthetic of connection”: a process of forging meanings and tracing the reach of power that has the creative potential of dissent (Tickell 10). As well as speaking out against the “war on terror” and the occupation of Iraq, Roy has lent notable personal support to a variety of Indian and international protest groups and causes.
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SEE ALSO: English Studies, the Academy, and Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS (2002). The God of Small Baneth-Nouailhetas, E. Things: Arundhati Roy. Paris: Armand Colin/VUEF-CNED. Bhatt, I., & Nityanandam, I. (eds.) (1999). Explorations: Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things.” New Delhi: Creative. Dhawan, R. K. (ed.) (1999). Arundhati Roy: The Novelist Extraordinary. New Delhi: Sangam. Durix, C., & Durix, J. P. (eds.) (2002). Reading Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things.” Dijon: Editions Universitaires de Dijon. Mullaney, J. (2002). Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things.” London: Continuum. Prasad, A. N. (2005). Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things”: A Critical Appraisal. New Delhi: Sarup. Roy, A. (1997). The God of Small Things. London: HarperCollins. Roy, A. (1999). The Cost of Living. London: HarperCollins. Roy, A. (2001). Power Politics. Cambridge, MA: South End. Roy, A. (2002). The Algebra of Infinite Justice. London: HarperCollins. Roy, A. (2004a). The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. London: HarperCollins. Roy, A. (2004b). Public Power in the Age of Empire. New York: Seven Stories. Roy, A., & Barsamian, D. (2004). The Chequebook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy. London: Harper Perennial. Roy, A., Sokmen, M. G., & Falk, R. (2008). World Tribunal on Iraq: Making the Case against War. New York: Interlink. Sharma, A. P. (2003). The Mind and the Art of Arundhati Roy. New Delhi: Minerva. Tickell, A. (2007). Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things.” London: Routledge.
Rushdie, Salman ANDREW TEVERSON
Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most conceptually and artistically ambitious writers of literary fiction. He is also a controversialist whose
provocative forays into sensitive ideological battlegrounds have resulted in a contentious, and in the case of one novel incendiary, body of fiction. Politics, however, while it is crucial to Rushdie’s artistry, is ultimately a secondary concern in his work, for though he has consistently used his fictions to interrogate political and cultural developments, Rushdie is first and foremost a storyteller whose fictions seek to entertain readers with their lush extravagances, their Rabelaisian comedy, their witty denunciations, their gothic depravities, their clever (sometimes overly clever) game playing, their grotesque caricatures, their hyperbolic narrative experiments, and their unfettered sense of the pleasures to be found in language and narration. To read Rushdie is, sometimes, to be overwhelmed – as many of his less sympathetic reviewers have noted with disapproval. Being overwhelmed is, however, a central part of the aesthetic experience that Rushdie seeks to create, for it is Rushdie’s view that the world he represents is one that is frequently overwhelming, one that doesn’t conform to conventional notions of what is “real,” “normative,” “natural,” or “known,” and one that, as a result, requires an extraordinary aesthetic to do justice to it. “The world,” as Rushdie explained in 1993, “is operatic and surreal and grotesque” – and so the novels he writes are “operatic and surreal and grotesque” too (Chauhan 131). Ahmed Salman Rushdie was born to Muslim parents on June 19, 1947 in Bombay, India. His birth year, by meaningful coincidence, is a significant one in recent Indian history: in August 1947 India gained its independence from Britain, and at the same time the former British colony of India was “partitioned” into the secular (but predominantly Hindu) Dominion (later Republic) of India and the Muslim state of Pakistan. Both these interlinked events have marked Rushdie’s writing. The former, which effectively made him a member of the earliest generation of independent Indians, has bequeathed him a lifelong investment in the successes and failings of the “new” postcolonial South Asian nation states. The latter, which artificially divided the country of his birth in two and ushered in a half century of fratricidal wars between India and Pakistan, has given him a powerful aversion to ideologically and religiously motivated segregationism, and has resulted in a career devoted to the consistent
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defiance of border lines and boundaries – whether national, aesthetic, or personal. These characteristics are apparent in his first successful novel, Midnight’s Children (1981), which uses the lives and experiences of its protagonists to pose the vital postcolonial question: How has India fared in its first few decades of independence? How has it used the magical gift of autonomous nationhood? The answer the novel gives, through its metafictional, magic-realist allegory of children born at the very moment of independence, is an ambivalent one. On the one hand, Rushdie argues that the nation has been tragically betrayed by its political leaders – particularly Indira Gandhi, whose “emergency” suspension of normal political processes between 1975 and 1977 Rushdie presents as a despoliation of her father, Jawaharlal Nehru’s, vision of India as a democratic and socially just modern state. On the other hand, the sheer polyphony of Midnight’s Children, the multiplicity of narrative and event, can create the impression of an endlessly regenerative culture that will always, ultimately, overcome tyrannical attempts at control, containment, and suppression. This practice of offsetting a satirist’s pessimism about the competence and credibility of political leaders with the artist’s and humanist’s faith in society, culture, and art has become a consistent feature of Rushdie’s work. Repeatedly, his novels involve a sustained, vitriolic condemnation of politically corrupt or totalitarian rulers, but mitigate the bitterness of their political satire by reveling extravagantly in the possibility for renewal offered by art and the unfettered utopian imagination. After early schooling in Bombay, Rushdie was sent at 14 to study in England. He attended Rugby School and then Cambridge University, graduating with a degree in History in 1968. Then, following a brief attempt to start a career in television in Pakistan, to which his family had relocated four years earlier, he settled in London. There, having abandoned an early interest in acting, he took jobs as an advertising copywriter while he worked on fiction, and, after several abortive early attempts, he wrote his first novel Grimus for a science fiction writing competition run by the publishing company Gollancz. Grimus did not win, but his friend and (later) agent, Liz Calder, managed to persuade Gollancz to publish the novel anyway, so in 1975 Rushdie became a published writer.
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Grimus was not commercially or critically successful, but Rushdie continued writing, and after visiting India with his then wife Clarissa Luard, he started an epic novel about the country that, he hoped, would “restore the past” of his own childhood “in CinemaScope and glorious Technicolor” (Rushdie 1991, 10). This novel, Midnight’s Children, took five years to write, and was published in 1981 to massive acclaim. It went on to win the Booker Prize that year and has subsequently won both the “Booker of Bookers” in 1993 and the “Best of the Booker” in 2008 celebrating, respectively, the first 25 and 40 years of the prize’s eminent history. Midnight’s Children has in some important senses changed the face of literary publishing in Britain. It heralded an era in which big books about weighty international issues could become bestsellers rather than niche fictions. It also represents a turning point in the study of literary fiction, because it was this publishing event that effectively made “postcolonial” writing in English voguish. This voguishness has been criticized and, indeed, has made Rushdie himself a target of critique, because, it has been argued, it rests upon a commercial appetite for the exotic in Western book markets and so can be seen as a continuation of the old imperial project of othering and exploiting the East. If the publishing industry can be accused of marketing Rushdie’s novels in order to maximize this element of his appeal, however, Rushdie himself has a much more complex relationship to this process, since his fictions, while feeding the West’s appetite for the exotic, simultaneously work to condemn and critique such appetites by exposing their implicit Orientalism, and by undermining the binary oppositions upon which such othering rests. The success of Midnight’s Children enabled Rushdie to concentrate solely on his writing. In 1983 he published Shame, which focuses predominantly upon the political experience of Pakistan between the late 1960s and early 1980s and involves a thinly veiled caricature of two political leaders of the period, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Zia ul-Haq. It also includes a series of reflections, delivered by its unnamed but distinctly Rushdielike narrator, upon the experience of seeing from two perspectives at once: that of the insider, whose family lives in Pakistan, and that of the outsider, whose emigrant status allows him
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a distanced perspective. This capacity for “stereoscopic vision” (Rushdie 1991, 19) has become a dominant theme in his writing, and it has been one of Rushdie’s most consistent arguments, in both his fiction and non-fiction, that the dual vision and sense of displacement produced by the migrant experience should be regarded not solely as a curse, but as a gift to be celebrated. “It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation,” as Rushdie writes in his important essay “Imaginary Homelands”: “I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained” (17). The interrogation of the migrant experience is also to the fore in Rushdie’s 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, in which, after his complementary (and contrasting) fictions about India and Pakistan, he turns to consider the third dominant area of his own cultural experience – diasporic South Asian communities in London. This complex and profound novel focuses on the lives of two male Bombayites who have, for different reasons and with different objectives, moved to London in the era of the Brixton race riots, ascendant post-Falklands Thatcherism, and institutionalized racism in the police force and media. It engages, among other things, in a scathing, Menippean satire on British racism, and a sustained philosophical investigation into the impact of migration upon the individual and the nation. These were not, however, the aspects of the novel that initially garnered the most attention, for The Satanic Verses also includes some inflammatory scenes that parodically rewrite the life of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and that, provocatively, question the sacred inviolability of the Koran as a received text. These scenes prompted a rumble of complaints from some Muslim readers, which escalated into a storm of protests after photocopied extracts were circulated to Islamic leaders in Britain. This British “affair” then became international, with bans in various countries (including India), mass protests and – the climax of the “Rushdie affair” – a fatwa demanding Rushdie’s execution for blasphemy issued by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran on Valentine’s Day, 1989. Rushdie, in fear for his life, went into hiding and he remained thus, protected by British Special Branch police, for over nine years until, after lengthy negotiations, the Iranian government announced on September 24, 1998 that it would
not pursue the death sentence on Rushdie and disassociated itself from the bounty money offered for his murder. The significance of the Rushdie affair for our understanding of the writer’s role in the modern world cannot be underestimated. The extensive debates surrounding the fatwa touch upon such pressing international issues as the nature of free speech and its limits (if it has any limits); the responsibilities of the writer in sensitive multicultural contexts; the nature, role, and permissibility of blasphemy in the arts; and relations between Muslim and non-Muslim communities in Britain and elsewhere. The affair has also become a kind of test case, invoked whenever the role of the arts in multicultural, multifaith arenas is being discussed. The impact on Rushdie has, of course, been enormously damaging – both personally, because of his long-term loss of personal freedoms, and professionally, because the affair’s international prominence has tended to distract attention from his work and refocus it on non-literary issues. However, an understanding of the fatwa’s significance is not entirely irrelevant to the study of his subsequent works. His children’s fiction, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), written under the shadow of the death sentence, involves a sustained allegorical satire upon censorious tyrannical regimes, and includes a spirited defense of the storyteller against the forces of silence and oppression. Later novels, moreover, such as The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) and Shalimar the Clown (2005), offer up disturbing anatomies of the uses of political violence, the former by engaging in a bitter lament for a Bombay that is being destroyed by brutal sectarian politicians and cynical globalizing mega-capitalists, the latter by offering a sobering representation of the impact upon international relations of the scramble for control of Kashmir. A longer-term effect of the fatwa has been Rushdie’s detachment from his moorings in Britain. He had, he felt, been treated with scandalous contempt in the British press during the affair. Events had also severed him from the communities in Britain with which he had identified himself in the early 1980s. Shortly after emerging from hiding in 1998, he started spending more of his time in the United States, and in 1999 moved to New York. This shift is also
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marked in his two novels of the late 1990s and early 2000s: The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999), which traces the journey of its rock-star protagonists from Bombay to London to New York; and Fury (2001), which sees its artist-inventor protagonist a permanent resident in Manhattan. Rushdie’s severance from Britain has not been absolute, however. In 2006 he returned to work with the British sculptor Anish Kapoor on an installation that fused sculpture with words, and, in 2007, he accepted a knighthood from the queen. Sir Salman Rushdie can thus still be considered British, as well as Indian, Pakistani, and, indeed, international. Rushdie’s farewell to the East (see Rushdie 2002, 294), staged successively in The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground beneath Her Feet, and Fury, has also proved premature, suggesting that Rushdie, for all his celebration of movement and migration, has found it very difficult to detach himself from the wellsprings of his inspiration. Not only has he gone on, in Shalimar, to compose a sweeping epic of modern Kashmiri history, but his 2008 novel, The Enchantress of Florence (his first fully historical novel) also returns to South Asian themes by providing a fabulous, pyrotechnic account of a meeting between Renaissance Florence and Mughal India. The novel, in this respect, recalls and extends the fictional explorations of similar meetings gathered together in Rushdie’s earlier collection of short stories, East, West (1994). Rushdie established new fictional territory in the 1980s. He made Indian writing in English popular, he reinvigorated the epic novel, he reacquainted English fiction with politics, and he helped to fuse the difficult forms of narrative experiment favored by the modernists of the early twentieth century with popular forms of narrative storytelling favored by writers of “genre fiction.” Despite its innovative character, however, Rushdie’s work, as its anchoring in modernist aesthetics might suggest, does not emerge from a vacuum but from many preceding acts of authorial and artistic creation. Among Rushdie’s dominant literary influences must be included the stories of the Arabian Nights, the Indian epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Grimms’ fairy tales, the works of Charles Dickens, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, the novels of James
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Joyce, G. V. Desani’s All about H. Hatterr, Gunter Grass’s Tin Drum, and Gabriel Garcıa Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is not only novelists and storytellers that have influenced Rushdie, moreover, but filmmakers, artists, painters, and photographers too. The Bengali auteur, Satyajit Ray and the Spanish surrealist director, Luis Bunuel, for instance, have both had a marked impact on Rushdie’s work, as has Indian popular cinema and the Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz. Such intensive, cross-media intertextuality in Rushdie’s work serves to reinforce, at the level of the text, arguments about culture and identity that Rushdie is also making at the level of theme and plot. Cultures and individuals, in Rushdie’s view, like artworks, are not isolated from each other, but are in constant dialogue, feeding one another, modifying one another, creating new hybrid forms of identity. Rushdie’s intertextuality, in this way, is also part and parcel of his central political arguments: that cultures and communities become damaged and distorted if they are artificially isolated from one another by “lines drawn across the world,” and that the most healthy and politically robust communities are those that permit tolerance of diversity and allow free, sustained dialogue between sites of difference. The most consistent target of satire in Rushdie’s writing is what has become known as “fundamentalism” – the ideological insistence upon the absolute inviolable rightness of one particular worldview, and the demand that the community that holds this view should be regarded as “pure,” “distinct,” and “separate” from other communities. The word has, of course, become associated recently with certain radical forms of Islamic belief, but Rushdie finds this segregationist and supremacist tendency elsewhere too: in British cultural imperialism, in racism, in radical Hinduism, and in the views of the Christian right in America. His work, in its formal intertextuality, its relentless refusal of coherent orders, its rejection of final solutions, and its potent satires on bigotry, monomania, and absolutism, is radically opposed to such fundamentalisms at every level. Instead it celebrates impurity, mixture, melange, and muddle, and, through those qualities, the political values that Rushdie cares most about: those of inclusivity, pluralism, humanism, and mutual engagement.
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SEE ALSO: Black British Fiction (WF); Censorship and the Novel (WF); Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Pakistani Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the British South Asian Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ahmad, A. (1992). In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso. Ahsan, M. M., and Kidwai, A. R. (eds.) (1991). Sacrilege versus Civility: Muslim Perspectives on “The Satanic Verses.” Leicester: Islamic Foundation. Ball, J. C. (2003). Satire and the Postcolonial Novel: V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie. New York: Routledge. Booker, K. (ed.) (1999). Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie. New York: G. K. Hall. Brennan, T. (1989). Salman Rushdie and the Third World. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Chauhan, P. (ed.) (2001). Salman Rushdie Interviews: A Sourcebook of His Ideas. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Clark, R. Y. (2001). Stranger Gods: Salman Rushdie’s Other Worlds. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Fletcher, M. D. (ed.) (1994). Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Goonetilleke, D. C. R. A. (1998). Salman Rushdie. New York: St. Martin’s. Grant, D. (1999). Salman Rushdie. Plymouth: Northcote House. Gurnah, A. (ed.) (2007). The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hamilton, I. (1995–6). The First Life of Salman Rushdie. New Yorker, pp. 90–113 (Dec. 25/Jan. 1). Huggan, G. (2001). The Post-Colonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge. Kortenaar, N. ten (2004). Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children.” Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press. Kuortti, J. (1997). The Salman Rushdie Bibliography. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Pipes, D. (2003). The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah, and the West. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Reder, M. (ed.) (2000). Conversations with Salman Rushdie. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Rushdie, S. (1975). Grimus. London: Gollancz. Rushdie, S. (1981). Midnight’s Children. London: Jonathan Cape. Rushdie, S. (1983). Shame. London: Jonathan Cape. Rushdie, S. (1988). The Satanic Verses. London: Viking. Rushdie, S. (1990). Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta. Rushdie, S. (1991). Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Granta. Rushdie, S. (1994). East, West. London: Jonathan Cape. Rushdie, S. (1995). The Moor’s Last Sigh. London: Jonathan Cape. Rushdie, S. (1999). The Ground beneath Her Feet. London: Jonathan Cape. Rushdie, S. (2001). Fury. London: Jonathan Cape. Rushdie, S. (2002). Step across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992–2002. London: Jonathan Cape. Rushdie, S. (2005). Shalimar the Clown. London: Jonathan Cape. Rushdie, S. (2008). The Enchantress of Florence. London: Jonathan Cape. Sanga, J. (2001). Salman Rushdie’s Postcolonial Metaphors. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Sawhney, S., & Sawhney, S. (eds.) (2001). Salman Rushdie [special issue]. Twentieth-Century Literature, 47(4). Teverson, A. (2007). Salman Rushdie. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
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S Sahgal, Nayantara ANNA GUTTMAN
Nayantara Sahgal was born on May 10, 1927 in Allahabad, then in British India. At the time of Sahgal’s birth, her maternal uncle, Jawaharlal Nehru, was already a well-known nationalist leader, writer, and activist. Twenty years later, he would become independent India’s first prime minister. Given her family background, it should be no surprise that Sahgal’s writing, both fiction and non-fiction, demonstrates a strong interest in the Indian nation, nationalist history, and national politics. Indeed, she published two autobiographies early in her writing career – From Fear Set Free (1962) and Prison and Chocolate Cake (1966) – which document life with the first family of Indian politics and reveal her great admiration and respect for Nehru. Sahgal went on to edit the letters of Nehru and his sister Vijayalakshmi, who enjoyed a close relationship and also wrote two biographies of Indira Gandhi, her first cousin and prime minister of India from 1971 to 1977 and again from 1980 until her assassination in 1984: Indira Gandhi’s Emergence and Style (1978) and Indira Gandhi: Her Road to Power (1982). Highly critical of the state of emergency declared by then Prime Minister Gandhi between 1975 and 1977, Sahgal resigned her presidency of India’s national literary academy in protest and, for her outspoken views, had a promised diplomatic appointment to Italy revoked. She then lived in the United States and in Britain for a time. Outside of India she is best known as a novelist, particularly for Rich Like Us (1985b), for which
she won both the Sinclair Prize for fiction and the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1985 as well as the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1987. Gender is another one of Sahgal’s persistent concerns. In particular, the difficulties faced by women struggling with dysfunctional marriages are a recurring theme. This Time of Morning (1965), for instance, tells the story of Rashmi’s decision to divorce her husband. The Day in Shadow (1971) begins just after Simrit’s divorce and deals with her struggle to negotiate her new status (along with a punishing divorce settlement) and her discovery of happiness with a new partner. Infidelity and marital discontent are major themes of Storm in Chandigarh (1969). In Rich Like Us, Rose and Mona struggle to come to terms with their respective marriages to the same man, his infidelities, and each other, while Nishi, their daughterin-law, inhabits an unhappy marriage with Mona’s son Dev. Sahgal’s attention to women’s lives and agencies has been critically compared to that of Margaret Drabble, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Buchi Emecheta, and Shashi Deshpande, among others. Such personal stories are often paired in Sahgal’s novels with examinations of critical moments in Indian national politics and debates over national values. A Time to be Happy (1958), Plans for Departure (1985a), Mistaken Identity (1988), and Lesser Breeds (2003) all investigate the birth of Indian nationalist consciousness, with perspectives ranging from those of an unconventional Danish woman (Anna Hansen in Plans for Departure) to a minor Raja (Nikhil in Mistaken Identity) to a small-town teacher (Nurullah in
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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Lesser Breeds). Sonali, the main female character in Rich Like Us, remains unmarried, a choice directly connected with her commitment to the nation and what she believes to be its founding ideals. While only A Situation in New Delhi (1977a) and Lesser Breeds depict women who are directly involved in the nation’s political life, many of Sahgal’s other female characters have husbands, lovers, sons, and other family members who are involved in national politics. Their experiences, and the impact that political events have on their private lives, enable Sahgal to examine the complex relationship between the public and the private in a country that, as Sunil Khilnani and Partha Chatterjee have demonstrated, has both insisted upon and precluded their separation. Within India, Sahgal is also well known for her essays – some of which have been collected in A Voice for Freedom (1977b) and Point of View (1997) – and has published a collection of her correspondence with her second husband, E. N. Mangat Rai. Her history textbook, The Freedom Movement in India (1970a), is used in Indian high schools. Nayantara Sahgal is rare among Indian writers in English for having attracted a wide range of readers, both abroad and at home, long before Indian literature attained its current level of international recognition and prestige. SEE ALSO: Drabble, Margaret (BIF); Emecheta, Buchi (WF); Gordimer, Nadine (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Lessing, Doris (BIF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Crane, R. J. (ed.) (1998). Nayantara Sahgal’s India: Passion, Politics and History. New Delhi: Sterling. Jain, Jasbir (1994). Nayantara Sahgal. Jaipur: Printwell. Sahgal, N. (1958). A Time to Be Happy. New York: Knopf. Sahgal, N. (1962). From Fear Set Free. London: Gollancz. Sahgal, N. (1965). This Time of Morning. London: Gollancz. Sahgal, N. (1966). Prison and Chocolate Cake. New York: Knopf. Sahgal, N. (1969). Storm in Chandigarh. New York: Norton.
Sahgal, N. (1970a). The Freedom Movement in India. New Delhi: National Council of Educational Research and Training. Sahgal, N. (with Mehta, C., & Dar, R.) (1970b). Sunlight Surround You: A Birthday Bouquet. New Delhi: Orient Longman. Sahgal, N. (1971). The Day in Shadow. New Delhi: Penguin. Sahgal, N. (1977a). A Situation in New Delhi. London: London Magazine Editions. Sahgal, N. (1977b). A Voice for Freedom. New Delhi: Hind Pocket Books. Sahgal, N. (1978). Indira Gandhi’s Emergence and Style. New Delhi: Vikas. Sahgal, N. (1982). Indira Gandhi: Her Road to Power. New York: Ungar. Sahgal, N. (1985a). Plans for Departure. New York: Norton. Sahgal, N. (1985b). Rich Like Us. London: Heinemann. Sahgal, N. (1988). Mistaken Identity. London: Heinemann. Sahgal, N. (with Mangat Rai, E. N.) (1994). Relationships: Extracts from a Correspondence. New Delhi: Kali for Women. Sahgal, N. (1997). Point of View: A Personal Response to Life, Literature and Politics. New Delhi: Prestige. Sahgal, N. (2003). Lesser Breeds. New Delhi: HarperCollins. Sahgal, N. (2004). Before Freedom: Nehru’s Letters to His Sister (1909–1947). New Delhi: Roli.
Salkey, Andrew LYNNE MACEDO
Andrew Salkey was a key figure among the first group of Caribbean writers to settle in London in the early 1950s. A writer, broadcaster, editor, journalist, and lecturer, Salkey was a prolific writer whose output encompassed all the literary genres, and whose awards included a Guggenheim Fellowship (1960) and the Casa de las Americas Prize (1979) for his poetry. Salkey was born to Jamaican parents in Panama on January 30, 1928; as a small child he returned to his grandmother in Jamaica, where he was educated at St. George’s and Munro Colleges before going to London University to study English literature in 1952. Salkey spent the last 19 years of his life working as professor of creative writing at Hampshire College, Massachusetts, where he was given the Black Scholar’s Award of Excellence in 1993. He died on April 28, 1995.
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SALKEY, ANDREW
Salkey’s writing career began with submissions to BBC Radio’s Caribbean Voices. He eventually became a regular guest and writer-in-residence on the influential program, which helped bring writers such as George Lamming and Sam Selvon to public attention. He was also a founding member of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), an organization that was instrumental in introducing V. S. Naipaul and Wilson Harris to their longtime publishers, Andre Deutsch and Faber and Faber respectively. Salkey also edited anthologies of Caribbean writing in the 1960s and 1970s that eventually gave further inspiration to other aspiring writers from the region. The diverse nature of his own writing reflected Salkey’s many interests in questions of place and identity, as well as his abiding concern with the effects of colonization on the Caribbean. Always conscious of his own state of exile, Salkey in much of his poetry reflected the feelings of displacement that so many Caribbean writers experienced: “For whom do I speak, now, so far away from home?” (1980a, 24). Salkey clearly felt he could speak to Caribbean youth, and between 1964 and 1980 he published nine illustrated books for children dealing with natural events and situations specific to the region. His collections of folktales and reworkings of traditional Anancy stories clearly demonstrate both his mastery of the vernacular and his abiding concern to preserve the indigenous tales of childhood that form part of the Jamaican oral tradition. Salkey’s first novel A Quality of Violence was published in 1959, and following this work he wrote four more novels: three of the five are set in London and two in Jamaica. Both A Quality of Violence and The Late Emancipation of Jerry Stover (1968) explore the corrupting nature of power and the links between politics and religion in the Caribbean. Key characters meet untimely ends – Mrs. Johnson is stoned to death in A Quality of Violence, and several of Jerry’s friends in The Late Emancipation are killed by a landslide after an excessive bout of drinking – which seems to highlight Salkey’s own sense of pessimism about the region’s future. His London novels do not, however, offer a more positive outlook. Johnnie Sobert, the young Jamaican protagonist in Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960a), finds that his life and sexuality are ruled by individuals who never consider his needs. In The Adventures of Catullus
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Kelly (1969a), sexual promiscuity, heavy drinking, and a fruitless search for racial identity dominate the life of Catullus, another young Jamaican trying to make his way in the metropolis. Salkey’s final novel, Come Home, Malcolm Heartland (1976), has even darker undertones with its expose of racial politics. It culminates in the fatal stabbing of Malcolm, a London-based Jamaican barrister, for “knowing too much” about members of the Black Power movement in Britain. As his writing demonstrates, Salkey’s abiding passion for politics and his concern and compassion for the Caribbean people lasted throughout his lifetime. Although he poignantly wrote that “together, we were all helpless people who had been asked to put our trust in elites” (1972, 35), Salkey never stopped hoping that the Caribbean region would eventually shake off its colonial legacy, and finally forge the kind of future he always had believed its people were capable of achieving. SEE ALSO: Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Harris, Wilson (WF); Lamming, George (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Naipaul, V. S. (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Selvon, Sam (WF); West Indian Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Nazareth, P. (1994). In the Trickster Tradition. London: Bogle L’Ouverture. Salkey, A. (1959). A Quality of Violence. London: Hutchinson. Salkey, A. (1960a). Escape to an Autumn Pavement. London: Hutchinson. Salkey, A. (ed.) (1960b). West Indian Stories. London: Faber and Faber. Salkey, A. (1964). Hurricane. London: Oxford University Press. Salkey, A. (1965a). Earthquake. London: Oxford University Press. Salkey, A. (ed.) (1965b). Stories from the Caribbean: An Anthology. London: Elek. Salkey, A. (1966a). Drought. London: Oxford University Press. Salkey, A. (1966b). The Shark Hunters. London: Nelson. Salkey, A. (ed.) (1967a). Caribbean Prose: An Anthology for Secondary Schools. London: Evans Brothers.
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Salkey, A. (1967b). Riot. London: Oxford University Press. Salkey, A. (ed.) (1967b). Caribbean Prose: An Anthology for Secondary Schools. London: Evans Brothers. Salkey, A. (1968). The Late Emancipation of Jerry Stover. London: Hutchinson. Salkey, A. (1969a). The Adventures of Catullus Kelly. London: Hutchinson. Salkey, A. (1969b). Jonah Simpson. London: Oxford University Press. Salkey, A. (ed.) (1971a). Breaklight: An Anthology of Caribbean Poetry. London: Hamish Hamilton. Salkey, A. (1971b). Havana Journal. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Salkey, A. (1972). Georgetown Journal. London: New Beacon. Salkey, A. (1973a). Anancy’s Score. London: Bogle L’Ouverture. Salkey, A. (ed.) (1973b). Caribbean Essays: An Anthology. London: Evans Brothers. Salkey, A. (1973c). Jamaica: An Epic Poem. London: Hutchinson. Salkey, A. (1974). Joey Tyson. London: Bogle L’Ouverture. Salkey, A. (1976). Come Home, Malcolm Heartland. London: Hutchinson. Salkey, A. (ed.) (1977). Writing in Cuba Since the Revolution. London: Bogle L’Ouverture. Salkey, A. (1979a). In the Hills Where Her Dreams Live: Poems for Chile 1973–1980. La Habana: Casa De Las Americas. Salkey, A. (1979b). The River that Disappeared. London: Bogle L’Ouverture. Salkey, A. (1980a). Away: Poems. London: Allison and Busby. Salkey, A. (ed.) (1980b). Caribbean Folk Tales and Legends. London: Bogle L’Ouverture. Salkey, A. (1980c). Danny Jones. London: Bogle L’Ouverture. Salkey, A. (1985). The One. London: Bogle L’Ouverture. Salkey, A. (1992). Anancy, Traveller. London: Bogle L’Ouverture. Salkey, A. (1993). Brother Anancy and Other Stories. Harlow: Longman. Salkey, A. (1998). In the Border Country and Other Stories. London: Bogle L’Ouverture.
Sarachchandra, Ediriwira D. C. R. A. GOONETILLEKE
Ediriwira Sarachchandra, who won Sri Lanka’s Sahitya Akademi Award for the best Sinhalese novel with his first book, Malagiya Attho (1959),
and the Arts Council Award for the best English novel of 1985 for the manuscript of With the Begging Bowl (1986), was Sri Lanka’s most distinguished man of letters and leading twentiethcentury novelist in English. Born on June 3, 1914, Sarachchandra graduated from the University of Ceylon in 1936, having read Sanskrit, Pali, and Sinhalese. He studied Indian philosophy and music at Tagore’s Institute, Shantiniketan, and, having gained a MA, was appointed lecturer in Pali at the University of Ceylon. He later read Western philosophy at the University of London for a PhD (1949). He was appointed professor of Pali at the University of Ceylon, later becoming professor of modern Sinhalese literature. After 1965, he taught in the United States before returning to the University of Colombo in 1972. Sarachchandra’s literary services were recognized by the state when he was appointed ambassador to France (1974–7); his experiences there resulted in his novel With the Begging Bowl (1986). He won the Kumaran Asan World Prize (1983), the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Literature (1988), and the Japanese honor, the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold and Silver Star (1995), before his death in 1996. As a boy of the colonial era at a time when children could be fined five cents for speaking a word of Sinhalese or Tamil at school, Sarachchandra enjoyed reading English poets and began writing his own poems in English. The colonial educational system equipped him with a command of the language; it also stirred nationalistic feelings, resulting in his decision to specialize in South Asian languages. He achieved preeminence in many fields in Sinhalese – philosophy, literary criticism, research, drama, and fiction – and his success as an English novelist was instant. His first work in English was a short story, “Of a Queen and a Courtesan” (1970), published in the Philippine magazine Solidarity – an early indication that his fiction transcended national frontiers. He wrote six novels in Sinhalese and three in English: Curfew and a Full Moon (1978), With the Begging Bowl (1986), and Foam upon the Stream: A Japanese Elegy (1987) – each of which was different in its interests and narrative strategies yet unified by a controlling ironic intelligence. In Curfew and a Full Moon, Sarachchandra pays undivided attention to the Sinhalese youth insurgency of April 1971. The main strength of
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SARGESON, FRANK
his novel lies in his rendering of his protagonist’s response to the events taking place around him. Professor Amaradasa is a well-versed, dedicated scholar of archaeology and ancient history. But Sarachchandra frames his hero ironically, thus opening up the possibility of self-criticism. Professor Amaradasa does not fully measure up to Sarachchandra’s conception of the ideal intellectual: he is out of touch with the world around him. Although the insurrection was an event unparalleled in history of independent Sri Lanka, Professor Amaradasa represents the many people who neither took into account the social changes that led to the insurgency, nor took insurrectionary activity itself seriously, until the explosion came. Professor Amaradasa finds himself involved peripherally in the insurgency via his students. Sarachchandra, who presents the insurrection far more analytically and fully than James Goonewardene in Acid Bomb Explosion (1978), portrays it as a movement of frustrated rural youth who have no hope of employment and no faith in the existing political system. He portrays the revolutionaries as both callow and genuinely idealistic, and Sarachchandra is equally critical of the state as it combats the revolutionaries. Sarachchandra’s best novel is With the Begging Bowl. His original intention was to focus on public concerns, but the couple at the center claims precedence – a wayward, enigmatic woman who breaks with traditional mores, and a writer who, rather than criticize the woman, suggests ways of understanding her. The marriage breaks down and the husband’s mind crumbles as a consequence of both private misery and his failure as an ambassador, a sensitive victim of a bureaucracy he cannot fight with its own weapons. But the ambassador and his wife are not only victims. The ambassador tries to improve the embassy and serve his country, and his wife tries to embrace a new way of life. In the end, however, they are defeated. The comedy, sharply satirical, targets officialdom, diplomacy, and the consumerist greed of the lower middle classes. Foam upon a Stream is a lyrical romantic tragedy set mostly in Japan. Dharmasena, a middle-aged Sinhalese academic with a child and wife, loves Japanese culture, and Noriko, a young, uneducated, poor, and unattached girl is, for him, a symbol of that culture. Their fulfillment is
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difficult to achieve because of the cultural and personal barriers between them. Constant references to their problems and to suicide in other contexts provide the text with a sense of tragic loss. What ultimately dooms the couple is that their attachment has little mutual understanding or communication. While delineating their association with psychological and cultural perceptiveness, the author sketches an authentically Japanese cultural context. The novel is presented from the point of view of the two protagonists and the omniscient narrator by turns, thereby expressing the author’s basic appeal to the reader to understand rather than criticize. Although his oeuvre in English is small, Sarachchandra’s deep understanding of Sri Lankan culture and realities, and his writing talent, make him the English-language novelist with the most sensitive response to and acute insights regarding life in the island. SEE ALSO: Goonewardene, James (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Sri Lankan Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Amerasinghe, A. R. B., & Sumanasekera Banda, S. B. (eds.) (1988). Ediriwira Sarachchandra Festschrift. Colombo: Sri Lanka National Commission for UNESCO. De Silva, L. (1991). Ediriwira Sarachchandra: Virtuosity and Vision. In R. Ross (ed.), International Literature in English. New York: Garland pp. 691–702. Sarachchandra, E. (1970). Of a Queen and a Courtesan. Solidarity, 5(2), 51–64. Sarachchandra, E. (1978). Curfew and a Full Moon. Hong Kong: Heinemann. Sarachchandra, E. (1986). With the Begging Bowl. New Delhi: BR Publishing. Sarachchandra, E. (1987). Foam upon the Stream: A Japanese Elegy. Singapore: Heinemann.
Sargeson, Frank MARK WILLIAMS
Frank Sargeson ought to be to New Zealand literature what Mark Twain is to American or Henry Lawson to Australian: an unassailable icon.
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Like Twain, he found in the marginal and uneducated a literary language that spoke the particularity of place; like Lawson, he found a means of valuing the experience of a transplanted white people. Like both, he figured powerfully in the intense cultural nationalisms settler societies produce as rites of passage to an incomplete postcolonial status. But Sargeson has had a less robust afterlife than either, having been eclipsed as national icon both by Katherine Mansfield and by Janet Frame. The problem lies partly with his writing, which remains too stubbornly anchored to its cultural moment, but also in the resentments that drove him to fashion his style. Born Norris Davey on March 21, 1903, Sargeson grew up in the town of Hamilton. His parents were proper, middle-class, church-going citizens, suspicious of literature as an occupation for their son. Sargeson dutifully trained in law, but his efforts at respectability failed, not just because he had no desire to replicate their lives but because he carried a secret. The source of Sargeson’s antagonism to his puritanical family, and by extension his puritanical nation, was a collision of late colonial, white New Zealand and his homosexuality. Outed by a court case, he changed his birth name, inventing the masculine literary identity that goes with his early stories of matey love and disguise. Sargeson’s writing arises from his animosity toward the world he chose to represent. The classic Sargeson story proceeds from a point of failure; an uneducated male too inarticulate to express the sources of his confusion lashes out in an act of violence that registers an authorial anger. Violence in Sargeson’s stories is particularly disturbing because it is not always negatively depicted. Jack’s assaults on his wife’s laundry in “The Hole that Jack Dug,” the murder of the unlikable Ken in “A Great Day,” even Victor’s incineration of the tomcat in “Sale Day” – all these acts are especially troubling because they don’t prompt a clear response. The key to these stories is the turn they execute against the New Zealand reader, who is coaxed into a scene of concentrated national meaning by the sense that Sargeson has found a way of “speaking for ourselves” and by a picture of white masculinity that conforms to a dominant stereotype, but which also slyly subverts the heterosexual pattern. Commentators have noted the
giggling sexual innuendo insinuated into the masculine mode of his fiction. But in the closeted atmosphere of the late 1930s and 1940s, the gay references could not be publicly referred to, which no doubt increased the author’s sense of satisfaction at having slyly exhibited what his opponents could not name. The opening paragraph of “The Hole that Jack Dug” is now difficult to read without exaggerating its attention to manly musculature and dirt – and to the inviting “hole” Jack digs against his wife’s domain. Thus the story turns against the masculine style Sargeson carefully constructed to outfox the circumscribed language of sexuality of the day. What is important about this is not so much the sexual identity it discloses but the antagonism it directs at the wounding inflicted by parents and legal punishers – the whole apparatus of Pakeha (white) respectability. Yet there is affirmation as well as animosity in Sargeson’s early stories. Sargeson fashioned a style for the Pakeha tribe by whittling back the more elaborate style he had tried to emulate under the influence of earlier modernists. But the richness of a style aimed at a less limited readership is worked into the tight prose he perfected. The stories use symbolism and subversion to set up a laminated reading process in which different levels of meaning are available. Sargeson’s passionate attention to the speech of working-class, uneducated men indicates his belief that forms of richness and even beauty are to be found especially where bourgeois society instructs us not to find them. But it is the layering of sexual implication in the stories that produces their subversive energy. The prisoners’ request for Vaseline in “That Summer” would be noticed by those within the gay underworld of uneducated men Sargeson knew through his lover and by the enclave of literary readers who were not gay, but the joke is aimed at the ignorance of that middle ground of New Zealanders who cared for neither world. Late in his life, middle New Zealand caught up with Sargeson and he could write more directly, though still rather coyly, about the new sexual freedom. But the later work, less constrained, lacks the fierce animus that drives the classic stories and has not figured prominently in anthologies. Feminism in the 1970s acted particularly against Sargeson’s status as the Abraham of white New Zealand fiction. His fables of
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masculinity counted against him among younger and women readers. Recently, a new recognition of the erasure by the mid-twentieth-century cultural nationalists of the colonial legacy has indicated another limit to Sargeson’s nation-making mythology. Perhaps to see New Zealand’s literature whole will require not only shifting Sargeson’s eminence so as to register what his legacy obscures but also by rereading his work in the more complex terms it invites. SEE ALSO: Frame, Janet (WF); Mansfield, Katherine (WF); New Zealand Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS King, M. (1995). Frank Sargeson: A Life. Auckland: Viking. Sargeson, F. (1936). Conversation with My Uncle and Other Sketches. Auckland: Unicorn. Sargeson, F. (1940). A Man and His Wife. Christchurch: Caxton. Sargeson, F. (1945a). Speaking for Ourselves. Christchurch: Caxton. Sargeson, F. (1945b). When the Wind Blows. Christchurch: Caxton. Sargeson, F. (1946). That Summer and Other Stories. London: John Lehmann. Sargeson, F. (1949). I Saw in My Dream. London: John Lehmann. Sargeson, F. (1965). Memoirs of a Peon. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Sargeson, F. (1967). The Hangover. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Sargeson, F. (1969). Joy of the Worm. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Sargeson, F. (1976). Sunset Village. London: Martin Brian and O’Keeffe. Sargeson, F. (1982). Collected Stories. Auckland: Penguin. Sargeson, F. (1983). Conversation in a Train and Other Critical Writing (ed. K. Cunningham). Auckland: Auckland University Press.
Saro-Wiwa, Ken SANYA OSHA
Ken Saro-Wiwa is a Nigerian author who was hanged on November 10, 1995, along with eight
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compatriots from Ogoniland, under the military dictatorship of General Sani Abacha. Although he had a lifelong commitment to literature, his environmental activism and the brutal manner of his death sometimes overshadow his contributions as a creative writer. Born in 1941 in southern Nigeria, Saro-Wiwa studied at Government College, Umuahia, through whose ranks passed Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, and Elechi Amadi. SaroWiwa read English at the University of Ibadan and then taught for a number of years. During the Nigerian Civil War and afterwards, he was employed in a number of high-profile government positions; later, seeking freedom from responsibility to support the government, he undertook a number of business and writing ventures. Saro-Wiwa believed that authors and intellectuals must devote themselves to the sociopolitical struggles of their community – that works of art must reflect an unambiguous social conscience. In Saro-Wiwa’s case, three major realities can be said to constitute his political outlook. First, he came from a minority ethnic group; second, he was profoundly affected by the Nigerian Civil War of 1967–70; and third, his political awakening came about as a result of a sense of outrage caused by the environmental degradation inflicted on his homeland by multinational oil-prospecting concerns. Angered that farmlands and watercourses had been polluted, and that human lives in the Niger Delta region generally had become devalued by hunger, violence, poverty, and neglect, Saro-Wiwa claimed that his fellow Ogoni indigenes were being exterminated by a deliberate policy of genocide orchestrated by the Nigerian military elite in conjunction with multinational petroleum firms. These broad presuppositions informed much of his creative output, which he published with his own company, Saros International, in order to avoid compromising his artistic vision and tastes, and to maintain the freedom to write and publish in experimental and unconventional ways. Saro-Wiwa produced a diverse body of work ranging from television scripts (including the long-running Nigerian sitcom Basi and Company) to historical narratives and fiction. His fiction and prose works as a whole reflect his various ideological leanings regarding politics and the
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Nigerian federation. For instance, his novel Sozaboy (1985b) can be read as a parable of the postcolonial Nigerian situation. This first novel is a tale about a dispossessed outsider, Sozaboy (i.e., Soldier Boy), who has been brought up by a poor single mother and has to make his way in a harsh social milieu plagued by war, corruption, and the negativities of militarist politics. These conditions were a fact of life in the Nigeria that Saro-Wiwa knew. The bleakness of Sozaboy’s landscape also mirrors the continuing degradation of Ogoni territory, which Saro-Wiwa fought to redeem. The novel is written in what SaroWiwa calls “rotten English,” an experimental language of his own invention that mixes Nigerian pidgin, broken English, and a smattering of Standard English. Like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, it represents a deeply idiosyncratic form of novelistic discourse. Within the Nigerian context it resembles another linguistically transgressive novel, Gabriel Okara’s The Voice. Sozaboy can be seen as a paradigmatically postcolonial fiction in its operations of subverting, mimicking, and reinventing metropolitan texts, languages, and cultures. Saro-Wiwa’s strategy of employing fiction to explore the dilemmas of being a Nigerian is also evident his short story collection Prisoners of Jebs (1988). Jebs, the geographical setting, is an imagi-nary penitentiary undermined by the vices of corruption, profligacy, and incompetence. It can therefore be read as a metaphor for the Nigerian political context, which Saro-Wiwa believed no nation ought to emulate. However, Prisoners of Jebs also extends its discursive reach beyond Nigerian borders to satirize the excesses of African kleptocracies. Indeed, in much of SaroWiwa’s prose writings satire is a prominent feature, reflecting his view of the pan-Nigerian nation-building project as at worst a truncated one and at best an incomplete initiative. Accordingly, Sozaboy and Prisoner of Jebs attempt to capture many of the nation’s failings and are infused with a tone of bleakness and dark laughter. A Forest of Flowers (1986), another collection of short stories, is particularly distinctive for its exploration of the female voice and consciousness. Here, there are deliberate explorations of themes pertaining to domesticity, relations of
affect, and the private space. This shift in discursive emphasis stands in sharp contrast to the other books’ overriding preoccupations with war, conflict, and chaos. Twice shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s creative fiction sits well with his wider project of contesting the viability of the Nigerian nation-building project in the context of its exclusionary militarist politics. He hailed from a minority ethnic group with a tremendous amount of oil wealth to which it had no access. He also believed his ethnicity was on the verge of extinction in political, cultural, and economic terms, and so his writings can be conceived as attempts to grapple with a siege mentality. They were a way of writing out of a tight corner, an inscription of a singular voice over a congested and threatening canvas. SEE ALSO: Censorship and Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Joyce, James (BIF); Okara, Gabriel (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); West African Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Osha, S. (2007). Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Shadow: Politics, Nationalism and the Ogoni Protest Movement. London: Adonis and Abbey. Saro-Wiwa, K. (1985a). Songs in a Time of War. Port Harcourt: Saros International. Saro-Wiwa, K. (1985b). Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English. Port Harcourt: Saros International. Saro-Wiwa, K. (1986). A Forest of Flowers. Port Harcourt: Saros International. Saro-Wiwa, K. (1988). Prisoners of Jebs. Port Harcourt: Saros International. Saro-Wiwa, K. (1989). On a Darkening Plain: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War. Port Harcourt: Saros International. Saro-Wiwa, K. (1991a). Nigeria: The Brink of Disaster. Port Harcourt: Saros International. Saro-Wiwa, K. (1991b). Pita Dumbrok’s Prison. Port Harcourt: Saros International. Saro-Wiwa, K. (1993). Genocide in Nigeria: The Ogoni Tragedy. Port Harcourt: Saros International. Saro-Wiwa, K. (1995). A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary. London: Penguin. Wiwa, K. (2000). In the Shadow of a Saint. Toronto: Knopf.
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
SCOTT, KIM
Scott, Kim JOHN EUSTACE
Born in 1957 in Perth, Western Australia, Kim Scott is the first Aboriginal writer to have won the Miles Franklin Literary Award. He received Australia’s premier literary prize for fiction in 2000 for his second novel, Benang: From the Heart (1999). That novel also won the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award in 1999 and The Kate Challis RAKA Award in 2001. Scott is Noongar, a member of the Indigenous community that inhabited a vast area of Australia’s southwest before colonial settlement, a process that resulted in the Noongars’ systematic displacement and dislocation from traditional country and culture. His growing body of fiction, non-fiction, and criticism, much of which is semiautobiographical, addresses directly that history, along with its material, cultural, and psychological ramifications. He uses complex and multivoiced narratives to interrogate the master narratives of Australian history and the identity politics that continue to influence discussions of indigeneity, race, and identity in the former colony. While his work has received critical accolades and attention, particularly with the success of Benang, scholarly treatments remain limited. Scott’s preoccupation with history and the identity politics of Aboriginality in Western Australia is informed by his own experience and his research into his family history. Although he knew he was Noongar from a young age, his immediate family remained at the fringes of the Indigenous community at a time when the temptation to deny an Aboriginal heritage was strong and the ability to pass as white perceived as advantageous. Thus, like Harley, the fair-skinned protagonist of Benang – with whom the author shares a Scottish grandfather, a father named Tommy, and a Noongar ancestor named Fanny – Scott grew up with relatively little knowledge of his Noongar heritage. His attempt to discover more about that heritage led him to seek a teaching position in the rural southwest of the state. His failure and the resulting disappointment led to his first novel True Country (1993b), the story of a young Aboriginal man, Billy, who accepts a teaching position in a remote northwestern community with a similar purpose and similar results.
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While True Country is open-ended and somewhat ambivalent about the possibility of reestablishing a connection to place and culture in any more than a figurative way, Benang is more hopeful, reflecting the more developed understanding of Aboriginal identity politics that came of Scott’s continuing research into his family history. Through the protagonist’s own tortured research into his Indigenous heritage, the author explores the regulatory and eugenic policies of Western Australia and their legacies for the Noongars. In a fragmentary, magic-realist narrative, Harley pieces together a family history of massacres, rape, and dispossession perpetrated by European ancestors upon Indigenous ones. At the same time, he comes to terms with the Aboriginal self-loathing that resulted from this history and that contributed to his personal sense of dispossession as “the first white man born” in his family. The novel points to two sources of that destructive self-loathing: on the most obvious level, it is a function of internalizing dominant and racist notions about Aboriginality; on a less obvious level, it is a function of the guilt arising from the many instances of Indigenous cooperation and collaboration in genocidal policies and actions. In the end, however, the novel makes clear that, given the increasingly asymmetrical power relations between settlers and Noongars, such collaborations were often necessary to ensure survival. Ultimately, Scott asserts through Harley that dispossessed Noongars’ connections to place and culture can be enabled only by acknowledging and privileging Aboriginal perspectives on colonial history in Western Australia. Scott’s other major work is a non-fictional family history, Kayang & Me (2005), written with Noongar elder Hazel Brown. He has also published a children’s book, The Dredgersaurus (2001b). He is completing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Western Australia in which he continues to explore identity politics and the history of settler–Indigenous relations in the state.
SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Indigenous Fiction
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(WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Scott, K. (1993a). An Intimate Act. In P. Holland (ed.), Summer Shorts. Fremantle: Fremantle Press, pp. 215–22. Scott, K. (1993b). True Country. Fremantle: Fremantle Press. Scott, K. (1995). Registering Romance. In B. Warnock & D. Warnock (eds.), Summer Shorts 3. Fremantle: Fremantle Press, pp. 36–40. Scott, K. (1999). Benang: From the Heart. Fremantle: Fremantle Press. Scott, K. (2000a). Damaged but Persistent. Siglo, 12, 54–9. Scott, K. (2000b). Disputed Territory. In A. Brewster, A. O’Neill, & R. Van Den Berg (eds.), Those Who Remain Will Always Remember: An Anthology of Aboriginal Writing. Fremantle: Fremantle Press, pp. 162–71. Scott, K. (2000c). Into the Light (After Hans Heysen’s Painting of the Same Name). In A. Brewster, A. O’Neill, & R. Van Den Berg (eds.), Those Who Remain Will Always Remember: An Anthology of Aboriginal Writing. Fremantle: Fremantle Press, pp. 121–4. Scott, K. (2001a). Australia’s Continuing Neurosis: Identity, Race and History. Alfred Deakin Lectures. www.abc.net.au/rn/deakin/stories/s291485.htm, accessed Aug. 29, 2008. Scott, K. (2001b). The Dredgersaurus. North Fremantle: Sandcastle Books. Scott, K. (2001c). A Sense of Who I Am. Weekend Australian, p. 7 (Feb. 24–5). Scott, K. (2002a). Between Black and White. Bulletin, 120(6326), pp. 74–5 (May 28). Scott, K. (2002b). Capture. Southerly, 62(2), 24–33. Scott, K. (2002c). Wangelanginy. Southerly, 62(2), 98–9. Scott, K. (2005). Asleep (from: Naatj, a novel-inprogress). Westerly, 50, 113–20. Scott, K. (2007a). Covered Up with Sand. Meanjin, 66(2), 120–4. Scott, K. (2007b). Strangers at Home. In M. Besemeres & A. Wierzbicka (eds.), Translating Lives: Living with Two Languages and Cultures. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, pp. 1–11. Scott, K. & Brown, H. (2005). Kayang & Me. Fremantle: Fremantle Press. Tweedie, P. (2001). Kim Scott: Writer, Coolbellup. In Indigenous Australia: Standing Strong. East Roseville, NSW: Simon and Schuster, pp. 154–6.
Sealy, I. Allan ROHIT CHOPRA
I. Allan Sealy is an Indian writer whose literary creations span a gamut of forms from magnificently complicated, labyrinthine edifices spun out of exuberant word play to delicate, haunting worlds conjured up in prose that is powerfully suggestive and precise. His body of work, five novels and a travelogue, reveals a literary sensibility forged by both a thematic eclecticism and a penchant for literary experimentation. Critically acclaimed by reviewers, Sealy’s novels have gathered a dedicated, and expanding, circle of admirers in India and elsewhere. Born in Allahabad in 1951, Sealy was schooled in Lucknow. He holds degrees from Delhi University and Western Michigan University and a doctorate, with a dissertation on the Guyanese writer Wilson Harris, from the University of British Columbia. Like many Indian writers Sealy claims multiple “homes,” including Australia, New Zealand, and Dehradun in India. Sealy’s first novel, The Trotter-Nama (1988), is a sprawling saga that follows the fortunes of seven generations of the Trotters, an Anglo-Indian family, and explores the grand themes of postcolonial Indian fiction as it imagines a history of the minority Indian community: the encounter between India and Europe; hybrid identities; the state of belonging between two worlds but wholly in neither; the curious character and plenitude of Indian modernity; and the ways personal and public histories bleed into one another. Some critics have seen in its magic-realist and fabulist style a debt to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children; the coincidence, in Sealy’s words, is a function of “two writers responding to the same historical moment” (Jaidka 245). Hero (1991) is a satire that delves into the world of cinema and politics, taking as its creative fount the conventions of Indian popular cinema. The Everest Hotel (1998) is often considered Sealy’s best work. Marking a significant shift in expressive register and idiom, the novel is written in a quieter, almost minimalist tone that pulses with dramatic tension. Set in the town of Drummondganj, it centers on the inhabitants of the Everest Hotel – a gathering of the abandoned, disenfranchised, and senile with a group of nuns who care for them – as well as others whose lives are
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SEALY, I. ALLAN
intertwined with the hotel and its characters. The biography of independent India glimmers distinctly across the canvas of the work: a secessionist movement, political violence, the failures of development, and the frustrations of everyday life. Peopled with compelling characters, The Everest Hotel is a profound meditation about the world of postcolonial India and the place of a dying Anglo-India in that world. The Brainfever Bird (2003) is written in a similar tone to The Everest Hotel, its descriptive power suffused with the same nimbleness and delicacy. Set mostly in Delhi, but bookended with vignettes in St. Petersburg, the novel centers on the complicated relationships between four characters – Maya, Lev, Morgan, and Lariq – who struggle with grand issues of love and loss, privacy and public seclusion, and the importance of friendship. A tale of partly requited but ultimately blighted love, the novel is also a mystery with motivations left murky and happenings left unexplained. Events unfold with an inscrutable logic, foreshadowing the denouement that will test the fragile threads tying the characters’ lives to one another. With Red (2006), Sealy’s most recent novel, the author returns to the more visible literary playfulness and experimentation of his earlier works. The Matisse painting The Painter’s Family functions as a horizon to the novel’s universe. Through the generous and loose structure of an abecedary, Sealy explores the necessary ambivalence of human relationships yoked to the possibilities of the printed word. In many of his novels, Sealy employs Indian narrative techniques and forms. The TrotterNama, for example, utilizes the nama form, broadly defined as a chronicle of courtly provenance documenting the doings of royal authority. The Everest Hotel is structured according to the Indian poet Kalidasa’s division of seasons, which provide a background for the novel’s development. Sealy’s writings reflect a fondness for classificatory and taxonomic structures, among other postmodern conceits. His work can be placed in multiple literary lineages, with commentators counting inspirations as diverse as G. V. Desani, Fran¸cois Rabelais, and Gabriel Garcıa Marquez. A recurring theme is the process of creation and its costs and rewards. As exemplified by Maya in The Brainfever Bird and Jed in The Everest Hotel,
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the figures of forger, actor, musician, writer, and artist fascinate Sealy and provide him with a way to address a range of experiences, themes, and concerns. In addition to his fictional writings, Sealy has published a travelogue, From Yukon to Yucatan (1994). The Trotter-Nama won a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in 1989 and the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1991. The Everest Hotel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1998. An enduring and recognized presence in Indian fiction for two decades, Sealy is a writer’s writer – arguably more so than any other postcolonial Indian author – and his corpus is long overdue for detailed scholarly and critical examination. SEE ALSO: Desani, G. V. (WF); Harris, Wilson (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF); Rushdie, Salman (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Chopra, R. (2006). Beyond Hybridity and Purity: Anglo-Indian Marginality and the Postcolonial Condition in The Everest Hotel. South Asian Review, 27(1), 53–73. Dutta, P. K. (1990). Studies in Heterogeneity: A Reading of Two Recent Indo-Anglian Novels. Social Scientist, 18(3), 61–70. Hussein, A. (1990). Shipwrecked between Cultures: Anglo-Indian Chronicles. Third World Quarterly, 12(1), 220–3. Jaidka, M. (2003). I. Allan Sealy (1951). In J. C. Sanga (ed.), South Asian Novelists in English: An A-to-Z Guide. Greenwood, CT: Greenwood, pp. 243–6. Rushdie, S. (1980). Midnight’s Children. London: Jonathan Cape. Sealy, I. A. (1988). The Trotter-Nama: A Chronicle 1977–1984. London: Penguin. Sealy, I. A. (1991). Hero: A Fable. London: Secker and Warburg. Sealy, I. A. (1994). From Yukon to Yucatan: A Western Journey. London: Secker and Warburg. Sealy, I. A. (1998). The Everest Hotel: A Calendar. London: Doubleday. Sealy, I. A. (2003). The Brainfever Bird. London: Picador. Sealy, I. A. (2006). Red. London: Picador.
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Tickell, A. (2000). I. Allan Sealy, The Everest Hotel. SOAS Literary Review, 2, 1–4.
Selvon, Sam VICTOR J. RAMRAJ
When Sam Selvon’s novels, particularly The Lonely Londoners (1956), arrived on the London literary scene in the 1950s, what impressed readers and reviewers was his employment of a then unfamiliar version of English, Caribbean demotic. Selvon was praised for the assurance with which he adapted the feel and flow of Caribbean everyday speech to portray the lives of West Indians at home and in London. But as early as his second novel, An Island is a World (1955), Selvon published many other pieces of fiction using Standard English (more precisely, Caribbean Standard English). Indeed, he consciously divided his fiction into what he called “dialect” and “straight” works. He was proud of his “dialect” novels and defended emphatically his use of this linguistic form, proclaiming that he “was the first Caribbean writer to explore and employ dialect in a full-length novel where it was used in both narrative and dialogue” (1971, 74). Scholars have acknowledged this accomplishment and published many studies of Selvon’s innovative use of the vernacular. In later years, however, Selvon lamented the fact that critics’ preoccupation with his use of demotic language blinded them to other aspects of his fiction, and that his reputation as a novelist appeared to rest on certain novels to the exclusion of others. He was particularly fond of An Island, which not only employs Standard English but has a much more serious tone and intent than the comic works that preceded and followed it. Whether he is writing humorously or seriously, in Standard or demotic English, what pervades Selvon’s fiction is a romantic, tolerant, understanding vision of the human condition, particularly when he writes about the Caribbean diaspora in London and of the Indo-Trinidadian community – the two worlds he returns to repeatedly in his fiction. Critics have contrasted Selvon’s romanticism with the severity of his fellow Trinidadian novelist V. S. Naipaul, his empathetic brush strokes with the analytical pen of Naipaul (whom he nonetheless admired immensely).
Selvon was born on May 20, 1923 in South Trinidad. His father was a first-generation Indian immigrant; his mother was of Anglo-Scottish descent. He was educated at Naparima College, a secondary school founded by the Canadian Presbyterian Mission. Unable to afford further education, Selvon became a Royal Navy wireless operator in Trinidad during World War II, a position that allowed him much spare time, which he devoted to writing. After the war, he became a subeditor at the Trinidad Guardian, and in 1950 he joined the ranks of aspiring Caribbean writers migrating to London (a group that included George Lamming, Wilson Harris, and Naipaul). The editors of Bim, the prominent Barbados little magazine, and the BBC World Service’s Caribbean Voices program, a weekly broadcast produced in London, were the first to recognize his talent, accepting several of his stories. Over a 50-year period that saw him working off and on as an office worker and later as writer-in-residence at various institutions (much in demand at international conferences), marrying twice and raising a family of four children, surviving tuberculosis and immigrating from London to Canada (in 1978), Selvon wrote 10 novels, at least 50 short stories, dozens of essays, plays, radio and film scripts, and a handful of poems – an accomplishment that assures him a prominent place in Caribbean and postcolonial literatures. Selvon’s first novel, A Brighter Sun (1952), traces the progression from adolescence to adulthood of a rural Indo-Trinidadian, Tiger, who abandons his life on a sugar estate for a suburban, Creole world. Tiger reappears in a sequel, Turn Again Tiger (1958), in which he returns to the sugar estate with new-found admiration for the industrious canefield workers and their strategic temporizing relationship with their white colonial masters – a positive tone that stands in contrast to Selvon’s depiction of the sad lot of canefield workers of the Indenture period in his oft-anthologized story “Cane is Bitter.” Another thoughtful young protagonist appears in what could be taken as Selvon’s second “first novel,” An Island is a World. Contemplative as the later Moses, Foster struggles with issues of truth, identity, and the purpose of life. Selvon himself drew attention to An Island as an important, germinal work that introduces many ideas about individual and communal relationships – and about social, political,
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religious, and artistic matters – that appear in subsequent works. His young but already worldweary Trinidadian protagonist grapples with values and truths that originate in but transcend his Trinidadian world: “If only there were some creed to hold on to, some culture, some doctrine that offered hope, something worth dying for” (152). These early novels of maturation feature recognizable aspects of Selvon’s plotting and characterization: they construct narratives of enterprising individuals who, driven by a desire to improve and redefine themselves, venture bravely into new worlds. These novels were followed by the first of the Moses trilogy about West Indian immigrants in 1950s London, The Lonely Londoners (1956), which garnered high praise in the UK. In this novel and The Housing Lark (1965) – an account of the zany efforts of some immigrants to buy a house – Selvon deliberately avoids giving the working-class Caribbean immigrants specific ethnic or island identities, concerned more with portraying their common sense of humor, resilience, and adaptability in response to London’s hardships. Even their language is filtered of island specificities as Selvon attempts to create a common, pan-Caribbean demotic speech. Selvon has been criticized for objectifying women – a valid charge in some cases – but in his London novels, particularly The Housing Lark, he depicts women as far more responsible than their male partners. In Moses Ascending (1975), a sequel to The Lonely Londoners written almost 20 years later, Moses and his group are not as enterprising and spirited as in the earlier novel. Some have achieved a measure of success but most are just surviving. Selvon retains the humor of the earlier novel, which serves to underline the sad undercurrents of their lives. Moses Migrating (1983) returns to them several years later when some, including Moses, are contemplating remigration to Trinidad. With a major shift in tone Selvon lapses into farce, playing most episodes for laughter as an end in itself. I Hear Thunder (1963), The Plains of Caroni (1970) – a loose sequel to the Tiger novels – and Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972) are set in Trinidad and touch on aspects of race, class, education, and materialism that threaten Selvon’s romantic vision of a harmonious Trinidadian Caribbean world. Selvon’s tone is still genial and
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tolerant, but in The Plains his humor shifts uncharacteristically at times from comedy (and farce) to satire. These novels have not garnered as much critical attention as the Tiger and Moses novels, which, marked by their laughing philosopher’s perceptions and tone, are regarded as quintessential Selvon. In Moses Ascending, Selvon inverts the paradigmatic relationship between Robinson Crusoe and Friday, with Moses as a black Crusoe and his English handyman, Bob, as his Man Friday. Colonial exploitation, subjection, and subjugation recur in such works as An Island and Cascadura, but the imperial/colonial divide is just one of many socio-political problems afflicting Selvon’s protagonists; it is not an exclusive or obsessive preoccupation. In Cascadura, which relates the doomed love entanglement of a visiting Englishman and a local Anglo-Indian girl on a cocoa estate in Trinidad, Selvon downplays the imperial-colonial theme to focus on the young girl’s ability to pick up the pieces and survive after her lover abandons her. In Moses Migrating, Selvon does not take seriously Moses’s frantic but sporadic postcolonial militancy, though at the end Moses, returning to Britain from Trinidad, is stranded at Heathrow airport without a passport – a potent symbol of the postcolonial figure caught between worlds. Selvon is as distinguished for his stories as for his novels. Ways of Sunlight (1957) and Foreday Morning (1989) are impressive collections that showcase his considerable talent as a short story writer – a form with which he was arguably more at home than the full-length novel, as the episodic structure of his novels suggests. One story, “Turning Christian” (1986), explores the expedient conversion of some colonials – a theme treated only in passing in Selvon’s novels. Set in early twentieth-century Trinidad, it examines the discord generated between two post-indenture Hindu friends by the conversion of one to Christianity. Selvon points out the racial rivalries of Trinidadian society as some members of the black community mock the convert, seeing him and his fellow Indians as interlopers. Known primarily for fiction, Selvon also wrote a handful of occasional poems on the Caribbean landscape and people, and the deceptive simplicity of his adult fiction is evident in his three children books: Carnival in Trinidad (1964),
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A Cruise in the Caribbean (1966), and A Drink of Water (1968). The dramatic flair of his novels and stories informs a number of original plays and more than 30 radio and film scripts, including many adaptations of his own work for the BBC and the CBC. His stage play Switch was performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1977, and he co-scripted (with director Horace Ove) the movie Pressure for the British Film Institute in 1978. Most of his scripts are collected in Eldorado West One (1988) and Highway in the Sun (1991). At the time of his death in 1994, Selvon had accumulated a number of distinguished recognitions. He was awarded the government of Trinidad and Tobago’s highest national honor, the Humming Bird Medal (Gold). He received grants from the Arts Council and the Society of Authors in the United Kingdom and the Guggenheim Foundation, and received honorary doctorates from the universities of the West Indies (St. Augustine), Warwick, and Sussex. In 1988, living in Canada, Selvon noted in an essay that “I am, in a sense, still visiting abroad. But home is where you start from. And should end from” (1995 [1988]: 61). He had his wish. On a visit home, ailing from a weakened heart, Selvon died on the tarmac at Trinidad’s Piarco airport en route to the jet-ambulance that was to fly him back to Canada for treatment. SEE ALSO: Angry Young Man Fiction (BIF); Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); London in Fiction (BIF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/ Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); West Indian Fiction (WF); Working-Class Fiction (BIF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Birbalsingh, F. (ed.) (2002). Selvon and Salkey: Makers of Modern West Indian Literature. [special issue]. Journal of Caribbean Studies, 16(3). Martin, Z. (ed.) (2003). Something Rich and Strange: Selected Essays on Sam Selvon. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Nasta, S. (ed.) (1988). Critical Perspectives on Sam Selvon. Washington, DC: Three Continents. Ramraj, V. J. (ed.) (1996). Samuel Selvon [special memorial issue]. Ariel, 27(2).
Rutherford,A.,& Nasta, S.(eds.)(1995).Tiger’s Triumph: Celebrating Sam Selvon. Armidale, NSW: Dangaroo. Salick, R. (2001). The Novels of Sam Selvon: A Critical Study. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Selvon, S. (1952). A Brighter Sun. London: Allan Wingate. Selvon, S. (1955). An Island is a World. London: Allan Wingate. Selvon, S. (1956). The Lonely Londoners. London: Allan Wingate. Selvon, S. (1957). Ways of Sunlight. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Selvon, S. (1958). Turn Again Tiger. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Selvon, S. (1963). I Hear Thunder. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Selvon, S. (1964). Carnival in Trinidad. Wellington: Department of English. Selvon, S. (1965). The Housing Lark. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Selvon, S. (1966). A Cruise in the Caribbean. Wellington: Department of Education. Selvon, S. (1968). A Drink of Water. London: Nelson. Selvon, S. (1970). The Plains of Caroni. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Selvon, S. (1971). A Note on Dialect. In A. Rutherford (ed.), Commonwealth. Aarhus: Academisk Boghandel, p. 124. Selvon, S. (1972). Those Who Eat the Cascadura. London: Davis-Poynter. Selvon, S. (1975). Moses Ascending. London: Davis Poynter. Selvon, S. (1977). Switch. Royal Court Theatre London. Selvon, S. (with Ove, H.) (1978). Pressure [movie script]. London: British Film Institute. Selvon, S. (1983). Moses Migrating. London: Longman. Selvon, S. (1988). Eldorado West One and Other Plays. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Selvon, S. (1989). Foreday Morning: Selected Prose 1946–1986 (ed. K. Ramchand & S. Nasta). London: Longman. Selvon, S. (1991). Highway in the Sun and Other Plays. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Selvon, S. (1995). Finding West Indian Identity in London [1988]. In Rutherford & Nasta (1995), pp. 58–61. Wyke, C. (1991). Sam Selvon’s Dialectical Style and Fictional Strategy. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
Senior, Olive HYACINTH SIMPSON
Widely acknowledged as among the best contemporary short fiction writers and poets from the
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anglophone Caribbean, Olive Senior first won acclaim when her debut collection, Summer Lightning and Other Stories (1986), won the inaugural Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1987. Two more collections, Arrival of the Snake-Woman and Other Stories (1989) and Discerner of Hearts and Other Stories (1995), soon followed, but the 10 stories in Summer Lightning introduced the chief characteristics of Senior’s short fiction: using children’s perspectives and “the voices of those who don’t normally get heard” (Simpson 1971, 12) to shape the central consciousness of her narratives; “fus[ing] the oral and the scribal tradition” (Glaser 77); and foregrounding conflict situations for characters caught between value systems, communities, geographies, and cultures. A mixed-race child born December 23, 1941 into a poor family of 10 children in rural Jamaica, Senior spent her early years shuttling between the largely black village of her immediate family and the more Eurocentric world of her mother’s light-skinned relatives. Schooled in both the vibrant Jamaican Afro-folk oral tradition and the English literary tradition, Senior’s poetics fuse the two. She foregrounds the folk tradition in an effort to “reaffirm those parts of [Jamaican] heritage that have been misplaced, misappropriated, subsumed, submerged, never acknowledged fully as the source of our strength” (Rowell 484). Consequently, she experiments with narrative strategies that allow for “transposing to the page some of the storyteller’s art” (Rowell 483) and that enable her characters to speak directly to readers without obvious mediation. Whether through the child’s worldview presented in stories such as “Summer Lightning,” “Love Orange,” and “Confirmation Day” (1986) or through the direct speaking voices of marginalized characters like the madwoman in “You Think I Mad, Miss?” (1995), the largely ironic revelations that result provide a penetrating critique of Jamaica’s complex race, class, and gender relations and the erosion of traditional cultural values. In the humorous “Ascot” (1986), as in “The Two Grandmothers” (1989), self- and cultural alienation result when latent color prejudice combines with a callous materialism sourced in the increasing lure of America. “Windows” (1995) and “Lily, Lily” (1989) provide vivid accounts of the pre-independence challenge posed by an emerging black and mixed-race middle
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class to the troubling nexus of race and class privilege entrenched under colonialism and slavery. Similarly, “Do Angels Wear Brassieres?” and “Ballad” (1986) are deeply critical of the role a corrosive Victorian sensibility, coupled with a stifling Christianity, plays in the socialization and sexualizing of poor black women. “Country of the One-Eyed God” (1986), written in the late 1970s, anticipates the social and political turbulence of the 1980s, while “The Lizardy Man and His Lady” (1995) is disturbingly evocative of Jamaica’s recent gang and drug scenes. In both, violence underscores the decreasing distance between rural and urban, and the increasing gap between traditional values of respect and community and the new gospel of grasp, greed, and individualism. However, Senior understands her role as more of a handmaiden to awakened consciousness than a critic, preferring to see her work as aiding “in the act of re-imagining the worlds we have inherited and the new worlds we are called upon to re-create” (1996, 39). The most striking difference between Senior’s poetry and prose is that her poems are more explicitly political. Each collection is built around a central image/theme or a cluster of images/ themes: trees (Talking of Trees, 1985); gardens and gardening (Gardening in the Tropics, 1994, winner of the F. J. Bressani Literary Prize); birds, flight, and traveling (Over the Roofs of the World, 2005, finalist for Canada’s Governor General’s Award); and shells (Shell, 2007). Her poetry ranges farther afield than her fiction in its themes, locations, communities, and temporal moments. “Talking of Trees” (1985) registers anger at the deliberate destruction of trees, and with them historical memory, in a Jamaican park long associated with political activity and struggle. In “Meditation on Yellow” (1994) the poetic persona bears witness to over five centuries of exploitation in the New World, from the commodification of humans under slavery to the tourism-generated rape of Edenic Caribbean destinations. “Ode to Pablo Neruda” (2005) is a praise-song to a fellow poet. In Shells, Senior gently pries open, sometimes cracks, and at times blasts the shell that covers over the dark secrets of the former British West Indies. Resident in Canada since 1991, Senior maintains ties with Jamaica and regularly reads and speaks abroad. Her fiction is taught around
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the world, and she has also written non-fiction works on Jamaican culture, history, and oral tradition – including The A–Z of Jamaican Heritage (1984) and The Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage (2003).
Simpson, H. (2008). The In-Between Worlds of Olive Senior: An Interview. Wasafiri, 53, 10–15.
Seth, Vikram ROCıO G. DAVIS
SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); West Indian Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Dawes, K. (2000). Olive Senior. In K. Dawes (ed.), Talk Yuh Talk: Interviews with Anglophone Caribbean Poets. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, pp. 73–85. Glaser, M. (1994). A Shared Culture: An Interview with Olive Senior. In M. Glaser & M. Pausch (eds.), Caribbean Writers: Between Orality and Writing. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 77–84. Rowell, C. (1988). An Interview with Olive Senior. Callaloo, 36, 480–90. Rutherford, A. (1986). Olive Senior: Interview. Kunapipi, 8(2), 11–20. Senior, O. (1972). The Message is Change. Kingston: Kingston. Senior, O. (1984). The A–Z of Jamaican Heritage. Oxford: Heinemann. Senior, O. (1985). Talking of Trees. Kingston: Calabash. Senior, O. (1986). Summer Lightning and Other Stories. Essex: Longman. Senior, O. (1989). Arrival of the Snake-Woman and Other Stories. Essex: Longman. Senior, O. (1991). Working Miracles: Women’s Lives in the English-Speaking Caribbean. London: James Currey; Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Senior, O. (1994). Gardening in the Tropics. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Senior, O. (1995). Discerner of Hearts and Other Stories. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Senior, O. (1996). Lessons from the Fruit Stand; or, Writing for the Listener. Journal of Modern Literature, 20(1), 39–44. Senior, O. (2003). The Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage. St. Andrew, Jamaica: Twin Guinep. Senior, O. (2005). Over the Roofs of the World. Toronto: Insomniac. Senior, O. (2007). Shell. Toronto: Insomniac. Simpson, H. (2004). Voicing the Text: The Making of an Oral Poetics in Olive Senior’s Short Fiction. Callaloo, 27(3), 829–43.
An award-winning Indian poet and novelist educated in India, Britain, China, and the United States, Vikram Seth demonstrates the ways a transcultural sensibility may be realized not only in the content of a text, but also in its style. Born on June 20, 1952 into a middle-class Hindu family, Seth was working on a PhD in economics at Stanford University when a course in creative writing, which illustrated how poetic form and inspiration function together, changed his career path. He began writing poetry and his two early collections, Mappings (1980) and The Humble Administrator’s Garden (1985), which won the 1985 Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Asia, reveal the perspectives and concerns that he would explore in more depth in his fiction: the cultural relationship between the East and West, the symbolic possibilities of commonplace incidents and mundane details, and a striving for technical virtuosity in diverse forms. Seth’s literary experiments in cultural hybridity also include his versions of moral fables – based on folklore of India, China, Greece, Ukraine, and the imaginary “the Land of Gup” – for children in Beastly Tales from Here and There (1992). Seth’s verse novel, The Golden Gate (1986), composed of 590 sonnets of iambic tetrameter based on Aleksandr Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, focuses on the relationships between five San Francisco yuppies in the 1980s and explores issues such as anti-nuclear demonstrations, contemporary art, homosexuality, cancer, and existential choices. Seth’s unconventional choice of Russian poetic meter for a narrative about contemporary America produced a witty, sophisticated, and unpredictable text of agile rhythms. This text illustrates Seth’s particular obsession with matters of style and the talent for linguistic accomplishment and formal experimentation that mark his work. His second novel, the widely acclaimed A Suitable Boy (1993), is, at 1,349 pages, is almost certainly the longest single-volume work of English fiction ever published. The novel opens and
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closes with a wedding as Seth weaves a narrative of four families – the Mehras, the Kapoors, the Chatterjis, and the Khans – representatives of India’s diverse classes and religions – who are linked by marriage or friendship, in the years between India’s independence and its first democratic elections. The action takes place primarily in the city of Brahmpur, capital of the fictional state of Purva Pradesh (with visits to Calcutta and Debaria, a rural village), and Seth explores the social, political, religious, and cultural shifts gripping postcolonial India. Nineteen-year old Lata Mehra – for whom her mother Rupa, a sentimental widow whose ambitions for her daughters give the novel much of its wit, seeks “a suitable boy” – has to choose between three suitors: a handsome Muslim cricket player, a sophisticated Bengali poet, and the affable foreman of a shoe factory. Lata’s decision becomes the emotional focus of the book as she comprehends the role of societal limitations in personal choices. A Suitable Boy has been compared to the novels of George Eliot and Jane Austen. Indeed, its linear narrative with a proliferation of subplots, its historical grounding in post-independence India, its many characters from all levels of society, and its detailed portrayal of the ceremonies and celebrations of Indian culture not only are reminiscent of the Victorian model but, in many ways, take it a step further. Seth’s meticulous focus on quotidian details reveals his concern with not metaphysics but the reality of life – people and things – and how nuances are revealed in physical phenomena. A Suitable Boy won both the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book overall and the W. H. Smith Literary Award. Seth’s third novel, An Equal Music (1999), is a love story set in London in the 1990s. The underlying discourse of the novel is music which, as Seth explains in his author’s note “is dearer even than speech.” Narrated in first person by Michael Holme, second violin for the Maggiore Quartet, the narrative details the revival of his affair with Julia, a deaf pianist whom he had abandoned in Vienna 10 years earlier. The novel highlights the social and musical dynamics of the Quartet’s rehearsals for their concerts and recordings, a guided tour of the history of Western classical music. The love story ends tragically, yet celebrates the redeeming possibility of music over
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love: music lifts Michael out of his depression into the absolute world of perfect form. Seth has also written non-fiction: From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet (1983), the account of a 1981 hitchhiking adventure from Nanjing University in eastern China through Tibet and Nepal to his home in Delhi; and Two Lives (2005), the biography of his Indian greatuncle, Shanti, and German great-aunt, Henny, who met in Nazi Berlin and later settled in north London. Criticism on Seth has celebrated his accomplished versatility and draws attention to the diversity of his themes and styles. Each of his novels is a unique project that blends subject and form to produce a text that, in diverse ways, communicates the nuances of the author’s transcultural perspective and concern with language as art. SEE ALSO: Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Agarwalla, S.S. (1995). Vikram Seth’s “A Suitable Boy”: Search for an Indian Identity. New Delhi: Prestige. Atkins, A. (2002). A Suitable Boy: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum. Mokashi-Punekar, R. (2008). Vikram Seth: An Introduction. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Pandurang, M. (2001). Vikram Seth: Multiple Locations, Multiple Affiliations. New Delhi: Rawat. Prasad, M. (2004). Vikram Seth: An Anthology of Recent Criticism. New Delhi: Pencraft International. Seth, V. (1980). Mappings. Calcutta: Writers Workshop. Seth, V. (1983). From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet. London: Chatto and Windus. Seth, V. (1985). The Humble Administrator’s Garden. Manchester: Carcanet. Seth, V. (1986). The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse. New York: Random House. Seth, V. (1990). All You who Sleep Tonight: Poems. New York: Knopf. Seth, V. (1992). Beastly Tales from Here and There (illus. by Ravi Shankar). New Delhi: Viking.
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Seth, V. (1993). A Suitable Boy. New York: HarperCollins. Seth, V. (1995). Arion and the Dolphin (illus. J. Ray). New York: Dutton. Seth, V. (1999). An Equal Music. New York: Broadway. Seth, V. (2005). Two Lives. New York: HarperCollins.
Shadbolt, Maurice RALPH CRANE
During his 40-year career, Maurice Shadbolt published 10 novels, four collections of short fiction, two volumes of selected stories, a play, two volumes of personal memoirs, and various works of non-fiction. His reputation as a major New Zealand writer rests largely on a triptych of historical novels about the New Zealand Wars – Season of the Jew (1986), Monday’s Warriors (1990), and The House of Strife (1993a). Born in Auckland on June 4, 1932 and educated at Te Kuiti High School, Avondale College, and Auckland University College, Shadbolt worked as a journalist and as a scriptwriter and director of documentary films before leaving for Europe in 1957, a period recorded in rollicking detail in his memoir, One of Ben’s (1993b). In his first two collections of stories, The New Zealanders (1959) and Summer Fires and Winter Country (1963b), Shadbolt records New Zealand’s social history during the first half of the twentieth century through the lives of mainly male New Zealanders of his own generation. Some of the themes introduced in these stories are pursued in his first novel, Among the Cinders (1965), and revisited in The Lovelock Version (1980). Temporarily, though, Shadbolt left the past behind. In his third collection of short fiction, The Presence of Music (1967), a triptych of novellas, he focuses on the role of the artist in society, a theme he would later pursue in A Touch of Clay (1974b). Shadbolt’s next two novels, This Summer’s Dolphin (1969) and An Ear of the Dragon (1971), were inspired by contemporary events – the story of Opo the dolphin, who spent a summer at the beach of Opononi in 1956, and the life of Renato Amato – and did little to further his reputation as a writer. These apprentice pieces were followed by Strangers and Journeys (1972), an ambitious novel that contrasts the lives of two sets of fathers and sons and draws together
many of themes from his earlier works. The strongest sections of the novel reach back into New Zealand’s pioneering past, anticipating the interests of his later historical fictions. Shadbolt published two more relatively slight novels – A Touch of Clay, which continues his interest in the artist figure, and Danger Zone (1974a), which focuses on New Zealand’s opposition to nuclear testing in the South Pacific and is loosely based on his voyage to Mururoa aboard the protest ship Tamure in 1972. In many ways, however, Strangers and Journeys marks the end of the first phase of Shadbolt’s career, in which he had largely focused on contemporary New Zealand and the position of the artist in society, and signals a shift toward an engagement with New Zealand’s nineteenth-century history – the focus of his most successful works. In 1980 Shadbolt found his form in The Lovelock Version, a work of historiographic metafiction that employs the family histories of the three pioneering Lovelock brothers and their families in a tragi-comic version of New Zealand history. The Gallipoli strand in The Lovelock Version, and Shadbolt’s consuming interest in those events, led to his only published play, Once on Chunuk Bair (1982), which treats the battle of Chunuk Bair as a moment of historical definition for New Zealand. Following this excursion into drama, Shadbolt returned to historical fiction with his New Zealand Wars trilogy, in which he addresses the three decades of conflict between Maori and the European colonizers: Season of the Jew, about Te Kooti’s campaigns in the 1860s; Monday’s Warriors, about Titokowaru’s war of 1868–9; and The House of Strife, about Hone Heke’s rebellion in 1845–6. Shadbolt’s first autobiographical work, One of Ben’s, is a family history that skillfully mixes the myths and legends of four generations of Shadbolts with those of Pakeha or post-colonization New Zealand. His second volume of memoirs, From the Edge of the Sky (1999), covers only 17 years, is more personal, and lacks the national consequence of One of Ben’s. After a gap of almost 30 years, Dove on the Waters (1996), a collection of three stories, marked Shadbolt’s successful return both to the genre of short fiction and to an interest in the twentieth century.
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SHIELDS, CAROL
Maurice Shadbolt, who died in 2004, has enjoyed greater international exposure than many New Zealand writers, with all his fiction being published in Britain and much of it in the United States, placing him in the vanguard of New Zealand literature’s growing international reputation during the second half of the twentieth century. SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (WF); New Zealand Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF)
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Shadbolt, M. (1988). Voices of Gallipoli. Auckland: Hodder and Stoughton. Shadbolt, M. (1990). Monday’s Warriors. Auckland: Hodder and Stoughton. Shadbolt, M. (1993a). The House of Strife. Auckland: Hodder and Stoughton. Shadbolt, M. (1993b). One of Ben’s: A New Zealand Medley. Auckland: David Ling. Shadbolt, M. (1996). Dove on the Waters. Auckland: David Ling. Shadbolt, M. (1998). Selected Stories (ed. R. Crane). Auckland: David Ling. Shadbolt, M. (1999). From the Edge of the Sky. Auckland: David Ling.
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bradley, D. (dir.) (1991). Once on Chunuk Bair. Avalon. Crane, R. J. (ed.) (1995). Ending the Silences: Critical Essays on the Works of Maurice Shadbolt. Auckland: Hodder Moa Beckett. Haedrich, R. (dir.) (1983). Among the Cinders. Pacific Films. Shadbolt, M. (1959). The New Zealanders: A Sequence of Stories. London: Gollancz. Shadbolt, M. (1963a). New Zealand: Gift of the Sea (photos by B. Brake). Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs. Shadbolt, M. (1963b). Summer Fires and Winter Country. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Shadbolt, M. (1965). Among the Cinders. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Shadbolt, M. (1967). The Presence of Music: Three Novellas. London: Cassell. Shadbolt, M. (1968). The Shell Guide to New Zealand. Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs. Shadbolt, M. (1969). This Summer’s Dolphin. London: Cassell. Shadbolt, M. (1971). An Ear of the Dragon. London: Cassell. Shadbolt, M. (1972). Strangers and Journeys. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Shadbolt, M. (1974a). Danger Zone. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Shadbolt, M. (1974b). A Touch of Clay. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Shadbolt, M. (1978). Figures in Light: Selected Stories. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Shadbolt, M. (1980). The Lovelock Version. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Shadbolt, M. (1982). Once on Chunuk Bair. Auckland: Hodder and Stoughton. Shadbolt, M. (1986). Season of the Jew. Auckland: Hodder and Stoughton.
Shields, Carol NORA FOSTER STOVEL
Carol Shields was one of the most popular and beloved Canadian writers of the later twentieth century. Poet, playwright, and biographer, she is best known as a novelist. She wrote primarily about ordinary people, domestic life, and the quotidian, revealing, as in her much anthologized story “Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass” (1985), the extraordinariness of the ordinary. Focusing particularly on women, although two of her novels feature male protagonists, her fiction became increasingly feminist. Born Carol Ann Warner on June 2, 1935 in Oak Park, Illinois, Shields earned her BA at Hanover College, Indiana, in English literature and history in 1957. She met Canadian engineering student Donald Shields during an exchange year in Exeter, England. Carol married Don in 1957 and moved with him to Canada, becoming a Canadian citizen in 1971. They had five children and 12 grandchildren. She earned her MA at the University of Ottawa in 1975 and taught there and at other Canadian universities. She lived 20 years in Winnipeg, where she was professor of English at the University of Manitoba (1980–99) and chancellor of the University of Winnipeg (1996–2000), while her husband was professor and dean of engineering at the University of Manitoba. She was named Winnipeg Citizen of the Year in 2001, a Carol Shields maze was built in Winnipeg after her death (the maze is a central image in her novel Larry’s Party), and a Shields symposium was
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established in 2009. She died after a five-year battle with cancer in Victoria on July 16, 2003. Shields published 10 novels, most of which can be viewed as pairs: two sister novels, Small Ceremonies (1976) and The Box Garden (1977a); two husband-and-wife novels, Happenstance (1980) and A Fairly Conventional Woman (1982), republished as Happenstance: The Husband’s Story and The Wife’s Story (1991); two novels alternating male and female viewpoints, A Celibate Season (1990, coauthored with Blanche Howard) and The Republic of Love (1992b); two fictional biographies, The Stone Diaries (1993) and Larry’s Party (1997); her delightful academic satire, Swann: A Mystery (1987); and her final, most feminist novel, Unless (2002b). Many of Shields’s protagonists are artists, usually writers, and consequently her fiction is frequently metafictional. Judith Gill, protagonistnarrator of Small Ceremonies is a biographer, and her sister Charleen Forrest, protagonist-narrator of The Box Garden, is a poet. Brenda Bowman, housewife, realizes her quilting artistry in A Fairly Conventional Woman. Fay MacLeod of The Republic of Love researches mermaids, and Larry Weller creates mazes in Larry’s Party. Mary Swann is a poet dismembered by her husband and cannibalized by her critics in Swann, and Shields’s final protagonist, Reta Winters in Unless, composes comic fiction, like Shields herself. Shields’s skills in other genres enhanced her fiction. Her biographies of Susanna Moodie (1976) and Jane Austen (2001) influenced her biographical approach to fiction: what she called the “arc of a human life” (2001, 10) informs all her novels, especially her fictional biographies, The Stone Diaries and Larry’s Party. The layering of Daisy Goodwill Flett’s alternating first-person and third-person narrative in The Stone Diaries intrigued readers and critics, and Larry’s Party, with its male protagonist, enhanced her popularity with men. Her three early poetry collections rendered her fiction poetic: Charleen Forrest and Mary Swann are poets, and Mary’s poems punctuate Swann. Shields’s playwriting, with four plays published and six produced, rendered her novels dramatic, inspiring her lively dialogue and the screenplay that concludes Swann. Two novels were adapted for film (Gyles 1996 and Mehta 2003) and three for the stage, including a musical version of Larry’s Party. Experimentation with
narrative methods in her three short story collections enhanced her full-length fiction, especially her innovative novel, Swann, which attracted literary critics. Like Austen, Shields wrote novels of manners scintillating with her signature “sparkling subversion” (Shields 1993, 337), especially her academic satires Small Ceremonies and Swann. Shields won numerous awards: The Stone Diaries won the Governor General’s Award in 1993 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1995, Larry’s Party won the Orange Prize in 1998, and Unless was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002. Special issues of A Room of One’s Own (1989) and Prairie Fire (1995) were devoted to Shields, and three Festschriften – Besner (2003), Eden & Goertz (2003), and Dvorak & Jones (2007) – were published in her honor. Collections of correspondence and conversations have been published by Blanche Howard, Eleanor Wachtel, and Arthur Motyer. Shields was awarded honorary degrees by 13 Canadian universities and by her alma mater, Hanover College. She was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1996, awarded the Queen Elizabeth Golden Jubilee Medal in 2002, and named Officer and then Companion of the Order of Canada in 1998 and 2002 respectively. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); Expatriate Fiction (AF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Besner, N. (ed.) (2003). Carol Shields: The Arts of a Writing Life. Winnipeg: Prairie Fire. Dvorak, M., & Jones, M. (eds.) (2007). Carol Shields and the Extra-Ordinary. Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press. Eden, E., & Goertz, D. (eds.) (2003). Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gyles, A. B. (dir.) (1996). Swann. Greenpoint Films. Mehta, D. (dir.) (2003). The Republic of Love. Dan Films. Shields, C. (1976). Small Ceremonies: A Novel. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Shields, C. (1977a). The Box Garden. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Shields, C. (1977b). Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision. Ottawa: Borealis.
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Shields, C. (1980). Happenstance. Toronto: McGrawHill Ryerson. Shields, C. (1982). A Fairly Conventional Woman. Toronto: Macmillan. Shields, C. (1985). Various Miracles. Toronto: Stoddart. Shields, C. (1987). Swann: A Mystery. Toronto: Stoddart. Shields, C. (1992a). Coming to Canada: Poems. Ottawa: Carleton University Press. Shields, C. (1992b). The Republic of Love. New York: Viking. Shields, C. (1993). The Stone Diaries. Toronto: Random House. Shields, C. (1997). Larry’s Party. Toronto: Random House. Shields, C. (2001). Jane Austen. New York: Viking. Shields, C. (2002a). Thirteen Hands and Other Plays. Toronto: Vintage. Shields, C. (2002b). Unless: A Novel. London: Fourth Estate. Shields, C. (2004). Collected Stories of Carol Shields. Toronto: Random House. Shields, C., & Howard, B. (1991). A Celibate Season. Regina: Coteau.
Sidhwa, Bapsi AMBREEN HAI
As the first woman writer from Pakistan to publish fiction in English internationally, Bapsi Sidhwa has garnered attention in South Asia, Europe, and North America. She has written a play, short stories, and five novels, one of which, Cracking India (1992), was adapted as the film Earth (1998) by the Indian Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta. A member of the tiny minority community of Zoroastrians or Parsis (Parsees) who migrated from Persia to India in the eighth century, Sidhwa delineates with selfironic humor and well-observed detail the dilemmas and strategic choices of diasporic Parsi families living in Pakistan or migrant to the US. Her novels also emphasize the difficulties faced by women, Parsi as well as Hindu or Muslim, in the context of British colonialism in India and its aftermath. Born Bapsy Bhandara to an affluent Parsi family in Karachi on August 11, 1938, Sidhwa grew up in the historic city of Lahore, which at the time had a population of only 300 Parsis. Afflicted by polio as a child, she was unable to attend school
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and was mostly tutored at home. As a consequence of her illness, she read a great deal, especially fiction in English, and grew up speaking mostly English and Gujarati (the language most Parsis speak), as well as Urdu and Punjabi. After several operations she attended the prestigious Kinnaird College for Women in Lahore and graduated in 1957 with a BA in psychology and ethics. At 19 she married Gustad Kermani and lived with him in Bombay (now Mumbai), which has the world’s largest population of Parsis. The marriage ended after the birth of two children, and she moved with her daughter back to Lahore, where she married another Parsi, Noshir Sidhwa, in 1963, and had another daughter. In the 1970s, bored with her life as a middleclass housewife, Sidhwa began writing a short story after she heard about a true incident in the northwestern tribal regions of Pakistan, where the headless body of a woman was found floating in a river. This incident inspired Sidhwa’s first novel (though the second to be published), The Bride (1983), recently republished in the US as The Pakistani Bride (2008). After many rejections, Sidhwa succeeded in finding publishers for her fiction in Pakistan, and then in Britain and the US. In 1986 she held the Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe/Harvard, where she began writing her most acclaimed novel, Ice-CandyMan (1988), republished in the US as Cracking India. She has since won several awards, including the Sitara-e-Imtiaz in 1991, Pakistan’s highest national honor in the arts, and the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’Award in 1993; she was inducted into the Zoroastrian Hall of Fame in Houston in 2000. Sidhwa has taught creative writing at several American universities; she became an American citizen in 1992 and now lives in Houston, Texas. The Crow Eaters (1980), Sidhwa’s first published novel, exemplifies some characteristic traits of her work. Written in a zesty, humorous, occasionally salacious style, it describes the rise from poverty to riches of Faredoon Junglewalla, a Parsi entrepreneur, as he migrates from central India to settle in late nineteenth-century Lahore with his growing family, and dies in 1940 as an affluent and powerful leader of the Zoroastrian community. Yet the novel is concerned not only with an individual but with an entire community, delineated with affectionate detail and acerbic irony.
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Sidhwa revels in both the larger-than-life caricatures as well as the subtle interactions and strategies that enable members of this fragile ethnic and religious group to survive. Because of its title, which alludes to the proverbial talkativeness of Parsis, but was thought by them to reference either their humiliation (eating crow) or the Parsi custom of relinquishing their dead to vultures, the novel was initially received with hostility by the Parsi community in Lahore, including bomb threats at the book launching (Jussawalla 208). But its comic tones are combined with serious purposes, including Sidhwa’s desire to “tell the story of my community . . ., to record their charm, their customs, . . . their humor, their courage” (Jussawalla 209). A continuous though understated concern of the novel is with gendered marital and familial relations, with the battle between Freddy and his mother-in-law, Freddy’s negotiations with his wife (named Putli, or “puppet”), and women’s various modes of accommodation and resilience. Another more obvious concern is with the modes of cultural adaptation and assimilation deployed by Parsis living in India under British colonial rule, and the effects of that colonial presence upon Indians in general. Thus from the beginning, Sidhwa’s work established its interest in exploring issues of migrancy and assimilation, the predicaments of minorities and women, and colonization and its aftermath. The Bride, the first novel Sidhwa wrote, unpublished until 1983, eschews the lightheartedness and humor for which her work has come to be known. It is her only work not to address Parsi culture. Instead, it constitutes a more somber effort to address both the grotesque and sexualized violence that accompanied the 1947 partition of British India into modern India and Pakistan, and the brutal lawlessness of Pakistan’s tribal mountainous peoples, particularly their treatment of women. The first half centers on lightskinned Qasim, an illiterate Kohistani man from this remote northern region, who is married at 10 to a girl of 16, and who, after losing her and his three children to smallpox, migrates to the Punjab plains. There, he adopts Zaitoon, a 5-year-old Punjabi girl who survives the torture and slaughter of Muslims by Sikhs that destroys her family in 1947. But after years of a settled life in Lahore, Qasim promises her to a kinsman in marriage, thus abandoning her to an alien and brutal exis-
tence as a sexualized commodity. The second half describes the abuses (beating, dehumanization, rape) she eventually escapes via the help of a visiting American woman and a Pakistani army major. The strengths of the novel consist in its pioneering, even sympathetic, effort to enter into the psychology of a remote “savage” people, its energetic description of Lahore, its frankness in addressing issues of female sexuality and desire, and its implicit protest against the devaluation and mistreatment of women in different Pakistani cultures among rich and poor, mountains and plains. As a first novel, it inevitably has certain weaknesses – unevenness of style and characterization, implausibility of plot, problematic generalizations (by no means does it represent all Pakistani brides, for instance, nor is Zaitoon only or always a bride) – but it remains a notable beginning for a writer who surmounted many obstacles to break the silence surrounding issues of nation and partition, violence, and sexuality. Sidhwa’s semiautobiographical third novel, Cracking India, has deservedly drawn more attention. Maintaining a unity of perspective, narrated entirely by Lenny Sethi, a young Parsi girl disabled by polio, the novel begins with Lenny’s upperclass pre-partition childhood and her fascination with her attractive Hindu nanny or “Ayah,” who introduces her to the apparently harmonious multiethnic interactions of the underclasses in Lahore. The novel’s power lies in its depiction of the anarchy that follows when India is partitioned and millions of Hindus and Muslims leave their homes to cross newly created borders. Through the neutral Parsi child-narrator, Sidhwa describes the ethnic violence enacted by Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs upon each other, as entire villages are burnt, people tortured and killed, women raped and dismembered, and trains arrive at their destinations carrying only dead bodies. While Lenny’s Parsi mother and godmother engage in efforts to find homes for women abducted and dishonored, Lenny is tricked into betraying her beloved Hindu Ayah to the Muslim “Ice-CandyMan,” an erstwhile admirer. After Ayah is kidnapped by a mob, raped and turned into a prostitute by this former lover, Lenny’s godmother eventually finds her and engineers her departure to India. Combining the strengths of the two earlier novels, Cracking India balances the self-ironic
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SIDHWA, BAPSI
humor of a Parsi child and an account of her community with a political commitment to feminist causes: the telling of repressed histories to contest official narratives that paper over the horrors of nation making; the foregrounding of women and children as individuals caught in the maelstrom; the implicit protest against various religious-ethnic patriarchal systems that turn women into instruments of male honor or dishonor. While celebrated for its strengths and ambition, and adapted into a major film, Earth, the novel has also invited critiques of its myopic representation of lower-class figures or subalterns, in particular the romanticized, sexualized, and unnamed “Ayah,” upon whom Sidhwa displaces the victimization that remains unrepresentable for upper-class women, and at whose expense Lenny vicariously acquires her maturity (see Hai 2003). Sidhwa’s fourth novel, An American Brat (1993), written after Sidhwa had moved to the US, attempts to describe the process of a Parsi girl’s initial arrival and eventual adaptation to living in the US as a student. It has been hailed by some American reviewers as a fresh immigrant story, but to more knowing South Asian American readers it is less successful because of its unlikely plot, dialogue, and uninformed accounts of student culture. South Asian students who came to the US in the 1970s and 1980s were usually men with graduate degrees, or a few women seeking undergraduate degrees, not 16-year-olds left to the mercies of vindictive 22-year-old uncles. The humor is often dubious, at the expense of South Asian students who are depicted in some cases as cheats and frauds. Sidhwa has adapted the more successful final section of the novel, when the mother arrives to dissuade her daughter from embarking on a crosscultural Parsi–Jewish marriage, into a play, “Sock ’em with Honey” (unpublished), which has been performed in London, New York, and Houston. Sidhwa’s collaboration with the director Deepa Mehta in adapting her novel into the film Earth led to an unusual reversal of the relationship between film and fiction. After writing, directing, and producing her controversial film Water, about the mistreatment of Hindu widows, Mehta asked Sidhwa to write a novel based on her film-script. Sidhwa’s most recent novel, Water (2006), is thus an unusual collaboration that fleshes out the
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screenplay by adding physical description, some scenes, and psychological interiority to Mehta’s film narrative. Sidhwa has also edited a collection of writing about Lahore, in tribute to the historic and resplendent city of her childhood, and is currently at work writing a collection of short stories. She remains Pakistan’s most well-known novelist in English, though, as Jussawalla notes (1992), as a Parsi and not a Muslim Pakistani writer now immigrant to the US, Sidhwa requires us to complicate the categories usually created for national literatures and is better understood as an international writer of literature in English. SEE ALSO: Feminism and Fiction (WF); Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Pakistani Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Afzal-Khan, F. (1991). Bapsi Sidhwa. In R. L. Ross (ed.), International Literature in English: Essays on the Major Writers. New York: Garland, pp. 271–81. Dhawan, R. K., & Kapadia, N. (eds.) (1996). The Novels of Bapsi Sidhwa. New Delhi: Prestige. Hai, A. (2000). Border Work, Border Trouble: Postcolonial Feminism and the Ayah in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India. Modern Fiction Studies, 46(2), 379–426. Jussawalla, F. (1992). Bapsi Sidhwa. In F. Jussawala & R. W. Dasenbrock (eds.), Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 198–221. Mehta, D. (dir.) (1998). Earth. Kaleidoscope–India/ Cracking Earth Films. Montenegro, D. (1990). Interview with Bapsi Sidhwa. Massachusetts Review, 31(4), 513–33. Palsetia, J.S. (2001). The Parsis of India: Preservation of Identity in Bombay City. Leiden: Brill. Sidhwa, B. (1980). The Crow Eaters. London: Jonathan Cape. Sidhwa, B. (1983). The Bride. London: Jonathan Cape. Sidhwa, B. (1988). Ice-Candy-Man. Oxford: Heinemann. Sidhwa, B. (1992). Cracking India. Minneapolis: Milkweed. Sidhwa, B. (1993). An American Brat. Minneapolis: Milkweed. Sidhwa, B. (ed.) (2005). City of Sin and Splendour: Writings on Lahore. London: Penguin.
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Sidhwa, B. (2006). Water. Minneapolis: Milkweed. Sidhwa, B. (2008a). The Pakistani Bride. Minneapolis: Milkweed. Singh, R. B. (2008b). Traversing Diacritical Space: Negotiating and Narrating Parsi Nationness. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 43(2), 29–47. Taraporevala, S. (2004). Parsis: The Zoroastrians of India: A Photographic Journey. Woodstock, NY: Overlook. Zaman, N. (2006). Bapsi Sidhwa. In F. Alam (ed.), South Asian Writers in English.Detroit:Cengage Gale pp. 352–61.
Singh, Khushwant R. K. DHAWAN
Khushwant Singh’s reputation as one of India’s most significant novelists in English rests on his partition novel Train to Pakistan (1956), winner of the Grove Press India Fiction Prize. He is also a noted Sikh historian, political analyst, journalist, and translator. Born on February 2, 1915 in West Punjab (now in Pakistan), Singh attended St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, and King’s College London, to qualify as a barrister. He trained lawyers and judges as a professor at Lahore Law College and practiced law at Lahore High Court from 1939 to 1947. After India’s partition in 1947, he moved to Delhi and spent four years as an information officer at India’s High Commissions in Ottawa and London. His first story, “Portrait of a Lady,” was published in the Canadian Forum, and more followed in Canadian and American magazines. His literary breakthrough came in 1950 with The Mark of Vishnu and Other Stories, which reveals Singh’s extraordinary craftsmanship and his mastery in fusing theme and plot. Interestingly, Singh did not become a writer by choice. He was greatly moved by the harrowing violence of partition, and his outlook underwent a drastic change. He lost faith in humanity and religion and wrote Train to Pakistan, originally titled Mano Majra, as an act of atonement: “The partition theme,” he has said, “was born out of a sense of guilt that I had done nothing to save the lives of innocent people and behaved like a coward” (Surendran, n.p.). Mano Majra, a tiny Punjabi village on the India/Pakistan border, is the fictional setting of Train to Pakistan. While the frontier has become
a scene of rioting and bloodshed, the village is portrayed as the epitome of undivided India – a place where Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus have lived amicably. The novel details the tragic love story of a Sikh boy and a Muslim girl, interwoven with a catastrophic event, and seeks to bridge a wide gulf of communal hatred as the pair’s emotional and physical ties cut across religious barriers. The novel is a classic of post-independence fiction not only because of the bold, brutal, and unrelenting realism with which it exposes the hypocrisy and savagery of the times, but also because of the surprisingly optimistic worldview that emerges from it – the author affirms his enduring faith in the values of love, loyalty, and humanity in the face of sordid cruelties. I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale (1959), which earned the Sahitya Akademi Award, is set in 1942 and 1943, when Japanese successes in Southeast Asia unnerved the British and the Empire was threatened with imminent collapse. Meanwhile, Indian patriots, sensing the end of the Raj, sought emancipation from British clutches through revolutionary means. This second novel treats nationalism in a more detached and critical manner than Singh’s first. His acclaimed third novel, Delhi (1990), records the major historical events of Delhi’s past over a 700-year period from the Muslim invasion in 1265 to the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the ensuing massacre of Sikhs in 1984. While unfolding the saga, the novelist aims for a detached view of historical situations and personages. The Company of Women (1999) presents a protagonist for whom the body is more important than the spirit: sex is the driving force in Mohun Kumar’s life, and the book portrays his relationships with various women. In 1995, Singh published the highly controversial prose work Women and Men in My Life, in which he sketches characters based on his erstwhile friends with humor and wit. His other nonfiction includes the classic two-volume A History of the Sikhs and a number of translations and works on Sikh religion and culture, Delhi, nature, current affairs, and Urdu poetry. His autobiography Truth, Love and a Little Malice came out in 2002. Singh is an ardent lover of the Urdu language, whose richness and bewildering variety he has
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SOUTH PACIFIC FICTION
introduced to English-speaking readers. His bestknown translation is of Mirza Ruswa’s Umrao Jan Ada, considered both the first significant novel in Urdu language and the first feminist fiction in Indian literature. Why I Supported the Emergency (2009) is a bold and thought-provoking collection with essays on Indira Gandhi’s government and the 1984 riots as well as on the art of kissing and the importance of bathing. Alongside these are portraits of historical figures such as Bahadur Shah Zafar and General Dyer, as well as candid, intimate profiles of famous personalities he has known. From his first journalistic assignment – articles on the 1965 Indo-Pakistani war for the New York Times – to being named editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India (1969–78), Singh became one of India’s most controversial and widely read journalists. He also successfully pioneered three major publications in India: Yojna, New Delhi, and the Hindustan Times. A member of parliament from 1980 to 1986 and recipient of several prestigious awards, Singh is a versatile, active public figure on India’s literary and political scene. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (WF); Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Dhawan, R. K. (1987). Three Contemporary Novelists: Salman Rushdie, Khushwant Singh and Chaman Nahal. New Delhi: Classical. Dhawan, R. K. (2001). Khushwant Singh: The Man and the Writer. New Delhi: Prestige. Shahane, V. A. (1972). Khushwant Singh. New York: Twayne. Singh, K. (1956). Train to Pakistan. London: Chatto and Windus. Singh, K. (1959). I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale. London: John Calder. Singh, K. (n.d. [1971]). I Believe. New Delhi: Hind Pocket Books. Singh, K. (1982). We Indians. New Delhi: Orient. Singh, K. (1989). The Collected Short Stories. New Delhi: Ravi Dayal. Singh, K. (1990). Delhi. New Delhi: Penguin. Singh, K. (1991). Need for a New Religion in India and Other Essays (ed. R. Singh). New Delhi: Penguin.
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Singh, K. (1993). Not a Nice Man to Know: The Best of Khushwant Singh (ed. N. Mehta). New Delhi: Penguin. Singh, K. (1995). Women and Men in My Life. New Delhi: UBSPD. Singh, K. (1999). The Company of Women. New Delhi: Viking Penguin. Singh, K. (2002). Truth, Love and a Little Malice. New Delhi: Penguin. Singh, K. (2009). Why I Supported the Emergency: Essays and Profiles. New Delhi: Penguin. Surendran, K.V. (2002). Indian Literature in English: New Perspectives. New Delhi: Sarup.
South Pacific Fiction PAUL SHARRAD
Writing in English by people from the South Pacific islands began under the push toward Islander literacy from Christian missions: the London Missionary Society in Tahiti from the 1790s on, followed by the Anglican mission to New Zealand in 1814 and American missions in Hawaii from 1820. Samoa took up Christianity from 1830, and both Western and Polynesian missionaries worked in Melanesia from the 1870s. Most texts were conversion narratives, frontline reports back to mission bases, and some recording of oral traditions and contact history (as with Cook Islanders Maretu and Ta’unga). While overshadowed by white culture, some stories and life writing with literary touches did emerge “under sponsorship”: Florence “Johnny” Frisbie’s 1948 travelogue/autobiography, Miss Ulysses of Puka Puka, appeared because of her trader father, the American writer Robert Dean Frisbie; short stories by Maori writers came out in the 1950s in a government-produced magazine, Te Ao Hou. The first novel by a Pacific Islander is supposed to be Makutu (1960), by the Cook Islands doctor and later politician, Tom Davis, with his wife Lydia. Significant quantities of literary writing did not emerge until a secularized education system began to spread under colonial aegis, and particularly not until the late 1960s when international pressure to equip countries for self-government led to the introduction of centers of higher schooling, particularly the University of Papua New Guinea and the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. An emerging regional awareness, the introduction of creative writing classes,
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SOUTH PACIFIC FICTION
and the beginnings of small-press production were coupled with a curriculum of “Third World” writing (by Chinua Achebe, Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o, and V. S. Naipaul, for example) and American Civil Rights discourse; fictional writing was added to other searches for national culture in a new era (such as collections of oral history, theater and radio drama, anti-colonialist verse, and memoirs). Often the need for school texts with relevant material resulted in booklets of typescript stories that were mainly versions of folklore (sometimes with novel hybridizing touches from cowboy films and Western fairy tales) and “day-in-thelife” sketches. Writers who saw themselves as entering the literary world during the decolonizing era often consciously sought to provide a corrective “insider” view of the romanticized or racist tales of adventure in the South Seas from white writers such as Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, Somerset Maugham, and James Michener. Island life remains largely on the edges of a cash economy, and writing tends still to be either very personal (letters) or very formal and institutional (school, church, government). Publishing and buying books is not a habit, and writers have tended to stick to short stories, producing one or two creative works and then moving on to more functional modes of print culture. An example is Vincent Eri, who wrote the pioneering novel, The Crocodile (1970) – based on his father’s experiences of colonial contact and World War II – while at university, then went on to become an education administrator and eventually governor general of Papua New Guinea (PNG). John Kasaipwalova of PNG, who showed great promise as a poet, dramatist, and story writer able to make political points across all the registers of Pacific English (as in “Betel Nut is Bad Magic for Aeroplanes”), became a businessman. Those who live in metropolitan centers and who are teachers have been the mainstays of Pacific fiction. Russell Soaba has continued to write poems, stories, and two novels, Wanpis (1975) and Maiba (1985), depicting the alienation of the educated artist amid the confusion of modern materialist PNG life. Albert Wendt of Samoa, a teacher and academic, continues to produce fiction and to experiment with literary form, originally drawing on the island’s fagogo storytelling. His colleagues, Tongan Epeli Hau’ofa
– writer of satiric Rabelaisian stories in Tales of the Tikongs (1983) and the novel Kisses in the Nederends (1987) – and Subramani – who wrote atmospheric tales of Indo-Fijian life in The Fantasy Eaters (1988) and a novel in Fiji Hindi, Dauka Puraan (2001) – have also been important theorists of regional culture. Joseph Veramu, another teacher in Fiji, has written stories (The Black Messiah, 1989) and a naturalistic novel, Moving through the Streets (1994). A newer generation with global reach and a sense of Pacific literary tradition based on these figures is emerging, led in fiction by Samoan performance artist Sia Figiel. Figiel’s fiction (Where We Once Belonged, 1996; The Girl in the Moon Circle, 1996; They Who Do Not Grieve, 1999) is a lively set of monologues “strung together” on the principle of Pacific floral necklaces to give a composite sense of village life from the viewpoint of young girls dreaming of glamor abroad while experiencing domestic violence and sexual predation. New Zealand has its own literary dynamic, but is a center of Pacific Island cultural production. Its major Maori novelists, Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace, and Keri Hulme, circulate in the region, and poet Alistair Campbell revisits his Cook Islands origins in a humorous, fantastical trilogy, The Frigate Bird (1989), Sidewinder (1991), and Tia (1993). John Pule depicts both migrant life in Auckland and Niuean history in his novel The Shark that Ate the Sun (1992). Celestine Hitiura Vaite, a Tahitian who writes in English because of her Australian residency, has attracted international attention with her affectionate comedies of communal life at the lower end of Papeete society, Breadfruit (2000), Frangipani (2004), and Tiare (2006). SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); New Zealand Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Beier, U. (ed.) (1980). Voices of Independence. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Hereniko, V., & Wilson, R. (eds.) (1999). Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific. Lanham, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.
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Keown, M. (2007). Pacific Islands Writing: The Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Oceania. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Najita, S. (2006). Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific. London: Routledge. Sharrad, P. (ed.) (1983). Readings in Pacific Literature. Wollongong: New Literatures Research Centre. Subramani (1992). South Pacific Literature: From Myth to Fabulation, 2nd edn. Suva: University of the South Pacific. Va’ai, S. (1999). Literary Representation in Western Polynesia: Colonialism and Indigenenity. Apia: National University of Samoa. Wendt, A. (ed.) (1980). Lali: A Pacific Anthology. Auckland: Longman Paul. Wendt, A. (ed.) (1995). Nuanua: Pacific Writing in English Since 1985. Auckland: Auckland University Press.
Southeast Asian Fiction ANDREW HOCK SOON NG
One challenge faced by a postcolonial nation is what to do with its colonial legacies. In Southeast Asia, the Philippines and Singapore have appropriated the language of the colonizers for their own socio-cultural and nationalist ends; like India and Ireland, they have recognized English as a language of the people and promoted its flowering through literary activities and education. The situation is different in Malaysia, where policy makers in the 1970s endeavored to relegate English (and other minority-group languages) to secondary status in a bid to strengthen the prominence of the national language, Malay. Nevertheless, these countries’ anglophone literary histories share two important similarities. First, while the genesis of their literature in English is poetry, the poems produced in the Philippines in the early twentieth century and in Malaysia and Singapore in the 1960s tended to echo the flavor and language of their colonizer’s literary English, which distorts the vibrancy and veracity of the local landscape and society. This was perhaps inevitable given their recent postcolonial status. Also, writers in the early years of independence may have felt they did not have the linguistic capacity to write longer, more sustained
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pieces of work, and were attracted to poetry’s relative brevity. But as these countries matured, so did their writers. Today, although poets such as Edith Tiempo (Philippines) and Wong Phui Nam (Malaysia) powerfully evoke the local and regional in English, the novel and short story dominate. Important fiction writers include N. V. M. Gonzales, Kerima Polotan, Nick Joaquin, and F. Sionil Jose from the Philippines; Lloyd Fernando, Lee Kok Liang, and K. S. Maniam from Malaysia; and Catherine Lim, Suchen Christine Lim, Gopal Baratham, and Simon Tay from Singapore. More importantly, all three countries’ anglophone literature is significantly tied to their nationalistic fervor. While Malaysia attempted to subordinate English so that Malay could replace it as the language of racial accord, the Philippines (and to an extent Singapore) recognized English’s efficacy as a unifying force; as the only shared language, it has been steadfastly mobilized through state apparatuses to reinforce cross-cultural understanding. Literature in English is vitally endorsed but for different ends. In the Philippines, since independence from American occupation, literature has helped fashion the Philippine identity, a motivation grounded in Jose Rizal’s two novels, Noli me Tangere (1887) and El Filibusterismo (1891). Indeed, Rizal’s influence on succeeding writers is enormous; the symbiotic relationship between contemporary Philippine literature (in whatever language) and nationalism derives from his belief in literature’s power to shape the nation’s destiny. Writers exercise considerable freedom to criticize the status quo. Historical fiction rendered in a realist manner is privileged: important works include Steven Javallena’s Without Seeing the Dawn (1947), a novel about the Bario people’s resistance against military occupation during World War II; and F. Sionil Jose’s The Rosales Saga (1962–78), a monumental five-volume sequence that spans three centuries of the Philippines’ history. But Philippine writers also excel in other forms. Indeed, a trademark of literary maturity among Philippine writers is their elegant retelling of myths, legends, and folktales in English without compromising their local impact. One writer of such versatility is Nick Joaquin, whose many magic-realist stories are collected in The Woman with Two Navels (1961) and Tropical Gothic (1972).
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SOUTHEAST ASIAN FICTION
After separating from Malaysia in 1963, Singapore has provided incentives to establish its art and literature. As in the Philippines, the Singaporean government recognizes the effectiveness of literature to tell the nation’s history, and has sought to engage its creative writers to align their work with the direction set by the island state’s policy makers. Any detraction is swiftly and severely dealt with. For example, Catherine Lim has faced public denunciation for criticizing the government in a 1994 essay and has been increasingly compelled to either self-publish or publish overseas. Writers must find subtle means to criticize, usually by rendering their narratives openended enough to accommodate a “conformist” reading. Writings that engage in social commentary – such as Gopal Baratham’s A Candle or the Sun (1991) and Phillip Jeyaratnam’s Abraham’s Promise (1994) – must be ambiguous, simultaneously criticizing and affirming the everyday political realities of living in a one-party state. Both novels share an existential theme, portraying an individual contending against insurmountable political and social forces that finally compel profound sacrifices and radical reprioritizations. Another noteworthy Singaporean novel is Lim’s The Serpent’s Tooth (1982), which, on one level, portrays the gradual disintegration of a middleclass Chinese family, and on another, is a powerful criticism of the hypocrisy and tensions in contemporary Singaporean society. In Malaysia, English-language literature’s demotion to secondary status in the 1970s has caused a considerable slowdown of creative writing that only recently began to reverse. The promotion of Malay as the only language worthy of a national literature has prompted many frustrated anglophone writers either to abandon their craft temporarily (such as Fernando, whose two novels were separated by almost 20 years) or to emigrate (Ee Thian Hong and Shirley Lim). Compared to neighboring countries, Malaysia’s output of anglophone writing is therefore small. Canonical works of fiction include Fernando’s novels Scorpion Orchid (1976) and Green is the Colour (2002), which capture the racial tension that periodically erupts in Malaysia, and K. S. Maniam’s semiautobiographical The Return (1981), which looks with sensitivity at the postcolonial condition of the country’s diasporic people. The situation has improved since the 1980s and 1990s as a result of
globalization and the weakening of nationalist ideology, thereby encouraging more critical evaluation of the country’s policies. The reinstatement of the importance of English, coupled with a new breed of writers with a more global outlook, has brought about a reflowering of Malaysian anglophone writing; works that have gained international recognition include Rani Manicka’s The Rice Mother (2003, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize), Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory (2005, winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award), and Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain (2007, longlisted for the Booker Prize). SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); East Asian Fiction (WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Hau, C. S. (2000). Necessary Fictions: Philippine Literature and the Nation, 1946–1980. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press. Hidalgo, C. P. (2000). The Philippine Novel in English into the Twenty-First Century. World Literature in English, 74(2), 333–6. Leong, L. G. (2000). Dissenting Voices: Political Engagements in the Singaporean Novel in English. World Literature in English, 74(2), 285–92. Lim, S. (1991). Malaysia and Singapore. In B. King (ed.), The Commonwealth Novel Since 1969. London: Macmillan, pp. 87–103. Lumbero, B., & Lubera, C. N. (1982). Philippine Literature: A History and Anthology. Manila: National Book Stores. Mojares, R. (1983). Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press. Quayum, M. A. (2007). One Sky, Many Horizons: Studies in Malaysian Literature in English. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish. Quayum, M. A., & Wicks, P. (eds.) (2001). Malaysian Literature in English: A Critical Reader. Petaling Jaya: Longman. Quayum, M. A., & Wicks, P. (eds.) (2002). Singaporean Literature in English: A Critical Reader. Serdang: University Putra Malaysia Press.
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SOUTHERN AFRICAN FICTION
Southern African Fiction M. KEITH BOOKER
Fiction by writers from Southern Africa has been an important element of postcolonial literature’s rise to global prominence since the middle of the twentieth century. The special history of the Republic of South Africa has produced a longer and more overtly politicized literary tradition than those in most other African nations. However, fiction from Zimbabwe has been particularly rich as well. Zimbabwe (then the British colony of Rhodesia) was the childhood home of the British novelist (and 2007 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature) Doris Lessing, many of whose later works are set in colonial Rhodesia. In novels such as Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), and Landlocked (1965), Lessing presents powerful critiques of colonial ideology from a Marxist-feminist perspective. A similar critique informs much of the fiction by black writers from Zimbabwe, perhaps the most important of whom has been Dambudzo Marechera, whose novels The House of Hunger (1978) and Black Sunlight (1980) focus on the horrors of poverty in Zimbabwe and London, respectively. Other important novels include Shimmer Chinodya’s Harvest of Thorns (1989), which details the impact of the long and difficult Zimbabwean war of liberation from white rule, and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s female Bildungsroman, Nervous Conditions (1988), a powerful fictional exploration of the social conditions of African women’s lives, followed by a sequel, The Book of Not, in 2006. The Zimbabwean poet Chenjerai Hove has also written novels, including Bones (1988), about the impact of Zimbabwe’s fight for liberation on the experiences of rural women, and Shadows (1991), which tells of innocent lovers who must struggle against poverty, oppression, and generational conflicts to be together. Fiction from what is now the Republic of South Africa has a proud tradition that dates back to the early twentieth century, despite a long legacy of repression and censorship, especially during the apartheid era (1948–90). For example, Thomas Mofolo’s Sotho-language novel Chaka (submitted in 1910, but first published in 1925) has claim to considerable literary merit and continues to
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receive attention. Based on the story of an early nineteenth-century Zulu king, it was an early attempt to recover elements of the African past that were suppressed in colonialist histories, thus initiating what would become a major project of later postcolonial literature. An important founding figure of black South African literature in English was the communist political activist Peter Abrahams, who went into exile in 1939 to pursue his writing. In novels such as Song of the City (1945) and Mine Boy (1946), Abrahams conducts Marxist critiques of the relationship between racism and class-based oppression under industrial capitalism in South Africa. Other early Abrahams novels include The Path of Thunder (1948), Wild Conquest (1950), and A Wreath for Udomo (1956), the latter of which is especially significant in the way its indictment of colonialism and its understanding of the dangers of neocolonialism anticipate the works of later African writers. Abrahams extends this theme beyond Africa in This Island Now (1966), a critique of neocolonialism in an island nation modeled on Haiti and (especially) Jamaica, where Abrahams settled in 1956. Abrahams employs a relatively conventional Western aesthetic in his novels, though many black South African writers have drawn upon indigenous oral traditions. In this category is Es’kia Mphahlele, whose most important single work is his autobiography, Down Second Avenue (1959), which joins Abrahams’s Tell Freedom (1954) as one of the two most important South African works in that genre. Mphahlele also wrote three novels, but is particularly important for his contributions to the short story, both as writer and as editor of the important literary magazine Drum, which, along with similar magazines, offered publication venues for black short story writers and helped to make that genre particularly important in South African fiction, with contributions from such writers as Richard Rive, James Matthews, Njabulo Ndebele, Mbulelo Mzamane, and Alex La Guma. La Guma is probably the most important of all non-white South African novelists. Novels such as A Walk in the Night (1962), And a Three-fold Cord (1964), and The Stone Country (1967) combine graphic descriptions of current squalor with a strong commitment to the possibility of radical
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change. Like Abrahams, La Guma was eventually forced into exile to continue his writing, and the novels written abroad, including In the Fog of the Seasons’ End (1972) and Time of the Butcherbird (1979), are perhaps his finest. Most of La Guma’s fiction is marked by journalistic realism. Poets such as Sipho Sepamla (A Ride on the Whirlwind, 1981) and Mongane Serote (To Every Birth Its Blood, 1981) have written novels that show the clear influence of their poetic backgrounds, while maintaining an intense engagement with the realities of apartheid. Lewis Nkosi’s Mating Birds (1986) also employs an experimental style, while its focus on an aspiring writer who is in a South African prison awaiting execution participates in a tradition of prison novels that has, not surprisingly, been a prominent aspect of South African literature, including such key examples as D. M. Zwelonke’s Robben Island (1973) and Moses Dlamanini’s Robben Island, Hell-Hole (1983), while prison and jail experiences also figure prominently in La Guma’s work. Black South African women writers have been more active in the short story than in the novel, though at least one non-white woman from South Africa, Bessie Head, became, in a career cut short by her premature death in 1986, one of Africa’s leading women novelists. However, all of Head’s novels were written in exile in Botswana, where most of her fiction is also set. Her first novel, When Rain Clouds Gather (1969), is, like many African novels, a story of conflict between modern and traditional societies. Maru (1971) is a complex, multilayered narrative that employs a lovestory plot to explore the psychic consequences of African social phenomena such as tribalism, racism (among different groups of blacks), and the oppression of women. Head’s best-known and most psychologically powerful novel is A Question of Power (1974), a partly autobiographical exploration of mental instability in a Botswanan village. Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind (1981) blends oral and written narrative forms to depict the historical development of Botswana from 1880 to 1970. Head’s last novel, A Bewitched Crossroad: An African Saga (1984), also focuses on themes in Botswanan history. Many of her short stories are collected in the volumes The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Tales (1977) and Tales of Tenderness and Power (1987).
The tradition of novels by white South African women goes back to the late nineteenth century in the work of Olive Schreiner, whose Story of an African Farm (1883) is still read today and has influenced writers such as Lessing. Meanwhile, South Africa’s most prominent novelist on an international scale is Nadine Gordimer, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. Much of Gordimer’s work stands as an enduring antiapartheid monument, but her combination of deft literary technique with an uncompromising sense of social responsibility stands as a model for novelists worldwide. Gordimer’s earliest novels, including The Lying Days (1953), A World of Strangers (1958), and Occasion for Loving (1960), treat conditions in South Africa through relatively light satire. Novels such as The Late Bourgeois World (1966), A Guest of Honour (1970), and The Conservationist (1974) evidence Gordimer’s increasingly strident opposition to social and political conditions in South Africa under apartheid, though their focus remains on the white population. In Burger’s Daughter (1979), Gordimer begins to take a more radical political stance in her positive treatment of the anti-apartheid activities of South African communists. Burger’s Daughter is a large-scale work in the tradition of the nineteenth-century European historical novel, informed by a sense of impending crisis that comes to full fruition in July’s People (1981), an imaginative study of a future South African society in which a black revolution has toppled white rule. A strong sense of political commitment and engagement with South African history continues to inform novels such as A Sport of Nature (1987) and My Son’s Story (1990), while Gordimer in these works also begins to meditate on the post-apartheid future of South Africa. White men’s writing in South Africa has also reacted against apartheid, including such early novels as Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948), Dan Jacobson’s Evidence of Love (1960), and Jack Cope’s The Dawn Came Twice (1969). However, by far the most important white male novelist from South Africa has been J. M. Coetzee, the 2003 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Coetzee’s impressive body of work combines technical sophistication with often disturbing content to produce a powerful fictional commentary on South African political and social reality. Coetzee’s novels begin with Dusklands (1974), a
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parody of colonialist discourse, and In the Heart of the Country (1977), a stream-of-consciousness exploration of the master–slave mentality of South African society. His best-known novel is probably Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), which combines symbolic imagery with starkly realistic descriptions of violence to comment upon the phenomenon of imperialism in general and apartheid in particular. The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and Foe (1986) mark an increasingly metafictional turn in Coetzee’s work, while maintaining an interest in the relationship between artistic creation and real-world politics. Age of Iron (1990) similarly explores the impact of social marginalization on the writer. Coetzee’s sometime collaborator, Andre Brink, is the only South African writer working in the Afrikaans language who has any significant critical reputation. Brink, however, translates his own work into English, and it is in translation that his work is most widely known. Novels such as Looking on Darkness (1974), A Dry White Season (1979), A Chain of Voices (1982), and An Act of Terror (1991) make Brink, along with Gordimer and Coetzee, one of the leading figures in the white critique of apartheid through fiction. With the end of apartheid, the South African novel entered an entirely new phase, though figures such as Gordimer and Coetzee remained at the forefront. Coetzee’s first post-apartheid novel, The Master of Petersburg (1994), a fictional recreation of the life of the nineteenth-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, departs from Coetzee’s earlier engagement with South African history, but continues his long postmodernist dialogue with the European literary tradition. On the other hand, Disgrace (1999) focuses on the travails of life in post-apartheid South Africa, while also showing Coetzee’s increasing interest in animal rights. In 2002, Coetzee emigrated to Australia. Gordimer has been particularly prolific in the post-apartheid era; novels such as None to Accompany Me (1994), The House Gun (1998), The Pickup (2002), and Get a Life (2005) continue her engagement with South African history by focusing on the difficult attempt to build new national and individual identities in the post-apartheid era. That era has not yet been a rich one in producing new writers, though encouraging signs have appeared. Among new black novelists, Zakes Mda
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has emerged as particularly important with such works as Ways of Dying (1995) and The Heart of Redness (2000). Among new white novelists is the Tanzanian-born Mark Behr, whose first novel, The Smell of Apples (published in Afrikaans in 1995) similarly deals with the growing awareness of a young boy, the son of an Afrikaner general during the apartheid era. Perhaps tellingly, both Mda and Behr now hold academic positions in the US. SEE ALSO: Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); East African Fiction (WF); Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the African Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Queer/ Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF); West African Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Barnett, U. (1983). A Vision of Order: A Study of Black South African Literature in English, 1914–1980. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Booker, M. K. (1998). The African Novel in English: An Introduction. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Chapman, M., Gardner, C., & Mphahlele, E. (eds.) (1992). Perspectives on South African English Literature. Parklands: Donker. Gray, S. (1979). Southern African Literatures: An Introduction. New York: Barnes and Noble. JanMohamed, A. R. (1983). Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Jolly, R. J. (1996). Colonization, Violence, and Narration in White South African Writing: Andre Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J. M. Coetzee. Athens: Ohio University Press. Ngara, E. (ed.) (1995). New Writing from Southern Africa: Authors Who Have Become Prominent Since 1980. London: Heinemann. Nkosi, L. (1981). Tasks and Masks: Themes and Styles of African Literature. Harlow: Longman. Povey, J. (1993). English-Language Fiction from South Africa. In O. Owomoyela (ed.), A History of Twentieth-Century African Literatures. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 85–104. Primorac R. (2006). The Place of Tears: The Novel and Politics in Modern Zimbabwe. New York: Tauris. Shava, P. V. (1989). A People’s Voice: Black South African Writing in the Twentieth Century. London: Zed.
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Trump, M. (ed.) (1990). Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture. Athens: University of Ohio Press. Van Wyk Smith, M. (1990). Grounds of Contest: A Survey of South African English Literature. Kenwyn, South Africa: Jutalit.
Soyinka, Wole NEIL TEN KORTENAAR
Wole (Akinwande Oluwole) Soyinka, the first writer from Africa and the only black African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1986), is the most multidimensional of the continent’s writers. Dramatist, poet, novelist, literary and social critic, and memoirist – he has achieved preeminence in all genres. Soyinka combines genres in important new ways, and he is the most significant writer of dramatic verse in English in the second half of the twentieth century. His literary career has been marked by fresh beginnings and resisted prediction. His three novels are so varied as to seem almost by different hands. At the same time, there is a distinctive Soyinka voice already present in the plays and poems written as a young man and recognizable across his output, a voice characterized by erudite display, rhetorical flourish, sensuous or grotesque imagery, irreverence, and rebarbative syntax. Soyinka was born on July 13, 1934 in Abeokuta, in Yorubaland, western Nigeria. His parents were Christians and his father was a schoolteacher. His mother’s family was prominent in early nationalist politics: his maternal uncle was a leader in education, and his cousin was the renowned musician Fela Kuti. From the account of his childhood in his memoir Ake (1981a) (named after the small town, part of Abeokuta, where he grew up), young Soyinka was a prodigy, able to read long before he went to school. He was, along with fellow Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, among the first generation to attend University College Ibadan in the early 1950s, a period Robert Wren has called “those magical years.” Soyinka left for England in 1954, where he attended the University of Leeds, at the time the premier academic center of Commonwealth writing. (It is no coincidence that wherever Soyinka studied, that institution enjoyed its period of greatest glory.) While in England he wrote the plays
The Swamp Dwellers and The Lion and the Jewel and the poems “Telephone Conversation” and “Abiku,” works that immediately became part of the African canon. Soyinka returned to Nigeria in 1959, on the eve of independence, on a Rockefeller research project and to take up a teaching appointment at the University of Ibadan. To commemorate independence he formed a theater group, the 1960 Masks, which performed a play, A Dance of the Forests, deemed too experimental and pessimistic for the official ceremonies for which it had been commissioned. In 1961 he founded the Mbari Writers Club with Ulli Beier. He served as editor of the literary journal Black Orpheus and later of Transition. In 1962 Soyinka became a lecturer in English at the University of Ife and, in 1965, took up a similar post at the University of Lagos. He has continued to teach and to organize theater groups in university contexts in Nigeria and the United States (Emory University and at the University of Nevada Las Vegas) throughout his career. From the start, Soyinka’s work deliberately defied expectations. The Lion and the Jewel (1963b) overturns the conventions of comedy by making a male of the parents’ generation triumph over a younger suitor in the contest for a young woman’s heart. Unlike almost every other West African writer of his generation, Soyinka did not write about the colonial encounter or the anticolonial struggle. His pithy dismissal of the tenets of Negritude, the poetic affirmation of Africanness associated with the poet Leopold Senghor, quickly became famous: a tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, wrote Soyinka, he pounces. As a result, Soyinka has often been celebrated or denigrated as a “universalist,” but it is more accurate to say that he champions a Yoruba cultural field. He measures himself against the world, extending back to classical Greece, and explicitly including Europe, America, and Asia, but always with his feet planted firmly in Yorubaland. Like almost all West African writers, Soyinka rejected the Christianity of his parents, but he is unusual in declaring himself a devotee of Ogun, the Yoruba god of iron, war, and roads, whose myths he has explored in the long poem Idanre and in the collection Ogun Abibiman. Soyinka complicates the notions of tradition and modernity by folding the latter into the former. Ogun, the god of iron, is also the god of
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airplanes and machines; Sango, the god of thunder, is also the god of electricity. Soyinka combines in original, sometimes bewildering, and always productive ways mysticism and social comment, classical tragedy and realist detail. A good example is The Road (1965b), a play involving possession by a god, sacrifice, and an existentialist quest for the meaning of death, set in a modern social context with such recognizably Nigerian features as a gang of touts, police corruption, rickety motor vehicles, carnage on the roads, and an aladura (African Christian) church where communion is with palm wine. Soyinka’s first novel, The Interpreters (1965a), is a modernist masterpiece, unlike anything before it in African literature. It traces the relations of five male friends from university who are now a journalist, a painter, an engineer and sculptor, a civil servant, and an academic, as they negotiate their responsibilities as artists and intellectuals in newly independent Nigeria. The interpreters define themselves not by kin or inheritance but by friendship and sexual desire. They have almost no inheritance from the previous generation, whose corruption, mimicry, and greed are targets of their satirical antics. The interpreters are concerned with art (they look down on law, politics, and business as careers), with personal authenticity, and with subverting the mimicry and materialism of the world around them. They are the first citizens of the modern Nigerian nation state and are shaping an unabashedly African modernity. There is a generous amount of satire aimed at the new bourgeoisie, but the interpreters themselves are also subjected to critical irony for their selfimportance and cynicism. The great tableau that the painter Kola is creating, a theogony depicting the Yoruba gods, for which his friends serve as models, functions both to dignify the characters (they are the modern equivalents of mythic prototypes) and to ironize them. Soyinka has always been a social and political activist. He was very active in the general strike in western Nigeria of 1964. He was arrested in 1965 for taking over a government radio station and replacing a taped message by the prime minister of western Nigeria, who had stolen the elections, with one of his own; Soyinka faced trial and was freed on a technicality. At the outbreak of the Nigerian Civil War he was again arrested for having met with the leaders of secessionist Biafra
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in an effort to halt the war, and he spent two years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement, an experience he writes about in the prison memoir The Man Died (1972) and in the poetry collection A Shuttle in the Crypt (1971c). The Biafran War ended many Nigerian literary careers – Achebe did not write another novel for two decades – but Soyinka became, if anything, more fiercely political. Not for nothing is “Outrage” the third term in the title of his collected essays. Madmen and Specialists (1971b), a play about the war, reaches an apogee of bitterness and obscurity. Political satire fills Soyinka’s second novel, Season of Anomy (1973), about a despotic cartel that exploits an anonymous African country that resembles pre-Civil War Nigeria. The leaders of the cartel are the governors of the three regions and the military commander-inchief. An alternative social model is represented by Aiyero, a socialist commune (based on the Aiyetoro Holy Apostles community in western Nigeria). The men of Aiyero have strategically spread far and wide in order to transform the nation from below. Their position as educated Christians in the Muslim north, a region called Cross-River, resembles the situation of Igbos in Northern Nigeria before the war, and the Cartel responds to the threat of Aiyero by sponsoring a region-wide massacre like that suffered by Igbos in 1966. The hero, Ofeyi, is a public relations officer for the Cocoa Corporation, who stages shows, designs posters, and writes jingles with subtly subversive messages. His quest to rescue the beautiful Iriyise, who has been abducted and taken to Cross-River, is a loose version of the Greek myth of Orpheus, who tries to recover his lover Eurydice from the Underworld. (Soyinka has retold Greek myth elsewhere, most notably The Bacchae of Euripides (1971a), first produced in London the same year as Season appeared.) The novel’s scenes of mass violence eerily foreshadow scenes from Rwanda or Darfur that have since entered the literary imagination. However, the novel’s fierce allegory and mythic underpinning lack the irony of The Interpreters: all the virtuous characters in Season immediately recognize Ofeyi as their leader, and, as in a Salman Rushdie novel, the hero has the love of the most beautiful woman in the country, one known to and beloved by all. Soyinka became very involved with the People’s Redemption Party, and in 1983 released an
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album of politically charged songs titled Unlimited Liability Company, satirizing the corruption of Shehu Shagari’s regime. An important part of his theatrical output since his days in England has been satirical revues of political targets, ranging from the racist regime of South Africa, through the dictatorships of Nkrumah and Banda, to corruption closer to home. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he led a Guerrilla Theatre Unit at the University of Ibadan, which performed “shotgun theatre,” brief unscheduled satirical sketches, staged in public places such as motor parks and markets, or on the street. Themes and songs from those sketches were later incorporated into the major plays satirizing African Big Men, the corrupt tyrants who ran Africa’s states, a series that began remarkably early and presciently with Kongi’s Harvest (1967), a satire on Nkrumah of Ghana, and includes Opera Wonyosi (1977), A Play of Giants (1984), and From Zia, With Love (1992). Soyinka typically juxtaposes the underworld of petty criminals and thugs, prominent in The Road and The Beatification of Area Boy (1993), with the elite world of Africa’s leaders, thereby suggesting that the corruption at the top runs throughout society, but also that the urban poor shall wrest the state from the hands of the corrupt rich and redeem it. As Derek Wright points out, however, the dictators who are Soyinka’s targets are larger than life and already parody themselves, limiting the effectiveness of his satire. Africa’s most prominent poet and playwright has not been restricted to political satire. Soyinka’s imagination renewed itself in the 1970s and 1980s by returning to the colonial past that hitherto he had ignored as subject matter. Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman (1975a), based on a historical incident from the 1940s, has become his most famous and most studied play. Soyinka declared that the theme is not cultural conflict, a topic he has always eschewed, but rather metaphysical crisis, as the king’s horseman is tempted to forgo the ritual suicide required of him at the death of the king and so brings tragedy upon his house and his community. Nevertheless, the play’s staging of the conflict between the poetry-spouting Yoruba characters and the prosaic British illuminates the foundations of both cultures. The play works with a productive tension between essential notions of culture (as
expressed in sacrifice) and notions of culture as role-playing and performance. Soyinka again turned to the colonial past to write his two greatest prose works, a memoir of childhood, Ake (1981a), and a novel about his father’s generation, Isara (1989), subtitled A Voyage Around “Essay” – Essay being the nickname he applied to his father, S. A. Soyinka. In these two works Soyinka returns to the late 1930s and early 1940s, that is to his Christian past, before he became a devotee of Ogun. Soyinka had once scorned his father’s generation for having been colonized, but his father’s death seems to have changed his outlook. Both books depict a simpler world when authenticity and solidarity were possible and political action brought concrete and salutary results. Nostalgia is not the dominant tone, but neither is vitriol. The inspiration is love of a particular place and of family. Isara is often regarded as the prequel to Ake, for both are named after locales of personal significance to the author; but, whereas Ake recreates Soyinka’s own thought processes as a child, Isara imagines a time he was too young to remember and enters the thoughts of others. Isara is therefore a novel rather than a memoir, closer to V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, another novel based on the author’s father. As if to acknowledge this generic distinction, the names of the characters are fictional, and the novel scrupulously avoids “any pretence to factual accuracy” (1989, p. viii). Soyinka’s three novels all feature a generational cohort that embodies what the nation should be. In The Interpreters the eponymous protagonists preserve their distance from the world of corruption around them, but are also compromised by that distance. In Season, the men of Aiyero, unnamed as individuals, represent an ideal viciously cut down by the forces of disaster. In Isara, however, set a generation earlier, the young men from Isara who studied at St. Simeon’s Teaching Seminary in Ilesha, and who call themselves the ex-Iles, are able at once to put themselves at the center of the town Isara and to imagine and so bring into being the new nation to which they will belong. Soyinka has published two other volumes of autobiography, Ibadan: The “Penkelemes” Years (1994) and You Must Set Forth at Dawn (2006). He calls the first volume “faction,” a fictionaliza-
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tion of facts. It is narrated in the third person and the protagonist is called Maren, but Soyinka declares that he has not invented events. Novelists who return repeatedly to autobiographical narrative (such as Doris Lessing, Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid, or J. M. Coetzee) have strong, remarkably consistent personalities and measure themselves as individuals against the world. Soyinka is no exception. Biodun Jeyifo has pointed out that the young boy in Ake associates with adults more than with children. In contrast, Maren in Ibadan seems never to grow up: his political and artistic exploits as an adult are an extension of his mischief at school. He took on bullies then and takes on dictators now. Soyinka reveals himself to be a strange mix of integrity and rebellion, at once madcap and courageous. The way he deliberately puts himself at the center of national and continental history distinguishes him, however, from the aforementioned literary autobiographers. To judge from his autobiographies, this particular quality, almost a superhero identity, is recognized by people around him, even working-class people. Soyinka therefore resembles the figure he so often satirizes: the Big Man who cannot imagine the nation without himself at the helm. A poem in the voice of Gulliver in Lilliput (published in A Shuttle in the Crypt) expresses an affinity for the giant in a world of dwarves who extinguishes a fire by pissing on it. In spite of himself, Soyinka has something in common with Senghor, the poet and philosopher of Negritude who became president of Senegal, and Soyinka signals his peace with Negritude in the essay The Burden of Memory (1999). Soyinka the poet speaks as a prophet, on speaking terms with classical Greeks and with presidents. His turgid, clotted style produces a great compression: his poems feel ready to burst. He has been reprimanded by the critic Chinweizu for the difficulty of his language, denounced as Euromodernism. Soyinka has replied by labeling his critics “neo-Tarzanists.” In the 1990s he had again to go into exile after denouncing the dictatorship of Sani Abacha, which he writes about in Open Sore of a Continent (1996). Nigeria’s suffering since independence has proved a “Vain ransom,” Soyinka writes in Samarkand and Other Markets I have Known (2002): it seems no amount of sacrifice will bring it to an end. Soyinka, however, continues his campaigns of opposition unbowed.
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SEE ALSO: Achebe, Chinua (WF); Censorship and Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the African Diaspora (BIF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF); West African Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Chinweizu, O. J., & Madubuike, I. (1983). Towards the Decolonization of African Literature. Washington, DC: Howard University Press. Jeyifo, B. (ed.) (2001). Conversations with Wole Soyinka. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Jeyifo, B. (2004). Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, and Postcolonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Omotoso, K. (1996). Achebe or Soyinka: A Study in Contrasts. London: Hans Zell. Soyinka, W. (1963a). A Dance of the Forests. London: Oxford University Press. Soyinka, W. (1963b). The Lion and the Jewel. London: Oxford University Press. Soyinka, W. (1965a). The Interpreters. London: Deutsch. Soyinka, W. (1965b). The Road. London: Oxford University Press. Soyinka, W. (1967a). Idanre and Other Poems. London: Methuen. Soyinka, W. (1967b). Kongi’s Harvest. London: Oxford University Press. Soyinka, W. (1971a). The Bacchae of Euripides. London: Methuen. Soyinka, W. (1971b). Madmen and Specialists. London: Methuen. Soyinka, W. (1971c). A Shuttle in the Crypt. London: Methuen. Soyinka, W. (1972). The Man Died. London: Rex Collings. Soyinka, W. (1973). Season of Anomy. London: Rex Collings. Soyinka, W. (1975a). Death and the King’s Horseman. London: Methuen. Soyinka, W. (ed.) (1975b). Poems of Black Africa. London: Secker and Warburg. Soyinka, W. (1976). Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Soyinka, W. (1981a). Ake: The Years of Childhood. London: Rex Collings. Soyinka, W. (1981b). Opera Wonyosi. London: Rex Collings. Soyinka, W. (1988a). Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture. Ibadan: New Horn.
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Soyinka, W. (1988b). Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems. New York: Random House. Soyinka, W. (1989). Isara: A Voyage Around “Essay”. New York: Random House. Soyinka, W. (1994). Ibadan: The “Penkelemes” Years. London: Methuen. Soyinka, W. (1995). The Beatification of Area Boy. London: Methuen. Soyinka, W. (1996). The Open Sore of a Continent. New York: Oxford University Press. Soyinka, W. (1999). The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness. New York: Oxford University Press. Soyinka, W. (2002). Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known. London: Methuen. Soyinka, W. (2005). Blackout, Blowout and Beyond: Satirical Revue Sketches (ed. M. Banham) [special issue of African Theatre]. Oxford: James Currey. Soyinka, W. (2006). You Must Set Forth at Dawn. New York: Random House. Wren, R. (1991). Those Magical Years: The Making of Nigerian Literature at Ibadan, 1948–1966. Washington, DC: Three Continents. Wright, D. (1993). Wole Soyinka Revisited. New York: Twayne.
Sri Lankan Fiction D. C. R. A. GOONETILLEKE
The history of Sri Lankan (originally Ceylonese) fiction in English dates from 1917. The early works are artistically unrewarding, but novelists such as Lucien de Zilwa in The Dice of the Gods (1917), S. J. K. Crowther in The Knight Errant (1928), and H. E. Weerasooriya in The Trousered Harijan (1946) offer critical glimpses of the society around them. The semidocumentary, semiimaginative writings of R. L. Spittel, including Savage Sanctuary (1941) and Vanished Trails (1950), are unique: he focuses on the Veddas, an aboriginal community. The presence of British colonizers from 1796 on had a suffocating effect on the creative energies of Ceylon’s colonized inhabitants. These energies were released, not by independence in 1948, but by the revival of indigenous culture in 1956 and the wide impact of the critical work and standards of the department of English at the island’s single university in the 1930s and 1940s. Imaginative writing emerged from writers such as Yasmine Gooneratne and Chitra Fernando, who had been to university, and those who had
not such as Punyakante Wijenaike and James Goonewardene. The nationalism associated with Sri Lanka’s independence struggle manifested itself in a pride in the country’s past and, in literary terms, in the emergence and continuation of historical novels such as Rosalind Mendis’s Nandhimitra: A Story of Ancient Ceylon (1952), W. T. Keble’s Son of the Lion (1968), Elmo Jayawardena’s The Last Kingdom of Sinhalay (2003), and Colin De Silva’s series of blockbusters published in the US and UK, beginning with The Winds of Sinhala (1983). Sri Lanka’s novelists are all English-educated and urban-based; in the decades soon after independence, however, they often set their fiction in the countryside or dealt with rural characters. Characteristically, the writers are conscious that they are alienated from the mass of the people and indigenous traditions by virtue of their use of English and their class affiliations; turning to the countryside or rural characters for their subject matter is an attempt to capture a national, authentic Lankan experience and find roots in the soil. Such writers, when successful, overcome the barriers separating them from their subject and imaginatively enter into rural milieux and rural experience, as Wijenaike does in The Third Woman and Other Stories (1963) and Mendis in My Son Lia and Other Stories (1975). When unsuccessful, they tend to romanticize village life and simplify rural character, for example, Wijenaike in The Waiting Earth (1965) and Goonewardene in A Quiet Place (1968) and Call of the Kirala (1971). The traumatic insurgency of 1971, the first organized uprising since independence, also spurred creative writing in English. It helped writers to break through their sense of alienation and identify themselves with public concerns. It stimulated Ediriwira Sarachchandra to write Curfew and a Full Moon (1978); Goonewardene Acid Bomb Explosion (1978) and its revised, expanded version, An Asian Gambit (1985); Wijenaike The Rebel; M. Chandrasoma Out Out Brief Candle (1981); and Raja Proctor Waiting for Surabiel (1981). While Sarachchandra, Goonewardene, and Wijenaike concentrate on the insurgency, Chandrasoma and Proctor cover decades and conclude with the insurgency. Sarachchandra shows how this event creates a personal crisis for liberal intellectuals like his protagonist, Professor Amaradasa, as well as a crisis in society. Proctor dramatizes Lankan history
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in the making through several phases of rural life and the life story of Surabiel, a villager. The best analyses of the insurgency are Sachchandra’s and Proctor’s, but their representation of politics is too close to a documentary level to deepen the awareness of the reader. The Sri Lankan novel came of age in the 1980s with Sarachchandra’s With the Begging Bowl (1986), a harsh but hilarious satire of the juxtaposition of developing-world poverty and its consequences in the Quai D’Orsay, and Foam upon the Stream (1987), a lyrical romantic tragedy. The tendency to break with alienation and be more keenly alert to national and international currents began with Suvimalee Karunaratne. In Lake-Marsh (1993), she focuses on lethargy, corruption, ethnic strife, and neocolonial exploitation as destroying the country, and in The Vine (2001) on terrorism, socio-economic, spiritual, and feminist issues. Indeed, the terrorist problem, especially acute since 1983, has been another major factor in spurring creative writing. Carl Muller’s novels (The Jam Fruit Tree) about the railway “Burghers” (descendants of the Portuguese and Dutch) are notable for concentrating on a community previously unrepresented in Sri Lankan fiction and notable for the deployment of the Burgher dialect. A new cosmopolitanism has developed as Sri Lankans who have sojourned in foreign lands have set novels there on returning home. Sita Kulatunga’s Dari the Third Wife (1993) is a Nigerian tale; more ambitious is Manel Ratnatunga’s portrayal of Indonesia from Dutch colonial days to the Sukarno administration in Saga Indonesia (1994). Sri Lankan expatriates such as Yasmine Gooneratne (A Change of Skies, 1991), Romesh Gunesekera (Reef, 1994), Shyam Selvadurai (Funny Boy, 1994), Michael Ondaatje (Anil’s Ghost, 2000), and Michelle de Kretser (The Hamilton Case, 2003) have set one or more works of fiction in their original home country. There has been formal and stylistic experimentation in Sri Lankan novels, though it is less extensive and less adventurous than in the West. P. B. Rambukwelle’s The Desert Makers (1985) presents socio-economic issues by merging fact with fiction. Goonewardene’s One Mad Bid for Freedom (1990) is innovative in both form (semirealistic, parable-like) and style (copious, hardhitting, satiric).
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Skill and ease mark the work of Nihal de Silva and Ashok Ferrey. Ferrey specializes in witty, satiric, sometimes deep and moving short stories of the affluent locals and hedonistic or cashstrung cosmopolitans. De Silva emerged suddenly and splendidly as an accomplished writer whose awareness of contemporary political, social, and economic problems make his novels more valuable than mere thrillers. The Road from Elephant Pass (2003), which confronts the terrorism of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), is now rivaled by David Blacker’s finely structured narrative of war and espionage, A Cause Untrue (2005). The terrorist problem is tragically illustrated by De Silva’s death – in a landmine explosion triggered by the LTTE. SEE ALSO: Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Pakistani Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Goonetilleke, D. C. R. A. (ed.) (1992). The Penguin New Writing in Sri Lanka. New Delhi: Penguin India. Goonetilleke, D. C. R. A. (ed.) (1996). The Penguin Book of Modern Sri Lankan Stories. New Delhi: Penguin India. Goonetilleke, D. C. R. A. (2005, 2007). Sri Lankan English Literature and the Sri Lankan People, 1917–2003. Colombo: Vijitha Yapa. Goonetilleke, D. C. R. A. (2007). Kaleidoscope: An Anthology of Sri Lankan English Literature. Colombo: Vijitha Yapa. Salgado, Minoli (2006). Writing Sri Lanka. Oxford: Routledge.
Stead, Christina ANN BLAKE
The expatriate novelist Christina Stead, author of 12 novels and many short stories, stands in the front rank of Australian fiction, but not all readers warm to her minutely evoked settings, to the fierce monologues of her characters, or to her sense of human egocentricity. Born in Sydney on July 17, 1902, Stead left for London in 1928. There she met William Blake, a US-born Marxist economist and writer who became her lifelong companion. From 1929 she was
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in Paris and from 1937 in New York. In 1947, with leftists under suspicion, the couple moved to Europe, and from 1953 lived in England. After Blake’s death in 1968 Stead returned to Australia, where she died in 1983. With Blake she lived among the communist intelligentsia, but did not join any party, admitting only to an innate sympathy with the underdog. She saw literary circles as extensions of commercial publishing and avoided them too. In her first novel, Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934b), the challenging qualities of her fiction are already present: a large cast of loosely interconnected characters, all remarkably voluble; minutely detailed descriptions of place and people; political and social discussions; a lack of conventional plot or resolution, and, instead, apparently repetitive episodes, moving with growing pace to a crisis. Also typical is the focus on the humiliations of poverty and how it distorts consciousness. Stead does not espouse any ideology: her concern is always with how and why her figures take up and act on their ideas. Less well received than her virtuoso collection of short stories The Salzburg Tales (also 1934), the novel, an evocation of an entire 1920s environment, was seen as rambling, but with flashes of brilliance. Stead is a transnational writer, finding her subjects wherever she lived. The massive work House of All Nations (1938), about the collapse of a Parisian private bank, is a Rabelaisian satire of the rich (the “Fat People”), presenting innumerable financial schemes with wit and disarming moral effrontery. At the center is Jules Bertillon, a man for whom banking is a game. Stead’s chief interest was always psychology: not abnormal, Freudian psychology, but the fictional recreation of people whom she had observed closely. Typically, the narrative remains aloof, making no overt judgments of capitalism or morality; the characters stand exposed by what they say and do. The Man Who Loved Children, now acknowledged as Stead’s masterpiece, met with little success in 1940. Reissued in 1965, it was acclaimed as a book that “knows as few books have ever known . . . what a family is” (Jarrell, p. v). This recreation of her childhood, painstakingly resituated in the US at her publisher’s request, presents the children amid tempests of passion as the ill-matched
parents, fair-haired Sam and dark, witch-like Henny, fight. As the family falls into poverty, the oldest child, Louisa, begins to write and, to free herself from her domineering father – the most disturbing of Stead’s self-deceiving, wordspinning monsters – finally walks out. Reworked autobiography continues in For Love Alone (1944), Teresa like Louisa attracting the interest of feminist critics. Teresa rejects the compromises forced on women by financial disadvantage and conventional propriety: she will love and be free. In this Bildungsroman, Teresa’s journey from Sydney to London becomes an Odyssey. This undercurrent of symbolism endows her with a mythic dimension, which, in a fashion typical of Stead, resonates beyond her particular setting. Her story examines female desire and self-delusion in a 1930s context, recalling Lawrentian debates about “free love” and sexual difference. Its resolution, with Teresa enjoying love and freedom, rejects any feminist wariness of heterosexual relationships, Stead elsewhere insisting men were women’s “natural companions.” Dark Places of the Heart (1966), completed in 1953, came out only after the reissue of The Man Who Loved Children. Published in Britain as Cotters’ England the following year, it presents a view of England at the end of World War II and is arguably one of the few great novels of the working class. The center here is the lesbian villain Nellie Cotter, a child of the Depression and a failed socialist. Stead attributes her desire to dominate and destroy to the deprivations of those hungry years. The novel is rich with Stead’s researches into the history and folklore of northern England, and presents a gloomy but unforgettable picture of the postwar years. I’m Dying Laughing (1986), posthumously published but begun in the 1950s, is the most ambitious of Stead’s American novels. It sums up the paradox of the American Dream, where the land of opportunity and home to the huddled masses is also the land where wealth equals success. Personifying this contradiction are the wise-cracking popular writer Emily and her husband, scion of a wealthy family and a convert to Marxism. Anxious to promote socialism, they are nevertheless trapped by the habits of wealth in a tragic situation that sees them betray the cause they espouse. Attempting to do justice to the poetic intensity of Stead’s dark vision of the human condition,
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Carter (180, 189) compares her to Blake, Jarrell (p. vi) to Dostoevsky. Judged “great” by her fellow writers, she is inimitable. SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Blake, A. (1999). Christina Stead’s Politics of Place. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press. Carter, A. (1992). Christina Stead. In Expletives Deleted. London: Chatto and Windus, pp. 177–192. Gribble, J. (1994). Christina Stead. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Jarrell, R. (1965). An Unread Book. In Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, pp. v–xli. Stead, C. (1934a). The Salzburg Tales. London: Peter Davies. Stead, C. (1934b). Seven Poor Men of Sydney. London: Peter Davies. Stead, C. (1938). House of All Nations. New York: Simon and Schuster. Stead, C. (1940). The Man Who Loved Children. New York: Simon and Schuster. Stead, C. (1944). For Love Alone. New York: Harcourt Brace. Stead, C. (1966). Dark Places of the Heart. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. (Published in UK as Cotters’ England. London: Secker and Warburg, 1967.) Stead, C. (1985). Ocean of Story: The Uncollected Stories of Christina Stead (ed. R. G. Geering). Ringwood, Vic.: Viking Penguin. Stead, C. (1986). I’m Dying Laughing: The Humourist (ed. R. G. Geering). London: Virago.
Stow, Randolph ANTHONY J. HASSALL
Randolph Stow’s novels typically combine a lyrical response to his native Australian landscape with what he calls “fanatical” realism; they are characterized by a vivid, spare, pictorial clarity, a preoccupation with the inner lives of his characters, and a sense of the mythic qualities of the outback Australian experience. His finest work possesses a poetic intensity and jewel-like precision that come from long meditation and a profound engagement with his subject.
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Stow was born on November 28, 1935 in Geraldton, Western Australia. An earlier generation of Stows had emigrated there from Suffolk, and his mother’s family, the Sewells, from nearby Essex. By the time he was 22 two novels, A Haunted Land (1956) and The Bystander (1957b), and a book of poems, Act One (1957a), had been published in London. The early novels explore territory that he was to make his own: the troubled fascination of European settlers with the unfamiliar landscape; failure to sustain love; and alienation of the self from a threatening psychic other. The country Stow described is harsh but haunting, and the white inhabitants tortured, restless, and bitter. To the Islands (1958), which won the Miles Franklin Award, draws on his experience at the Forrest River Mission in 1958. Revised in 1982, the novel chronicles the alienation of the aging missionary Stephen Heriot, who has lost belief and love, and is imprisoned in a sterile ritual of atonement for an earlier massacre of Aborigines by settlers. The final tableau of Heriot alone on a cliff above the Arafura Sea, confronting his estranged soul, and looking out toward the Aboriginal islands of the dead is one of the unforgettable images of Australian literature. Stow contracted a severe bout of cerebral malaria while working in the Trobriand Islands in 1959, and the poems of Outrider (1962) probe, cauterize, and seek to exorcise the anguished psychic crisis that accompanied the malaria. His next novel, Tourmaline (1963), is Stow’s most profound meditation on the spiritual malaise of white Australia. An outback Australian town cut off after a nuclear holocaust, Tourmaline is split between those who welcome a self-proclaimed savior from the desert promising to divine precious water and those who accept the quietist philosophy of Taoism. The semiautobiographical The Merry-GoRound in the Sea (1965), Stow’s most popular book, is a poetically structured and deeply elegiac account of growing up in wartime Geraldton that addresses the loss of the secure circles of childhood. The children’s book Midnite (1967) also remains popular with readers of all ages. The story of a good-natured but dim-witted boy bushranger with a gang of talking animals affectionately parodies Australians’ habit of romanticizing bushrangers and explorers.
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Stow’s growing stature was recognized with a Britannica Australia Award in 1966. In the same year, after traveling in Britain, Europe, and the United States, he settled in his ancestors’ Suffolk. For a decade after the release of A Counterfeit Silence: Selected Poems (1969), which won a second Grace Leven Prize for Poetry, he published no novels until Visitants (1979), which returns to his Trobriand Islands experience. His most powerful and accomplished novel, Visitants follows the worsening physical and mental illness of the Australian patrol officer Alistair Cawdor against the backdrop of a political coup against the island’s paramount chief, the two narratives echoing one another in disturbing and haunting ways. The tortured Cawdor is Stow’s most complex and convincing character, and the graphic account of his psychic disintegration eclipses even the tragic intensity of Heriot in To the Islands. A sequel to Visitants, The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980) describes the recovery from an illness contracted in the tropics of Crispin Clare, who is assisted back to life by family and friends in Suffolk. In return, he works these new-found friends into new versions of local medieval legends that embody and help to exorcise the isolation and alienation he experienced as a colonial anthropologist. His last novel, The Suburbs of Hell (1984), is a postmodern murder mystery and a meditation on the random depredations of death. Stow describes it as a version of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, a chilling, unresolved parable of death, in which a serial killer stalks the streets of Old Tornwich, a fictional counterpart of Harwich, Stow’s home since 1981. Randolph Stow’s imposing body of work was recognized with the Patrick White Award in 1979 while To the Islands, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea and Visitants are considered classics of Australian literature and of twentieth-century fiction. A private rather than a social novelist, he is less interested in interpersonal relationships than in his characters’ relationships with themselves and with God. He writes with a fine, poetic intensity,
in a spare yet richly evocative style that recreates the psychic impact of landscape with extraordinary vividness and imaginative power. Like his pioneering ancestors, he has claimed new territory, annexing his native Western Australia, charting the European experience of it, and adding it to the known literary world. SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bhagat, N. (1993). The Novels of Randolph Stow. Jaipur: Pointer. Hassall, A. J. (ed.) (1990a). Randolph Stow: Visitants, Episodes from Other Novels, Stories Interviews, and Essays. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Hassall, A. J. (1990b). Strange Country: A Study of Randolph Stow, 2nd edn. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Stow, R. (1956). A Haunted Land. London: Macdonald. Stow, R. (1957a). Act One: Poems. London: Macdonald. Stow, R. (1957b). The Bystander. London: Macdonald. Stow, R. (1958). To the Islands. London: Secker and Warburg. Stow, R. (1962). Outrider: Poems, 1956–1962. London: Macdonald. Stow, R. (1963). Tourmaline. London: Macdonald. Stow, R. (1965). The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea. London: Macdonald. Stow, R. (1967). Midnite: The Story of a Wild Colonial Boy. London: Macdonald. Stow, R. (1969). A Counterfeit Silence: Selected Poems. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Stow, R. (1979). Visitants. London: Secker and Warburg. Stow, R. (1980). The Girl Green as Elderflower. London: Secker and Warburg. Stow, R. (1982). To the Islands, rev. edn. London: Secker and Warburg. Stow, R. (1984). The Suburbs of Hell. London: Secker and Warburg. Willbanks, R. (1978). Randolph Stow. Boston: Twayne.
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T Tharoor, Shashi RALPH CRANE
The Indian writer Shashi Tharoor is the author of 10 books, including three novels, a collection of short fiction, and six works of non-fiction. Despite living in the United States for most of his adult life, in his novels and his collection of early stories, The Five-Dollar Smile (1990), published in response to the success of The Great Indian Novel (1989), Tharoor eschews such topics as identity and migration – common concerns of Indian diasporic writing – in favor of a more direct (perhaps nostalgic) engagement with India that manifests differently in each book. Tharoor was born in London on March 9, 1956 and was educated in India and the United States, earning a BA from St. Stephen’s College in Delhi, and completing his doctorate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in 1978. Formerly Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, Tharoor came second behind Ban Ki-moon in the race to succeed Kofi Annan as Secretary-General in 2006; he is currently chairman of the Dubai-based Afras Ventures. The title of Tharoor’s first novel, The Great Indian Novel – a direct reference to the Mahabharata (which, loosely translated, means “great India”), the work that provides the framework for his story while alluding to the elusive “great American novel” – immediately signposts his postmodernist interest in language. In his retelling of India’s greatest epic through the lens of modern Indian historical politics, Tharoor enters ground familiar to readers of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1980). Yet, while Tharoor
obviously owes a literary debt to Rushdie, his magnificent reworking of the Mahabharata also demonstrates the originality of his own voice. In the novel Tharoor transplants the story of the epic into modern Indian history with the Kauravas of the epic, for example, representing India’s Congress Party: Bishma from the Mahabharata becomes Ganga Datta in Tharoor’s version, a fictional representation of Mahatma Gandhi; the Karna of the epic becomes Muhammad Ali Karna, a figure who parallels the historical Mohammed Ali Jinnah; Priya Duryodhani becomes Duryodhana, who clearly resembles Indira Gandhi; while Dhritarashtra is Jawaharlal Nehru. But perhaps of even greater importance than the allusions to history and politics in this novel is Tharoor’s interest in language. Through various linguistic games and numerous literary allusions to Paul Scott, E. M. Forster, and other Raj writers, Tharoor exposes the power of language as a tool of the colonial process. Tharoor’s next two novels both have contemporary settings. In Show Business (1991), Tharoor delivers a strident indictment of Indian politics beneath the veneer of an ironic satire of Bollywood, India’s popular, Bombay-based cinema industry. The novel closely follows the career of Ashok Banjara, an Indian film hero – his rise to fame, his marriage to an up-and-coming young heroine, his many affairs, his vast wealth, his flirtation with politics, and his eventual fall. Interspersed with Banjara’s own story, and ultimately indistinguishable from it, are the plots of various films in which he stars. The novel is at once a comic tale about the Indian film industry, a homily on greed and ambition, and a highly
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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entertaining look at the boundaries between fiction and reality. And while The Great Indian Novel engages with the British Raj, and Riot (2001) addresses the influence of American neocolonialism, Show Business, somewhat surprisingly, does not grapple with the effects of colonialism in any direct way. Riot, Tharoor’s latest novel, again blends history, fiction, and the reworking of ancient texts, drawing on the recipe Tharoor followed so successfully in The Great Indian Novel, though none of the characters can be identified with historical figures. Riot explores both Hindu–Muslim violence in the aftermath of the real destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992, and East– West relations following the death of the fictional American Priscilla Hart, who has been having an affair with the district magistrate, V. Lakshman. Against this backdrop of communal violence, Tharoor examines Indo-British and Indo-American relations through the eyes of an American investigative journalist who interviews, among others, Priscilla’s parents, the local police chief, and, most significantly, the local political leader, whose views are clearly intended to represent those of the real Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Tharoor’s early stories – some of which he wrote as a teenager for Indian mass-circulation periodicals – along with a two-act play are published in The Five Dollar Smile (1990). The stories, which treat such issues as racism, hypocrisy, and gender stereotyping, show early signs of the linguistic skills that Tharoor exploits to such extraordinary effect in The Great Indian Novel. While Tharoor’s work has yet to receive the widespread critical attention it deserves, The Great Indian Novel alone secures his place alongside the major Indian writers of recent decades. SEE ALSO: Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Indian Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Rushdie, Salman (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Chowdhury, K. (1995). Revisioning History: Shashi Tharoor’s Great Indian Novel. World Literature Today, 69(1), 41–8.
Crane, R. (2001). Duelling with the Crown: Literature and Language in Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel. Wasafiri, 33, 58–61. Khan, B. J. (dir.) (1994). Bollywood [based on Show Business]. Soni-Khan Productions. Skinner, J. (2003). Literary Moonlighting: The Cultural Spaces of Shashi Tharoor. Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 16, 255–68. Tharoor, S. (1982). Reasons of State: Political Development and India’s Foreign Policy under Indira Gandhi 1966–1977. New Delhi: Vikas. Tharoor, S. (1989). The Great Indian Novel. New Delhi: Penguin. Tharoor, S. (1990). The Five Dollar Smile: Fourteen Early Stories and a Farce in Two Acts. New Delhi: Viking. Tharoor, S. (1991). Show Business. New Delhi: Viking. Tharoor, S. (1997). India: From Midnight to Millennium. New York: Ardace. Tharoor, S. (2001). Riot: A Novel. New Delhi: Penguin. Tharoor, S. (2002). Kerala: God’s Own Country (with paintings by M. F. Hussain). New Delhi: Books Today. Tharoor, S. (2003). Nehru: The Invention of India. New York: Arcade. Tharoor, S. (2005). Bookless in Baghdad: And Other Writings about Reading. New Delhi: Penguin. Tharoor, S. (2007). The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cell Phone: India – The Emerging Twenty-First Century Power. New York: Arcade.
Tlali, Miriam GUGU HLONGWANE
The accomplishments of Miriam Masoli Tlali are remarkable given the repressive conditions under which she wrote. Tlali was the first black woman to publish a novel in South Africa during the period of racial segregation enforced by the National Party beginning in 1948. Her postcolonial writings, translated into several languages, include novels, short stories, journalistic writings, interviews, and one play. It is largely through the literary efforts of writers such as Tlali, Bessie Head, Noni Jabavu, Ellen Kuzwayo, Sindiwe Magona, and Lauretta Ngcobo that the particular challenges of black women under apartheid became known to local and international audiences. Despite writing during a state of emergency and being constantly harassed by
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apartheid’s spies, Tlali bravely put pen to paper for the greater good of her society. She co-founded an African press, Skotaville, as well as the radical anti-apartheid literary magazine, Staffrider, for which she wrote a column titled “Soweto Speaking.” Born on November 11, 1933 in Doornfontein, Johannesburg, Tlali was encouraged to write not only by a volatile political situation but also by her parents; her father, originally from Lesotho, was one of the first people in that country to own a printing press. While Tlali’s education was especially challenging in a country where black learners were deliberately undermined, she used her experiences as a bookkeeper and typist as material for her first novel, Muriel at Metropolitan (1975), which later appeared under its original title, Between Two Worlds (1979). That Tlali continued to write even with the banning of this novel and her second, Amandla (1980), testifies to her indomitable spirit. The difficulty of publishing and writing in a state of repression is reflected in the title of her collection of essays, interviews, non-fiction, and a short story, Mihloti (1984). In the preface to Mihloti, which means “tears” in isiShangane, Tlali laments the back-breaking work of her mother and grandmother and the uncomfortable fact that her father would have preferred a son; she cries, too, “for the fate of all black children” (p. xv). With Footprints in the Quag (1989) – published in London as Soweto Stories – Tlali further documents the ripple effects of apartheid. Displayed in this collection of short stories are not only the wedges between blacks and whites, but also those divides that alienate black people from each other and themselves. In all her historical fiction and non-fiction, Tlali writes from her experience as both a cultural insider and a cultural worker. Between Two Worlds, for example, captures the racism of a government that thought nothing of bulldozing functional neighborhoods to make room for white South Africans. Tlali’s neighborhood of Sophiatown was razed by the apartheid state machinery and renamed Triomf, Afrikaans for “triumph.” Set at Metropolitan Radio, a shop that operates on a loan-to-buy system – and charges high interest to those who cannot maintain their payments – Tlali’s critically acclaimed first novel effectively exposes the economic and social ex-
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ploitation of the oppressed. Reduced to “girls” and “boys,” regardless of age, Tlali’s characters take risks that chip away at the apartheid state’s machinery. The protagonist, Muriel, an employee at Metropolitan Radio, is literally not permitted a soft place to sit. Initially working out of an attic cum workshop before she is moved downstairs, Muriel is separated from her white colleagues by steel wire mesh and forbidden to use their toilet facilities. Despite these annoyances, she rises above the indignities of her work. Her black and colored co-workers, who are given demeaning names such as John the Chimp and Big Head, either resist or succumb to their oppression. Yet, Muriel strategically tolerates the humiliation and pettiness, exercising her inalienable right to choose the life she wants despite the constraints. From the racial tensions of her first novel, to the inferiority complexes of black men highlighted in the seemingly headless character in “The Haunting Melancholy of Klipvoordam” (1984), to the violent sexual tensions between black men and women, Tlali’s writing addresses a wide range of thematic concerns. Although her collection Mihloti characteristically puts the stories of women first, she also contextualizes black male violence. If one reads Tlali’s work as being thematically connected, there seems to be an obvious link between the emasculated black man of “Haunting Melancholy” and the abusive black men in Footprints in the Quag. In stories such as “Fud-u-u-a” (1989), black women share painful stories of being groped by men on commuter trains. In Amandla, a novel about the 1976 students’ uprising against the institutionalization of Afrikaans in black schools, student leader Pholoso and his girlfriend Felleng are allowed only a brief respite from violence as they enjoy the pleasures of the cinema before their worlds turn completely upside down. In all of Tlali’s writings is an inherent search for normality under a punitive system that normalized racial discrimination by making it official policy and everyday reality. Miriam Tlali was a strong corrective voice in a country that attempted to rob the black majority of their dignity. Although most of her work is unfortunately out of print, her achievements have been honored by South Africa’s Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, which awarded her a Literary Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.
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SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (WF); Head, Bessie (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Southern African Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Lee S. (1995). Conversations with Miriam Tlali. African Literature Association Bulletin, 17(3), 40–2. Lenta, M. (1992). Two Women and Their Territories: Sheila Roberts and Miriam Tlali. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 11(1), 103–11. Mackenzie, C., & Clayton C. (eds.) (1989). Between the Lines: Interviews with Bessie Head, Sheila Roberts, Ellen Kuzwayo, Miriam Tlali. Grahamstown: National English Literary Museum. Schipper, M. (ed.) (1985). Unheard Words: Women and Literature in Africa, the Arab World, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America London: Allison and Busby. Tlali, M. (1975). Muriel at Metropolitan. Johannesburg: Ravan. Tlali, M. (1979). Between Two Worlds. London: Longman. Tlali, M. (1980). Amandla. Johannesburg: Ravan. Tlali, M. (1984). Mihloti. Johannesburg: Skotaville. Tlali, M. (1989a). Footprints in the Quag: Stories and Dialogues from Soweto. Johannesburg: David Philip. Tlali, M. (1989b). Soweto Stories. London: Pandora.
Tutuola, Amos NEIL TEN KORTENAAR
Amos Tutuola’s controversial literary career is an object lesson in the production and reception of African literature. He published his first novel before Chinua Achebe or Wole Soyinka started writing, and his novels have inspired successors, most notably Ben Okri, yet Tutuola has not been accepted as a father of Nigerian literature. His career received its stamp from his first published book, The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), often his only work discussed by critics, who treat his subsequent output as mere restatements. His reputation resembles that of another canonical anomaly, the Guyanese Wilson Harris who, critics assume, said everything he wanted to say in Palace of the Peacock, the first of his 24 novels.
Tutuola was born June 20, 1920 in Abeokuta, in western Nigeria. His schooling began at age 12 and ended at 19 when his father died. During World War II he joined the RAF as a blacksmith. After the war he found employment as a messenger in the Department of Labour. While working as a government storekeeper he wrote a story titled The Wild Hunter in the Bush of Ghosts that he sent to Focal Press in London, which purchased the rights but left the book unpublished. (It finally came out in 1989.) His second book, The PalmWine Drinkard, attracted attention at Faber and Faber and was published in 1952. It received positive reviews in Britain, notably from Dylan Thomas, and was touted as the beginnings of African literature in English. The sources of controversy are multiple and all have their origins in the fact that Tutuola did not himself read books and had no idea of literary markets, movements, or literature’s duty to instruct or redeem. Tutuola did not write Standard English, but neither does his English reflect pidgin or even the speech patterns of his native Yoruba. It is a “rotten English,” to borrow Ken Saro-Wiwa’s term, reflecting a semi-educated writer’s poor grasp of grammatical logic, and it is used unselfconsciously: Tutuola does not seem to have realized that he did not know English. The warm reception accorded this unliterary style in England offended many African writers and critics. Others, such as Chinweizu, celebrated Tutuola’s storytelling as being closer to the folk than the modernism of Soyinka. A second complaint is that Tutuola merely retold traditional stories and borrowed his best tales from D. O. Fagunwa’s Yoruba writings. Tutuola does not disguise this and believed there was nothing wrong with sharing good tales. Indeed, in his nine novels and short story collection he liberally repeats his own stories. A final source of criticism concerns the plotlessness of his narratives: Tutuola wrote what came to him and did not rewrite or edit. British reviewers seem to have thought that Tutuola gave them access to a precolonial world untouched by history. It is true that there are no white people and no references to colonialism in his narratives. There are, however, references to slavery (assumed to be part of the evils resident in the bush), to Christianity (assumed to be the truth of the world, yet coexisting with a world of ghosts, demons, and other gods), and to technology such
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as radios and televisions. The typical Tutuola plot involves a townsperson setting out on a quest into the bush, where he must overcome many obstacles before returning home successful. Success often means slaughtering giants and wild animals to render the bush safe for fellow townspeople, assumed to be superior to the inhabitants of the bush. Presumably because Tutuola could not imagine his audience, he rarely uses Yoruba words, as more self-consciously literary authors would. He calls an abiku spirit a “burglar-ghost” or a “BORN-AND-DIE BABY.” Tutuola has no interest in the Yoruba pantheon that inspires a writer like Soyinka. The Yoruba gods are never named (there is only the god of iron or the god of thunder, never Ogun or Sango). When, after a 14-year silence, Tutuola wrote The Witch-Herbalist of the Remote Town (1981), the quality of his English had improved significantly. The novel also introduced an element of “psychology”: the protagonist is accompanied by his First and Second Mind, his memory, and by a “Supreme Second,” a kind of spiritual second self, all of whom influence the course of the action. Tutuola died in 1997 in Ibadan. He is an important link between Fagunwa and Okri. The latter’s Famished Road makes liberal use of Tutuola’s universe, in particular the mysterious and dangerous world of nameless spirits with deformed bodies and the random, seemingly meaningless way in which these spirits appear. The controversy surrounding Tutuola’s reputation, however, shows no signs of abating: for every Ato Quayson who locates him in the canon of Nigerian writing there is an Oyekan Oyomoyela who considers him an anomaly soon to be forgotten. SEE ALSO: English Studies, the Academy, and Fiction (WF); Harris, Wilson (WF); Okri, Ben
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(WF); The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF); Thomas, D. M. (BIF); West African Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Achebe, C. (1988). Work and Play in Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard. In Hopes and Impediments. New York: Doubleday pp. 68–76. Chinweizu, O. J., & Madubuike, I. (1983). Towards the Decolonization of African Literature. Washington, DC: Howard University Press. Fagunwa, D. O. (1968). The Forest of a Thousand Daemons (trans. W. Soyinka). London: Nelson. Irele, A. (1981). The African Experience in Literature and Ideology. London: Heinemann. Okri, B. (1991). The Famished Road. London: Vintage. Oyomoyela, O. (1999). Amos Tutuola Revisited. New York: Twayne. Quayson, A. (1997). Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing. Oxford: James Currey. Tutuola, A. (1952). The Palm-Wine Drinkard. London: Faber and Faber. Tutuola, A. (1954). My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. London: Faber and Faber. Tutuola, A. (1955). Simbi and the Satyr of the Dark Jungle. London: Faber and Faber. Tutuola, A. (1958). The Brave African Huntress. London: Faber and Faber. Tutuola, A. (1962). Feather Woman of the Jungle. London: Faber and Faber. Tutuola, A. (1967). Ajayi and His Inherited Poverty. London: Faber and Faber. Tutuola, A. (1981). The Witch-Herbalist of the Remote Town. London: Faber and Faber. Tutuola, A. (1987). Pauper, Brawler, and Slanderer. London: Faber and Faber. Tutuola, A. (1989). The Wild Hunter in the Bush of Ghosts (ed. B. Lindfors). Washington, DC: Three Continents. Tutuola, A. (1990). The Village Witch Doctor and Other Stories. London: Faber and Faber.
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U Urquhart, Jane ANNE COMPTON
Jane Urquhart is a poet and fiction writer whose landscape-rich novels feature border crossings. Her early characters – in The Whirlpool (1986), Changing Heaven (1990), and Away (1993) – are situated on the permeable border between natural and supernatural. Her foundational stories are therefore romances. In The Underpainter (1997), which shifts to realism, life and art border one another. The Stone Carvers (2001) similarly occupies this border, but here art’s relation to life is redemptive rather than conflictual. In A Map of Glass (2005), Urquhart explores mapping and language, and how each records the human excursion into nature. Actual borders – fences, perimeters, and concession lines – proliferate. Because European migration to the New World or the reverse – of Canadians to Europe, usually to battlefields – occurs in five of Urquhart’s narratives, the borders are also political. Preeminently, however, her obsession with border crossings has its origins in landscape. The landscapes that preoccupy her are those of the past; her imagining of those landscapes and their inhabitants is a response to present-day threats to landscape. Apart from Whirlpool, set entirely in the nineteenth century, every Urquhart novel juxtaposes a nineteenth-century landscape with a twentieth- or twenty-first-century one, with parallel stories situated in the two eras. The circumstances of present-day characters – often scholars (Changing Heaven), storytellers (Away) or art makers (Underpainter, Stone
Carvers, Map) – are reformulated or resolved only through extensive referral to stories inscribed on a landscape by the character’s forebears. Until characters cross over into the past, self-knowledge is withheld, and the past, for Urquhart, is always landscape-specific. Born in 1949, Urquhart grew up north of Lake Superior, a landscape featured in Underpainter. Her family later moved to Toronto, but the landscape most germane to her work is the Lake Ontario shoreline, where, since infancy, she has summered at Loughbreeze Beach. Here, she heard the ancestral stories of her Irish maternal line (famine emigrants), which inspired Away, and stories of the Great War, a formative experience for two Canadian characters in Underpainter. Lake Ontario is the setting for Map and parts of Underpainter; sometimes described as a regional writer, Urquhart is, more particularly, a novelist of the Great Lakes. Her much praised visual depiction of landscape is available to her through personal memory and visits to foreign locales – Yorkshire, Ireland, Picardie. She currently lives in Stratford, Ontario, with a second home in Ireland. Urquhart began her career as a poet, and her shift to prose occurred quite by accident: prose poems about nineteenth-century Niagara Falls outgrew their form, becoming Whirlpool. Whereas her poetry is narrative-based and serial, her prose, especially in its metaphorical lyricism, retains the impress of poetry. Urquhart, who has a degree in art history and collaborated with a visual artist on her poetry collection Montespan, frequently features artists as central characters. The prevalent intersection of the literary and visual
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URQUHART, JANE
arts in contemporary Canadian literature mirrors British Victorian poetry. In Urquhart’s extensive exploration of history through fiction, immigration (Away, Map) and the Canadian experience in World War I (Underpainter, Stone Carvers) predominate as subjects. In Away, among others, history is interwoven with mythology in a blending that can bear “political and cultural resonance” (Wyile 35). This most studied Urquhart novel links the condition of being “away,” depicted in Celtic mythology, with the real-life situation of immigrants, raising significant issues about national identity and postcoloniality. Although Urquhart undertakes archival research, her historically based characters – D’Arcy McGee (Away), Rockwell Kent (Underpainter), Walter Allward (Stone Carvers) – become displaced from the center by her fictional characters. Urquhart is preeminently a storyteller; fiction, rather than history, is foremost in her work. The literary past also plays a role in her narratives: Robert Browning’s death scene figures in Whirlpool; Archibald Lampman, nineteenth-century Canadian poet, is the model for the novel’s nature-loving poet; and in Changing Heaven, Emily Bront€e’s ghost inhabits every other chapter. Structurally, Urquhart’s practice of keying inner landscapes to outer reflects the influence of Canadian novelist L. M. Montgomery. With her transatlantic and multicultural reach, Urquhart has always enjoyed an international reputation and readership. Whirlpool received the Prix du Meilleur livre etranger in France, where she was named a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1996. Her work has been widely translated and studied in Europe, especially in Italy. In Canada, Urquhart won the Governor General’s Award for Underpainter. Away, which dominated bestseller lists for two years, won Ontario’s Trillium Award. In 2005, she became an Officer of the Order of Canada. Urquhart’s popularity may be connected to what she sees as Canada’s hunger for mythology. In Stone Carvers, a novel based on national rather than folkloric myths, Walter Allward, obsessed by the catastrophe of the Great War, creates his towering sculpture, the Vimy memorial, in a ravaged battlefield. Having abandoned the super-
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natural, Urquhart mythologizes the superhuman efforts humans are capable of in the grip of obsession. In Allward’s case, however, the memorial obscures the experiences of war survivors. Map tells the story of another obsessive: Joseph Woodman, founder of a prosperous nineteenthcentury timber industry that destroys an entire eco-system over one generation. For his descendant, twentieth-century landscape geographer Andrew Woodman, there can be no “ecological forgetting” (99). Urquhart’s most despairing novel, Map affords the fullest understanding of a Canadian novelist preoccupied with the degradation of landscape, one for whom preserving the stories associated with a landscape is an aesthetic ecology. SEE ALSO: Border Fictions (AF); Canadian Fiction (WF); Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Montgomery, L. M. (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ferri, L. (ed.) (2005). Jane Urquhart: Essays on Her Works. Toronto: Guernica. Sugars, C. (2003). Haunted by (a Lack of) Postcolonial Ghosts: Settler Nationalism in Jane Urquhart’s Away. Essays on Canadian Writing, 79, 1–32. Urquhart, J. (1982). I Am Walking in the Garden of His Imaginary Palace: Eleven Poems for Le Notre. Toronto: Aya. Urquhart, J. (1982). False Shuffles. Victoria: Porcepic. Urquhart, J. (1983). The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan. Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill. Urquhart, J. (1986). The Whirlpool. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Urquhart, J. (1987). Storm Glass. Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill. Urquhart, J. (1990). Changing Heaven. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Urquhart, J. (1993). Away. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Urquhart, J. (1997). The Underpainter. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Urquhart, J. (2000). Some Other Garden. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Urquhart, J. (2001). The Stone Carvers. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Urquhart, J. (2005). A Map of Glass. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
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Urquhart, J. (ed.). (2007). The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories. Toronto: Penguin. Urquhart, J. (2009). L. M. Montgomery. Toronto: Penguin.
Wyile, H. (1999). “The Opposite of History is Forgetfulness”: Myth, History, and the New Dominion in Jane Urquhart’s Away. Studies in Canadian Literature, 24(1), 20–45.
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
V Vanderhaeghe, Guy NEIL KALMAN BESNER
Guy Vanderhaeghe’s four novels and three collections of stories have redefined and enriched the reach of prairie writing in Canada, and broadened the power and possibilities of contemporary fiction. Beginning with the Governor General’s Award- and Faber Prize-winning collection, Man Descending (1982), Vanderhaeghe’s short fiction has depicted a rich series of ironic, detached, and quirkily philosophical characters, such as Ed, the collection’s sardonic title figure, who is reincarnated and more fully developed in Vanderhaeghe’s first novel, My Present Age (1984). While his short stories, often darkly comical, are founded on his characters’ quotidian vices and arresting voices, Vanderhaeghe’s novels – particularly his two most recent, The Englishman’s Boy (1996) and The Last Crossing (2002) – are at once grounded in and reach far beyond their prairie settings as they represent a dialogue between competing facets of the last two centuries of North American and European history and culture. Vanderhaeghe was born April 5, 1951 in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan and completed BA Honors (1972) and MA (1975) degrees in history at the University of Saskatchewan, followed by an education degree at the University of Regina (1978). He has taught at Sir Thomas More College in Saskatoon since 1993, with a stint at the University of Ottawa as writer-in-residence (1985) and visiting professor of creative writing (1985–6). Homesick (1989), co-winner of the Toronto Book Award in 1990, is Vanderhaeghe’s warmest and
closest exploration of family to date. The novel probes with compassion and humor the taut complexities of a forced homecoming as Vera, a headstrong daughter, worrying over her precocious son after her husband dies, returns to Western Canada after a long absence to live with her widowed father in a small prairie town. All of Vanderhaeghe’s strengths at this stage of his career are evident here: rounded characters with deep interior lives; sculpted but lyrical language; and a watchful eye for the details, both natural and social, of a prairie setting. The early 1990s saw the appearance of another widely praised book of stories, Things as They Are? (1992) and two plays, I Had a Job I Liked. Once (1992a), winner of the Canadian Authors’ Association Award for Drama in 1993, and Dancock’s Dance (1996a). The second phase of Vanderhaeghe’s career was inaugurated with the appearance of The Englishman’s Boy, winner of his second Governor General’s Award (and shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award). His most ambitious novel to that point, and the first book in what he has since projected as a trilogy about Western Canada, The Englishman’s Boy opens with a vividly evoked scene of horse-stealing on the prairies, before deftly weaving together two plots: one recreates an infamous historical episode, a dissolute pack of wolfers’ pursuit of stolen horses across the prairies and into Cypress Hills, culminating in a drunken conflagration of misogyny, rape, and killing; the other dissects the culture and ideology of mythmaking movies that glorify and distort the settling of the West. Aboriginal characters and culture make their first
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(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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sustained and memorable appearance in the novel, framing both the opening and the closing episodes; but the character that most vitally links the plots is the title figure, Shorty McAdoo. A literal “Englishman’s Boy” in his first, youthful incarnation, in which he serves a British dandy until that character’s untimely death, McAdoo later becomes a veteran movie cowboy. A scriptwriter from Canada, Harry Vincent, provides another of the novel’s frames as he writes the film treatment from Shorty’s account. But Vincent’s treatment, tellingly, is distorted by the novel’s Hollywood movie mogul and destructive mythmaker, Damon Ira Chance, with consequences that resonate widely. Vanderhaeghe wrote the screenplay (enjoying a brief guest appearance as a bartender) for a successful two-part miniseries based on the novel that was directed by John N. Smith and aired on CBC in 2008. The Last Crossing, winner of several Canadian awards and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, is the second book in Vanderhaeghe’s projected trilogy and his finest fiction to date. Like The Englishman’s Boy, it explores the settling of North America and its haunting European antecedents, this time, however, through the peregrinations suffered by the three Gaunt brothers: Simon, naive and adrift in North America, where he has been led on the expedition of a mad visionary; his brother Charles, an artist and some-time narrator, sent by his father to find Simon; and their doomed, vainglorious, and syphilitic brother Addington, who marshalls the ill-fated search. Accompanying the Gaunts is Vanderhaeghe’s complex recreation of the famous Metis guide, Jerry Potts. As the party wanders across harsh and unfamiliar landscapes, their journey accrues filaments that reach back to the storyline of The Englishman’s Boy. In October 2003 Vanderhaeghe was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada, and in 2004 The Last Crossing won the CBC Canada Reads contest. Vanderhaeghe has received the Harbourfront Festival Prize and the Timothy Findley Prize, and is a Member of the Saskatchewan Order of Merit. In May 2008, he was named a Trudeau fellow. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Calder, A. (2000). Unsettling the West: Nation and Genre in Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Englishman’s Boy. Studies in Canadian Literature, 25(2), 96–107. Melnyk, G., Ring, D., & Vanderhaeghe, G. (1993). The Urban Prairie. Saskatoon: Fifth House. Smith, J. N. (dir.) (2008). The Englishman’s Boy. CBC Television. Vanderhaeghe, G. (1982). Man Descending. Toronto: Macmillan. Vanderhaeghe, G. (1983). The Trouble with Heroes. Vanderhaeghe, G. (1984). My Present Age. Toronto: Macmillan. Vanderhaeghe, G. (1989). Homesick. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Vanderhaeghe, G. (1992a). I Had a Job I Liked. Once. Saskatoon: Fifth House. Vanderhaeghe, G. (1992b). Things as They Are? Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Vanderhaeghe, G. (1996a). Dancock’s Dance. Winnipeg: Blizzard. Vanderhaeghe, G. (1996b). The Englishman’s Boy. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Vanderhaeghe, G. (2002). The Last Crossing. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Wyile, H. (1999). Dancing with Wolfers: Choreographing History in The Englishman’s Boy. Essays on Canadian Writing, 67, 23–52. Wyile, H. (2005). Doing the Honourable Thing: Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Last Crossing. Canadian Literature, 185, 59–74.
Vassanji, M. G. ıO G. DAVIS ROC
Author of six novels and two collections of short stories, and the only two-time winner of Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize for fiction, M. G. Vassanji engages themes that include multiple diasporas, interracial tension and religious intolerance, immigrant communities, history and memory, the relationship between the personal and the political, and the use of stories to link people to their past. His only non-fiction work so far, A Place Within: Rediscovering India (2008), is both travelogue and history as Vassanji returns to the country of his ancestors and reflects on his family’s story. Born on May 30, 1950 into the Indian community in Nairobi, Kenya, Vassanji was raised in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, but moved to the United
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States to study at MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, before finally settling in Toronto in 1980. Together with his wife, Nurjehan Aziz, he has actively promoted the literature of South Asian writers in Canada, primarily though their press, TSAR Publications. Vassanji’s fiction recreates the two-part history of the fictional Shamsi community, Indian Muslims who traveled first to East Africa as part of the labor mobility of the British Empire and then, in the late twentieth century, to North America, making the narratives a multilayered saga of the Indian diaspora. His first novel, The Gunny Sack (1989), is structured around the objects – including a bead necklace, photograph, shell, Swahili cap, and broken rosary – that the narrator, Salim, pulls out of a sack inherited from a greataunt. This simple strategy allows the author to weave stories of four generations of an Indian family in Africa. No New Land (1991) traces the efforts of some Shamsi community members to settle in Toronto, having to choose between old ways and new in matters that range from the culinary to those of the heart. His two collections of stories, Uhuru Street (1992) and When She was Queen (2006), explore the ways people build and rebuild communities in many countries, and what it means to try to go home again. His third novel, The Book of Secrets (1994), inaugural winner of the Giller Prize, is generally considered his most accomplished work. In this novel, two narratives – the 1913 diary of a colonial administrator, Alfred Corbin, found in a shopkeeper’s backroom in Dar es Salaam, and the notebook entries of a retired history teacher Pius Fernandes – are brought together to uncover a hidden family history. Fernandes uses Corbin’s diary to reimagine the colonial Indian community in the village of Kinoko, Kenya. Centring on the events around World War I and its effect on families who found themselves divided by new political and territorial configurations, Vassanji’s characters are obliged to be on the move, shifting their allegiances, and revising notions of homelands and affiliations. This novel, a blend of love story, history, war narrative, and mystery, highlights a notion that recurs in Vassanji’s fiction: that the drive to understand the past, together with the impossibility of truly knowing it, plays an important role in our position in the present.
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The protagonists of his three subsequent novels all need to return, physically or through memory, to the past they left behind in Africa or India. The main character of Amriika (1999), Ramji, an idealistic young Indian African, looks back on his arrival to America (which his mother calls “Amriika”) three decades earlier in 1968 and chronologically traces his journey from Dar es Salaam and his struggle to preserve his identity and his faith in the middle of those particularly tumultuous decades of American history. The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003), Vassanji’s second Giller Prize-winner, focuses on interracial tension in Kenya before and after independence. From his comfortable perspective in Ontario, Vikram looks back at his childhood in Kenya and his relationship with his African friend, Njoroge, with whom his sister, Deepa, fell in love, with tragic consequences; he also recalls his own engagement in corrupt politics. The past comes back to visit Vic in the person of Njoroge’s son, Joseph. Vassanji blends the personal and the political by intertwining love stories with politics to illustrate the often violent intrusion of national drama into private lives. The novel highlights modes of “in-betweenness” in the character: cultural hybridity, the limbo that separates a child’s world from adulthood, and moral indeterminacy. Finally, The Assassin’s Song (2007) again takes up the notion of the inevitable need to reclaim one’s home. Karsan Dargawalla, who had been brought up to be the “gaadi-varas, the successor and avatar” of an ancient Sufi shrine in Gujarat open to all religions, leaves his home to study in Boston and Canada, but finds he cannot escape his destiny. The novel juxtaposes two parallel stories – Karsan’s in the present and that of Nur Fazal in 1260 – as Karsan learns the truth about his heritage and the role of tradition in his life. In addition to his vibrant prose and complex engagement with the consequences of multiple diasporas, critics have praised Vassanji for giving voice to a community that has been underrepresented in English-language literature, the Ismaili Muslim community. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); East African Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonial
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Fiction of the African Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Fischer, S. (2006). History, Memory, Home: An Exchange with M. G. Vassanji. Canadian Literature, 190, 49–61. Genetsch, M. (2007). The Texture of Identity: The Fiction of M. G. Vassanji, Neil Bissoondath, and Rohinton Mistry. Toronto: TSAR. Rhodes, S. (1998). Frontier Fiction: Reading Books in M. G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets. Ariel, 29(1), 179–83. Vassanji, M. G. (ed.) (1985). A Meeting of Streams: South Asian Canadian Literature. Toronto: TSAR. Vassanji, M. G. (1989). The Gunny Sack. London: Heinemann. Vassanji, M. G. (1991). No New Land. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Vassanji, M. G. (1992). Uhuru Street. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Vassanji, M. G. (1994). The Book of Secrets. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Vassanji, M. G. (1999). Amriika. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Vassanji, M. G. (2003). The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. Toronto: Doubleday. Vassanji, M. G. (2006). When She was Queen. Toronto: Anchor. Vassanji, M. G. (2007). The Assassin’s Song. Toronto: Doubleday. Vassanji, M. G. (2008). A Place Within: Rediscovering India. Toronto: Doubleday.
Vera, Yvonne MEG SAMUELSON
Yvonne Vera is the most prolific and provocative black woman writer to have emerged from Zimbabwe. Her prose is evocatively lyrical, transfusing the ethical concerns of her writing into a nuanced, associative aesthetics. Vera’s fiction delves into the marrow of women’s embodied experiences, re-evaluating national history through a prism that refracts both stunning beauty and excruciating pain. Within the context of Zimbabwean literature, her oeuvre can best be situated alongside Dambudzo Marechera’s, in its formal experimentation and its unflinching airing of social taboos, and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, in its focus on the inner lives of women on the margins of war. Vera, who once
said “I would like to be remembered as a writer who had no fear of words and who had an intense love of her nation” (Mutandwa 2002), received numerous accolades – including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Africa and the Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa – and in 2002 her novel Butterfly Burning (1998) was listed among “Africa’s Best 100 Books of the Twentieth Century.” Vera was born in Bulawayo on September 19, 1964. As a child she traveled around Zimbabwe with her itinerant schoolteacher mother, spending vacations with her grandmother in Makokoba, Bulawayo’s oldest township and the backdrop to Butterfly Burning. She completed graduate studies at York University, Canada, earning a doctorate with a thesis titled “The Prison of Colonial Space.” In 1997, she became director of the National Art Gallery in Bulawayo, spearheading various community projects on urban memory. Vera died tragically young, succumbing to AIDS-related meningitis in 2005. Vera’s oeuvre charts the coming into being of modern Zimbabwe. Her first story, “Independence Day,” later published in Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals? (1992), hones in on the flagraising moment to consider the implications for women of the shift from colonial to national power. Other stories in the collection explore the complexities and contradictions of the Zimbabwean Liberation War, and probe the possibilities of art in such a state. In her first novel, Nehanda (1993), Vera revisits in mythical-fictional mode the story of the spirit medium, Charwe, who incarnated the Nehanda ancestral spirit and marshaled the Shona in their war of resistance (the First Chimurenga) against British imperialists in 1896. As Vera has claimed in an interview, the novel aims to recreate “the actuality of her life” as a woman leader, rescuing Nehanda from her cooption by a “grand narrative of heroism” (Hunter 78–9). Before being hanged by the British, Nehanda reportedly issued the prophecy “my bones will rise again,” which spurred on the later Liberation War (the Second Chimurenga) that eventually toppled the Rhodesian regime, resulting in national independence in 1980. Far from tracing the heroic continuities between the two wars, however, Vera offers a critical presentation of the Liberation War in her next novel, Without a Name (1994), which is set in
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1977. The central character, Mazvita, flees her rural village after being raped by a soldier while her home is burnt. Challenging mythologies of land by associating it with her rape, Mazvita moves to the city in search of freedom and new beginnings. As these prove increasingly elusive, she commits infanticide before returning to her destroyed village seeking memory and mercy. Vera’s demythologizing of what she calls the “patriarchal narrative” of war (Hunter 79) continues in Under the Tongue (1996). As in Without a Name and Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, the war is displaced to the textual margins as Vera unfolds the damaged interior world of her young protagonist Zhizha, who has been raped by her father. Zhizha’s story is one of coming to healing through the power of language and the nurture of women. Butterfly Burning turns away from historical crisis moments to prise open the settled colonial order of the 1940s. Makokoba township is presented as infused with Kwela music and beating to the pulse of Johannesburg, the alluring “city of gold” across the border. Within Makokoba, a young woman, Phephelaphi, finds herself entrapped between the competing demands of intersecting indigenous and colonial patriarchies. Freedom is ultimately sought in an act of selfimmolation, rendering her a butterfly burning. This paradoxical image, which blends selfdestruction with self-actualization, is among Vera’s most searing. The Stone Virgins (2002), Vera’s final and perhaps most accomplished novel, begins by revealing again the creative acts of self-fashioning that take place between the cracks of colonial administration. Independence arrives later in a short, heady paragraph; then “Independence ends. Guns rise. Rising anew. In 1981” (68). The central historical event mediated through Vera’s poetic prose is that of so-called dissident activity and state-sponsored massacres in Matabeleland (southern Zimbabwe) during the early independence years. As one of the few novels to
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highlight this hidden history, The Stone Virgins mourns the losses that were silenced by state repression. Two sisters, Thenjiwe and Nonceba, are attacked by a dissident, who himself feels betrayed by the new nation; Thenjiwe is murdered and Nonceba raped and mutilated. While the novel acknowledges through Nonceba’s scarred body “the wounds of war, which no one can heal” (94), it concludes with a character declaring, “A new nation needs to restore the past” (174). Vera’s writing project can be summed up in his closing words: restorying the national past through the fragile forms of her poetic prose, and generating spaces in which her characters might find deliverance. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (WF); Dangarembga, Tsitsi (WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Marechera, Dambudzo (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Southern African Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Hunter, E. (1998). “Shaping the Truth of the Struggle”: An Interview with Yvonne Vera. Current Writing, 10(1), 75–86. Muponde, R., & Taruvinga, M.(eds.) (2002). Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera. Harare: Weaver. Mutandwa, G. (2002). Yvonne Vera: The Person and the Dreamer. Financial Gazette (May 23). At www.weaverpresszimbabwe.com/lit/litframeset. htm, accessed Nov. 30, 2008. Vera, Y. (1992). Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals? Toronto: TSAR. Vera, Y. (1993). Nehanda. Harare: Baobab. Vera, Y. (1994). Without a Name. Harare: Baobab. Vera, Y. (1995). The Prison of Colonial Space: Narratives of Resistance. PhD thesis. York University, Toronto. Vera, Y. (1996). Under the Tongue. Harare: Baobab. Vera, Y. (1998). Butterfly Burning. Harare: Baobab. Vera, Y. (2002). The Stone Virgins. Harare: Weaver.
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W Wendt, Albert PAUL SHARRAD
Albert Wendt is the leading anglophone writer from the South Pacific, not merely for being the first Islander to publish a novel (Sons for the Return Home, 1973), but also for his prolific output of stories, novels, poems, drama, and artwork. Wendt is also important for his essays (notably “Towards a New Oceania,” 1976b) and his support for young writers. Concurrent with the Pacific-wide movement toward political independence from the 1960s on, Wendt’s output has engaged with broad postcolonial themes (Frantz Fanon’s problematic of the “native intellectual,” V. S. Naipaul’s traumatized mimicry, Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o’s satire of corrupted nationalism). Critics have noted his mix of activist anger with existentialist despair, leavened with poetic symbol. His work has been translated into several languages, adapted into two feature films (Sons for the Return Home and Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree), and he is now the subject of a documentary film, The New Oceania: Albert Wendt, Writer (2005). He has been awarded numerous prizes, an honorary doctorate, and is a Companion of the Order of New Zealand. Alipati Tuaopepe Wendt was born on October 27, 1939 in Western Samoa, then administered by New Zealand. His family was Samoan, with Europeans married in (a heritage rehearsed in the poem “Inside Us the Dead”). Albert learned from his grandmother, Mele, the oral fagogo style that mixed traditional tales with fables from around the world. When he went on scholarship to
New Zealand in 1953 he began writing verse and discovered Albert Camus, who expressed the alienation of someone distanced from his heritage and from white culture. Wendt progressed to teachers college and obtained an MA in history at the Victoria University of Wellington. In 1965 he returned to Samoa to teach at and then head Samoa College, and in 1974 he moved to Fiji to the University of the South Pacific. He helped establish the seminal journal Mana, taught postcolonial literatures, and encouraged young writers. From 1977 he headed the Samoan campus of USP and then became professor of Pacific studies at Auckland University in 1988. Most recently he has occupied the Citizens’ Chair in English at the University of Hawaii. Although he self-identifies as a poet, Wendt is mostly known for fiction. Sons for the Return Home (1973) created a small scandal when it appeared, exposing the racist attitudes beneath polite “Kiwi” society via an interracial love affair and excoriating the self-interested social climbing and moral stuffiness of Islander society. Betrayed by both white and brown communities, the protagonist rejects his family for a void of solitary “honesty,” like subsequent isolated prophet/ artist figures, memorably evoked in the novella Pouliuli (1977) and poems in The Shaman of Visions (1984). This figure is developed in the epic Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979). Pepe is a teenage rebel who succumbs to tuberculosis and writes his life from hospital. He is trained in traditional lore by his grandfather but watches his father cheat, bully, and bribe his way to capitalist power using rank
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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and church rhetoric as his cover. Pepe forms a clan of urban dropouts, presenting his self-destructive protest as a clowning refusal of tyranny. As in early stories, Wendt gives his picaresque characters a stylized English version of Pacific speech. Dwarf Tagata relates Camus’s Sisyphus hero to the void of Pacific creation myth, the trickster Maui, and Samoa’s volcanic wastelands. A more ruthless version of Pepe finally displaces the father, raising the question whether a postcolonial future will be any better than the violent, hypocritical past. Correcting colonialist representations remains a key motivation for Wendt; The Mango’s Kiss (2003) dramatizes the 1918 influenza epidemic, disastrously mismanaged by New Zealand, and the Mau resistance. He also alludes to the white trader part of his family history and produces mocking tributes to writing on Samoa by Stevenson and others. With Ola (1991) and Black Rainbow (1992), Wendt engages with literary theory, quantum physics, and postmodern discontinuous narrative. He mixes magic realism with political protest against racism, and metafictional jokes; he envisions a new hybridized community having global reach but indigenous roots. Later work builds self-consciously on Wendt’s tendency to write in fragments and assemble a “collage” whole, and celebrates his love of popular fiction and cinema. Wendt is important for critiquing both external injustices against indigenous peoples and internal abuses of culture and power. His writing constitutes a unique blend of global awareness and Pacific forms such as the dynamic flux from gaps between things (the va) and hybrid allegory based on Samoan fale aitu satiric theatre and fagogo storytelling. SEE ALSO: Naipaul, V. S. (WF); Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o (WF); New Zealand Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); South Pacific Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Horrocks, S. (dir.) (2005). The New Oceania: Albert Wendt, Writer. Point of View Productions. Maunder, P. (dir.) (1979). Sons for the Return Home. New Zealand Film Corporation.
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Sanderson, M. (dir.) (1989). Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree. GMA Productions. Sharrad, P. (2003). Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void. Manchester: Manchester University Press; Auckland: Auckland University Press. Wendt, A. (1973). Sons for the Return Home. Auckland: Longman Paul. Wendt, A. (1974). Flying-Fox in a Freedom Tree. Auckland: Longman Paul. Wendt, A. (1976a). Inside Us the Dead. Auckland: Longman Paul. Wendt, A. (1976b). Towards a New Oceania. Mana Review, 1(1), 49–60. Wendt, A. (1977). Pouliuli. Auckland: Longman Paul. Wendt, A. (1979). Leaves of the Banyan Tree. Auckland: Longman Paul. (Reissued as The Banyan. New York: Doubleday, 1984.) Wendt, A. (ed.) (1980). Lali. A Pacific Anthology. Auckland: Longman Paul. Wendt, A. (1984). The Shaman of Visions. Auckland: Auckland University Press/Oxford University Press. Wendt, A. (1986). The Birth and Death of the Miracle Man and Other Stories. Auckland: Viking. Wendt, A. (1991). Ola. Auckland: Penguin. Wendt, A. (1992). Black Rainbow. Auckland: Penguin. Wendt, A. (ed.) (1995a). Nuanua: Pacific Writing in English Since 1980. Auckland: Auckland University Press. Wendt, A. (1995b). Photographs. Auckland: Auckland University Press. Wendt, A. (1999). The Best of Albert Wendt’s Short Stories. Auckland: Vintage. Wendt, A. (2002). The Book of the Black Star. Auckland: Auckland University Press. Wendt, A. (2003a). The Mango’s Kiss. Auckland: Vintage. Wendt, A. (2003b). The Songmaker’s Chair. Wellington: Huia. Wendt, A., Sullivan, R., & Whaitiri, R. (eds.) (2003). Whetu Moana. Auckland: Auckland University Press.
West African Fiction STEPHANIE NEWELL
When the European colonial powers met in Berlin to embark on their infamous “scramble for Africa” in the late nineteenth century, a flurry of African-owned newspapers sprang into existence in West Africa to respond to colonialism with local perspectives. These newspapers paved the way for the emergence of local novelists, poets, and short story writers. The first West African
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novel in English was serialized in the Western Echo of colonial Ghana between 1886 and 1888. Anonymous and incomplete, Marita: Or the Folly of Love by “A Native” contained themes and debates that remained central to West African fiction for more than a century afterwards, including marital conflict, the ways Christian missionary teachings affected African households, the cultural alienation caused when Africans “mimic” European culture, and the effects of women’s challenges to masculine authority in the home. Throughout the region in subsequent decades, locally owned newspapers hosted a variety of new works of fiction, including African-language material such as the serialized tragedy of the prostitute Segilola, by Yoruba author I. B. Thomas, and folktales updated to include current moral or political preoccupations. In parallel with these indigenous newspaper presses, from the 1890s onward many early West African nationalists produced full-length books, often written and published in Paris or London, containing histories of “native” and “traditional” institutions, or celebrations of African identity: the novel Ethiopia Unbound by J. E. Casely Hayford (1911), Kobina Sekyi’s play The Blinkards (1915), and Sekyi’s novella The Anglo-Fanti (1918) are three creative works in which the authors promote precolonial African legal systems and political organizations over and against alienating and racist imperial systems. Similarly, in Paris in the 1930s and 1940s, French-speaking proponents of the Negritude movement, including Leopold Senghor of Senegal, produced creative writing, usually poetry, that celebrated African cultures and traditions. Together, these texts comprise the earliest nationalist literature, created to support authors’ assertions of African identity. Perhaps the most famous example of this tradition is Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart (1958), which charts the dissolution of an Igbo community in the wake of missionary and colonial hegemony. This large body of anglophone and francophone literature – including poetry, drama, fiction, essays, histories, and journalism – provides the “cultural nationalist” material to accompany West Africans’ political opposition to colonialism and neocolonialism. Alongside the critique of Christianity and colonialism, West African Islam, or Islam noir as it was known to the French colonial authorities,
has featured prominently in the work of West African authors, particularly those from francophone countries (see Yambo Ouologuem’s Bound to Violence, 1968; Ousmane Sembene’s Ceddo, 1976; Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure, 1962). Whether the early authors were based in European cities or in West African towns, an intensely masculine discourse grew up around their expressions of nationalism and idealizations of “Mother Africa,” attracting considerable criticism from feminist scholars (Stratton 1994). Since the 1960s, however, increasing numbers of West African women writers have published novels highlighting women’s issues and perspectives, including Flora Nwapa (Efuru, 1966), Ama Ata Aidoo (No Sweetness Here, 1970), Buchi Emecheta (The Bride Price, 1976; The Slave Girl, 1977), Mariama B^a (So Long a Letter, 1981), and Amma Darko (The Housemaid, 1998). The recent success of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Purple Hibiscus, 2004; Half of a Yellow Sun, 2006) owes a great deal to these gender-aware precursors. West African authors often employ fiction to protest against colonial exploitation and the behavior of postcolonial regimes. Historical novels such as Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood (1979) focus in part on the figure of the white colonial boss or the European missionary in order to describe the destruction of local cultures and institutions under the legal and political impact of colonial rule. Other authors focus on the violence and corruption of contemporary politicians. The execution of Nigerian author Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995 revealed the real dangers accompanying political activism against postcolonial dictatorships. Not all West African authors addressed colonialism directly in the decades after decolonization. Elechi Amadi’s early fiction studiously avoids the topic of colonialism, focusing instead upon precolonial cultures and mythologies (The Concubine, 1966; The Great Pond, 1968; The Slave, 1978). Likewise, in Nwapa’s Efuru the colonial encounter features only insofar as it adversely affects men’s behavior, for the educated young men in the novel flout customary rules about polygyny and have little respect for women’s traditional gender roles. Since the 1960s, many African authors have shared a concern for urban poverty, slum life, and
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political violence in the postcolonial city. These concerns are often expressed scatologically: Ayi Kwei Armah’s influential novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) exemplifies a postcolonial tradition of scatological writing in which authors are preoccupied with dirt, sex, odors, vermin, disease, and slimy bodily excretions (see also Ouologuem’s Bound to Violence, 1968). Focusing on urbanization, Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) is set in a rapidly changing environment where ancient forests are destroyed to make way for roads, and where slum-dwellers struggle to survive in the new political climate. Clouds of magical spirits and forces are stirred up by the disruptions. Many West African authors and intellectuals have sought to accommodate African identity and precolonial traditions within a socialist or Marxist political framework. In Senegal in the 1950s and 1960s, poet-president Senghor produced a theory of “African socialism” that combined key features of his philosophy of Negritude with the promotion of “Western technology” and “universal civilization” (Senghor 1964). The result was a syncretic political and cultural model that could not have been produced in Europe, combining a keen sense of Africa’s racial and spiritual heritage with socialist principles of state management and internationalism. Senghor’s investment in the notion of a shared African identity allowed him to think beyond the limits of the postcolonial nation state, and he promoted his African socialism as a political and cultural model for the entire continent. His ideas stimulated intense debate and controversy among novelists and intellectuals in anglophone West Africa. The Nobel Prizewinning dramatist, intellectual, and occasional novelist, Wole Soyinka, famously dismissed Senghor’s philosophy as over-defensive in relation to the colonial culture. Several socialist creative writers and intellectuals have targeted Soyinka for criticism. According to his critics, Soyinka’s celebrations of Yoruba mythology, rituals, and deities in his plays and novels, and also in his influential book, Myth, Literature and the African World (1992 [1976]), manifest a great deal of “ahistorical detachment” over and against the critics’ political ideal that an African author should be a “revolutionary realist [who] confronts the present and has no interest in the past or tradition
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except for their significance in the repossession of the present and redirection of the future” (Hunt 1985, 74). Critics feel that Soyinka’s promotion of African “traditional” values does not avoid the pitfalls of “nativism,” or “traditionalism”; in their view, he produces a static, essentialist vision of African society, sapping history of the human agency which, for Marxists, molds future possibilities from the status quo (see Amuta 1989). Ironically, these are the very arguments that Soyinka made against Negritude. Soyinka is a giant in the field of West African literature and literary criticism. Hardly a passive recipient of these comments, he engages forcefully with African Marxism in his essays and lectures. This confrontation has set the tone of much literary critical debate in West Africa. Why, Soyinka demands, should his rejection of a “literary ideology” be construed as a lack of political commitment in the outside world, especially when the accusers are academics who sit comfortably in their studies while African writers – most particularly himself – are exposed to real physical violence from the regimes they confront (Soyinka 1993, 265)? How can Marxist critics presume, reductively, in the manner of Lenin, that all art is merely a tool for the ruling class to maintain its domination (266)? On the other hand, why should a work of imaginative literature be expected to provide a political manifesto for the oppressed masses in Africa (268)? With a lifelong commitment to the rejuvenation of precolonial Yoruba mythologies, rituals, and deities, Soyinka rejects “imperial” discourses in favor of indigenous African models for the interpretation of African culture, and Marxism is one of the discourses he repudiates, alongside Islam and Christianity (48). His insistence that African writers should be free to write what they choose continues to provoke debate in West Africa. Oral literatures are often neglected in discussions of West African fiction, but throughout the region griots (poets and praise-singers) produce narratives that help to redefine and reinforce local cultural identities. Such narratives have played a major role in the production of West African literature, particularly drama (Efua Sutherland’s The Marriage of Anansewa, 1967). Englishlanguage novelists and poets also make extensive use of oral narrator figures and oral genres in their
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work. The Nigerian novelist Gabriel Okara famously attempted to transliterate his native Ijaw (or Ijo) language directly into English in The Voice (1964). Kofi Awoonor makes use of Ewe oral genres and rhythms in his poetry. For a long time, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) dominated the English-language market for African literature. Since the publication of Okri’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Famished Road, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in an alternative, non-realist trajectory of African writing, beginning with Amos Tutuola’s epic fantasy, The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952). The West African literary canon has shifted somewhat since the 1990s, not least as a result of the translation of new francophone texts into English alongside the increase in titles by women writers. Alongside the reaccommodation of Tutuola’s work, the translation into English of francophone authors such as Veronique Tadjo (As the Crow Flies, 1992; trans. 2001) and Calixthe Beyala (The Sun Hath Looked upon Me, 1986; trans. 1996) has stimulated a break with the realist and nationalist tradition. Cyprian Ekwensi’s prolific, racy novels and stories, which form part of a body of bestselling literature in West Africa, have generally been neglected by critics in favor of more “literary” and “political” writers from the 1960s and 1970s such as Amadi, Armah (The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, 1968; The Healers, 1978), and Kofi Awoonor (This Earth My Brother, 1971). Outside the field of internationally available Englishlanguage literature from West Africa, a vast array of local literatures can be found in African and world languages, including Arabic as well as English and French, and an array of aesthetic rules and expectations about the author’s role in society and the way books should be interpreted. If the impact of colonialism and postcolonial rule are under scrutiny in the internationally available literature described above, in locally published literature authors generally focus on protagonists’ – and readers’ – intimate lives. Beyond the novel, diverse literary genres are produced locally in West Africa, ranging from self-help books to evangelical and Pentecostal testimonials as well as increasing quantities of pornographic and homoerotic (generally homophobic) material. Often labeled “popular literature,” these publications promise to help readers resolve personal
problems, particularly in relationships and marriage. The most famous of these pamphlets are known as “Onitsha market literature,” named after the eastern Nigerian market town where they were mass-produced in the 1950s and 1960s. With titles such as Never Trust All that Love You (R. Okonkwo, 1961), Caroline the One Guinea Girl (O. A. Ogali, 1960), and Agnes in the Game of True Love (T. Iguh, 1960), Onitsha market literature generated, and continues to inspire, a great deal of international interest and commentary. SEE ALSO: The City in Fiction (WF); East African Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the African Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); The Publishing Industry and Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF); Southern African Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Amuta, C. (1989). The Theory of African Literature: Implications for Practical Criticism. London: Institute for African Alternatives/Zed Books. Hunt, G. (1985). Two African Aesthetics: Soyinka versus Cabral. In G. M. Gugelburger (ed.), Marxism and African Literature. London: James Currey, pp. 64–93. Newell, S. (1996). West African Literatures: Ways of Reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Senghor, L. S. (1964). On African Socialism (trans. M. Cook). New York: Praeger. Soyinka, W. (1992). Myth, Literature and the African World [1976]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Soyinka, W. (1993). Art, Dialogue and Outrage. London: Methuen. Stratton, F. (1994). Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender. London: Routledge.
West Indian Fiction EDICTE BEN LEDENT
In his 1960 essay, The Pleasures of Exile, Barbadian writer George Lamming listed the postwar rise of the West Indian novel as the third most important event in British Caribbean history – after
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the “discovery” of the islands by Christopher Columbus in the fifteenth century and the abolition of slavery, which led in the nineteenth century to the arrival of East Indians in the Caribbean and made it one of the world’s most cosmopolitan areas. This statement evidences the central role played by fiction in the development of a regional sensibility and in the attempts of the West Indian community to come to terms with its painful, century-long experience of colonialism and exploitation. The rise of the West Indian novel as a “method of investigation” (38) was further linked by Lamming to the migration to England in the mid twentieth century of a number of young male writers, among them Andrew Salkey, Samuel Selvon, and himself. Their presence in the so-called mother country facilitated the international circulation of their works and triggered an unprecedented upsurge of creativity, with long-lasting effects on the following generations of writers. This does not mean, however, that there had not been any fiction produced in the West Indies in the early twentieth century, but the novels and short stories published before the 1950s suffered from a relative absence of visibility. And even if they paved the way thematically for the writing that was to come, they lacked, to some extent, the originality, political commitment, and vigor that later became the hallmark of the fiction from the anglophone Caribbean. The first major West Indian novels were mostly written by men from Jamaica and Trinidad, two islands with a dynamic literary culture. Jamaican H. G. de Lisser’s Jane’s Career (1914) is a famous early text. Like many subsequent novels from the region, it addresses social changes through a coming-of-age story – here of a young woman who moves from country to town to work as a domestic servant. A similar concern for social realism is present in Minty Alley (1936), by Trinidadian C. L. R. James, a novel that follows the confrontation of its young middle-class black protagonist with the residents of Port of Spain’s Minty Alley. Race and class – understandably pervasive themes in former plantation societies – are at the heart of other fiction from the same period, notably by Claude McKay, a Jamaican who contributed to the Harlem Renaissance and spent much of his life outside the West Indies. In Banana Bottom (1933) he addresses the identity crisis of his proud heroine, Bita Plant, who, after
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being educated in England, returns to Jamaica and is faced with important choices. The alienated individual divided between several cultures is a recurring feature of West Indian fiction; another is the attention paid to collective history and the development of the postcolonial nation, a theme particularly prominent in another pioneering early work, V. S. Reid’s New Day (1949). Written in a form of Jamaican dialect laced with biblical language, this national epic traces a direct line from the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion to the 1944 independence celebrations. The West Indies has always had a strong storytelling tradition, a legacy from slavery times. Still, except for a few volumes – mostly by expatriates in the US or Europe, such as Eric Waldrond’s Tropic Death (1926) and Jean Rhys’s The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927) – many early short stories were not published in books but in the literary magazines that flourished in the West Indies, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, such as Bim, The Beacon, and Kyk-Over-Al. It was not until the 1960s that stories became more widely available, thanks to the anthologies and collections that were published as West Indian writing acquired a larger readership. Many of the region’s leading novelists also composed short stories, particularly at the beginning of their careers. The second half of the century opened with A Morning at the Office (1950), the third book by the prolific Guyanese Edgar Mittelholzer, who had arrived in the UK in 1948. Set in a Trinidadian office and spanning only six hours, the narrative explores through its varied cast the racial complexities of West Indian society and their impact on the individual psyche. Its sharpness of observation apart, this book stands out as one of the first novels published in the UK in the wake of the postwar wave of migration; it ushered in an explosion of fictional talents. Trinidadian Samuel Selvon, whose first book was A Brighter Sun (1952), is mostly famous for The Lonely Londoners (1956), an episodic novel written in creolized English, tracing with tenderness the bittersweet experiences of West Indian immigrants in London. Its central character, Moses Aloetta, is the hero of two humorous sequels, Moses Ascending (1975) and Moses Migrating (1983). Exile in the former imperial capital is a common theme in fiction published in the 1950s and 1960s, as exemplified by Lamming’s The Emigrants
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(1954), Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960), and V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men (1967), the story of a Caribbean politician in exile in London. However, it would be reductive to view all West Indian fiction of that period through the prism of migration to Britain. Naipaul, for example, wrote Miguel Street (1959) and A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), two early examinations of the writer’s native Trinidad that reveal a compassion that contrasts with his later, more cynical analyses of neocolonialism in Guerrillas (1975) and A Bend in the River (1979). Likewise, Lamming published In the Castle of My Skin (1953), a classic Bildungsroman set in Barbados, and Season of Adventure (1960), a more political novel set on the fictional island of San Cristobal. Jean Rhys, from Dominica, who had already written a migration novel entitled Voyage in the Dark (1934), published in 1966 one of the most celebrated Caribbean books, Wide Sargasso Sea, a fictional response to Charlotte Bront€e’s Jane Eyre. Through the experience of her white Creole heroine, Antoinette (Bront€e’s “madwoman in the attic”), Rhys brilliantly tackles the racial, sexual, and cultural tensions inherent in all human encounters, but which are particularly intense in Caribbean societies. Nevertheless, of all the West Indian novelists in Britain, it was the Guyanese Wilson Harris whose imagination remained most profoundly and consistently shaped by the region, as shown in his visionary, formally groundbreaking first novel, Palace of the Peacock (1960), which follows the expedition of a multiracial crew into the Guyanese interior and lays the foundation for the original, cross-cultural worldview developed in his many subsequent, densely metaphorical novels. Like Harris, many West Indian novelists in exile kept writing to the end of the twentieth century. Their enduring success, however, meant that less critical attention was paid to the literary production of those who stayed on their native islands, such as Jamaican Erna Brodber and Trinidadian Earl Lovelace. Educated as a sociologist, Brodber evoked in her highly innovative work the trauma that slavery and colonial education had imposed on her female protagonists, such as young Ella in Myal (1988). For Brodber, the only path toward spiritual restoration and healing involves an awareness of the multiple roots of Caribbean culture. Folk traditions are equally
important in the fiction of Lovelace, especially The Dragon Can’t Dance (1979), which presents the annual carnival celebrations as a source of pride and dignity for the region’s dispossessed people. But writers like Brodber and Lovelace remained exceptions, for West Indian fiction at the end of the millennium was mostly written by Caribbean-born writers, many of them women, who had settled abroad – not only in Britain, but also the United States and Canada. Despite its dispersed origins, however, their diasporic fiction displayed strikingly similar preoccupations, most notably an interest in identity issues related to displacement and an almost obsessive concern with the past, themes present to a greater or lesser degree in all the writing from the region. The second generation of West Indian novelists in Britain started publishing in the mid-1980s. While their first novels often dealt with Caribbean migrants’ difficulties fitting into the colonial metropolis, such as Joan Riley’s The Unbelonging (1985), Caryl Phillips’s The Final Passage (1985), and David Dabydeen’s The Intended (1991), they developed in the following years a special attention to history, in particular to transatlantic slavery, which, they suggested, had shaped postcolonial society radically and could account for its entrenched racism. Chief among these historical fictions are Phillips’s Cambridge (1991) and Crossing the River (1993), Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts (1997), and Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress (1999), character-driven narratives that subvert conventional views of the past. Their multiple settings – England, Africa, and often the New World – might indicate a trend toward internationalization in Anglo-Caribbean fiction. Yet, other recent novels remain clearly rooted in an occasionally baroque Caribbean, whether Trinidad in Witchbroom (1992) or Guyana in The Ventriloquist’s Tale (1997), respectively by Lawrence Scott and Pauline Melville, two authors with remarkable short story collections as well – Scott’s Ballad for the New World (1994) and Melville’s Shape-Shifter (1990). Slightly different developments are perceptible in fiction by US-based West Indians. For some time, its main representative was veteran Paule Marshall, the author among other novels of Brown Girl, Brown Stones (1959), focusing on a Barbadian girl living in Brooklyn. In the 1980s, however, other major talents came to the fore,
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generally with texts set in their ancestral homeland. The most acclaimed was Jamaica Kincaid, born in Antigua. Her economical fiction focuses on the vulnerability of apparently ruthless female characters whose childhood is shaped by colonialism, whether the eponymous Annie John (1985) or Xuela in The Autobiography of My Mother (1996). Other original voices were Jamaica’s Michelle Cliff – author of Abeng (1984), another childhood story, and Free Enterprise (1993), an imaginative exploration of historical links between the Caribbean and African America – and Robert Antoni, with roots in Trinidad, whose great formal inventiveness is displayed in Divina Trace (1991). West Indian short fiction was particularly well developed in Canada, as testified, for example, by Olive Senior’s collections of stories set in Jamaica, Arrival of the Snake Woman (1989) and Discerner of Hearts (1995). Senior has not written novels, but it is significant that many renowned anglophone Caribbean novelists in Canada were also established short story writers. Austin Clarke, who arrived in Toronto in the 1950s, is a good example; by the end of the century he had published five collections of stories and nine novels, tackling both black immigrant life in Canada, as in The Bigger Light (1975), and the situation in his native Barbados, in Proud Empires (1986). The same generic and thematic versatility is true of the younger writers, particularly the Trinidadians Neil Bissoondath – whose work is concerned with rootlessness and memory, from the collection Digging Up the Mountains (1985) to the novel The Worlds within Her (1998) – and Dionne Brand, whose lyrical prose also shuttles between the Caribbean and Canada, for example in Sans Souci and Other Stories (1988) and At The Full and Range of the Moon (1999), a family saga starting in the nineteenth century with the slave Marie Ursule. The works of West Indian fiction writers have been acclaimed internationally, not only for their innovativeness but also because they carry within themselves variegated and profound reflections on multiculturalism, one of the most crucial global issues in the twentieth century and beyond. SEE ALSO: Black British Fiction (WF); Canadian Fiction (WF); Children’s and
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Young Adult Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonial Fiction of the West Indian/ Caribbean Diaspora (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Butcher, M. (ed.) (1989). Tibisiri. Mundelstrup: Dangaroo. Donnell, A. (2006). Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History. London: Routledge. Donnell, A., & Welsh, S. L. (eds.) (1996). The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature. London: Routledge. Figueredo, D. H. (ed.) (2006). Encyclopedia of Caribbean Literature. 2 vols. Westport, CT: Greenwood. King, B. (ed.) (1995). West Indian Literature, 2nd edn. London: Macmillan. James, L. (1999). Caribbean Literature in English. London: Longman. Lamming, G. (1960). The Pleasures of Exile. London: Michael Joseph. Ramchand, K. (1983). The West Indian Novel and Its Background, 2nd edn. London: Heinemann.
White, Patrick ANDREW MCCANN
By the time of his death in 1990, Patrick White had produced one of the greatest and most cohesive bodies of fiction to emerge during the twentieth century. His novels, often epic in scale, are driven by a postromantic, modernist sensibility that obsessively searches for traces of higher meaning and unity in an otherwise disordered and disenchanted universe. These novels draw on the main currents of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European fiction, but they reconfigure these currents to accommodate the spatial and psychological specificity of Australian experience. White was born on May 28, 1912 into an immensely wealthy pastoral family that owned large tracts of land in New South Wales. Though born in London, where his parents were holidaying at the time, he spent his first 13 years in
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Australia before being educated at Cheltenham College in England. He returned to Australia to work as a jackaroo before attending King’s College at Cambridge University in the early 1930s, where he studied modern languages. He returned to Australia permanently in 1948, drawn by a nostalgia for the landscapes of his childhood. It was in Castle Hill, on the outskirts of Sydney, and then in the inner-Sydney suburb of Centennial Park that White produced virtually all of his major work. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973, for what the prize citation described as “an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature.” Despite the immensity of his achievement, White’s current standing, especially in Australia, is hotly contested. In 2006, for example, a major broadsheet newspaper, The Australian, constructed a hoax designed to expose the neglect into which White had fallen (Sexton 2006). Chapter 3 of White’s The Eye of the Storm (1973) was submitted to a representative group of editors and publishers under the name Wraith Picket. The sample chapter was almost unanimously rejected, and its author was referred to writing workshops and how-to books like The Art of Fiction. What was disconcerting about these results was not simply the fact that no one seemed to recognize White’s prose, but the naturalness with which commercial viability seemed to displace all other considerations. The outcry that followed indicated the strange place White now occupies in Australian literary culture. On the one hand, his iconic status is undisputed, at least among academics and students of Australian literature. On the other hand, his work makes demands that many readers find intimidating. He embodies the paradox of a canonical literary culture at odds with the market’s commercial imperatives. But White’s apparently waning popularity in a changing cultural and commercial landscape is hardly surprising. His novels clearly cultivate a hostile relationship to forms of populism (consumerism and nationalism especially), and to what he repeatedly portrays as the philistinism of postwar Australia, whether it be the materialism of the upper classes or the more general infantilism of what, in his autobiography Flaws in the Glass (1981), he calls Australian “child-
adults” who “grow resentful on being forced to recognize themselves” in works of fiction, and “shy away from the deep end of the unconscious” (104). His modernism developed aesthetic strategies at odds with what he saw as the realism dominating Australian writing, and his corresponding interest in the interior states of alienated and marginalized characters found a natural foil in images of a provincial, conformist, and sometimes xenophobic Australia pitted against redemptive creative and spiritual impulses. Like James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, his relationship to the world he wrote about was adversarial. His novels eschew the notion of literature as entertainment and strive instead toward a more exacting sense of literature as a form of prophecy and a conduit for the sacred in an otherwise fallen world. In his work oppositions between the secular and the sacred, commerce and culture, surface and depth, and society and the individual enable moments of epiphany that cut through the ephemera of the everyday and grasp at the ecstatic. This has led to charges of elitism and political disengagement in his novels (see Wilding 1995). Simon During has also discussed the politically regressive element in what he calls White’s “latecolonial transcendentalism,” which During presents as a “return to the timeless and spiritual” (1996, 17–18) at the expense of a more direct engagement with the political realities of a postcolonial society. While these critiques get at something fundamental to White’s work and career – a patrician investment in forms of moral and aesthetic universality that, to contemporary Australians, sometimes look apolitical, conservative, and Eurocentric – they also underplay White’s engagement with the myths of contemporary Australia, and his interest in minorities stigmatized according to ethnicity and sexual orientation. White’s fictional characters often echo his own sense of marginalization. In Flaws in the Glass he describes himself as a “green, sickly boy,” whose delicacy and shyness disturbed his parents and contradicted the sort of healthy masculinity expected of a grazier’s heir (1981, 5). Yet when his class-conscious parents packed him off to an English boarding school, he experienced his Australianness as a colonial deformity. This sense of being caught between two worlds, England and Australia, metropolis and colony, and never really belonging to either, would stay with White
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throughout much of his life. At the same time his developing sense of his homosexuality bred an introspection that lent itself quite naturally to fiction writing. At one point in Flaws in the Glass, White relates an early memory of a “mad woman” who used to rummage about in the family’s Sydney backyard. His description of her “blotched, alcoholic skin and munching gum” is unrelenting in its sense of abjection. Yet it is precisely this figure with whom White identifies, not just because he later associates the “paraphernalia and illusion referred to as art” with her (20), but because he too experienced himself as a “skeleton at the Australian feast” (22). This memory of the mad woman is an important clue to much of his fiction, which focuses on damaged, but aesthetically and spiritually privileged individuals cast out into a hostile and unforgiving world. After studying French and German at Cambridge and traveling extensively in Germany, White moved to London where the expatriate modernist artist Roy de Maistre was a significant social and aesthetic force in his life, putting him contact with figures like Francis Bacon, among others. It is to de Maistre that White’s first novel, Happy Valley (1939) is dedicated, no doubt reflecting his influence on White’s developing conception of modernist aesthetics, which includes moments of linguistic abstraction and stream of consciousness in an ambitious, but otherwise fairly straightforward novel about the limitations of life in a small Australian town and the struggle to transcend it in the quest for a greater, metaphysical unity. His subsequent novel, The Living and the Dead (1941), was finished in New York just as the war was commencing. Both novels are generally considered apprenticeship works, but what does emerge very powerfully in regard to them is the importance of patronage: White was fortunate to have had the backing of Ben Huebsch in New York, who supported modernist prose that would fall foul of the market but accrue cultural capital over time. During the war White served in North Africa and the Middle East as an RAF intelligence officer and met Manoly Lascaris, who became his lifelong partner. The two returned to Australia in 1948 as White was completing what critics consider his first great novel: The Aunt’s Story (1948). The “aunt” of the title is Theodora Goodman, a
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spinster who travels from Australia to Europe and then America experiencing an increasing sense of interior fragmentation and alienation that reflects both Europe’s descent into war and a broader sense of dislocation that embodies a sort of metaphysical homelessness. Theodora also echoes White’s own alienation from the norms of heterosexual family life: the denomination “aunt” is clearly meant to signify a strained relationship to these conventions. The novel’s most discussed section focuses on Theodora’s sojourn in the Hotel du Midi, with its jardin exotique and its cast of eccentric Europeans who collectively embody the world that is about to disintegrate as World War II erupts, and the “Gothic shell” (133) of Europe collapses. When Theodora arrives in America she meets the apparitional figure Holstius, who reconciles her to her interior fragmentation, explaining that “true permanence is a state of multiplication and division” (278). The novel finishes with Theodora resigning herself to psychiatric care in the knowledge that “home” had become an abstraction that “did not fit” (254). The Aunt’s Story offers much that became typical of White’s subsequent novels: the outsider protagonist, the languorous descriptions of the sparse quotidian detail of provincial Australia, and the potential for revelation lingering within it. Early in the novel White masterfully evokes this in the idea of an “opaque world” becoming momentarily “transparent” (56), a romantic gesture reminiscent of Wordsworth’s sense of seeing “into the life of things” in “Tintern Abbey.” This impulse is evident in his next novel, The Tree of Man (1955), which recasts many of the concerns of the previous novel into an epic story of Australian settlement. The novel begins with the lone figure of Stan Parker staking out a plot of land and finishes with the blight of suburbia encroaching upon and swallowing up the pastoral setting. The novel’s devastating account of suburbanization will prefigure the anti-suburban novels of the 1960s, which remain White’s most adversarial works. It also continues White’s interests in the revelatory power of the ordinary and, beyond it, the abject, as when Stan Parker famously finds God in a “glob of spittle” (495). As White was writing The Tree of Man, he and Lascaris were living outside Sydney and raising dogs on a small farm. White almost gave up writing in this
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period. The Aunt’s Story had done well in America; it was glowingly reviewed and went into a second edition. In Australia it was a different story. Reviews were bored and neglectful, and sales were poor. It was a paradoxical trend that would linger throughout White’s career: even as he was becoming a national literary celebrity his career was always best supported and fostered by publishers and institutions outside Australia. Yet with every novel White’s vision seemed to be growing in ambition. Voss (1957) recasts the story of the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt as an immense metaphysical quest across the Australia desert, a quest that takes Voss to the limit of Western experience, and beyond it to his violent, ritualistic death at the hands of an Aboriginal tribe. In refashioning colonial history according to his own metaphysical vision, White exposes the callowness and superficiality of an official version of that history and claims the Australian landscape as a reserve of what David Tacey calls “a shocking revelatory and transformative power” (7) bound up with the sacred and a drive toward the ecstatic. The novel won the Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s most prestigious prize for fiction, and helped secure White’s reputation as a writer who belonged to a world literary tradition but was introducing specifically Australian material into it. White’s work throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, which includes the novels Riders in the Chariot (1961), which also won the Miles Franklin Award, and The Solid Mandala (1966), the play A Season in Sarsaparilla (1962), and the short stories “Down at the Dump” and “The Night the Prowler,” published in The Burnt Ones (1964) and The Cockatoos (1974) respectively, consolidates what many critics now see as his most characteristic vision of a suburban modernity. In these works the fictional suburban setting of Sarsaparilla is defined by both banality and evil. In Riders in the Chariot, which equates the racism of suburban Australia with the racism of the Holocaust, White’s attack on contemporary Australia is at its most vitriolic and controversial. Critics have found elements of misogyny in White’s portrayal of Mrs. Flack and Mrs. Jolley (see Gerster 1990) – embodiments of a vapid domestic hygiene bound up with a facile consumerism and hatred
of foreigners – and have been unsettled by his relentless hostility toward the suburban expanses that typify most Australian cities. White’s Sarsaparilla novels are also the main locus of his religiously oriented transcendentalism. In Riders in the Chariot, for example, his four central characters, Himmelfarb (a Holocaust survivor), Mary Hare (a psychologically damaged, aging recluse), Ruth Godbald (a saintly mother figure) and Alf Dubbo (an Aboriginal artist suffering from tuberculosis), are also figured as illuminati: privileged but persecuted figures in touch with the secret life hidden under the surfaces of the everyday. This body of work also indicates White’s disdain for the norms of a disciplined, consumer society. From this perspective White’s interest in forms of corporeality bound up with illness, old age, or physical decrepitude correlates with his interest in forms of racial and sexual otherness that are stigmatized by a putatively, though pathologically, “normal” society. In subsequent novels these themes are reiterated in ways that implicate White’s vision of creative practice and of homosexuality. In The Vivisector (1970), White’s protagonist is an artist. As David Marr, White’s biographer, puts it, the story of Hurtle Duffield may be about a painter, “but the novel is a writers’ profound exercise in self-justification” (471), as when Duffield declares his intentions to “find some formal order behind a moment of chaos and unreason” (473). In The Twyborn Affair (1979), the story of Eddie Twyborn, who at different moments appears as Eudoxia Vatatzes (the lover of an elderly Greek obsessed with Byzantium) and later Eadith Trist (a London brothel madam), we encounter White’s most obviously queer work. Here transvestitism clearly highlights his interest in sexual alterity, in artifice, and in corporeality. As in The Eye of the Storm, in which the dying socialite Elizabeth Hunter encounters her superficial and duplicitous children and the skeletons of her own past, the abject body adorned with make-up is a powerful evocation of White’s aesthetic sensibility, which moves beyond poles of beauty and ugliness toward the luridly decadent: both Elizabeth Hunter and Eadith Trist embody a sort of baroque performativity bound up with forms of adornment that are described as barbaric and grotesque in their excessiveness.
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Both also seem to echo the mad woman of White’s childhood, whom he recalls as surrounded with the paraphernalia and illusion of art. The issue of performativity and multiple identities, so central to these novels, also informs White’s last major work, Memoirs of Many in One (1986), in which White casts himself as the editor of a fictional memoir, but it is perhaps most resonant in White’s second piece of historical fiction, A Fringe of Leaves, published in 1976. Like Voss, A Fringe of Leaves takes a piece of colonial history, this time the story of the Eliza Fraser, who was shipwrecked on what would be named Fraser Island after her, and taken in by its Aboriginal inhabitants. White recasts the Eliza Fraser story as the story of Ellen Roxburgh, a girl from Cornwall who marries into the English upper classes, is forced to assimilate its norms, but finally manages to cast off this contrived identity in the midst of Aboriginal Australia. The primitivism of the novel clearly evokes work by Lawrence, and White’s portrayal of Aboriginal cannibalism, which Ellen experiences as a form of sacrament, remains one of his most controversial passages. While it stereotypes Indigenous Australians, the novel is uncompromising in its critique of Western cultural norms, which it presents as psychologically and sexually repressive. A Fringe of Leaves is perhaps White’s clearest statement of how he believes the conventions of middle-class society damage the human capacity for experience, vision, and interaction. In 2006, shortly after The Australian’s hoax and 16 years after his death, the news broke that White’s literary executor, Barbara Mobbs, had given a collection of papers, hitherto believed to have been destroyed by White himself, to Australia’s National Library in Canberra. Besides a mass of biographical material, the papers include three unpublished manuscripts. It remains to be seen how this material will alter White’s legacy. In the meantime, there is little doubt that virtually every Australian novelist writing today does so in his immense shadow. SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); The City in Fiction (WF); Fictional Responses to Canonical English Narratives (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF);
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Modernist Fiction (BIF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS During, S. (1996). Patrick White. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Gerster, R. (1990). Gerrymander: The Place of Suburbia in Australian Fiction. Meanjin, 49(3), 565–75. Hewett, H. (2002). Patrick White, Painter Manque: Paintings, Painters and Their Influence on His Work. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Marr, D. (1991). Patrick White: A Life. London: Jonathan Cape. Sexton, J. (2006). Why Bother with Patrick White? Weekend Australian, p. 21 (July 15–16). Tacey, D. (1995). Edge of the Sacred: Transformation in Australia. Blackburn, Vic.: HarperCollins. White, P. (1939). Happy Valley. London: Harrap. White, P. (1941). The Living and the Dead. New York: Viking. White, P. (1948). The Aunt’s Story. New York: Viking. White, P. (1955). The Tree of Man. New York: Viking. White, P. (1957). Voss. New York: Viking. White, P. (1961). Riders in the Chariot. New York: Viking. White, P. (1964). The Burnt Ones. New York: Viking. White, P. (1965). Four Plays. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. White, P. (1966). The Solid Mandala. New York: Viking. White, P. (1970). The Vivisector. New York: Viking. White, P. (1973). The Eye of the Storm. London: Jonathan Cape. White, P. (1974). The Cockatoos: Shorter Novels and Stories. London: Jonathan Cape. White, P. (1976). A Fringe of Leaves. London: Jonathan Cape. White, P. (1979). The Twyborn Affair. London: Cape. White, P. (1981). Flaws in the Glass: A Self-Portrait. London: Jonathan Cape. White, P. (1983a). Netherwood. Sydney: Currency. White, P. (1983b). Signal Driver: A Morality Play for the Times. Sydney: Currency. White, P. (1985). Collected Plays. Sydney: Currency. White, P. (1986). Memoirs of Many in One. London: Jonathan Cape. White, P. (1987). Three Uneasy Pieces. Melbourne: Pascoe. White, P. (1989). Patrick White Speaks (ed. P. Brennan & C. Flynn). Sydney: Primavera.
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Wilding, M. (1995). Patrick White and Modernism. In John McLaren & Mary-Ellen Ryan (eds.), Prophet from the Desert: Critical Essays on Patrick White. Red Hill South, Vic.: Red Hill, pp. 24–33.
Wiebe, Rudy HILDI FROESE TIESSEN
Rudy Wiebe’s fiction is rooted in the experiences of the communities he lived among in his childhood and youth: Mennonite immigrants to the Canadian prairies, and native peoples who occupied the lands the Mennonites came to settle. In his award-winning historical fiction, he has imaginatively documented significant alternative histories of the Indigenous peoples of Canada’s west and far north, countering the notion that these territories were “empty” before the Europeans arrived. Born on October 4, 1934 to Mennonite immigrants from Ukraine in the homesteading community of Fairholme, Saskatchewan, Wiebe grew up speaking three languages – German, Low German, and English. After spending his youth in southern Alberta, he earned a degree at the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 1956. Further studies in Germany and Winnipeg (including a degree in theology) followed. In 1960 he returned to Edmonton to complete an MA in creative writing. In 1962, during his founding year as editor of the first English-language national paper of the Canadian Mennonite Brethren, his first novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many, was published. In the wake of the controversy that followed – see Wiebe’s essay “The Skull in the Swamp” in River of Stone (1995) – he left his Canadian Mennonite community to teach in the United States. Wiebe returned to the University of Alberta in 1967, and mentored many writers there until he retired from teaching in 1992. As the first Canadian to write in English out of his own experience in a Mennonite community, Wiebe is also the pivotal forerunner in the development of a thriving Mennonite literary tradition in North America. Although the reception of his first novel among Mennonites was harsh, Wiebe remained present among them and continued to document Mennonite experience from the beginning of the Anabaptist-Mennonite movement in the early sixteenth century to the present. The
often dense prose of Wiebe’s grand fictions is balanced in his writing by the lyrical, intimate tone of more autobiographical narratives like the story “Chinook Christmas” or the memoir of his Mennonite boyhood, Of This Earth (2006). Wiebe’s polyphonic narratives invoke critical discourses of postcolonialism and postmodernism; yet his core vision is driven by what he calls a “radical” Jesus-centered Christianity. A list of key subjects and themes in his work might include land, diaspora, community, betrayal, cultural memory, faith, redemptive love, and language. His narratives, though often chronologically fractured and multivocal, express an urge toward a generally unrealized coherence. His own voice, as his earliest publishers declared, is prophetic, expressing his desire to make the world better. His deep moral passions inform all the layers of his work. Wiebe’s large fictions place historical and imagined individuals in circumstances that allow him to both foreground and challenge traditional ways of thinking and being. His historical metafictions – like The Temptations of Big Bear (1973) and The Scorched-Wood People (1977) – expose the hypocritical and ruthless actions of British colonizers in nineteenth-century Canada, as does A Discovery of Strangers (1994), in which various voices evoke the encounter of British explorers and the Dene people of the Arctic during the first Franklin Expedition. His proclivity to question the assumptions underlying prevailing structures of power – what in his first novel he identifies repeatedly as “the ways of the fathers” – is evident throughout his work. His Mennonite novels, Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962), The Blue Mountains of China (1970), My Lovely Enemy (1983), and Sweeter than All the World (2001), explore the history, traditions, and theological propensities of his own people. The first of these fictions is set in a closed immigrant community over the course of one year; the second spans the globe from Stalin’s Russia to Paraguay to Canada, over the duration of a century. In his later Mennonite novels Wiebe employs techniques of magic realism and postmodernism to investigate how the beliefs and practices of the Mennonites’ forebears can possibly inform the lives of his cynical late twentieth-century protagonists. Rudy Wiebe’s writing extends beyond his major novels to short fiction, including the
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WILSON, ETHEL
much anthologized “Where is the Voice Coming From?” (1974). He has published numerous collections of stories, essays, and “memories,” and the narrative documentary Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman (1998), with Yvonne Johnson, a descendant of Big Bear. A two-time recipient of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction (for Temptations and Discovery), Wiebe, an Officer of the Order of Canada, has had a palpable influence on the conditions writers enjoy in Canada: as founding vice president of the Writers’ Union of Canada, founding president of the Writers Guild of Alberta, and member of various national literary boards and juries. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Keith, W. J. (1981a). Epic Fiction: The Art of Rudy Wiebe. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. Keith, W. J. (ed.) (1981b). A Voice in the Land: Essays by and about Rudy Wiebe. Edmonton: NeWest. Tiessen, H. F. (2002). Rudy Wiebe: A Tribute. Kitchener, ON: Sand Hills. Van Toorn, P. (1995). Rudy Wiebe and the Historicity of the Word. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. Wiebe, R. (1962). Peace Shall Destroy Many. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Wiebe, R. (1970). The Blue Mountains of China. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Wiebe, R. (1973). The Temptations of Big Bear. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Wiebe, R. (1974). Where is the Voice Coming from? Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Wiebe, R. (1977). The Scorched-Wood People. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Wiebe, R. (1980). The Mad Trapper. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Wiebe, R. (1982). The Angel of the Tar Sands and Other Stories. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Wiebe, R. (1983). My Lovely Enemy. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Wiebe, R. (1989). Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic. Edmonton: NeWest. Wiebe, R. (1994). A Discovery of Strangers. Toronto: Knopf. Wiebe, R. (1995). River of Stone: Fictions and Memories. Toronto: Vintage.
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Wiebe, R. (1998). Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman. Toronto: Knopf. Wiebe, R. (2001). Sweeter than All the World. Toronto: Knopf. Wiebe, R. (2006). Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest. Toronto: Knopf.
Wilson, Ethel CAROLE GERSON
Ethel Wilson’s stylishly ironic novels and short stories, mostly written in the 1940s and 1950s, placed Vancouver and southwestern British Columbia on the national and international literary map. Her fiction creates a tension between her intense attachment to the region’s contrasting landscapes and her characters’ quests for belonging and social standing. Wilson received the Canada Council Medal in 1961, followed by the Lorne Pierce Medal of the Royal Society of Canada in 1964 and the Order of Canada in 1970. In 1985, her status as “the doyenne of British Columbia writers” (Stouck, in Wilson 1987, p. xvi) was further recognized in the establishment of British Columbia’s Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Ethel Davis Bryant was born on January 20, 1888 in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, where her English parents served as Methodist missionaries. Following her mother’s death in 1890, Ethel and her father returned to Britain, where her father raised her until his death when she was 9. Ethel was taken to Vancouver by her maternal grandmother, Ann Malkin, who had recently emigrated with her extended family. Ethel returned to England at 14 to attend a school that catered to Methodist ministers’ daughters, receiving a thorough grounding in English literature and social deportment. Upon returning to her grandmother’s strict household, she worked as an elementary schoolteacher for over a decade. Her life changed significantly in 1921 when she married the highly respected Dr. Wallace Wilson. The childless couple lived comfortably and happily in downtown Vancouver in an apartment filled with books. While her first published work appeared in 1919 as “The Surprising Adventures of Peter,” a children’s serial that ran in the Malkin grocery firm’s regular newspaper advertisement, Wilson
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claimed to have begun writing in the late 1930s in the family automobile while her husband made medical calls. Her “wish to present herself as a writer purely by chance, with no particular ambition to be published” (Stouck 119) has resulted in contradictory accounts of her work’s genesis. The New Statesman (London) accepted her first three stories, but the war disrupted this connection. Several more stories appeared in Canadian periodicals before she published her first book, the short novel Hetty Dorval (1947). Opening in the town of Lytton in the Fraser Canyon, it presents the story of the sophisticated and ambiguous Mrs. Dorval through the innocent eyes of Frankie Burnaby, a local teenager. Wilson’s stunning description of the confluence of two rivers, in which the muddy Fraser swallows the brilliant blue of the Thompson, serves as a metaphor for the threat posed by Hetty’s amoral seductiveness. The adult Frankie’s quotation of John Donne’s “No man is an Iland” would reappear in Wilson’s later fiction as one of her abiding images of human interaction. Well reviewed in England, Hetty Dorval might have been made into a film had not Wilson resisted the ethos of Hollywood. Archival evidence shows that Wilson worked for nearly 20 years on the family history that resulted in her second book, The Innocent Traveller (1949). This episodic narrative traces the collective story of the fictional Hastings family, based on the Malkins, in a witty portrait of middle-class Vancouver life in the early twentieth century. The story of Rose, a young orphan whose emigration from England to Vancouver parallels Wilson’s experience, intertwines with that of her innocent Aunt Topaz, who remains a cheerful spinster past her hundredth birthday. The rise of second-wave feminist criticism in the early 1970s contributed to the belated high standing of Swamp Angel (1954), which became Wilson’s most celebrated novel. In a memorable gesture of resistance, Maggie Vardoe dutifully prepares her husband’s dinner before she walks out the door to a waiting taxi, thereby escaping from an unpleasant marriage in Vancouver to a remote lake near Kamloops, BC, where she renews her spirits in the open landscape and learns independence and compassion running a fishing lodge. The book contains one of Wilson’s most unusual characters, the oracular Mrs. Severance, a
retired circus juggler who reminds Maggie of the importance of community. Less admired is The Equations of Love (1952), whose two novellas present working-class life in a rather condescending style. “Tuesday and Wednesday” recounts the ironic convergence of circumstances surrounding the accidental drowning of a tipsy laborer, and “Lily’s Story” commends an unwed mother’s determination to elevate her daughter to middle-class respectability. Wilson’s deftly ironic final novel, Love and Salt Water (1956), recounts a young woman’s conflicted search for independence and love following World War II; its portraits of the people she meets on a long sea journey and during stays on a coastal BC island are particularly memorable. In 1961, Wilson issued Mrs. Golightly and Other Stories. Formal yet shy, Ethel Wilson kept her distance from literary organizations. Her life diminished after her husband’s death in 1966, and following a stroke a few years later she took residence in a private hospital until her death on December 22, 1980. In 1981 she was subject of a symposium at the University of Ottawa, whose proceedings were published, and in 1987 David Stouck edited a selection of stories, essays, and letters from the University of British Columbia’s extensive Wilson archive. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); Feminism and Fiction (WF); Historical Fiction (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS McAlpine, M. (1988). The Other Side of Silence: A Life of Ethel Wilson. Madeira Park, BC: Harbour. McMullen, L. (ed.) (1982). The Ethel Wilson Symposium. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Pacey, D. (1967). Ethel Wilson. New York: Twayne. Stouck, D. (2003). Ethel Wilson: A Critical Biography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Wilson, E. (1947). Hetty Dorval. Toronto: Macmillan. Wilson, E. (1949). The Innocent Traveller. Toronto: Macmillan. Wilson, E. (1952). The Equations of Love. Toronto: Macmillan. Wilson, E. (1954). Swamp Angel. Toronto: Macmillan. Wilson, E. (1956). Love and Salt Water. Toronto: Macmillan.
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Wilson, E. (1961). Mrs. Golightly and Other Stories. Toronto: Macmillan. Wilson, E. (1987). Ethel Wilson: Stories, Essays, and Letters (ed. D. Stouck,). Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
Winton, Tim SALHIA BEN-MESSAHEL
Tim Winton’s writing concerns questions of community and the importance of landscape and seascape in coastal Australia. With a particular interest in the settler’s perception of the bush as a site of isolation and boundless space, his lyrical prose addresses themes of nostalgia, the loss of innocence, alienation, exile, and the human relationship to place. Born Timothy John Winton in Perth on August 4, 1960, he insists on the connection between his working-class background and his cultural identity as a Western Australian. The son of a police officer and a switchboard operator, Winton often refers to his forebears as a bunch of originals – a matriarchal grandmother who slept in a backyard tent and a grandfather who was a ventriloquist and magician. His family stories have influenced his representations of gender and class, and his writing often evokes Albany, the city in southwest Australia where he lived his adolescent years. Winton is an avid reader of adventure stories, particularly those set on desert islands or lonely beaches (1993a, 14–15), and he admires the work of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and Herman Melville. Elizabeth Jolley, his supervisor at the Western Institute of Technology, was also inspirational in the depiction of odd, eccentric, lonely, and marginal characters dealing with dark issues and trying to survive amid a symbolic environment. An Open Swimmer (1982), written at age 19, was an immediate success, winning Winton the Australian/Vogel National Literary Award for best first novel. Set in Western Australia, it describes the meanderings of Jerra Nilsam, a young Anglo-Australian whose search for a precious pearl is set against a background of family and country-town isolation, emphasizing the character’s stoicism and the greatness of failure along the remote coastal fringe. The sentimental
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longing for past happiness, encoded in the triptych structure of the book, reflects Winton’s nostalgia about childhood and history. Shallows (1984), a historical novel and winner of the Miles Franklin Award, harks back to the beginning of Western Australian settlement through intertextual and digressive narratives set in the 1830s and 1970s. Cleve Cookson, instructed by Daniel Coupar to read the journal for “the things that aren’t there” (14), journeys into the European settlement of Australia while a battle with conservationists and whalers ensues in the present. The novel’s examination of Australian history suggests that the resentments of the past and the realities of the present alienate individuals. With the short story collection Scission (1985), alienated characters try to escape from boredom, death, and domestic conflicts. A concise, fragmentary style encapsulates themes of division and separation along with the inner turmoil wrought by marriage, children, and divorce. Winton also shows an interest in Christian beliefs and human suffering. His third novel, That Eye, the Sky (1986), delves into the ominous and uncanny as a means of escaping from harsh realities. Set in a small country town near Perth, the plot suggests that full contentment is to be found in emptiness rather than plenitude through a symbolic connection with humanized natural elements. Beliefs and customs are subverted through humor; religion is demystified, and the signs and symbols Winton employs emerge as a hybrid of Christian and Antipodean experience. The dangers of materialism in the 1980s and the loss of human values surface through the innocent vision of an adolescent who experiences the abrupt loss of his father and subsequent disruption of his family. Winton expresses a tragic vision through contemplative nostalgia for a paradise lost. Modern violence and pain reverberate through Minimum of Two (1987), a short story collection whose overlapping narratives sketch a social history of Australia in the 1970s and 1980s. The reappearance of characters from earlier books, Jerra Nilsam from An Open Swimmer and Queenie Coupar from Shallows, creates what Winton calls “an imaginary republic” (Ben-Messahel 242) as stories build upon one another and characters travel through an alternative world. The stories are distinguished by their minimalist and formal
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style, fragmentary narrative structure, suggestive typographic elements, inconclusive endings, and marginal characters and places. In The Winter Dark (1988a), an adult novel, and Jesse (1988b), a children’s book, both advocate keeping small and pristine rural places intact; both involve personal journeys through an unknown and frighteningly beautiful environment. The former marks a shift in genre as Winton plays with gothic and fantastic elements conveyed through the somber, reflective mood of a firstperson narrator, Maurice Stubbs. Addressing what its epigraph calls “the pressure of darkness,” it depicts four protagonists haunted by an imaginary, surreal wild cat in the heart of a mystic forest. Large blank spaces at the beginning of each chapter, suggestive of the aesthetics of space and the open Australian landscape, foreshadow the deceptive life of alienated individuals. The 1998 film adaptation, directed by James Bogle, was hailed as a subversive and gripping experience. Throughout his career Winton has shown an interest in genre and in combining stories for multiple audiences. His six children’s books include the celebrated Lockie Leonard stories, adapted as a television series in 2007. Lockie Leonard, a teenager growing up in secure Angelus, is depicted as the emblematic figure of a young, innocent, free-spirited nation. Caught between childhood and adulthood, he evolves from a popular high school surf-rat to a determined battler for environmental causes. While in Europe from 1987 to 1988, and following a move to Lancelin, a fishing town north of Perth, Winton wrote Cloudstreet (1991b), winner of the Miles Franklin Award. This long and discontinuous narrative has roots in family mythology and the memory of provincial life in Perth between the late 1930s and 1960s. This saga of two working-class families, the Lambs and the Pickleses – a God-fearing family and an immoral mob respectively – is narrated through the juxtaposition of a voice that seems to be that of Fish Lamb, a retarded boy, with a third-person narrator. The dialogical form and use of the Australian vernacular alleviate the novel’s tragic events and prevailing despair. Confronted with Winton’s idiosyncratic style and playful punctuation and spelling, the 1998 stage adaptation lifts the dialogue from the book while retaining its exploration of the spirit of mateship, love and faith, and
connection with the land. Demystifying history by connecting the rational and the irrational, it uses ghostly Indigenous figures and Fish Lamb’s extratemporal visions to remind AngloAustralians about the importance of place and community. The semiautobiographical Land’s Edge (1993) incorporates images of coastal settings to suggest that people are an intrinsic part of their landscape. A stream-of-consciousness memoir of Winton’s boyhood, Land’s Edge advocates regional distinctiveness through the narrator’s identification with Australia’s southwest coast. A condition Patrick White diagnosed as “The Great Australian Emptiness” encourages Winton’s protagonists to embrace the spiritual and metaphysical environment as an expression of their true identity. The journey to the interior is projected outward onto an expressionistic landscape to develop as a parable of the wandering soul in the spiritual desert. Winton’s return from Europe in 1988 was marked by his heightened awareness of Australia’s distinctive postcolonial cultural identity. With The Riders (1995), winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Winton starts to write back to the past to explore that national identity. With its vistas of the Netherlands, Greece, Ireland, and Paris, the novel is considered his most European work. The story transposes autobiographical details and tackles cultural issues through the experience of Fred Scully, a foreign and alienated Antipodean character who searches desperately for his missing wife. His quest becomes a voyage into the heart of his country, and the novel includes allusions to classical and modern texts from Homer’s Odyssey to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Intertextuality is a ground for meaning beyond the text and for a discursive space that allows difference and identification with the “other.” The rejection of Eurocentric values expressed in The Riders extends to the appreciation of the Australian outback and an interest in Indigenous culture in Dirt Music (2001), winner of seven awards, including the Miles Franklin, and nominated for the 2002 Booker Prize. Winton shifts his focus from the coastal regions to the deserted Kimberley area in a fragmented narrative of the nomadic Luther Fox, a poacher compelled to escape White Point and leave his androgynous lover, Georgie. Winton’s belief that he can connect with the land only from the perspective of an
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Anglo-Australian (see Moran 12) is manifest in this novel. Magic realism combines Christian spirituality with anthropological observation and the “surrealism” of Indigenous dreaming narratives, advocating hybridity through a modern spiritual voyage. Winton’s focus on local rather than global or universal concepts reflects his skepticism about high-flown, abstract discourse and academia. He is a strong advocate of land preservation, active in the Save the Ningaloo Reef cause, and patron to the Australian Marine Conservation Society. His move to Fremantle, a port city on the outskirts of Perth, at the end of the 1990s, has secured both his involvement in local issues and his desire to write about the working class. Since men usually appear powerless when dealing with women in Winton’s fiction, questions of gender and masculinity are often raised in discussions of Winton’s work. Winton subverts modes inherited from the colonial period – for instance, the Australian mythologizing of the strong male and the emphasis on mateship – and interrogates gender identity by setting the sensitive male against the disturbed, contradictory, or matriarchal female. The Turning (2004), a short story collection of overlapping narratives, focuses on the traumatic evolution of Vic Lang, police officer’s son, suggesting that humanity and brutality lie beneath the character’s dilemmas and heroic ordinariness while female characters endure what Winton calls a “materialistic, closeminded, emotionally fearful, macho, pragmatic kind of culture” (Sibree 3). In Breath (2008) Winton draws from earlier stories to devote a whole novel to his love for surf and the sea. Reminiscent of the nostalgia and pain of Jerra Nilsam, this epic novel concerns a scarred adult, Bruce Pike, a paramedic called to an incident where a teenage boy has hanged himself, who is then prompted to remember his life as an 11-year-old growing up in the 1970s. The character’s journey into the past and the memory of his symbolic initiation with surf reiterates Winton’s major themes: the quest and self-discovery through hardships, the pains of growing up, and men’s difficulties expressing emotions. Winton’s narratives, with their intertwined histories and interdependent characters, suggest that everything is rooted in the earth and that cultural identity derives from the topography of
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place, from the displacement of the nomadic life. His work poses existential questions and reveals ethnographic and historical differences in a hybrid, postcolonial Australia. SEE ALSO: Australian Fiction (WF); Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (WF); Faulkner, William (AF); Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction (WF); Hemingway, Ernest (AF); Historical Fiction (WF); Jolley, Elizabeth (WF); McCarthy, Cormac (AF); O’Connor Flannery (AF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF); White, Patrick (WF) REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Ben-Messahel, S. (2006). Mind the Country: Tim Winton’s Fiction. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press. Bennett, B. (1991). An Australian Compass. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Bogle, J. (dir.) (1998). In the Winter Dark. RB Films. Moran, J. (1993). Tim Winton: Man of the Land. West Australian, pp. 11–16 (Dec. 11). Sibree, B. (1997). Solidarity with the Children. Canberra Times, C10 (June 14). Winton, T. (1982). An Open Swimmer. Sydney: Picador. Winton, T. (1984). Shallows. Ringwood, Vic.: McPhee Gribble. Winton, T. (1985). Scission and Other Stories. Ringwood, Vic.: McPhee Gribble. Winton, T. (1986). That Eye, the Sky. Ringwood, Vic.: McPhee Gribble. Winton, T. (1987). Minimum of Two. Ringwood, Vic.: McPhee Gribble. Winton, T. (1988a). In the Winter Dark. Melbourne: McPhee Gribble. Winton, T. (1988b). Jesse. Melbourne: McPhee Gribble. Winton, T. (1990). Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo. Ringwood, Vic.: McPhee Gribble. Winton, T. (1991a). The Bugalugs Bum Thief. Ringwood, Vic.: Puffin. Winton, T. (1991b). Cloudstreet. Ringwood, Vic.: McPhee Gribble. Winton, T. (1993a). Land’s Edge. Sydney: Macmillan. Winton, T. (1993b). Lockie Leonard, Scumbuster. Sydney: Piper. Winton, T. (1994). Local Colour: Travels in the Other Australia. St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin. Winton, T. (1995). The Riders. Sydney: Macmillan. Winton, T. (1997a). Blueback. Sydney: Pan Macmillan. Winton, T. (1997b). Lockie Leonard Legend. Sydney: Pan Macmillan.
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Winton, T. (1998a). Australian Colors: Images of the Outback. New York: Amphoto/Watson-Guptill. Winton, T. (1998b). The Deep. Sydney: Sandcastle. Winton, T. (2001). Dirt Music. Sydney: Macmillan. Winton, T. (2004). The Turning. Sydney: Picador. Winton, T. (2008). Breath. Sydney: Penguin/Hamish Hamilton.
Wiseman, Adele RUTH PANOFSKY
Adele Wiseman (1928–92) was an iconoclastic Canadian writer whose work brings together her private and public interests in the moral imperative of art and Jewish experience. An accomplished novelist, she was also a playwright, essayist, children’s author, short story writer, poet, and literary reviewer. A friend and mentor to other writers, she sustained an impressive number of correspondences with peers and colleagues throughout her life. Wiseman’s formative years in Winnipeg fed her imagination, nurtured her literary aspirations, and fostered the drive to fulfill them. Her parents had emigrated from the Ukraine in 1923 and spent two years in Montreal before settling in Winnipeg’s North End, a vibrant enclave of Jewish, German, Ukrainian, and Slavic immigrants. Born on May 28, 1928, Wiseman once described her North End upbringing as “the very incubator of conflicting absolutes” (1970, 105). Despite limited funds and a palpable marginalization, Wiseman flourished, producing writing that mines the prairie landscape and secular Jewish culture. Her Jewish sensibility differed markedly, however, from male writers such as Mordecai Richler and Philip Roth, whose predilection for satire she did not share. Wiseman earned a BA in English and psychology from the University of Manitoba in 1949. Following graduation, she lived abroad, writing and working at various jobs. From 1964 to 1969 Wiseman lived in Montreal where she taught English at Sir George Williams (now Concordia) University and McGill University. She was later writer-in-residence at several universities and head of a prestigious writing program in Banff, Alberta. She married Dmitry Stone in 1969 (whom she later divorced) and had one daughter.
Wiseman published two novels, The Sacrifice (1956), which won the Governor General’s Award for fiction, and Crackpot (1974). Both novels employ biblical metaphors, are set in (unnamed) Winnipeg, and explore the lives of Jewish immigrants. The Sacrifice tells the tragic story of Abraham, a butcher who murders a local temptress. Having lost his two eldest sons in a pogrom, Abraham, his wife Sarah, and their remaining son Isaac flee the Ukraine and settle on the Canadian prairies. As immigrants, the family members face new hardships in an unfamiliar environment and culture. The novel charts the clash of generations and the crushing demise of a patriarch who insists that God favors him as he murders Laiah, a sensual woman who seeks Abraham’s affection. The biblical story of Abraham and Isaac serves as shaping metaphor in a novel that focuses on modern Jewish experience and introduces Wiseman’s penchant for myth, characters who challenge normative behavior, and an affirming belief in community. The Sacrifice received widespread international attention and critical acclaim; it was one of the first novels to explore Jewish life in Canada, and Wiseman returned to this subject 18 years later in Crackpot. By then, her vision had become increasingly female-centered. To articulate that vision, Crackpot shifts to a comic mode and experiments with narrative form and perspective. At the center of this epic is Hoda, an obese Jewish prostitute, the daughter of a hunchbacked mother and a blind father who flee Russia for Canada. After her mother’s death, Hoda supports herself and her father through prostitution. The plot hinges on Hoda’s moral dilemma when her teenaged son (whom she abandoned at birth) visits her for sexual initiation. The choice she faces, between incestuous relations and sexual rejection, leads finally to personal and communal reconciliation. Hoda’s life, like Abraham’s, is shattered by moral and spiritual challenges; each remains a watershed figure in Canadian literature. Crackpot was later adapted into a play by Rachel Wyatt. One of Wiseman’s preferred forms was the essay. Inspired by her mother’s craft of dollmaking, Old Woman at Play (1978) is a moving testimonial to the mother–daughter bond and a sophisticated exploration of the creative impulse. A work of life writing that incorporates elements of autobiography, biography, memoir, and
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WISEMAN, ADELE
creative non-fiction, Old Woman reveals the unpretentious attitude toward art that informs all of Wiseman’s writing: “art, uncapitalized and unshunned, is our human birthright, the extraordinary right and privilege to share, both as givers and receivers, in the work of continuous creation” (146). In Memoirs of a Book Molesting Childhood and Other Essays (1987), the final book published during her lifetime, Wiseman favors the personal over the authoritative voice. This eclectic collection shows her broad knowledge of world literature, a fierce commitment to her craft, and generosity and loyalty to loved ones. In the short story about physically handicapped youths published just before her death, “Goon of the Moon and the Expendables” (1992), Wiseman’s vision remains one of singular generosity and community. Although Wiseman’s unconventional vision often challenged editors and publishers, she attributed high moral value to her writing. Her life was marked by a similar tenacity as she nurtured and cared for her daughter, parents, friends and colleagues, students, and those she perceived as oppressed. Her life is reflected in a body of work that speaks passionately for the marginalized and dispossessed – those denied comfort and security by the relentless force of circumstances. SEE ALSO: Canadian Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Jewish Fiction (BIF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Richler, Mordecai (WF); Roth, Philip (AF)
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Greene, E. (ed.) (1997). We Who Can Fly: Poems, Essays and Memories in Honour of Adele Wiseman. Dunvegan, ON: Cormorant. Lennox, J., & Panofsky, R. (eds.) (1997). Selected Letters of Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Panofsky, R. (1992). Adele Wiseman: An Annotated Bibliography. Toronto: ECW. Panofsky, R. (ed.) (1993). Adele Wiseman [special issue]. Room of One’s Own, 16(3). Panofsky, R. (ed.) (2001). Adele Wiseman: Essays on Her Works. Toronto: Guernica. Panofsky, R. (2006). The Force of Vocation: The Literary Career of Adele Wiseman. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. Rypp, H. (dir.) (1983). Old Woman at Play. Nepesh Theatre. Wiseman, A. (1956). The Sacrifice. Toronto: Macmillan. Wiseman, A. (1964). Old Markets, New World. Toronto: Macmillan. Wiseman, A. (1970). A Brief Anatomy of an Honest Attempt at a Pithy Statement about the Impact of the Manitoba Environment on My Development as an Artist. Mosiac, 3(3), 98–106. Wiseman, A. (1974). Crackpot. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Wiseman, A. (1978). Old Woman at Play. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin. Wiseman, A. (1987). Memoirs of a Book Molesting Childhood and Other Essays. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Wiseman, A. (1992). Goon of the Moon and the Expendables. Malahat Review, 98, 5–44. Wyatt, R. (1995). Crackpot: A Play. Toronto: Playwrights Canada.
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Z Zameenzad, Adam KAMILA SHAMSIE
Adam Zameenzad belongs to a generation of postcolonial South Asian writers who opened up the possibilities of the anglophone novel form in the 1980s. Yet it goes against the spirit of his work to speak of it in connection to a specific region. His characters inhabit a range of nations and identities, resulting in an oeuvre that adamantly refuses to view the world through any kind of narrowing lens, preferring to seek collective truths. Stylistically, there is an exuberance and generosity to his work, even while it depicts tragedy and injustice. Both the comic and the cosmic feature strongly in his fiction, which has been published and translated widely. Born on March 14, 1947 in Pakistan, Zameenzad spent part of his childhood in Nairobi, Kenya, and later lived in Canada and the US before moving to Britain. These geographical shifts are mirrored in a journey through faith: he was born into a liberal Muslim family but as a young man immersed himself in Buddhism, followed by a series of other religious traditions, before becoming an adherent of two diametrically opposed Christian denominations – Catholicism and Quakerism. Quests and voyages, both literal and allegorical, appear in much of his work. Zameenzad began writing novels as a steppingstone to having his poetry published, but the form soon drew him in. He was attracted by the novel’s ability to influence people around the world through stories, characters, and settings. His debut novel, The Thirteenth House (1987), winner
of the David Higham Prize for first fiction, is set in a poor Karachi suburb during the military regime of Zia ul-Haq. A concern for the dispossessed and the marginalized, a mark of all Zameenzad’s fiction, is already evident, as is his fierce criticism of charlatans who exploit people’s spiritual hunger. In this case, the charlatan is Shah Baba, a so-called holy man, who seizes upon Zahid and proceeds to divest him of his life savings. Many reviewers talked of the novel, and of Zameezad’s later work, as belonging to the realm of magic realism, a label he rejected. Overall, the book explores the possibility of a reality that extends beyond the world of so-called natural laws. In My Friend Matt and Hena the Whore (1988), Zameenzad explores brutality and the injustice of a globalized world via events in an unnamed East African country. In one of the most remarked-upon images of the novel, starving children watch the American soap opera Dallas on television. The child protagonist, Kimo, and his group of friends lead readers through a world of war with an effective mix of innocence, numbed horror, and lavatory humor. Despite all they witness in this often harrowing novel, they never lose their own humanity. Love, Bones and Water (1989) explores the lives shaken by the politically powerful. The central figure is, once more, a child – 9-year-old Peter Paul Poacher Peruva. Peter’s affluent and politically well-connected mother is the moving force behind a plan to remove the dwellers of a shanty town, in the name of progress. Peter’s identification with the victimized despite (or because of) the fact that his mother is chief among the
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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victimizers gives the novel much of its narrative thrust, continuing Zameezad’s exploration of those who refuse to set aside their own compassion even in the face of inhumanity. The blurring of realism, myth, and allegory that is often a feature of Zameenzad’s work takes shape primarily through the mutilated mysterious figure of the Grey Man who functions as a messiah figure for the shanty-dwellers. In Cyrus, Cyrus (1990), Zameenzad gives the eponymous hero a name that straddles cultures – appearing, as it does, in biblical, Greco-Roman, and Persian literature. The antihero of this picaresque novel is an untouchable, born in India, who travels through various worlds and ultimately makes it all the way to hell/Hades. Rather than trotting out East/West binaries, the novel weaves a rich tapestry through “Eastern, Inner, Western, Under, and Prison” worlds. In Zameenzad’s follow-up novel, Gorgeous White Female (1995), the desire for transformation pushes the preadolescent, dark-skinned Lahya Cenna into a Faustian pact with the goddess Kali as he strives obsessively to become a white female. Through Cenna and other characters in the novel Zameenzad explores questions of gender identification and alternative sexualities. Zameenzad’s skill at using young narrators to animate stories of injustice and hope continues in Pepsi and Maria (2004), set in an unnamed Latin American country, which focuses on the lives of young street children trying to escape a murderous policeman. A debilitating accident in 2000 forced Zameenzad to write shorter pieces and deepen his focus on writing poetry, but without giving up on the novel form. It is possible to see Zameenzad’s fiction as prefiguring work by writers such as Kiran Desai and David Mitchell whose writing leaps from one continent to another. Yet, while Zameenzad
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chooses different locations for different works, within each novel the characters often stay in the country of their birth, and only Cyrus, Cyrus has a multination narrative. What remains consistent through his work is its interest in faith, mysticism, sexuality, injustice, and quests for truth, often told via child protagonists and always shot through with humor. SEE ALSO: Black British Fiction (WF); Humor and Satire (WF); Migration, Diaspora, and Exile in Fiction (WF); Pakistani Fiction (WF); Politics/Activism and Fiction (WF); Postcolonialism and Fiction (WF); Realism/Magic Realism (WF)
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Bomb (2008). Indrana Amirthanayagam and Adam Zameenzad. Bomb, 103, 88–96. Bradbury, M. (1994). The Modern British Novel. London: Penguin. Hashmi, A. (1992). Current Pakistani Fiction. Commonwealth Novel in English, 5(1), 59–64. Shamsie, M. (2006). The Pakistani English Novel: Tales of Conflict and Violence. In Troubled Times, Sustainable Development and Governance in the Age of Extremes. Karachi: Sustainable Development Policy Institute/Sama, pp. 630–642. Zameenzad, A. (1987). The Thirteenth House. London: Fourth Estate. Zameenzad, A. (1988). My Friend Matt and Hena the Whore. London: Fourth Estate. Zameenzad, A. (1989). Love, Bones and Water. London: Fourth Estate. Zameenzad, A. (1990). Cyrus, Cyrus. London: Fourth Estate. Zameenzad, A. (1995). Gorgeous White Female. London: Fourth Estate. Zameenzad, A. (2004). Pepsi and Maria. London: Maia.
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Index
Note: Page references in bold type indicate main references to each writer. Aaron, Jane, A View across the Valley 388 Abbasi, Talat 1278 Abe, Kobo 1056 Abercrombie, Lascelles 107 Abish, Walter 422 works: 99: The New Meaning 442; Alphabetical Africa 442 Abrahams, Peter 942–3 and censorship 1004 works: The Black Experience in the Twentieth Century 943; A Black Man Speaks of Freedom! 942; Dark Testament 942; Mine Boy 942, 1353; A Night of Their Own 943; The Path of Thunder 942, 1353; Return to Goli 943; Song of the City 942, 1353; Tell Freedom 942, 943, 1353; This Island Now 943, 1353; The View from Coyaba 943; Wild Conquest 942–3, 1130, 1353; A Wreath for Udomo 943, 1353 Abse, Dannie, The Presence 20 academy: and English Studies 161–5, 1062 and postcolonialism 1284–5 Achebe, Chinua 297, 938–9, 943–7 awards and prizes 945, 946–7, 975 and censorship 1004 and Conrad 79, 944 English Studies and the Academy 1062 politics and activism 940, 946 and publishing industry 1292 and realism 1304 works: Anthills of the Savannah 295, 297, 940, 946–7; Arrow of God 845, 1078, 1130; Beware Soul Brother 946; Girls at War and Other Stories 946; A Man of the People 946, 1143; No Longer at Ease 944, 945–6, 1015; Things Fall Apart 62, 80, 153, 294, 937, 943–5, 1057, 1063, 1078, 1082, 1130, 1287, 1380, 1382 Acker, Kathy 427–8 and the avant garde 422, 441, 740 and postmodernism 360, 422, 427, 776 works: Blood and Guts in High School 428; Don Quixote 104, 441; Empire of the Senseless 428,
776; Great Expectations 441; Hello, I’m Erica Jong 427; Kathy Goes to Haiti 427; My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini 441; Pussy, King of the Pirates 428 Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective and The Burning Bombing of America 428 Ackroyd, Peter 7–8 awards and prizes 975 and London 7–8, 235, 347 and postmodernismm 7, 94 works: Chatterton 310; English Music 8; The Great Fire of London 7; Hawksmoor 7–8, 235–6, 311; The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde 8; London: The Biography 235 activism see politics Adams, Douglas, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 334 Adams, Henry 423, 590 The Education of Henry Adams 627–8 Adamson, Judith 169 Adebayo, Diran: My Once upon a Time 297 Some Kind of Black 297, 985 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi: Half a Yellow Sun 975, 1131, 1380 Purple Hibiscus 1380 Adiga, Aravind, The White Tiger 1015 Adorno, Theodor 516, 717, 906 African diaspora 294–7 and Achebe 295 and Emecheta 1058–60 and Phillips (Caryl) 288–9 Afrika, Tatamkhulu 1297 Afrofuturism 479 Agard, John 1011 Agee, James 248–50 awards and prizes 429 works: Agee on Film 429; “Comedy’s Greatest Era” 429; A Death in the Family 429; “Knoxville: Summer 1915” 429; Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 428–30, 829; Permit Me Voyage 429 Ahenakew, Edward, Voices of the Plains Cree 1150
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction General editor: Brian W. Shaffer Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
Ahmad, Aijaz 1033, 1286 Ahmad, Rukhsana 1278 Aidoo, Ama Ata 948–9 and feminist activism 948–9, 1143, 1283 influence 1021 and publishing industry 948 and queer/alternative sexualities 1297 works: Anowa 948; Changes 948–9, 1074; The Dilemma of a Ghost 948, 949; The Girl Who Can and Other Stories 948; No Sweetness Here 948, 1380; Our Sister Killjoy 948, 949, 1222–3, 1297 Aiken, Conrad: Blue Voyage 237 and Markson 685 Aiken, Joan 71, 73 Aitkin, Will 1298 Akare, Thomas 1054 Akutagawa, Ryunosuke 1056 Alderman, Naomi 201 Alderson, David 179 Aldington, Richard 8–9, 103, 349 and Lawrence 220 works: All Men are Enemies 9; The Colonel’s Daughter 9; Death of a Hero 9, 260, 289, 414; Roads to Glory 9; Women Must Work 9 Aldiss, Brian 335 works: Helliconia trilogy 334–5; Non-Stop 334; Report on Probability A 334 Alexie, Robert, Porcupines and China Dolls 1150 Alexie, Sherman 430–1 awards and prizes 431 and road novels 423 works: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian 431; Flight 431; Indian Killer 431; The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven 431; Reservation Blues 431; Ten Little Indians 431; “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona” 431, 802; The Toughest Indian in the World 431 Algonquin Round Table 569, 763 Algren, Nelson 424, 432–3 awards and prizes 432 and Dahlberg 508 and Federal Writers’ Project 923 influence 868 and realism 422 works: Chicago: City on the Make 432; Man With the Golden Arm 432, 433, 502; The Neon Wilderness 432; Never Come Morning 432; Somebody in Boots 432, 433; A Walk on the Wild Side 433 Ali, Ahmed 949–50, 1148
1401
works: Angarey 949, 1003; Ocean of Night 949, 950; Of Rats and Diplomats 949, 950 Sholay 949; Twilight in Delhi 939, 949–50, 1003, 1277 Ali, Monica: Alentejo Blue 1064 Brick Lane 300, 301, 1005, 1016, 1064 Ali, Tariq: Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree 1278 A Sultan in Palermo 1278 Allan, Dot, Makeshift 340 Allfrey, Phyllis, The Orchid House 1080, 1083 Allingham, Margery 268 Allison, Dorothy, Bastard Out of Carolina 838 Allott, Kenneth and Farris, Miriam 168 Almond, David 72 Alsanea, Rajaa, Girls of Riyadh 1063 Althusser, Louis 1029, 1032 Altman, Dennis 1297 Aluko, T. M., One Man, One Machet 1143 Alvarez, A. 357 Amadahy, Zainab, The Moons of Palmares 1067 Amadi, Elechi 950–2 works: The Concubine 951, 1380; The Dancer of Johannesburg 951; Estrangement 951; Ethics in Nigerian Culture 950, 951; The Great Ponds 951, 1380; Isiburu 951; Peppersoup 951; The Road to Ibadan 951; The Slave 951, 1380; Sunset in Biafra 950, 951; The Woman of Calabar 951 Amis, Kingsley 10–12 and angry young man fiction 4, 10, 16 awards and prizes 11 critique of modernism 10, 308 and Golding 157 influence 47 and ladlit 70 and realism 3, 4, 10, 12, 264 as satirist 10–12 works: The Alteration 11; The Amis Anthology 12; The Amis Collection 12; The Anti-Death League 10, 11; An Arts Policy 11; The Biographer’s Moustache 10; The Book of Bond 10; Bright November 10; “Communication and the Victorian Poet” 10; Ending Up 11; Every Day Drinking 11; How’s Your Glass? 11; I Like It Here 11; Jake’s Thing 11; Lucky Jim 4, 10, 11, 17, 55, 291; Lucky Jim’s Politics 11; Memoirs 12; New Maps of Hell 10; The Old Devils 10, 11–12; On Drink 11; One Fat Englishman 11; The Pleasure of Poetry 12; The Russian Girl 12; Socialism and the Intellectuals 10–11; Stanley and the Women 10, 11; Take a Girl Like You 11; That Uncertain Feeling 11; We are All Guilty 11
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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INDEX
Amis, Martin 13–15 awards and prizes 13 and London 7, 235 and Nabokov 729 and postmodernism 5, 92, 94 as satirist 13, 14, 235 works: Dead Babies 13; Einstein’s Monsters 13; Experience 11, 14; Heavy Water and Other Stories 14; House of Meetings 14; The Information 13; Koba the Dread 14; London Fields 13, 14, 235, 311; Money: A Suicide Note 5, 13, 292; The Moronic Inferno 13; Night Train 14; Other People: A Mystery Story 13, 311; The Pregnant Widow 15; The Rachel Papers 13, 14; The Second Plane 13, 14–15; Success 13; Time’s Arrow 13–14; The War against Cliche 14; Yellow Dog 14 Anand, Mulk Raj 398, 949, 952–4, 1045 awards and prizes 953, 954 and Hosain 1136 politics and activism 940, 952, 1281–2 and publishing industry 1291 and realism 952, 1303 works: Across the Black Waters 953; The Big Heart 953; The Bubble 953; Confessions of a Lover 953; Coolie 299, 953; Death of a Hero 954; Little Plays of Mahatma Gandhi 953 Morning Face 953; Nine Moods of Bharata 953; The Old Woman and the Cow (Gauri) 53–4; Private Life of an Indian Prince 953; Reflections on the White Elephant 954 The Road 954; Seven Summers 953; The Sword and the Sickle 953, 1282; Two Leaves and a Bud 953; Untouchable 299, 952–3, 1147, 1282, 1300; The Village 953 Anaya, Rudolfo 422, 434–5 awards and prizes 434 and Traven 872 works: The Adventures of Juan Chicaspatas 434; Albuquerque 434; “Aztlan: A Homeland without Boundaries” 434; Bless Me, Ultima 434; A Chicano in China 434; Curse of the ChupaCabra 434; Elegy on the Death of Cesar Chavez 434; Heart of Aztlan 434; Jemez Spring 434; The Legend of La Llorrona 434; Lord of the Dawn 434; “The New World Man” 434; Rio Grande Fall 434; Shaman Winter 434; Tortuga 434; Zia Summer 434 Anderson, Barbara, Girls High 1261 Anderson, Benedict 547–8, 1031, 1304–5 Anderson, Jessica 955–6
awards and prizes 955, 956 works: The Commandant 955–6; The Impersonators (The Only Daughter) 956; The Last Man’s Head 955; One of the Wattle Birds 956; An Ordinary Lunacy 955; Stories from the Warm Zone 955, 956; Taking Shelter 956; Tirra Lirra by the River 955, 956 Anderson, Lindsay 16, 355 Anderson, Margaret 435, 667 669, 716 Anderson, Sherwood 135 435–7, 555 and Frank 577 influence 435, 562, 971 and modernism 421–2, 715, 741 and Stein 848 works: Beyond Desire 437; Dark Laughter 436, 437; Death in the Woods 436–7; Hello Towns 437; Horses and Men 436; Kit Brandon 437; Many Marriages 436; Marching Men 435; MidAmerican Chants 435; Poor White 436; Puzzled America 437; Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs 437; A Story Teller’s Story 437; Tar: A Midwest Childhood 437; The Triumph of the Egg 436; Windy McPherson’s Son 435; Winesburg, Ohio 435, 436, 557, 849, 853 Angelou, Maya 510, 838, 866 angry young man fiction 4, 15–18, 291, 906 as anti-modernist 16–17 Annan, Noel 322 Ansen, Alan 582 Anthony, Michael 303, 956–7 works: All That Glitters 957; The Games were Coming 956–7; Green Days by the River 957; The Year in San Fernando 306, 957 Antin, David 440 After the War: A Long Novel With Few Words 441 Antoni, Robert 958–9 works: Blessed is the Fruit 958–9; Carnival 959; Divina Trace 958, 959, 1385; My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales 959 Anzaldua, Gloria, Borderlands/La Frontera 466 Appiah, A. K. 470, 1272 Appignanesi, Lisa 201 Arac de Nyeko, Monica 1055 Aram, Tahima, A Golden Age 975 Arana, Victoria and Ramey, Lauri 297 Arasanayagam, Jean 959–60 works: The Cry of the Kite 960; All is Burning 960; Apocalypse ‘83 960; The Dividing Line 960; Dragons in the Wilderness 960; In the Garden Secretly 960; Kindura 960; A Nice Burgher Girl 960; The Outsider 960; Peacocks and Dreams 960 Aravamudan, Srinivas 1045
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
Arden, John 16 Armah, Ayi Kwei 961–2 and queer/alternative sexualities 1297 works: The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 961, 1143, 1287, 1381, 1382; The Eloquence of the Scribes 962; Fragments 961–2; The Healers 962, 1382; KMT: In the House of Life 962; Osiris Rising 962; Two Thousand Seasons 962, 1297; Why Are We So Blest? 962, 1297 Armstrong, Jeanette 999, 1212 works: Slash! 1150; Whispering in Shadows 1150 Arnold, Matthew 180 works: Culture and Anarchy 54; “Dover Beach” 2 Ashbery, John 7, 440 Three Poems 440 Ashley, Robert, Perfect Lives 440 Ashton-Warner, Sylvia, Spinster 1261 Asian American fiction 604–5, 654–5, 659–60, 862–3 Asimov, Isaac 841, 842 Aslam, Nadeem 963–4 awards and prizes 963 works: Maps for Lost Lovers 301, 963, 1278; Season of the Rainbirds 963; The Wasted Vigil 963–4, 1278 Astley, Thea 964–5 awards and prizes 964 works: The Acolyte 964–5, 1142; Beachmasters 965; A Boat Load of Home Folk 965; Coda 965; Drylands 964; Girl with a Monkey 964; Hunting the Wild Pineapple 965; It’s Raining in Mango 965; A Kindness Cup 965; Reaching Tin River 965; The Slow Natives 964; The Well Dressed Explorer 964 Atwood, Margaret 372, 965–9, 997 awards and prizes 966, 968, 969, 975 and feminism 940, 967, 998, 1072, 1283 and Southern Ontario Gothic 966, 967, 1038 works: Alias Grace 177, 969, 998, 1073, 1131; The Animals in That Country 966; The Blind Assassin 869, 968; Bluebeard’s Egg 966, 968; Bodily Harm 966, 968; Cat’s Eye 968, 1073; The Circle Game 177; Dancing Girls 968; Double Persephone 966; The Edible Woman 966, 967, 1283; “An End to Audience” 969; Good Bones 968; The Handmaid’s Tale 122, 966, 968, 969, 998, 1066, 1072, 1083, 1141; The Journals of Susanna Moodie 966–7, 969; Lady Oracle 966, 967, 968, 1079; Morning in the Burned House 967; Oryx and Crake 966, 968–9, 1066, 1141; The Penelopiad 966; Power Politics 966; Procedures for Underground 966; The Robber Bride 966,
1403
968, 1073; Strange Things 968; Surfacing 967, 1078, 1083; Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature 965–6, 967–8; True Stories 968; Two-Headed Poems 966; Wilderness Tips 968; The Year of the Flood 966, 968 Auden, W. H. 135, 186–7, 188, 268, 367, 376, 697 Auster, Paul 422, 425, 438–9 awards and prizes 438 and critical theory 95 works: The Art of Hunger 438; The Book of Illusions 438; The Brooklyn Follies 438; City of Glass 438; Ghosts 438; Hand to Mouth 438; In the Country of Last Things 438, 439, 882; The Invention of Solitude 438; Leviathan 438; The Locked Room 438; Moon Palace 438; Mr Vertigo 438; The Music of Chance 438, 439; Oracle Night 438; Timbuktu 438; Travels in the Scriptorium 438; White Spaces 438 Austin, J. L. 1031–2 Australian fiction 937, 970–3 awards and prizes 970, 971, 972, 976, 986, 1093, 1388 for children and young adults 1012–13, 1333, 1363, 1394 and the city 972, 1388 and colonialism 1388 and English Studies 1062 fantasy 1151, 1394 and feminism 1073, 1115 film adaptations 1081, 1082, 1394 historical fiction 1130–1, 1389, 1393 humor and satire 1141, 1143 Indigenous fiction 971, 1151, 1241–3, 1333 magic realism 1333, 1395 modernism 971, 1128, 1385–7 and politics and activism 940, 971, 1072, 1281, 1289–90, 1395 and postcolonialism 1001, 1002, 1288, 1394 and postmodernism 972 queer/alternative sexualities 1297, 1312 and realism 971, 1290, 1363, 1386 science fiction 1067 speculative fiction 1067 and World War I 1131 avant garde novels 422, 439–43, 476, 666 American see Acker, Kathy; Barnes, Djuna; Burroughs, William; Faulkner, William; Kerouac, Jack; Mathews, Harry; Miller, Henry; Oates, Joyce Carol; Selby, Hubert Jr.; Sorrentino, Gilbert; Spiegelman, Art; Stein, Gertrude; Toomer, Jean; West, Nathanael British see Johnson, B. S.; Sinclair, Iain
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
1404
INDEX
avant garde novels (Continued ) and comics 845 Edwardian 110 and little magazines 439 and phenomenology 441–2 world fiction see Bail, Murray Avedon, Richard 447 Aw, Tash, The Harmony Silk Factory 1352 awards and prizes: African fiction 977 American fiction 21, 429, 536 Asian fiction 976–7 Australian fiction 970, 971, 972, 976, 986, 1093 British and Irish fiction 19–22, 46, 57 Canadian fiction 976, 988 New Zealand fiction 976 Southern African fiction 990 West Indian fiction 977 world fiction 21, 973–7, 1056, 1063 see also critical theory; publishing industry Awekotuku, Ngahuia Te: Ruahine: Mythic Women 1152 Tahuri 1152, 1297 Awoonor, Kofi 977–8, 1382 works: The Breast of the Earth 978; Comes the Voyager at Last 978; The House by the Sea 978; The Latin American and Caribbean Notebook 978; Night of My Blood 977; Rediscovery and Other Poems 977–8; This Earth, My Brother 977–8, 1382; Until the Morning After 978 Azzopardi, Trezza, The Hiding Place 292, 388 B^a, Mariama, So Long a Letter 1380 Bacon, Francis, New Atlantis 369 Baddiel, David 201 Bail, Murray 980–1 awards and prizes 981 works: Camouflage 981; Contemporary Portraits and Other Stories 980; Eucalyptus 981; Holden’s Performance 980–1; Homesickness 980; The Pages 981 Bainbridge, Beryl 24–5 awards and prizes 25 works: According to Queenie 24–5; An Awfully Big Adventure 24; The Birthday Boys 24–5; The Dressmaker 24; English Journey 25; Every Man for Himself 24, 25; Front Row 25; The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress 24; Harriet Said 24; Injury Time 24; Master Georgie 24, 25; Sweet William 24; Young Adolf 24 Baingana, Doreen 1055 Baker, Nicholson 445–6
and politics 446 works: A Box of Matches 445–6; Checkpoint 446; Double Fold: The Assault on Libraries and Paper 446; The Everlasting Story of Nory 445; The Fermata 445; Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II 446; The Mezzanine 445; Room Temperature 445; The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber 446; U and I: A True Story 446; Vox 445 Baker, Pat Heretaunga, Behind the Tattooed Face 1152 Baker, R. 181, 182 Bakhtin, Mikhail 94, 440, 1029, 1181 Balch, Jack, Lamps at High Noon 922 Baldick, Chris 1032 Baldwin, James 424, 446–9 and Du Bois 533 and expatriate fiction 555, 557 and gender 446 and homosexuality 447, 448–9, 791 influence 288, 447 and myth of black sexuality 448 and Styron 859 works: Another Country 448; “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy” 448; Blues for Mister Charlie 448; “The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King” 448; “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American” 448; “Everybody’s Protest Novel” 447; Evidence of Things Not Seen 449; The Fire Next Time 448, 915; Giovanni’s Room 448, 557–8; Go Tell It on the Mountain 447, 503; “Going to Meet the Man” 448; “Here Be Dragons” 448; If Beale Street Could Talk 449; Just Above My Head 447, 449; “A Letter from the South” 448; “Many Thousands Gone” 447; No Name in the Street 449; “Notes of a Native Son” 447; Nothing Personal (with Avedon) 447; “Preservation of Innocence” 448; “Sonny’s Blues” 447; “Stranger in the Village” 447; Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone 447, 448; and Wright 447, 929 Baldwin, William 1052 Ball, John Clement 1078 Ballantyne, David, The Cunninghams 1261 Ballard, J. G. 26–7 and censorship 26 film adaptations 27 and London 7, 26–7 and postmodernism 26 and realism 95 and science fiction 26, 27, 334, 843
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
works: The Atrocity Exhibition 26, 311, 334; Cocaine Nights 27; Concrete Island 26–7, 334; Crash 25, 311, 334; The Drowned World 26, 334; Empire of the Sun 26, 27; Hello America 334; High-Rise 27, 334; The Kindness of Women 27; Kingdom Come 27; Millennium People 27; Miracles of Life 27; Running Wild 27; Super-Cannes 27; The Unlimited Dream Company 27; The Voices of Time 26 Bang, Young-ung 1057 Banker, Ashok 1068 Banks, Iain: The Bridge 342 The Wasp Factory 342 Banks, Lynne Reid, The L-Shaped Room 17 Banks, Russell 449–51 and race 450 works: Affliction 450; The Book of Jamaica 450; The Cloudsplitter 450; Continental Drift 450; The Darling 450; Family Life 450; Hamilton Stark 450; The Relation of My Imprisonment 450; The Reserve 451; Rule of the Bone 450; Success Stories 450; The Sweet Hereafter 450; Trailerpark 450 Banville, John 28–9 awards and prizes 28, 192 and crime fiction 192 and historiographic metafiction 28 and postmodernism 92, 192, 301 and realism 94, 192 and Swift 357 works: Athena 28, 192; Birchwood 28, 310 The Book of Evidence 28, 192; The Broken Jug 29; Christine Falls 29; Doctor Copernicus 28, 192, 310; Eclipse 28, 29; Ghosts 28; God’s Gift 29; Kepler 28, 192; The Lemur 29; Long Lankin 28; Love in the Wars 29; Mefisto 18, 192; The Newton Letter 28, 192; Nightspawn 28; The Sea 28, 29; Shroud 28–9; The Silver Swan 29; The Untouchable 28–9 Baratham, Gopal 981–2, 1351 works: A Candle or the Sun 982, 1352; The Caning of Michael Fay 982; The City of Forgetting 982; Figments of Experience 982; Memories That Glow in the Dark 982; Moonrise, Sunset 982; People Make You Cry 982; Sayang 982 Barfield, Owen 114 Barke, James, The Land of the Leal 341 Barker, Nicola, and critical theory 92, 95 Barker, Pat 29–31, 412 awards and prizes 30, 120 and feminism 120–1
1405
works: Another World 30; Blow Your House Down 30; Border Crossing 30; Double Vision 30, 31; The Eye in the Door 30; The Ghost Road 30, 120; Life Class 31, 415; Liza’s England 30; The Man Who Wasn’t There 30; Regeneration 30, 31, 120, 415; Union Street 30, 120–1, 410 Barnard, Marjorie 1092 Barnes, Djuna 102, 451–3 and high modernism 422, 451, 452–3, 716, 790 and intertextuality 452, 453 and little magazines 452 works: The Antiphon 451, 452, 453; A Book (A Night Among the Horses) 451; Ladies Almanack 451; Nightwood 441, 451, 453, 555; Poe’s Mother 451; Ryder 451, 452, 453 Barnes, Julian 31–3 awards and prizes 32, 33, 975 and London 31 and postmodernism 5, 94 works: Arthur and George 33; Before She Met Me 31–2; Cross Channel 33; Duffy 31; England, England 33; Fiddle City 31; Flaubert’s Parrot 5, 32, 310, 626; Going to the Dogs 31, 32; A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters 32, 61; The Lemon Table 33; Letters from London 33; Love, Etc. 33; Metroland 31, 32, 33; Nothing to be Frightened of 32, 33; The Pedant in the Kitchen 33; The Porcupine 33; Putting the Boot In 31, 32; Something to Declare 33; Staring at the Sun 32; Talking It Over 32–3 Baron, Alexander 199 Barreca, Regina 381 Barrett, Robert G. 1048 Barrie, J. M.: Auld Licht Idylls 340 Peter Pan 111 Barry, Sebastian 42 Barstow, Stan 16 Barth, John 454–7, 586 awards and prizes 455 influence 1007 and metafiction 808 and minimalist fiction 707 and postmodernism 4, 454, 455, 486, 505, 627, 773, 775 and realism 265 and television 864 works: The Book of Ten Nights and a Night 456, 457; Chimera 456, 457; Coming Soon!!!! A Narrative 457; The Development 456; The End of the Road 455–6, 801; The Floating Opera 455–6, 457; The Friday Book 455;
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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INDEX
Barth, John (Continued ) Further Fridays 456; Giles Goat-Boy 456; The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor 455, 456 LETTERS 455–6; “The Literature of Exhaustion” 455; “The Literature of Replenishment” 455; Lost in the Funhouse 455, 456, 457, 775; On With the Story 456; Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera 457; Sabbatical: A Romance? 457; The Sot-Weed Factor 454, 456, 628; The Tidewater Tales 457; Where Three Roads Meet 456 Barthelme, Donald 458–9 awards and prizes 458 influence 459, 896, 1007 and postmodernism 458, 505, 775 works: Amateurs 459; “The Balloon” 896; City Life 458; Come Back, Dr. Caligari 458; The Dead Father 459; Forty Stories 459; Great Days 459; Guilty Pleasures 458; The King 459; Not-Knowing 459; Overnight to Many Distant Cities 459; Paradise 459; Sadness 459; Sam’s Bar 459; Sixty Stories 459; Snow White 458; The Teachings of Don B. 459; Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts 458 Barthelme, Frederick, Moon Deluxe 707 Barthes, Roland 95, 125, 310–11, 553, 1030, 1032, 1076, 1084, 1178 Baudrillard, Jean 5, 515 Baughan, Blanche, Brown Bread from a Colonial Oven 1260 Bauling, Jayne, E Eights 977 Baum, L. Frank, Oz narratives 114, 127 Baxter, John 1067 Baxter, Stephen, Evolution 335 Bazin, Andre 125 Beach, Sylvia 206–7, 716 Beat Generation 427, 471, 476, 556, 651, 773, 801, 1214 see also Burroughs, William; Ginsberg, Allen; Kerouac, Jack; Sinclair, Iain Beattie, Ann, The Burning House 707 Beauman, Sally, Rebecca’s Tale 122 Beck, Mordechai 200 Beckett, Samuel 34–8, 154, 1187 and avant garde novelists 5 awards and prizes 37, 190 and censorship 35–6 critical studies 38 influence 38, 124, 211, 361, 438, 1225 and Joyce 35, 36, 37, 190, 207, 209 and modernism 3, 28, 92, 95, 190, 261, 308 and O’Brien (Flann) 275 and realism 95
works: Company 34, 37, 38; Dream of Fair to Middling Women 35; The End 34; Endgame 37; Enough 37, 38; Fizzles 37; From an Abandoned Work 36; Happy Days 37; How It Is 37–8; Ill Seen Ill Said 37, 38; Imagination Dead Imagine 37; Krapp’s Last Tape 35; Lessness 37; Malone Dies 19, 34, 36–7, 190; Mercier and Camier 190; Molloy 36, 190; More Pricks Than Kicks 35–6; Murphy 36, 190; Not I 37; Ohio Impromptu 37; A Piece of Monologue 37; Ping 37; Proust 35; Rockaby 37; Stirrings Still 36; Texts for Nothing 37; The Unnamable 36, 37, 38, 190; Waiting for Godot 35, 37; Watt 36, 190; Worstward Ho 37 Beerbohm, Max 376 Zuleika Dobson 54, 110 Begley, Adam 89 Behn, Aphra, Oroonoko 78 Behr, Mark, The Smell of Apples 1355 Behrendt, Lisa, Home 1151 Beith, John Hay (Ian Hay), The First Hundred Thousand 413 Bellamy, Dodie, The Letters of Mina Harker 441 Bellamy, Edward, Looking Backward 369, 370, 879–80 Belleau, Lesley, Colour of Dried Bones 1151 Bellow, Saul 459–63, 540, 586 awards and prizes 460, 461 and Federal Writers’ Project 923 influence 250, 650 and Jewish life 810 and Ozick 759 and politics 432 and postmodernism 773 works: The Actual 462–3; The Adventures of Augie March 460; The Bellarosa Connection 462; Dangling Man 460, 773; The Dean’s December 462; Henderson the Rain King 461; Herzog 461; Him With His Foot in His Mouth 462; Humboldt’s Gift 461–2, 553; It All Adds Up 462; To Jerusalem and Back 462; The Last Analysis 461; More Die of Heartbreak 462; Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories 461; Mr. Sammler’s Planet 461; Ravelstein 463; Seize the Day 460–1; A Theft 462; The Victim 460 Benchley, Robert 1187 Benjamin, Floella, Coming to England 74 Benjamin, Walter 41, 501, 717 Bennett, Arnold 39–40, 101, 106, 109 critique 40 influence 314 and Joyce 108
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
and realism 39, 107–8, 111 and Wells 384 and West 392 and Woolf 40, 107, 111 works: Anna of the Five Towns 39; Clayhanger 39, 110; Hilda Lessways 39, 110; A Man from the North 39; Milestones 40; The Old Wives’ Tale 39–40; Riceyman Steps 232; These Twain 39; Those United States 39; Whom God Hath Joined 39 Bennett, Gwendolyn, “Wedding Day” 670 Bennett, Louise 234 Bentley, N. 18 Beresford, J. D., The Hampdenshire Wonder 333 Berger, John 40–2, 309 awards and prizes 41 influence 41, 1287 works: From A to X 41; G. 41; Here is Where We Meet 41; Lilac and Flag 41; Once in Europa 41; A Painter of Our Time 41; Pig Earth 41; A Seventh Man 41; To the Wedding 41; Ways of Seeing 41 Berger, Thomas 464–5 awards and prizes 465 works: Arthur Rex 465; Crazy in Berlin 464; The Feud 464; Killing Time 464; Little Big Man 464, 465; Meeting Evil 464; Neighbors 464; Nowhere 464; Orrie’s Story 465; Regiment of Women 465, 882; Reinhart in Love 464; Reinhart’s Women 464, 465; The Return of Little Big Man 464; Robert Crews 465; Sneaky People 464; Suspects 464; Vital Parts 464; Who Is Teddy Villanova? 464 Bergonzi, Bernard, Heroes’ Twilight 412 Berlin, Isaiah 44, 95 Bermant, Chaim 200 Jericho Sleep Alone 199 Berry, James, A Thief in the Village 1011 Berry, Ron: Flame and Slag 388 This Bygone 388 Bertens, Hans 5, 628 Berumen, Humberto Felix 468 Beyala, Calixthe, The Sun Hath Looked upon Me 1382 Bhabha, Homi K. 1031–2, 1047, 1286, 1287 Bhattacharya, Bhabani: A Goddess Named Gold 1148 So Many Hungers 1148 Bhatti, Gupreet Kaur 1005 Bilgrami, Shahbano, Without Dreams 1278 Binchy, Maeve 193 Bion, Wilfred, The Long Weekend 413 Bishop, Alan 63
1407
Bishop, Gavin, The House that Jack Built 1013 Bissoondath, Neil 983–4, 999 works: A Casual Brutality 983, 984, 1223; Digging Up the Mountains 983, 1385; Doing the Heart Good 983, 984; The Innocence of Age 983, 984; On the Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows 983; Selling Illusions 984; The Soul of All Great Designs 983, 984; The Unyielding Clamour of the Night 983, 984; The Worlds Within Her 983, 984, 1385 Blacer, David, A Cause Untrue 1361 Black, Benjamin see Banville, John Black British fiction 294, 985–6 and Dabydeen 1034–5 and London 234–5, 297, 300, 303, 350–1, 1016 and Phillips (Caryl) 287–9 and Rushdie 294, 298, 300 Blackman, Malorie, Noughts and Crosses 1011 Blair, Eric Arthur see Orwell, George Blake, George, The Shipbuilders 340 Blake, Nicholas see Day Lewis, Cecil blasphemy, and censorship 64, 99, 235, 1005, 1322 Blixen, Karen, Out of Africa 1052 Bloom, Valerie 1011 Bloomsbury Group 136, 137, 226, 241, 299, 376, 401–2, 405 Bluestone, George 127 Blumefeld, Simon, Jew Boy 200 Blunden, Edmund, Undertones of War 289, 413 Bolger, Dermot 42–4 works: The Family on Paradise Pier 42; Father’s Music 42; Finbar’s Hotel 43, 363; In High Germany 42; The Journey Home 42–3; Ladies’ Night at Finbar’s Hotel 43; Night Shift 42; A Second Life 42; Temptation 42; The Valparaiso Voyage 42; The Woman’s Daughter 43 Bond, Ruskin: Angry River 1011 Grandfather’s Private Zoo 1011 The Room on the Roof 1011 Booker Prize 19–22, 974 Australian fiction 972, 1001, 1167–8 Booker backlash 298 Booker of Bookers 299, 975, 1321 British fiction 11, 30, 41, 51, 92–3, 118, 120, 158, 178, 184, 212, 230, 250, 252, 265, 299, 338, 355, 357 British Jewish fiction 50, 202 Canadian fiction 969, 1273 Indian fiction 1015, 1319, 1321; Irish fiction 28, 98 judges 380, 947 New Zealand fiction 1138
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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INDEX
Booker Prize (Continued ) postcolonial fiction 1288 and publishing industry 1293 Southern African fiction 1022–4, 1111 West African fiction 295, 947, 1271–2 West Indian fiction 1253 world fiction 938, 974–5 Borden, Mary, The Forbidden Zone 414 border fictions: American 422, 465–8, 695 Canadian 467, 468, 1370–1 Chicana/o 465–6, 887–8 detective/crime 468 Mexican 468 Borges, Jorge Luis 209, 310, 454, 643, 705, 725, 1000, 1187 Bowen, Elizabeth 44–5 and Compton-Burnett 83 and London 233, 290 and Macauley 242 and modernism 261, 308 and politics 290 and sexuality 324 works: A Day in the Dark and Other Stories 44; The Death of the Heart 44–5; The Demon Lover and Other Stories 44, 233; Encounters 44; Eva Trout 44, 45; “The Happy Autumn Fields” 324; The Heat of the Day 44, 45, 233, 290, 418; The Hotel 44; The House in Paris 44, 45, 191; The Last September 45, 153, 191, 290; The Little Girls 44; “Mysterious K^ or” 324; To the North 44, 45; A World of Love 44 Bowen, John, After the Rain 291 Bowen, Marjorie, The Viper of Milan 166 Bowering, George 1218 Burning Water 998 Bowker, Gordon 239 Bowles, Jane Auer 556 Bowles, Paul 556 Let It Come Down 557 Boyd, Martin 970, 986–7 awards and prizes 986 and realism 987 works: The Cardboard Crown 987; Day of My Delight 987; A Difficult Young Man 987; Lucinda Brayford 971, 987; The Montforts 971, 986, 987; Outbreak of Love 987; When Blackbirds Sing 987 Boyd, William 46–7 awards and prizes 46 works: Any Human Heart 46, 47; Armadillo 46, 47; Bamboo 46; The Blue Afternoon 46; Brazzaville Beach 46; The Destiny of Nathalie
“X” 46; The Dream Lover 46; Fascination 46; A Good Man in Africa 46, 47; An Ice-Cream War 46; Nat Tate 46; The New Confessions 46; On the Yankee Station 46; Ordinary Thunderstorms 46; Restless 46–7; School Ties 46; Stars and Bars 46 Boyden, Joseph: Three-Day Road 1150 Through Black Spruce 1150 Boyle, Kay 469–70 and modernism 424, 469 and queer modernism 470 and realism 422 works: Avalanche 470; Death of a Man 470; Generation without Farewell 470; Gentlemen, I Address You Privately 470; My Next Bride 470; Plagued by the Nightingale 470; Primer for Combat 470; Process 470; The Smoking Mountain 470; The Underground Woman 470; Year Before Last 470 Boyle, T. Coraghessan, The Tortilla Curtain 468 Bradbury, Malcolm 3, 5, 184, 250 works: The History Man 55; Stepping Westward 56 Bradbury, Ray, Fahrenheit 451 882 Bradford, Richard 11 Bradley, Marion Zimmer, The Mists of Avalon 866 Bradshaw, D. 181 Bragg, Melvyn 88 Braine, John 4, 157 and angry young man fiction 16, 17 works: Room at the Top 17, 291, 408 Braithwaite, E. R. 1105 To Sir, With Love 303, 1083–4 Brand, Dionne 988–9, 998, 999 awards and prizes 988, 989 and the city 1016 and feminism 1073 politics and activism 940, 988–9, 1282 and queer/alternative sexualities 988, 1298 works: At the Full and Change of the Moon 988–9, 1132, 1224, 1385; Bread Out of Stone 988, 1073; Chronicles of the Hostile Sun 988, 1282; Earth Magic 988; In Another Place, Not Here 988, 1073, 1282; Inventory 989; Land to Light On 988; Map 989; No Language is Neutral 988; Sans Souci and Other Stories 988, 1222, 1385; Thirsty 989; What We All Long For 989 Brant, Beth 1212, 1298 Brathwaite, Kamau 1068 Brautigan, Richard 471–2 works: The Abortion: An Historical Romance 471; A Confederate General from Big Sur 471; Dreaming
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 472; The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western 472; So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away 472; Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel 472; The Tokyo-Montana Press 472; Trout Fishing in America 471, 472; An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey 472; Watermelon Sugar 471; Willard and His Bowling Trophies 472 Brierley, Walter, Means Test Man 408 Briggs, Raymond: Fungus the Bogeyman 72 Snowman 72 Brink, Andre 941 n.10, 989–90 awards and prizes 990 and censorship 1004 and magic realism 990 and modernism 990 and politics 990, 1280 and postmodernism 990 works: An Act of Terror 990, 1355; The Ambassador 990; Before I Forget 990; A Chain of Voices 990, 1355; Devil’s Valley 990; A Dry White Season 990, 1355; Imaginings of Sand 990; An Instant in the Wind 990; Looking on Darkness 990, 1355; Orgie 990; Other Lives 990; The Other Side of Silence 990; Praying Mantis 990; The Right of Desire 990 Britain, linguistic empire 1 British South Asian diaspora 298–302, 1118–20 and young adult fiction 74 see also African diaspora; Black British fiction; colonialism; Indian fiction; Pakistani fiction; Sri Lankan fiction; West Indian/Caribbean diaspora Brito, Aristeo 466 Brittain, Vera, Testament of Youth 119, 413, 414 Britton, Lionel, Hunger and Love 407 Brodber, Erna 939, 991–3, 1304 and feminism 1073 and politics 1282 works: Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home 991, 992, 1073; Louisiana 991, 992–3; Myal 991, 992, 1073, 1132, 1133, 1384; The Rainmaker’s Mistake 991, 992 Broderick, Damien 1067 Brook, S. 17 Brooke, Rupert 111, 241 Brooke-Rose, Christine 47–8 awards and prizes 48 and postmodernism 95, 309 works: Anon 48; Between 48; The Dear Deceit 48; Go When You See the Green Man Walking 48; Gold 48; A Grammar of Metaphor 48;
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Invisible Author: Last Essays 48; The Languages of Love 48; Life, End of 48; The Middlemen: a Satire 48; Next 48; Out 48; Remake 48; A Rhetoric of the Unreal 48; Stories, Theories and Things 48; A Structural Analysis of Pound’s Usura canto 48; Subscript 48; Such 48; The Sycamore Tree 48; Textermination 48; Thru 48; Verbivore 48; Xorandor 48; A ZBC of Ezra Pound 48 Brooker, Joseph 277 Brookner, Anita 49–51, 201 awards and prizes 50, 975 and Lehmann 225 and O’Brien 272 and realism 3 works: Brief Lives 50; Falling Slowly 50; Family and friends 50; A Family Romance 50; Hotel du Lac 50; Leaving Home 50; Lewis Percy 50; The Next Big Thing 50; A Start in Life 49; Strangers 49, 50–1 Broome, Adam: The Cambridge Murders 55 The Oxford Murders 55 Brophy, Brigid 95, 129, 130, 309 Brossard, Nicole 1298 Brown, George, The House with the Green Shutters 340 Brown, Robert Carlton 469 Browne, Anthony, Hansel and Gretel 73 Bruce, Mary Grant, Billabong books 1012–13 Bruce Nugent, Richard, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” 610, 670 Brunner, John: The Sheep Look Up 334 Stand on Zanzibar 334 Brydon, Diana 1077 Buchan, John: Greenmantle 413 John Burnet of Barns 339 Mr. Standfast 413 Prester John 1081 The Thirty-Nine Steps 413 Witch Wood 339 Buck, Pearl S. 424, 472–3, 556, 1083 awards and prizes 472–3 and television 867 works: The Angry Wife 473; East Wind, West Wind 473; The Good Earth 473, 490; The Hidden Flower 473; A House Divided 473; Imperial Woman 473; Letter from Peking 473; The Living Reed 473; Mandala 473; The New Year 473; The Patriot 473; Sons 473; Three Daughters of Madame Liang 473
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Buckler, Ernest 997, 1310 Bukowski, Charles 474–5 influence 474 and vernacular 422, 474 works: Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame 474; Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live With Beasts 475; Factotum 475; Ham on Rye 475; Hollywood 474; Love Is a Dog From Hell 474; Notes of a Dirty Old Man 475; Post Office 475; Pulp 475; Roominghouse Madrigals 474; Septuagenarian Stew 474; Shakespeare Never Did This 475; Women 475; You Get So Alone at Times It Just Makes Sense 474 Bulgakov, Mikhail, The Master and Margarita 359, 1304, 1323 Bullough, Tom, The Claude Glass 20, 22 Burdekin, Katherine, Swastika Night 333 Burgess, Anthony 104, 1002 and Desani 1045 and Ford Madox Ford 132 and Joyce 209 works: 1985 234; A Clockwork Orange 233–4, 334, 372 see also Durrell, Lawrence; London, in British and Irish fiction Burgess, Melvin: Junk 74 My Life as a Bitch 74 Burke, John Muk Muk, Bridge of Triangles 1151 Burne-Jones, Edward 132 Burnett, Frances Hodgson: A Little Princess 74 The Secret Garden 111 Burnham, James, The Managerial Revolution 284 Burns, Alan 95 Burroughs, William 104, 476–8, 556 and the avant garde 422, 441, 476–7, 740 and homosexuality 476 influence 478 and Kerouac 651 and modernism 715 and postmodernism 360 works: Cities of the Red Night 478; The Job 478; Junkie 476; Minutes to Go 477; Naked Lunch 441, 476, 477; Nova Express 441, 477; The Place of Dead Roads 478; Queer 476; The Soft Machine 441, 477; The Third Mind 477; The Ticket That Exploded 441, 477; The Western Lands 478; The Wild Boys 477–8; The Yage Letters 476–7 Bush, Catherine 999 Butler, Judith 593, 716, 1032, 1072, 1296 Butler, Octavia E. 479–80, 842, 843
awards and prizes 480 works: Bloodchild 480; Fledgling 479; Kindred 479, 725; Parable of the Sower 479, 881; Parable of the Talents 479, 480; Wild Seed 479; Xenogenesis trilogy 479 Butler, Robert Olen, A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain 839 Butler, Samuel: Erewhon 880 The Way of All Flesh 106, 110, 289 Butts, Mary 260, 329 Armed with Madness 258 Byatt, A. S. 51–3, 100, 101 awards and prizes 21–2, 51, 122, 975 and critical theory 92 and feminism 51 film adaptations 52 and Ford Madox Ford 133 and postmodernism 5, 52 and realism 92, 94 works: Angels and Insects 52; Babel Tower 52, 92; The Biographer’s Tale 52; The Children’s Book 52; The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye 52–3; Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice 53; The Game 51; The Little Black Book of Stories 53; The Matisse Stories 52; Possession 5, 6, 22, 51, 52, 56, 92, 104, 122, 176, 368; The Shadow of a Sun 51, 92; Still Life 52, 56; Sugar and Other Stories 52; The Virgin in the Garden 52; A Whistling Woman 52, 92 Cain, James M. 481–2 influence 868 and noir fiction 422 and realism 481–2 works: The Butterfly 482; Double Indemnity 481, 714; Mildred Pierce 482; The Moth 482; The Postman Always Rings Twice 481; Serenade 481 Hammett, Dashiell; noir fiction; social realism, American Calder, A. 416 Caldwell, Erskine 830 works: God’s Little Acre 837, 900; Tobacco Road 837, 900 Callaghan, Morley 995–6 and modernism 997 works: A Broken Journey 995; The Enchanted Pimp 996; A Fine and Private Place 996; It’s Never Over 995; The Loved and the Lost 995; The Many Colored Coat 995; More Joy in Heaven 995; A Native Argosy 995; Now That April’s Here 995; Our Lady of the Snows 996; A Passion in Rome 995–6; Strange Fugitive
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
995; Such is My Beloved 995; That Summer in Paris 995; They Shall Inherit the Earth 995; A Time for Judas 996; A Wild Old Man on the Road 996 Campbell, Alistair: The Frigate Bird 1350 Sidewinder 1350 Tia 1350 Campbell, Federico, Tijuanenses 468 Campbell, John W. 335 Campbell, Maria 1212 campus novels 4, 54–5 Canadian fiction 996–9 awards and prizes 974, 976, 988, 1141, 1275 for children and young adults 1013, 1314 and the city 1016, 1104 and English Studies 1062 fantasy fiction 1067 feminist 1072–3, 1212–13, 1218 and film adaptations 1081, 1082–3 historical fiction 998, 1130, 1131, 1390–1 and humor and satire 1141–2, 1174, 1231–2, 1313–15, 1396 and immigration 998–9, 1017 Indigenous fiction 468, 999, 1067, 1142, 1150–1, 1173–4, 1212–13 Jewish fiction 997 and magic realism 1390 and modernism 997, 1095, 1118, 1198–9, 1317 and politics and activism 940, 988–9, 998, 1131, 1174, 1175, 1282 and postmodernism 998–9, 1095, 1176–8, 1390 queer/alternative sexualities 1298 and realism 995, 997, 1117–18 science fiction 999, 1066–7, 1103–5, 1150–1 speculative fiction 999, 1066–7 women writers 998 and World War I 997, 1131 and World War II 1131 Canfield, Dorothy 424, 473, 482–3 influence 868 works: The Brimming Cup 483; The Deepening Stream 482; Gunhild 483; The Home-Maker 483; Seasoned Timber 483; Self-Reliance 483; Understood Betsy 483; Vermont Tradition 483 canon, English: fictional responses to 937, 1043, 1076–80: Austen 287, 1079; the Bront€es 122, 305, 1073, 1079, 1133, 1308; Conrad’s Heart of Darkness 944, 1078; Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe 78, 1027, 1077–8, 1133, 1173; Dickens 310, 975, 976, 1001, 1076, 1079, 1133; feminism 122, 311, 1073;
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postmodernism 310–11; Rhys 67, 305; Shakespeare’s Tempest 78, 1077, 1182 and film adaptations 126–7 and Gass 587 and queer modernism 716 and Updike 878 see also English Studies Cantu, Norma Elia 466 Canıcula 467 Cao, Lan, Monkey Bridge 839 capitalism, and postmodernism 311, 581–2 Capote, Truman 838 In Cold Blood 677 Card, Orson Scott, Ender’s Game 842 Carey, John 6, 40 Carey, Peter 1000–2 awards and prizes 972, 975, 1001 and postcolonialism 1001, 1002, 1288 works: The Big Bazoohley 1001; Bliss 1000, 1082; The Fat Man in History 1000; His Illegal Self 1002; Illywhacker 1000–1; Jack Maggs 1001, 1079, 1133; My Life as a Fake 1002; Oscar and Lucinda 177, 972, 1001, 1082, 1131, 1142; The Tax Inspector 1001, 1288; Theft 1002; Thirty Days in Sydney 1001; True History of the Kelly Gang 972, 1001, 1130–1, 1288; The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith 1001; Wrong about Japan 1001 Carnevali, Emanuel 469 Carnie Holdsworth, Ethel, This Slavery 407 carnivalesque novels 59, 61 Carpenter, David 1298 Carpenter, Edward 322, 329 Carroll, Lewis, influence 71, 73 Carroll, Steven, The Time We Have Taken 976 Carswell, Catherine 57–8 influence 146 and Lawrence 57 works: The Camomile 57; Life of Burns 58; Lying Awake 58; Open the Door! 57, 341; “Proust’s Women” 57 Carter, Angela 58–61, 534 awards and prizes 20, 59 and feminism 59, 120, 291 and Golding 157 influence 30, 184, 397 and magic realism 120 and postmodernism 5, 92, 296, 486 works: The Bloody Chamber 59, 60–1, 120; Heroes and Villains 59, 60; The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman 59, 60; Love 59, 60; The Magic Toyshop 59, 60; Nights at the Circus 5, 30, 58, 59, 60, 310; The Passion of
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(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Carter, Angela (Continued ) New Eve 59, 60, 311; The Sadeian Woman 59, 120; The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales 59; Several Perceptions 59, 60; Shadow Dance (Honeybuzzard) 59; The Virago Book of Fairy Tales 59, 61; Wayward Girls and Wicked Women 59; The Wise Children 59, 60 Carver, Raymond 484–5, 706, 776 and Alexie 431 awards and prizes 484 and Bukowski 747 influence 645, 965 and vernacular 422 works: Cathedral 484, 864; What We Talk About When We Talk About Love 484, 707–8; Where I’m Calling From 484; Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? 484 Cary, Joyce 62–3, 295, 944 awards and prizes 62 works: The African Witch 62; Aissa Saved 62; An American Visitor 62; To Be a Pilgrim 62; The Captive and the Free 62; Castle Corner 62; Charlie Is My Darling 62; Cock Jarvis 62; Except the Lord 62; A Fearful Joy 62; Herself Surprised 62; The Horse’s Mouth 62–3; A House of Children 62; Mister Johnson 62, 944; The Moonlight 62; Not Honour More 62; Prisoner of Grace 62 Casanova, Pascale 1033 Cash, William, The Third Woman 165 Cassady, Neal 652, 653, 801 Castillo, Ana 486 awards and prizes 486 works: The Guardians 486; The Mixquiahuala Letters 486; Peel My Love Like an Onion 486; Sapagonia 486; So Far From God 486 Castro, Brian: After China 973 Birds of Passage 973 Shanghai Dancing 973 Cather, Willa 487–90 awards and prizes 489 and feminism 488 and gender 591 influence 584, 868 and modernism 715, 716 works: Alexander’s Bridge 488; Death Comes for the Archbishop 488, 489–90; Hard Punishments 490; A Lost Lady 489, 712; Lucy Gayheart 490; My Antonia 487, 488–9, 490, 549, 591, 1163; O Pioneers! 487, 488; Obscure Destinies 490; One of Ours 489; “Paul’s Case” 716; The Professor’s House 488, 489, 591; Sapphira and the Slave Girl 490; Shadows on
the Rock 490; The Song of the Lark 488, 490; A Troll Garden 488 Caute, David 309 Cavafy, C. P. 138 censorship: and American fiction 63–4, 477, 669, 677, 702–4, 820 and British and Irish fiction 63–7, 191, 215 and World War I 412, 414 and children’s fiction 1010, 1012 and obscenity 63–4, 65–6, 120, 207, 221, 224, 317–18, 319, 323, 477, 702, 820, 1005 and politics 64, 283, 1353 and religion 64–5, 67, 121, 235, 1322 and sexuality 64–7, 139, 253, 272 and world fiction 1002–6, 1024 Cesaire-Thompson, Margaret 1123 Cha, Teresa 1055 Dictee 776 Chabon, Michael 491–2 awards and prizes 492 and Nabokov 729 works: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay 492; The Final Solution 492; Gentleman of the Road 492; Maps and Legends 492; A Model of the World 492; The Mysteries of Pittsburgh 491; Summerland 492; Werewolves in Their Youth 492; Wonder Boys 491–2; The Yiddish Policeman’s Union 492 Chamber, Aidan: Breaktime 74 Caught in the Crossfire 74 Dance on My Grave 74 Postcards from No Man’s Land 74 Chamoiseau, Patrick 1123 Chandler, A. Bertram 1067 Chandler, Raymond 475, 493–4, 1046, 1048 and noir fiction 422, 423, 739, 741 works: The Big Sleep 493; Farewell, My Lovely 493–4; The High Window 493; The Lady in the Lake 493–4; The Little Sister 494, 882; The Long Goodbye 494; Playback 494 Chandra, Vikram 1007–8 works: Love and Longing in Bombay 1007; Red Earth and Pouring Rain 1007; Sacred Games 1007–8 Chandrasoma, M., Out Out Brief Candle 1360 Chang, Eileen 248 Chaplin, Sid: The Leaping Lad 409 The Watchers and the Watched 409 Charles, Gerda 200 The Crossing Point 199
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
Chaudhuri, Amit 1008–9, 1045 awards and prizes 1008 works: Afternoon Raag 1008, 1009; Clearing a Space 1009; Freedom Song 1008, 1009, 1015; The Immortals 1009; A New World 1008, 1009; Real Time 1009; St. Cyril Road and Other Poems 1008; Small Orange Flags 1009; A Strange and Sublime Address 1008, 1009 Cheever, John 494–6 awards and prizes 495 and Federal Writers’ Project 923 influence 965 works: Bullet Park 495; The Enormous Radio 495; Falconer 495; The Housebreaker of Shady Hill 495; Oh, What a Paradise It Seems 496; Stories of John Cheever 495; The Wapshot Chronicle 495; The Wapshot Scandal 495 Chesnutt, Charles W. 496–8, 671 awards and prizes 498 works: The Colonel’s Dream 498; The Conjure Woman 497, 836; “The Goophered Grapevine” 497; The House Behind the Cedars 497, 836; The Marrow of Tradition 498, 836; Paul Marchand, F. M. C. 498; The Quarry 498; “The Rainbow Chasers” 497; The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line 497 Chesterton, G. K. 267 Cheyette, Bryan 200 Chicago Renaissance 435 Chicana/o fiction, and border fiction 465–6: see also Anaya, Rudolfo; Castillo, Ana; Cisneros, Sandra; Rechy, John; Viramontes, Helena Marıa chicklit 68–71 Indigenous 1151 Irish 193 and postmodernism 68–9 Chidgey, Catherine 1261 children’s and young adult fiction: American 434, 483, 698, 758, 766, 783, 851, 862, 895 British and Irish 71–4, 110–11 and fantasy 71–2, 73–4, 113, 1098 historical 73 and home 72–3, 74 paperback 317 world fiction 1010–14, 1268, 1306, 1314 China, children’s fiction 1012 Chinodya, Shimmer, Harvest of Thorns 1353 Chodorow, Nancy, The Reproduction of Mothering 1072 Choi, Susan, The Foreign Student 839 Chon, Sang-guk, Abe’s Family 1056
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Chopin, Kate 595, 596, 671 The Awakening 590, 836, 857 Choy, Wayson 998 Christian, Ed 1046, 1047 Christie, Agatha 267, 268, 317, 1046 Christopher, John, The Death of Grass 334 Ciantar, Benedict 1297 cinema see film industry; film and television adaptations Cisneros, Sandra 499–500 awards and prizes 499 works: Bad Boys 499; Caramelo 499; The House on Mango Street 499–500, 503; Loose Woman 499, 500; My Wicked, Wicked Ways 499, 500; Woman Hollering Creek 499, 500 Citron, Lana 200 city: in American fiction 500–5; and Black Americans 513, 766, 1016; and border fiction 467–8; and Chandler 493; Chicana/o fiction 499–500, 887–8 in Asian American fiction 659–60 in British and Irish fiction: and McLiam Wilson 255; in Scottish fiction 340–1: see also London and ethnicity 502–3 in world fiction 1014–17 Clarke, Arthur C. 335 works: 2001: A Space Odyssey 334; Childhood’s End 334 Clarke, Austin 939, 998, 1016, 1017–20 awards and prizes 976, 1019–20 and politics 1282 works: Amongst Thistles and Thorns 1018; The Bigger Light 1018–19, 1385; Growing Up Stupid under the Union Jack 1019; The Meeting Point 1018, 1223; More 1018–19; Nine Men Who Laughed 1019; The Origin of Waves 1019; A Passage Back Home 1019; Pig Tails ’n Breadfruit 1019; The Polished Hoe 1018, 1019, 1132–3; The Prime Minister 1018; Proud Empires 1018, 1385; The Question 1019; Storm of Fortune 1018; The Survivors of the Crossing 1018; When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks 1019; When Women Rule 1019 Clarke, Marcus, His Natural Life 1078, 1081 Clarke, Susannah 116 Clavell, James: Noble House 866 Shogun 866 Cleary, Jon, The Sundowners 1082 Cleven, Vivienne, Bitin’ Back 1151
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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INDEX
Cliff, Michelle 1020–1 queer/alternative sexualities 1021, 1298 works: Abeng 1020, 1385; Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise 1020; Free Enterprise 1021, 1385; No Telephone to Heaven 1020–1 Cloete, Stuart, The Honey Bird 1081 Coates, Robert, The Eater of Darkness 440 Cockburn, Alexander 400 Coe, Jonathan 75–7 and postmodernism 311 works: “9th and 13th” 77; An Accidental Woman 77; The Dwarves of Death 76; The House of Sleep 76, 77; The Rain Before It Falls 77; The Rotters’ Club 76; A Touch of Love 77; What a Carve Up! 76–7, 292 Coetzee, J. M. 1022–5 awards and prizes 974, 975, 977, 1022, 1023, 1024, 1033, 1354 and critical theory 95 and Joyce 209 and politics 1283–4 and queer/alternative sexualities 1024, 1297 works: Age of Iron 1024, 1355; Boyhood 1022; Diary of a Bad Year 1025; Disgrace 1022, 1024, 1025, 1081, 1284, 1288, 1297, 1355; Doubling the Point 1022; Dusklands 1022–3, 1354–5; Elizabeth Costello 1024, 1284; Foe 1023–4, 1077–8, 1133, 1355; Giving Offence 1022; In the Heart of the Country 1023, 1355; Inner Workings 1022; Life & Times of Michael K 1022, 1023, 1355; The Lives of Animals 1024; The Master of Petersburg 1024, 1355; Scenes from Provincial Life 1022, 1025; Slow Man 1025; Stranger Shores 1022; Summertime 1025; Waiting for the Barbarians 1023, 1069, 1355; White Writing 1022; Youth 1025 Cohn, Ruby 38 Cole, John Reece 1048 Coleman, Emily 555 Collins, Merle 1026–7 works: Angel 1026–7; Because the Dawn Breaks 1026; The Colour of Forgetting 1027; Invisible Streams 1026; Lady in a Boat 1026; Rain Darling 1027; Rotten Pomerack 1026 colonialism 77–81, 937–9 and Arasanayagam 960 in Behn’s Oroonoko 78 and censorship 1002–3 in children’s fiction 1010–11 and Clarke 1017–20 and Conrad 79–80, 84–7, 247, 295, 944 in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe 78
in Desani’s Hatterr 1045 in East African fiction 1052–3 in East Asian fiction 1055–6 and Emecheta 1058–9 English Studies 1062 and exile 1222–3 and Farrell 118 gender 1036 in Irish fiction 189, 193 and Kipling 79, 295 and masculinity 324, 325, 1052, 1296 and modernism 461 and Orwell 281 and realism 1303 and Scott (Paul) 337–8 in Shakespeare’s Tempest 78 and stereotypes 78–80, 247–8 and Waugh 377 in West African fiction 1379–80 West Indian fiction 304 in world fiction 1036, 1050–1 comedy see humor and satire comics 844–5 Commonwealth fiction 1063–4, 1101, 1287 Commonwealth Poetry Prize 946, 1340 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 25, 974, 975, 1197 Australian fiction 981, 1116, 1206, 1394 Black British fiction 287, 288, 1220 Canadian fiction 1019, 1134, 1229–30, 1249, 1374 East African fiction 1053, 1376 Indian fiction 1008, 1101, 1325, 1335, 1341 Southeast Asian fiction 1352 Southern African fiction 1036 West African fiction 1272 West Indian fiction 958, 991, 1338 Compton-Burnett, Ivy 82–3 awards and prizes 82 and feminism 82 and modernism 82, 261 works: Dolores 82; Elders and Betters 83; Mother and Son 83; Pastors and Masters 82; The Present and the Past 82; Two Worlds and Their Ways 82, 83 Conde, M. and Lonsdale, T. 303 Conde, Maryse, Windward Heights 1079 Conde, Rosina, Women on the Road 468 condition of England novels 76, 138, 383 condition of Scotland novels 197, 353 Condon, Richard, The Manchurian Candidate 749 Connolly, Cyril 285, 394 Connor, Ralph 997 Conrad, Joseph 83–7, 154 and colonialism 79–80, 84–7, 247, 295, 944 and Ford Madox Ford 133–4, 260, 289
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
and Galsworthy 148, 149 influence 84, 133–4, 166, 755, 1252 and modernism 1, 2, 84, 85, 107, 108, 258, 260, 289 and politics 86, 289 works: Almayer’s Folly 80, 84–5; The Arrow of Gold 87; Chance 84, 86–7, 107; “The End of the Tether” 85; Heart of Darkness 79–80, 84, 85, 260, 295, 305, 749, 931, 944, 1034, 1078; The Inheritors (with Ford) 133, 333; Last Essays 87; Lord Jim 1, 78, 80, 84, 85, 106, 107, 1078; The Mirror of the Sea 86; The Nigger of the “Narcissus” 84, 85, 86; Nostromo 2, 80, 84, 86, 107, 108, 857, 1078; Notes on Life and Letters 87; An Outcast of the Islands 80, 85; A Personal Record 86; The Rescue 80, 87; Romance (with Ford) 133; The Rover 84, 87; The Secret Agent 84, 86, 87, 232, 260, 289; “The Secret Sharer” 84, 86; A Set of Six 86; The Shadow-Line 87; “The Sisters” 87; Suspense 84, 87; Tales of Hearsay 87; Tales of Unrest 85; ’Twixt Land and Sea 86; Typhoon and Other Stories 84, 85–6; Under Western Eyes 84, 86; Victory 87; Within the Tides 87; “Youth” 84, 95 Conroy, Jack 433, 923 works: The Disinherited 924; They Seek a City 924 see also Algren, Nelson Conte, Steven, The Zookeeper’s War 976 Cook, Hugh, Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series 1067 Cook, Kenneth, Wake in Fright 1082 Cooper, Susan, 116 works: The Dark is Rising 116; Greenwitch 116; The Grey King 116; Over Sea, Under Stone 73, 116; Silver on the Tree 116 Cooper, William 16, 308 Coover, Robert 505–6, 534, 586, 773 awards and prizes 505 works: The Adventures of Lucky Pierre 506; “The Babysitter” 865; Briar Rose 506; A Child Again 506; Gerald’s Party 506; Ghost Town 506; John’s Wife 506, 581; A Night at the Movies: or, You Must Remember This 506; The Origin of the Brunists 505; Pinocchio in Venice 506; Pricksongs and Descants 506; The Public Burning 506, 628, 775; The Universal Baseball Association 506 Cope, Jack, The Dawn Came Twice 1354 Corelli, Marie 107 Corkery, Daniel 190 Corrigan, Timothy 126 Corris, Peter 1048 Corso, Gregory 556, 651
1415
Cortazar, Julio 104 Costa Awards see Whitbread Book of the Year; Whitbread First Novel Award Coupland, Douglas 1027–9 works: Eleanor Rigby 1028; Generation X 999, 1027, 1028; Girlfriend in a Coma 1028; Hey Nostradamus! 1028; JPod 1028; Life After God 1028; Microserfs 1028; The Penguins 1028; Souvenir of Canada series 1028–9; Terry 1029 Courage, James 1297 Couto, Maria 169 Cowan, Peter 971 Coward, Rosalind 121 Cowley, Malcolm 437, 572, 733 Cox, Earl, Out of the Silence 1067 Crace, Jim 88–90 awards and prizes 89–90 and fantasy fiction 88, 89 and landscape 88–9 and London 88 works: “Annie, California Plates” 88; Arcadia 89; Being Dead 89; Continent 88–9; “Cross Country” 88; The Gift of Stones 89; The Pesthouse 89; Quarantine 89; Signals of Distress 89; Six (Genesis) 89 Crane, Stephen 134, 671, 791 and naturalism 734 and White (Edmund) 912 works: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets 734, 736; Red Badge of Courage 524, 734 Creeley, Robert 833 works: The Gold Diggers 442; The Island 442; Mabel: A Story 440 Crichton, Michael, Andromeda Strain 866 Crick, Bernard 285 Crickett, S. R., The Stickit Minister 340 crime fiction see detective/crime fiction critical theory 90–6 and Buck 472–3 and crime fiction 267, 1046 and deconstruction 95 ethnic fiction 301 feminist 91, 119, 120, 121–2, 405, 412, 593, 620, 716, 763, 812–13, 1072 and film 429 and formalism 1030 and Marxism 1032 and metafiction 93–4 and migration, diaspora, and exile 1221–5 and modernism 330, 715–16, 790 New Criticism 66, 67, 90–1, 473, 715, 773, 902 and postmodernism 6, 91–5, 308, 1030 and poststructuralism 90–1, 96, 1030, 1285 and sentimentalism 93
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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critical theory (Continued ) and structuralism 90, 1029–32, 1285 theory of fictions 95–6 and utopian and dystopian fiction 882 and world fiction 938, 1029–33, 1061–5 and World War II 419 criticism, film 125–7, 1084 critics, and awards and prizes 20 Croft, Freeman Wills 268 Cronin, Anthony 42 Crosby, Harry and Caresse 469 Cross, Amanda 56 Cross, Ian, The God Boy 1082, 1261 Crossley-Holland, Kevin 73 Crosthwaite, Luis Humberto 468 Crowther, S. J. K., The Knight Errant 1360 Crump, Barry 1082 cubism, and the avant garde 440 Cuddy-Keane, Melba 402 Cullen, Countee 607, 610, 633, 884, 928, 942 Culler, Jonathan 95 Culleton, Beatrice see Mosionier, Beatrice Culleton cultural theory 91 cummings, e. e. 135, 440, 555, 666 works: Eimi 441; The Enormous Room 441, 525 Curwood, James Oliver 1081 Dabydeen, David 294, 1034–5 awards and prizes 977, 1034–5 works: Coolie Odyssey 1034; The Counting House 1035, 1132; Disappearance 306–7, 1034; Handbook for Teaching Caribbean Literature 1035; A Harlot’s Progress 307, 985, 1035, 1132, 1384; The Intended 1034, 1224, 1384; Molly and the Muslim Stick 1035; Our Lady of Demerara 1034–5; Oxford Companion to British Black History 1035; Slave Song 1034; Turner 1034 D’Aguiar, Fred 985 awards and prizes 977 and Harris 1123 works: Dear Future 306; Feeding the Ghosts 306, 985, 1132, 1384; The Longest Memory 176, 306, 985 Dahl, Roald, Revolting Rhymes 72 Dahlberg, Edward 508–9 influence 508 works: “Ariel in Caliban” 509; Because I Was Flesh 508, 509; Bottom Dogs 508; Can These Bones Live 508, 509; Do These Bones Live 509; For Those Who Perish 508; From Flushing to Calvary 508; The Sorrows of Priapus 508
Dangarembga, Tsitsi 1035–7 awards and prizes 1036 works: The Book of Not 1036, 1353; Everyone’s Child 1037; Kare Kare Zvako (Mother’s Day) 1037; Neria 1036–7; Nervous Conditions 1035–6, 1222, 1353, 1376; She No Longer Weeps 1036 Dangor, Achmat, From Riverlea to Parkview 1016 Danielewski, Mark: and historiographic metafiction 423, 629 House of Leaves 629 Danticat, Edwidge 509–10 awards and prizes 510 works: Breath, Eyes, Memory 510; Brother, I’m Dying 510; The Dew Breaker 510; The Farming of Bones 510; Krik? Krak! 510 Darko, Amma, The Housemaid 1380 Darwinism 258, 332, 335, 369 and critical theory 92 Davenport, Guy 511–12 works: Acts of the Apostles 511; Every Force Evolves a Form 511; Tatlin! 511; Thasos and Ohio 512 David Cohen Prize for Literature 21, 352 Davidson, Lionel 200 Davies, Andrew: A Very Peculiar Practice 55 A Very Peculiar Practice: The New Frontier 55 Davies, Lewis: Grits 388 My Piece of Happiness 388 Stump 388 Davies, Luke, Candy 1082 Davies, Peter Ho, The Welsh Girl 389 Davies, Rhys, The Withered Root 386 Davies, Robertson 997, 1037–9, 1187 awards and prizes 1037–8 and MacLennan 1199 works: Cornish Trilogy 1038–9; The Cunning Man 1039; Deptford Trilogy 1038; The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks 1037; The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies 1039; Fifth Business 1038; High Spirits 1039; The Merry Heart 1039; Murther and Walking Spirits 1039; One Half of Robertson Davies 1039; Salterton trilogy 1038; The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks 1037; TempestTost 1077 Davies, Russell Celyn 389 Davies, Stevie, Kith and Kin 388 Davis, Lindsey 270 Davis, Rebecca Harding, Life in the Iron Mills 757 Davis, Tom, Makutu 1349
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
Davison, Peter 285 Day, Douglas 239 Day Lewis, Cecil 226, 268 Dazai, Osamu 1056 d’Costa, Jean 1011 De, Shobha 1298 de Kretser, Michelle, The Hamilton Case 1361 De la Mare, Walter 73 De Lint, Charles, Moonheart 1067 De Lisser, Herbert G. 1040–1, 1142, 1306 works: Anacanoa 1041; The Crocodiles 1041; In Cuba and Jamaica, with Hints to Tourists 1040; The Jamaica Nobility 1041; Jane (Jane’s Career) 1040, 1041, 1383; Morgan’s Daughter 1041; Myrtle and Money 1040; Poltergeist? 1041; Revenge 1041; The Rivals 1040; Triumphant Squalitone 1041; Twentieth Century Jamaica 1040; Under the Sun 1041; The White Maroon 1041; The White Witch of Rose Hall 1041, 1132 De Man, Paul 90–1 De Pierre, D. B. C., Vernon Little God 975 De Silva, Colin, The Winds of Sinhala 1360 De Silva, Nihal, The Road from Elephant Pass 1361 De Vitis, A. D. 166, 169 De Zilwa, Lucien, The Dice of the Gods 1360 Defence of the Realm Act 1914 64 Defoe, Daniel 1078 works: Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe 78; Robinson Crusoe 78, 465, 1024, 1077–8, 1133, 1173; Roxana 1024, 1078 Deighton, Len, The Ipcress File 291 Delaney, Shelagh, A Taste of Honey 17 Delany, Samuel 372, 513–14 awards and prizes 513 speculative fiction 842, 1068 works: Atlantis: Three Tales 513–14; Babel-17 513; Dark Reflections 514; Dhalgren 513; Hogg 513; The Mad Man 513; Nova 513; Return to Neveryon tetralogy 513; Trouble on Triton 513 Delbanco, Andrew 1062 DeLillo, Don 425, 514–17, 698, 706 awards 515 and Franzen 579 and Nabokov 729 and postmodernism 422, 514–15, 776 and television 865 works: Americana 515; The Body Artist 516; Cosmopolis 515, 581, 800; Endzone 515; Falling Man 516–17; Great Jones Street 515; Libra 515–16, 626–7; Mao II 516; The Names 515, 775; Players 514; Ratner’s Star 515;
1417
Underworld 516, 708, 709; White Noise 514, 515, 775–6, 865, 878 Denisoff, Dennis 1298 Dennis, C. J., The Song of a Sentimental Bloke 1081 Derrida, Jacques 95, 209, 310, 877, 1029–30, 1286 Desai, Anita 1041–4 and the Academy 1062 awards and prizes 1042 and the city 1015, 1042 and feminism 1074 and publishing industry 1292 and realism 1304 works: Baumgartner’s Bombay 1042, 1131; Bye-Bye, Blackbird 1042; Clear Light of Day 292, 1015, 1042, 1043, 1074, 1148; Cry, the Peacock 1042, 1074, 1148; In Custody 1042, 1083; Diamond Dust 1043; Fasting, Feasting 1042, 1043, 1074; Fire on the Mountain 1043; Games at Twilight 1043; Journey to Ithaca 1042; The Village by the Sea 1042; Voices in the City 1042; Where Shall We Go This Summer? 1042–3, 1074 Desai, Kiran 95, 1399 The Inheritance of Loss 1016–17 Desani, G. V. 294, 1044–5 and Sealy 1335 works: All about H. Hatterr 299, 939, 1044–5, 1323; Hali 1045 Deshpande, Shashi 1149 detective/crime fiction: American 267, 434, 492: and border fiction 468; and ethnicity 550, 611, 625, 766, 914; hard-boiled 481, 493–4, 606, 739, 741–2, 786, 844, 922; postmodernist 438, 657 British and Irish 267–70: awards and prizes 270; feminist 122, 267, 270; historical 269–70; and paperback fiction 317, 319; and postmodernism 311 and film industry 713–14 world fiction 1046–8, 1151 Dexter, Colin 195 dialect see vernacular diasporas 1224–5 and critical theory 94, 1064 see also African diaspora; British South Asian diaspora; migration, diaspora, and exile; West Indian/Caribbean diaspora Dıaz, Junot, Drown 504 Dick, Philip K. 517–18, 739, 774, 775, 842 awards and prizes 518 works: Confessions of a Crap Artist 518; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 518, 881; Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Learned to Get Along After the Bomb 518; Flow My Tears, the
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
1418
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Dick, Philip K. (Continued ) Policeman Said 518, 881; The Man in the High Castle 517, 518; Martian Time-Slip 517–18; Now Wait for Last Year 518; A Scanner Darkly 518; Solar Lottery 517; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldridge 517–18; Ubik 518; VALIS 518; “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” 518 Dickens, Charles 7, 50, 125, 141, 181, 232, 235 fictional responses to 310, 975, 976, 1001, 1076, 1079, 1133 influence 826, 1252, 1323 Dickey, James, Deliverance 839 Dickinson, Peter 73 Didion, Joan 425, 519–20, 776 awards and prizes 520 and road novels 423 works: A Book of Common Prayer 519; Democracy 519; The Last Thing He Wanted 519–20; Play It As It Lays 519, 800; Run River 519; Slouching Towards Bethlehem 519; Where I Was From 520; The Year of Magical Thinking 520 Diemert, Brian 169 Dillon, Des 342 Dillwyn, Amy, The Rebecca Rioter 386 Dimaline, Cherie, Red Rooms 1151 Disch, Thomas 513 Diski, Jenny 201 Divakaruni, Chitralekha Banerjee, The Mistress of Spies 1083 Dixit, Kanak Mani, Adventures of a Nepali Frog 1011 Dixon, Stephen 520–1 awards and prizes 520 works: 14 Stories 521; 30: Pieces of a Novel 521; All Gone 521; End of I 521; Fall and Rise 520; Friends 521; Frog 520; Garbage 520; Gould: A Novel in Two Novels 521; I 521; Interstate 520; Long Made Short 521; Love and Will 521; Meyer 521; Movies 520; No Relief 521; Phone Rings 521; The Play and Other Stories 521; Quite Contrary: The Mary and Newt Story 521; Sleep 521; Time to Go 520; Too Late 521; Work 521 Dixon, Thomas Jr.: The Clansman 835 The Leopard’s Spots 835 Dlamanini, Moses, Robben Island, Hell-Hole 1354 Doctorow, E. L. 522–3, 785 awards and prizes 523 influence 576 and postmodernism 523 works: Billy Bathgate 521; The Book of Daniel 516, 522, 628; City of God 521; Loon Lake 522;
The March 521–2; Ragtime 522, 626, 802; The Waterworks 522; Welcome to Hard Times 522; World’s Fair 516 Dodd, Lynley 1013 Doherty, Len: The Man Beneath 409 A Miner’s Sons 409 Donleavy, J. P., The Ginger Man 55 Donoghue, Emma: Hood 192, 326 Slammerkin 192 Stir Fry 326 Doolittle, Hilda see H. D. Dorscht, Susan Rudy 1178 Dorsey, Candas Jane 1067 Dos Passos, John 489, 524–7 and the city 525 and expatriate fiction 555, 557 and gender 716 and high modernism 422, 524, 525, 527, 581, 715, 717 and historiographic metafiction 423 influence 525, 868 and politics 735, 829, 922 works: Chosen Country 527; District of Columbia trilogy 526; The Great Days 527; Manhattan Transfer 524, 525–6; Midcentury 528; One Man’s Initiation: 1917 524; Streets of Night 525; Three Soldiers 524–5, 745; U.S.A trilogy 504, 524, 526–7, 557, 621, 628, 712–13, 735, 801, 829, 876 Dowling, Terry 1067 Doyle, Roddy 42, 98–9, 410 awards and prizes 22, 98 and magic realism 98–9 and realism 98–9 works: The Commitments 98, 193; The Deportees 99; The Giggler Treatment 72; Oh, Play That Thing 99; Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha 22, 98; Paula Spencer 99; The Snapper 98, 193; A Star Called Henry 99, 193; The Van 98, 193; The Woman Who Walked into Doors 98–9 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan 107, 232, 267, 492 The Lost World 333 Drabble, Margaret 51, 99–102 awards and prizes 101 and feminism 101 and London 101 and postmodernism 101 and realism 3 works: The Gates of Ivory 100; The Ice Age 100; A Natural Curiosity 100; The Needle’s Eye 100; The Peppered Moth 100; The Radiant Way 100;
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
The Realms of Gold 100; The Red Queen 100; A Summer Bird Cage 100; The Waterfall 100, 1185; The Witch of Exmoor 100 Dreiser, Theodore 435, 528–31 influence 459, 494, 530, 702, 927 and naturalism 502, 581, 734, 742, 828 works: An American Tragedy 528, 530, 591, 712; The Bulwark 530; A Hoosier Holiday 530, 800; Jennie Gerhardt 529, 530; Notes on Life 530; Plays of the Natural and Supernatural 530; Sister Carrie 502, 503, 528, 529–30, 590–1, 734, 736, 849, 925; The Stoic 529–30; The Titan 530; A Traveler at Forty 530 Drewe, Robert 972 works: The Bodysurfers 972; Grace 972; The Savage Crows 972 Du Bois, W. E. B. 531–4, 817, 837–8, 942 and double-consciousness 532–3 and Fauset 566 and Larsen 659 and little magazines 667, 670 and McKay 610, 701 and Van Vechten 885 works: The Black Flame trilogy 533; Black Folk Then and Now 533; Black Reconstruction 533; Dark Princess 533; Darkwater 533; Dusk of Dawn 533; The Gift of Black Folk 533; A Litany of Atlanta 533; Mansart Builds a School 533; The Negro 533; The Ordeal of Mansart 533; The Quest of the Silver Fleece 533, 735; The Souls of Black Folk 532, 533, 548, 608, 735; The Star of Ethiopia 533; Worlds of Color 533 Du Maurier, Daphne, Rebecca 122, 126, 1080 Duarte, Stella Pope, If I Die in Juarez 467 Ducornet, Rikki 425, 534–5 awards 535 works: The Complete Butcher’s Tales 535; Entering Fire 535; The Fanmaker’s Inquisition 535; The Fountains of Neptune 535; Gazelle 535; The Jade Cabinet 535; Phospher in Dreamland 535; The Stain 535 Duff, Alan: Jake’s Long Shadow 1152 Once Were Warriors 1082, 1152, 1261 Szabad 1152 What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? 1152 Duggan, Maurice 1048–9, 1261 film adaptations 1082
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works: Falter Tom and the Water Boy 1049; Immanuel’s Land 1049; “The Magsman’s Miscellany” 1049; O’Leary’s Orchard 1049; “Riley’s Handbook” 1049; Summer in the Gravel Pit 1049; “The Wit of Willie Graves” 1049 Dunant, Sarah 122 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, The Sport of the Gods 735 Duncan, Sara Jeannette 1050–1 works: An American Girl in London 1050; The Burnt Offering 1050–1; Cousin Cinderella: A Canadian Girl in London 1050; A Daughter of Today 1050; His Royal Happiness 1051; The Imperialist 997, 1050, 1051; On the Other Side of the Latch 1050; The Pool in the Desert 1050; Set in Authority 1050; The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib 1050; A Social Departure 1050 Dunmore, Helen, A Spell of Winter 21 Dunn, Nell: Poor Cow 409 Up the Junction 409 Dunnett, Dorothy 339 Dunsany, Edward John Plunkett, Lord 114 works: The Charwoman’s Shadow 114; The Curse of the Wise Woman 114; A Dreamer’s Tales 114; The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth 114; The Gods of Pegana 114; The King of Elfland’s Daughter 114; The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories 114; Time and the Gods 114 Dunsford, Cathie 1297 Duras, Marguerite 146 Durcan, Paul 42 During, Simon 1386 Durrell, Lawrence 102–5 awards and prizes 104 and censorship 103 and colonialism 103 influence 104–5 and Miller (Henry) 102, 103, 104, 703, 704 and modernism 104 and politics 104 and postcolonialism 103, 104 and postmodernism 103, 104 and surrealism 102, 103 works: Alexandria Quartet 103–4, 153; Avignon Quintet 103, 104, 105; Bitter Lemons 103, 104; The Black Book 103; Panic Spring 102, 103; Pied Piper of Lovers 102, 103; The Revolt of Aphrodite 103, 104; White Eagles over Serbia 103 Dusinberre, Juliet 71
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Dybek, Stuart 536–7 works: Childhood and Other Neighbourhoods 536; The Coast of Chicago 536, 537; I Sailed with Magellan 536; “The Palatski Man” 536 Dyer, Frank L. 125 Eagleton, Terry 76, 91 East African fiction 1052–5 and the city 1053–4 and colonialism 1052–3 and humor and satire 1143 and politics and activism 940, 1264–5, 1280–1 and postcolonialism 1053–4 and queer/alternative sexualities 1297 East Asian fiction 1055–7 and the city 1055–6 and colonialism 1055–6 Eco, Umberto 209, 455 Edel, Leon 330 Edgerton, Clyde, The Floatplane Notebooks 839 Edwardian fiction 106–12 and children’s and young adult fiction 110–11 and modernism and realism 107–11 novels of education 110 and short stories 110 and World War I 111 Edwards, Dorothy 260–1, 389 Edwards, Paul 414 Edwards, Ruth Dudley, Matricide at St. Martha’s 56 Egan, Greg 1067 Egger, Dave, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius 708 Eisenstein, Sergei 125 Ekwensi, Cyprian 939, 1057–8, 1382 works: Beautiful Feathers 1058; The Boa Suitor 1057; Burning Grass 1057; The Drummer Boy 1058; Ikolo the Wrestler and Other Ibo Tales 1057; Jagua Nana 1057; Juju Rock 1058; Lokotown and Other Stories 1057; Passport of Mallan Ilia 1058; People of the City 1015, 1057; Rain Maker and Other Stories 1057; Restless City and Christmas Gold 1057; Survive the Peace 1058; Trouble in Form Six 1058 Eldershaw, M. Barnard, Tomorrow and Tomorrow 1067 Eliot, T. S. 2, 7, 8, 103, 190, 227, 349, 581, 718, 1076 and Barnes (Djuna) 451 and Bloomsbury Group 402, 403 and critical theory 90–1 and Desani 1044 and expatriate fiction 556 and Golding 157 and Greene 166
influence 338, 352 and Mansfield 1209 and modernism 2, 190, 227, 349, 421, 424, 790, 877 The Waste Land 35, 181, 232, 403, 414, 501, 502, 617 Elis, Islwyn Ffowc, The Shadow of the Sickle 388 Elkin, Stanley 538–9 awards and prizes 539 and magic realism 539 works: Boswell: A Modern Comedy 538; The Dick Gibson Show 539; The Franchiser 538, 539; George Mills 539; The Living End 538–9; The MacGuffin 539; Mrs. Ted Bliss 538; Pieces of Soap 538; Stanley Elkin’s The Magic Kingdom 539 Elliott, Kamilla 127 Ellis, John 1084 Ellison, Ralph 424, 540–3 awards and prizes 540, 543 and the city 1016 and Du Bois 533 and Federal Writers’ Project 541, 923 and gender 592 influence 287, 687 and modernism 717 and Morrison 590 works: “Cadillac Flambe” 802–3; The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison 540; Flying Home and Other Stories 541; Going to the Territory 540; “Hymie’s Bull” 540, 541; Invisible Man 425, 503, 540, 541–2, 549–50, 592, 660, 736, 802, 836; Juneteenth 540, 542; “The Little Man at Chehaw Station” 541, 543; Shadow and Act 540; “Slick Gonna Learn” 541; “Tell It Like It Is, Baby” 540 Ellman, Richard 107 Ellmann, Mary 119 Ellroy, James 544–5 and noir fiction 743 and vernacular 422 works: American Tabloid 544; Because the Night 544; The Big Nowhere 544; The Black Dahlia 544; Blood’s a Rover 545; Brown’s Requiem 544; The Cold Six Thousand 545; L.A. Confidential 544–5; L.A. Noir 544; My Dark Places 544; White Jazz 544–5 Emecheta, Buchi 294, 295, 939, 1058–60 awards and prizes 1060 and feminism 121, 1060, 1074, 1283 and postcolonialism 1059 and realism 296 works: The Bride Price 296, 1059, 1074, 1380; Destination Biafra 295, 1059; Double Yoke 1059–60; Gwendolen (The Family) 1060;
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
Head Above Water 1058, 1059; In the Ditch 121, 296, 985, 1059; The Joys of Motherhood 1059, 1074, 1380; Kehinde 1060; The Moonlight Bride 1059; The New Tribe 1060; The Rape of Shavi 1069; Second-Class Citizen 234–5, 296, 985, 1016, 1059, 1222; The Slave Girl 1059, 1060, 1380 Endo, Shusaku 154 Eng, Tan Twan, The Gift of Rain 1352 English, James F. 19, 20 English language: and British history 59 as international 1–2, 153, 938–9 see also vernacular English Studies, and world fiction 938, 1036, 1061–5 see also critical theory; publishing industry Enright, Anne, The Portable Virgin 193 Erdrich, Louise 425, 545–6, 899 and gender 591 works: The Antelope Wife 546; The Beet Queen 546; The Bingo Palace 546; The Blue Jay’s Dance 546; Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country 546; Four Souls 546; The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse 546; Love Medicine 546; The Master Butchers Singing Club 546; The Painted Drum 546; The Plague of Doves 546; Tales of Burning Love 546; Tracks 546 Eri, Vincent, The Crocodile 1350 Eshun, J. O., The Adventures of Kapapa 1069 espionage see spy novels ethnicity 547–51 in angry young man fiction 18 and the city 502–4 in colonial fiction 78–80, 1058–9 in detective/crime fiction 550, 625, 1046–7 and Doyle 99 and gender 590, 591 in historiographic metafiction 423, 628 and modernism 716–17 Native American 430–1 in noir fiction 550, 625 in road novels 802–3 in science fiction 479 and social realism 830 in young adult fiction 74, 431 Eugenides, Jeffrey 425, 552–3 and Nabokov 729 works: Middlesex 552–3, 593; My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead 553; The Virgin Suicides 552 Evans, Caradoc 261 works: Capel Sion 386; My People 386 Evans, Gareth 41 Evans, Margiad (Peggy Whistler), Country Dance 386
1421
Evans, Richard John, Entertainment 388 Evans, Stuart 389 Evaristo, Bernardine 297 works: The Emperor’s Babe 986; Lara 986; Soul Tourists 986 Everett, Percival 553–4 awards 553 works: The Body of Martin Aguilera 554; Erasure 554; Glyph 554; A History of the African-American People (with James Kincaid) 554; I Am Not Sidney Poitier 554; Walk Me to the Distance 554; The Water Cure 554; Watershed 554; Wounded 554; Zulus 553–4 exile see migration, diaspora, and exile expatriate fiction: American 555–8 British and Irish see under Joyce, James and exile 1222 world fiction 939, 970 Fagunwa, D. O. 1368 Fainlight, Ruth 200 Fairbairn, Zoe, Benefits 122 fairy tales 73 and Atwood 966 and Coover 486, 506 and Ford 132, 133 Fallon, Mary, Working Hot 1297 Fanon, Frantz 550, 793, 916, 929, 1036, 1053, 1077, 1264, 1309, 1378 fantasy: American 471, 477–8, 479, 492, 513, 661–2: and television 866 Australian 1151, 1394 British and Irish 113–16, 324: early forms 113; humorous 116; portal fantasy 114–15, 116; quest fantasy 113–14, 115, 116; sword and sorcery 115, 116; transformative 116, 145 Canadian 1067 for children 71–2, 73–4, 113–16, 1011, 1098 South Asian 1068 Southern African 1069 and speculative fiction 843 world fiction 1066–70 Far, Sui Sin, “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” 735 Farah, Nuruddin 1054, 1070–1, 1283 awards and prizes 1071 works: Close Sesame 1071; A Dagger in Vacuum 1070; From a Crooked Rib 1070; Gifts 1071; Knots 1071; Links 1071; Maps 1053, 1071; A Naked Needle 1070; Sardines 1053, 1071; Secrets 1071; Sweet and Sour Milk 1071; Yesterday, Tomorrow 1071
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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INDEX
Farhi, Rachel Castell 201 Farjeon, Benjamin 200 Farmer, Beverley, Alone 1297 Farmer, Penelope, Charlotte Sometimes 73 Farrell, Fiona 976, 1261 Farrell, J. G. 117–18 awards and prizes 118, 299 and colonial fiction 118 and Dahlberg 508 and naturalism 735, 868 works: A Girl in the Head 117; The Hill Station 118; The Lung 117; A Man from Elsewhere 117; The Siege of Krishnapur 118; The Singapore Grip 118; Troubles 118 Farrell, James T. 424, 432, 433, 560–1 works: O’Neill-O’Flaherty pentalogy 560, 561; Studs Lonigan trilogy 560–1, 676, 735 Faulkner, William 561–6 and Anderson 436, 437 awards and prizes 565 and film adaptation 126, 564, 712 and Ford (Richard) 575, 576 and gender 590, 591, 716 influence 514, 546, 565, 584, 768, 868, 927, 1267 and McCarthy (Cormac) 693 and modernism 422, 423, 562, 715–17 and naturalism 735 and noir fiction 423, 742 and O’Connor (Flannery) 755 and television 867 works: Absalom, Absalom! 563–4, 566, 628, 837, 901; As I Lay Dying 563, 566, 837, 874; A Fable 565; Flags in the Dust 562; Go Down, Moses 564, 837; The Hamlet 564, 591; Intruder in the Dust 564; Light in August 563, 566, 590, 591, 736, 837, 901; The Mansion 564; The Marble Faun 62; Mosquitoes 562; Pylon 564–5; The Reivers 565; Requiem for a Nun 565; Sanctuary 563, 742; Sartoris 562; Soldiers’ Pay 562; The Sound and the Fury 442, 561–2, 566, 591, 712, 834, 837, 858; The Town 564; The Unvanquished 564; The Wild Palms 565 Faulks, Sebastian 412 Birdsong 415 The Girl at the Lion d’Or 415 Fauset, Jessie Redmon 424, 566–7 and Harlem Renaissance 566, 567, 607 and modernism 716 works: The Chinaberry Tree 567; Comedy: American Style 567; Plum Bun 567; There Is Confusion 567 Fearon, George 16 Federal Writers’ Project 423, 541, 624, 922–5, 927
Federman, Raymond 38 Feinberg, Leslie, Stone Butch Blues 593 Feinstein, Elaine 200 feminism: American 56, 756 Australian 1073, 1115 black 593, 658, 798, 895, 1027 British and Irish 119–22, 291: and Amis (Kingsley) 10, 11; British Asian 300; and campus novels 56; and chicklit 68–9, 120; and Edwardian fiction 109; and historical fiction 177; and modernism 259, 260, 716; and science fiction 335 Canadian 1072–3, 1213, 1218, 1283 and critical theory 91, 119, 120, 121–2, 405, 412, 593, 620, 716, 1072 East Asian 1227 and humor and satire 1140 Indian 1074 lesbian 121 New Zealand 1073, 1210 Pakistani 1278, 1345–7 and postfeminism 122, 1074 second wave 109, 119–20, 121, 309, 329, 330, 1072, 1392 Southern African 1073, 1124 third wave 1072 West Indian 1072 world fiction 1054, 1060, 1071–4 see also gender Ferber, Edna 424, 488, 568–9, 711–12 awards and prizes 568 works: Buttered Side Down 568; Cimarron 568; Dawn O’Hara: The Girl Who Laughed 568; Emma McChesney & Co. 568; Fanny Herself 568; Giant 568; The Girls 568; Great Son 568; Ice Palace 568; A Kind of Magic 569; A Peculiar Treasure 569; Personality Plus 568; Roast Beef Medium 568; The Royal Family 568; Showboat 568–9; So Big 568 Fernandez, Roberto, Holy Radishes! 839 Fernando, Chitra 1360 Fernando, Lloyd 1074–5, 1351 works: Cultures in Conflict 1075; Green is the Colour 1075, 1132, 1352; Scorpion Orchid 1075, 1132, 1352 Ferrebe, A. 17 Ferrey, Ashok 1361 Fetterley, Judith 119 Fiedler, Leslie A. 60, 130, 433, 773, 808 Fielding, Helen, Bridget Jones’ Diary 68, 70 Fielding, Henry, Tom Jones 93, 456 Figes, Eva 123–4
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
and feminism 124 works: B 124; Days 124; Equinox 124; Ghosts 124; Journey to Nowhere 124; The Knot 124; Konek Landing 124; Light 124; Little Eden: A Child at War 124; Nellie’s Version 124; Patriarchal Attitudes 124; The Seven Ages 124; Sex and Subterfuge 124; Tales of Innocence and Experience 124; The Tenancy 124; The Tree of Knowledge 124; Waking 124; Winter Journey 124 Figes, Kate 12 Figes, Odo 12 Figiel, Sia 1350 works: The Girl in the Moon Circle 1350; They Who Do Not Grieve 1350; Where We Once Belonged 1350 film industry: American 710–14: and Agee 428–9; and criticism 429; and detective/crime fiction 713–14; and Fitzgerald 573, 712, 717; and Maupin 491–2; and modernism 424, 711, 712–13, 717; and Vidal 886 and British and Irish science fiction 334 and globalization 153 and modernism 259 film and television adaptations: academic studies 128 American fiction 865–6 British and Irish fiction 125–8, 267: critical views 125–8 world fiction 1081–5 see also canon, English, fictional responses to Findley, Timothy 999, 1085–7 awards and prizes 1086 queer/alternative sexualities 1086–7, 1298 works: The Butterfly Plague 1085, 1086; Elizabeth Rex 1085, 1087; Famous Last Words; 1085, 1086, 1087; Headhunter 1085, 1086, 1087; The Last of the Crazy People 1085, 1086; Not Wanted on the Voyage 1086–7, 1173; The Piano Man’s Daughter 1087; Pilgrim 1086; The Wars 998, 1083, 1086–7, 1131, 1298 Finlayson, Roderick, Brown Man’s Burden 1261 Firbank, Ronald 129–30, 178, 884 works: Caprice 129; Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli 129, 324; The Flower beneath the Foot 129; Inclinations 129–30; Sorrow in Sunlight (Prancing Nigger) 129, 130; Valmouth 129–30, 324 Firchow, P. 181 Fish, Laura, Strange Music 1079 Fish, Stanley 1031 Fisher, Rudolph 625
1423
works: “The Caucasian Storms Harlem” 609; The Conjure Man Dies 611 Fisher, Vardis 922 Orphans in Gethsemane 922 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 555, 569–73 and film industry 573, 712, 717 and Ford (Richard) 576 and gender 716 influence 47, 433, 436, 570–1, 617 and modernism 569, 715, 717 and road novels 423 works: “Babylon Revisited” 571; The Basil and Josephine Stories 571; The Beautiful and Damned 571, 572, 713; “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” 571; Flappers and Philosophers 571; “George Jackson’s Arcady” 571; The Great Gatsby 502, 548, 569, 570, 572, 712, 801, 859, 881; “I Didn’t Get Over” 570; The Last Tycoon 126, 573, 713, 717; The Offshore Pirate” 570; Tales of the Jazz Age 571; Tender is the Night 239, 569, 572–3, 713; This Side of Paradise 491, 569, 570, 572; “Winter Dreams” 570 Fitzgerald, Penelope 130–2 works: The Beginning of Spring 131–2; The Blue Flower 131; The Gate of Angels 131; Innocence 131 see also historical fiction, British and Irish Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre 555, 569 Fitzpatrick, Sir Percy, Jock of the Bushveld 1012, 1081 Flanagan, Richard: Death of a River Guide 972 Gould’s Book of Fish 972 Fleming, Ian 168, 268 Fletcher, Beryl 1297 Fletcher, John 38 Flint, F. S. 8 Flower, Desmond 318 Foden, Giles, The Last King of Scotland 292 Foer, Jonathan Safran 574–5 awards and prizes 574 and historiographic metafiction 423 works: Everything Is Illuminated 574, 629; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close 574–5, 708, 709 Fokkema, Douwe W. 6 n.34 Ford, Ford Madox 132–5, 227 and Conrad 133–4, 260, 289 influence 166, 436 and Lawrence 219 and Lewis 227, 228 and London 133 and modernism 2, 84, 258, 260, 308 and Rhys 134, 135, 1307–8, 1309
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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INDEX
Ford, Ford Madox (Continued ) and Stein 848 and West 392 works: The Brown Owl 132; England and the English 133; The Good Soldier 106, 132, 133, 134, 166, 258, 260, 289; The Inheritors (with Conrad) 133, 333; It Was the Nightingale 135; Ladies Whose Bright Eyes 133; Last Post 132; “Latin Quarter” 133; A Man Could Stand Up– 132; The March of Literature 135; New York Essays 135; New York is Not America 135; No More Parades 132; “On Heaven” 133; “On Impressionism” 135; Parade’s End 26, 132, 133, 134–5, 289, 413, 414; Return to Yesterday 133; Romance (with Conrad) 133; Some Do Not... 132; The Queen Who Flew 132 and World War I 133, 134–5 Ford, Richard 575–6, 706, 838 works: Independence Day 576, 592; The Lay of the Land 576; A Multitude of Sins 576; A Piece of My Heart 575–6; Rock Springs 576, 707; The Sportswriter 576; The Ultimate Good Luck 575–6; Wildlife 576; Women with Men 576 Forster, E. M. 106, 136–40 and colonialism 247 and Firbank 129 and Golding 157 and homosexuality 136–7, 138, 139, 178, 322, 395 influence 351, 395 and Isherwood 187 and Lawrence 220 and Macauley 242 and modernism and realism 2, 107–10, 135, 261, 308, 792 and politics 952 and Scott (Paul) 338 and Woolf 137, 402 works: Abinger Harvest 139; “Albergo Empedocle” 137; Alexandria: A History and a Guide 138; Arctic Summer 140; Aspects of the Novel 135, 139; The Celestial Omnibus 138; Collected Short Stories 139; The Eternal Moment 139; Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson 139; The Hill of Devi 138, 139; Howards End 108–9, 110, 111, 137, 138; The Life to Come 140; The Longest Journey 110, 137; “The Machine Stops” 333, 370; Marianne Thornton 139–40; Maurice 109, 137, 138, 140, 322–3; A Passage to India 80, 109, 110, 136, 137, 138–9, 202, 1217, 1298; Pharos and Pharillon 138; A Room with a View 107, 109, 137; Two Cheers for Democracy 139;
“What I Believe” 136, 168; Where Angels Fear to Tread 137 Fortunati, Vita 133 Foster, Marion 1298 Foucault, Michel 513, 674, 791–3, 1285, 1296 Fowler Wright, S.: Deluge 333 Dream 333 Fowles, John 28, 140–2 film adaptations 142 and metafiction 94, 141–2, 309 and postmodernism 142, 296 works: The Aristos 142; The Collector 141; Daniel Martin 96, 142; The Ebony Tower 142; The French Lieutenant’s Woman 5, 6, 95, 96, 141–2, 175, 309, 310, 1185; Journals 142; A Maggot 142, 335; The Magus 96, 141; Mantissa 142; The Tree 142; Wormholes 142 Fox, William Price, Southern Fried 839 Frame, Janet 938, 1088–91 awards and prizes 1089, 1091 and modernism 1088 and postmodernism 1088 speculative fiction 1067 television adaptations 1082 works: The Adaptable Man 1089–90, 1091; An Angel at My Table 1082, 1090; An Autobiography 1088; The Carpathians 1067, 1088, 1090, 1091, 1142; Daughter Buffalo 1089–90, 1091; The Edge of the Alphabet 1089, 1090; Faces in the Water 1089; The Goose Bath 1091; Intensive Care 1067, 1089, 1091; To the Is-Land 1090; The Lagoon: Stories 1088, 1089, 1091; Living in the Maniototo 1090, 1091, 1261; Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun 1091; Owls Do Cry 1089, 1261; A Pocket Mirror 1091; The Rainbirds 1090–1; The Reservoir: Stories and Sketches 1090; Scented Gardens for the Blind 1089–90; Snowman, Snowman: Fables and Fantasies 1090; A State of Siege 1082, 1090–1; Towards Another Summer 1088–9, 1091; “University Entrance” 1088 France, and postmodernism 5–6 Frank, Waldo 576–7, 870 works: The Bridegroom Cometh 577; Chalk Face 577; City Block 577; The Dark Mother 577; The Death and Birth of David Markand 577; Holiday 577; The Invaders 577; Island in the Atlantic 577; Not Heaven 577; Our America 577; Rahab 577; The Rediscovery of America 577; Summer Never Ends 577; The Unwelcome Man 577
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
Frankfurt School 41, 715 Franklin, Miles 1092–3 awards and prizes 1093 works: All That Swagger 1093; Bring the Monkey 1093; My Brilliant Career 937, 970, 1072, 1082, 1092, 1142; My Career Goes Bung 1092; Pioneers on Parade 1093; Some Everyday Folk and Dawn 1092; Up the Country 1092–3 Franklin, Tom, Poachers 839 Franzen, Jonathan 578–9, 706, 776 awards and prizes 578 and Purdy 784 and television 867 works: The Corrections 578, 579, 708, 709, 867; The Discomfort Zone 579; How to Be Alone 579; “Perchance to Dream” 579; Strong Motion 578, 579; The Twenty-Seventh City 578–9 Frayn, Michael 143–5 awards and prizes 144 works: Constructions 144; Copenhagen 144; Headlong 144; The Human Touch 144; A Landing on the Sun 144; Noises Off 144; Now You Know 144; The Russian Interpreter 144; Spies 144; Sweet Dreams 144; The Tin Men 144; Towards the End of the Morning (Against Entropy) 144; The Trick of It 144; A Very Private Life 144 Freeman, Joseph 668, 829 French, Fiona, Snow White in New York 73 Freud, Sigmund 2, 3, 80, 106–7, 258, 360, 441, 461, 715, 1312 and homosexuality 422, 791–2 and Lawrence 219, 223, 224 and Nabokov 732 Friedan, Betty 550, 1072 Friel, George, Mr. Alfred MA 341 Frisbie, Florence “Johnny”, Miss Ulysses of Puka Puka 1349 Fromm, Gloria 330 Frye, Northrop 966, 967, 1038 Fryer, Peter 985 Fuentes, Carlos 209, 310 The Crystal Frontier (La Frontera de Cristal) 468 F€ ul€ op-Miller, Rene 181 Fussell, Paul 412 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 96 Gaddis, William 581–3, 698 awards and prizes 581, 583 and postmodernism 422, 581, 773 works: Agape Agape 583; Carpenters Gothic 583; A Frolic of His Own 583; JR 581, 582; The Recognitions 581, 582, 583, 685, 708
1425
Gaiman, Neil 116, 335 works: Coraline 72; Wolves in the Wall 72 Gaines, Ernest J. 584–5 awards and prizes 584 and Stegner 846 and television 866 works: The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman 584, 838; Bloodline 584; Catherine Carmier 584; A Gathering of Old Men 584; In My Father’s House 584; A Lesson Before Dying 584–5; A Long Day in November 584; Of Love and Dust 584 Gaitens, Edward, Dance of the Apprentices 341 Galford, Ellen, Moll Cutpurse 121 Galgut, Damon 1297 Gallant, Mavis 965, 998, 1094–6, 1221 awards and prizes 1094 and modernism 1095, 1096 works: “By the Sea” 1096; “The Four Seasons” 1096; Home Truths 1094–5; “Jorinda and Jorinel” 1095; “The Moslem Wife” 1096; Paris Notebooks 1094; The Pegnitz Junction 1096; “Senor Pinedo” 1096; “Up North” 1095; What Is To Be Done? 1095–6 Galleano, Eduardo, La Memoria Del Fuego trilogy 524 Gallie, Menna: The Small Mine 388 Strike for a Kingdom 388 Galloway, Janice 146–7, 390 and feminism 146 and Warner 375 works: Blood 147; Clara 146, 147; Foreign Parts 146–7; This Is Not About Me 146, 147; The Trick is to Keep Breathing 146, 342; Where You Find It 147 Galsworthy, John 40, 147–50 awards and prizes 150 and Conrad 148, 149 and Lawrence 111, 149 and marriage and divorce 109 and modernism 149–50 and Orwell 148 and realism 107–8 and Woolf 148, 150 works: The Civilized 148; The Country House 109; Flowering Wilderness 148; The Forsyte Saga 106, 109, 147, 148–50; “Indian Summer of a Forsyte” 148; Justice 148; Maid in Waiting 148; A Man of Devon 148; Man of Property 109, 111, 148–9; A Modern Comedy 147, 148, 149–50; On Forsyte Change 148; Over the River 148; Saint’s Progress 148; The Silver Box 148; and World War I 148
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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INDEX
gangster fiction 318–19 Garcia, Christina, Dreaming in Cuban 592–3 Gardner, Erle Stanley, Perry Mason 866 Gardner, John 484, 585–6 works: The Art of Living 586; Freddy’s Book 586; Grendel 586; Jason and Medeia 586; The King’s Indian 586; Mickelsson’s Ghost 586; Nickel Mountain 586; October Light 586; On Moral Fiction 586; Resurrection 585–6; The Sunlight Dialogues 586; The Wreckage of Agathon 586 Garfield, Leon 73 Garimara, Doris Pilkington: Caprice: A Stockman’s Daughter 1151 Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence 1082 Garland, Muthoni 1055 Garner, Alan: Fairy Tales of Gold 73 Lad of the Gad 73 The Owl Service 72 Garner, Helen: Postcards from Surfers 972 The Spare Room 972 Garnett, Edward 134, 149, 150 Garnett, Eve, The Family from One End Street 73 Garrett, George 406 Gaspar de Alba, Alicia 422 Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders 467 Gass, William H. 309, 422, 587–9 awards and prizes 587 metafictional essays 588–9 and modernism and postmodernism 505, 587 works: Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas 588; In the Heart of the Heart of the Country 588; Middle C 588; Omensetter’s Luck 588; On Being Blue: A Philosophical Enquiry 588; The Tunnel 587, 588; Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife 588 see also Stein, Gertrude; Woolf, Virginia Gates, Henry Louis Jr., Signifying Monkey 798 Gatheru, Mugo, A Child of Two Worlds 1053 Gavin, Jamila: Coram Boy 73 The Eye of the Horse 74 The Track of the Wind 74 The Wheel of Surya 74 Gavron, Jeremy 201 Gay, William, Twilight 839 Gee, Maurice 1097–8 awards and prizes 976, 1098 children’s fiction 1098 works: The Big Season 1097; Blindsight 1098; The Burning Boy 1098; Crime Story 1098, 1261; Ellie
and the Shadow Man 1098; Games of Choice 1097; A Glorious Morning, Comrade 1097; Going West 1098; “The Hole in the Window” 1097; In My Father’s Den 1097; Live Bodies 1098; “The Losers” 1097; Loving Ways 1098; Meg 1098, 1261; “O” trilogy 1098; Plumb 1097, 1098, 1261; Prowlers 1098; “A Retired Life” 1097; “Salt” trilogy 1098; The Scornful Moon 1098; Sole Survivor 1098, 1261; A Special Flower 1097 gender: in American fiction 590–3: and Acker 427–8; and Baldwin 446; and Barnes (Djuna) 452; and Canfield 483; and Cisneros 499–500; and ethnicity 590, 592; and Eugenides 552–3; and Gilman 595; and Gordon 601; and Hemingway 616–20, 716; and Kingston 654; and modernism 716; and social realism 830; and colonialism 1036, 1053; in East African fiction 1053, 1054 and feminism 1072: see also feminism masculinity see masculinity in Southern African fiction 990 Genette, Gerard 1030 Genga-Idowu, F. M. 1054 genius loci, in children’s and young adult fiction 72 Genya, Monica, Links of a Chain 1054 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize 118, 345, 974 George, Elizabeth 195 Gernsback, Hugo 333, 335, 841 Ghose, Zulfikar 1099–100 works: The Art of Creating Fiction 1099; Confessions of a Native-Alien 1099; The Contradictions 1099; Don Bueno 1100; The Fiction of Reality 1100; The Incredible Brazilian 1099–100, 1277; The Murder of Aziz Khan 1099, 1277; A New History of Torments 1100; Statement against Corpses 1099; The Triple Mirror of the Self 1099, 1277; Veronica and the Gongora Passion 1100 Ghosh, Amitav 1100–3, 1148 awards and prizes 1101 works: The Calcutta Chromosome 1048, 1068, 1101–2, 1133; The Circle of Reason 1101, 1102; Countdown 1101; Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma 1101; The Glass Palace 1101, 1102; The Hungry Tide 1101, 1102; The Imam and the Indian 1101; In an Antique Land 1101, 1102; Incendiary Circumstances 1101; Sea of Poppies 1101, 1102; The Shadow Lines 1015, 1016, 1101, 1102, 1131, 1224
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
Gibbon, Lewis Grassic 151–2, 411 and modernism and politics 151–2, 261, 290, 340–1 works: Cloud Howe 151, 152, 340; Grey Granite 151, 152; A Scots Quair 151–2, 261, 290, 340–1, 408; Sunset Song 151–2, 340 Gibbons, Kay: Charms for the East Life 839 Ellen Foster 838 Gibson, Colin, The Pepper Leaf 1067 Gibson, William 1103–5 awards and prizes 1103 and Burroughs 478 and Stephenson 855 works: Agrippa 1104; “Burning Chrome” 1104; Count Zero 1104; Mona Lisa Overdrive 1104; Neuromancer 776, 842, 999, 1066, 1103–4; Pattern Recognition 1104; Spook Country 1104 Gicheru, Mwangi 1054 Gikandi, Simon 944 Gilb, Dagoberto 466 Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan 330, 412, 716, 1072 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 594–6 influence 329 and naturalism 594, 735 works: The Crux 596; Herland 596, 735, 880; In This Our World 595; The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman 596; Moving the Mountain 596; What Diantha Did 596; With Her in Ourland 596, 880; Women and Economics 596; “The Yellow Wallpaper” 595 Gilmore, Rachna 1013 Gilroy, Beryl 985, 1105–6 awards and prizes 1106 works: Black Teacher 305, 1105; Boy-Sandwich 1106; Frangipani House 305, 1106; Gather the Faces 1106; The Green Grass Tango 1106; In Praise of Love and Children 1106; Inkle and Yarico 1106, 1132; She Wore Silk 1106; Stedman and Joanna: A Love in Bondage 1106; Sunlight on Sweet Water 1105 Gins, Madeline, Helen Keller or Arakawa 442 Ginsberg, Allen 556, 791 and Burroughs 476–8 and Dahlberg 508 influence 768–9 and Kerouac 652, 653 Glanville, Brian 200, 201 The Bankrupts 199 Glasgow, Ellen 424, 597–8 awards and prizes 597
1427
works: Barren Ground 598, 836; A Certain Measure 598; The Descendant 598; In This Our Life 597; The Romance of a Plain Man 598; The Romantic Comedians 598; The Sheltered Life 598, 836; They Stooped to Folly 598; Virginia 598; The Voice of the People 598; The Wheel of Life 598 Glen, Esther, Six Little New Zealanders 1013 Glissant, Edouard 958, 992 Gloag, John, Tomorrow’s Yesterday 333 globalization 152–6 and awards and prizes 973 in British and Irish fiction 27 and critical theory 91 and English language 1–2 and homogenization and diversity 155–6 and migration 1221, 1224 and modernization 153–5 and postmodernism 776 and publishing industry 1291, 1293 and urbanization 504 and Westernization 153 and world fiction 1070 Glover, Douglas, Elle 1078, 1131 Gluck, Robert: Jack the Modernist 441 Margery Kempe 441 Goff, Martyn 20, 21 Gogarty, Oliver St. John 206 Gold, Mike 424, 501, 599–600, 621, 924 and Dos Passos 526 and little magazines 669 works: Change the World! 599; The Hollow Men 599; “The Jesus-Thinkers” 669; Jews Without Money 502, 503, 599–600, 735–6; “Proletarian Realism” 828 Golding, Louis: The Glory of Elsie Silver 200 Magnolia Street 200 Golding, William 156–9 awards and prizes 158 and evil 157, 158 and fantasy 158 and masculinity 157–8 and metafiction 94 and postmodernism 5, 92, 94, 96, 265 and war 157 works: The Brass Butterfly 158; Close Quarters 157, 158; Darkness Visible 5, 96, 157, 158; The Double Tongue 157, 158–9; An Egyptian Journey 157; Fire Down Below 157, 158; Free Fall 96, 156; The Hot Gates 156; The Inheritors 156, 333–4; Lord of the Flies 74, 156, 157, 333–4; A Moving
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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INDEX
Golding, William (Continued ) Target 157; The Paper Men 157, 158; Pincher Martin 156; The Pyramid 156; Rites of Passage 157, 158; The Scorpion God 157, 158; The Spire 156, 174; To the Ends of the Earth 158 Goldman, William 200 East End My Cradle 200, 407 Goldsworthy, Peter 972 Gontarski, S. E. 38 Gonzales, N. V. M. 1351 Goodis, David: Black Friday 741 Down There (Shoot the Piano Player) 741 Goodwin, Geraint, Call Back Yesterday 386 Goodyear, Sara Suleri: Boys Will Be Boys 1278 Meatless Days 1278 Gooneratne, Yasmine 1107–8, 1360 awards 1107 works: A Change of Skies 1107, 1361; The Lizard’s Cry 1107; The Pleasures of Conquest 1107; Relative Merits 1107, 1108; The Sweet and Simple Kind 1108; Word, Bird, Motif 1107 Goonewardene, James 1108–9 works: Acid Bomb Explosion 1109, 1132, 1329, 1360; An Asian Gambit 1109, 1360; The Awakening of Doctor Kirthi 1109; Call of the Kirala 1109, 1360; Dream Time River 1109; One Mad Bid for Freedom 1109, 1361; A Quiet Place 1108–9, 1360; The Tribal Hangover 1109 Gordimer, Nadine 938, 947, 1110–13 and the Academy 1062 awards and prizes 974, 977, 1110, 1111, 1112 and censorship 1004 and the city 1015–16 and Coetzee 1023 and feminism 1073 politics and activism 1110–13, 1282–3, 1354 and publishing industry 1292 and queer/alternative sexualities 1113, 1297 works: Beethoven was One-Sixteenth Black 1113; Burgher’s Daughter 1016, 1074, 1111–12, 1282–3, 1354; The Conservationist 1111, 1354; The Essential Gesture 1283; Friday’s Footprint and Other Stories 1110, 1111; Get a Life 1113, 1355; A Guest of Honour 1111, 1354; The House Gun 1113, 1297, 1355; July’s People 1112, 1354; Jump and Other Stories 1112; The Late Bourgeois World 1111, 1282–3, 1354; Loot and Other Stories 1113; The Lying Days 1074, 1110, 1354; My Son’s Story 1016, 1112, 1354; None to Accompany Me 1112,
1355; Occasion for Loving 1110, 1282, 1354; The Pickup 1113, 1355; Something Out There 1112; A Sport of Nature 1073, 1112, 1354; A World of Strangers 1110, 1354; Writing and Being 1113 Gordon, Mary 600–1 awards and prizes 601 works: The Company of Women 600; Final Payments 600; Men and Angels 601; The Other Side 601; Pearl 601; Spending 601 Gosse, Edmund 110 Father and Son 110 gothic fiction 45, 59–60, 113, 132, 367–8 American 751, 754 Australian 1243 British 244–5 Irish 189, 249, 366 Southern Ontario 966, 967, 1038, 1086 Gotlieb, Phyllis: Son of the Morning 1066 Sunburst 1066 Gour, Neelum Saran 1149 Grace, Alfred A., Tales of a Dying Race 1260 Grace, Patricia 1114–15, 1152, 1261, 1350 awards and prizes 976, 1115 and politics 1282, 1288 works: Baby No-Eyes 1114, 1115; Collected Stories 1114; Cousins 1114, 1261; Dogside Story 1114; The Dream Sleepers 1114; Electric City and Other Stories 1114; Mutuwhenua 1114, 1152; Potiki 1069, 1114, 1151; Selected Stories 1114; The Sky People 1114, 1115; Small Holes in the Silence 1114, 1115; Tu 1114, 1115, 1152; Waiariki 1114, 1152 Graff, Gerald 4 Grafton, Sue 196, 743 Graham, Candis 1298 Graham, R. B. Cunninghame 339, 340, 343 Grahame, Kenneth, The Wind in the Willows 71, 72, 111 Gramsci, Antonio 1032, 1285 Grant, Linda: The People on the Street 199 When I Lived in Modern Times 199 Graves, Robert 159–60 autobiography and fiction 160 works: Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina 159; Count Belisarius 160; “The Devil’s Advice to Story-Tellers” 159; Good-Bye to All That 159, 160, 413; Greek Myths 159; I Claudius 159, 160; King Jesus 160; Proceed, Sergeant Lamb 160; Sergeant Lamb of the
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
Ninth 160; The White Goddess 159, 160; Wife to Mr Milton 160 and World War I 159–60 Gray, Alasdair 161–2, 390 influence 146, 374 and postmodernism 5, 342 works: The Fall of Kelvin Walker 161; A History Maker 161; Janine 161, 342; Lanark 5, 6, 161, 213, 292, 310, 335, 341–2; Mavis Belfrage 161; McGrotty and Ludmilla 161; Old Men in Love 162; Poor Things 161–2, 176, 342; Something Leather 161 Gray, Stephen 1297 Green, H. M. 937 Green, Henry 162–4 influence 956 and modernism 162, 163, 261, 308 works: Back 163–4; Blindness 163; Caught 163, 290, 417; Concluding 164; Doting 164; Living 163; Loving 163, 164, 417–18; Nothing 164; Pack My Bag 163, 164; Party Going 163, 164 and World War II 163–4 Greene, Graham 165–9 and Conrad 166 and film adaptations 126, 166, 168 and Ford Madox Ford 133, 166 and Hamilton 173 influence 755 and London 165, 233 and modernism and realism 166, 169 and Moore 263 and Narayan 1256 and O’Brien (Flann) 275 and Spark 352 works: Babbling April 165; “The Basement Room” 166; Brighton Rock 166; A Burnt-Out Case 168; The Captain and the Enemy 168; The Comedians 168; The Confidential Agent 166, 290; Dream Diary 165; The End of the Affair 166–7, 168, 233; “The Revolver in the Corner Cupboard” 165; A Gun for Sale 166, 416; The Heart of the Matter 166, 167, 1167; The Honorary Consul 168; The Human Factor 168; It’s a Battlefield 167; The Last Word and Other Stories 168; The Lawless Roads 166; “The Lost Childhood” 166; The Man Within 166, 167; The Ministry of Fear 166, 167, 233, 418; Monsignor Quixote 168; The Name of Action 167; No Man’s Land 168; Our Man In Havana 168; The Power and the Glory 166, 167; The Quiet American 166, 168; Rumour at Nightfall 167; A Sort of Life 165, 168; Stamboul Train 167; The
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Tenth Man 168; The Third Man 166, 168; Travels with My Aunt 166, 168; Ways of Escape 165 Greenwood, Walter, Love on the Dole 290, 408 Greer, Germaine 1005 Greig, Nordahl, The Ship Sails On 237 Grenville, Kate 1000, 1115–16 awards and prizes 1115, 1116 works: Bearded Ladies 1115, 1116; Dark Places (Albion’s Story) 1073, 1116; Dreamhouse 1115, 1116; The Idea of Perfection 1116; Joan Makes History 1116; Lilian’s Story 1073, 1116; Making Stories 1116; Searching for the Secret River 1116; The Secret River 972, 975, 1116, 1130; The Writing Book 1116; Writing from Start to Finish 1116 Griffin, Dustin 1140 Griffiths, Niall 390 Grimshaw, Charlotte, Opportunity 976 Groom, Winston, Forrest Gump 839 Grossmann, Edith Searle, The Heart of the Bush 1260 Grove, Frederick Philip 1117–18 awards and prizes 1117 works: Consider Her Ways 1118; Fruits of the Earth 1118; In Search of Myself 1117; The Master of the Mill 1118; Our Daily Bread 1118; Over Prairie Trails 1117; A Search for America 1117, 1118; Settlers of the Marsh 997, 1118; The Yoke of Life 1118 Guardian Fiction Prize 89, 124, 1008, 1126, 1214, 1220 Guedalla, Philip, “A Russian Fairy Tale” 283 Guerrero, Lucrecia, Chasing Shadows 467 Gunesekera, Romesh 939, 1118–20, 1221 works: Heaven’s Edge 1119; The Match 1119; Monkfish Moon 1119; Reef 302, 1119, 1361; The Sandglass 302, 1119 Gunn, Neil M. 170–1 and modernism 170, 261, 342 works: The Green Isle of the Great Deep 171; The Atom of Delight 171; Butcher’s Broom 171, 341; The Drinking Well 171; The Grey Coast 170; Highland River 170, 341; The Lost Chart 171; Morning Tide 170; The Serpent 171; The Silver Darlings 171, 341; Sun Circle 171, 341; Wild Geese Overhead 171 Gupta, Sunetra: Memories of Rain 302 A Sin of Colour 1079–80 Gurnah, Abdulrazak 294, 295–6, 1054 works: Admiring Silence 296; Memory of Departure 296; Paradise 296
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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INDEX
H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) 2, 424, 603–4 and Aldington 8, 414 and Lawrence 220 and sexuality 596 works: Asphodel 603; Bid Me To Live 414, 603–4; The Gift 604; HERmione 603; Magic Mirror 604; The Majic Ring 604; The Mystery 604; Paint It Today 603; Palimpsest 604 Haag, M. 104 Haddon, Mark, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time 975 Hage, Rawi, De Niro’s Game 976 Hagedorn, Jessica 604–5, 1298 awards and prizes 604 works: Danger and Beauty 605; Dangerous Music 604; Dogeaters 551, 604–5; Dream Jungle 605; The Gangster of Love 60; Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions 604 Haggard, H. Rider 107, 113, 268, 944, 1068 works: Allan Quatermain 1081; King Solomon’s Mines 79, 1081; She 79 Al-Hakim, Tawfiq 1069 Haley, Alex, Roots 838, 866 Hall, Radclyffe: “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” 323 The Well of Loneliness 63, 66, 119–20, 139, 323, 414 Hall, Sandi: The Godmothers 1068 Wingwomen of Hera 1068 Hall, Stuart 16, 235, 298, 302, 985, 1224 Hamid, Mohsin: Moth Smoke 1015, 1278 The Reluctant Fundamentalist 301, 1278 Hamilton, Patrick 172–3 works: Craven House 172; Gas Light 172; Hangover Square 173; Impromptu in Moribundia 172; The Midnight Bell 172; Monday Morning 172; Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse 173; Rope 172; The Slaves of Solitude 173; Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky 172–3; Twopence Coloured 172; Unknown Assailant 173 Hammett, Dashiell 475, 493, 606–7, 616, 922, 1046 and Faulkner 742 and noir fiction 422, 739, 741 works: The Dain Curse 606; The Glass Key 607; The Maltese Falcon 606–7, 742, 882; Red Harvest 606, 741, 742; The Thin Man 606, 866 Handke, Peter, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams 553 Hanif, Mohammed, A Case of Exploding Mangoes 302, 1278
Hanley, James 408 works: Boy 290; No Directions 290 Hannah, Barry: Airships 839 Ray 839 Hanscombe, Gillian 330 Harding, Lee, Displaced Person 1067 Hariharan, Githa 1149 Harlem Renaissance 607–11, 624, 716, 1383 influence 942, 1180 and little magazines 423, 611, 667, 669, 670 and modernism 828 and sexuality 610, 670 Harper, Frances Ellen Warkins, Iola Leroy 836 Harrington, James, Oceana 369 Harris, E. Lynn 550 Harris, Wilson 303, 304–5, 985, 992, 1121–3, 1223, 1304 awards and prizes 977, 1123 influence 1034–5, 1123, 1223 and myths 304–5, 1121, 1122 speculative fiction 1068 works: The Age of Rainmakers 1122–3; The Angel at the Gate 1123; Ascent to Omai 305, 1122; The Carnival Trilogy 305; Companions of the Day and Night 305; Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness 1123; The Dark Jester 1123; Eternity to Season 1121; The Eye of the Scarecrow 305, 1122; The Far Journey of Oudin 1122; Fetish 1121; The Ghost of Memory 1123; The Guyana Quartet 304; Heartland 1122; Jonestown 305, 1123; The Mask of the Beggar 1123; Palace of the Peacock 304, 1078, 1122, 1368, 1384; Resurrection at Sorrow Hill 1123; The Secret Ladder 307, 1122; The Sleepers of Roraima 1122; Tradition, the Writer and Society 1121–2; The Tree of the Sun 305, 1123; Tumatumari 1122; The Waiting Room 1122; The Whole Armour 1122; The Womb of Space 304, 1122; Harrison, Jim 612–13 works: Dalva 612; Farmer 612; A Good Day to Die 612; Julip 612; Legends of the Fall 612; Returning to Earth 612–13; The Road Home 612; Sundog 612; True North 612–13; Warlock 612; Wolf 612; The Woman Lit by Fireflies 612 Harrison, M. John, In Viriconium 334 Harrower, Elizabeth 955 Hartley, J. 419 Hartnett, Michael 43 Haskell, John, American Purgatorio 802 Hassan, Ihab 38
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
Hauser, Arnold 125 Haviland, Virginia, Favourite Fairy Tales Told in Ireland 73 Hawkes, John 534, 613–14 and postmodernism 774 and Scott (Joanna) 818 works: Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade 614; The Beetle Leg 613, 774; The Blood Oranges 614; The Cannibal 613; Death, Sleep and the Traveler 614; The Frog 614; The Goose on the Grave 613; An Irish Eye 614; The Lime Twig 613; Lunar Landscapes 614; The Owl 613; The Passion Artist 614; Second Skin 553, 613–14; Sweet William 614; Travesty 614; Virginie: Her Two Lives 614; Whistlejacket 614 Hawthornden Prize 21, 144, 364 Hawthorne, Susan, The Falling Woman 1297 Hay, John MacDougall, Gillespie 340 Hayford, J. E. Casely, Ethiopia Unbound 1380 Head, Bessie 1124–6 and censorship 1004 and exile 1222 influence 1021 and queer/alternative sexualities 1297 works: A Bewitched Crossroad 1125, 1354; The Cardinals 1125; The Collector of Treasures 1125, 1354; A Gesture of Belonging 1125; Maru 1124–5, 1354; A Question of Power 1125, 1222, 1297, 1354; Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind 1125, 1354; Tales of Tenderness and Power 1125, 1354; When Rain Clouds Gather 1124, 1354; A Woman Alone 1125 Heaney, Seamus 21, 193, 254, 276 Heath, Roy 303, 306, 1126–7 awards and prizes 1126, 1127 works: The Armstrong Trilogy 306; From the Heat of the day 1127 “The Function of Myth” 1126; Genetha 1127; Kwaku 1126–7; A Man Come Home 1126; The Ministry of Hope 1126; The Murderer 1126; One Generation 1127; Orealla 1127; The Shadow Bride 1127; Shadows Round the Moon 1127 Heinlein, Robert 841, 842 Starship Troopers 842 Heiss, Anita: Dhuuluu-Yala/To Talk Straight 1151 Not Finding Mr Right 1151 Hejinian, Lyn: My Life 441 Oxota: A Short Russian Novel 441 Heller, Joseph 615–16 influence 613
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works: Catch-22 615, 616, 746, 747, 749, 775, 878; Closing Time 615; God Knows 615; Good as Gold 615; No Laughing Matter 615; Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here 615; Picture This 615; Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man 616; Something Happened 615 Heller, Zoe 201 Hemingway, Ernest 617–20 and Anderson 436 awards and prizes 616, 619 and East Africa 1052 and expatriate fiction 555, 556 and Fitzgerald 570, 617 and Ford (Richard) 576 influence 211, 329, 361, 433, 459–61, 474, 485, 494, 514, 584, 616, 1198, 1203 and Lewis (Sinclair) 666 and masculinity 590, 591, 619, 716 and modernism 421–2, 616–17, 715, 717, 741, 1198 and naturalism 735 and Stein 848 works: Death in the Afternoon 617, 618; A Farewell to Arms 317, 590, 618, 746, 749; The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories 619; For Whom the Bell Tolls 618, 619, 746, 925, 1181; The Garden of Eden 619, 620; Green Hills of Africa 618; To Have and Have Not 127, 618; Islands in the Stream 619; “The Killers” 712, 865; Men Without Women 618; The Old Man and the Sea 618, 619–20; “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” 619, 1052; “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” 619, 1052; The Sun Also Rises 180, 515, 562, 617, 618, 959; Three Soliders 489; Torrents of Spring 436; True at First Light 620, 1052; In Our Time 617–18, 849; “A Way You’ll Never Be” 617; Winner Take Nothing 618 and World War I 617–18 Hempel, Amy, Reasons to Live 707, 708 Henderson, Ian 1052 Henderson, Philip 290 Hendry, J. F., Fernie Brae 341 Henjinian, Lynn 422 Henry, Walter, Equitania: or, The Land of Equity 880 Heppenstall, Rayner 95, 203 Herbert, Xavier 1127–9 awards and prizes 1128 works: Capricornia 971, 1128, 1130; Disturbing Element 1128; Larger than Life 1128; Poor Fellow My Country 1128–9; Seven Emus 1128; Soldiers’ Women 1128
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Herbst, Josephine 620–2 works: The Executioner Waits 521; “Following the Circle” 621; “Hunter of Doves” 621; Money for Love 621; New Green World 621; Nothing Is Sacred 621; Pity Is Not Enough 521; Rope of Gold 521; Satan’s Sergeants 621; Somewhere the Tempest Fell 621 Herr, Michael, Dispatches 775 Hersey, John, A Bell for Adano 549 Heseltine, Nigel, Tales of the Squirearchy 389 Heslop, Harold, The Gate of a Strange Field 407 Higgins, Aidan 192 Highsmith, Patricia 556, 622–4 and noir fiction 423, 622 and sexuality 623 works: The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder 623–4; The Blunderer 623; The Boy Who Followed Ripley 623; “Heroine” 622; The Price of Salt 623; Ripley Under Ground 623; Ripley Under Water 623; Ripley’s Game 623; Strangers on a Train 622–3, 740; The Talented Mr Ripley 555, 622, 623; This Sweet Sickness 623; Those Who Walk Away 623; The Tremor of Forgery 623 Highway, Tomson 999 Kiss of the Fur Queen 1150 Hill, Lawrence, The Book of Negroes 975 Hill, Reginald 195, 269 Hillerman, Tony 1047 Hilliard, Noel, Maori Girl 1261 Himes, Chester 555, 624–5 awards and prizes 625 influence 625 and noir fiction 423, 741, 742 works: All Shot Up 625; The Big Gold Dream 625; Blind Man With a Pistol 625; The Crazy Kill 625; “Crazy in the Stir” 624; For Love of Imabelle 625; If He Hollers Let Him Go 503, 624; Lonely Crusade 624; My Life of Absurdity 625; “To What Red Hell” 624; Yesterday Will Make You Cry 624 Hind, Archie, The Dear Green Place 341 Hines, Barry, A Kestrel for a Knave 409 Hinojosa, Rolando 422, 466, 468 Hird, Laura 390 historical fiction, British and Irish 174–7 for children 73 and feminism 177 lesbian 121 and national identity 174, 176, 177 “neo-Victorian” novels 175–6, 177 and nostalgia 176–7 and postcolonialism 292
and postmodernism 174–7 and Scott (Walter) 152, 174 Scottish 339, 341 historical fiction, world 292, 940, 975, 1129–33 Australian 1130–1, 1389, 1393 Canada 998, 1130, 1131, 1390–1 India 1131–2, 1202–4 New Zealand 1130, 1260 Pakistani 1278 Sri Lanka 1132 West Africa 1130, 1131, 1380 West Indies 1132–3, 1384 Hitchcock, Alfred 126 Hoban, Russell, Riddley Walker 335 Hobsbaum, Philip 55, 211 Hodge, Merle, Crick Crack, Monkey 305 Hodgins, Jack 998, 1134–5 awards and prizes 1134, 1135 works: The Barclay Family Theatre 1134; Broken Ground 1134; Damage Done by the Storm 1134; Distance 1134, 1135; The Honorary Patron 1134; The Invention of the World 1134; Left Behind in Squabble Bay 1134–5; Over Forty in Broken Hill 1135; A Passion for Narrative 1134; The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne 1134; Spit Delaney’s Island 1134 Hoffman, F. J. et al. 667, 669 Hogan, Desmond 192 A Curious Street 310 Hogarth Press 403 Hoggart, Richard 16, 17–18 Holdstock, Robert, Mythago Cycle 116 Holkins, Pauline, Contending Forces 836 Hollinghurst, Alan 178–9 awards and prizes 178, 179 and politics 178–9, 291 works: Confidential Chats with Boys 178; The Folding Star 179; The Line of Beauty 178; The Spell 179; The Swimming-Pool Library 129, 178, 179, 325 Hollywood see film industry, American Hollywood novels 126, 713 Holocaust novels 656, 746, 759, 825, 844, 850 Holroyd, Stuart 16 Holtby, Winifred 119 Holzwarth, Werner and Erlbruch, Wolf, The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew It Was None of His Business 72 homosexuality see queer/alternative sexualities; queer modernism Hong, Ee Thian 1352 Hooker, Richard, MASH: A Novel about Three Army Doctors 749, 866
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
Hopkins, Bill 16 Hopkins, Pauline, Contending Forces 735 Hopkinson, Nalo 1068 works: Brown Girl in the Ring 1068; Midnight Robber 1068; The New Moon’s Arms 1068; The Salt Roads 1068; So Long Been Dreaming 1069; Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root 1068 Hopper, Keith 277 Hornby, Nick: Fever Pitch 69 High Fidelity 69 Hosain, Attia 299, 1135–6 works: Phoenix Fled 1136; Sunlight on a Broken Column 299, 1136, 1148, 1277 Hospital, Janette Turner 1137–8 awards and prizes 1137 and border fiction 468 works: Borderline 1137; Charades 1073, 1137; Dislocations 1138; Due Preparations for the Plague 1137; Isobars 1138; The Ivory Swing 1072, 1137; The Last Magician 1132; North of Nowhere, South of Loss 1138; Orpheus Lost 972, 1137–8; Oyster 972, 1137; The Tiger in the Tiger Pit 1137 Hove, Chenjerai: Bones 1353 Shadows 1353 Howard, Elizabeth Jane 11 Howard, Maureen 425, 630–1 awards and prizes 631 works: Before My Time 630; Big as Life: Three Tales for Spring 631; Bridgeport Bus 630; Expensive Habits 630–1; Facts of Life 631; Grace Abounding 630, 631; A Lover’s Almanac 631; Natural History 630–1; Not a Word About Nightingales 630; The Silver Screen 631 Howells, William Dean 671, 673, 734, 820, 827–8, 830 Huang, Chunming 1056 Huff, Tanya 1067 Huggan, Graham 1288 Hughes, Dorothy B., In a Lonely Place 740 Hughes, Langston 424, 631–3, 648, 928, 942 and Du Bois 533 and Ellison 540–1 and Fauset 566 and Himes 624 and Hurston 609, 633 influence 892 and little magazines 670 and Schuyler 816 and Van Vechten 884 works: The Big Sea 610; Children of the Night 739; Not Without Laughter 632; Simple stories 632;
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Tambourines to Glory 632; The Ways of White Folks 632 and Wright 927 Hughes, Richard 389 Hughes, Ted 586 Hughes, Tristan, Send My Cold Bones Home 389 Hulme, Keri 1138–9, 1350 awards and prizes 20, 1138 and globalization 156 works: The Bone People 1138, 1139, 1152, 1261; Home Places 1138; Lost Possessions 1139; The Silences Between (Moeraki Conversations) 1139; Stonefish 1139; Strands 1139; The Windeater (Te Kaihau) 1139, 1152 humor and satire: British and Irish: domestic comedy 202; and fantasy 116; social comedy 137; and utopian fiction 370–1 world fiction 964, 1140–3: Australian 1141, 1143; Canadian 1141–2, 1174, 1186–7, 1229, 1231–2, 1313–15, 1396; Indian 1141, 1143, 1256; New Zealand 1142; West African 1141, 1143; West Indian 1141, 1142, 1252–3 Humphreys, Emyr 387 works: Land of the Living series 387; A Man’s Estate 387; Outside the House of Baal 387 Hunt, Violet 134 The Workaday Woman 109 Hunter, William 126 Hurston, Zora Neale 633–6 and Du Bois 533 and Federal Writers’ Project 923 and Hughes 609, 633 influence 892 and little magazines 670 and modernism 716, 717 and sexuality 596 and Van Vechten 884 works: “Drenched in Light” 633; Dust Tracks on a Road 635, 802; “John Redding Goes to Sea” 633; Jonah’s Gourd Vine 634, 836; Moses, Man of the Mountain 635, 923; Mules and Men 633–4; Seraph on the Suwanee 635; “Sweat” 610, 670; Tell My Horse 634, 923; Their Eyes Were Watching God 591, 611, 634–5, 802, 836, 923 Hussein, Aamer 1277 works: Insomnia 1278; A Mirror to the Sun 1278; Turquoise 1278 Hussein, Abdullah, Emigre Journeys 1278 Hutcheon, Linda 3, 127, 174, 251, 310, 423, 516, 626–9, 785, 1140, 1176
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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INDEX
Hutchinson, G. 658 Huxley, Aldous 180–2 and film adaptations 126 and Lawrence 181, 220 and mysticism 180, 182 and utopianism and dystopianism 181, 182, 370–1, 372 works: After Many a Summer 182; Antic Hay 180, 181; Ape and Essence 291; Brave New World 126, 180, 181, 333, 370–1, 372, 881, 882; Crome Yellow 180, 181; Eyeless in Gaza 180, 181–2; Island 182, 372, 880; Music at Night 180; Point Counter Point 180, 181, 1210; Those Barren Leaves 180–1; Time Must Have a Stop 182 Huxley, Elspeth 1052 Huyssen, Andreas 311, 628 Hwang, Sok-yong 1057 Hyde, Robin, The Godwits Fly 1261 Hynes, Samuel 111 Ihimaera, Witi 1145–6, 1152, 1350 awards and prizes 1145 film adaptations 1082, 1146, 1152 queer/alternative sexualities 1145–6, 1152, 1282 works: Bulibasha: King of the Gypsies 1145; Dear Miss Mansfield 1079, 1211; The Dream Swimmer 1145; The Matriarch 1130, 1145–6, 1152, 1261; Nights in the Gardens of Spain 1146, 1152, 1297; Pounamu, Pounamu 1145, 1152; The Return (The Rope of Man) 1145; Sky Dancer 1146; Tangi 1145, 1152; The Uncle’s Story 1146, 1282, 1297; The Whale Rider 1082, 1146, 1152; Whanau 1145; Woman Far Walking 1146 Imagism 8, 219 Indian fiction 1146–9 and censorship 1003, 1004 for children 1011 and the city 1014–15 and colonialism 1146–8 and English Studies 1062 and feminism 1074 film adaptations 1083 and historical fiction 1131–2 and humor and satire 1141, 1143 and politics and activism 940, 952, 1281–3, 1300, 1349 and postcolonialism 1148 and queer/alternative sexualities 1219, 1298 and realism 952, 1099–100, 1304 science fiction 1068 Indigenous fiction 1149–52 Australian 971, 1151, 1241–3, 1333
Canadian 468, 999, 1067, 1142, 1150–1, 1173–4, 1212–13 and children 1013 and gender 592 Native American 430–1, 545–6, 719–20, 757–8, 821–2, 839, 888–9, 899–900 New Zealand 976, 1114–15, 1138, 1145–6, 1151–2, 1261, 1350 and postcolonialism 1288 Innes, C. L. 295 Innes, Michael 56, 1046 works: Death at the President’s Lodging 55; Old Hall, New Hall 55; The Weight of the Evidence 55 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 21, 22, 975–6, 1200, 1206, 1373 International PEN Club 150, 1003 intertextuality: and American fiction 452–3, 455–7, 575, 657, 688, 693, 896, 931 and British and Irish fiction 175, 176, 181, 202, 273, 311 and world fiction 1031, 1122, 1323 Irish fiction 189–93 and Celtic Revival 207 and colonialism 189, 193 historical fiction 192–3 and Irish identity 189, 192 and modernism 190–1 and politics 289–90, 292 and postcolonialism 42 and queer/alternative sexualities 324–5 and realism 191–2 women writers 191, 193, 410–11 Irish Literary Revival 189 Irish-American fiction see Farrell, James T.; Howard, Maureen; Kennedy, William; McCarthy, Mary irony: and historiographic metafiction 175 and humour 1140 and postmodernism 454, 455, 458, 705, 708, 896 Irving, John 637–8 awards and prizes 638 influence 931 works: The 158-Pound Marriage 637; The Cider House Rules 637; The Fourth Hand 637; The Hotel New Hampshire 637; A Prayer for Owen Meany 637; Setting Free the Bears 637; A Son of the Circus 637; A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound 638; Trying to Save Piggy Sneed 638; Until I Find You 638; The WaterMethod Man 637; A Widow for One Year 638; The World According to Garp 637
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
Isegawa, Moses: Abyssinian Chronicles 1054 Snakepit 1054 Isherwood, Christopher 135, 186–8 and modernism 261 and politics 187–8 works: All the Conspirators 187; Cabaret 187; Christopher and His Kind 187, 324; Down There on a Visit 187; Exhumations 187; Goodbye to Berlin 187, 188; I Am a Camera 187; Journey to a War (with Auden) 187; Kathleen and Frank 187; Lions and Shadows 187; A Meeting by the River 187, 188; The Memorial 187; Mr. Norris Changes Trains (The Last of Mr. Norris) 187–8; Prater Violet 187, 188; A Single Man 187, 188, 558; The World in the Evening 187, 188 Ishiguro, Kazuo 30, 184–5, 1055 awards and prizes 184, 185 and postmodernism 92, 94 works: An Artist of the Floating World 154, 184; Never Let Me Go 185; Nocturnes 185; A Pale View of Hills 184; The Remains of the Day 184, 418; The Unconsoled 94, 184–5; When We Were Orphans 185; The White Countess 185 Islam, Manzu, Burrow 302 Islas, Arturo 466 Jackman, Harold 610 Jackson, Graham 1298 Jacob, Naomi 199 Jacob, Violet, Flemington 339 Jacobs, Eric 11 Jacobs, Jane 89 Jacobson, Dan 200 Evidence of Love 1354 Jacobson, Howard 201 Jacques, Brian, Redwall series 71 James, C. L. R. 700, 985, 1154–5 works: American Civilization 1155; Beyond a Boundary 1155; The Black Jacobins 1154; Facing Reality 1155; Minty Alley 303, 1154–5, 1383; Modern Politics 1155; World Revolution 1917–1936 1154 James, Henry 84, 132, 639–42 and Ford Madox Ford 134 influence 28, 50, 166, 178, 447, 488, 755, 759, 848, 927, 956, 1043 and modernism 107–8, 260, 556 and naturalism 734 and style 640–2 and Wells 383 and Wharton 909, 911
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works: The Ambassadors 109, 623, 639, 641; The American Scene 642, 800; The Art of the Novel 641; “The Aspern Papers” 640; Daisy Miller 639; The Golden Bowl 107, 108, 109, 556, 639, 641; The Ivory Tower 639; literary criticism 639; The Middle Years 639; Notes of a Son and Brother 639; The Outcry 639; The Portrait of a Lady 50, 109, 639–40, 809; Roderick Hudson 556; The Sacred Fount 106, 109; The Sense of the Past 639; A Small Boy and Others 639; The Spoils of Poynton 640–1; The Turn of the Screw 260, 640; Watch and Ward 639; What Maisie Knew 640–1; The Wings of the Dove 108, 639, 641 James, Louis 957 James, P. D. 195–6, 268, 270 works: The Black Tower 195; A Certain Justice 195; The Children of Men 196; Cover Her Face 195, 268; Death of an Expert Witness 195, 196; Death in Holy Orders 195, 196; Devices and Desires 195; film and television adaptations 196; Innocent Blood 196; The Lighthouse 195; The Maul and the Pear Tree (with T. A. Critchley) 196; A Mind to Murder 195; The Murder Room 195, 196; Original Sin 195; Shroud for a Nightingale 195; The Skull beneath the Skin 195, 196; A Taste for Death 195; Time to be in Earnest 196; Unnatural Causes 195; An Unsuitable Job for a Woman 122, 196 James, Si^an: Not Singing Exactly 388 A Small Country 388 James Tait Black Memorial Prize 21 and British and Irish fiction 13, 25, 46, 48, 59, 62, 82, 101, 170, 179, 212, 221, 242, 287, 347, 352 and world fiction 1111, 1188 James, William 3, 639, 848 Jameson, Fredric 94, 310, 774, 830–1, 1032–3, 1132 Jameson, Storm 119 JanMohamed, Abdul, Manichean Aesthetics 63 Janson, Hank 318–19 Jarvis, Robin 73 Javallena, Steven, Without Seeing the Dawn 1351 Jayawardena, Elmo, The Last Kingdon of Sinhalay 1360 Jenkins, Robin 196–7, 353 works: The Awakening of George Darroch 197; The Changeling 198; The Cone-Gatherers 34, 197; Dust in the Paw 197; Fergus Lamont 197; Lunderston Tales 197; The Sardana Dancers 197; So Gaily Sings the Lark 197; Some Kind of Grace 197; The Thistle and the Grail 197
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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INDEX
Jepson, Edgar 113 Jewett, Sarah Orne 595 Jewish fiction, American 459–63, 491–2, 538–9, 551, 574–5, 599–600, 615–16, 656–7, 681–4, 756–7, 759–60, 761–2, 805–7, 808–12, 824–5, 844–5, 903–6, 933–4 Jewish fiction British 198–201: and anti-Semitism 198, 199, 200; and assimilation 199–200; and identity 198; Irish 201; and Israel 198–9; and World War II 200; and Yiddish 200 Canadian 997, 1016, 1313–15, 1396–7 Jeyaratnam, Phillip, Abraham’s Promise 1352 Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer 200, 202–3 awards and prizes 202, 299 screenplays 184, 202, 1083 works: A Backward Place 202; East into Upper East 202; Esmond in India 202; Get Ready for Battle 202; Heat and Dust 202, 1083; The Householder 202, 1083; In Search of Love and Beauty 202; My Nine Lives 202; The Nature of Passion 202; A New Dominion 202; Poet and Dancer 202; Shards of Memory 202; A Stronger Climate 202; Three Continents 202; To Whom She Will 202 Ji, Dawei 1056 Jia, Pingwa, Abandoned Capital 1056 Jin, Ha 1155–7 awards and prizes 1055, 1156 works: Between Silences 1156; The Bridegroom 1156; The Crazed 1156; Facing Shadows 1156; A Free Life 1156; In the Pond 1156; Ocean of Words 1156; Under the Red Flag 1156; Waiting 1055, 1156; War Trash 1055, 1132, 1156; Wreckage 1156; The Writer as Migrant 1055, 1156 Joaquin, Nick 1157–8 awards and prizes 1157 and queer/alternative sexualities 1298 works: Caves and Shadows 1157, 1158; Collected Verse 1157; Culture and History 1157, 1158; The Portrait of the Artist as Filipino 1157, 1158; Tropical Gothic 1351; The Woman with Two Navels 1157–8, 1351 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 21, 46, 59, 101, 213, 345, 963 Johnson, B. S. 203–5 and Coe 77, 204 and Ghose 1099 and Joyce 5 and modernism 3, 47, 261 and postmodernism 95, 309 and realism 95, 265
works: Alberto Angelo 204, 309; Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry 204; House Mother Normal 204; London Consequences (with Drabble) 204; See the Old Lady Decently 204–5; Statement against Corpses 204; Travelling People 203; Trawl 203, 204; The Unfortunates 204, 309 Johnson, Charles 643–4 works: The American Scholar 644; Dr. King’s Refrigerator 644; Dreamer 644; Faith and the Good Thing 64; Middle Passage 643–4; Oxherding Tale 643; The Sorcerer’s Apprentice 643; Soulcatcher 644; Turning the Wheel 644 Johnson, Denis 644–6 awards and prizes 645 works: Already Dead: A California Gothic 645; Angels 645, 737; Fiskadoro 645; Jesus’ Son 645, 737; The Name of the World 645; Nobody Move 645; Resuscitation of a Hanged Man 645; The Stars at Noon 645; Tree of Smoke 645–6 Johnson, E. Pauline 1150 Johnson, James Weldon 533, 610, 884 works: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man 503, 591, 608; Black Manhattan 608 Johnson, Linton Kwesi, Mi Realueshanary Fren 1016 Johnston, Jennifer 193 Johnston, Wayne 1158–60 awards and prizes 1159 works: Baltimore’s Mansion 1159; The Colony of Unrequited Dreams 998, 1131, 1142, 1159; The Custodian of Paradise 1159–60; The Divine Ryans 1159; Human Amusements 1159; The Navigator of New York 1159; The Story of Bobby O’Malley 1159; The Time of Their Lives 1159 Jolas, Eugene 207, 469, 470, 555 Jolley, Elizabeth 955, 971, 1160–2 awards and prizes 1160, 1161 film adaptations 1161 influence 1393 works: An Accommodating Spouse 1162; Cabin Fever 1162; Five Acre Virgin 1160; Foxybaby 1161; The Georges’ Wife 1162; “A Hedge of Rosemary” 1160; An Innocent Gentleman 1162; Lovesong 1162; Milk and Honey 1161; Miss Peabody’s Inheritance 1079, 1161; Mr. Scobie’s Riddle 1161; My Father’s Moon 1162; The Newspaper of Claremont Street 1161; The Orchard Thieves 1162; Palomino 1161; The Sugar Mother 1161–2; The Well 1161 Jones, David, In Parenthesis 414
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
Jones, Edward P. 646–7, 838 awards and prizes 647 works: All Aunt Hagar’s Children 646, 647; The Known World 646, 647; Lost in the City 646, 647 Jones, Gayl 647–9, 725 and realism and naturalism 830 works: Corrigedora 647, 648; Die Volgelfaengerin (The Birdwatcher) 648; Eva’s Man 648; The Healing 648; The Hermit-Woman 648; Liberating Voices 648; Mosquito 648; Songs for Anninho 648; White Rat 648; Xarque and Other Poems 648 Jones, Glyn: The Blue Bed and Other Stories 387 The Island of Apples 387 Jones, Gwyneth, Bold as Love 335 Jones, Jack 386 works: Bidden to the Feast 386; Black Parade 386; The Black Venus 386; Honey and Bread 386; Jubilee Blues 398; Rhondda Roundabout 386; A Time to Laugh 386 Jones, James, From Here to Eternity 525, 746 Jones, John Sam: Crawling Through Thorns 389 Welsh Boys Too 389 Jones, Langdon, The New SF 334 Jones, LeRoi, The System of Dante’s Hell 441 Jones, Lewis: Cymardy 290, 386–7, 407 We Live 386–7, 407 Jones, Lloyd (New Zealand): The Book of Fame 1261 Mister Pip 975, 976, 1079 Jones, Lloyd (Wales): Mr. Cassini 388 Mr. Vogel 388 Jones, Mary, Resistance 292 Jordan, Neil, Company of Wolves 59 Jorgens, Jack 127 Jose, F. Sionil 1163–4 awards and prizes 1164 works: Rosales saga 1132, 1163, 1351; Sherds 1163 Jose, Nicholas 973 Avenue of Eternal Peace 973 Chinese Whispers 973 Joseph, Anthony, The African Origins of UFOs 1068 Joshi, Arun 1164–5 awards and prizes 1165 works: The Apprentice 1165; The City and the River 1165; The Foreigner 1165; The Last Labyrinth 1165; The Strange Case of Billy Biswas 1078, 1148, 1165; The Survivor 1165 Joshi, Ruchir, The Last Jet Engine Laugh 1068
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Josipovici, Gabriel 200, 309 Jourdain, Margaret 82 Joyce, James 103, 205–9, 227, 436 and Beckett 35, 36, 37, 190, 207, 209 and censorship 63, 65–7, 206–7 and exile 206–7, 1222 and Freud 3 influence 14, 35, 59, 110, 187, 189–92, 209, 253, 273, 275, 514, 584, 806, 1214, 1225, 1267, 1323 and modernism 1–2, 4–5, 6, 10, 28, 107, 190, 207–8, 258, 261, 308, 773, 1293 and O’Flaherty 279 works: Chamber Music 206; Collected Poems 206; Dubliners 28, 65, 110, 189–90, 206, 207, 261, 341, 361, 364; “Eveline” 363; Exiles 206; Finnegans Wake 1, 35, 135, 190, 207, 209, 261, 1332; Giacomo Joyce 206; Pomes Pennyeach 206; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 42, 65, 108, 110, 189, 191, 206, 207–8, 253, 341, 349; Stephen Hero 206; Ulysses 2, 4, 5, 56, 59, 63–4, 65, 66, 76, 189, 201, 206–7, 208–9, 261, 290, 316, 323, 414, 525, 617, 669, 858, 877, 896; Work in Progress 35, 207 Justice, Daniel Heath, The Way of Thorn and Thunder 1151 Kafka, Franz, influence 211, 438, 820, 980, 1095, 1214, 1267 Kane, Cheikh Hamidou, Ambiguous Adventure 1380 Kang, Zhengguo, Confessions 1056 Kao, Xingjian 1033, 1056 Karunaratne, Suvimalee: Lake-Marsh 1361 The Vine 1361 Kasaipwalova, John 1350 Kavanagh, Dan see Barnes, Julian Kawabata, Yasunari 1056 Kawana, Phil: Attack of the Skunk People 1152 Dead Jazz Guys 1152 Kay, Guy Gavriel: The Darkest Road 1067 The Summer Tree 1067 The Wandering Fire 1067 Kay, Jackie, Trumpet 326, 985–6 Kazin, Alfred 421, 433, 715, 808, 877 Keane, Molly (M. J. Farrell) 191, 323 Keating, H. R. F. 1046, 1047 Keating, Joseph, Son of Judith 386 Keating, Peter 281 Keble, W. T., Son of the Lion 1360 Keefer, Janice Kulyk, Thieves 1210
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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INDEX
Keegan, Claire: Antarctica 192 Walk the Blue Fields 192 Kelly, Mary, Dead Man’s Riddle 55 Kelman, James 211–12, 374, 390 awards and prizes 92–3, 212 and politics 292, 410 and postmodernism 92, 342 and vernacular 92–3, 151, 411 works: The Busconductor Hines 211–12, 342; A Chancer 212, 342; A Disaffection 212; How Late It Was, How Late 92–3, 212, 292, 342; Kieron Smith, Boy 212; Not Not While the Giro 342; An Old Pub Near the Angel 211; Translated Accounts 212; You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free 212 Kemp, Sandra 107 Kempadoo, Oonya 1123 Keneally, Thomas 1167–9 awards and prizes 1167 works: Bettany’s Book 1169; Blood Red, Sister Rose 1168; Bring Larks and Heroes 1167, 1168; The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith 972, 1082, 1131, 1167, 1168, 1169; The Commonwealth of Thieves 1169; Confederates 1167, 1168; The Cut-Rate Kingdom 1168; A Family Madness 972; Flying Hero Class 1169; Gossip from the Forest 1167; The Great Shame 1169; Homebush Boy: A Memoir 1167; The Place at Whitton 1167; The Playmaker 1130, 1168; A River Town 1169; Schindler’s Ark 972, 1082, 1167, 1168; Three Cheers for the Paraclete 1167–8; The Tyrant’s Novel 1169; A Victim of the Aurora 1168; The Widow and Her Hero 1169 Kennaway, James, Tunes of Glory 341 Kennedy, A. L. 213–14, 390 awards and prizes 213, 214, 975 and postmodernism 312 works: The Audition 213; Day 214, 975; Everything You Need 214; Indelible Acts 214; Looking for the Possible Dance 213–14; Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains 213; Now That You’re Back 213, 342; Original Bliss 214; Paradise 214; So I Am Glad 214; Stella Does Tricks 213 Kennedy, William 650–1 awards and prizes 651 works: Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game 650; The Cotton Club (with Coppola) 650; The Flaming Corsage 651; Grand View 651; The Ink Truck 650; Ironweed 650, 651; Legs 626, 650; O Albany! 650; Quinn’s Book 650–1; Riding the
Yellow Trolley Car 650; Roscoe 651; Very Old Bones 651 Kennelly, B. 280 Kenner, Hugh 38, 556, 790 Kenney, Gayle, Me, Antman, and Fleabag 1151 Kenyatta, Jomo, Facing Mount Kenya 1053 Kermode, Frank 95–6, 107 Kerouac, Jack 556, 651–4, 680 and Burroughs 476–7 and gender 591–2 and Mailer 704 and modernism 715 and realism 476 works: Big Sur 654; Desolation Angels 653; The Dharma Bums 563; Doctor Sax 653; Maggie Cassidy 653; On the Road 477, 508, 549–50, 591–2, 651–3, 800, 801; Satori in Paris 654; The Subterraneans 653; The Town and the City 652; Tristessa 653; Vanity of Duluoz 654; Visions of Cody 442, 654; Visions of Gerard 653 Kesey, Ken 846, 857 The Further Inquiry 801 Kesson, Jessie 146 Keyes, Marian 70, 193 Khan, Adib 973 Khan, Sorayya Y., Noor 1278 Khan, Uzma Aslam, The Geometry of God 1278 Kibera, Leonard and Kahiga, Sam, Potent Ash 1054 Kiberd, D. 280 Kidman, Fiona 1261 Kiely, Benedict 214–16 works: All the Way to Bantry Bay 216; A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly 216; Call for a Miracle 215; The Captain with the Whiskers 215; The Cards of the Gambler 215; A Cow in the House 216; Dogs Enjoy the Morning 215; In a Harbour Green 215; Honey Seems Bitter (The Evil Men Do) 215; A Journey to the Seven Streams 216; Land without Stars 215; A Letter to Peachtree 216; Nothing Happens in Carmincross 215–16; Proxopera: A Tale of Modern Ireland 215; There was an Ancient House 215 Kim, Won-il, Sunset 1056 Kincaid, Jamaica 430, 939, 1170–2 awards and prizes 1170, 1171 and politics 1282 speculative fiction 1068 works: Among Flowers 1172; Annie John 1073, 1170, 1385; At the Bottom of the River 1170; The Autobiography of My Mother 1073, 1171, 1385; Best American Travel Writing 1172; “Girl” 1170; Lucy 1073, 1171, 1223–4;
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
Mr. Potter 1171; My Brother 1171; My Favourite Plant 1171; My Garden 1172; See Now Then 1172; A Small Place 1171, 1172; Talk Stories 1170 King, John 390 King, Stephen: influence 913 and road novels 423, 800 works: Christine 800 King, Thomas 1048, 1173–4 and border fiction 468 detective/crime fiction 468 works: DreadfulWater Shows Up 1174; “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial” 1173; Green Grass, Running Water 468, 999, 1069, 1142, 1150, 1173; “How Corporal Colin Sterling Saved Blossom” 1067; Medicine River 468, 1150, 1173; One Good Story, That One 468, 1151, 1173; The Red Power Murders 1174; Truth and Bright Water 468, 1173–4 Kingston, Maxine Hong 425, 654–5 and historiographic metafiction 423 and magic realism 776 works: To Be the Poet 655; China Men 592, 654, 655, 776; The Fifth Book of Peace 655; Hawai’i One Summer 655; Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book 655; Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace 655; The Woman Warrior 592, 628, 654–5, 776, 830, 1195 Kipling, Rudyard: and adventure fiction 268 and colonialism 247, 295 and realism 107, 108, 111 works: “As Easy as ABC” 333; Just So Stories 111; Kim 74, 78, 79, 106, 107, 1079; Plain Tales from the Hills 79; Puck of Pook’s Hill 73, 111; Rewards and Fairies 73; Stalky & Co. 1256–7; “With the Night Mail” 333 Kiriamiti, John, My Life in Crime 1015, 1054 Kirmess, C. H., The Australian Crisis 1067 Kitson, Frank 1052 Klein, A. M. 997 Klein, Joe, Primary Colors 897 Knight, Stephen 268 Mr. Schnitzel 389 Knowles, S. 419 Knowlson, J. 37, 38 Knox, Elizabeth, The High Jump 1261 Koch, Christopher 973 works: Across the Sea Wall 973; Crossing the Gap 973; Highways to a War 973; The Memory Room 973; The Year of Living Dangerously 973, 1082 Koenigsberger, Kurt 40
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Koestler, Arthur 200 and politics 392 works: Darkness at Noon 154; The Gladiators 154; The Yogi and the Commissar 284 Kogawa, Joy 1174–6 awards and prizes 1175 and politics 998, 1131, 1174, 1176, 1282 works: Emily Kato 1175; Itsuka 1175; Naomi no Michi 1175; Naomi’s Road 1175; Naomi’s Tree 1175; Obasan 998, 1131, 1174, 1175, 1282; The Rain Ascends 1175; The Splintered Moon 1175 Kojima, Nubuo 1056 Koldony, Annette 1074 Kops, Bernard 200 Korean War 748–9, 767, 858, 889 Kosinski, Jerzy 656–7 awards and prizes 656 works: Being There 656, 864; Blind Date 656–7; Cockpit 656; The Devil Tree 656; The Hermit of 69th Street 657; The Painted Bird 656, 746; Passion Play 657; Pinball 657; Steps 656 Krakauer, Jon, Into the Wild 802 Krauth, Nigel 1297 Kreisel, Henry 997 Kroetsch, Robert 967, 997, 998, 1176–8 awards and prizes 1176 and critical theory 1178 and postmodernism 1176–8 works: Abundance 1178; Alibi 1176, 1177; Badlands 1078, 1176, 1177; But We Are Exiles 1176; Completed Field Notes 1177; The Crow Journals 1178; Field Notes: 1–8 A Continuing Poem 1177; “For Play and Entrance” 1177; Gone Indian 1141, 1176, 1177; The Hornbooks of Rita K 1177; Labyrinths of Voice 1178; The Ledger 1177; A Likely Story 1178; The Lovely Treachery 1178; The Man from the Creeks, 1177; The Puppeteer 1176, 1177; Seed Catalogue 1177, 1178; The Studhorse Man 1141, 1176–7; What the Crow Said 1141, 1176, 1178; The Words of My Roaring 1178 Kubrick, Stanley 334 Kuhn, Thomas 96 Kulatunga, Sita, Dari the Third Wife 1361 Kulet, Henry ole, Is It Possible? 1054 Kunzru, Hari 302 and the city 1016 and critical theory 92 The Impressionist 300
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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INDEX
Kureishi, Hanif 217–18, 302 and critical theory 92, 95, 217 and postcolonialism 217 and queer/alternative sexualities 1298 and realism 95, 217 works: The Black Album 217, 235, 301, 985, 1278; The Body 217–18; The Buddha of Suburbia 217, 218, 235, 292, 301, 985, 1016, 1224, 1278; Gabriel’s Gift 217; Intimacy 217; Love in a Blue Time 217; Midnight All Day 217; My Beautiful Laundrette 217, 218, 301; “My Son the Fanatic” 301, 1224; Something to Tell You 218 Al-Kuwayri, Yusuf 1069 Kyomuhendo, Goretti, Secrets No More 1054 La Guma, Alex 1180–1 and censorship 1004, 1180 and colonialism 1182 politics and activism 940, 1180–1, 1353–4 and realism 1180–1, 1303, 1354 works: And a Threefold Cord 1180, 1353; In the Fog of the Season’s End 1180, 1354; A Soviet Journey 1181; The Stone Country 1180, 1353; Time of the Butcherbird 1181, 1354; A Walk in the Night 1180, 1353 Lacan, Jacques 80, 209, 1286 LaCapra, Dominick 627 ladlit 68, 69–71 Lahiri, Jhumpa 558, 1095 and the city 1016 and Nabokov 729 Laing, Stuart 408 Lamming, George 294, 295, 303, 938, 985, 1105, 1181–3 and exile 1222 influence 1017 and James (C.L.R.) 1155 works: The Emigrants 292, 304, 1182, 1222, 1294, 1383–4; In the Castle of My Skin 304, 305, 957, 1182, 1384; Natives of My Person 1132, 1182; Of Age and Innocence 1182; The Pleasures of Exile 1077, 1182, 1382–3; Season of Adventure 1182, 1384; Water with Berries 1077, 1182 Lancaster, G. B., Sons o’ Men 1260 landscape: in British and Irish fiction 30–1, 88–9 in fantasy fiction 113 Lane, Allen 316–17, 318, 319 Lappin, Elena 199 Larkin, Philip 16, 318, 321 Jill 54 Larsen, Nella 658–9
and modernism 716 and Stein 850 works: Passing 591, 610, 658, 659, 716; Quicksand 503, 591, 610, 658–9, 736 Lassner, P. 419 Laurence, Margaret 967, 997, 1183–5 awards and prizes 1184 and censorship 1005 and feminism 1072–3 film adaptations 1184–5 and Mitchell (W. O.) 1232 works: A Bird in the House 1185; The Diviners 998, 1005, 1073, 1077, 1185; The Fire-Dwellers 1185; A Jest of God 1184–5; Long Drums and Cannons 1184; The Prophet’s Camel Bell 1184; The Stone Angel 1072, 1184; This Side Jordan 1184; The Tomorrow-Tamer 1184; A Tree for Poverty 1184 Lauter, Paul 593 Lavin, Mary 191, 279 Lawler, Ray, The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll 1082 Lawrence, D. H. 6, 103, 219–24 awards and prizes 221 biographies 8 and censorship 63, 64, 65–7, 219, 221, 224 and Dahlberg 508 and Dos Passos 525–6 and feminist criticism 224 and Galsworthy 111, 149 and Huxley 181, 220 influence 57, 224, 393, 1290 and Mansfield 220, 1209, 1210 and modernism 1, 2–3, 10, 107, 219–20, 222, 224, 258, 308 and primitivism 220, 221, 223, 224 and Richardson (Dorothy) 329 and sexuality 324, 355 and social realism 219 and utopianism 223 and vitalism 181, 221, 436 and West 392–3 works: Aaron’s Rod 220, 222–3; Birds, Beasts and Flowers 221; The Boy in the Bush 223; The Captain’s Doll 224; “England, My England” 224; The Escaped Cock (The Man Who Died) 224; The Fox 224, 324; “Jimmy and the Desperate Woman” 224; Kangaroo 223, 415; Lady Chatterley’s Lover 57, 63–4, 65–6, 139, 220, 221, 223–4, 317, 319; The Ladybird 224; The Lost Girl 220, 221, 222; Mornings in Mexico 220; Movements in European History 221; “Odour of Chrysanthemums” 224; Pansies 221; The Plumed Serpent 223, 224;
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
“The Prussian Officer” 110, 224; The Rainbow 57, 63, 65–6, 220, 221–2, 324; St. Mawr 224; Sea and Sardinia 220; Sketches of Etruscan Places 220; Sons and Lovers 3, 42, 65, 106, 108, 110, 219, 221, 258; Studies in Classic American Literature 221; “Study of Thomas Hardy” 221; The Trespasser 221; Twilight in Italy 220; The White Peacock 109, 221, 324; “Why the Novel Matters” 224; “The Woman who Rode Away” 224; Women in Love 57, 220, 221–2, 224, 1210 Laxness, Halld or 154 Laye, Camara, The Radiance of the King 1078 Lazarus, Neil 1285 Le Carre, John 268–9 works: Call for the Dead 269; A Most Wanted Man 269; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy 291 Le Guin, Ursula K. 372, 513, 661–2, 842, 843 awards and prizes 662 works: Always Coming Home 661, 881; Changing Planes 662; The Dispossesed 661, 881; Eye of the Heron 661; A Fisherman of the Inland Sea 662; Four Ways to Forgiveness 662; Lathe of Heaven 661; Lavinia 662; The Left Hand of Darkness 661, 881; The Other Wind 662; The Telling 662; Unlocking the Air 662; Western Shore trilogy 662; A Wizard of Earthsea 661 Le Sueur, Meridel, The Girl 925–6 Leacock, Stephen 937, 1038, 1186–7 works: Afternoons in Utopia 1066; Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich 1186; The Iron Man and the Tin Woman 1066; Literary Lapses 1186; Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town 997, 1141, 1186 Leader, Zachary 11 Lean, David 126 Leavis, F. R. 51, 90–2, 1262 Lee, Alison 310 Lee, Chang-rae 659–60 awards and prizes 660 works: Aloft 660; A Gesture Life 660; Native Speaker 504–5, 592, 660 Lee, Harper, To Kill a Mockingbird 126, 550, 838 Lee, Hermione 20, 405 Lee, John A. 1082 Lee, Sky 998 Lehmann, Rosamond 225–6 and Bowen 44 and Coe 77 and Macauley 242 and modernism 261 works: The Ballad and the Source 226; Dusty Answer 225–6; The Echoing Grove 226; Invitation to the
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Waltz 226; A Note in Music 226; A Sea-Grape Tree 226; The Swan in the Evening 226; The Weather in the Streets 226 Leitch, Thomas 127 Lema, Eliesh 1054 Lentin, Ronit 201 Leonard, Elmore 616, 743 lesbian fiction see queer modernism; queer/alternative sexualities Lessing, Doris 294, 938, 1187–91 and angry young man fiction 16, 17 awards and prizes 1188, 1353 and censorship 1190 and the city 1014 and feminism 121 and Hamilton 173 and Lawrence 224 and metafiction 94 and Piercy 769 and publishing industry 1292 works: African Laughter 1190; African Stories 1190; Alfred and Emily 1191; Ben, in the World 1190; Briefing for a Descent into Hell 1189; Canopus in Argos: Archives sequence 372, 1189–90; Children of Violence 1188; The Cleft 1190; The Diaries of Jane Somers 1190; The Diary of a Good Neighbour 1190; The Fifth Child 1190; Going Home 1190; The Golden Notebook 121, 1073, 1189; The Good Terrorist 1190; The Grandmothers 1190; The Grass is Singing 1188; If the Old Could . . . 1190; In Pursuit of the English 17; Landlocked 1353; Love, Again 1190; Mara and Dann: An Adventure 1190; The Marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five 1072, 1189; Martha Quest 1353; The Memoirs of a Survivor 1189; A Proper Marriage 1353; A Ripple from the Storm 1353; The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter 1190; The Summer before the Dark 1189; The Sweetest Dream 1189, 1190; Under my Skin 1188; Walking in the Shade 1188–9 Lethem, Jonathan 425, 662–3, 776 awards 663 works: Amnesia Moon 663; As She Climbed Across the Table 663; The Disappointment Artist 663; The Fortress of Solitude 663; Girl in Landscape 663; Gun With Occasional Music 663; Motherless Brooklyn 663; Omega the Unknown 663; You Don’t Love Me Yet 663 Levy, Amy and Frankau, Julia (Frank Denby) 199–200
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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INDEX
Levy, Andrea 297, 300, 985 Small Island 177, 975 Lewis, Alun: In the Green Tree 387 The Last Inspection 387 Lewis, C. S. 71, 73 and Golding 157 works: The Allegory of Love 114; Chronicles of Narnia 113, 114–15; Cosmic trilogy 333; The Discarded Image 114; Ransom trilogy 114 Lewis, R. W. B. 166, 169 Lewis, Saunders 261 Lewis, Sinclair 664–6 awards and prizes 665 and Dos Passos 525, 666 works: Ann Vickers 665; Arrowsmith 665; Babbit 664–5; Dodsworth 665; Elmer Gantry 632, 665; Free Air 664, 800; It Can’t Happen Here 665; The Job 664; Kingsblood Royal 665–6; Main Street 483, 664, 800; Our Mr. Wrenn 664; The Trail of the Hawk 664 Lewis, Wyndham 227–9 and modernism 1, 2, 227–8, 308 works: The Apes of God 228–9, 834; Blasting and Bombadiering 412; “Cantleman’s SpringMate” 669; The Childermass 228, 289; Malign Fiesta 229; Monstre Gai 229; The Revenge for Love 229, 290; Self Condemned 229; Snooty Baronet 229; Tarr 228; The Vulgar Streak 229; The Wild Body 228 Li, Ang, Butcher’s Wife 1056 Li, Qao 1056 Liang, Lee Kok 1351 Lim, Catherine 1143, 1192–3, 1351 awards and prizes 1193 and politics 1193, 1283, 1352 works: The Bondmaid 1193; Deadline for Love and Other Stories 1192–3; Following the Wrong God Home 1193; The Howling Silence 1192; Humoresque 1193; A Leap of Love 1193; Little Ironies: Stories of Singapore 1192; Love’s Lonely Impulses 1193; Meet Me on the Queen Elizabeth II 1193; O Singapore: Stories in Celebration 1193; Or Else, the Lightning God and Other Stories 1192; The Serpent’s Tooth 1192, 1352; The Shadow of a Shadow of a Dream 1192; The Song of Silver Frond 1193; The Tear-drop Story Woman 1193; They Do Return 1192; Unhurried Thoughts at My Funeral 1193; The Woman’s Book of Superlatives 1193 Lim, Shirley 1352
Lim, Suchen Christine 1194–5, 1351 awards and prizes 1194 works: A Bit of Earth 1194, 1195; Fistful of Colours 1194, 1195; Gift from the Gods 1195; The Lies that Build a Marriage 1195; Rice Bowl 1195 Lin, Bai 1056 Lindsay, Joan, Picnic at Hanging Rock 1082 Lindsay, Norman, Age of Consent 1082 Lindsay, Vachel 435 Linmark, R. Zamora 1298 Linscott, Gillian 270 Lipscomb, J. F. 1052 Litt, Toby 311, 312 little magazines 308, 439, 666–70, 966 and Burroughs 477 and Carver 484 and Frank 577 and Harlem Renaissance 423, 611, 667, 669, 670 and modernism 666–7, 670 and Pound 206 Little Review 9, 66, 667, 716 Lively, Penelope 230–1 awards and prizes 230 children’s and young adult fiction 230 and colonialism 230 and realism 230 works: According to Mark 230; Astercote 230; Consequences 231; The Ghost of Thomas Kempe 73, 230; A House Unlocked 231; Making It Up 231; Moon Tiger 230; Nothing Missing but the Samovar 230; Oleander, Jacaranda 230; The Photograph 231; The Road to Lichfield 230; A Stitch in Time 230 and World War II 231 Llewellyn, Richard, How Green Was My Valley 292, 387 Llosa, Mario Vargas 154, 565 Lloyd, Errol, Many Rivers to Cross 74 Llywelyn, Morgan 115 works: Finn MacCool 115; The Horse Goddess 115; The Isles of the Blest 115; Red Branch 116 Locke, Alain 608, 609, 610, 635, 701, 829, 869, 928 Lodge, David 4, 11, 169 and critical theory 92 works: Changing Places 56; Deaf Sentence 54; Thinks 55 London 18, 101, 232–6 Black British fiction 234–5, 297, 300, 303, 350–1, 1016, 1383–4 and modernism 232–3 and World War II 233, 290 London, Jack 282, 671–4, 841
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
influence 664 and Sinclair (Upton) 823 works: The Call of the Wild 548, 671, 734; The Cruise of the Snark 673; The Iron Heel 735, 882; The Kempton-Wace Letters 672–3; Martin Eden 673; The People of the Abyss 672, 673, 735; The Road 671; The Sea Wolf 548, 671, 673, 735; A Son of the Sun 673; The Son of the Wolf 672; South Sea Tales 673; White Fang 548, 671, 673 Loos, Anita, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 763, 836 Lorde, Audre 1298 Lott, T., White City Blue 69, 70 Love, Rosaleen 1067 Lovelace, Earl 1196–7 works: The Dragon Can’t Dance 1196–7, 1384; Jestina’s Calypso 1197; Salt 1197; The Schoolmaster 1196, 1197; While Gods are Falling 1196; The Wine of Astonishment 1196–7 Lowe, Lisa 547–8 Lowell, Robert 135, 753 Lowry, Malcolm 237–9 and Gaddis 685 and Markson 685 and modernism 261 works: Dark as the Grave wherein My Friend is Laid 238–9; Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place 239; In Ballast to the White Sea 237, 238; La Mordida 239; The Last Address (Swinging the Maelstrom) 237; Lunar Caustic 237, 239; October Ferry to Gabriola 239; Selected Letters 239; Selected Poems 2; Ultramarine 237, 239; Under the Volcano 1, 2, 237–8, 239, 418, 935 Loy, Mina, Insel 440 Lucashenko, Melissa: Hard Yards 1151 Killing Darcy 1151 Steam Pigs 1151 Luo, Yijun 1056 Lurie, Alison 56 Lurie, Morris 1000 Lyon, Janet 439 Lyotard, Jean-Fran¸cois 5, 774, 1029 Macauley, Rose 241–2 awards and prizes 241, 242 and modernism 261 works: Abbots Verney 241; And No Man’s Wit 242; Crewe Train 242; Dangerous Ages 241; Fabled Shore 242; The Furnace 241; Going Abroad 242; I Would Be Private 242; Keeping Up
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Appearances 242; The Lee Shore 241; Life among the English 242; The Making of a Bigot 241; Mystery at Geneva 241–2; NonCombatants and Others 241, 414; Orphan Island 241–2; Potterism 241; The Secret River 241; Staying with Relations 242; They Went to Portugal 242; They were Defeated 242; Told by an Idiot 241; The Towers of Trebizond 241, 242; The Two Blind Countries 241; The Valley Captives 241; Views and Vagabonds 241; What Not 241; The World My Wilderness 242 MacDiarmid, Hugh 57, 151, 170, 341 MacDonald, Ann-Marie 999 Fall on Your Knees 998 MacDonald, Dwight 429, 430 MacDonald, George, influence 71, 73–4, 113–14 MacDonald, Ross 1048 The Moving Target 741 MacEwen, Gwendolyn: Noman 1066 Noman’s Land 1066 MacGill, Patrick: Children of the Dead End 340, 406 The Rat-Pit 340 Macgoye, Marjorie Oludhe 1052–3 Coming to Birth 1052 MacGreevy, Thomas 35, 36 MacInnes, Colin: Absolute Beginners 18, 234 City of Spades 18, 234 Mackay, M. 419 MacKenzie, Compton: Extraordinary Women 323 Sinister Street 110 Thin Ice 325 Vestal Fire 323 Mackenzie, Kenneth “Seaforth”, The Young Desire It 1297 Mackey, Nathaniel: Atet A.D. 441 Bass Cathedral 441 Bedouin Hornbook 441 Djbot Baghostus’s Run 441 MacLennan, Hugh 1198–9 awards and prizes 1198–9, 1275 and Gallant 1094–5 works: Barometer Rising 1198; “Boy Meets Girl in Winnipeg and Who Cares?” 1198; Cross-Country 1198; Each Man’s Son 1199; The Precipice 1199; Return of the Sphinx 1199; Thirty and Three 1198; Two Solitudes 997, 1083, 1095, 1199; Voices in Time 1066, 1199; The Watch that Ends the Night 1199
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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INDEX
MacLeod, Alistair 1200–1 awards and prizes 1200 works: As Birds Bring Forth the Sun 1200; Island 1200; The Lost Salt Gift of Blood 1200; No Great Mischief 998, 1200–1 Macleod, Norman, You Get What You Ask For 922 MacMillan, Terry 550 MacSween, Richard, Victory Street 74 Madden, Deirdre, One by One in the Darkness 193, 292 Maddy, Yulissa Amadu, No Past, No Present, No Future 1297 magazines see little magazines magic realism: American 830 Australian 1333, 1395 British and Irish 121, 297 Canadian 1390 Latin American 310, 940, 1304 and postcolonialism 940, 1070, 1303, 1304 and postmodernism 776 Welsh fiction 388 and West Indian diaspora 306, 1233–4 world fiction 940, 1054, 1303–5 Mahfouz, Naguib 154, 977 Mahmud, Mustafa 1069 Mahy, Margaret: The Changeover 1013 The Haunting 1013 Mailer, Norman 424, 555, 676–9 awards and prizes 679 and Dreiser 530 and gender 590 influence 250 and Miller (Henry) 704 and Vidal 885 works: Advertisements for Myself 677; An American Dream 678; Ancient Evenings 677–8; Armies of the Night 676, 678, 679; Barbary Shore 678, 679; The Big Empty 676; The Castle in the Forest 676, 678, 679; The Deer Park 677, 679; The Executioner’s Song 677, 678–9; The Fight 677; The Gospel According to the Son 678; Harlot’s Ghost 678, 679; In the Belly of the Beast 677; Miami and the Siege of Chicago 677, 679; The Naked and the Dead 525, 541, 676, 677, 678, 746–7; No Percentage 676; Prisoners of Sex 677; Tough Guys Don’t Dance 678, 679; “The White Negro” 448, 677; Why Are We in Vietnam? 678, 832 Maillu, David G. 1053–4 Mais, Roger 303, 1201–2 and censorship 1003, 1201
works: Black Lightning 1202; Brother Man 1202; The Hills Were Joyful Together 1003–4, 1201–2; In the Light of This Sun 1202; “Now We Know” 1003 and Wright 1202 Major, Clarence 680–1 and Himes 625 works: All-Night Visitors 680; Come By Here 681; Dirty Bird Blues 681; Emergency Exit 680; My Amputations 680–1; NO 680; One Flesh 681; Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar 681; Reflex and Bone Structure 680; Such Was the Season 681 Malamud, Bernard 681–4 awards and prizes 683–4 and postmodernism 773 and Roth (Philip) 808 works: The Assistant 682, 683; “Cost of Living” 682; Dubin’s Lives 683; The Fixer 683; God’s Grace 683; “Idiots First” 682; “The Mourners” 682; The Natural 682, 683; The People 683; “Take Pity” 682; The Tenants 683 Malaysia see Southeast Asian fiction Malgonkar, Manohar 1202–4 works: A Bend in the Ganges 1131, 1148, 1203; Cactus Country 1203; Combat of Shadows 1203; The Devil’s Wind 1148, 1203; Distant Drum 1203; The Men who Killed Gandhi 1203; The Princes 1203, 1217 Malkani, Gautam, Londonstani 1016 Malory, Sir Thomas, Morte d’Arthur 113, 115, 852 Malouf, David 1000, 1204–6 awards and prizes 1206 queer/alternative sexualities 1205, 1297 works: 12 Edmonstone Street 972, 1205; Antipodes 1204, 1206; Child’s Play 1205; Conversations at Curlow Creek 1206; Dream Stuff 1206; Every Move You Make 1206; Fly Away Peter 1205, 1206; The Great World 1131, 1204, 1205–6; Harland’s Half Acre 1205; An Imaginary Life 972, 1204, 1205; Johnno 972, 1014, 1205, 1297; Neighbours in a Thicket 1204, 1205; Remembering Babylon 972, 1130, 1204, 1206 see also migration, diaspora, and exile; postcolonialism Maltz, Albert, “Man on a Road” 829 Man Asian Literary Prize 976–7 Man Booker International Prize 975 Man Booker Prize see Booker Prize Mander, Jane, Allen Adair 1260 Mangua, Charles 1054 Maniam, K. S. 1207–8, 1351
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
works: Between Lives 1208; In a Far Country 1207–8; The Return 1207, 1352 Manicka, Rani, The Rice Mother 1352 Manlove, Colin 113 Mann, Phillip 1067–8 manners, novels of 45, 179, 202, 321, 908, 986, 1038 Manning, Frederic 970 The Middle Parts of Fortune 414, 971 Manning, Olivia 104, 242–4 and colonialism 243 works: Artist among the Missing 243; The Balkan Trilogy 243, 417, 418; A Different Face 243; The Doves of Venus 243; The Fortunes of War 243–4; The Levant Trilogy 243, 417; The Play Room (The Camperlea Girls) 243; The Rain Forest 243; The Wind Changes 243 Mansfield, Katherine 937, 1209–11, 1260 and Bloomsbury Group 402 and feminism 1073, 1211 film adaptations 1082 and Forster 110 and Galsworthy 148 and Lawrence 220, 1209, 1210 and modernism 349 and Richardson (Dorothy) 329 short stories 1048, 1209–10 and Woolf 1209 works: “At the Bay” 1260; Bliss and Other Stories 1073, 1211; The Dove’s Nest 1209; The Garden Party and Other Stories 1073, 1079, 1209; In a German Pension 110, 1209; “An Indiscreet Journey” 414; Journal 1209–10; Letters 1209–10; “Prelude” 403, 1260; Scrapbook 1210; Something Childish (The Little Girl) 1209; The Urewera Notebook 1209; “The Woman at the Store” 1260 and World War I 412 Mantel, Hilary 244–5 awards and prizes 245 works: Beyond Black 245; A Change of Climate 245; Eight Months on Gazzah Street 244–5; Every Day is Mother’s Day 244; An Experiment in Love 245; Fludd 245; The Giant O’Brien 245; Giving Up the Ghost 244; A Place of Greater Safety 245; Vacant Possession 244; Wolf Hall 245 Maoris 976, 1013, 1049, 1069, 1079, 1088, 1130, 1142, 1151–2, 1211, 1260–1 writers 1114–15, 1138–9, 1145–6 Maracle, Lee 999, 1150, 1212–13 works: Bobbi Lee, Indian Rebel 1212; Daughters are Forever 1213; I am Woman 1212; My Home as I
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Remember 1212; Ravensong 1150, 1212; Sundogs 1150, 1213; We Get Our Living Like Milk from the Land 1212; Will’s Garden 1213 March, William, Company K 745–6 Marchetta, Melina, Looking for Alibrandi 1082 Marcus, Ben 422 The Age of Wire and String 442 Marcus, David, To Next Year in Jerusalem 201 Marechera, Dambudzo 1213–14 and politics 1282, 1353 and queer/alternative sexualities 1214, 1297 works: The Black Insider 1214; Black Sunlight 1214, 1297, 1353; Cemetery of Mind 1214; The House of Hunger 1213, 1214, 1353; Mindblast 1214; Scrapiron Blues 1214 Marıas, Javier, All Souls 55, 56 Marita: Or the Folly of Love (anon.) 1380 Markandaya, Kamala 299, 938, 1215–17 works: Bombay Tiger 1217; The Coffer Dams 1216, 1217; The Golden Honeycomb 1217; A Handful of Rice 1216; Nectar in a Sieve 299, 1148, 1216, 1217; The Nowhere Man 300, 302, 1016, 1148, 1215–7; Pleasure City (Shalimar) 1217; Possession 1216; A Silence of Desire 1216, 1217; Some Inner Fury 1148, 1216; Two Virgins 1217 Markham, Robert see Amis, Kingsley Markson, David 425, 684–6 works: The Ballad of Dingus Magee 685; Going Down 685; The Last Novel 684, 685; Reader’s Block 685; Springer’s Progress 685; This Is Not a Novel 685; Vanishing Point 685; Wittgenstein’s Mistress 685 Marlatt, Daphne 1218–19 works: Ana Historic 998, 1073, 1219, 1298; Frames of a Story 1218; The Given 1219; The Gull 1219; leaf leaf/s 1218; Salvage 1218; Steveston 1218; Taken 1219; Vancouver Poems 1218 Marquand, John P. 1203 Marquez, Gabriel Garcıa 565, 705, 725, 1000, 1079, 1271, 1303, 1304–5, 1323, 1335 marriage, in Edwardian fiction 108–10 Marriner, Craig, Stone Dogs 976 Mars-Jones, Adam: The Darker Proof 325 Monopolies of Loss 325 Marshall, Owen 1261
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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INDEX
Marshall, Paule 686–7 awards and prizes 687 influence 510 works: Brown Girl, Brownstones 305, 550, 687, 1384; The Chosen Place, The Timeless People 687; Daughters 687; The Fisher King 687; Praisesong for the Widow 687; Soul Clap Hands and Sing 687; “The Valley Between” 686 Marshall, Vance, Walkabout 1082 Marshik, Celia 67 Marston, Una 985 Martel, Yann, Life of Pi 975, 1078 Martin, S. I. Incomparable World 985 Marx, Karl 2, 258 Maschler, Tom 16, 20, 21 masculinity: in angry young men fiction 17 in Baldwin 448, 449 in Barker 30 in Bellow 460, 463 in children’s fiction 1011 and colonialism 324, 325, 970, 1052, 1128, 1330, 1386 in Golding 157–8 in Greene 167 in Harrison (Jim) 612 in Hemingway 590, 591, 616–20, 716 in Indigenous fiction 1152 in Irving 637 in Kerouac 591–2 and ladlit 68, 69–70 in London (Jack) 735 in Mailer 678 and modernism 716 and postmodernism 1176 in Roth (Philip) 592 Maso, Carole 425, 688–9 awards 689 and postmodernism 422, 688 works: The American Woman in the Chinese Hat 688; The Art Lover 688; AVA 688, 689; The Bay of Angels 689; Beauty Is Convulsive 689; Break Every Rule 688; Defiance 688; Ghost Dance 688; The Room Lit by Roses 688–9 Mason, Bobbie Ann 706, 767, 838–9 works: In Country 838, 864; Shiloh and Other Stories 707 Massey, Sujata 1048 Masterman, J. C., An Oxford Tragedy 55 Masterman, Lucy 134 Masters, Edgar Lee 435 Mathews, Harry 689–90
awards and prizes 690 works: Cigarettes 690; The Conversions 442, 689; The Journalist 690; My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973 690; S: Semaines du Suzanne 690; The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium 442, 690 Matthee, Dalene: Circles in the Forest 1081 Fiela’s Child 1081 Matthiessen, F. O. 509 Maugham, W. Somerset 246–8 and colonialism 247–8 and homosexuality 247 influence 248 and modernism 248 and working-class fiction 246 works: Ah King 247; Cakes and Ale 248; The Casuarina Tree 247; The Gentleman in the Parlour 247; Liza of Lambeth 246; The Magician 246; The Moon and Sixpence 247, 248; Mrs. Craddock 246; The Narrow Corner 247; Of Human Bondage 246–7; On a Chinese Screen 247; The Painted Veil 246, 247–8; The Razor’s Edge 248; The Trembling of a Leaf 247 Maupin, Armistead 691–2 works: Babycakes 691; Further Tales of the City 691; Maybe the Moon 691; Michael Tolliver Lives 692; More Tales of the City 691; The Night Listener 692; Significant Others 691; Sure of You 691; Tales of the City 691, 866 Maurois, Andre, Ariel 317 Maxted, Anna 201 Mayne, William, Earthfasts 73 Mayo, Katherine, Mother India 1003 Mazza, Cris and DeShell, Jeffrey 68 Mboya, Tom, Freedom and After 1053 McAlmon, Robert 555 McArthur, Alexander and Long, Kingsley, No Mean City 340 McAuley, Sue, Other Halves 1082 McCabe, Patrick 5, 249–50 awards and prizes 249 and Bolger 42 works: The Adventures of Shay Mouse 249; Breakfast on Pluto 192, 249, 250, 292; The Butcher Boy 5, 192, 249–50; “The Call” 249; Call Me the Breeze 250; Carn 249; The Dead School 250; Emerald Germs of Ireland 250; The Holy City 250; Mondo Desperado 249; Music on Clinton Street 249; Winterwood 250 McCann, Colum 192
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
McCarthy, Cormac 692–5, 739 awards and prizes 693, 695 and border fictions 422, 693 and modernism 422 and television 866 works: All the Pretty Horses 468, 694; Blood Meridian: or, The Evening Redness in the West 694, 838; Child of God 693, 838; Cities of the Plain 694; The Crossing 468, 694; Desert of the Plains 468; The Gardener’s Son 694; No Country For Old Men 468, 692, 694; The Orchard Keeper 693, 694–5; Outer Dark 693; The Road 694, 800, 881; The Stonemason 694; The Sunset Limited 694; Suttree 693–4, 838 McCarthy, Mary 424, 695–6 and cultural criticism 696, 925 and Nabokov 731 and travel writing 696 works: Birds of America 696; Cannibals and Missionaries 696; Cast a Cold Eye 695; A Charmed Life 696; The Company She Keeps 696; The Group 591, 696; The Groves of Academe 696; How I Grew 695; Memories of a Catholic Girlhood 695; The Oasis 696 McClure, James 1047 McCork, Jill, The Cheerleader 839 McCourt, Frank, Angela’s Ashes 192 McCrum, Robert 20 McCullers, Carson 697–8, 742, 965, 1086 awards and prizes 697 and television 867 works: The Ballad of the Sad Cafe 698, 837; Clock Without Hands 698; The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter 697, 837; The Member of the Wedding 697, 837; The Mortgaged Heart 698; Reflections in a Golden Eye 697, 837; The Square Root of Wonderful 698; Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a Pig 698; “Wunderkind” 697 McDermid, Val 260 works: Hostage to Murder 269; Report for Murder 269; A Suitable Job for a Woman 269 McDonald, Ian, The Humming-Bird Tree 1083 McDonald, Roger, The Ballad of Desmond Kate 976 McElroy, Joseph 698–700 works: Actress in the House 700; Ancient History: A Paraphrase 699; Hind’s Kidnap: A Pastoral on Family Affairs 699; The Letter Left to Me 699–700; Lookout Cartridge 699; Plus 699; A Smuggler’s Bible 699; Women and Men 699 McEwan, Ian 30, 250–2 and Amis (Martin) 250
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awards and prizes 250, 252, 975 and London 233 and politics 250–1, 292 and postmodernism 92, 250, 252 works: Amsterdam 251; Atonement 175, 233, 250, 251–2, 310; Black Dogs 251, 310; The Cement Garden 251; The Child in Time 251, 292, 311; The Comfort of Strangers 251; Enduring Love 251; First Love, Last Rites 250–1, 975; In Between the Sheets 250–1; The Innocent 251; On Chesil Beach 252; Saturday 252; Solar 252 McGahern, John 191–2, 253–4 and censorship 191 and realism 3, 191, 253 works: Amongst Women 191–2, 253–4; The Barracks 253; The Collected Stories 253; The Dark 191, 253; The Leavetaking 253; Memoir (All Will Be Well) 191, 253; The Pornographer 253; That They May Face the Rising Sun 192, 253 McGehee, Peter 1298 McIlvanney, William 390 Docherty 341, 410 McKay, Claude 424, 700–1, 717, 1154, 1383 awards and prizes 701 and Federal Writers’ Project 923 and Frank 577 works: Banana Bottom 701, 1383; Banjo: A Story Without a Plot 701; Constab Ballads 701; Harlem: Negro Metropolis 701; Harlem Shadows 700; Home to Harlem 609–10, 659, 701; “If We Must Die” 700, 701; A Long Way From Home 701; My Green Hills of Jamaica 701; Songs of Jamaica 701; Spring in New Hampshire 700 McLaren, Ian, Beside the Bonny Brier Bush 340 McLaren, Philip: Murder in Utopia 1151 Sweet Water - Stolen Land 1151 McLaverty, Bernard 193 McLean, Duncan 211, 342, 374 Bunker Man 342 Mcleod, A. L. 1063 Mcleod, John 985 McLiam Wilson, Robert 254–5 works: The Dispossessed 254, 255; Eureka Street 254, 255; Manfred’s Pain 254; Ripley Bogle 254, 255, 292 McMurtry, Larry, Lonesome Dove 866 McNamee, Eoin 42 Resurrection Man 193 McNeillie, Andrew 403
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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INDEX
Mda, Zakes 156 works: The Heart of Redness 1355; Ways of Dying 1355 Mehan, Uppinder 1068 Melville, Herman 509, 693, 708, 884 Melville, Pauline 305, 1123, 1219–20 awards and prizes 1220 works: The Migration of Ghosts 306, 1219, 1220; Shape-Shifter 306, 1219, 1220, 1384; The Ventriloqist’s Tale 306, 1219, 1220, 1223, 1384 Menand, Louis 421 Mencken, H. L. 9, 180, 664, 745, 816, 927 Mendez, Miguel, Peregrinos de Aztlan (Pilgrims in Aztlan) 466 Mendis, Rosalind: My Son Lia and Other Stories 1360 Nandhimitra: A Story of Ancient Ceylon 1132, 1360 Mendleson, Charlotte 201 Meredith, Christophe 388 works: Griffri 388; Shifts 388; Sidereal Time 388 Merril, Judith 1066 England Swings SF 334 Merriman, Catherine, State of Desire 388 metafiction 93–4, 124, 141–2, 161, 276, 358, 689, 705, 1000 and avant garde fiction 442 and Brautigan 472 and Coetzee 1355 and Frame 1091 and Gass 588–9 historiographic: in American fiction 626–9, 808; in British and Irish fiction 174–5, 251, 359: see also Banville, John; Doyle, Roddy historical fiction: and ethnicity 423, 628; and parody 175, 176; in world fiction 1129, 1133, 1244, 1342, 1390: see also Laurence, Margaret; Vassanji, M. G. and intertextuality 175, 176 and Laurence 1185 and Lowry 238–9 and Maso 688 and postmodernism 309–10, 1129 and Vollmann 890 Michaels, Anne, Fugitive Pieces 21, 1016 Michaels, Livi, Under a Thin Moon 410 Michener, James, The Bridges at Toko-Ri 748 Mieville, China 116 Perdido Street Station 335 migration, diaspora, and exile 1221–5 and African diaspora 294–7 and British South Asian diaspora 298–302 and Jewish fiction 198 and Maniam 1207–8
and politics 291–2 and postcolonialism 1221 and postmodernism 1223 and West Indian/Caribbean diaspora 303–7 Miles, Arthur, Land of the Lingam 1003 Miller, Alex 1225–7 works: The Ancestor Game 1226; Conditions of Faith 1226; Journey to the Stone Country 973, 1226–7; Landscape of Farewell 973, 1226–7; Prochownik’s Dream 1226; The Sitters 1226; The Tivington Nott 1226, 1227; Watching the Climbers on the Mountain 1226 Miller, Arthur, The Man Who Had All the Luck 541 Miller, Henry 555, 702–4 and censorship 702 and Dahlberg 508 and Dreiser 702 and Durrell 102, 103, 104, 703 and Orwell 283 works: Air-Conditioned Nightmare 801; Black Spring 702, 704; Book of Friends trilogy 704; The Books in My Life 702; Crazy Cock 703; Moloch 703; Nexus 702; Plexus 702; Rosy Crucifixion trilogy 702, 703; Sexus 702, 703; Tropic of Cancer 702, 703; Tropic of Capricorn 702, 703 Miller, Jane Eldridge 08, 107 Millett, Kate 66 Sexual Politics 1072 Millhauser, Steven 705–6 awards and prizes 705 works: The Barnum Museum 705; Dangerous Laughter 705; Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 705; Enchanted Night 705; The Illusionist 705; The King in the Tree 705; The Knife Thrower and Other Stories 705; Little Kingdoms 705; Martin Dresslet: The Tale of an American Dreamer 705; In the Penny Arcade 705; The Portrait of a Romantic 705; From the Realm of Morpheus 705; Milligan, Spike 73 Milne, A. A. 71, 72, 73, 113 Milton, John: Paradise Lost 113 Paradise Regained 113 Min, Anchee 1227–8 works: Becoming Madame Mao 1055, 1228; Empress Orchid 1055, 1132, 1228; Katherine 1227–8; Last Empress 1132, 1228; Red Azalea 1055, 1132, 1227; Wild Ginger 1228 Miner, Valerie 56
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
minimalist/maximalist fiction American 706–10: and postmodernism 776 British and Irish, and Durrell 102 Mirrlees, Hope, Lud-in-the-Mist 113 Mishima, Yukio 1056 Mistry, Rohinton 999, 1229–31 awards and prizes 976, 1229 and the city 1015 and realism 1304 works: “Auspicious Occasion” 1229; Family Matters 1149, 1229, 1230–1; A Fine Balance 1015, 1132, 1143, 1229, 1230, 1288; “One Sunday” 1229; The Scream 1229, 1231; Such a Long Journey 1064, 1083, 1143, 1149, 1229–30; Tales from Firozsha Baag 1229, 1230 Mitchard, Jacquelyn, The Deep End of the Ocean 866 Mitchell, Charlotte 107 Mitchell, David 95, 312, 1399 Mitchell, Hannah 408 Mitchell, James Leslie: Three Go Back 333 see also Gibbon, Lewis Grassic Mitchell, Margaret, Gone With the Wind 836, 926 Mitchell, W. O. 997, 1082, 1231–2 works: The Alien 1232; “The Black Bonspiel of Willie MacCrimmon” 1232; Jake and the Kid 1141, 1232; The Kite 1223; The Vanishing Point 1232; Who Has Seen the Wind? 1118, 1141, 1232 Mitchison, Naomi 67 Mittelholzer, Edgar 303, 1233–4 works: Corentyne Thunder 1233; Creole Chips 1233; Eltonsbrody 1234; Kaywana trilogy 1234; Latticed Echoes 1234; The Life and Death of Sylvia 1233; The Mad MacMullocks 1234; A Morning at the Office 1233–4, 1384; My Bones and My Flute 1234; Of Trees and the Sea 1234; The Piling of Clouds 1234; Shadows Moving among Them 1234; Thunder Returning 1234 Mo, Timothy 256–7, 1055 works: Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard 257; An Insular Possession 256; The Monkey King 256; The Redundancy of Courage 256; Renegade or Halo[2] 257; Sour Sweet 256, 257, 1287 modernism: American 421–2, 715–18: documentary 430; and ethnicity 548, 700, 715–17; and expatriate fiction 555–6; and film industry 424, 711, 712–13, 717; and gender 591; high
1449
modernism 422, 423, 424, 460, 514, 915; history 469; and social realism 828 British and Irish 1–3, 257–61: and Beckett 3, 28, 92, 95, 190, 261, 308; and Conrad 1, 2, 84, 85, 107, 108, 258, 260, 289; and Durrell 102; “fascist” 228; and feminism 259, 260; and Galsworthy 149–50; and Joyce 1–2, 4–5, 6, 10, 28, 107, 190, 207–8, 258, 261, 308, 1293; and Lawrence 1, 2–3, 10, 107, 219–20, 222, 224, 258, 308; and Lewis 1, 2, 227–8, 308; and literary criticism 90–1, 330; and London 232–3; and point of view 1, 2, 100, 158; and politics 2–3, 151–2, 259, 261, 289, 290, 340–1; and queer/alternative sexualities 323–4; and realism 3–4, 16–17, 46, 107–11, 166, 191, 264, 290, 392, 1128; and Richardson 1, 110, 259, 308, 324, 328–9, 348; and Woolf 1, 2, 4, 6, 107, 190, 258, 260, 289, 308, 328, 401, 404–5, 1293; and World War I 259, 289, 412–15; and World War II 308, 419 world fiction: Australia 971, 1128, 1385–7; Canada 995–6, 997, 1095, 1118, 1198–9; and exile 1221–2; Southern Africa 1267 Mofolo, Thomas, Chaka 1353 Mohsin, Moni, The Age of Innocence 1278 Molloy, Frances, No Mate for the Magpie 410–11 Momaday, N. Scott 719–20 awards and prizes 545, 720 and Stegner 846 works: The Ancient Child 720; Angle of Geese and Other Poems 719–20; The Gourd Dancer 720; House Made of Dawn 719–20, 899; In the Bear’s House 720; In the Presence of the Sun 720; The Names 720; Three Plays 720; Way to Rainy Mountain 719–20 Montague, C. E., Disenchantment 413 Montero, Sergio G omez 468 Montgomery, L. M. 937, 1235–7, 1310 awards and prizes 1371 influence 1371 and literary criticism 1236–7 and publishing industry 1235 works: Anne of Green Gables 997, 1013, 1083, 1235, 1236–7; The Blue Castle 1236; Emily Climbs 1073; Emily of New Moon 1073, 1235; Emily’s Quest 1073; The Golden Road 1236; Jane of Lantern Hill 1236; Mistress Pat 1236; Pat of Silver Bush 1236; The Story Girl 1236; A Tangled Web 1236; The Watchman 1236 Moorcock, Michael 347 works: Behold the Man 334; Elric of Melnibone series 116
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
1450
INDEX
Moore, Alan: and noir fiction 739 works: From Hell series 235; The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 235 Moore, Brian 262–3 works: Black Robe 154, 262; Catholics 262, 263; Cold Heaven 263; The Colour of Blood 262, 263; The Doctor’s Wife 263; The Emperor of Ice Cream 262–3; The Feast of Lupercal 262; I Am Mary Dunne 263; Lies of Silence 262, 263; The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne 262; The Magician’s Wife 262, 263; No Other Life 263; The Statement 262, 263; The Temptation of Eileen Hughes 263 Moore, George: “Homesickness” 363 The Lake 189 The Untilled Field 189 Moore, Lorrie 721–2 awards 721 works: Anagrams 721; Birds of America 721; A Gate at the Stairs 722; Like Life 721; Self-Help 721; Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? 721–2 Moore, Marianne 469 Moore-Bentley, Mary Ann, A Woman of Mars 1067 Moorhead, Finola, Remember the Tarantella 1297 Moorhouse, Frank 1000, 1238–9 and postmodernism 1238 works: The Americans, Baby 972, 1238; Dark Palace 972, 1238–9; Days of Wine and Rage 972, 1238; Forty-Seventeen 1238; Futility and Other Animals 1238; Grand Days 972, 1238–9; Tales of Mystery and Romance 1238 Mootoo, Shani 999 Cereus Blooms at Night 1073, 1298 More, Thomas, Utopia 368–9, 879 Morgan, Mihangel, Melog 388 Morgan, Sally 1242 My Place 972 Morreall, John 1140 Morrieson, Ronald Hugh, Came a Hot Friday 1082 Morris, Wright 722–3 awards and prizes 723 and noir fiction 742 works: Ceremony in Lone Tree 723; The Field of Vision 723; The Home Place 722; The Huge Season 723; The Inhabitants 722; The Man Who was There 722; My Uncle Dudley 722; Plains Song: For Female Voices 723; The Works of Love 723 Morrison, Toni 425, 648, 724–7, 776, 1222 awards and prizes 724, 727, 1033
and Baldwin 447 and the city 1016 and Ellison 590 and gender 592 and historiographic metafiction 423 influence 1021 and magic realism 776, 915, 1303 and Wideman 915, 916 works: Beloved 450, 592, 628, 724, 725–6, 1021; The Bluest Eye 592, 724, 725, 726, 738; “Dreaming Emmett” 725; Jazz 725–6; Love 724, 727; A Mercy 724, 726; Paradise, 724, 726; Playing in the Dark 490; “Recitatif” 725; Song of Solomon 724, 727, 1304; Sula 724, 725, 726–7; Tar Baby 725; “Things We Find in Language” 724 Morrissey, Mary, Mother of Pearl 193 Morse, Ruth 1046, 1047 Mosionier, Beatrice Culleton 999, 1212 In Search of April Raintree 1013, 1150 Mosley, Walter 625, 743, 914 Cinnamon Kiss 1046–7 Devil in a Blue Dress 742 Moss, John 1117 Mottram, R. H., Spanish Farm trilogy 413 Mphahlele, Es’kia 1239–40 works: Africa My Music 1239, 1240; The African Image 1240; Chirundu 1240; Down Second Avenue 1239–40, 1353; Es’kia 1240; Es’kia Continued 1240; In Corner B and Other Stories 1240; Man Must Live and Other Stories 1240; The Unbroken Song 1240; Voices in the Whirlwind and Other Essays 1240; The Wanderers 1240 Mudrooroo 1064, 1241–3 awards and prizes 1242, 1243 and postmodernism 1241 works: Aboriginal Mythology 1243; Dalwurra, the Black Bittern 1242; Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription 1130, 1142, 1242; Doin Wildcat 1242; The Garden of Gethsemane 1242; The Kwkan 1243; Long Live Sandawara 1241–2; Master of the Ghost Dreaming 1069, 1242; The Mudrooroo/M€uller Project 1242–3; Pacific Highway Boo-Blooz 1243; The Promised Land 1243; The Song Circle of Jacky 1242; Struggling 1242; Underground 1243; The Undying 1243; Us Mob: History, Culture, Struggle 1243; Wild Cat Falling 1241; Wildcat Screaming 1242; Writing from the Fringe 1242, 1243 Mueenuddin, Daniyal, In Other Rooms Other Wonders 1278 Muir, Edwin, Poor Tom 340
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
Mukherjee, Bharati 939, 1244–6 and the city 1016 and feminism 1074 and postcolonialism 1246 works: Darkness 1245; Desirable Daughters 124, 1244, 1245; The Holder of the World 1068, 1133, 1244, 1245–6; “An Invisible Woman” 1245; Jasmine 1074, 1223, 1245, 1246; Leave It to Me 1245; The Tiger’s Daughter 1244, 1245; The Tree Bride 1244; Wife 1074, 1245, 1246 Mulgan, Alan, Spur of the Morning 1260 Mulgan, John, Man Alone 1261 Muller, Carl, The Jam Fruit Tree 1361 Mulligan, Robert 126 Munoz, Gabriel Trujillo, Tijuana City Blues 468 Munro, Alice 998, 1038, 1247–50 awards and prizes 1247–8, 1249 and feminism 1072 works: Dance of the Happy Shades 1247; Friend of My Youth 1248–9; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage 1239; Lives of Girls and Women 1072, 1141–2, 1247, 1248, 1250; The Love of a Good Woman 1249; Moons of Jupiter 1248, 1250; The Progress of Love 1248; Runaway 1249; Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You 1247–8; “The Turkey Season” 1298; The View from Castle Rock 1249, 1250; Who Do You Think You Are? 1248 Munro, Hector Hugh (Saki) 110, 376 Munro, Neil 342 The New Road 339 Munsch, Robert: Love You Forever 1013 The Paper Bag Princess 1013 Munton, A. 416, 419 Murakami, Haruki 1056 Murakami, Ryu 1056 Murdoch, Iris 264–6 awards and prizes 265 and feminism 121 influence 51, 250, 832 and modernism 361 and postmodernism 92, 95–6 and realism 3, 4, 264–6 works: The Bell 264, 265; The Black Prince 96, 265; The Book and the Brotherhood 56, 266; A Fairly Honourable Defeat 96, 265; The Fire and the Sun 265; The Flight from the Enchanter 264; The Good Apprentice 265, 266; The Green Knight 266; Jackson’s Dilemma 266; Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals 265; The Philosopher’s Pupil 265; The Red and the Green 174; The Sacred and Profane
1451
Love Machine 265; Sartre: Romantic Nationalist 264; The Sea, The Sea 96, 265; A Severed Head 96, 264; The Sovereignty of Good 265; Under the Net 4, 264; A Word Child 265 Murry, John Middleton 57, 180, 220, 402, 1209–10 Mwangi, Meja 1054 works: Big Chiefs 1054; Carcase for Hounds 1082; The Cockroach Dance 1054; Kill Me Quick 1015, 1054; The Last Plague 1054 myth: in American fiction 456, 486, 613, 654–5, 830 in British and Irish fiction 158, 159, 304–5, 306, 1121, 1122–3 in world fiction 958, 966, 1115, 1126, 1138–9, 1145–6, 1256, 1258, 1371, 1381, 1386 na gCopaleen, Myles see O’Brien, Flann Nabokov, Vladimir 28, 729–32 influence 729, 912 and Joyce 209 and modernism 10, 192 as stylist 14, 730 works: Ada, or Ardor 730–1, 732; Bend Sinister 730, 731, 732; Conclusive Evidence 731; The Defense 732; The Gift 729; Laughter in the Dark 732; Lolita 540, 730, 731, 732, 800, 802; Look at the Harlequins 730, 731; The Original of Laura 730; Pale Fire 730, 731, 732; Pnin 730; The Real Life of Sebastian Knight 730, 732; Speak, Memory 729, 731; Strong Opinions 732; Transparent Things 730, 1096 Naipaul, Shiva 306 works: The Chip-Chip Gatherers 306; Fireflies 306; A Hot Country (Love and Death in a Hot Country) 306 Naipaul, V. S. 294, 303, 938, 985, 1077, 1131, 1252–5 and the Academy 1062 awards and prizes 21, 974, 1033, 1252 and Conrad 1078, 1252 and globalization 154 influence 956, 1017 and London 234, 1016, 1252 and Narayan 1258 and publishing industry 1292 and realism 1304 and Selvon 1336 works: Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey 1254; An Area of Darkness 1252; A Bend in the River 295, 304, 974, 1078, 1254, 1384; Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions 1255; The Enigma of Arrival 234, 304, 307, 1034, 1223, 1254–5; Finding the Center 1254; A Flag on the Island 1253;
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
1452
INDEX
Naipaul, V. S. (Continued ) Guerrillas 1079, 1254, 1384; In a Free State 304, 1132, 1253–4; Half a Life 1252, 1255; A House for Mr. Biswas 304, 1014, 1142, 1253, 1287, 1358, 1384; India: A Million Mutinies Now 1255; India: A Wounded Civilization 1254; The Loss of El Dorado 1253; Magic Seeds 1255; The Middle Passage 1253; Miguel Street 304, 305, 1252, 1254, 1287, 1384; The Mimic Men 234, 304, 1014, 1078, 1142–3, 253, 1384; Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion 1252; The Mystic Masseur 304, 1083, 1084, 1252; Reading and Writing: A Personal Account 1255; The Suffrage of Elvira 304, 1252–3; “Tell Me Who to Kill” 984, 1142, 1254; A Turn in the South 1255; A Way in the World 304, 1253, 1255; A Writer’s People 1255 Nakagami, Kenji 1056 Nam, Wong Phui 1351 Nambisan, Kaveri 1149 Namjoshi, Sunita 1298 The Conversations of a Cow 121 Feminist Fables 121 Naqvi, Tahira 1278 Narayan, R. K. 938, 939, 949, 1147–8, 1256–9 and the city 1015 works: An Astrologer’s Day 1259; The Bachelor of Arts 1257; The Dark Room 1257; The English Teacher (Grateful to Life and Death) 1257; The Financial Expert 1257; Gods, Demons and Others 1258; The Grandmother’s Tale 1259; The Guide 1256, 1257, 1258; A Horse and Two Goats 1259; Lawley Road 1259; The Man-Eater of Malgudi 1143, 1256, 1257, 1258; Mr. Sampath 1083, 1257, 1258; My Days 1257; Old and New 1259; The Painter of Signs 1257, 1258–9; Reluctant Guru 1258; Swami and Friends 1147, 1256–7, 1300; Talkative Man 1259; A Tiger for Malgudi 1259; Under the Banyan Tree 1259; The Vendor of Sweets 1256, 1257, 1258; Waiting for the Mahatma 1257, 1258; Watchman of the Lake 1259; The World of Nagaraj 1257, 1259 narrative theory 90, 267, 1030 Nasta, Susheila 298, 299, 302 Native American fiction see Indigenous fiction, Native American nativism 1056, 1381 naturalism: American 581, 733–7: and ethnicity 549, 736 British and Irish 41, 107, 374 and West Indian fiction 306 world fiction 997 Naylor, Gloria 738–9 awards and prizes 738 and magic realism 738
works: 1996 739; Bailey’s Cafe 738; Linden Hills 738; Mama Day 738; The Men of Brewster Place 736; The Women of Brewster Place 502, 504, 736, 738 Nelson, C. and Watt, S. 1064 Nemerov, Howard 469 neo-realism see realism Neruda, Pablo 209 Nesbit, E.: “The Aunt and Amabel” 73 Five Children and It 71 The Railway Children 111 New Criticism 66, 67, 90–1, 473, 715, 773, 902 New Weird movement 116 New Zealand fiction 937, 1260–1 awards and prizes 976, 1261 for children and young adults 1013 and colonialism 1260 and feminism 1073 film adaptations 1082 and historical fiction 1130, 1260, 1261 and humor and satire 1142 Indigenous fiction 976, 1114–15, 1138, 1145–6, 1151–2, 1261, 1350 queer/alternative sexualities 1145–6, 1152, 1282, 1297–8 and realism 100, 1261 and social realism 1049 speculative fiction 1067–8 Newby, P. H. 83 Newland, Courttia 985 The Scholar 1047 Newman, Frances: Dead Lovers Are Faithful Lovers 836 The Hard-Boiled Virgin 836 Newman, Kim 335 Ng~ ug~ı wa Thiong’o 154, 938–9, 1052, 1071, 1262–5 and Conrad 1078 influence 1214 politics and activism 940, 1264–5, 1280–1 and publishing industry 1292 works: Barrel of a Pen 1265; Decolonizing the Mind 939, 1265, 1281; Devil on the Cross (Caitaani mutharabi-Ini) 154, 939, 1053, 1143, 1264, 1281; A Grain of Wheat 1053, 1078, 1131, 1143, 1263, 1264; Homecoming 1262, 1265; Matigari (Marigari ma Njiruungi) 154, 1053, 1264; Moving the Centre 1265; Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams 1265; Petals of Blood 1053, 1078, 1264, 1265; The River Between 1053, 1130, 1263; Secret Lives 1054; Weep Not, Child 1053, 1131, 1263; Wizard of the Crow 1053, 1264, 1265; Writers in Politics 1265
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
Nichols, Grace 1011 Whole of a Morning Sky 305 Nicoll, Allardyce 125 Nietzsche, Friedrich 2, 258–9 Niland, D’Arcy, The Shiralee 1082 Nimblett, Anton 1298 Niven, Frederick, The Justice of the Peace 340 Njau, Rebeka, Ripples in the Pool 1054 Nkosi, Lewis 1266–7 awards 1267 and modernism 1267 works: Home and Exile 1267; Mandela’s Ego 1266, 1267; Mating Birds 1266, 1267, 1354; The Rhythm of Violence 1267; Tasks and Masks 1267; The Transplanted Heart 1267; Underground People 1266, 1267 Nobel Prize for Literature: American fiction 460, 472–3, 565, 616, 619, 665, 724, 727, 824, 852, 854 Australian fiction 971, 1386 British and Irish fiction 37, 150, 158 East Asian fiction 1033, 1056 Indian fiction 1063 Southern African fiction 974, 977, 1022, 1110, 1112, 1188 West African fiction 974, 977, 1356 West Indian fiction 974, 1252 world fiction 938 noir fiction 422, 423, 739–43 and ethnicity 550 Noon, Jeff 335 Noonan, Michael, December Boys 1082 Nordan, Lewis, The All-Girl Football Team 839 Norfolk, Laurence, In the Shape of a Board 310 Norris, Frank 501, 743–4 and naturalism 581, 671, 734, 743–4, 828 works: Blix 744; A Man’s Woman 744; McTeague 502, 711, 734, 736, 744; Moran of the Lady Letty 744; The Octopus, 735, 744; The Pit 744; Vandover and the Brute 743–4; The Wolf 744 novelty, and modernism 1–2 Nunes, Claude: Inherit the Earth 1069 Recoil 1069 The Sky Trapeze 1069 Nwapa, Flora 1267–8 works: Cassava Song and Rice Song 1268; Efuru 1074, 1268, 1380; The First Lady 1268; Idu 1268; Journey to Space 1069; The Lake Goddess 1268; Never Again 1268; One is Enough 1268; This is Lagos 1268; Wives at War 1268; Women are Different 1268
1453
O, Jong-Hui, Garden of Childhood 1056 Oakley, Barry 1000 Oakley, Graham, Church Mice series 72 Oates, Joyce Carol 750–2 awards and prizes 750 and Foer 574 and television 866 works: Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart 751; Bellefleur 736, 751; Black Water 752; Blonde 752; On Boxing 752; Childwold 751; The Falls 736; A Garden of Earthly Delights 750; High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories 751; Invisible Woman: New and Selected Poems 751; Journal 751; Marriages and Infidelities 751; Marya: A Life 751; Middle Age: A Romance 752; My Sister, My Love 752; Mysteries of Winterthurn 751; them 736, 750–1; We Were the Mulvaneys 736, 752; “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” 751, 802; Wild Nights! 751; With Shuddering Fall 750; (Woman) Writer 752; Wonderland 751; You Must Remember This 751, 752 objectivism 795–6 O’Brien, Edna 191, 272–4 and censorship 121, 191, 272 critical recognition 272–4 and postmodernism 276 works: August is a Wicked Month 272; Casualties of Peace 272; The Country Girls 121, 191, 272, 273, 274; Down by the River 191, 274; In the Forest 274; Girls in Their Married Bliss 272; The High Road 273; House of Splendid Isolation 273–4; Johnny I Hardly Knew You 273; Lantern Slides 273; The Light of Evening 274; The Lonely Girl 272; The Love Object 273; Mother Ireland 273; Mrs. Reinhardt and Other Stories 273; Night 273; A Pagan Place 273; Returning 273; A Scandalous Woman: Stories 273; Time and Tide 273, 274; Wild Decembers 274 O’Brien, Flann 275–7 and Joyce 209 and modernism 3, 261, 275, 308 works: At Swim-Two-Birds 161, 190, 275–7; The Dalkey Archive 277; The Hard Life 277; The Poor Mouth (An Beal Bocht) 276; The Third Policeman 276, 277 O’Brien, Kate: and queer/alternative sexualities 325 works: The Land of Spices 191; Mary Lavelle 325; That Lady 25 O’Brien, Tim 775 works: Going After Cacciato 749; The Things They Carried 749
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
1454
INDEX
Obscene Publications Act 1959 63, 317, 323 obscenity see censorship O’Casey, Sean 279 O’Connor, Flannery 742, 753–5 awards and prizes 753, 755 influence 485, 613 and postmodernism 774 works: “The Artificial Nigger” 503, 754; Everything That Rises Must Converge 754, 837; The Geranium 753; A Good Man is Hard to Find 753, 754, 837; “The River” 754; The Violent Bear It Away 753, 837, 838; Wise Blood 753, 837, 838 O’Connor, Frank 191, 276, 278–9, 364 and realism 279 works: The Big Fellow: A Life of Michael Collins 278; Guests of the Nation 278; The Lonely Voice 278, 279 O’Connor, Joseph: Desperadoes 192 Redemption Falls 192–3 Star of the Sea 192 Odaga, Asenath Bole 1054 Odle, E. V., The Clockwork Man 333 O’Donovan, Gerald 190, 241, 242 Oe, Kenzaburo 1056 O’Faolain, Sean 191, 279, 364 O’Flaherty, Liam 191, 279–80 works: The Assassin 280; The Black Soul 280; Duil 280; Famine 192, 280; I Went to Russia 280; The Informer 280; Insurrection 280; Land 280; Mr. Gilhooley 280; The Pedlar’s Revenge 280; The Puritan 280; Shame the Devil 279, 280; Skerrett 280; “The Sniper” 280; Spring Sowing 280; Thy Neighbour’s Wife 280; Two Years 280 Ogola, Margaret 1054 Ogot, Grace: Land Without Thunder 1054 Promised Land 1054 O’Grady, John, They’re a Weird Mob 1082 Ogunde, Chief Herbert 1082 Ogunyemi, Chikwenye Okonjo 1060 O’Hagan, Howard, Tay John 997 Okara, Gabriel 1270–1 works: The Fisherman’s Invocation 1270; The Voice 1270–1, 1332, 1382 Okri, Ben 295, 985, 1271–2 awards and prizes 295, 1272 and the city 1015 and magic realism 1272, 1303, 1304–5 and realism 95, 297, 1272 works: An African Elegy 1272; Astonishing the Gods 1069; Dangerous Love 1272; The Famished Road 292, 295, 297, 310, 940, 1015, 1069, 1272, 1304–5, 1369, 1381, 1382; Flowers and Shadows
1272; Incidents at the Shrine 1222, 1272; Infinite Riches 1015, 1272; The Landscapes Within 1272; Mental Fight 1272; Songs of Enchantment 1272; Star Book 1272; Stars of the Night Curfew 1272 Okurut, Mary 1054 Olivier, Laurence 126 Olsen, Tillie 584, 756–7 and Stegner 846 works: “Hey Sailor, What Ship?” 757; “I Stand Here Ironing” 757; “The Iron Throat” 830; Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother 756; Silences 756, 757; Tell Me a Riddle 756, 757; Yonnodio: From the Thirties 756–7 Olson, Charles: Call Me Ishmael 509 and postmodernism 773 Omotoso, Kole, The Edifice 1297 Ondaatje, Michael 966, 1273–5 awards and prizes 976, 1273–5 and Berger 41 influence 375 works: Anil’s Ghost 1224, 1274–5, 1361; The Brick Reader 1275; The Collected Works of Billy the Kid 1273–4; Coming through Slaughter 1273–4; The Dainty Monsters 1273; Divisadero 1274, 1275; The English Patient 999, 1083, 1131, 1274, 1298; From Ink Lake 1275; The Long Poem Anthology 1177; Running in the Family 1274; In the Skin of a Lion 998, 999, 1016, 1274, 1288, 1304; There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do 1274 O’Neill, Eugene 712 O’Neill, Joseph 192 Onitsha market literature 1382 O’Nolan, Brian see O’Brien, Flann oral tradition: in American fiction 821, 889 in Australian fiction 1000 in East African fiction 1054 in Irish fiction 279 and magic realism 1304 in New Zealand fiction 1115 in Southern African fiction 990, 1353 in West African fiction 944–5, 978, 1057, 1381–2 in West Indian fiction 1026 in world fiction 940, 1071 Orange Prize for Fiction 21–2, 122, 350, 975, 1116, 1344 Orczy, Emma, Baroness, Scarlet Pimpernel 107, 268 O’Reilly, Sean 193 Ortiz, Simon J. 757–8, 899 works: From Sand Creek 758; The Good Rainbow Road 758; Out There Somewhere 758; The People Shall Continue 758; Woven Stone 758
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
Orwell, George 281–6 and Anand 953 and Galsworthy 148 and Maugham 248 and modernism 1, 2–3, 290 and politics 282–6, 290, 392, 1283 and realism 91–2, 102 works: Animal Farm 282, 283–4, 291; Burmese Days 80, 281; A Clergyman’s Daughter 282; Coming Up for Air 283, 290, 417; Critical Essays 284; “In Defense of P. G. Woodehouse” 399–400; Down and Out in Paris and London 232, 282; “A Hanging” 281; Homage to Catalonia 282, 290; “Inside the Whale” 283; Keep the Aspidistra Flying 102, 148, 416; “Marrakech” 283; “My Country Right or Left” 283; Nineteen Eighty-Four 103, 104, 233–4, 281, 282, 284–5, 291, 333, 370, 371, 408, 418–19, 465, 881, 882; “Notes on Nationalism” 283; “Pacifism and the War” 283; “Politics and the English Language” 285; The Road to Wigan Pier 282, 408, 953; “Shooting an Elephant” 281; “Such, Such Were the Joys” 281; “Why I Joined the I.L.P.” 282–3; “Why I Write” 281, 282, 283, 285–6; “You and the Atom Bomb” 285 Osborne, John, Look Back in Anger 16, 17 Ostenso, Martha 997 Wild Geese 1118 O’Sullivan, Vincent 1261 O’Toole, Fintan 42 Ouologuem, Yambo, Bound to Violence 1380, 1381 Ousmane, Sembene 1303 Ceddo 1380 Owen, Guy, The Ballad of the Flim-Flam Man 839 Owuor, Yvonne Adhiambo 1055 Ozdamar, Emine Sevgi 41 Ozick, Cynthia 684, 759–60 awards 759 works: “Bialik’s Hint” 759; The Cannibal Galaxy 759–60; Dictation 760; Envy; or Yiddish in America” 759; Heir to the Glimmering World 760; The Messiah of Stockholm 760; The Puttermesser Papers 760; The Shawl 759; “Towards a New Yiddish” 759; Trust 759; “Usurpation (Other People’s Stories)” 759; “Who Owns Anne Frank?” 760 Padmore, George 929, 943, 1154 Pakistani fiction 1277–8 and magic realism 1398–9 and politics 1346–7 and publishing industry 1277, 1278 and women’s fiction 1277–8 Paley, Grace 425, 761–2
1455
and vernacular 422 works: Begin Again: Collected Poems 761; Enormous Changes of the Last Minute 761, 762; Fidelity 761; Just as I Thought 761; Later the Same Day 761; Leaning Forward 761; The Little Disturbances of Man 761; New and Collected Poems 761 Palmer, C. Everard 1011 Palmer, Vance 971, 1129, 1281 works: Let the Birds Fly 971; The Passage 971; Sea and Spinifex 971; Separate Lives 971 Panofsky, Erwin 125 paperbacks 316–20 American 318, 476, 783–4 covers 318 and hardbacks 318 and marketing 319–20 and Penguin 316–18 Paredes, Americo 466 Paretsky, Sara 196, 1047 Pargeter, Edith see Peters, Ellis Park, Kyung-ni, The Land (Toji) 1056 Parker, Dorothy 424, 762–3, 1187 awards 763 works: After Such Pleasures 763; Laments for the Living 763; “The Waltz” 763 Parker, Gilbert 997 Parkin, Frank, The Mind and Body Shop 55 Parkinson, Siobhan, Breaking the Wishbone 74 Parks, Adele, Tell Me Something 68 parody: and historiographic metafiction 175, 176 and Huxley 181 Parrington, Vernon Louis 556 Parry, Benita 1286 Pater, Walter 524 Paterson, Glen 254 Paton, Alan 1279–80 works: Ah, but Your Land is Beautiful 1280; Apartheid and the Archbishop 1280; Cry, the Beloved Country 1081, 1279, 1354; Hofmeyr 1279–80; Journey Continued 1280; Songs of Africa: Collected Poems 1280; Tales from a Troubled Land 1279; Too Late the Phalarope 1279; Towards the Mountain 1280 Patterson, A. B., The Man from Snowy River 1082 Payne, Simon 1297 Paz, Octavio 209 Peake, Mervyn 73 Gormenghast trilogy 115 Pearce, Philippa, Tom’s Midnight Garden 73 Pearson, Bill, Coal Flat 1261 Pease, Alison 67 Penguin Books 221, 316–19 Penton, Brian, Landtakers 1128
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
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Percy, Walker 764–5, 838 awards and prizes 764 works: Lancelot 765, 839; The Last Gentleman 764, 839; Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book 765; Love in the Ruins 765; The Message in a Bottle 765; The Moviegoer 764, 839; The Second Coming 764–5; The Thanatos Syndrome 765 periodicals see little magazines Perleman, S. J. 903, 1187 Perloff, Marjorie 439 Perry, Anne 269–70 Peterkin, Julia, Black April 836 Peters, Ellis, Brother Cadfael novels 269 Petry, Ann 424, 501, 503, 765–7 awards and prizes 766 works: Country Place 766; The Drugstore Cat 766; Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad 766; Legends of the Saints 766; “Marie of the Cabin Club” 766; Miss Muriel and Other Stories 766; The Narrows 766; “On Saturday, the Siren Sounds at Noon” 766; The Street 502, 736, 765–6; Tituba of Salem Village 766 Petterson, Per, Out Stealing Horses 976 Phelan, Jim: Jail Journey 408 Lifer 408 Philip, M. N. 303 Philippines see Southeast Asian fiction Phillips, A. A. 937 Phillips, Caryl 287–8, 294, 306, 985 awards and prizes 287–8 works: The Atlantic Sound 288; Cambridge 287–8, 985, 1384; Crossing the River 287–8, 985, 1384; Dancing in the Dark 288; A Distant Shore 288; The European Tribe 287; The Final Passage 287, 292, 1384; Foreigners 288; Higher Ground 287; The Nature of Blood 288, 1079; A State of Independence 287, 1079; Strange Fruit 287 Phillips, Edward 1298 Phillips, Jayne Anne 706, 767–8 awards and prizes 768 works: Black Tickets 767, 768; Fast Lanes 767; Lark and Termite 767; Machine Dreams 767, 839; Motherkind 767; Shelter 767, 768 Phillips, Mike, A Shadow of Myself 1046 Phondke, Bal, It Happened Tomorrow 1068 picaresque fiction: American 423, 475, 492, 802 British and Irish 58–9, 219, 299, 413, 423 world fiction 1045, 1057 Pierce, Peter 1168 Piercy, Marge 372, 768–9, 842 works: Braided Lives 769; City of Darkness, City of Light 769; Gone to Soldiers 769; He, She and It
769, 881; Sex Wars 769; Storm Tide 769; The Third Child 769; Three Women 769; Woman on the Edge of Time 769 Piette, A. 419 Pigott, Edward 65 Pinter, Harold 16, 21, 38, 142 Plain, G. 419 Plath, Sylvia, The Bell Jar 570 Plomer, William 1297 Podhoretz, Norman 433 point of view: in American fiction 601, 605, 612–13, 625, 687, 859, 896 in British and Irish fiction 1, 2, 100, 158, 211, 358, 392, 413 in world fiction 1098, 1252 politics: American fiction: and ethnicity 548–9; and Popular Front fiction 423, 473, 524, 526, 624–5, 922–6 Australian fiction 940, 971, 1072, 1281, 1289–90, 1395 British and Irish fiction 2, 88–92: and Hollinghurst 178–9; and Orwell 282–6, 290, 291, 392, 1283; and Welsh fiction 386–7 Canadian fiction 940, 988–9, 998, 1131, 1174, 1175, 1282 and censorship 64 and humour 1140–1 of identity 91, 291, 322–6, 350–1, 1333 Indian fiction 940, 952, 1281–3, 1300, 1349 and individualism 102–3, 178, 197, 289 and modernism 2–3, 151–2, 259, 261, 289, 290, 340–1 and naturalism 735–6 and realism 290–2 and sexuality 792 West African fiction 940, 1004, 1281, 1357–8, 1380 West Indian fiction 1339 world fiction 940, 1280–4 see also realism, socialist Pollard, Arthur 1140 Polotan, Kerima 1351 Popper, Karl 95, 96 Popular Front fiction 423, 473, 828, 922–6 and Dos Passos 524, 526 and Himes 624–5 and Gold, Mike 924 pornography, and feminism 59, 120 Porter, Hal 971 Porter, Katherine Anne 742, 755, 770–2 awards and prizes 772 and Phillips (Jayne Anne) 768 and Welty 902
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
works: Collected Stories 772; Flowering Judas and Other Stories 771, 838; “He” 771; “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” 771; “Many Redeemers” 771; “Marıa Concepci on” 771; “The Martyr” 771; The Never-Ending Wrong 772; “Noon Wine” 771; “Rope” 771; Ship of Fools 771–2; “Theft” 771; “Virgin Violeta” 771 postcolonialism 94, 292, 938–9, 1062–4, 1284–8 and Australian fiction 1001, 1002, 1288, 1394 and children’s and young adult fiction 73, 74 and critical theory 1032, 1285–6 and detective/crime fiction 1046–8 and East African fiction 1053 and English Studies 1061–2 and feminism 1073 and the global and the local 1070, 1134 and historical fiction 1130, 1133 and humor and satire 1140, 1141 and Indian fiction 1148–9, 1215–17, 1321, 1334, 1340–1 and Jewish fiction 198, 199 and London 234 and magic realism 940, 1069, 1303, 1334 and modernism 259, 715, 790 and publishing industry 1321 and queer/alternative sexualities 325, 1296 and realism 296, 1304 and Southeast Asian fiction 547 and Southern African fiction 1181 and speculative fiction 1069–70 and violence 295–7 and West African fiction 1332, 1380–1 and West Indian fiction 958 Postgate, Raymond, The Ledger is Kept 54 postmodernism: and the city 504, 1014–15 and historical fiction 174, 1133 and metafiction 309, 442, 626–8, 1120 as reaction to modernism 3, 773 and realism 750, 773, 776, 780 see also self-reflexivity postmodernism American 421–2, 424, 450, 773–6: and detective fiction 438; high 505, 775; and science fiction 775, 776, 842; and television 864–5 British and Irish 3–6, 308–12: and chicklit and ladlit 68–9; and critical theory 6, 91–5, 308; and mass culture 311; and politics 285 and queer/ alternative sexualities 325; and realism 3–4, 6, 52, 296, 309, 311, 325, 357; and selfconsciousness 51, 52, 92–4, 96, 235; and women writers 311 world fiction: Australian 972, 1241; Canadian 998, 1095, 1176–8, 1390; East African 1054; and exile
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1223; and magic realism 1304; Southern African 990 poststructuralism: and American fiction 513, 625, 704, 766, 773–4, 830 and British and Irish fiction 90–1, 95, 142 and postcolonialism 1285 and world fiction 998, 1030, 1133, 1178, 1285 Potter, Beatrix, The Tale of Peter Rabbit 72 Pound, Ezra 8, 48, 135, 414, 555 and Davenport 511, 512 and Joyce 206–7 and Lawrence 219 and modernism 133, 190, 227, 349, 421, 424, 587, 617, 790, 834 and West 392 Powell, Anthony 308, 313–14 and Boyd (William) 47 and Green 163, 164 works: Afternoon Men 313; Agents and Patients 313; A Dance to the Music of Time sequence 47, 313–14; Military philosophers 418; A Question of Upbringing 313; The Soldier’s Art 417; The Valley of the Bones 417; Venusberg 313; From a View to a Death 313; What’s Become of Waring? 313 Powell, Dawn 424, 777–8 works: Angels on Toast 778; The Bride’s House 778; Come Back to Sorrento (The Tenth Moon) 777, 778; Dance Night 777, 778; The Happy Island 778; The Locusts Have No King 778; My Home Is Far Away 777; She Walks in Beauty 778; A Time to Be Born 777, 778; Turn, Magic Wheel 777, 778; Whither 778; The Wicked Pavilion 778 Powell, Patricia, A Small Gathering of Bones 1298 Powers, Richard 706, 779–80 awards and prizes 780 works: The Echo Maker 780; Gain 581, 779; Galatea 2.2 779; The Gold Bug Variations 779; Operation Wandering Soul 779; Plowing the Dark 779–80; Prisoner’s Dilemma 779; Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance 779; The Time of Our Singing 780 Powys, John Cowper 224, 783 Pratchett, Terry: The Colour of Magic 116, 334 Johnny and the Bomb 73 The Light Fantastic 116 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 133 Price, Reynolds 780–2, 838 awards and prizes 780 and Selby 820 and Tyler 873
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Price, Reynolds (Continued) works: Blue Calhoun 781; A Generous Man 781; Good Hearts 781; The Good Priest’s Son 781; A Great Circle trilogy 781; Kate Vaiden 781; A Long and Happy Life 780, 781; Love and Work 781; Noble Norfleet 781; Permanent Errors 781; The Promise of Rest 781; Roxanna Slade 781; A Singular Family trilogy 781; The Source of Light 781; The Surface of the Earth 781; The Tongues of Angels 781 Prichard, Caradoc, One Moonlit Night 388 Prichard, Katharine Susannah 937, 1289–90 politics and activism 940, 971, 1071, 1281, 1289–90 works: Brumby Innes 1290; Coonardoo 937, 1128, 1281, 1290; Golden Miles 1072, 1290; Intimate Strangers 1290; Kiss on the Lips 937; “N’Goola” 1281; The Pioneers 1289; The Real Russia 1289; The Roaring Nineties 1072, 1290; Winged Seeds 1072, 1290; Working Bullocks 937, 1290 Priest, Christopher, Inverted World 334 Priestley, J. B. 25, 314–15 works: Adam in Moonshine 315; Angel Pavement 315; Benighted 315; Bright Day 315; Daylight on Saturday 315, 417; Farthing Hall (with Walpole) 315; Festival at Farbridge 315; The Good Companions 315; The Image Men 315; Lost Empires 315; Sir Michael and Sir George 315; Wonder Hero 315 primitivism: and Bellow 461 and Lawrence 220, 221, 223, 224 and Selby 819 and White (Patrick) 1389 Pritchett, V. S. 130, 285 Procter, James 1286 Proctor, Mortimer 54 Proctor, Raja, Waiting for Surabiel 1360–1 Progressive Writers’ Movement 952, 1135 proletarian fiction 508 Propp, Vladimir 1030 Proulx, Annie 422, 782–3 awards and prizes 782 works: Accordion Crimes 783; Bad Dirt 782; “Brokeback Mountain” 783; Close Range 782; Fine Just the Way It Is 782–3; Heart Songs 782; Postcards 783; The Shipping News 783; That Old Ace in the Hole 783 Pryce, Malcolm, Last Tango in Aberystwyth 389 Prynne, J. H. 7 psychology: and avant garde fiction 441 and modernism 3, 50, 90, 107, 133, 267, 349, 358, 461
publishing industry: and avant garde fiction 439–40 and Black British fiction 304 and chicklit and ladlit 70 and children’s fiction 1010, 1011 and feminism 59, 120, 121, 269 feminist press 226, 1035, 1071 and globalization 1291, 1293 and Indian fiction 1217, 1256–8 and Indigenous fiction 1150, 1151, 1152 and Lessing 1190 and misery memoirs 70 Net Book Agreement 1291 paperbacks 316–20 small presses 439 and world fiction 948, 962, 1063, 1107, 1235, 1268, 1277, 1291–4, 1331, 1368, 1386 Puchner, Martin 439 Pule, John, The Shark that Ate the Sun 1350 Pullman, Philip, His Dark Materials trilogy 74, 113 Purcell, Deirdre 193 Purdie, Susan 1140 Purdy, James 783–5 awards 784 influence 613 works: 63: Dream Palace 784; Cabot Wright Begins 784; Eustace Chisholm and the Works 784; Garments the Living Wear 784; Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue 784; The House of the Solitary Maggot 784; I Am Elijah Thrush 784; Jeremy’s Version 784; Malcolm 784; Mourners Below 784; Narrow Rooms 784; The Nephew 784; On Glory’s Course 784; Out With the Stars 784; In a Shallow Grave 784 Puri, Shalini 1223 Pym, Barbara 320–1 works: An Academic Question 56; Civil to Strangers and Other Writings 320; Crampton Hodnet 56, 320; Excellent Women 320–1; A Few Green Leaves 321; A Glass of Blessings 321; Jane and Prudence 320, 321; Less than Angels 320, 321; Quartet in Autumn 321; Some Tame Gazelle 320; The Sweet Dove Died 321 Pynchon, Thomas 425, 690, 698, 706, 785–8 awards and prizes 785 and DeLillo 516 and high postmodernism 77, 505, 748, 773, 785 and Miller (Henry) 703 and Nabokov 729 and television 864, 865
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
works: Against the Day 581, 786, 788; The Crying of Lot 49 505, 785, 786–7, 865; “Entropy” 785, 786; Gravity’s Rainbow 708, 746, 748, 775, 776, 785, 787, 799, 896; Inherent Vice 786; Mason and Dixon 708, 786, 788; “The Secret Integration” 785, 786; Slow Learner 786; V. 785, 786; Vineland 787–8 Qiu, Miaojin 1056 queer modernism 422–3, 716, 790–4 and Harlem Renaissance 610, 670 queer/alternative sexualities: bisexuality 324, 1296, 1297 in British and Irish fiction 109, 129, 192, 273, 291, 322–6 and censorship 64, 67 crime fiction 269 and feminism 119–20, 121 and homosexuality 136–7, 138, 139, 178, 322–5, 389, 395, 409, 1296 and lesbianism 322, 323–4, 325, 330, 389, 452–3, 1296, 1297–8 transgender issues 326 in world fiction 988, 999, 1021, 1055, 1146, 1217, 1296–8 and World War II 324–5 Quin, Ann 95 Quinonez, Ernesto 505 Bodega Dreams 504 Rabasa, George, Floating Kingdom 468 race see ethnicity Raine, Allen (Anne Adaliza Evans): The Queen of the Rushes 386 A Welsh Singer 386 Rambukwelle, P. B., The Desert Makers 1361 Ramchand, Kenneth 957 Ranasinha, Ruvani 298–9 Rand, Ayn 424, 795–6 works: Anthem 882; Atlas Shrugged 795–6; The Fountainhead 795; Red Pawn 795; We the Living 795 Randhawa, Ravinder, A Wicked Old Woman 300 Rankin, Ian 195 Ransome, Arthur, Swallows and Amazons series 71, 72 Rao, Raja 938, 949, 1045, 1300–2 and the city 1015 and publishing industry 1291 works: The Cat and Shakespeare 1300, 1301–2; The Chessmaster and His Moves 1300, 1302; Comrade Kirillov 1300, 1302; On the Ganga Ghat
1459
1302; Kanthapura 939, 1147, 1148, 1300, 1301, 1302; The Serpent and the Rope 1300, 1301 Rao, Sirish, Real Men Don’t Pick Primroses 1011 Raphael, Chaim 200 Raphael, Frederic 200 The Limits of Love 199 Rata (Thomas Roydhouse), The Coloured Conquest 1067 Ratnatunga, Manel, Saga Indionesia 1361 Ratti, Rakesh, A Lotus of Another Colour 1298 Rau, Santha Rama, Remember the House 1217 Raven, Simon: The Feathers of Death 325 Places Where They Sing 55 Ravenscroft, A. 1271 Rawlinson, M. 419 Read, Herbert 102, 104, 413 realism: American fiction: documentary 429–30, 624–5; postmodernist 750, 780; and social realism 827–8; see also magic realism British and Irish fiction: Black British fiction 296; comic 98; and naturalism 306; and politics 290–2; and queer/alternative sexualities 324; Scottish fiction 340, 342; and World War I 414; and World War II 419 critical 1097, 1261 dirty 450, 474, 485, 838 domestic 219, 826 expressive 91 and film adaptations 711 and maximalist fiction 708–9 and modernism 3–4, 16–17, 46, 107–11, 166, 191–2, 264, 392, 1128 and naturalism 733–4, 828 and postmodernism 4–5, 52, 94–5, 309, 311, 325, 359, 374, 773, 776 psychological 101, 107, 354, 358, 377–8, 588, 624–5, 639–41, 825, 830, 1009, 1200 socialist 368, 828–9, 933, 1290 subjective 481–2 world fiction 940, 1303–5: Australian 987, 1290, 1363, 1386; Canadian 995, 997, 1117–18, 1134, 1200–1, 1370; Indian 952, 1099–100, 1229–31, 1304; New Zealand 1001, 1261; Southeast Asia 1208, 1351; Southern African 1354; West Indian 959, 1304 see also fantasy; science fiction; speculative fiction reality: and modernism 2, 3, 33 and postmodernism 51, 91 Rebar, Kelly 468
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Rechy, John 796–7 awards 797 and border fictions 422, 466 works: About My Life and the Kept Women 797; Beneath the Skin 797; Bodies and Souls 797; City of Night 797; The Coming of the Night 797; The Fourth Angel 797; The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens 797; Marilyn’s Daughter 797; The Miraculous Day of Amalia G€omez 797; Numbers 797; Our Lady of Babylon 797; Rushes 797; This Day’s Dying 797; The Vampires 797 Reed, Carol 166, 168 Reed, Ishmael 798–9, 915 and Himes 625 works: Flight to Canada 798–9; The Freelance Pallbearers 798; Mumbo Jumbo 628, 775, 798–9; Reckless Eyeballing 799; The Terrible Twos 798; Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down 798 Rees, Dillwyn, The Cambridge Murders 55 Rees, Goronwy 226 Reid, Forrest 323 Reid, V. S. 295, 1305–6 awards and prizes 1306 works: The Horses of the Morning 1306; The Jamaicans 1306; The Leopard 1306; Nanny Town 1306; New Day 939, 1132, 1306, 1383; Peter of Mount Ephraim 1306; Sixty-Five 1306; The Young Warriors 1306 religion: and censorship 64–5, 67, 121 and Edwardian fiction 107, 131 and Golding 158 and Greene 165, 166, 167, 168–9 Renault, Mary: Charioteers 324 The Last of the Wine 324 Rendell, Ruth 195, 269 From Doon with Death 268 Rhys, Jean 398, 1307–9 and canonical narratives 67 and Ford Madox Ford 134, 135, 1307–8, 1309 and Golding 157 works: After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie 1308; Good Morning, Midnight 1308, 1309; “Goodbye Marcus Goodbye Rose” 1307; The Left Bank and Other Stories 305, 1307, 1383; Quartet 1308; Voyage in the Dark 1222, 1308, 1309, 1384; Wide Sargasso Sea 122, 305, 1073, 1079, 1084, 1133, 1308, 1384 Richards, Alun, Dai Country 388 Richards, David Adams 998, 1310 awards and prizes 1310 works: Blood Ties 1310; Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace 1310; The Friends of Meager Fortune 1310; Lives of Short Duration 1310; Mercy among the
Children 1310; Nights Below Station Street 1310; Riven of the Brokenhearted 1310; Road to the Stilt House 1310; For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down 1310; Richards, Frank, Old Soldier Sahib 1003 Richards, I. A. 90 Richardson, Dorothy 328–30 critical interest in 329–30 and London 232–3, 329 and modernism 1, 110, 259, 308, 324, 328–9 works: Dawn’s Left Hand 324; Pilgrimage 110, 232–3, 260, 289, 328–30, 348, 349; The Quakers: Past and Present 329 Richardson, Henry Handel 937, 970, 1311–12 awards and prizes 1311 and queer/alternative sexualities 1297, 1312 works: The Fortunes of Richard Mahony 970, 1312; The Getting of Wisdom 1311, 1312; Maurice Guest 970, 1311; Ultima Thule 1311; The Young Cosima 1312 Richler, Mordecai 938, 997, 1095, 1313–15 awards and prizes 1313 and the city 1016 and Leacock 1186 works: The Acrobats 1314; The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz 1083, 1313–14; Barney’s Version 1313, 1314; Cocksure 1141, 1313, 1314; Hunting Tigers under Glass 1313; The Incomparable Atuk 1314; Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang 1314; Joshua Then and Now 1141, 1313, 1314; Oh Canada Oh Quebec! 1313, 1314; St. Urbain’s Horseman 1141, 1313, 1314; Solomon Gursky Was Here 134, 1131, 1313, 1314–15; Son of a Smaller Hero 1313, 1314 Riis, Jacob 548, 734 Riley, Elizabeth, All That False Instruction 1297 Riley, Joan 1316 works: A Kindness to the Children 1316; Leave to Stay 305; Romance 1316; The Unbelonging 121, 305, 1060, 1222, 1316, 1384; Waiting in the Twilight 1316 Rimmon, Shlomith 95 Rıos, Alberto Alvaro 422, 466 works: The Curtain of Trees 466; The Iguana Killers 466 Ritchie, Harry 16 Rizal, Jose: El Filibusterismo 1351 Noli Me Tangere 1351 road novels, American 423, 799–803 post-apocalyptic 663 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 5, 48, 265, 309 Roberts, Charles G. D. 997, 1077, 1310 In the Morning of Time 1066
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
Roberts, Kate, Feet in Chains 388 Roberts, Keith, Pavane 334 Roberts, Michele: A Piece of the Night 120 Reader, I Married Him 120 Roberts, Wil Owen, The Pestilence 388 Robinson, Eden: Monkey Beach 1142, 1150 “Terminal Avenue” 1067 Traplines 1151 Robinson, Marilynne 804–5 awards and prizes 804 works: Gilead 804–5; Home 804, 805; Housekeeping 804 Robinson, Spider: Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir 466 Telempath 1066 Robison, Mary, Believe Them 707, 708 Rodker, John 329 Rodriguez, Nice 1298 Roe, Sue, Estella: Her Expectations 310 Rohmer, Sax 235 Rolfe, Frederick (Baron Corvo), The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole 323 romance: and feminism 121–2 and Greene 166 historical 133 interracial 79, 85 Irish authors 193, 255 paperback 319 see also chicklit Romo, Ito, El Puente (The Bridge) 467 Rong, Jiang, Wolf Totem 977 Rose-Innes, Henrietta, “Poison” 977, 1069 Rosen, Michael 73 Ross, Sinclair 1317–18 film adaptations 1082 queer/alternative sexualities 1298, 1318 works: As for Me and My House 997, 1118, 1298, 1317–18; Sawbones Memorial 1318; The Well 1318; Whir of Gold 1318 Rossen, J. 55 Rotella, Carlo 536 Roth, Henry 805–7 and realism 422 works: Call It Sleep 804–5; A Diving Rock on the Hudson 806–7; From Bondage 807; Mercy of a Rude Stream 806–7; Requiem for Harlem 807; Shifting Landscape 806; A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park 806–7 Roth, Philip 425, 808–12 awards and prizes 808, 810, 811 and gender 592
1461
and Malamud 682 and postmodernism 810 and realism 808, 809 works: American Pastoral 551, 811; The Anatomy Lesson 809, 810; The Breast 809, 811; The Counterlife 810; Deception: A Novel 811; “Defender of the Faith” 809; The Dying Animal 811; Everyman 811; Exit Ghost 811; The Facts 808, 810–11; The Ghost Writer 809, 810, 811; Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories 808, 809; The Great American Novel 809; The Human Stain 809, 811; The Humbling 811; I Married a Communist 811, 926; Indignation 811; Letting Go 809; My Life as a Man 809–10; Operation Shylock 809, 811; Our Gang 809; Patrimony: A True Story 811; The Plot Against America 808, 811, 926; Portnoy’s Complaint 809; The Prague Orgy 810; The Professor of Desire 811; Sabbath’s Theater 811; Shop Talk 811; When She Was Good 809; Zuckerman Unbound 809, 810 Rowling, J. K., Harry Potter series 52, 73, 113, 1011 Roy, Arundhati 1318–19 awards and prizes 975 and critical theory 92, 95 and feminism 1074 The God of Small Things 939, 1063, 1074, 1143, 1148–9, 1283, 1284, 1318–19 influence 41 politics and activism 940, 1283, 1284, 1319 Ruark, Robert: Something of Value 1052 Uhuru 1052 Rubens, Bernice: I, Dreyfus 199 I Sent a Letter to My Love 388 Yesterday in the Back Lane 388 Rudd, Steele: Dad Rudd MP 970 New Selection 1081 On Our Selection 970, 1081 Ruddick, Nicholas 335 Ruheni, Mwangi 1054 Rukeyser, Muriel, The Book of the Dead 829 Rule, Jane 999 Desert of the Heart 1298 The Young in One Another’s Arms 1298 Rushdie, Salman 61, 940, 1320–4 awards and prizes 22, 298, 975, 1321 and “black British” fiction 294, 298, 300, 939 and censorship 67, 940, 1004, 1005–6 and the city 1014–15
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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INDEX
Rushdie, Salman (Continued) and Commonwealth fiction 1064 and critical theory 92 and Desani 1045 and globalization 154 and historiographic metafiction 175 and hybridity 92, 94 and Joyce 209 and magic realism 299, 310, 1132, 1143, 1287, 1304–5, 1321, 1334 and politics 292, 1283, 1320–1 and postcolonialism 1287–8, 1321 works: East, West 1068, 1323; The Enchantress of Florence 1015, 1132, 1323; Fury 1323; Grimus 1068, 1321; The Ground beneath Her Feet 1015, 1068, 1323; Haroun and the Sea of Stories 1011, 1068, 1322; Imaginary Homelands 1223, 1322; Midnight’s Children 22, 175, 292, 299–300, 310, 975, 1004, 1014, 1015, 1079, 1132, 1143, 1147, 1278, 1287, 1304–5, 1321, 1334, 1365; The Moor’s Last Sigh 1015, 1322, 1323; The Satanic Verses 67, 217, 235, 292, 298, 299–300, 301, 310, 1005–6, 1014, 1016, 1069, 1143, 1223, 1288, 1304, 1322; Shalimar the Clown 1132, 1322, 1323; Shame 299, 302, 1004, 1015, 1132, 1143, 1203, 1278, 1305, 1321–2; Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1246 Russ, Joanna 372, 413, 775, 812–13, 842 awards 812–13 works: And Chaos Died 812; The Female Man 812, 813; “Not Custom Stale” 812; The Two of Them 812; “When It Changed” 813 Rutherfurd, Edward, London 235 Saadi, Suhayl, Psychoraag 1278 Sahgal, Nayantara 1325–6 awards and prizes 1325 works: The Day in Shadow 1325; From Fear Set Free 1325; Lesser Breeds 1325–6; Mistaken Identity 1325; Plans for Departure 1325; Point of View 1326; Prison and Chocolate Cake 1325; Rich Like Us 1148, 1325–6; A Situation in New Delhi 1148, 1326; Storm in Chandigarh 1325; This Time of Morning 1325; A Time to be Happy 1325; A Voice for Freedom 1326 Said, Edward W. 1255, 1287 works: Orientalism 1032, 1065, 1285–6; “Reflections on Exile” 1223; The World, the Text, and the Critic 1076 St Aubyn de Teran, Lisa 975 Sakaguchi, Ango 1056 Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) 110, 376 Salih, Tayeb, Season of Migration 1078 Salinger, J. D. 815–16
and postmodernism 773 works: The Catcher in the Rye 503, 540, 549, 570, 815; Franny and Zooey 816; “Hapworth 16, 1924” 816; Nine Stories 816; Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour 816 Salkey, Andrew 303, 985, 1105, 1326–7, 1383 awards and prizes 1326 and children’s fiction 1011, 1327 queer/alternative sexualities 1298 works: The Adventures of Catullus Kelly 1327; Come Home, Malcolm Heartland 1327; Escape to an Autumn Pavement 1298, 1327, 1384; The Late Emancipation of Jerry Stover 1327; A Quality of Violence 1327 Saloman, Randi 40 Salter, James, The Hunters 748–9 Salverson, Laura Goodman, The Viking Heart 1117–18 Samuel, Ralph 16 San Juan, E. Jr. 1286 Sandburg, Carl 435 Sandforth, Jeremy, Cathy Come Home 409 Sandhu, Sukhdev 301 Sands-O’Connor, Karen 74 Sansom, C. J. 270 Santos, Bienvenido 1298 Sarachchandra, Ediriwira 1328–9 awards and prizes 1328 works: Curfew and a Full Moon 1132, 1328–9, 1360; Foam upon the Stream 1328, 1329, 1361; Malagiya Atho 1328; With the Begging Bowl 1328, 1329, 1361 Sarban (J. W. Wall), The Sound of His Horn 333 Sargeson, Frank 1329–31 and Duggan 1048–9 and Frame 1089 and Gee 1097 queer/alternative sexualities 1297, 1330 works: “A Great Day” 1330; “The Hole that Jack Dug” 1330; “The Making of a New Zealander” 1261; “Old Man’s Story” 1261; “Sale Day” 1330; “That Summer” 1330 Saro-Wiwa, Ken 1331–2 politics and activism 940, 1004, 1281, 1331–2, 1380 works: A Forest of Flowers 1332; Prisoners of Jebs 1332; Sozaboy 940, 1332 Sarraute, Natalie 5 Sassoon, Siegfried 148–9 works: Memoirs of an Infrantry Officer 414; Memoirs of George Sherston 413–14; Sherston’s Progress 414
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
Satchell, William: The Greenstone Door 1260 The Toll of the Bush 1260 satire see humor and satire Saturday Evening Post, and little magazines 667–9, 670 Saunders, Max 135 Saussure, Ferdinand de 1030 Sawyer, Robert J. 1067 Sayers, Dorothy L. 267, 268, 317 Gaudy Night 56 The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club 414–15 Scalapino, Leslie: Orion 440 The Pearl 440 The Return of Painting 440 Schama, Simon, Rough Crossing 288 Schemberg, Claudia 251 Schneider, K. 419 Schrank, B. and Farquharson, D. 273 Schreiner, Olive 329 Story of an African Farm 937, 1354 Women and Labour 109 Schulberg, Budd, What Makes Sammy Run? 713 Schuyler, George 816–18 and speculative fiction 424 works: Black and Conservative 817; Black Empire 817; Black No More 817; Ethiopian Stories 817–18; Slaves Today 817 Schuyler, James 440 Schwarz, B. 338 science fiction: African 1068, 1069 American 332, 333, 335: African American 479, 513; New Wave 842; and postmodernism 775, 776, 842; and television 866 Australian 1067 British and Irish 332–5: and Ballard 26, 27, 334; and C. S. Lewis 114–15, 333; New Wave 116, 334; parody and pastiche 334; and postmodernism 311; prehistoric 333; and totalitarianism 333–4, 371; and Wells 332–3, 335, 370, 382–3 Canadian 999, 1066–7, 1103–5, 1150–1 for children 1069 feminist 335, 1066 Indian 1068, 1101 in world fiction 1066–70 see also fantasy; magic realism; speculative fiction; utopian and dystopian fiction, British and Irish Scott, Bonnie Kime 260, 330 Scott, Gail 999
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Scott, Joanna 818–19 awards 818 works: Arrogance 818; The Closest Possible Union 818; Everybody Loves Somebody 819; Fading, My Parmacheene Belle 818; Follow Me 819; Liberation 819; Make Believe 819; The Manikin 818–19; Tourmaline 819; Various Antidotes 819 Scott, Kim 1333 works: The Dredgersaurus 1333; Benang: From the Heart 972, 1151, 1333; Kayang & Me 1333; True Country 1151, 1333 Scott, Lawrence 1298 Ballad for the New World 1384 Witchbroom 1384 Scott, Paul 337–8 awards and prizes 299 works: After the Funeral 338; The Day of the Scorpion 337; A Division of the Spoils 337–8; The Jewel in the Crown 337; Johnny Sahib 337; The Mark of the Warrior 337; Staying On 338; The Towers of Silence 337 Scott, Sir Walter 152–4, 155, 170, 174, 339, 1129, 1203 works: Old Mortality 153; The Surgeon’s Daughter 79; Waverley 152, 153, 174 Scottish fiction 339–43 historical fiction 339, 341 Kailyard fiction 339–40 literary renaissance 57–8, 151, 170, 213, 341 and national identity 339, 341–2, 353 and politics 292, 342–3 screenplays: and Jhabvala 184, 202, 1083 and Kennedy (A. L.) 213 and Kureishi 217 and McEwan 251 see also film industry Sealy, I. Allan 1334–5 works: The Brainfever Bird 1335; The Everest Hotel 1334–5; From Yukon to Yucatan 1335; Hero 1334; Red 1335; The Trotter-Nama 1334, 1335 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 17, 422, 593, 641–2, 716, 790–1, 793–4, 1296 Segal, Lynne 17 Sekyi, Kobina: The Anglo-Fanti 1380 The Blinkards 1380 Selby, Hubert Jr. 501, 819–20 works: The Demon 820; Last Exit to Brooklyn 820; Requiem for a Dream 820; The Room 820; Song of the Silent Snow 820; Waiting Period 820; The Willow Tree 820
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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INDEX
Self, Will 344–6 awards and prizes 345 and critical theory 92 and London 344–5, 347 and politics 345 and postmodernism 311, 345 works: The Book of Dave 345; The Butt 345–6; Cock and Bull 345; Dorian: An Imitation 310, 345; Feeding Frenzy 345;Great Apes 344, 345; How the Dead Live 345; Junk Mail 345; My Idea of Fun 345; Psychogeography 345; The Quantity Theory of Insanity 344, 345; Slump 344; Sore Sites 345; The Sweet Smell of Psychosis 345 self-referentiality, and modernism 1, 32, 91, 94–5, 358, 395, 822 self-reflexivity: American fiction 443, 454, 472, 587, 618, 626, 657, 689, 810, 825, 896, 915 British and Irish fiction 51, 52, 74, 92–4, 96, 174, 235, 251–2, 352 world fiction 1011, 1100, 1129–30 Selvadurai, Shyam 999 Funny Boy 1298, 1361 Selvon, Sam 294, 295, 303, 938, 940, 985, 1336–8, 1383 and angry young man fiction 18 awards and prizes 1338 influence 1017 and vernacular language 296, 1011, 1336 works: A Brighter Sun 304, 1336, 1383; Carnival in Trinidad 1337; A Cruise in the Caribbean 1338; A Drink of Water 1338; Eldorado West One 1338; Foreday Morning 1337; Highway in the Sun 1338; The Housing Lark 1337; I Hear Thunder 1337; An Island is a World 1336–7; The Lonely Londoners 18, 234, 292, 297, 304, 409, 939, 1016, 1143, 1222, 1294, 1336, 1337, 1384; Moses Ascending 304, 1077, 1143, 1337, 1383; Moses Migrating 304, 1337, 1383; The Plains of Caroni 1337; Switch 1338; Those Who Eat the Cascadura 1337; Turn Again Tiger 1336; Ways of Sunlight 1337 Senior, Olive 1338–40 awards and prizes 1339 and oral tradition 1339 speculative fiction 1068 works: Arrival of the Snake-Woman and Other Stories 1339, 1385; Discerner of Hearts and Other Stories 1339, 1385; Gardening in the Tropics 1339; Over the Roofs of the World 1339; Shell 1339; Summer Lightning and Other Stories 1338; Talking of Trees 1339 sentimentalism 93 Sepamla, Sipho, A Ride on the Whirlwind 1354
Serote, Mongane, To Every Birth Its Blood 1354 Seth, Vikram 1340–1 awards and prizes 1340 queer/alternative sexualities 1298 works: Beastly Tales from Here and There 1340; An Equal Music 1341; From Heaven Lake 1341; The Golden Gate 1340; The Humble Administrator’s Garden 1340; Mappings 1340; A Suitable Boy 1148, 1340–1; Two Lives 1341 sexuality: and American modernism 435, 452, 642, 680, 702–4, 790–2, 848 in Australian fiction 955–6 black 448, 610 and British and Irish modernism 1, 219–21, 223–4 and censorship 64–7, 219, 272–3 in Edwardian fiction 109 and postmodernism 427–8 and young adult fiction 74 see also queer modernism; queer/alternative sexualities Seymour, Miranda 160 Shadbolt, Maurice 1342–3 film adaptation 1082 works: Among the Cinders 1342; An Ear of the Dragon 1342; Danger Zone 1342; Dove on the Waters 1342; From the Edge of the Sky 1342; The House of Strife 1261, 1342; The Lovelock Version 1342; Monday’s Warriors 1261, 1342; The New Zealanders 1342; Once on Chunuk Bair 1342; One of Ben’s 1342; The Presence of Music 1342; Season of the Jew 1130, 1261, 1342; Strangers and Journeys 1342; Summer Fires and Winter Country 1342; This Summer’s Dolphin 1342; A Touch of Clay 1342 Shakespeare, William: Hamlet 1301–2 Othello 1078–9 The Tempest 78, 506, 535, 1077, 1182 Shamsie, Kamila 1277 works: Broken Verses 1015, 1278; Burnt Shadows 1278; In the City by the Sea 1015, 1278; Kartography 1278 Sharpe, Tom, Porterhouse Blue 54 Sharrock, Roger 167, 169 Shaw, Drew 1297 Shaw, George Bernard: and politics 407 and West 392 works: An Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism and Sovietism 318; Back to Methuselah 333; Major Barbara 1
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
Shaw, Irwin: Rich Man, Poor Man 866 The Young Lions 746 Shawn, William 393–4, 1170 Sheed, Wilfred, A Middle-Class Education 56 Sheikh, Farhana, The Red Box 300 Sheldon, Michael 165 Shepherd, Nan, The Quarry Wood 341 Sherry, Norman 165–6 Sherry, Vincent 415 Shields, Carol 1343–4 awards and prizes 1141, 1344 and feminism 1072 works: The Box Garden 1344; A Celibate Season 1344; A Fairly Conventional Woman 1344; Happenstance 1344; Larry’s Party 1343, 1344; “Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass” 1343; The Republic of Love 1344; Small Ceremonies 1344; The Stone Diaries 1072, 1141, 1344; Swann: A Mystery 1344; Unless 1073, 1344 Shiels, M. P., The Purple Cloud 333 Shinebourne, Janice, Timepiece 305–6 short stories Australian 971, 981, 1000, 1238, 1312, 1362, 1388, 1393, 1395 British and Irish, crime 267 Canadian 988, 995, 1019, 1094–5, 1134, 1151, 1186–7, 1229, 1247–50, 1317, 1344, 1373, 1385, 1390–1, 1392, 1397 East African 1054–5 Indian 1009, 1099, 1259, 1348, 1366 New Zealand 1097, 1114, 1152, 1209, 1260–1, 1330, 1342 South Pacific 1350 Southeast Asian 982, 1192, 1208 Southern African 1110, 1112, 1190, 1239–40, 1279, 1353–4, 1367 Sri Lankan 1360 West African 1268, 1332 West Indian 686–7, 1308–9, 1337, 1338–9, 1383, 1395 Showalter, E. 55, 91, 330, 1072 Shute, Nevil, On the Beach 291, 1082 Sidgwick, Cecily 199 Sidhwa, Bapsi 1345–7 awards and prizes 1345 works: An American Brat 1277, 1347; The Bride 1277, 1345, 1346; The Crow Eaters 1277, 1345–6; IceCandy-Man (Cracking India) 1083, 1132, 1277, 1345–7; Water 1083, 1277, 1347 Silk, Dennis 200 Silko, Leslie Marmon 821–2, 899 awards and prizes 822 and border fictions 422, 467
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and gender 59 and modernism 422 and Reed 798 works: Almanac of the Dead 467, 524, 628, 822; Ceremony 59, 821, 822; Storyteller 776, 822 Silliman, Ron: Ketjac 440 Tjanting 440 Sillitoe, Alan 16, 17, 157 works: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner 17; Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 17, 18, 291, 409 Silvera, Makeda 1298 Simmel, Georg 503 Sinclair, Clive 200 works: Blood Libels 199; Diaspora Blues 199 Sinclair, Iain 346–8 awards and prizes 347 and critical theory 92 and London 7, 346–8 and politics 347 works: Dining on Stones 347; Down River 236, 347; Edge of the Orison 347; Hackney: That Rose-Red Empire 347–8; Landor’s Tower 347; Lights Out for the Territory 347; Liquid City 236; London: City of Disappearances 347; London Orbital 347; Lud Heat 236, 346; Radon Daughters 347; Rodinsky’s Room (with Lichenstein) 347; Suicide Bridge 346; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings 236, 346–7 Sinclair, Keith 1049 Sinclair, May 106, 109, 111, 348–9 and feminism 349 and modernism 110, 258, 348–9 and realism 107, 110, 348 and Richardson (Dorothy) 329 works: Audrey Craven 348; The Creators 349; The Divine Fire 107–8, 349; The Helpmate 110, 349; Journal of Impressions of Belgium 414; The Judgment of Eve 110; Kitty Tailleur 110, 349; The Life and Death of Harriett Frean 258, 349; Mary Olivier: A Life 110, 349; The Three Sisters 349; Tree of Heaven 414 Sinclair, Upton 501, 823–4, 841 awards and prizes 823 and Lewis (Sinclair) 664 noir fiction 742 works: Autobiography 824; The Cry for Justice 823; The Gnomobile 823; The Jungle 548, 735, 823; Oil! 823; Singing Jailbirds 823; The Wet Parade 823; World’s End series 823 Singapore see Southeast Asian fiction
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Singer, Isaac Bashevis 824–5 awards and prizes 824, 825 works: “A Crown of Feathers” 825; Enemies: A Love Story 825; The Estate 825; The Family Moskat 824, 825; “The Gentleman from Cracow” 825; “Gimpel the Fool” 824, 825; The Magician of Lublin 824–5; Meshugah 825; Satan in Goray 824; The Seance 824–5; Shadows on the Hudson 825; Short Friday 825; The Slave 825; Yarma and Keyle 825; “Zeidlus the Pope” 825 Singh, Khushwant 938, 1348–9 awards and prizes 1348 works: The Company of Women 1348; Delhi 1348; A History of the Sikhs 1348; I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale 1348; The Mark of Vishnu and Other Stories 1348; “Portrait of a Lady” 1348; Train to Pakistan 1083, 1132, 1148, 1348; Truth, Love and a Little Malice 1348; Why I Supported the Emergency 1349; Women and Men in My Life 1348 Sitwell, Edith 329, 783 Sitwell, Sir Osbert 376 Sivanandan, A., When Memory Dies 301–2 Skinner, B. F., Walden Two 880 Skinner, M. L., and Lawrence 223 Slade, Caroline: Sterile Sun 924 The Triumph of Willie Pond 924 Slipperjack, Ruby, Honour the Sun 1150 Smart, Elizabeth, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept 997 Smiley, Jane 590, 826–7 awards and prizes 826 works: “The Age of Grief” 826; The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton 826; Good Faith 826; The Greenlanders 826; Horse Heaven 827; “Lily” 826; Moo 826; Ten Days in the Hills 827; Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel 827; A Thousand Acres 826; A Year at the Race 827 Smith, Ali 95 Smith, Angela 412 Smith, G. Gregory 339 Smith, Lee, Black Mountain Breakdown 838 Smith, Lilian, Strange Fruit 837 Smith, Russell 999 Smith, S., Over the Frontier 416–17 Smith, Zadie 300, 350–1 awards and prizes 21, 350, 986 and critical theory 92, 95 and Nabokov 729 and postmodernism 312 works: The Autograph Man 350, 351, 986; “Fail Better: The Morality of the Novel” 351; On
Beauty 21, 350, 351, 986; White Teeth 235, 292, 350, 351, 986, 1016, 1224 Smithyman, Kendrick 1049 Snow, C. P. 4, 308 works: The Light and the Dark 55; The Masters 55; Strangers and Brothers 313 Soaba, Russell: Maiba 1350 Wanpis 1350 social realism: American 827–31 British and Irish 98–9, 101, 110, 161, 219, 264 and ethnicity 830 and gender 830 and historiographic metafiction 423 Lawrence, D. H. 219 and modernism 828 New Zealand fiction 1049 West Indian fiction 1383 see also realism Somerset Maugham Award 13, 21, 32, 46, 59, 144, 375, 974, 975, 1188 Somerville, Edith and Ross, Martin 325 Sommerfield, John, May Day 407 Sontag, Susan 41, 783, 832–3 awards 832 works: Alice in Bed 833; In America 833; The Benefactor 832; Death Kit 832; I etcetera 832–3; “Notes on Camp” 832; The Volcano Lover 833 Sorrentino, Gilbert 833–4 awards and prizes 834 works: Aberration of Starlight 834; The Abyss of Human Illusion 834; Blue Pastoral 834; Crystal Vision 834; Gold Fools 834; Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things 834; Little Casino 834; Lunar Follies 834; Misterioso 442; Mulligan Stew 834; Odd Number 442; Pack of Lies 834; Rose Theatre 442; The Sky Changes 834; Splendide-Hotel 834; Steelwork 834; A Strange Commonplace 834; Under the Shadow 834 Soseki, Natsume 1056 Sougou, Omar 1060 South Pacific fiction 1349–50 and magic realism 1379 Southeast Asian fiction 1351–2 for children 1012 historical 1132 and magic realism 1351 politics and activism 1193, 1283, 1351 and publishing industry 1291 queer/alternative sexualities 1298
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
Southern African fiction 1353–5 and censorship 1004 for children 1012 and the city 1015–16 and feminism 1073, 1124 film adaptations 1081 historical 1130 humor and satire 1141 politics and activism 990, 1110–13, 1279–80, 1282–3, 1353–4 queer/alternative sexualities 1297 Southern novels 835–9 modernist 837, 838 and race 837–8, 894 Southern gothic 743, 754 Southern Ontario Gothic fiction 966, 967, 1038, 1086 Soyinka, Wole 297, 938, 1304, 1356–9 and Achebe 945 awards and prizes 974, 977, 1381 and censorship 1004 and modernism 1356–7 politics and activism 940, 1281, 1357–9, 1381 and queer/alternative sexualities 1297 works: Ake 1356, 1358, 1359; The Beatification of Area Boy 1358; The Burden of Memory 1359; A Dance of the Forests 1356; Death and the King’s Horseman 1358; From Zia, With Love 1358; Ibadan: The “Penkelemes” Years 1358–9; Idanre 1356; The Interpreters 1143, 1297, 1357, 1358; Isara 1358; Kongi’s Harvest 1081–2, 1358; The Lion and the Jewel 1356; Madmen and Specialists 1357; The Man Died 1281, 1357; Ogun Abibiman 1356; Open Sore of a Continent 1359; Opera Wonyosi 1358; A Play of Giants 1358; The Road 1357, 1358; Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known 1359; Season of Anomie 1281, 1357, 1358; A Shuttle in the Crypt 1357, 1359; The Swamp Dwellers 1356; You Must Set Forth at Dawn 1358 Spanish Civil War, and Hemingway 619, 746 Spark, Muriel 352–4 awards and prizes 352 and Jewish identity 199 and London 233 and metafiction 94 and postmodernism 95–6, 309 and realism 3, 265, 354 works: The Abbess of Crewe 96, 354; The Ballad of Peckham Rye 353; The Comforters 352; The Driver’s Seat 354; The Fanfarlo and Other Verse 352; A Far Cry from Kensington 354; The Finishing School 352; The Girls of Slender Means 233, 353–4, 418; Loitering with Intent 122, 354;
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The Mandelbaum Gate 352, 354; Memento Mori 352–3; Not to Disturb 96, 354; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie 96, 341, 353; “The Seraph and the Zambesi” 352 speculative fiction: American 424, 840–3: and postmodernisn 842–3 British and Irish: Ballard, J. G. 26, 27, 334, 843; Wells, H. G. 332, 335, 370 feminist 1067, 1068 and historical fiction 1133 world fiction 1066–70: Australian 1067; Canadian 1066–7; Indian 1068, 1246; New Zealand 1067–8; Southern African 1112; West Indies 1068 see also children’s and young adult fiction; fantasy; magic realism; science fiction Spender, Stephen 367 Spenser, Edmund, Faerie Queene 113 Spicer, Jack, The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether 441 Spiegelman, Art 844–5 awards and prizes 844 works: Breakdowns: From Maus to Now 845; In the Shadow of No Towers 845; Maus: A Survivor’s Tale 844, 845; Maus II 845; MetaMaus 845; Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@& ! 845 Spillane, Mickey 423, 740 I, the Jury 740 Spittel, R. L.: Savage Sanctuary 1360 Vanished Trails 1360 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 1286, 1287 Spring, Howard 389 Sproat, Iain 399 Spurling, John 118 spy novels 45, 246, 251, 268–9, 291 and Maugham 246 and West (Rebecca) 393 Squillace, Robert 40 Sri Lankan fiction 302, 1360–1 and the city 1108 historical fiction 1132 Srivastava, Atima, Transmission 300 Stableford, Brian 335 Stacpoole, Henry de Vere, The Blue Lagoon 1081 Staley, Thomas 330 Stam, Robert 127 Stapledon, W. Olaf 334 works: Odd John 333; Star Maker 333 Stead, C. K.: and metafiction 1261 works: All Visitors Ashore 1261; The End of the Century at the End of the World 1211; Smith’s Dream 1067, 1082
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Stead, Christina 955, 956, 970, 1361–3 works: Dark Places of the Heart (Cotters’ England) 1362; For Love Alone 971, 1362; House of All Nations 971, 1362; I’m Dying Laughing 1362; The Man Who Loved Children 971, 1362; The Salzburg Tales 1362; Seven Poor Men of Sydney 1362 Stead, Robert 997 Grain 1118 Stegner, Wallace 846–7 works: All the Little Live Things 847; Angle of Repose 847; The Big Rock Candy Mountain 846; Crossing to Safety 847; Fire and Ice 846; On a Darkling Plain 846; The Potter’s House 846; The Preacher and the Slave 846; Recapitulation 847; Remembering Laughter 846; Second Growth 846; A Shooting Star 846; The Spectator Bird 847 Stein, Gertrude 847–52 and avant garde fiction 422, 440–1, 666 and ethnicity 850 and expatriate fiction 555, 557 and gender 591 influence 436, 440, 617, 848 and modernism 715, 741, 791, 847–9 and naturalism 735 works: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas 848, 849; Brewsie and Willie 851; Furnhurst 849; Ida 851; A Long Gay Book 850; Lucy Church Amiably 849, 851; The Making of Americans 440, 848, 849, 850; Mrs. Reynolds 851; A Novel of Thank You 850; Paris France 557; Q.E.D. 849, 850; A Saint in Seven 849; Tender Buttons 850; Three Lives 422, 436, 440, 548, 591, 848, 849–50; The World Is Round 851 Stein, Mark 301 Steinbeck, John 433, 852–4 awards and prizes 852, 854 influence 584, 801 and television 867 works: America and Americans 854; Cannery Row 853, 854; Cup of Gold 852; In Dubious Battle 735, 853; East of Eden 854; To a God Unknown 852; The Grapes of Wrath 54, 621, 711, 735, 801, 852, 853–4, 925, 1180; Log From the Sea of Cortez 854; Of Mice and Men 197, 852, 853; The Moon Is Down 854; The Pastures of Heaven 853; The Red Pony 854; Sea of Cortez 854; Sweet Thursday 853; Tortilla Flat 852; Travels With Charley in Search of America 801; The Winter of Our Discontent 854 Steiner, George 200, 730, 776, 783, 877 Stencl, Avram 200 Stephen, Leslie 401–2 Stephens, James, The Crock of Gold 190
Stephenson, Neal 855–6 awards 856 works: Anathem 855; The Baroque Cycle 855; The Big U 855; Cryptonomicon 855, 856; The Diamond Age 855, 856; Snow Crash 855; Zodiac 855 Stern, G. B. 199 Sterne, Lawrence 454 A Sentimental Journey 93 Tristram Shandy 93, 204, 1079, 1323 Stevens, Wallace 96, 884 Stevenson, Robert Louis 339, 342, 391 Stewart, Bruce: Disorderly Girl 1152 Tama and Other Stories 1152 Stewart, J. I. M. see Innes, Michael Stone, Robert 856–7 awards 857 and realism 857 and Stegner 846 works: Bay of Souls 857; Bear and His Daughter 857; Children of Light 857; Damascus Gate 857; Dog Soldiers 857; A Flag for Sunrise 857; A Hall of Mirrors 857; Outerbridge Reach 857; Prime Green 857 Stoppard, Tom, Travesties 209 Storey, David 355–6 and angry young man fiction 16, 17, 355 awards and prizes 355 and realism 356 works: As It Happened 356; Flight into Camden 355, 409; The March on Russia 355; Pasmore 355; Present Times 356; A Prodigal Child 356; Radcliffe 355, 409; The Restoration of Arnold Middleton 355; Saville 355–6; A Serious Man 356; A Temporary Life 355; Thin-Ice Skater 356; This Sporting Life 17, 291, 355, 409 Stow, Randolph 1363–4 awards and prizes 1363, 1364 works: Act One 1363; The Bystander 1363; A Counterfeit Silence 1364; The Girl Green as Elderflower 1364; A Haunted Land 1363; To the Islands 971, 1363, 1364; Merry-Go-Round in the Sea 971, 1297, 1363; Midnite: The Story of a Wild Colonial Boy 971, 1363; Outrider 1363; The Suburbs of Hell 1364; Tourmaline 971, 1363; Visitants 1364 Straight, Susan, Highwire Moon 468 Stratford, Philip 169 stream of consciousness 1, 3, 309, 349 and American fiction 470, 560, 756, 763, 806, 858, 877 and British and Irish fiction 3, 76, 82, 104, 151–2, 208
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
Richardson (Dorothy) 110, 232–3, 260, 329, 348 and world fiction 1073, 1355, 1394 Stringer, Arthur, The Prairie Wife 1117 structuralism 90, 267, 461, 1029–32, 1133, 1176, 1178 and postcolonialism 1285 Stuart, Francis 42 Sturgis, Howard Overing: Belchamber 322 Tim 322 Styron, William 858–60 awards 858 works: The Confessions of Nat Turner 838, 859, 860; Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness 860; Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays 860; In the Clap Shack 858; Lie Down in Darkness 858; The Long March 858; Set This House on Fire 859, 860; Sophie’s Choice 746, 859–60; This Quiet Dust and Other Writings 860; A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youth 860 subjectivity, and modernism 2, 3, 6, 95, 107, 828–9 Sullivan, J. W. N. 180–1 Sullivan, Rosemary 968 surrealism: American fiction 4, 440, 477, 495, 702, 704, 756, 850, 857 Australian fiction 980 British and Irish fiction 102, 103, 145, 368, 374, 387 Sutcliff, Rosemary, The Sword and the Circle 73 Sutcliffe, William 201 Sutherland, Efua, The Marriage of Anansewa 1381 Swarup, Vikas, Q and A 1083 Sweven, Godfrey: Limanora: The Island of Progress 1067 Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles 1067 Swift, Graham 30, 357–8 awards and prizes 357, 975 and London 233, 357–8 and postmodernism 5, 94, 358 and realism 358 works: “Hoffmeier’s Antelope” 358; Last Orders 357, 358; Learning to Swim and Other Stories 358; The Light of Day 357, 358; Out of This World 357–8; “Seraglio” 358; Shuttlecock 233, 314, 358; The Sweet-Shop Owner 357; Tomorrow 357, 358; Waterland 5, 6, 310, 357, 358, 627 Syal, Meera: Anita and Me 121, 301, 985 Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee 300–1, 985 Symons, A. J. A. 323 Symons, Scott 999, 1298 Tadjo, Veronique, As the Crow Flies
1382
1469
Taibo, Paco Ignacio II: Frontera Dreams (Sue~nos de Frontera) 468 Life Itself (La Vida Misma) 468 Tan, Amy 862–3 works: The Bonesetter’s Daughter 863; The Joy Luck Club 550, 862; Kitchen God’s Wife 862; The Moon lady 862; The One Hundred Secret Senses 863; The Opposite of Faith 863; Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat 862–3; Saving Fish From Drowning 863 Tan, Shaun: The Arrival 1013 The Lost Thing 1013 The Red Tree 1013 Tanizaki, Junichiro 1056 Tanner, William see Amis, Kingsley Tarantino, Quentin 625 Tarkington, Booth, Alice Adams 712 Tate, Allen 135, 753, 755, 897 The Fathers 836 Tay, Simon 1351 Taylor, A. J. P. 378 Taylor, Alf, Long Time Now 1151 Taylor, Andrew 270 Taylor, Apirana: He Rau Aroha 1152 Ki Te Ao 1152 Tangi Aroha 1152 Taylor, Charles 1223 Taylor, Drew Hayden, The Night Wanderer 1151 Taylor, Philip Meadows 79 Confessions of a Thug 79 television 863–7 and awards and prizes 20 and book clubs 866–7 and postmodernism 864–5 see also film and television adaptation Temple, Peter 1047–8 Tennant, Emma 122 works: Emma in Love 122; Pemberley 122; Tess 310; Two Women of London 310 Terdiman, Richard 1077 Terkel, Studs 433, 746, 923 Tew, Philip 203–4 Texidor, Greville 1048 Tharoor, Shashi 1365–6 works: The Five-Dollar Smile 1365, 1366; The Great Indian Novel 939, 1131, 1365, 1366; Riot 1366; Show Business 1365–6 Theroux, Paul, Picture Palace 169 Thirlwell, Adam 201 Thomas, Audrey 1077 Thomas, Bertha 389 Thomas, Clara 1038
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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INDEX
Thomas, D. M. 359–60 and postmodernism 359–60 and realism 359–60 works: Birthstone 360; Bleak Hotel 360; Eating Pavlova 360; The Flute-Player 360; Flying in to Love 360; “The Opportunist” 359; Pictures at an Exhibition 360; The Puberty Tree 359; Russian Nights quintet 360; The White Hotel 310, 335, 359, 360 Thomas, Dylan 10, 126, 261, 387, 685, 1368 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog 387 Thomas, Gwyn: All Things Betray Thee (Leaves in the Wind) 387 Sorrow for Thy Sons 387 The World Cannot Hear You 387 Thomas, I. B. 1380 Thomas, Sheree R., Dark Matter 1068 Thompson, E. P. 16 Thompson, Jim 774, 868–9 works: The Criminal 868; Heed the Thunder 868; A Hell of a Woman 868–9; The Kill-Off 868; The Killer Inside Me 740, 868, 869; The Killing 868; Nothing More than Murder 868; Now and on Earth 868; Paths of Glory 868; Pop. 1280 869; Savage Night 868, 869; The Transgressors 868; Wild Town 868 Thomson, George H. 330 Thurman, Wallace 607, 670 “Cordelia the Crude” 610, 670 Infants of the Spring 609, 611 Tiefensee, Dianne 1178 Tiempo, Edith 1351 Tiffin, Helen 1077 time and space: in avant garde fiction 440, 441 in children’s and young adult fiction 73 in fantasy fiction 113, 115 and modernism 1, 84, 170, 259 and postmodernism 7, 124, 1118–19, 1122 Tlali, Miriam 1366–8 awards 1367 works: Amandla 1367; Between Two Worlds 1367; Footprints in the Quag (Soweto Stories) 1367; Mihloti 1367; Muriel at Metropolitan 1367 Tobias, Lily, Eunice Fleet 389 Todd, Richard 973 Todorov, Tzvetan 1304 T oibın, Colm 361–3 and Bolger 42, 363 and queer fiction 291, 325 works: The Blackwater Lightship 192, 362; Brooklyn 363; The Heather Blazing 192, 361–2; Homage to Barcelona 361; Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush 363; Love in a Dark Time 363; The Master 192, 362–3;
Mothers and Sons 363; The South 361; The Story of the Night 192, 362, 363; The Trial of the Generals 361; Walking Along the Border 361 Tolkien, J. R. R.: and fantasy fiction 73, 113, 114, 333 influence 1067 works: The Silmarillion 114; The Hobbit 73, 114, 333; Lord of the Rings 113, 114, 333 Toole, John Kennedy, A Confederacy of Dunces 839 Toomer, Jean 869–71 and Fauset 566 and Frank 577 and high modernism 422, 717 influence 892, 1021 and little magazines 669 works: “The Blue Meridian” 871; Cane 441, 502, 577, 608–9, 669, 836, 869–71; Essentials 871 Torgovnick, Marianna 223 Traill, Catherine Parr, Canadian Crusoes 1078 Transatlantic Review 135 transcendentalism, and Bukowski 474 Tranter, Nigel 339 Traven, B. 872–3 works: The Bridge in the Jungle 872; The Cotton Pickers (Der Wobbly) 872; The Death Ship 872; Jungle Novels 872–3; The Treasure of the Sierra Madre 872 Trease, Geoffrey 73 Treglown, J. 164 Treitel, Jonathan 200 Tremain, Rose, The Road Home 21, 975 Tremblay, Michel 1298 Tressell, Robert, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists 406–7 Trevor, William 364–6 awards and prizes 364 works: “Attracta” 366; “Ballroom of Romance” 365; “A Bit on the Side” 365; The Children of Dynmouth 365; “The Death of Peggy Meehan” 365; “The Distant Past” 366; Elizabeth Alone 364; Felicia’s Journey 364, 365; Fools of Fortune 364, 365; “Honeymoon in Tramore” 365; The Love Department 365; “Mr. McNamara” 364–5; Mrs. Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel 364; “Office Romances” 365; The Old Boys 364; Other People’s Worlds 364, 365; The Silence in the Garden 365; A Standard of Behaviour 364; The Story of Lucy Gault 365; “Teresa’s Wedding” 365 Trezise, Rachel, In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl 388 Trotter, David 107, 717–18 truth: and modernism 2, 33, 82, 91, 94, 95 and postmodernism 164–5, 252
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
Tuma, Hama, Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor 1054 Turner, Ethel, Seven Little Australians 1013 Turner, Michael, Hard Core Logo 1083 Tutuola, Amos 1271, 1368–9 influence 1368 works: The Palm-Wine Drinkard 940, 1293, 1368, 1382; The Wild Hunter in the Bush of Ghosts 1368; The Witch-Herbalist of the Remote Town 1369 Tuwhare, Shape Shifter 1152 Tylee, Claire 412 Tyler, Anne 873–4 awards 874 works: The Accidental Tourist 874; The Amateur Marriage 874; Back When We Were Grownups 874; Breathing Lessons 874; Celestial Navigation 873–4; The Clock Winder 873; Digging to America 874; Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant 874; Earthly Possessions 874; If Morning Ever Comes 873; Ladder of Years 874; Morgan’s Passing 874; A Patchwork Planet 874; Saint Maybe 874; Searching for Caleb 874; A SlippingDown Life 873; The Tin Can Tree 873 Tynan, Kenneth 16 unconscious: and Ducornet 535 and Freud 3, 441, 461 and Joyce 65 university novels see campus novels Unsworth, Barry, Sacred Hunger 174 Updike, John 876–8, 1149 awards and prizes 876 and Baker (Nicholson) 446 and modernism 877 and Nabokov 729 and Oates 751–2 and realism 877 and Roth (Philip) 808 works: Bech: A Book 877; Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel 878; Bech is Back 877–8; Couples 877, 878; Gertrude and Claudius 878; Memories of the Ford Administration 877; Month of Sundays 878; Rabbit is Rich 876; Rabbit Redux 876; Rabbit Remembered 876; Rabbit at Rest 876, 877; Rabbit, Run 800, 801, 864, 876, 877; Roger’s Version 878; S. 878 Upfield, Arthur 1046, 1047 Upward, Edward 367–8 and Isherwood 186–7, 367, 368 and surrealism 368 works: Journey to the Border 367, 368; Mortmere stories 367–8; The Spiral Ascent trilogy 368 urbanization see city; London
1471
Urquhart, Jane 1370–1 and realism 1370 works: Away 1370–1; Changing Heaven 1073, 1079, 1370; A Map of Glass 1370–1; Montespan 1370; The Stone Carvers 1131, 1370–1; The Underpainter 1370–1; The Whirlpool 1370, 1371 Utemorrah, Daisy and Torres, Pat, Do Not Go Around the Edges 1013 utopian and dystopian fiction: American 879–82 British and Irish 55, 368–72: feminist 122; and Huxley 181, 182, 370–1, 372, 880, 881; and Orwell 370, 371–2, 881; and Wells 333, 369–70, 372, 383, 384; world fiction: for children 1011; New Zealand 1067 Uttley, Alison, A Traveller in Time 73 Vaite, Celestine Hitiura: Breadfruit 1350 Frangipani 1350 Tiare 1350 Van Camp, Richard: Angel Wing Splash Pattern 1151 The Lesser Blessed 1150 Van Herk, Aritha, No Fixed Address 1073 Van Vechten, Carl 129, 424, 633, 884–5 influence 624 and Larsen 658–9, 884 and Stein 884 works: The Blind Bow-Boy 885; Excavations 884; Firecrackers 885; Nigger Heaven 658–9, 884–5; Parties 885; Peter Wiffle 884; Red 884; Spider Boy 885; The Tattooed Countess 884 Van Vogt, A. E. 1066 Vanderhaege, Guy 1373–4 awards and prizes 1373, 1374 works: Dancock’s Dance 1373; The Englishman’s Boy 998, 1373–4; Homesick 1373; I Had a Job I Liked Once 1373; The Last Crossing 1373, 1374; Man Descending 1373; My Present Age 1373; Things as They Are? 1373 Vassanji, M. G. 939, 999, 1223, 1374–5 awards and prizes 976, 1053, 1374, 1375 and the city 105, 1016 and Durrell 104–5 works: Amriika 1375; The Assassin’s Song 1375; The Book of Secrets 1053, 1131, 1375; The Gunny Sack 1053, 1375; The In-Between World of Vikram Lall 1053, 1131, 1375; No New Land 105, 1016, 1224, 1375; A Place Within: Rediscovering India 1374; Uhuru Street 1375; When She was Queen 1054, 1375
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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INDEX
Vaughan, Hilda: The Battle to the Weak 386 Iron and Gold (The Fair Woman) 386 Vaughan, Richard, Moulded in Earth 387 Venkataramani, K. S.: Kandan the Patriot 1147 Murugan the Tiller 1147 Vera, Yvonne 1376–7 works: Butterfly Burning 1015, 1376, 1377; Nehanda 1130, 1376; The Stone Virgins 1377; Under the Tongue 1377; Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals? 1376; Without a Name 1376–7 Verdecchia, Guillermo 468 vernacular: and African fiction 1264, 1271 and American fiction 422, 432, 433, 496–7, 584–5, 701, 851 and Caribbean fiction 303, 939, 1011, 1034, 1336 and Indian fiction 954 and Irish fiction 275, 277, 410 modernist 92–3, 151–2, 290, 291 and Scottish fiction 211–12, 342, 374, 408 and World War I fiction 414 Vidal, Gore 885–6 and Mailer 885 and Purdy 783, 784 works: 1876 886; The Best Man 886; Burr 886; The City and the Pillar 886; Empire 886; The Golden Age 886; Hollywood 886; Julian 886; Lincoln 886; Live from Golgotha 886; Myra Breckinridge 886; On the March to the Sea 886; Visit to a Small Planet 886; Washington, D.C. 886 Vietnam War 745, 747, 749, 761, 774, 775, 839, 842, 892, 931 Vincedon, Claude: A Chair for the Prophet 104 The Rum Go 104 Vine, Barbara see Rendell, Ruth Vinge, Vernor: A Deepness in the Sky 843 A Fire Upon the Deep 843 “True Names” 842–3 Viramontes, Helena Marıa 887–8 awards and prizes 888 and border fictions 422, 466 works: The Moths and Other Stories 887, 888; Paris Rats in E.L.A. 887; Their Dogs Came With Them 887, 888; Under the Feet of Jesus 887, 888 Viswanathan, Gauri 1032, 1062 Vizenor, Gerald 888–9, 899 and historiographic metafiction 423 works: Griever: An American Monkey King in China 889; The Heirs of Columbus 628; Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 889; Trickster of Liberty 889
Vollmann, William T. 706, 890–1 works: An Afghan Picture Show 890; The Atlas 891; The Butterfly Stories 890; Europe Central 708, 709, 891; The Rainbow Stories 890; Rising Up and Rising Down 890, 891; The Royal Family 708, 709; Seven Dreams series 891; Whores for Gloria 890–1; You Bright and Risen Angels 890, 965 Von Stroheim, Erich, Greed 711 Vonnegut, Kurt 785, 842, 892–3 influence 431, 637, 776 and television 864–5 works: Breakfast of Champions 865, 892; Cat’s Cradle 881, 892; Galapagos 892; Hocus Pocus 865; Jailbird 892; Mother Night 892; Player Piano 881; The Sirens of Titan 892; Slaughterhouse-Five 431, 746, 747–8, 775, 892; Timequake 892–3; “Unready to Wear” 892 Vorticism 227, 228 W. H. Smith Literary Award 21, 25, 1111, 1341 Wade, Stephen 187, 188 Wagamese, Richard: Dream Wheels 1150 Keeper ’n Me 1150 A Quality of Light 1150 Ragged Company 1150 Wagner, Geoffrey 127 Wain, John 4, 5, 16 Hurry On Down 117 Where the Rivers Meet 55 Wainaina, Binyavanga 1055 Walcott, Derek 938, 1215, 1222, 1255 awards and prizes 974, 1033 works, Another Life 1076 Walden, Daniel 682 Waldron, Eric, Tropic Death 1383 Wales Book of the Year award 20, 22 Walker, Alice 648, 725, 894–5 awards and prizes 894 and Du Bois 533 and Hurston 635, 894 works: Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth 895; Anything We Love Can be Saved 895; The Color Purple 738, 838, 894; “Everyday Use” 894; In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens 895; Jubilee 725; Meridian 895; Once 895; A Poem Traveled Down My Arm 895; Possessing the Secret of Joy 894; Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems 895; The Temple of My Familiar 894; The Third Life of Grange Copeland 894–5; To Hell With Dying 895; We Are the Ones We Have been Waiting For 895; Why War Is Never a Good Idea 895 Wallace, David Foster 706, 895–7 and television 865
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
works: The Broom of the System 895–6; Infinite Jest 708–9, 776, 896; oblivion 896; “Octet” 896; A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again 896; “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” 896 Wallace, Edgar 944 Walpole, Hugh 148, 315 Walsh, J. M. 1067 Walsh, Jill Paton 73 works: The Dolphin Crossing 73; Fireweed 73; Goldengrove 72; A Parcel of Patterns 72; Unleaving 72 Wambaugh, Joseph 544 Wambu, O. 304 Wang, Anyi 1055–6 Song of Everlasting Sorrow 1056 Wang, Zhenho 1056 war 745–9 see also Korean War; Vietnam War; World War I; World War II Warhol, Andy, a: A Novel 442 Warner, Alan 374–5, 390 and Kelman 211 and politics 292 and postmodernism 311, 342 and realism 374 works: The Man Who Walks 375; Morvern Callar 292, 342, 374–5; The Sopranos 375; The Stars in the Bright Sky 375; These Demented Lands 342, 375; The Worms can Carry Me to Heaven 375 Warner, Marina 59 Indigo 310 Warner, Rex: The Aerodrome 333, 418 The Professor 290 Warner, Sylvia Townsend: Flint Anchor 324 Lolly Willowes 324 Mr. Fortune’s Maggot 324 Warren, Robert Penn 897–8 awards and prizes 897 and O’Connor (Flannery) 753 and Welty 901 works: All the King’s Men 836, 858, 897–8; Band of Angels 898; The Cave 898; The Circus in the Attic and Other Stories 898; Flood: A Romance of Our Time 898; At Heaven’s Gate 897; Meet Me in the Green Glen 898; Night Rider 897; A Place to Come To 898; “Prime Leaf” 897; Wilderness: A Tale of the Civil War 898; World Enough and Time 898 Waterhouse, Keith 16 Billy Liar 17 Waters, Sarah 175, 270, 389
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and postmodernism 312, 325 works: Affinity 176; Fingersmith 176; Tipping the Velvet 121 Watmough, David 1298 Watson, Ian: Chekhov’s Journey 311 The Embedding 334 Watson, Sam, The Kadaitcha Sung 1151 Watson, Sheila, The Double Hook 997 Waugh, Alec 376 Waugh, Evelyn 376–9 film and television adaptations 46, 126 and Firbank 139 influence 755, 1252 and politics 377, 378 and Spark 352 works: Black Mischief 377, 378; Brideshead Revisited 54, 126, 376, 377–8, 417; Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh 378; Decline and Fall 376; A Handful of Dust 377, 378; Labels 377; A Little Learning 378; Men at Arms 417; Ninety-Two Days 377; Put Out More Flags 417; Remote People 377; Robbery under Law 377; Scoop 46, 377, 379; Sword of Honour trilogy 46, 290, 378, 418; Vile Bodies 376, 379, 416; Waugh in Abyssinia 377 Waugh, Patricia 626 Webb, Mary, Gone to Earth 317 Wedde, Ian, Symmes Hole 1014 Weerasooriya, H. E., The Trousered Harijan 1360 Welch, Denton 324 Welch, James 156, 899–900 awards and prizes 899 works: The Death of Jim Loney 899; Fools Crow 900; The Indian Lawyer 899; Riding the Earthboy 40 899; Winter in the Blood 899 Weldon, Fay 380–1 and awards and prizes 20, 380 and critical theory 92 and feminism 121, 291, 380–1 works: Auto da Fay 380; Big Women 121; The Bulgari Connection 381; The Cloning of Joanna May 381; Down among the Women 381; The Fat Woman’s Joke 380; The Heart of the Country 380; The Life and Loves of a She-Devil 121, 380; Praxis 380, 381; Puffball 381; Remember Me 380; The Spa Decameron 381; Splitting 380; What Makes Women Happy 381; Wicked Women 380; Worst Fears 380 Weller, Archie: Day of the Dog 1151 Land of the Golden Clouds 1067, 1151 Wells, H. G. 40, 106, 158, 382–5 and censorship 1003–4, 1006 and Ford Madox Ford 134
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Wells, H. G. (Continued) and Huxley 180, 181 influence 306, 841 and politics 332–3 and realism 108, 110, 111, 383 and Richardson (Dorothy) 328, 384 and science fiction 332, 335, 370 and utopian fiction 333, 369–70, 372, 383, 384 and West (Rebecca) 384, 392–3 works: Ann Veronica 384; Anticipations 383; “The Contemporary Novel” 384–5; The First Men in the Moon 370, 383; The Food of the Gods 383; The History of Mr. Polly 383; In the Days of the Comet 369, 383; The Invisible Man 333, 382; The Island of Doctor Moreau 332–3, 382; Joan and Peter 384; Kipps 383; Love and Mr. Lewisham 383; Mankind in the Making 383; Marriage 384; Men Like Gods 181, 369, 370, 383; A Modern Utopia 369, 370, 383; Mr. Bletsworthy on Rampole Island 384; Mr. Britling Sees It Through 111, 384, 413; The New Machiavelli 384; New Worlds for Old 383; The Outline of History 384; The Passionate Friends 108; The Sea Lady 384; The Shape of Things to Come 369, 370, 384; The Soul of a Bishop 384; The Time Machine 332, 370, 382, 841; Tono-Bungay 110, 232, 289, 383; The War in the Air 333, 383; The War of the Worlds 333, 382; When the Sleeper Wakes 383; The World Set Free 333, 369, 370, 384; The World of William Clissold 384; You Can’t Be Too Careful 384 and World War I 384, 413 Wells, Peter, Dangerous Desires 1297 Welsh fiction in English 385–9 and disability 388 and multiculturalism 388–9 and politics 292, 386–7 Welsh, Irvine 374, 390–1 and Kelman 211, 390 and postmodernism 92, 311 works: The Acid House 390; The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs 391; Crime 391; Ecstasy 391; Filth 391; Glue 391; If You Like School, You’ll Love Work 391; Marabou Stork Nightmares 342, 390–2; Porno 391; Trainspotting 74, 292, 342–3, 374, 390–1, 410; You’ll Have Had Your Hole 391 Welsh, James C.: The Morlocks 407 The Underworld 407 Welty, Eudora 755, 900–2 awards and prizes 902 and Woolf 901 works: The Bride of Innisfallen and Other Stories 902; “Clytie” 837; A Curtain of Green and Other
Stories 900–1; Delta Wedding 837, 901; The Golden Apples 901–2; “June Recital” 837; Losing Battles 837, 902; One Writer’s Beginnings 903; The Optimist’s Daughter 837, 902; “The Petrified Man” 837, 901, 902; The Ponder Heart 902; “Why I Live at the P.O.” 837, 902; The Wide Net and Other Stories 901 Wendt, Albert 937, 1350, 1378–9 awards and prizes 1378 and magic realism 1379 politics and activism 1378 works: Black Rainbow 1379; Leaves of the Banyan Tree 1378–9; The Mango’s Kiss 1379; Ola 1379; Puliuli 1378; The Shaman of Visions 1378; Sons for the Return Home 1378; “Towards a New Oceania” 1378 Wesker, Arnold 16 West, A. J. 165 West African fiction 1379–82 and the city 1015, 1380–1 and colonialism 1379–80 film adaptations 1081–2 historical fiction 1130, 1131 humor and satire 1141, 1143 politics and activism 940, 1004, 1281, 1357–8, 1380 postcolonialism 1332, 1380–1 realism 1304 West Indian fiction 294, 1382–5 awards and prizes 977 for children and young adults 74, 1011, 1337–8 and feminism 1073 film adaptations 1083–4 historical fiction 1132–3, 1384 and humor and satire 1141, 1142 and politics and activism 1339 queer/alternative sexualities 1298 and realism 959, 1304 and social realism 1383 speculative fiction 1068 and World War II 1131 West Indian/Caribbean diaspora 303–7, 1017–20, 1384–5 and politics 292 and women writers 305–6, 1020–1 young adult fiction 74 West, Nathanael 621, 712, 903–6 and high modernism 422 influence 613 and noir fiction 742 works: A Cool Million 905; The Day of the Locust 126, 502, 503, 713, 882, 905–6; The Dream Life of Balso Snell 441, 903–4; Good Hunting 905; Miss Lonelyhearts 904–5
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
West, Paul 706, 906–7 awards and prizes 907 and historiographic metafiction 423 and minimalist fiction 707 works: Alley Jaggers 906; Bela Lugosi’s White Christmas 906; Caliban’s Filibuster 906; Cheops: A Cupboard for the Sun 907; The Dry Danube: A Hitler Forgery 907; I’m Expecting to Live Quite Soon 906; Life With Swan 907; Lord Byron’s Doctor 906–7; Love’s Mansions 907; Master Class 907; My Father’s War 907; My Mother’s Music 907; OK: The Corral, the Earps and Doc Holliday 907; Out of My Depths 907; The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests 708; Rat Man of Paris 906; Sporting With Amaryllis 907; A Stroke of Genius 907; The Tent of Orange Mist 907; The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg 746, 907; The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper 907 West, Rebecca 106, 108, 227, 349, 392–4 awards 392 and feminism 392, 393 and Ford Madox Ford 132 and modernism 392, 393 and politics 392 and postmodernism 392 and Wells 384, 392–3 works: Aubrey saga 392, 393; The Birds Fall Down 392, 393; Black Lamb and Grey Falcon 392; Harriet Hume 392, 393; The Judge 393; The Meaning of Treason 393; The New Meaning of Treason 393; The Return of the Soldier 111, 119, 260, 393, 414; The Thinking Reed 393 Westall, Robert, The Machine-Gunners 73 Wettasinghe, Sybil, The Umbrella Thief 1011 Wharton, Edith 908–10 awards and prizes 908 as expatriate writer 908 and gender 590–1 influence 488 and naturalism 734 and realism 828, 911 and road fiction 423 works: The Age of Innocence 502, 908, 909, 910; “All Souls” 911; The Children 911; Crucial Instances 908; The Custom of the Country 909, 910; The Descent of Man and Other Stories 908; Ethan Frome 555, 909–10; The Fruit of the Tree 909; The Glimpses of the Moon 910; The Gods Arrive 911; The Greater Inclination 908; The House of Mirth 591, 734, 908, 909, 910; Hudson River Bracketed 910, 911; Madame de Treymes 909; The Marne 909; The Mother’s Recompense 911; A
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Motor-Flight Through France 800, 908; Old New York 910, 911; The Reef 909; Summer 910; Twilight Sleep 911; The Valley of Decision 909 Wharton, Herb: “Imba” (Listen): Tell You a Story 1151 Unbranded 1151 Where Ya Been, Mate? 1151 Whitbread Book of the Year 89, 144, 184–5, 230, 364 Whitbread First Novel Award 25, 46, 89, 217, 350, 397, 963, 1220, 1352 White, Edmund 912–13 awards and prizes 912–13 works: Arts and Letters 913; The Beautiful Room Is Empty 912; A Boy’s Own Story 912; The Burning Library 913; Caracole 912; Chaos 912; A Darker Proof 912; Fanny: A Fiction 912; The Farewell Symphony 912; Forgetting Elena 912; Hotel de Dream 912; The Married Man 912; My Lives 913; Nocturnes for the King of Naples 912; Skinned Alive 912 White, Hayden 174, 310, 627, 1133 White, Patrick 938, 971, 1168, 1385–9, 1394 awards and prizes 1386, 1388 and the city 1388 and colonialism 1388 and Grenville 1116 influence 1225, 1389 and modernism 1385–7 and publishing industry 1386 queer/alternative sexualities 1387, 1388 works: The Aunt’s Story 971, 1387–8; The Burnt Ones 1388; The Cockatoos 1388; The Eye of the Storm 971, 1386, 1388–9; Flaws in the Glass 1386–7; A Fringe of Leaves 971, 1078, 1130, 1389; Happy Valley 1387; The Living and the Dead 1387; Memoirs of Many in One 1389; Riders in the Chariot 1142, 1388; A Season in Sarsaparilla 1388; The Solid Mandala 1142, 1388; The Tree of Man 971, 1387–8; The Twyborn Affair 971, 1297, 1388–9; The Vivisector 1014, 1388; Voss 971, 1001, 1078, 1130, 1388 White, T. H., 115 works: The Queen of Air and Darkness 115; The Book of Merlyn 115; The Candle in the Wind 115; The Ill-Made Knight 115; The Once and Future King 115; The Sword in the Stone 73, 115 Whitehead, Colson 425, 913–14 awards and prizes 914 works: Apex Hides the Hurt 914; The Intuitionist 501, 914; John Henry Days 914; Sag Harbor: A Novel 914 Widdowson, Peter 310
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
1476
INDEX
Wideman, John Edgar 505, 915–16 awards and prizes 915 and modernism 422 works: The Cattle Killing 915; Damballah 915; Fanon 916; A Glance Away 915; Hiding Place 915; Hurry Home 915; The Lynchers 915; Philadelphia Fire 504, 915; Sent for You Yesterday 915; Two Cities 504, 915 Wiebe, Rudy 967, 997, 1390–1 awards and prizes 1391 works: The Blue Mountains of China 1390; A Discovery of Strangers 1131, 1390; My Lovely Enemy 1390; Of This Earth 1390; Peace Shall Destroy Many 1390; River of Stone 1390; The Scorched-Wood People 1131, 1390; Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman 1391; Sweeter Than All the World 1390; The Temptations of Big Bear 998, 1131, 1390; “Where is the Voice Coming From?” 1391 Wiesenfarth, Joseph 134 Wijenaike, Punyakante 1360 works: The Rebel 1360; The Third Woman and Other Stories 1108, 1360; The Waiting Earth 1108, 1360 Wilde, Oscar 103, 109, 136, 178, 322, 325 influence 1225, 1252 works: The Portrait of Dorian Gray 310, 391; Salome 64–5 Wilder, Cherry 1068 Wilder, Laura Ingalls 488 Little House on the Prairie 866 Wilder, Thornton 916–17 awards and prizes 917 and Stein 848 works: The Angel That Covered the Waters 917; The Bridge of San Luis Rey 917; The Cabala 917; The Eighth Day 917; Heaven’s My Destination 917; The Ides of March 917; Our Town 917; Theophilus North 917; The Woman of Andros 917 Wilding, Michael 972 Wilkins, Damien, The Fainter 1261 Wilkinson, Ellen, Clash 407–8 William, Gerry, The Black Ship 1067, 1150–1 Williams, Alexander, Murder in the WPA 922 Williams, Charles 114, 739 Williams, Charlotte, Sugar and Slate 389 Williams, Gordon M., From Scenes Like These 341 Williams, John, Cardiff Dead 388 Williams, Mallt and Gwenffreda, A Maid of Cymru 386 Williams, Raymond 16, 387–8, 864–5, 1108
works: The People of the Black Mountains series 388; Border Country 291, 388, 409–10; The Fight for Manod 388; Second Generation 55, 388, 410 Williams, Tennessee 783, 886, 1086 Suddenly, Last Summer 793 Williams, William Carlos 135, 207, 329, 469 and avant garde fiction 440, 441, 833–4 and Boyle (Kay) 469–70 and dadaism 440 and expatriate fiction 556 works: In the American Grain 441; The Great American Novel 441; Kora in Hell 441, 834; Spring and All 441 Williamson, Henry, Tarka the Otter 72 Wilson, A. N. 111, 975 Wilson, Angus 101, 250, 308, 394–6, 783 and homosexuality 325, 395–6 and realism 3, 4, 264 works: Anglo-Saxon Attitudes 395–6; As If By Magic 396; Hemlock and After 4, 395, 396; The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot 395; No Laughing Matter 395; “Raspberry Jam” 395; Setting the World on Fire 395; Such Darling Dodos 395; The Wrong Set 395 Wilson, Charles 1052 Wilson, Colin 16 Wilson, Edmund 129, 740, 848–9, 925 Wilson, Ethel 997, 1391–2 awards and prizes 1391 works: The Equations of Love 1392; Hetty Dorval 1392; The Innocent Traveller 1392; Love and Salt Water 1392; Mrs. Golightly and Other Stories 1392; “The Surprising Adventures of Peter” 1391; Swamp Angel 1072, 1392 Wilson, Jonathan 200 The Hiding Room 199 Winch, Tara June, Swallow the Air 1151 Winterson, Jeanette 73, 397–8 awards and prizes 397 and critical theory 92 and historiographic metafiction 175, 397 and magic realism 235, 397 and politics 291 and queer/alternative sexualities 2, 91, 325–6, 397–8 and science fiction 398 works: Art and Lies 397; Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit 121, 325, 397; The Passion 310, 325–6, 397; The PowerBook 398; Sexing the Cherry 175, 235, 397, 398; The Stone Gods 398; Written on the Body 325–6, 397–8 Winton, Tim 1393–5 awards and prizes 1393, 1394
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
works: Breath 972, 1395; Cloudstreet 972, 1394; Dirt Music 972, 1394–5; Jesse 1394; Land’s Edge 1394; Minimum of Two 1393; An Open Swimmer 1393; The Riders 1394; Scission 1393; Shallows 1130, 1393; That Eye, the Sky 1393; The Turning 1395; In the Winter Dark 1394 Wiseman, Adele 1396–7 awards and prizes 1396 works: Crackpot 1396; “Goon of the Moon and the Expendables” 1397; Memoirs of a Book Molesting Childhood 1397; Old Woman at Play 1396–7; The Sacrifice 997, 1396 Wodehouse, P. G. 376, 398–400 and literary criticism 400 and politics 400 works: The Code of the Woosters 399; Thank You, Jeeves 400 Wodhams, Jack, Ryn 1067 Wolfe, Thomas 652, 918–20 works: “Child by Tiger” 920; Complete Short Stories 919; From Death to Morning 918; “I Have a Thing to Tell You” 920; Look Homeward, Angel 652, 836, 918, 919, 920; “The Lost Boy” 920; Of Time and the River 918, 919; “Party at Jack’s” 920; The Short Novels of Thomas Wolfe 919; “Web of Earth” 920; You Can’t Go Home Again 836, 919 Wolfe, Tom 800, 921–2 awards and prizes 921 and social realism 830–1 works: Back to Blood 921; The Bonfire of the Vanities 921; The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test 801; I Am Charlotte Simmons 921; The Kandy-Colored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby 921; A Man in Full 831, 921; The Right Stuff 921 Wolff, Tobias 706 women: American fiction 590 angry young man fiction 16, 17 Australian fiction 1116 awards and prizes 21–2, 975 Canadian fiction 998 East African Fiction 1375 postmodernism 311, 424 Southern African fiction 1110–13, 1124–6, 1354, 1366–7 Welsh fiction 388 West African fiction 1380 West Indian diaspora 305–6 working-class fiction 407–8 World War I fiction 412, 414 World War II fiction 419 see also feminism; gender Woods, Gregory 322 Woof, Erica, Mud Puppy 389
1477
Woolf, Leonard 401, 402, 403, 405, 1107 Woolf, Virginia 401–5 and Bowen 44 and censorship 63, 67, 1003 and feminism 119–20, 122, 401–2, 405 and film adaptations 126 and Forster 137, 402 and Freud 3 and Galsworthy 148, 150 influence 187, 397, 689, 826, 1043 and London 232, 403, 405 and Macauley 242 and Mansfield 1209 and modernism 1, 2, 4, 6, 107, 190, 258–9, 289, 308, 329, 349, 401, 404–5, 1293 and politics 289 and realism 91, 108 and Richardson (Dorothy) 329 and West 392 works: Between the Acts 260, 404, 405, 417; “The Cinema” 126; A Haunted House and Other Stories 901; “Haworth Parsonage” 402; Jacob’s Room 108, 260, 328, 402–4, 415; “Kew Gardens” 403; To the Lighthouse 260, 289, 349, 402, 404–5, 415, 617; “The Mark on the Wall” 403; “Modern Fiction” 3 n.14, 404; “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” 3 n.14, 40, 111, 403; Mrs. Dalloway 232, 258, 260, 289, 324, 404, 415, 525; Night and Day 403; Orlando 59, 258, 323–4, 405; A Room of One’s Own 119, 351, 401, 402, 405; “Sketch of the Past” 402; “Street Haunting” 403; Three Guineas 119, 351, 401, 402, 404, 405;“An Unwritten Novel” 403; The Voyage Out 106, 260, 403; “The War from the Street” 402–3; The Waves 2, 260, 402, 404, 405, 688; The Years 148, 404, 405 and World War I 402–3, 415 and World War II 404, 417 Woolrich, Cornell 741, 742 works: Black Alibi 741; The Black Angel 741; The Black Curtain 741; The Black Path of Fear 741; The Bride Wore Black 741; Waltz into Darkness 742 working-class fiction 290, 291, 406–11 American 450 and angry young man fiction 15–18 and black Britons 408–9 and campus novels 54 Jewish 200 World War I 412–15 and American fiction 603–4, 617, 745–6, 779 and Australian fiction 971, 1131 and Canadian fiction 997, 1131 and Edwardian fiction 111
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
1478
INDEX
World War I (Continued) and masculinity 30 memoirs 413–14 and modernism 259, 289, 412, 413–15 and realism 414 World War II 290, 416–19 and American fiction 745, 746–8, 769, 823–4 anticipatory fiction 416–17 and Canadian fiction 1131 and critical theory 419 and ethnicity 549 and Holocaust novels 656, 746 and home front 417–18 and London 233, 290 and modernism 308, 419 and paperback fiction 317 and queer/alternative sexualities 324–5 and realism 419 retrospective fiction 418 and West Indian fiction 1131 Wouk, Herman: The Caine Mutiny 746 War and Remembrance 866 The Winds of War 866 WPA and Popular Front fiction 423, 922–6 Wright, Alexis: Carpentaria 972–3, 976, 1151 Plains of Promise 1151 Wright, Eric 1048 and Mais 1202 Wright, Richard 432, 433, 555, 927–30 awards 928 and Baldwin 447, 929 and the city 503, 1016 and Dahlberg 508 and Dreiser 530 and Du Bois 533 and Ellison 541, 929 and Federal Writers’ Project 923, 927, 934 and Himes 624, 625, 929 and Hurston 635 influence 287, 624, 868 and modernism 717 and noir fiction 423, 742 and politics 927–8 and realism 830, 1303 and Stein 850, 927 works: American Hunger 549, 929; “Between the World and Me” 927; “Big Boy Leaves Home” 927; Black Boy 541, 549, 925, 927, 928, 929; “Blueprint for Negro Writing” 549, 829, 928; Cesspool (Lawd Today) 541; Eight Men 930; A Father’s Law 930; The Long Dream 930; The Man Who Lived Underground 541; Native Son 447,
502, 541, 549, 585, 591, 736, 766, 837, 925, 927, 928–9; The Outsider 555, 929; Savage Holiday 930; Uncle Tom’s Children 541, 830, 837, 926, 928 Wright, Stephen 930–2 awards and prizes 931 works: The Amalgamation Polka 931; Going Native 931; M31: A Family Romance 931; Meditations in Green 931 Wylie, Max, Hindu Heaven 1003 Wyndham, John 333 The Day of the Triffids 334 Wynne-Jones, Diane 71, 73 works: Archer’s Goon 116; Castle in the Air 116; Chrestomanci novels 116; Dalemark Quartet 116; Howl’s Moving Castle 116 Yamashita, Karen Tei, Tropic of Orange 467–8, 776 Ya~ nez, Richard, El Paso del Norte 467 Yates, Richard, Revolutionary Road 801 Ye, Shitao 1056 Yeats, W. B. 114, 189, 206 works: “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” 60; “The Second Coming” 2, 945 Yellin, Tamar 201 Yezierska, Anzia 424, 933–4 and Federal Writers’ Project 923, 934 works: All That I Could Never Be 934; The Arrogant Beggar 934; Bread Givers 502, 934; The Children of Loneliness 934; “The Fat of the Land” 933–4; “The Free Vacation House” 933; Hungry Hearts 934; Red Ribbon on a White Horse 934; Salome of the Tenements 934; “Soap and Water and the Immigrant” 933 Yi, Ch’Song-jun: Cruel City 1056 Your Heaven 1056 Yi, Munyol 1057 Yoshikawa, Eiji 1056 Yoshimoto, Banana 1056 young adult fiction: American 431, 434, 571, 662, 766, 862, 894 British and Irish 74 world fiction 1010–14, 1072, 1098, 1213 Young, Marguerite 935–6 works: Angel in the Forest 935; Miss MacIntosh, My Darling 935–6; Prismatic Ground 935 Young, Robert 1061 Young, Stark, So Red the Rose 835 youth culture 18 Yu, Heaon-jong 1057 Yun, Hu-myong 1057
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INDEX
Zameenzad, Adam 1398–9 awards and prizes 1398 works: Cyrus, Cyrus 1277, 1399; Gorgeous White Female 1399; My Friend Matt and Henna the Whore 1277, 1398; Pepsi and Maria 1399; The Thirteenth House 1277, 1398 Zamyatin, Yevgeny, We 181, 370, 371 Zangwill, Israel 200 Zaremba, Eva 1298 Zhang, Dacun 1056
1479
Zhang, Eileen 1055 Zhu, Tienwen, Notes of a Desolate Man 1056 Zhu, Tienxin 1056 Zimbabwean fiction see Southern African fiction Zitkala-sa, “The Soft-Hearted Sioux” 735 Zneimer, J. 279 Zugsmith, Leane, A Time to Remember 925 Zu~ ntiga, Victor 468 Zwelonke, D. M., Robben Island 1354
Volume I: pages 1–420; Volume II: pages 421–936; Volume III: pages 937–1399
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
